In Brad's experience, disk performance seems to have traditionally been measured in how many acronyms you could list as present in a solution.  In filling the need for better metrics on storage performance, IOPS has become a commonplace term in determining shared storage capabilities.  In this white paper, Brad discusses the benefits and pitfalls of focusing on IOPS, and how storage I/O is an often over-simplified topic.  He provides a deep dive into:

• Shared storage fundamentals
• Links in the chain of storage
• IOPS as a measurement of disc I/O
• Making the most of IOPS

Download the free white paper here and when you're done share your thoughts and comments with us.  We'd like to hear them.

Enjoy!

Lauren Bonaca
Online Marketing Manager
VKernel
A Quest Software Company 

A video of the presentation can be seen here:

The white paper "Setting Prices for Private Clouds" the presentation was based on can be downloaded here.

Some observations and updates from the talk. The audience was composed of vendors but also some IT professionals running hard core private clouds. In general, the five reasons for pricing private clouds we discussed were:

1. Budgeting
2. Reduce waste and over allocation
3. Drive IT to operate as a business
4. Enable open market competition 

Walking through these reasons, there was general agreement from the audience that waste reduction is a critical component of this process, if not the most important. Pricing out private cloud services was also important for getting funding to reinvest and grow the cloud environment.

Walking through the pricing triangle of cost, competitors, and value yielded a lively discussion. From a cost standpoint:

• One IT administrator reported that public cloud providers where unable to provide a competitive bid for their 85,000 seat email environment
• A second IT administrator reported that for test and development, their $1M price tag was easily beaten in both time to stage and cost ($3,000) offered by a public provider

There appeared to be general agreement that from a cost standpoint, test and development worked for public clouds. When we discussed competitive pricing and value, one administrator was quick to point out that the public cloud providers are not his “competition”. Rather, he sees IT as the broker for services.

From a value standpoint, the top value issues internal IT provided over public clouds were:

• Customization
• Reliability
• Support for home grow applications
• Security
• Compliance
• Performance and latency 

The reliability comment surprised me. We spent some time discussing it and the general experience was that internal IT is still more reliable than public cloud providers.

We embarked on a lively discussion as to whether IT’s customers appreciated these value points. The results were mixed. But the lack of this appreciation for IT’s value added services was core to internal customers seeking out public cloud providers.

The most controversial part of the presentation was the recommendation on whether to reveal actual prices of cloud services to internal IT customers. My premise, that unless the goal of pricing IT services was to compete with external providers, avoiding the direct comparison was the best route. In other words, price cloud services as a loss leader since the value to the corporation of a customer using internal systems is higher than the value to end IT customer.

Cloud Connect was an enjoyable experience. To the audience, thank you for participating and providing new ideas on this topic.

Bryan Semple

CMO

VKernel

A Quest Software Company

The most costly part of our virtual infrastructures - storage - seems to be a popular theme this week. Here's what you should know:

Storage DRS (SDRS)

As more of us make plans to move over to vSphere 5, Frank Denneman explores the coexistence of SDRS and auto-tiering. Frank's partner in crime, Duncan Epping, shows us how to allow SDRS to spread VMs with multiple VMDKs across multiple datastores.

Server-Based Storage Tiering

As growing amounts of virtual servers and desktops continue to increase SAN and network workloads, EMC strives to improve storage performance by releasing VFcache, a server-based SSD solution. Chad Sakac shares his excitement and provides some details about VFcache. Others ask, "Is server-based storage tiering right for you?"

Cloud Storage

While I fish around for storage deals, Amazon defies Thailand and decreases its cloud storage prices by 12%. Red Hat piggybacks off the Amazon announcement and releases its Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon AWS. Google feels its cloud isn't big enough and prepares to launch it's own cloud storage solution. However, I'd be very surprised - and impressed - if they were able to replace the little Dropbox icon in my notification tray.

Happy Monday!

Jonathan Klick
Senior Systems Engineer
VKernel
A Quest Software Company

Let's start with Super Marketing .....

I came across a great VMware marketing campaign called VMware RealWorld. The campaign highlights the problems virtualization admins go through just to get through their days. The videos are funny and very poignant in their practical focus. No flash animations of clouds or narrators saying things like, “IT has to do more with less.” The videos present a practical look at issues administrators face.

You may not find yourself under your desk hiding from end users, but I think the videos make a great point.

The same day I came across this marketing campaign, I bumped into a white paper for vCenter Operations called “Super Metrics” for the Enterprise version. While the ad campaign and videos are practical, this white paper highlights the complexity that awaits a virtualization admin attempting to deploy vCenter Operations. vCOPS is derived from the original Integrien acquisition. Integrien is a great, theoretical product for boiling down the ocean of metrics for an organization in an attempt to link, say, the weather in Iowa driving up commodity prices, that increases server demand for brokerage firms that trade commodities, thereby causing high CPU utilization. By presenting this correlation between weather and CPU utilization, Integrien prevents the VM admin from running around thinking there is a problem, when in fact this is normal CPU behavior caused by extreme weather in Iowa.

