“Google knows everything,” said my then 3-year old son Jesse to me one day as I looked up the answer to yet another of his endless stump-the-chump questions. How astute, I thought. And almost true.

It seems Jesse was on to something that several virtualization management providers have clued into of late. Google — or at least search – is a great way to get at just about any kind of information you might be after — including virtual environment configuration information.

That might explain the sudden explosion of search-based virtualization management tools. Splunk Inc., which pioneered the idea of applying traditional search and indexing techniques to IT management data, already has an application targeted at Citrix Systems’ XenServer environments and, in the coming days, is set to announce its VMware equivalent. Hyper9, formerly InovaWave, is also planning to show off a search-based virtualization management tool at VMworld before going into beta. Last but not least, today VKernel announced the availability of its free SearchMyVM tool, whose “Google-like” interface enables administrators to ferret out information about their environments, including virtual machines, hosts, clusters, storage, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications and configuration information, to name but a few items.

On paper, the idea of using search to discover IT elements – even virtual ones — makes sense, but part of me wonders whether search is really as effective when trolling log files and configuration data as Google Desktop is at indexing, say, my sundry email messages and Word docs. Obviously, integration with a virtualization platform’s application programming interfaces provides visibility into key configuration items, but is that enough? If you’ve used any of these IT search tools, I’d be interested to hear how useful you found them to be. Comments welcome.

Anyone with five minutes of IT experience knows that vendors sometimes publish bogus “benchmarks” that portray their products in the best of all possible lights. Virtualization guru and Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf recently uncovered a particularly spectacular example of this, courtesy of QLogic and Microsoft.

In a release, QLogic Corp., a networking technology provider, said it tested virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and attached to a storage area network (SAN) via its 8 Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) host bus adapters, and saw near-native performance of 200,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS).

But, as Wolf discovered, what QLogic failed to mention was that it ran its tests against a very unusual SAN array: the Texas Memory RamSan 325 FC, which uses solid-state storage. Further, the benchmark used block sizes of just 512 bytes, compared with a more real-world block size of 8 K or 16 K.

This left Wolf feeling duped and betrayed:

If I was watching an Olympic event, this would be the moment where after thinking I witnessed an incredible athletic event, I learned that the athlete tested positive for steroids.

Wolf ran this benchmark by a colleague, who calculated that had the same benchmark been performed using “real disks” with latency of 7 milliseconds, it would have limited throughput to a much less impressive 9,142 IOPS. Hardly anything to write home about.

Thanks to Wolf for taking the time to look into this.

Word has it that Microsoft is finally getting it together and releasing Hyper-V, putting the tech world on notice that it is now safe to exhale.

Phew, we were all about to turn blue.

Has someone ever told you a story about some aging celebrity, and your first thought is, “Wait, you mean they’re not dead yet?’ I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I read that Hyper-V was coming out, I thought, ‘What do you mean, it’s being released? I thought that already happened!”

My mistake, I had confused the release with another important Microsoft — ahem, milestone — in March: the Hyper-V release candidate (RC).

Excuse me for being flip, but I was bored to tears by this whole Viridian-cum-Hyper-V saga long ago. Two years ago, when I first started covering virtualization, the big news was that Microsoft had made Virtual Server 2005 available for free. Immediately thereafter, VMware returned the volley and made its hosted virtualization platform VMware Server free too, eliminating any real advantage Virtual Server 2005 may have had over the better-established GSX. So much for that story line.

Since then, we’ve lived through name changes, (Viridian to Hyper-V), release candidates, pricing announcements (why $28 dollars, why not $25? $29.99?), delays (will Microsoft meet its 180-days-after-Longhorn deadline? Will it beat it?), feature cuts, feature clarifications (“Quick migration” anyone?), and countless press articles with VMware cast as David to Microsoft’s Goliath — or is it the other way around?

Everything except an actually shipping, nonbeta, nonrelease candidate product.

Until now.

