Support for Virtualized Environments
The Situation: Software vendors have broadly moved to support their customers who run in virtual environments. For instance, Microsoft has committed to offer commercially reasonable support to customers running Microsoft products in virtual environments, including customers using VMware, if the customer is a premier-level support customer. Across the industry, most major software vendors have also implemented support policies for customers running in virtualized environments.
The Opportunity: Customers are virtualizing every aspect of their IT infrastructure, and the operational value and benefits make further transition inevitable. Any vendor that doesn’t have a support policy for customers running in virtualized environments should introduce one immediately. In addition, limiting support to certain tiers of customers must be adjusted to provide a model for all to receive a high quality experience. Virtual hardware has become a norm in the industry, and should be handled on hardware compatibility lists and certification programs in a manner similar to other volume industry standard hardware platforms.
Per-Processor Licensing for Virtual Environments
The Situation: Major software vendors have also moved to normalize their licensing for virtual machine environments. The combination of multi-core processor technology and mainstream virtualization adoption has made virtualization a prevalent base environment for most software vendors.
Vendors such as IBM Software, BEA Systems, and Microsoft have moved to product licensing models based on the number of virtual processors or sockets that an application instance uses, as opposed to the number of physical processors or sockets. For example, Microsoft revised its policies to accommodate licensing by virtual processors in October 2005. Running an application in a one- or two-processor virtual machine on a two- or four-socket server with four or eight total cores is becoming the normal use case. Customers have demanded appropriate virtualized licensing models, and major vendors have responded positively.
The Opportunity: Every enterprise software vendor with licensing based on physical processors should also offer an option for licensing based on virtual processors. Legacy physical-only licensing has become burdensome and dated in a virtualized environment, and frustrates customers that are conscientious about tracking license consumption and compensating their software vendors fairly. Failure to make this transition places the largest burden on the most careful customers, thus penalizing the behavior vendors most want to foster.
The Situation: Customers need software to be licensed the same regardless of what virtualization product it runs on. This is fundamental to customer choice. A Microsoft SQL Server database running on Windows Server 2003 should be licensed and priced exactly the same whether it is running on VMware or a Microsoft virtualization product, and this is in fact the case. Almost all application software vendors and operating system vendors have been clear in their commitment to this.
The Opportunity: This parity in basic licensing and pricing across virtualization products is critical to customers and needs to be preserved as the industry continues to evolve.
Operating System APIs for Virtualization
Situation: Paravirtualization refers to the communication APIs between an operating system in a virtual machine and a virtualization product. VMware, IBM, Red Hat, XenSource, and other vendors have participated and contributed heavily in the open community to implement a paravirtualization API for any virtualization platform and any OS. This paravirtualization technology, known as paravirt ops, is freely available and is getting broadly adopted by Linux, Xen, kvm, etc.
Microsoft has developed proprietary APIs (including but not limited to what Microsoft calls “Enlightenments”) for Longhorn that manage communication between Windows and hypervisors. Microsoft disclosed these API specifications at the WinHEC conference in June 2006, but has not yet generally allowed open implementation of these APIs by third parties or open source projects. Microsoft has allowed some third parties like Novell to begin development with these APIs as part of an agreement involving critical operating system intellectual property rights and ongoing payments.
The Opportunity: Early, equal implementation access to operating system interfaces for virtualization for all vendors enables the innovation and choice that customers demand. Having open operating system APIs for both Linux and Windows that are freely usable by all vendors is critical to make this a reality. Microsoft should make their APIs available for broad open use by third parties as soon as possible so that the industry can move toward interoperability with the launch of Longhorn Server coming up.
Situation: The ability to robustly move a running mission-critical application in a virtual machine from one physical server to another without downtime is a key enabler of virtual infrastructure. Many customers leverage this live migration capability (known as VMotion) to balance resources across their applications and hardware, avoid hardware downtime, and facilitate scaling and responsiveness in their IT infrastructure.
Microsoft licensing policies allow for instances of Windows OS and server applications running in VMs to be moved from one physical server to another as long as the source and target server are both properly licensed for the OS and server application. This is what Microsoft calls “moving an instance of software” and is what VMotion does. For example, if two servers are attached to a SAN where multiple virtual hard disks contain both Windows Server 2003 and Exchange, these instances can be moved from one physical server to another as long as both physical servers are each assigned Windows Server 2003 and Exchange licenses.
The Opportunity: Customers want to be able transfer their actual software licenses from one server to another without burdensome restrictions in the same way that they can move instances of software in virtual machines freely from machine to machine. Most application vendors enable this by allowing licenses to be tied to virtual machine environments as opposed to physical hosts, letting customers move software instances in virtual machines among physical host machines as necessary. This policy confers significant benefits in terms of uptime and operational flexibility, and should be adopted broadly by software vendors.
In contrast, Microsoft’s licensing policy has some restrictions on transferring licenses from one server to another. Under Microsoft licensing, Windows Server licenses are tied to physical hosts and do not move with virtual machine environments. Reassignment of a license to another server is only allowed once per 90 days except in case of hardware failure, and for more frequent license reassignments, customers are required to separately license each machine to run for the server software. This means that the customer will either have to purchase additional Windows Server Standard or Enterprise Edition licenses to cover the potential number of virtual machines that may run on each host machine, or upgrade their Windows Server licenses to Datacenter Edition.
For customers who choose to use Windows Server Datacenter Edition, which allows an unlimited number of Windows instances in virtual machines on a single host, there is no problem. On the other hand, for customers who have pre-existing license agreements based on Windows Server Standard or Enterprise Edition, this can be an unnecessary and illogical inconvenience. Customers need a pragmatic, unencumbered model where users are not forced to either buy incremental licenses or shift to an “all-you-can-eat” model in order to leverage virtual machine mobility.