But with any general purpose platform, there are tradeoffs. In this case, the trade off is in usability. The white paper about Super Metrics shows this in spades. A relatively simple question such as, “What is the average CPU usage of a group of virtual machines and what is normal for them?” requires a multi-page white paper to describe how to set up and operate vCenter Operations. Perhaps a tinkerer's dream, this type of complexity is a nightmare for a manager trying to get answers and build a productive team. Overly complex analytics that require lots of labor to manage and design are counterproductive to the purpose of these products in the first place. vCenter Operations relies almost exclusively on self-learning analytics. Powerful, but costly to use in terms of learning and set up.

VKernel’s virtualization management products use a mix of technologies to help virtual admins get answers fast. Eric Jackson, VP of Product Management did an excellent podcast last week on self-learning analytics which is worth a listen for anyone who considers self-learning analytics as the only way to solve the virtualization management problem.

Super Marketing vs. Super Metrics vs. Super Bowl

Let's try and forget that last one...

Bryan Semple

CMO

VKernel

A Quest Software Company

P.S. If you want to understand behavior of any group of virtual machines using VKernel's vOperations Suite, you don't need Super Metrics or Super Human powers.  Simply download and install vOPS Performance Analyzer, then create a Business View (a few clicks) and add any VM you want to analyze as a group to this Business View (a few clicks). Not only will you get average CPU usage of the group, but also a lot of other interesting metrics that will help you manage your virtual environment.

Busy news week last week for virtualization and capacity management.

VMware End of Life's CapacityIQ

VMware end of lifed CapacityIQ pushing all customers onto the vCenter Operations platform. While it was never clear to us how many of these customers existed, at least one, below is not happy.

Hey CapacityIQ customers - download vOperations Suite Capacity Manager - try it out for 30 days. Knowing what we do about CapacityIQ,  this will more than meet your capacity planning needs -- and we are not end of lifing the product.

VMworld EMEA in Barcelona

The dates for VMworld EMEA are now out and finalized.  Hello Barcelona.

"Microsoft SC 2012 to Support Multi-Hypervisor Private Cloud for a Flat Fee"

Interesting headline in ReadWriteWeb describing how MSFT will be selling System Center 2012 for a flat fee and supporting multiple hypervisors, just not Hyper-V. Worth a read.

Voting Now Open for Top Virtualization Blogs

With over 180 blogs to chose from, vote EARLY, but not OFTEN for the virtualization blog and podcast of your choice.

Hyper-V vs. vSphere 5

Another interesting article in the genre, this time from UP2V.  This follows some Hyper-V and vSphere 5 comparison data that our own Jonathan Klick did last year.

Government to Save Billions with Virtualization

That's right, billions.  I'm actually surprised it is not more given the size of the Federal Government.  Read this interesting article from InfoWeek Government.

Scale Up vs. Scale Out

The decision to scale up or out has been one that we have looked at in the past. Without looking at this from a financial perspective,  it has never been clear to me how this decision gets made with certainty. Scaling up has its costs and benefits.  Higher memory densities cost more than low memory densities. The fastest CPUs cost more than the slower CPUs.  But scaling out increases the number of network connections required, data center space, etc.

The chart below summarizes the analysis from 6 months ago showing that scale out made the most sense.

SearchServerVirtualization has another take on this in a recent article claiming that the decision has already been made for scale out in the form of blade architectures.  While I am not certain I agree with the conclusion, this is nonetheless a good read on the subject.

Have a great week!

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel 
A Quest Software Company 

At the VKernel table, we met hundreds of IT enthusiasts as we demonstrated performance and capacity planning capabilities within the vOperations Suite.  A few themes we heard from the folks we met were:

• VM admins are looking for visibility into storage when managing their virtual environments
• Virtual environments are getting larger and heterogeneous, and IT organizations are overspending on hardware as to not deal with performance issues - leading to wasted resources
• Chargeback is still a dream, while showback being embraced as a reality

Aligned with these virtualization management realities, the user group attendees were excited about vOPS’s:

• Scalability yet ease of use
• Performance issue remediation and automation
• Insight into storage, particularly I/O
• VM rightsizing automation for over-allocated resources
• Waste cleanup for snapshot, abandoned VMDKs, and zombie VMs
• Robust reporting capabilities, including operational and management dashboards

The VKernel crew really enjoyed speaking with everyone and we hope to hear from you soon.  We’d also like to send a huge thank you and job well done to the New England VMUG team for organizing a memorable, educational and fun event for everyone.

Go Pats!

Lauren Bonaca
Online Marketing Manager
VKernel

VKernel vOperations Suite

.

• Hyper-V grows at 62%
• Virtualization management in 2012: All about multi-hypervisor
• Enterprises Strive Toward Multi-Vendor Virtual Environments

Whether you believe the multi-hypervisor datacenter is here or coming, these are some interesting articles that at least support the inevitability of the heterogeneous hypervisor data center.