As a journalist, I’m just happy that the wait is over, and we can all stop walking around on tenterhooks, expected to drop everything every time Microsoft comes knocking at our inbox with some virtualization-related announcement that may or may not pertain to the release of Hyper-V.

Now we can all get on with our job of waiting for Microsoft to update us on the status of all the product features that it excised from Hyper-V last year: quick migration, hot add of system resources, increased numbers of CPUs, etc. What a relief!

I chatted with server-based computing expert Brian Madden the other day, and we got on the topic of VMware Inc.’s long-term viability as a company. Unlike VMware’s stock holders, Madden believes that the company won’t always be the behemoth it is today, despite the massive changes it has spurned in the IT industry.

Today, VMware’s strength is its “first-mover advantage,” according to Madden. But the same lead that has enabled VMware to enjoy an overwhelming market share, and a several-year technological advantage over its competitors, might also come back to haunt it, Madden said.

“Look, Amazon wasn’t the first online bookseller, eBay wasn’t the first online auction house, Internet Explorer wasn’t the first Web browser,” he said.

The list of second-mover companies that have rapidly eclipsed the pioneers is substantial. (Then again, the list of companies with first-mover advantage that made it, so to speak, is probably also pretty long.)

With mounting pressure on VMware from all sides, Madden thinks the company’s days are numbered. “VMware is going to be a footnote in the history of IT,” he predicted, “albeit an important footnote, no doubt about it, because of the way that they’ve changed the industry. But in the long run, I think our kids will be talking about VMware in their history classes.”

Oracle doesn’t officially support its products running on VMware, but it will happily support you if you virtualize on its Xen variant, Oracle VM. But at least one large Oracle PeopleSoft customer with which I spoke recently refuses to play along and will maintain its VMware status quo.

“We looked at Oracle VM, but it’s where VMware was two or three years ago,” the systems administrator said, who asked that he and his organization not be named.

Not only did this system administrator find Oracle VM to be technically inferior to ESX Server, but also he didn’t want the burden of having a second virtualization environment to run and manage. “We’d rather not do that,” he said.

The other alternative — to switch from PeopleSoft to a competing product that’s supported on VMware — isn’t an option. “Our investment in PeopleSoft is too great,” he said, and “in the grand scheme of things, running it on dedicated hardware is a drop in the bucket.”

It’s a shame, he said, because in the past six months, his group has begun actively virtualizing not only “the low-hanging fruit,” but increasingly more production workloads. “This whole Oracle-hating-VMware thing has really put a crimp in our style,” he said. Meanwhile the organization’s CIO has approached Oracle and told the vendors, “We’d like to [virtualize Oracle applications], but with terms that don’t involve unilateral demands that we use only your software,” the administrator reported. As of yet, no word back from Oracle, but as far as he’s concerned, there’s no deal to be made.

“[Oracle] can either change their mind, or we’ll keep buying physical hardware. We’re not moving to Oracle VM.”

Security is the VMware topic du jour, what with VMware releasing several security patches for ESX 3.0.2, and with Boston-based Core Security Technologies revealing a vulnerability in VMware Workstation, ACE and Player that exploits the use of shared folders.

On the latter front, it appears that the shared folders vulnerability hasn’t sent shivers down VMware’s spine. According to Core Security CTO Ivan Arce, VMware has known about this vulnerability since last fall.

“We contacted VMware about this and reported it to them on Oct. 16,” of 2007, Arce said. Since then, VMware told Core that it was working to release a fix for the flaw, which was originally scheduled for December. But VMware has delayed the fix multiple times and has now scheduled the fix for this later month.

However, Arce said that Core has received no confirmation that the coming release will actually fix the problem.

Rather than wait any longer for VMware to resolve the problem, Core Security decided to go ahead and alert users to the vulnerability and its simple fix, Arce said.

But even though it’s been over four months since Core first alerted VMware to this vulnerability, know that VMware is by no means the most irresponsible independent software vendor Arce has worked with. “I think that they have been responsive, but they could have been more responsive,” Arce said. “There’s definitely room for improvement” in terms of “improving processes and getting things done faster. But there are companies that are far worse than VMware.”

