The Console

Posted by Réza Malekzadeh
Sr. Director, Product Marketing & Alliances

It is now just over a month since the very first VMworld Europe and now that the dust has settled it's a good time for us to share some of our thoughts on the show. There were a few key announcements at the event around new technologies we've been working on, all of which demonstrate just how far virtualization has come in terms of being accepted as a mainstream approach to computing.

OEM Announcements

It was especially exciting to see Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM all standing up to announce that they will be shipping our embedded hypervisor - ESXi 3.5 - as an option with their servers. One of our primary objectives when we announced ESXi was to extend our vision of making virtualization ubiquitous and open up the technology to as many organizations as possible. Consider this - Dell didn't just announce they would make ESXi available with a few of its PowerEdge servers; they announced that they will be making this an option across it’s entire PowerEdge server line. So, once launched, anyone who buys a VMware virtualization-certified Dell PowerEdge server will be able to deploy virtualization easily.

The support of these OEM partners goes beyond representing a huge opportunity for VMware; it also validates the vision for x86 virtualization we had many years ago and the work we have done over the years in effectively creating this market.

Security

There was further endorsement from numerous security vendors around our announcement of VMsafe which was a very significant move for us. For some time now people have been questioning how secure virtual machines are in comparison to their physical counterparts. The argument went (according to some) that if you can successfully attack a hypervisor with a piece of malware then the risks are greater, since that hypervisor has numerous systems running on it.

What we knew was that virtualization can be a fundamentally more secure way of running applications and that it opens up some new approaches to security which simply are not possible in the physical realm. In developing VMsafe we wanted to create an easy way for third party technology vendors - trusted by thousands of customers across the globe - to hook in to our technology and provide extra value for VMware customers.

VMsafe allows third-party security products to gain the same visibility as the hypervisor into the operation of a virtual machine. This allows VMsafe enabled security solutions to identify and eliminate malware that is undetectable on physical machines. This extra layer of protection is achieved through visibility into the virtual hardware resources of memory, CPU, disk and I/O systems within the VM which means every system execution can be monitored. Some journalists have asked whether by 'opening up' our product we are making it inherently easier to attack and more susceptible to malware.

To be very clear, VMware is not opening up its core hypervisor to third-party developers and therefore, potentially, to attack. Instead, what VMware has announced is a secure API; all code running from third parties will be running within a virtual machine, which by its very nature is isolated or 'sandboxed'. VMsafe works on a trust model – so customers will have to select which virtual machines they want VMsafe-enabled security applications to gain visibility into. The key here is that VMsafe-enabled virtual machines will have visibility into VMs and not control over them.

Just as VMware has helped trigger a new wave of innovation in management and storage, we also feel that VMsafe will set off a new round of innovation from security vendors who can harness the power of virtualization to build an entirely new breed of security products.

Automation

There have also been significant developments on our automation and management product lines. At VMworld Europe we gave a preview of what some of our automation and lifecycle management tools, such as Lifecycle Manager will deliver. A month on and we have just announced the general availability of VMware Lifecycle Manager – a product which we feel will help organizations to implement a consistent and automated process for managing the entire virtual machine lifecycle.

We've always believed in innovation, but this has very much been driven by what our customers need and has been delivered in line with the pace at which their deployments and skill sets have grown. VMware Lifecycle Manager is a tool which our larger customers will find makes a real difference to how they can manage their environments. The front end of Lifecycle Manager is completely customizable so customers will be able to build a web-based portal which allows anyone with access to commission, check-out and provision virtual machines. All the policies, permissions and processes associated with virtual machines can be automated and set to run in the background. What you have is a very straightforward, controlled and repeatable way of managing your virtual machine lifecycle.

One of the options we are most excited about in this product is the option to associate chargeback metrics with each virtual machine. This will mean that different business units and / or departments can be charged for the IT resources they use. In the physical realm a concrete cost could be associated with each physical machine - you bought a server, it was yours to run. However, virtual machines have to be treated differently and we have developed this tool to allow costs to be applied to virtual resources. In actual fact, chargeback in a virtual environment is far more granular than it is in physical realms. The cost of buying and building a server doesn't really reflect how much a department uses resources such as storage, networking bandwidth, power etc. With virtual infrastructure, its far easier to get this more detailed breakdown of what resources a machine has used.

Virtual Desktops

We've been making great strides in enhancing our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure offering by developing our existing technology and also through the acquisition of companies like Propero. At VMworld we previewed a couple of technologies that are incredibly exciting.

The first of these technologies is Offline Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Users can check out personalized desktops to a notebook, use them in offline mode and then check back in to the desktop running in online mode. This really takes VDI beyond the datacenter and means users can have a single image to use whatever machine they are using. It also means VDI can be as flexible as our customers require.

One of the issues with VDI that our customers had brought to our attention was that a large VDI deployment would require a lot of storage to support it; if you are supporting five hundred instances of Windows XP that is a large amount of bulky operating systems to have sat on your shared storage. This is why we have developed our scalable virtual image technology in a tech preview. This allows desktop images to be published to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines without the need for each image to be individually stored; instead we can clone the virtual machine image. This can reduce storage requirements by up to 90% which we believe will really help the uptake of VDI in general. We take the desktop virtualization market very seriously - when you think about how many PCs are out there we think customers will always be looking at better ways of managing enterprise desktops, and in VDI we think we have a great solution.