But as a commenter on a recent Linked In conversation pointed out:

"Hyper-V 3.0 should be on the roadmap for a 2014 deployment/upgrade. Windows 8 RTM most likely won't be available till the end of 2012. If you need immediate deployments there are other ways but Hyper-V 3.0 just isn't it. However Hyper-V 3.0 is going to change VDI and Private Clouds. I can't wait for it."

Waiting until end of 2012 for RTM on Windows 8 makes Hyper-V 3 for all its goodness, is a ways away. Filling this gap of progress is RHEV 3.0. In beta since last year, Red Hat is hosting their first ever virtual RHEV event next week. As a Red Hat partner, we will be participating. More than participating, we will be going GA on our heterogeneous version of vOPS that supports RHEV, Hyper-V and VMware environments.

So the march to heterogeneous data centers continues.  Join us at the RHEV event next week

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

VKernel vOperations Suite

According to the article and IDC, Hyper-V grew last year at 62%. Also in the article, Gartner states Hyper-V market share will be 27% of the market, up from 11% two years.

Those are some significant changes.

This data makes sense especially in light of the technical advances in Hyper-V over the past few years. Our Senior Systems Engineer, Jonathan Klick, created a compelling chart showing some interesting characteristics between vSphere 5 and Hyper-V 3:

You can read his entire blog post here.

The market share numbers are interesting in that they reflect a diversification of hypervisors. What they don't reflect is diversification of hypervisors within an organization. We are clearly starting to run into these organizations, and believe they are growing.  Application affinity, open source dedication, cost, tiering strategies, acquisitions, all drive organizations to adopt multiple hypervisor technologies.  So whether you are operating as a monolithic hypervisor company, or you run multiple hypervisors, or are using one of the emerging vendors, it looks as though you are in good company. Greater hypervisor diversity in the market is a good thing and will continue to accelerate.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

PS - Download a 30 day trial of VKernel's Award Winning capacity management application and see how it manages both vSphere 5 and Hyper-V environments. 

For data centers that wish to pursue increased automation, the enhancements in vOPS 4.5 introduces new capabilities, and importantly, robust controls for these automation features to provide data centers with "trusted automation". I.e, the software will implement changes with guidance from administrators based on specific needs for that environment. vOPS™ 4.5 specifically includes:

• New Automation Features - vOPS' VM management automation capabilities are enhanced with auto-deletion of abandoned VM images, auto-merging of unused snapshots, an additional automated remediation for performance issues and auto-calculation of future resource requirements.
• Automation Controls - vOPS 4.5 also adds the ability to more finely control some automation processes. For example, VMs can be grouped, and then these groups set with minimum and maximum resource amounts that automated right-sizing will respect.

Addtionally, vOPS 4.5 introduces:

• Application type tags to denote which application is running inside a virtual machine
• Storage DRS and storage cluster support available with VMware vSphere 5
• Access to VMware VASA interface storage statistics available with vSphere 5
• Capacity planning calculation adjustments for vSphere 5 HA methods
• Improved support and visibility into Raw Device Mapping (RDM) storage objects
• Additional management reports such as graphs for performance issue counts
• Auto-set VM metric trend alarms that generate warnings when abnormalities are detected

These features can be seen in action in the video below:

Trying out this "trusted automation" is quick and easy with a 30 day free trial of vOPS 4.5, which takes about 20 minutes to install and works immediately afterwards. Stay tuned for more discussions on how these new capabilities can help data centers save time and money.

Alex Rosemblat
Product Marketing Manager

2011 Prediction #1: VM stall makes its appearance in 2011 #FAIL

In 2011, we saw exactly the opposite. "Cheap" virtual machine access provided opportunities for organizations to increase their server counts with new applications.  Previously, it was challenging to deploy a new application.IT had to procure hardware, provision the server, and deploy the application. There were hurdles both in terms of business process, but also cost. Applications had to pass a high bar to get deployed.

What we continue to see in the virtualized world is that this deployment bar is much much lower, for better or worse. I continue to be surprised talking to customers about the size of their environments in terms of virtual servers relative to the companies size or revenue or even intensity of data processing needs.

For mission critical applications, we saw VMware do some great stuff with vSphere 5, RHEV 3 is in beta, and Hyper-V closed some major gaps specific to application scalability.

2011 Prediction 2: Hyper-V Appears #SUCCESS

2011 marked the appearance of real Hyper-V customers, running real applications,in production. The market share statistics published by the analyst firms always painted a picture that Hyper-V was prevalent in years past.But try as we could to locate customers prior to 2011, we could not locate many. This year, that changed.

2011 Prediction 3: Private Cloud Adoption is Slow #SUCCESS

Similar to the Hyper-V prediction, there was certainly lots of noise this year about private clouds. And yes, some IT organizations are building or planning to build private clouds. Other organizations have built virtualized environments with near self service provisioning capabilities and just have not called them "private clouds." But get a room full of virtualization admins together and ask "How many of you are running a private cloud" and the hands will be few. Ask a room of virtualization admins "Who is running vCloud Director?", and even fewer hands will go up. No doubt this private cloud trend will pick up, but in 2011, the hype did not match the on-the-ground-reality.

