ESX for free… but is it really?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Starting from today, VMware’s ESXi hypervisor will be offered free, supposedly to counter the threat from Microsoft Hyper-V and there is an interesting article over at virtualisation.info. But dig a little deeper and, as James Staten at Forrester Research notes:

“This doesn’t really address the typical enterprise’s cost of VMware deployment – just the marketing threat of the low Hyper-V starting price.”

James’s article on the release of “free” ESX is worth a read – he continues by noting that:

“VMware has used this pricing strategy several times to help seed the market, grow its customer base and fend off competitors. VMware Player and GSX server were both made free to respond to the threat of open source and other competitors. Both Player and GSX served as nice onramps to try VMware but had performance penalties and limitations, so customers quickly upgraded when they were through experimenting – stopped a lot of customers from experimenting with the open source stuff. The same is likely to be true here; while free ESXi certainly isn’t crippled (it’s the same code as in the commercial versions) the fact that you can’t manage more than one at a time is the driving drawback.”

But the part I struggle with in James’ analysis is the the summary:

“If you want a more mature solution and the live migration and HA capabilities VMware brings to the table, the cost differential is worth it.”

Is it? Is anybody really failing live production workloads over between hosts using VMotion? Not with the change control processes that most of my customers use. That’s why Microsoft’s quick migration is fine for controlled fail-over – a few seconds of outage is generally not a concern when you have already scheduled the work. As for high availability, I can provide a highly available Hyper-V cluster too. Then there is maturity… VMware may have invented the x86 virtualisation space but dealing with the company can sometimes be difficult (in fairness, that criticism can be levelled at other organisations too).

There’s an old adage that no-one got fired for choosing IBM. More recently no-one got fired for choosing HP (formerly Compaq) ProLiant servers. In the virtualisation space no-one gets fired for choosing VMware – not at the moment anyway – at least not until the CFO finds out that you could have implemented the solution using Microsoft technologies for less money. For that matter, when did anyone get fired for choosing Microsoft?

Comparison between Hyper-V and the Xen hypervisor in RHEL

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Even though choosing a hypervisor is only a small part of implementing a virtualisation strategy, much has been written about how Microsoft Hyper-V compares to VMware ESX – and there are some fundamental differences between those two products. Architecturally, Hyper-V has a lot more in common with the Xen hypervisor (although they are not identical) and indeed XenSource worked with Microsoft to provide Linux support for Hyper-V and I’ve recently been alerted to the presence of a short white paper which compares Hyper-V and the Xen technology implemented in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the leading Linux distribution, which is not currently on the list of supported guest operating systems for Hyper-V). Despite being published by Microsoft, it seems to me to give a balanced view between the two products, although it should also be noted that Red Hat has announced it will be switching from Xen to KVM for future virtualisation support.

Virtualised hardware hotel

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I was at a VMware event yesterday where they proudly played this video…

…it’s a bit of fun (and the music is really catchy – even if the lip sync is a bit out!) and was apparently first shown at VMworld a few months back.

It’s not just VMware that can offer this type of solution though – I did use VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI) in the design I produced for a server consolidation exercise with a “big four” accountancy firm a couple of years back but it was very expensive and required a huge leap of faith on the part of both the customer and the datacentre managed service provider. Now we’re in the second half of 2008, I’m not sure if I would be using VMware products in my “virtualised hardware hotel”. For a lot less money I could do the same thing with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, together with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Some people will argue that the VMware products have maturity on their side and I’ll concede that it’s true – VMware did create the x86 virtualisation market – but a hypervisor (or virtualisation layer, in VMware-speak) is a commodity now and the simple fact is that I really can’t justify advising my clients to spend the extra money on ESX and Virtual Center, especially as the Microsoft offerings under the System Center banner can be used to manage my virtual and physical infrastructure as one.

If only Microsoft produced viral videos like this, I could share one with you… so come on Redmond… give me something to play back at the VMware boys (and girls).

Stop installing unnecessary software on my PCs

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

What is it about software companies that they think they can install a load of rubbish on my PCs? This morning, Java was bugging me that it wanted to install an update. That’s fair enough but, as it installed, it asked me if I wanted to install OpenOffice too (I don’t) – I wouldn’t mind this so much if it wasn’t that the default state for the check box was selected.

Apple Software Update pestering for installation of Safari on WindowsNo sooner had Java finished updating itself then the Apple Updater popped up and said “hey, we’d like you to update QuickTime. We can’t be bothered to give you just a patch, so please download 29MB of our bloatware” (I said no because I was using a mobile connection), “and while you’re at it why not install our web browser that seems to have more than its fair share of security issues… that will be another 23MB” (of course, I am paraphrasing here – but you can see the dialog box… complete with checkbox selected by default. Can you imagine the uproar there would be if the Microsoft Office for Mac Updater tried to install another Microsoft product on people’s computers?

It’s not just the update programs either. I seem to recall that one time when I installed Adobe Reader it wanted to put some toolbar in my browser (no thanks). And, whilst they criticise (Windows) PC makers for shipping demo software on new PCs (in the “Stuffed” Get a Mac ad), Apple ships demo software on new Macs (albeit its a demonstration version of Microsoft Office).

Please! Stop installing this crapware. I want a tidy, secure system and the way to do that is to minimise unnecessary installs. Of course, as the software companies all know, 90% of PC users will click any old dialog box and that’s why their PCs run so slowly and fall over so often.