So between these four areas where we have made announcements - OEMs, Security, Automation, Virtual Desktops - we think we have really demonstrated our development efforts. Our OEM deals demonstrate how we are making virtualization more accessible and easier to deploy; VMsafe shows that we take security incredibly seriously; our Automation products reflect our desire to make virtual infrastructure easier to manage; the VDI tech previews show that VMware is determined to make virtual desktops easier to deploy, manage and use.

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Product Management and Market Development

As we close out 2007, I wanted to take a few moments to jot down some thoughts on virtual appliances in terms of accomplishments in 2007 and challenges we need to overcome in 2008.

2007 YiR

A virtual appliance as a software distribution and management paradigm is relatively new. VMware first talked about this paradigm in the context of launching the VMware Technology Network in June 2005. Six vendors (BEA, Oracle, RedHat, Novell, IBM and Spike Source) pre-installed and pre-configured their applications in virtual machines for easier demos. We created a website (www.vmtn.net) for customers to easily find and download these virtual machines. That was the modest beginning of virtual appliances and Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

Since then this paradigm has been getting more attention. We ended 2006 with about 300 virtual appliances available through the Virtual Appliance Marketplace (vam.vmware.com). Customers were downloading appliances at the rate of one every minute. ISVs were starting to sell production-ready virtual appliances by mid-2006. Even though many tech-savvy professionals were starting to talk about the benefits, validity and long-term outlook of virtual appliances, the vast majority, including press and analysts, took a wait-and-see approach to this initiative. Virtual appliances received more attention in 2007 and below are some of the significant highlights from this year:

1. Virtual appliances outside the security space became a reality with many tier 1 ISVs building virtual appliances. BEA launched their LiquidVM initiative. Business Objects, IBM, McAfee and others have all joined in with virtual appliance editions of their software stacks.

2. Customers were starting to buy production-ready virtual appliances. I’ve met numerous customers who bought virtual appliances and swear by the simplicity and ease of management they offer. Our marketing team will be posting quite a few success stories shortly.

3. Several leading analysts initiated coverage on virtual appliances. Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Yankee Group and others are actively tracking virtual appliances.

4. JeOS (Just Enough OS, pronounced “juice”) started to get traction within the OS community.

   
   Ubuntu JeOS is already available – kudos to the Canonical team for being the first OS vendor to take on Virtual Appliances. RedHat announced their intention to offer their version. Even though Microsoft hasn’t really participated in the virtual appliance space, their latest OS offers users the ability as part of Server Cores to install only those components that are required for each server installation and if they can get their licensing and pricing right, they could be a huge player in this space as well. I’m sure Novell and other OS vendors will eventually get on the bandwagon as well.

5. Leading vendors including Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource collaborated on Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), which was submitted to DMTF as a standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances.

6. The ecosystem around virtual appliances started growing with many startups either getting in or getting traction. rPath, virtualappliances.net, JumpBox, cohesiveFT stick out in this category.

7. Several vendors mimicked VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace with their own. Parallels introduced their VA Directory. RedHat rolled out RHX.

8. Microsoft joined the party with the VHD Test Drive program (launched in November 2006) to allow ISVs to redistribute Windows in a virtual machine for 30-day evaluations.

Challenges

While the progress in 2007 was tremendous, there are still some challenges that need to be addressed before virtual appliances become the defacto standard for distributing and managing software. The challenges can be broadly categorized into the following sections:

1. Lifecycle Management Tools: Even though many aforementioned startups and existing vendors offer some tools to create virtual appliances, the general feeling is that this area is still in its infancy. Customers frequently ask questions such as: how do I patch a virtual appliance? Can I use my existing patch management infrastructure to patch virtual appliances? Can I use my existing systems management tool to monitor and manage virtual appliances? At the same time, ISVs are now having to support OS patches as well, which they have not traditionally had to deal with. So they are looking for tools to track, test and roll out appropriate OS fixes in a timely manner. There is a bit of chicken-and-egg problem here with some customers not deploying virtual appliances until these issues are resolved while systems management vendors are reluctant to add these capabilities to their product until they see a wide-scale adoption of virtual appliances in their customer base. Better tools will help break the logjam.

2. Processes: More than the lack of tools, the real issue that comes up often times is that the industry is still trying to figure out how to manage virtual appliances. This paradigm completely changes many processes we have learnt and mastered over the years to manage our data centers. Customers are trying to answer some very basic questions such as: who do I call for support? How do I monitor and manage these virtual appliances? Will my existing tools work? If each virtual appliance has its own OS, how the heck do I manage this complexity? There are viable answers to all these questions but paradigm shifts don’t happen overnight. Vendors pushing virtual appliances will need to communicate a lot more to address such concerns.

3. Microsoft Windows Redistribution: Traditionally Linux has been the OS of choice for most hardware appliances. Vendors have not used Windows as much due to price and lack of modularity. On top of that, Microsoft does not allow ISVs to redistribute Windows in a virtual machine for production use, which really puts a damper on shipping Windows-based virtual appliances. For some ISVs this is an insurmountable problem because the cost to port the application to Linux is too much to swallow. As noted above, Microsoft launched their VHD Test Drive program, which allows ISVs to ship Windows-based virtual appliances for evaluation use only. This is definitely a step in the right direction but until they change their licensing policy around redistributing Windows in a virtual machine for production use, most virtual appliances will only be viable for ISVs who support both Windows and Linux. Once licensing and redistribution issues are resolved, Microsoft will need to work on a different pricing model for Windows shipped in virtual appliances. This will be especially interesting because a typical virtual appliance will only use a small part of the OS and this varies across ISVs so pricing it appropriately would be challenging.