2011 Prediction 4: VMware Master of World Domination Strategy Hits Some Snags #NEUTRAL

Last year I predicted VMware would have execution issues delivering all they had promised on their vision. That part has generally been true. We finally saw at VMworld Copenhagen an announcement around the delivery date of the Capacity IQ/Integrien integration (now Q12012). It is difficult to determine exactly how integrated all these products will be since they are not yet released. But, it has taken over a year to integrate these applications.

VMware once again gets an A in compelling strategy vision and hence my #NEUTRAL rating. They have defined the requirements for virtualization management once again. The time for point solutions is over.

2011 Prediction 5: CPTN Holdings, the Secretive Microsoft Holding Company, Will Be Uncovered as the Top Burger King Franchiser in America. #NEUTRAL

Last year, Novell sold certain technology assets to CPTN holdings. I am still looking for evidence of the Burger King connection, but there are signs out there if you open your eyes.

That is the 2011 wrap up. Next December I will comment on 2012 predictions.

Happy Holidays

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

The most attended sessions from what we saw at the Dutch VMUG were:

1. Eric Sloof and Mattias Sundling's Mythbusters goes virtual
2. Gabrie van Zanten's vSphere Healthcheck
3. .... and Cutting through the VM Management Language Barrier at the VKernel Booth with VMGuru.nl's Edwin Weijdema, some clips included below...

In other highlights, the Monster VM also came to visit: 

Stay tuned for some blogger interviews from the event to come out shortly. Kudos to the Dutch VMUG team for organizing a memorable event chock full of insightful sessions.

Gauw tot ziens Dutch VMUG!

Alex Rosemblat
Product Marketing Manager

There is some data to support this. From a statistical standpoint, IDC revealed in their 2010 report on virtualization management software that Quest was number three behind only Microsoft and VMware in virtualization management revenue. The old big four of systems management have been replaced by the “Virtualization Three” or v3– Microsoft, VMware, and Quest. VKernel’s acquisition will only increase Quest’s lead from the other players and solidify our strong number three position from a revenue standpoint. Better yet, Quest offers the only hypervisor neutral platform that can go from spindle to application across not only VMware, but also Hyper-V and Red Hat. It is a powerful product portfolio that the Big Four do not have.

What about the other various start-ups and smaller companies left in the space? The market is clearly consolidating. These struggling companies need to either quickly assemble broader product portfolios and attain critical mass, or they risk the markets evolutionary extinction. Last week we saw a start-up require a $10M infusion of cash to keep operating. If you are not generating cash at this stage of the market development, your future is clearly uncertain.

The key now as VKernel moves forward with Quest is to make the merger additive for both our customers and Quest. We see a path forward to do this across two dimensions. First, Foglight’s deep product functionality in application performance monitoring makes a logical complement to VKernel’s expertise in capacity planning. Second, VKernel’s simple to download, affordable applications that provide immediate measurable value complements Quest’s enterprise/field based model. So the acquisition provides both complementary product expertise and complementary sales channels.

The Big 4 are missing in action. The smaller start-ups have significant business risk.  The v3 is here to stay and Quests recent acquisition of VKernel will only increase our lead across multiple dimensions. Long live the v3.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

PS - The best proof is sometimes just trying something out. Download vOPS today to see what VKernel can do for your business.

Essentially, one narrative is that VMware has a formidable vision for the future. Product vendors will need to assemble the necessary products to compete against VMware. This has implications both for customers making product selections and the remaining, still independent smaller vendors. Bernd Harzog of The Virtualization Practice echoed this theme with a thought provoking piece you can read here.

Bernd also had some interesting tweets:

This tweet really caught my eye about how the “Big Four” are missing the market. More on this next week.

In a Search Server Virtualization article entitled “Quest takes aim at VMware with VKernel acquisition:"

Alessandro Perilli from Gartner commented:

“Capacity management alone is not enough,” Perilli said in an email. “It must be tightly coupled with performance management to efficiently manage resources in a cloud infrastructure and enforce service levels.”

Competitors also chimed in. Andi Mann of CA tweeted:

And Anton Gostev of Veeam left the following comment on my blog posting:

So the message seems pretty clear. Either you are in this race with a total solution to compete with VMware’s management portfolio, or you are out. At this point as the market consolidates, companies that choose to invest with niche vendors or single product vendors risk their investment as the market consolidates to the stronger, more fully capitalized vendors with a broader product offering. And, if you agree with Bernd, the Big Four are nowhere to be found. That leaves just a few vendors with the required product portfolio, financial pockets,and sales and marketing distribution to compete and win. It is nice to be on a team that will be winning for the long term.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

Current Customers

First, for our current customers, nothing changes. The same team that has built, sold, and supported your products is still here. In fact, we are continuing to expand and hire in development, QA, sales, and support. Our next release will be coming out in a few weeks and Eric Jackson, our VP of Product Development, will be briefing you on great new features we have in store. The main difference for our customers is that we now have the financial backing and support of a publicly traded company.