Useful Hyper-V links

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In the week or so since Hyper-V RTMed there has been a huge amount of coverage on various websites. Here’s a roundup of some of the more useful articles that I’ve come across recently:

Providing audio playback from a Hyper-V VM

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back, I wrote about using the Microsoft Remote Desktop protocol to access USB devices from within a Hyper-V virtual machine. At the time, I mentioned that this approach will also work for other local resources and James O’Neill recently highlighted that, as long as the Windows Audio service is running, the Remote Desktop client can be used to bring sound from a virtual machine back to the device that is providing access (it’s all part of a series James is writing on how to get the server he wants… perhaps he should read my post from a few months back on running Windows Server 2008 as a client operating system).

How Hyper-V works: product team videos

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve posted quite a bit of information about Hyper-V on this blog – including the Hyper-V presentation I gave at Microsoft UK in April 2008 but TechNet Edge has some videos from the Windows Server Virtualization product team that go into a lot of the detail – and where better to learn about this than from the guys who created the product?

Interview with Mike Neil (Microsoft General Manager, Virtualization) about Hyper-V RTM, including:

  • Why Microsoft decided to get into the server virtualization environment.
  • Changes between the various release candidates and RTM.
  • Challenges encountered along the way.
  • Where Hyper-V is heading.
  • IT Pro challenges for deploying Hyper-V.

Architectural overview:

  • Virtual service provider (VSP) virtual service client (VSC) and VMBus.
  • Disk operations within the Hyper-V architecture.
  • Comparison of fixed, dynamic, and differencing VHD disks.

Snapshots:

  • How virtual machine snapshots work.
  • How to properly export a specific VHD/snapshot.
  • Limitations with multiple branches of snapshots.

Backing up Hyper-V virtual machines:

  • Virtual machine snapshots and Volume Shadow copy Service snapshots (VSS).
  • How VSS snapshots function.
  • What happens with a backup for VSS and a non-VS aware operating system (e.g. Linux or Windows 2000 Server).

Disks and iSCSI:

  • Determine when to use a pass-through disk.
  • How iSCSI works and how to use it with Hyper-V.
  • Learn some best practices for using iSCSI.

High availability:

  • Guest operating system clustering.
  • Virtualization platform clustering.

How Microsoft uses server virtualisation for it’s own IT.

Exchange Server support in a Hyper-V virtual machine

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Virtualisation is great but it’s not a “one size fits all” solution – some workloads just don’t make sense for virtualisation.

For many organisations, Exchange Server is one such workload but there are scenarios when it might be appropriate – at least for part of the messaging infrastructure. Up until now it’s been unsupported (in any case, Exchange Server 2007 requires a 64-bit platform, and that wasn’t available on a Microsoft virtualisation platform before the advent of Hyper-V) but Microsoft is running some of its Exchange Servers on Hyper-V and, as Andrew “Dugie” Dugdell commented a few days back, Exchange Server support for Hyper-V is on its way.

In a Hyper-V briefing last week, I asked Bryon Surace, a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server Virtualization group, to clarify the situation with regards to Exchange Server support on Hyper-V and he explained that support for virtualisation is part of Microsoft’s common engineering criteria for 2008:

“Windows Server virtualization Support
Each server product must be capable of running within a Virtual Machine (VM) as provided by [Hyper-V] on Windows Server [2008]. Each server product must handle escalation and support running in a VM at the same level as was the product running directly on Windows Server.”

Some of the product teams are still testing their products on Hyper-V but, according to Surace, Exchange is supported but recommendations are to follow on implementation (the Exchange Server product team committed to an announcement within 60 days of Hyper-V’s RTM including a detailed support statement for Hyper-V, and a TechNet article with best practices).

Why Hyper-V does not mean the end of VMware – but at last it provides some competition for ESX

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Microsoft has been very careful in its statements about comparing Hyper-V with ESX. Jason Perlow’s Hyper-V review is a little more forthright and the graphics are great!

I don’t think that VMware is the new Netscape (although it seems IDC might think so) – they will be back with bigger and better things, and then Microsoft will push forward again in the next release of Hyper-V. Even so, all of a sudden, this is a two horse race, and VMware will start to see their market share decline.

And to all those who are comparing Hyper-V with VMware Virtual Infrastructure – get real – that’s not comparing apples with apples. More realistic comparisons are:

  • Hyper-V and ESX.
  • Hyper-V Server (not yet released) and ESXi.
  • Virtual Infrastucture and Hyper-V plus various System Center components.

As for the argument that it’s all about TCO, I’ll leave that to the vendors and analysts to go into the detail but, from a simplistic view, Hyper-V and System Center are much less expensive to purchase than Virtual Infrastructure 3, the technical skills required for support are less specialised (read less expensive) and I find it hard to see how a broad management suite like Microsoft System Center is more expensive to run than a virtualisation-only management product like VMware Virtual Center together with the other products that will be required to manage the workload itself.

Critics say that virtualisation is about more than just the hypervisor and that management is important (it certainly is), then they deride Hyper-V (which is really just a hypervisor and basic management tools) by comparing it to virtual infrastructure’s management features. Their next argument is typically that Hyper-V won’t support desktop virtualisation and, from what I’ve seen, Microsoft is pretty much there on a credible solution for that too – as well as profile, presentation and application virtualisation, with partners like Citrix, Quest and AppSense filling in the gaps.

It’s not all over for VMware but they do need to find a new business model. Quickly.

Resources for deploying Hyper-V

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Further to yesterday’s post about how Hyper-V has shipped, I thought I’d highlight that John Howard has blogged extensively on obtaining Hyper-V, changes at RTM, upgrade considerations and more.