Where do virtual appliances go from here? Will they turn the corner in 2008? Will the developments in 2008 be the tipping point?  2008 sure promises to be an exciting year for virtual appliances. Stay tuned and if you haven’t downloaded a virtual appliance, visit vam.vmware.com.

Happy New Year!

Posted by Réza Malekzadeh
Sr. Director, Product Marketing & Alliances

A lot of people have been talking about Microsoft's recent announcements regarding their Hyper-V hypervisor product, which was somewhat surprisingly announced ahead of schedule (although in truth, Microsoft had previously put this announcement back, so maybe the two timeline changes cancel each other out). Since VMware is the leader in virtualisation many people in the industry have been keen to hear what we think about Hyper-V.

This announcement (which, it should be reiterated, is just the availability of the beta version) is not altogether surprising. Microsoft was always going to attempt to get into this industry in earnest, but it is an industry which we have created. Don't forget, a few years ago x86 virtualisation as pioneered by VMware was still faced with its doubters and sceptics who thought this was a doomed attempt to breathe life into an old mainframe computing concept. Over the last few years many of these nay-sayers have dropped by the wayside as they have seen virtualisation truly become a mainstream technology. We have now been doing virtualisation - and only virtualisation - for 10 years.

Of course, then there are the inevitable questions about how VMware's technology compares with Hyper-V in terms of features and pricing. As with any comparison, this is about comparing apples with apples. On the features side, we truly believe that customers are now looking well beyond server consolidation as the main driver for going virtual. It is the advanced management features built around the hypervisor which will be key factors in what customers decide to purchase. If a customer is just interested in partitioning server hardware we offer a great product - VMware Server - for free!

With the VMware Infrastructure 3 platform, VMware has a wealth of advanced features which turn virtualized servers into pools of highly available and flexible computing resources. An example of one of the key features (and one which our customers love) is VMotion which allows you to move a live running VM between physical hosts without service interruption or downtime. For our customers VMotion has become an almost indispensable tool and has transformed the way many of them approach business continuity and disaster recovery since we started shipping four years ago. Hyper-V doesn't include a comparable feature - in fact, the scrapping of a live migration feature was well documented - so on this front Hyper-V cannot compare with VMware Infrastructure 3. In fact, the closest feature to VMotion that Microsoft can deliver in Hyper-V - Quick Migration - is just a rebranding of Host Clustering technology which has been around for a while. The same is true for a whole host of other features which we have been offering customers for some time.

This is not to dismiss Microsoft from the virtualisation landscape altogether - far from it. They will eventually come out with a product. Microsoft has announced pricing, which will allow customers to get Hyper-V bundled with Server 2008, but whether this works remains to be seen. As far as VMware is concerned, customers don't see virtualisation as a nice little add-on to server operating systems; it's a technology they are using to architect entire data centers, and for these kind of implementations they want software which is robust, stable, proven in production environments and provides the management tools and levels of automation which takes the pain out of IT management.

As far as the cost debate goes, this really centers on whether you look at just the straight up acquisition costs or whether you look at the long term cap-ex and op-ex cost benefits a virtualisation platform delivers. For the great majority of adopters, virtualisation is a strategic move rather than a tactical point solution, so the longer term view would seem to make more sense when evaluating the true costs associated with one platform versus another. Acquisition costs are a small piece of the overall solution cost.  VMware customers typically experience a return on investment within six to nine months of deployment and huge cost savings thereafter. Our support for increased amounts of physical hardware per host means VMware Infrastructure 3 can support far greater numbers of workloads on each physical machine - reducing costs for OS licenses, hardware acquisition, power and cooling and maintenance.

It is very exciting to see the virtualisation industry maturing so rapidly. Microsoft's announcements have added to the excitement around virtualisation which has been a theme throughout the year and which was highlighted by VMworld 2007. Increased competition or not, VMware will continue on its path, delivering amazing innovation to stay ahead of the curve and keep on bringing to market the solutions that customers require.

However, at the end of the day virtualisation is not really about cool technology; it is about allowing customers to run applications in the best possible way and delivering value to their organisations. Our recent announcement with SAP, announcing full support for SAP in VMware environments, demonstrates just this fact. Customers are buying our virtualization technology to have the best platform to run their applications.

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Product Management and Market Development

Greetings from VMworld 2007! Before the week gets really crazy, I wanted to jot down a couple of thoughts to document the exciting progress around Virtual Appliances since my blog on Enterprise Software 2.0 at VMworld 2006.