New Customers

For new customers of VKernel, becoming a Quest subsidiary means VKernel is now part of the leader in virtualization management. Vkernel's solutions will continue to provide powerful, simple to use virtualization management solutions that ensure the performance and reduce the costs of virtual infrastructures and cloud environments. Going forward, we are now in a position to leverage Quest’s expertise in application performance management to continue the creation of credible alternatives to VMware vCenter Operations. Our combined products not only support multiple hypervisor types, but also provide visibility into both physical and virtual systems. While we are not discussing product roadmaps at this time, the possibilities are intriguing.

Partners

VKernel partners will continue to work with our sales team selling our industry leading performance and capacity management products. If you are a current VKernel partner, we will be briefing you in the coming weeks about our upcoming release. We will continue to invest in our partner program with you.

Employees

Finally, as employees of VKernel, joining the Quest family of companies is great news. As a subsidiary of Quest, we can gain access to critical infrastructure for growth. To support our team’s expansion, we are currently renovating a new headquarters in downtown Boston and we expect to move in during Q1. The added space and headcount will help us move faster into what is a rapidly expanding market.

Competitors

So who isn't excited about this announcement?  Well our competitors! VKernel just got the backing of an industry leader in virtualization. Industry consolidation leaves winners and losers in the marketplace. We are happy to be on the winning team.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

P.S. The best way to experience VKernel is to download our vOperations Suite for yourself.

First, the VMware story:

1. VMware Talks Future Licensing Changes

The article entitled "VMware CEO Maritz warns customers to be prepared for licensing changes" appeared in ComputerWorld soon after CEO Paul Maritz's speech at VMworld Copenhagen. The article quoted him as saying

“We are going to have to move towards more of a consumption-based model. This is where we are going."

The time frame for these model changes was not spelled out except a prediction that in 10 years, things would look very different.

Consumption based models for management software in our view cause undue pain for virtualization administrators and the IT management team. Faced with fixed budgeting processes, consumption models complicate already complex budgeting cycles.

VMware's main argument for consumption based pricing is around the economics of the cloud.Yes, customers of clouds will most likely be billed based on consumption. But an overwhelming majority of the infrastructure powering the cloud will be fixed priced. With the exception of power,  nearly all cloud infrastructure assets are based on purchasing fixed units of a physical resource. Even much of the software licensing is tied to the size of the underlying hardware assets. This allows for simplified purchasing, planning and budgeting.

Even power, which is consumption based, is actually fairly predictable for datacenter operations. Power consumption is more driven by the equipment simply being turned on as opposed to the load on the hardware. Disks still spin, CPUs still clock along, and memory still holds data no matter the calculations underway.

Consumption based pricing is simply an added burden for virtualization administrators without any appreciable benefit for the customer.

So this brings us to part two of our story.

2. VKernel Announces New Free Application

Last week we announced a new free application called vScope Explorer. vScope Explorer analyzes and visualizes the entire virtual environment across resources, data centers , clusters, datastores, host, and virtual machines to identify performance, capacity, and resource efficiency issues in a virtual environment. The free application analyzes data using VKernel's Capacity Analytics Engine™.

Gabrie van Zanten of GabesVirtualWorld.com called it:

"...almost a light version of the new VMware vCOMS
only from VKernel instead of VMware."

So while VMware warns of further pricing changes to come, we will keep producing new free applications that help educate virtualization administrators to the challenges of capacity management in virtualized environments.The education assists administrators while the tools drive VKernel awareness. Unlike consumption based pricing, we think it is a win - win for everyone.

Download your free copy of vScope Explorer today.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

• Performance health for all VMs and physical hosts in an environment
• Capacity health and impending performance issues for all physical hosts
• Resource efficiency of CPU, memory and storage for all VMs and datastores

Because virtual objects are laid out in context (VMs are inside hosts, which are inside clusters. All clusters are in their respective data centers), administrators can also at a glance identify specific clusters or entire data centers that are facing a high volume of existing or emerging issues. The highly visual nature of this application makes it ideal to project on screens in the data center command center to monitor environment health.

Education is a key part of VKernel's mission. We regularly release white papers, technical deep dive videos, blogs and podcasts, and will be streaming this content at the bottom of vScope Explorer, providing users with the most up-to-date educational materials. Furthermore, vScope Explorer is itself an educational tool - showing VM administrators what is actually going on in their environments and revealing areas of concern. Administrators wishing to take the next step can activate a trial of the award-winning vOperations Suite with a single click to resolve the issues that vScope Explorer identified. 

vScope Explorer installs in minutes as a virtual appliance, and can be downloaded at no cost from here. Check out the quick overview video below for a quick tour:

Alex Rosemblat
Product Marketing Manager

• A “CIO” level of managing IT resources and expenses primarily built around the Digital Fuel acquisition
• A development team/ operations team level which primarily focused around application deployment, performance and management
• An infrastructure team/operations team level which primarily focuses on infrastructure. This is the area where VMware and VKernel compete.

The vision is bold, all encompassing, but also very, very big. VMware is now not only taking on the big four systems management players, but parts of their new announcements appear to commoditize the storage players and even network providers. Combine this attack plan with the Microsoft and the Linux guys gunning for VMware and sometimes you wonder if they are trying to do too much.

Yesterday’s keynote where Steve talked about infrastructure management validates many of the same trends we have been seeing for the past four years in our customer base:

• Virtual environments spin off massive amounts of data that must be analyzed into actionable intelligence for a virtualization administrator to effectively manage the environments
• Virtual infrastructure breaks the model of traditional IT management
• Performance, cost and efficiency are tied together and must be managed as a whole in a virtual environment

VMware must now execute on their exceptionally broad vision and specifically within infrastructure management, deliver their face lifted vCenter Operations Management Suite (vCOMS). vCOMS appears to be a fulfillment of some of the announcements they made 12 months ago where they committed to integrate CapacityIQ, and Chargeback into the new Integrien acquisition.

Customers who currently have performance, capacity or cost efficiency challenges in their environment should download VKernel vOperations Suite and compare it to the offerings from VMware.

In other news from VMworld:

• Booth traffic is exceeding our already high goals
• The Monster VM stopped by for an interview but didn’t say much except for being fixated with Jonathan Klick’s hair
• Eric Sloof stopped by and we got at least one myth out of him from his myth busters presentation
• David Davis and Kendrick Coleman snuck into the show and did their Free Tools presentation - you can watch a video of it here. They broke the story of our new vScope Explorer free application.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

• Part I: Overview of emerging trends
• Part II: Increasing scale of virtualized environments
• Part III: The impact of mission critical applications

This posting reveals how trends in VM mobility will require more innovation in performance and capacity management.

VM Mobility

Virtual machines continue to get more and more mobile. Workload balancing systems move virtual machines from host to host. Storage management systems move virtual machines from array to array. Disaster recovery solutions move virtual machines between production and disaster recovery sites. With advancements in hybrid clouds, virtual machine mobility now extends between enterprises and external providers.

Mobility adds an entirely new set of questions:

• Which environment is the most cost efficient for a given load?
• Has a virtual machine been inadvertently moved between classes of storage service?
• As production capacity is consumed, is there sufficient capacity at the DR site

Due to virtual machine mobility, the cost to operate a virtual machine can change dramatically as a vm is moved from expensive server hardware and storage to less expensive server and storage hardware. As the density of virtual machines running on this hardware changes, so too does the cost. The virtualization cost index is designed to answer this cost efficiency question for virtualization administrators.

Virtual machine mobility can also impact compliance. As virtual machines move between servers and storage systems,  the tier of underlying hardware can also inadvertently change. For production systems covered by disaster recovery systems, movement or growth of the production virtual machines can cause the production environment to exceed the capacity of the disaster recovery site. vOPS 4 contains inventory reporting for compliance purposes to catch these compliance issues. More can be done here and this remains a rich area for innovation.

Up Next: Cost Allocation...

Again, Stay Tuned!
— Bryan Semple

I've been in nerd heaven recently with all the new technological toys to play with. As soon as I reached contentment with my vSphere 5 lab, a bunch of new announcements and releases have followed. VMware Workstation 8 and Fusion 4, the Windows 8 developer preview, and... <drum roll>... a peek at the new Hyper-V 3.0, which is shaping up to be a more worthy competitor to vSphere.

To get started, here's a quick comparison I created of Hyper-V's scalability improvements and how they compare with vSphere 5.0:

Here's some other awesome additions in the upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 release:

• Simultaneously live migrate both the VM and the VM's disk to a new location.
• Live migrate VMs without shared storage
• NIC teaming with out special third-party hardware - something VMware has already been doing
• Drag-and-drop files from one virtual machine to another to directly transfer without having to pass through the host or your workstation.
• The ability to host virtual disks on file servers - CIFS, SMB, NFS

Since Hyper-V will also be packaged with the Windows 8 desktop OS, I can only imagine the variety of possibilities. I could live migrate VMs between my lab and laptop over wifi. Another use case - found in this post - is "when I need a VM quickly, I start one from a VM library maintained on a file share and then move the VM’s storage to my local drive."

Admittedly, even though the feature set is beginning to look rich and comparable, it will be interesting to see how it matches up against vSphere in performance. In August, VMware released a third-party performance study, showing that vSphere 5.0 outperformed the current release of Hyper-V by 20%. If Hyper-V wants to compete on all levels, this is something Microsoft will most likely be addressing.

If you're curious to dig into the upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 a bit more, here's a couple of the better posts and articles I found:

• Windows Server 8: The Best Cloud OS?
• Windows Server 8 will bring us this!

Jonathan Klick
Sr. Systems Engineer
VKernel

Mission-Critical Applications and Capacity Planning

As more and more mission-critical applications are deployed to virtualized environments, the ability to manage performance and capacity for them is critical. More attention, for example, needs to be placed on the SAP application than a test and dev environment. To respond to this, we added the concept of business views which allows grouping of VMs together based on whatever criteria a virtualization admin wants to use.