ISV Momentum

When we first started talking about virtual appliances in June 2005, we had six appliances from leading ISVs and OSVs listed on our web site. Since then virtual appliances are fast becoming a better way to distribute software for both evaluations and production use. ISVs are shipping virtual appliances because it reduces their development, testing and support costs and reducing time to market. Customers are more receptive to receiving software as virtual appliances because it is easier for them to deploy and manage. The combination is leading to more ISVs creating virtual appliances. We now have ~600 virtual appliances available in the Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM). Many of our larger ISV partners are jumping on the band wagon – BEA, Business Objects, IBM and McAfee all have their virtual appliances available in the VAM. Another compelling virtual appliance that was recently added is Lefthand Networks Virtual SAN Appliance. It converts local storage into a clustered iSCSI SAN. Now that is a cool concept… And the great thing is that there are more virtual appliances in the pipeline so be sure to check the VAM often for new virtual appliances.

Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

Think about all the CDs you own and how many different artists they represent and then imagine if every one of those artists said that his/her music can only be played on the CD player they sell. If you listen to more than one artist, you will end up with multiple CD players at home forcing you to constantly switch between them depending on what music you want to listen to. Sounds painful, doesn’t it? Oh, wait, it doesn’t end there. What if you want to listen to your music on the long commute in to work or on a long trip? How many CD players does your car need to support? Oye vaaye! Thankful we don’t live in that painful world because of standards! You can now buy and play any CD (software app packaged as a virtual appliance) on any CD player you own at home (data center) or in your car (remote office). Think of OVF as a similar format for virtual appliances. We worked with Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft and XenSource to come up with a standard way to package and distribute virtual appliances so that our customers can run them on any virtualization platform. As a customer you have the freedom of choice to buy a virtualization platform based on price and functionality and not be locked with one vendor because the content you need is only available in one non-standard format. There is a tremendous amount of useful information here.

JeOS Update

I recently talked about Just Enough Operating System (JeOS – pronounced “juice”) and how it will simplify IT management headaches, reduce patch frequency and improve security. I’m very excited to note that Ubuntu will soon ship Ubuntu JeOS, a slimed down Ubuntu Server OS that is optimized for VMware virtual appliances. Besides their JeOS being small and optimized for VMware, Ubuntu’s kinder and gentler distribution terms will be very appealing to ISVs who want to distribute Virtual Appliances. I applaud the folks at Canonical for taking the lead on providing an OS optimized for virtual appliances. It will be interesting to see how the other OSVs respond to this news.

VMware Tools

Lastly, I wanted to plug the effort around open sourcing VMware Tools. This is relevant to virtual appliances because it allows ISVs to provide Tools for the JeOS they include with their application. It gives ISVs the freedom of choice to pick any JeOS they want and still be able to ship a virtual appliance that is optimized to run efficiently on VMware Infrastructure.

Hope to see some of you at VMworld 2007.

Posted by Ben Matheson
Director of Small and Medium Business

This week marks two super important milestones. First, the start of NFL regular season football (Go Patriots!!). Second, a new promotion we are launching for SMB customers. I thought the promotion (certainly not the football season) would be breaking news but turns out some bloggers are quicker on the draw than I am and have been posting about it. So today I want to open our “playbook” about what we are doing and also talk about the next evolution in VMware’s product offerings targeted at SMB’s.

This week we are “kicking off” a new promotion called VI3 Foundation targeted at customers that want the advanced functionality of VI3 but for smaller deployments. For $3,000 a customer gets VirtualCenter Server 2.0 plus three 2-processor licenses for VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter Edition. So for $3,000 an SMB gets our hypervisor based virtualization platform (ESX Server) and our fully functional management product VirtualCenter. For more information you can go to our website.

I said this was an evolution and it is. VMware was the first company to introduce a free virtualization product with VMware Server in Summer of 2006. We were the first commercial vendor to have a free P2V/ V2V product called VMware Converter Starter Edition that reached general availability back in January, 2007. Finally a key piece of our strategy is virtual appliances and any customers can go out to Virtual Appliance Marketplace and easily download trial virtual appliances including 3^rd party software. VMware was the first to enable these technologies for free. We had some followers (as all market leaders do) but we were the first company that believed that enabling customers to have free virtualization products was important. Can’t beat the value of free.

VMware also launched a management product in February, 2007 called VirtualCenter for VMware Server. This management product is designed to manage VMware Server and for $1,500 you can buy and manage three physical servers with unlimited virtual machines on those physical boxes. You can manage incremental physical boxes for $400 per physical machine. With VirtualCenter for VMware Server you can centrally manage and monitor your virtual machines and physical servers and rapidly provision VM’s from a library of images. Again it’s a solution which provides great value to customers.

We also have had a version of our high end virtualization product named VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter for over a year. The product costs $1,000 and gives customers the true power, reliability and security of ESX Server, our hypervisor based virtualization product. This is the base for our new VI3 Foundation promotion.

As many customers, partners and press have noted, customers love the high end functionality that VMware Infrastructure 3 provides including technologies like VMotion, VMware High Availability, DRS and VMware Consolidated Backup. The belief that SMB customers need only basic functionality is not true. Sure some do, but many want all the goodness that VI3 Enterprise Edition has to offer. And generally customers tell us they start seeing a return on their VI3 investment almost immediately. Customers are seeing great value from reducing costs, improving manageability and improving the availability of their systems. Anytime a customer sees a very fast return and can save both capital and operating expense almost immediately there is a great value.

More info…

We will be announcing more news for SMB customers over the rest of 2007 so stay tuned and you will see more coming. If you are a medium or smaller business and are looking for more info you can go to www.vmware.com/solutions/smb and get more detail.

Thanks and I’ll be blogging soon,

Ben

Posted by Ben Matheson
Director of Small and Medium Business

About a year ago we started focusing more on the needs of small and medium business customers. The reason why we did this is quite simple. We were seeing a surprising number of midmarket and smaller customers adopting virtualization. 70% of downloads from VMware Server (of which we have over two million at this point by the way) were from SMB customers and we have over 10K midmarket or smaller customer adopting VMware Infrastructure (VI3), our high end virtualization product. 

Turns out that the benefits of virtualization are every bit as important to midsize and smaller businesses as they are to the world’s largest enterprises. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say they are even more important in a lot of cases. SMB’s don’t have the challenge of managing thousands of servers but they also don’t have the big budgets and IT staff that the larger enterprises have either. The challenge in midmarket IT is how they meet the demands of the business with very limited resources. And make no mistake their IT infrastructure is every bit as important to their business as it is within a large enterprise. Just because an SMB is smaller doesn’t mean they don’t need the highest levels of performance, availability, security, etc from their software infrastructure. They need all the good stuff that virtualization has to offer.

So why have these SMB’s deployed virtualization?

There is a simple way I like to describe the benefits of virtualization to medium and small businesses. It is what I call “Simplify. Optimize. Protect”. Customers can use virtualization to simplify their overall IT management (save time on management), optimize the use of their hardware assets (save money on hardware), and protect their systems and business critical information from disaster or downtime (save their business).  Let me take these one at a time.

Simplify: “to reduce in complexity”

Reducing the number of physical servers will help you simplify your IT environment but virtualization does much more than that. Virtualization reduces time spent on many of the common IT management activities. First off, our management tool, VMware VirtualCenter, provides a centralized management experience where customers can monitor and manage all their virtual machines and physical resources from the proverbial “single pane of glass”. Customers can also choose to setup alerts or automate routine tasks with task scheduling and alerting.

Second, virtualization simplifies the deployment of new servers. Provisioning a physical server traditionally has been a very time consuming task. First you have to order a server, then you wait until it is delivered, then provision the operating system, then the applications, then the management agents, etc. Provisioning a physical server takes days/weeks. With VirtualCenter a customer picks which virtual machine they want to deploy from a list of templates (such as email template, file server template, etc) and then determines the physical server they want to deploy it on and they are done. Provisioning a server with VirtualCenter can be done in minutes or hours rather than days. Equally as important, a customer does not have to buy a new physical server every time they need to roll out a new workload but rather they can roll out a virtual machine on an existing physical server.

Finally, customers can use VirtualCenter to apply policies across entire farms of virtual machines in a very simple, yet powerful way.  For example, they can apply technologies like VMware High Availability (our availability software solution) or VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (our dynamic load balancing solution) across all his virtual machines very easily. This process is much simpler than other technologies such as traditional clustering technologies which are very difficult to setup and manage.

Optimize: “to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible”

SMB customers consistently tell me they use 15% of less their servers' capacity. The root cause of this waste has been that running multiple line-of-business applications or server applications on the same physical box never really worked because of application and operating system conflicts. Physical systems have largely required a dedicated box for each application. The result is server sprawl. Using virtualization they can consolidate many physical boxes down to fewer physical boxes running virtual machines. In fact we have a great tool for converting physical machines to virtual machines called VMware Converter that you can download for free.  A nice side benefit of consolidating servers is that it lowers cooling, electricity and space costs.

Last week I spoke with a small business that had 3 VMware Infrastructure 3 servers running 15 virtual machines. In the old world he would have had to buy 15 separate physical servers.  I spoke with another company in the process of converting 14 physical servers down to 4 virtualized servers running VMware Server. Same thing – lower costs. Virtualization allows them to optimize the use of their hardware and reduce electricity, cooling and space at the same time.

Protect: “to defend or guard from attack, invasion, loss, annoyance, insult, etc.”

If I had to stack rank the business benefits of virtualization I would say that better data protection, availability and disaster recovery is the biggest reason why SMB’s adopt or are evaluating virtualization. Ultimately the most important thing about disaster recovery and backup and recovery is the speed of recovery. This is where virtualization really shines.  Virtualization packages all the system information and data into a nice virtual machine container which makes recovery very quick. We even have technologies like VMware High Availability (HA) to provide higher availability for the applications running in virtual machines. VMware HA reduces server downtime by automatically restarting virtual machines that were running on physical servers that crashed. VMware HA results in less application downtime and the restart is done automatically without any IT staff intervention.

Technologies like VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) eliminate the need for a backup window and allow customers to backup their systems anytime during the day without impacting their production users.

And finally customers can use virtualization along with replication technologies (either host based or array based replication) to replicate the entire virtual machine to a secondary disaster site. If the primary site goes down, the customers power on the virtual machines on the secondary site and they are up and running.  With virtualization the hardware on the second site does not need to be identical to the primary site. In fact, after a customer consolidates using VMware software they can repurpose some of their older, extra hardware to their disaster recovery site. Whitepapers on the benefits of virtualization on DR can be found here:

More info…..

There is a lot I could say about the solutions we are working on for medium and small businesses but a lot of that will have to wait until another day. If you are a medium or smaller business and are looking for more info you can go to: www.vmware.com/solutions/smb and get more detail.