But more importantly, we added advanced performance monitoring that takes the alerts and alarms in vCenter and adds both best practice threshold setting and root cause analysis. The result is that virtualization administrators to quickly drill down from problem to root cause for VM issues. In some cases, automated remediation can occur to clear the performance problems. Going forward, you will see additional innovation in this area as our Performance Analyzer product is just six months old.

From a planning perspective, the greater variety of applications also created the need to advance available virtual machine slot calculations. Initially, the number of available virtual machines that could be placed on a host or cluster could be calculated using the average size of a virtual machine running on that cluster. The assumption was that future machines would generally be of the same size as those already running.

As the variety of virtual machines deployed changed, this assumption was no longer valid. Utilizing both peak and average values of existing machines was a more accurate approach. However, even greater granularity for planning was required and vOPS 3.5 introduced the ability to plan based on actual machine sizes of virtual machines operating in the environment. Combined with the new reservation capability, virtualization administrators could now accurately determine available number of virtual machines left in a host or cluster, then reserve this space in the inventory. This level of planning is required to support the needs not only of mission critical applications, but to support the greater diversity of application profiles now getting virtualized.

Next Up: VM Mobility...

Stay Tuned,
— Bryan Semple

Besides the obvious technical requirements that vOPS scale to thousands of VMs, the ever increasing size of the environments we support has resulted in capacity modeling methodology changes and enhancements to environment visualization to more accurately analyze and present data to end users.

These changes have manifested themselves through a variety of use cases. First, as datacenters scale, they invariably also go global. Originally, we enabled the grouping of VMs in business views so that different groups could see VMs applicable to them by datacenter or application or whatever grouping mechanism made sense. While manually adding virtual machines to business views worked, we quickly found that larger environments required an automated approach to creating business views. This resulted in Smart Business Views that use naming conventions among other attributes to automatically group VMs into groups for analysis.

Global expansion also introduces different time zones into an environment. More than just different time zones, people are actually doing work at different times of the day. Hence, the ability to set different analysis periods at the VM, cluster, host or datacenter level is critical to perform meaningful analysis. Allowing for variable analysis periods at the VM level means a VM in Lisbon doesn’t get analyzed using the same period as a VM in San Francisco for peak and average values.

While we found analysis periods to be helpful, we have also been focusing significant effort on ranking, sorting, and prioritizing the top issues in an environment and easily bringing those to the attention of the virtualization admin. This is no small feat and requires significant and continuous advancement in our analytics. Prioritization of problems is the key output from this endeavor.

In vOPS 4 we released vSCOPE, an enterprise wide visualization feature which can fit 2,000 or more virtual machines on a single screen graphically showing problem points for performance, capacity, optimization and cost.

Resource exclusions are another interesting area of development. As environments scale in size, we discovered that certain classes of environments had different tolerance bands for utilization, CPU ready metrics, and waste. The HPC environment that is crunching numbers all day will run at 100% CPU utilization. There is nothing wrong with that as the applications are built to fully utilize the CPU. Continually flagging these virtual machines are problematic is inaccurate.

Another example where resource exclusions are important could be with a high value environment like SAP. Assume the SAP environment runs at less than 30% utilization. It may be that the political risks of attempting to increase utilization are just too high. This application is a high value application that just needs to be left alone, however inefficient it is. Excluding these types of applications from optimization calculations are critical. Resource exclusions allow virtualization admins to exclude virtual machines, hosts, clusters and datacenters from specific optimization calculations.

In the next blog posting, we will look at the challenges mission critical applications pose to capacity management.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

READ "Innovations" Part I and Part III too...!

First, the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) announced today that nearly 200 companies, including VKernel, are now members. The OVA is a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). The governing members of OVA are Red Hat, IBM, HP, and Intel. The growth of the OVA mirrors the growth VKernel is seeing in non-VMware based virtualization solutions. So while we don't expect KVM to overtake VMware anytime soon, we are see a pronounced uptick in KVM, XEN, and Hyper-V based solutions.

For a good summary of what Red Hat is doing with KVM, listen to this podcast with Red Hat Senior Director Navin Thadani. For an overview of the different hypervisors, Andreas Groth has a matrix at www.virtualizationmatrix.com. I had a good discussion with him at VMworld 2011 on the topic.

This brings us to the second article.  Last week, VMware issued a somewhat blistering response to Microsoft's advertising campaign that Microsoft kicked off just prior to VMworld. The VMware blog posting is titled:

First, I suspect Microsoft got under VMware's skin with their VMlimitd TAD video which has over 100,000 views.  I found the video rather funny especially coming from Microsoft. Did the portrayal of VMware as stuck in the past and Microsoft an innovator resonate? Sort of, but it is bit of a stretch. Nonetheless, the video raised some

interesting strengths about Microsoft's offering that I had not considered. Microsoft operates their own cloud, as opposed to just talking about cloud. The Hyper-V pricing model is more flexible than VMware. Finally, Microsoft's Systems Center Operations Manager supports multiple hypervisor types.

Maybe more than just the video got under Microsofts skin?