Thanks and I’ll be blogging soon, 

Ben

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Product Management and Market Development

Almost a year after we announced our intention to build a desktop product that allowed Mac users to run Windows, Linux, Solaris and many other PC operating systems without rebooting, I’m happy to announce that VMware Fusion™ is generally available as of August 6, 2007.

There will be a ton of reviews and blogs about features, performance, etc, so I will try to focus on things that the press and blogging community won’t necessarily cover. 

As I reflect back to the days when we first started talking in the kitchen of our previous headquarters about building this product, I’m glad we made and stuck to perhaps the biggest decision we had to make on this product yet.  That is to never compromise on the user experience. 

A wise man once told me, ‘Mac users expect great user interfaces; Windows users put up with rubbish interfaces and Linux users want rubbish interfaces.’  Not sure I completely agree with the entire statement but I definitely agree with him about Mac users expecting a clean and intuitive interface.  In order to provide an interface that Mac users expect, we decided to design and build a brand-new Mac native interface from the ground up.  We tried our best to build an interface that looks like a Mac app and behaves like a Mac app and we are delighted with the way the user interface turned out.

As we got closer to the GA date, we spent a fair bit of time discussing packaging for this product.  This was an interesting exercise for us primarily because we had never shipped consumer products nor sold our products through retail and etail outlets before.  (Before the VMware historians correct me, we actually did sell VMware Workstation through retail outlets way back when but we no longer do that.  I would venture to guess that 90% of the current employees weren’t around when Workstation was sold at Fry’s.)  Packaging is a big deal in retail outlets so in the same tradition of designing an intuitive and clean user interface, we decided early on that we need to develop packaging that would be clean, interesting and something that we would be proud of.  Needless to say, this video was sent around a million times, so much so that it wasn’t funny anymore.

The agency we hired proposed 10 different variations and amazingly enough, everyone on our project team gravitated towards one.  That design was cleaned up and now is the final design for VMware Fusion.

While not quite Apple-esque, we felt that this was a clean look and conveyed the essence of our product.  We all felt that black background was more appealing than other colors we considered.  Perhaps the coolest and most unique part of this design is the front flaps that open in the middle on the front.  After spending an entire Sunday afternoon at Best Buy, I realized most software boxes either have no flaps at all or have a flap that opens like a book.  Boooring!  We didn’t want to be just another box.  We wanted to be proud of the box, just like we wanted to be proud of the software we have built.   VMware Fusion has two flaps that open down the middle – think of the monitor opening up in the middle.  Each of the flaps has three screenshots showcasing the product while the middle of the box (once you open the flaps) has detailed description of the product. 

Just to make sure we got some objective feedback, Pat and I drove to the nearest Apple store for beta testing of the box design.  We performed the so-called 3-, 6- and 12-foot test and asked a few employees and customers for their feedback.  Positive!  We were on the right track. 

I hope you will enjoy what we came up with.  Each box contains a little surprise gift and we sincerely hope you will put that gift to good use.  A quick note: manufacturing these wicked cool boxes is taking a bit longer than anticipated so you will probably have to wait a few days if you have ordered the boxed product.  However, if you are not into packaging, please feel free to order an electronic download version from www.vmware.com/mac.

To end, I want to extend my sincere thanks to the many VMware folks who contributed to this initiative.  You all spent many a sleepless night and weekends at work but when you look at what we built together, I hope you will agree with me that it was well worth it!  I also want to thank all the beta customers who took the time to provide invaluable feedback – your feedback helped us build a robust product.

Game on!

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Product Management and Market Development

Just what the heck is Juice?  Juice is the pronunciation for JeOS, which stands for “Just Enough OS.”  So, why should you care about JeOS, or Just Enough of the OS?  Why would you install JeOS instead of the full blown general purpose operating system?  Before I get into the details, I want to clarify that this is not an operating system that VMware is developing, marketing or selling.  JeOS is a concept for what an operating system should look like in the context of a virtual appliance. 

Let’s start at the beginning. 

Traditionally, the general purpose OS has performed two high-level functions:

1. Provided a stable and consistent set of interfaces and libraries to support the range of applications the operating system might need to run.
2. Managed and allocated the various hardware resources of the host system, thereby abstracting the specific type of hardware from the application that sits on top.   

How has this changed recently?

Over time, the general purpose OS has grown significantly in size and complexity.  This expansion has come from its need to support a growing number of applications and devices.  To support the increasingly complex needs of this myriad of applications, OS vendors have added more interfaces, libraries, and functions with each release.  As a result, operating systems have ballooned, becoming bloated, complex, and far less secure.  Most operating systems now require at least 1 GB of RAM just to run because of the various necessary and unnecessary services that are loaded into memory, as well as a few GB of disk space.  Because the foot print is huge, keeping the OS and your data center secure requires that it be patched more often than ever before.

So, how can virtualization help?

The first is by virtualizing your environment with VMware Infrastructure.  Traditionally, in a non-virtualized environment, the general purpose operating system has to be able to interface with thousands of different devices, with each and every NIC and IDE drive, etc. that are present in a typical server box.  But, by installing VMware Infrastructure’s thin hypervisor layer which presents a select set of hardware devices and resources to the OS layer above, the components of the OS that were responsible for managing every variation of device ever manufactured are no longer needed.  Poof, off they go!  The OS has now been reduced in size.

But, can we do better?