Based on the title of the blog posting, it appears the recent pricing and vTAX issues perhaps are still raw at VMware.

But this doesn't explain why VMware even responded to Microsoft. Hyper-V market share is theoretically not even close to VMwares. By engaging Microsoft, VMware legitimizes the comparison between the two. Which, if I were a Microsoft marketing person, I would enjoy. I don't see any upside for VMware by engaging Microsoft, unless of course, there is legitimate concern that recent vTAX missteps among others has actually opened the door wider for Hyper-V and the team at the OVA. Perhaps this is really what is at work in VMware's mind.

A recent case study we published from Smead could perhaps illustrate this trend:

"We’re a Microsoft shop, so Hyper-V was the natural choice for virtualizing our environment," explains Klaas Snater, Sr. Technical Analyst at Smead. "We’ve been very satisfied with Hyper-V and how it enabled us to meet our growing needs without expanding the data center."

Either way, today is a win for hypervisor diversity as both the OVA records a milestone in membership and Microsoft gets some respect from VMware.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

RELATED POST: Hyper-V 3.0: Closing the Gap With vSphere by Jonathan Klick

• Environment Scale – As virtualization permeates organizations, the presence of enterprises with 1,000+ VMs is more common than two years ago. These enterprises are not just larger Global 2000 organizations, but also mid-market enterprises that are leveraging virtualizations capabilities to deploy compute capacity in a manner not possible in the physical world. The design requirements for capacity management for these larger virtualized environments are very different than the smaller environments initially encountered in the earlier days of virtualization.
• Mission-Critical Applications – Hypervisors and their associated management stacks have made progress closing the key requirements gap for running mission critical applications. These mission critical applications require enhanced performance monitoring and capacity planning to ensure their continued availability in a shared resource environment.
• Multi-Hypervisor Deployments – More and more environments are deploying multiple hypervisor brands. Hyper-V is a credible alternative to VMware for many applications. Linux environments may default to using KVM and RHEV rather than deploying a non-native hypervisor. XEN has significant traction for desktop virtualization. Multi-hypervisor environments will gradually become the rule rather than the exception. These environments require a hypervisor agnostic approach to management
• Cost Optimization – Many organizations have completed the server consolidation projects that provided easy cost reductions as rows of servers were replaced with just a few virtualized systems. But as these virtualized environments have grown, server teams are once again having to refresh and purchase additional hardware. CFOs are questioning these purchases once again and waste and sprawl is receiving more scrutiny. Chargeback and showback, originally the cure for this waste has not been effective for a variety of reasons at curbing waste.
• VM Mobility – New technologies for moving virtual machines between servers, between arrays, and between datacenters have increased the mobility for virtual machines and added new dimensions to the capacity planning problem. Emerging technologies for virtual machine mobility between private, public and hybrid cloud environments while very cutting edge, will make the capacity management problem even more challenging to solve.

VKernel’s vOperations Suite has been innovating along these trend dimensions for several years. For each of the trends above, each version of vOPS has responded with new capabilities. Over the next couple of days, I will post on each of these areas.

Bryan Semple
CMO
VKernel

READ "Innovations" Part II and Part III Next ...!

According to the V-Index, on average, VMware is only used in 58.2% of environments in all countries surveyed. That’s slightly over half of all environments. Even in the surveyed country with the biggest VMware environment share (the UK at 72%), over 25% of environments still employ other options. Long story short, those numbers don’t point to chokehold over the hypervisor market as many may believe VMware to have. Organizations may gravitate to other options for a variety of reasons. Take the case of Smead Manufacturing, as Klaas Snater, Sr. Technical Analyst explains:   

“We’re a Microsoft shop, so Hyper-V was the natural choice for virtualizing our environment. We’ve been very satisfied with Hyper-V and how it enabled us to meet our growing needs without expanding the data center.”

As these environments grow, they will likely require assistance in virtualization management. Recognizing this impending change, VKernel has become a hypervisor agnostic product in our recent release of the vOperations Suite 4. The suite’s technical architecture has been enhanced to take in data from multiple hypervisors and treat all virtual objects inside as just virtual machines, hosts, clusters, etc regardless of what hypervisor is being used for resource abstraction. That means that VM administrators can see all of their virtual assets in the same user interface, and group together objects from Hyper-V and VMware ESX for reporting and operational purposes to be worked with within the same tasks. Red Hat will be following soon in Q4.

As Smead Manufacturing found from their success in scaling a Hyper-V environment,

“… our virtualized environment had grown so large, that we were in need of a more sophisticated capacity management and planning tool… We were unable to assess actual resource utilization accurately and that made it difficult for us to forecast our future needs. In a way, our servers had become ‘black boxes’ with the lack of visibility. That’s when we began looking for some additional management capabilities.”

To learn more about Smead’s experience in a growing non-VMware environment, the case study is available here. To download the vOperations Suite 4 and see hypervisor agnosticism in action, the suite is available for download in OVF or VHD format. Stay tuned for more news on extending hypervisor support in VKernel's hypervisor agnostic suite.

Alex Rosemblat
Product Marketing Manager