Most servers today run just a single application – one database or one file/print server or one Exchange server – but never multiple disparate applications all at once on the same OS instance.  The question then is, if you run just one app per server, wouldn’t it make more sense to have only the OS components needed for that app rather than a general purpose OS that is slow, less secure and hard to manage?  Do you really need an ActiveX control on your Exchange server?  Do you really need all those services that are running in memory?

By ripping out the operating system interfaces, functions, and libraries and automatically turning off the unnecessary services that your application does not require, and by tailoring it to the needs of the application, you are now down to a lithe, high performing, secure operating system - Just Enough of the Operating System, that is, or JeOS. 

Why should you get juiced?

An OS finely tuned to the application it supports is smaller, more secure, easier to manage, and higher performing than a general purpose OS.   A smaller footprint means IT organizations can run more instances per server.  Tailoring the OS specifically to the app enables the removal of vulnerable components such as the browser from Windows and therefore significantly reduces the number of vulnerabilities and patches required to address those vulnerabilities.

Bringing it all together…

Ok, you get it.  JeOS makes sense.  But, how do we really make software hassle free?  How do we enable customers to gain value from their enterprise applications immediately and not get bogged down in managing the OS?  We run JeOS in a Virtual Appliance.  To recap from one of my earlier blog postings, Virtual Appliances are pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise software applications packaged along with an operating system within a virtual machine.  With the ISV tailoring the general purpose operating system down to a JeOS and packaging it along with their app inside a Virtual Appliance, all of the headaches associated with deploying, patching, and managing the OS are removed.  The ISV now takes responsibility for managing the Virtual Appliance (which includes both the JeOS and the app) and the customer can now focus managing their business, not the OS.  Furthermore, because the ISV now has full accountability for the entire Virtual Appliance, customers can be assured that they will invest more in fully integrating and testing the solution so that it works better together, faster.   

Real world JeOS examples

1. BEA:  BEA announced in December 2006 that they are working on a technology that allows Java applications to run directly on virtualized hardware running VMware Infrastructure to offer better flexibility and efficiency.  WLS-VE combines WebLogic Server with BEA’s Liquid VM, a virtualization-optimized JVM.  Liquid VM is a slimmed down OS written only to run Java virtual machines and is not a general purpose OS.  Supposedly it requires only 100MB of RAM.  Now you’re talking…

2. VMware: As part of VMware ACE 2, VMware is shipping a virtual appliance that offers management capabilities.  We ripped out parts of Debian we didn’t need and reduced the OS size to be ~20 MB.  That’s all the OS we needed to run the ACE Management Server.

3. Microsoft: One of the interesting features first introduced in Windows Server 2003 and enhanced immensely in Longhorn is roles, described in the Server Core section on the Longhorn overview page as follows (emphasis mine):
   

   Server Core: Beginning with the Beta 2 release of Windows Server "Longhorn," administrators can choose to install Windows Server with only the services required to perform the DHCP, DNS, file server, or domain controller roles. This new installation option will not install non-essential services and applications and will provide base server functionality without any extra overhead. While the Server Core installation option is a fully functioning mode of the operating system supporting one of the designate roles, it does not include the server graphic user interface (GUI). Because Server Core installations include only what is required for the designated roles, a Server Core installation will typically require less maintenance and fewer updates as there are fewer components to manage. In other words, since there are fewer programs and components installed and running on the server, there are fewer attack vectors exposed to the network, resulting in a reduced attack surface. If a security flaw or vulnerability is discovered in a component that is not installed, a patch is not required.

There you have it…  Even Microsoft Windows is adopting JeOS concepts. The next step would be to allow users to create their own roles so they can create their own juiced Windows.

JeOS is a slimmed down version of an OS that is tailored to match the needs of the application it supports.  It is therefore smaller, more secure, easier to manage and definitely a much better way to go.  Thin is definitely in!

The benefits of deploying juiced operating systems in the form of virtual appliances are simply too significant for customers to not ask for them.  This trend in operating systems is exciting and game changing (see press coverage).  It will be interesting to see how OS vendors adapt both in terms of technology as well as pricing/licensing.  Either way, next time you’re thinking about buying a new application, ask the vendor for a virtual appliance – it is the best way to simplify your IT landscape.

[For more information on virtual appliances and to download one today, visit the Virtual Appliance Marketplace.]

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Product Management and Market Development

A lot has happened since I last wrote about Project Fusion in December 2006 so I figured it was time to share my latest thoughts on this initiative. 

First off, at Beta 3 we finalized the name – Fusion was a good project name and we all loved it enough that it became the final product name.  We think VMware Fusion™ is the best way to run Windows and other PC operating systems and applications on your Mac without rebooting.

We released our public beta in December and over the last 6 months, we added a number of new features, improved performance and fixed bugs.  Obviously there are far too many features and improvements to list here but the highlights are: Unity, 3D support, snapshots and Boot Camp integration.

Later tonight you will have access to VMware Fusion Beta 4.  This final beta introduces features we are extremely proud of and ones that will showcase our attention to detail and quality of work.  The two features I wanted to highlight are:

Unity
They say pictures (or videos) are better than words so I encourage you to view this video. Unity provides a seamless integration so that each Windows application is its own window on your Mac.  You can use Command-Tab or Expose to switch between applications, even if some of them are actually running in a secure virtual machine.  You can minimize your Windows apps to the Dock and even keep your favorite ones in the Dock.  The other feature I like is the new Applications menu that is automatically populated to closely resemble your Start menu in Windows.  You can also use Launcher to find and open any application on your virtual machine.  We all love the Mac experience and with Unity you don’t have to leave that behind to use your Windows applications.

Customizable Toolbar
A lot of our beta customers complained that the toolbar was rather crowded in Beta 3.  We introduced a feature in Beta 4 whereby you can completely customize the toolbar – simply right click on the toolbar and off you go.

With beta 4 out of the way, we are on the home stretch to the final release (GA).  We will continue to work even harder on stability issues now to ensure that VMware Fusion is a rock-solid product when it is GA, if it isn’t already.  We focus a lot on quality, attention to detail and polish.  Customers hold us to a high bar and we love it!  I guess 20,000 enterprises and over 4 million users don’t depend on our products if the bar wasn’t high.  We are very excited to bring all our years of virtualization experience to the Mac community.

Download Beta 4 from www.vmware.com/mac later tonight.  We look forward to your feedback.  And look for us at WWDC next week.

Thanks for participating in our beta program and for your invaluable feedback in helping us build VMware Fusion.

Posted by Eric Horschman
Director, Product Marketing

Performance testing of virtualization platforms is important to our customers and partners and their desire for benchmark data is easy to understand. Virtualization is still a new technology and they want assurances that the end user experience won’t suffer when applications are moved into VMs. They also want performance data to support capacity planning and to compare hardware platforms.  To meet those needs, VMware is publishing benchmarks of our products and supporting testing by our users and partners. VMware is also helping to meet the demand by publishing new performance resources regularly. Another effort to support expanding performance data comes from the work of our performance team in defining standard benchmarks with the SPEC organization and their delivery of VMmark -- a comprehensive tool for measuring performance of virtualized systems that’s now in beta.

If you’re considering virtualization, make intelligent use of the performance data that VMware, our partners and our competitors are providing, but don’t get overly enamored with the benchmarks.  The bigger picture that includes the reliability, management scalability and security of your virtual infrastructure is always going to be more important than a single attribute like performance.  John Humphreys of IDC has made the same point, “While the focus in the vendor community has been on performance (i.e., should a customer chose a paravirtualized or native virtualized path), I would suggest the efforts and energy applied to wringing out a few extra performance percentage points would be better placed in demonstrating the underlying platform stability and reliability.”¹ VMware has taken this approach from the beginning and we’re delivering the most stable hypervisor available -– one so solid that many of our customers proudly report uptimes for their VMs exceeding 1000 days.

Virtualization users are coming to the same conclusions about the relative importance of performance in their deployment decisions. Consider some findings from our own surveys that compare the concerns of virtualization newbies and veterans. The prospective users invariably rank performance as their top concern. They’ve heard about “virtualization overhead” and worry it will lead to a revolt of angry end users. What’s fascinating is how quickly performance concerns drop in the rankings as users progress from VMware evaluations to production deployments. The veterans have learned that when they’re virtualizing three year old physical machines that typically run at 10% utilization or less into VMs on newer hardware, performance just isn’t a problem. The ability of VMware Infrastructure to elevate utilization into the 50-80% range and the relentless march of Moore’s Law means you can comfortably migrate most of your servers into VMs.

If you’re planning to conduct your own virtualization benchmarks, you should consider the uniqueness of testing in virtual machines. Our own performance testing work has uncovered many potential pitfalls that can skew results. Something as simple as relying on virtual time in a VM rather than true real-world time can lead to benchmarks showing virtual machines performing faster than native systems.  There are also recommended physical and virtual machine configuration settings needed to prevent resources from being sapped by activity unrelated to the benchmark tests being performed.  Ensuring the equivalence of VMs and physical machines is important when measuring virtual performance relative to native. We’ve assembled some benchmarking guidelines and performance tuning best practices. We have also implemented a benchmark review process and the real-live people behind that process will help our users design valid test plans for any of our products.

The VMware benchmark review process is simple.  If you want to publish VMware product performance testing results, just fill out our web form to get started.  We’ll contact you to arrange a review of your test plan and results and we commit to completing the whole process within 30 days.

That all sounds nice, but does VMware really meet its commitment to support testing of our products?  Just ask the over 50 commercial and academic users who’ve had their benchmark tests reviewed and approved by VMware.  Better yet, just ask our friendly competitors at XenSource who recently published results comparing their latest product to VMware Infrastructure 3. We asked for a few changes –- some we got and some we didn’t -– but, in the end, both VMware and XenSource agreed to the validity of the results.

Benchmarks and performance test results are useful tools when planning a move to virtualization, but don’t get fixated on them. Virtualization overhead is an inevitable tradeoff made for the tremendous management and provisioning efficiencies of technology. However, the incredible pace of hardware performance improvements and the universally low CPU utilizations in most data centers reduce that overhead to insignificance. Sure, there will always be workloads that push the limits of a physical server that aren’t good virtualization candidates. But don’t spend too much time worrying how to bring them into your virtual infrastructure -– AMD, Intel and VMware will do the heavy lifting for you to turn a server that’s taxing a dedicated box today into a slam-dunk P2V candidate tomorrow.

¹IDC Link, “The Battle for the Hypervisor,” Doc #lcUS20612507, March 22, 2007