Well, that’s something.

I just ran across an interesting article comparing the cost of VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with that of upgrading an existing “rich client” desktop to Vista. According to analyst Barb Goldworm, it ain’t all that pretty:

The simplified bottom-line pricing comparison (using the very rough example numbers given here) is this: Upgrading a physical desktop to Vista might cost $300 to $400 (per desktop) in hardware costs and $200 to $300 in software costs, totaling $500 to $700 per physical desktop. Delivering Vista through a virtual desktop architecture (VMware’s VDI in this example) and continuing to use existing PCs as rich clients accessing virtual desktops might cost $700 per VM desktop in infrastructure costs and $23 per VM desktop, if using VECD, totaling $723 per virtual desktop.

She goes into pretty extensive detail comparing the two models, and I wonder if anyone that’s evaluating VDI would care to comment on her assumptions or has done his or her own math? Alternately, has anyone thought about using a virtualization platform other than ESX for VDI? If you’re serious about VDI, exploring alternate virtualization platforms seems like an obvious place to trim some costs.

This summer, SearchServerVirtualization.com wrote about a large VMware shop that uses an application virtualization and provisioning tool from FastScale Technology Inc. to keep its test lab under control. Now there’s news that FastScale will launch version 2.0 of its Composer product, a good sign for the Santa Clara, Calif., startup with just a handful of customers to its name (according to Lynn LeBlanc, the company’s CEO, “more than 10,” to be imprecise).

The company’s goal with FastScale Composer 2.0 is twofold, said LeBlanc: scalability and useability. “With our prior user interface, I felt we were scalable if you were dealing with hundreds of machines — but not if you were dealing with thousands of machines.” To scale up to these large environments, FastScale re-architected its user interface to represent server inventory and configuration details in a browseable, hierarchical format.

Other features include new support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (previously, FastScale supported only RHEL 4) and provisioning into VMware ESX 3.5 virtual machines.

As more customers get their hands on it, LeBlanc says the principal use cases and benefits of FastScale’s technology are beginning to crystallize. For one thing, the company’s “application blueprinting” technology results in application stacks that are significantly smaller than traditional ones (LeBlanc claims an average size reduction of more than 90% over a traditional image), making it a good way to optimize performance and resources. “The smaller the environment, the fewer resources it uses,” LeBlanc explained. For another, these smaller environments encourage dynamic provisioning — and reprovisioning — of IT environments. Finally, blueprinting automatically detects dependencies between an application and the underlying operating system, eliminating the time-consuming and manual process of creating static “golden images.”

Anyway, it’s interesting technology, somewhere between Scalent Systems provisioning and Ardence application virtualization and is probably worth reading more about.

Despite VMware Inc.’s having missed analysts’ estimates for the fourth quarter of 2007 — which sent shares into an after-hours free-fall on Monday (trading was at $61 a share at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, down from $83 at the market’s close) — the company’s CEO Diane Greene maintained that the company will not lower product pricing in 2008. “We do think we can maintain our pricing,” Greene said on an earnings call with investors. “We anticipate continuing our pricing over the course of the year.”

Greene also said that while customers (of which there are now reportedly more than 100,000) are investigating Hyper-V, thus far the company hasn’t seen an impact from Microsoft’s forthcoming virtualization platform. “Our customers have evaluated it and told us they saw no reason to switch,” Greene said, pointing to an InfoWorld report that compared Hyper-V to VMware Server 1.0, “but not as polished.”

Of course, Wall Street is rarely satisfied. During Q407, VMware increased its revenue 80% to $412 million, profits more than doubled, and the company is on a run rate of $1.6 billion. But the ongoing shift in revenue from licensing to services (support, subscription and professional services), as well slower U.S. growth relative to international markets has worried investors, who responded by depressing the stock price to levels not seen since mid-August, days after the IPO.

Looking forward, Greene told investors that in 2008 the company plans to unveil new products for security and virtual desktops and will “preview a major new Virtual Infrastructure suite.”

Test-and-development environments that want to see how software runs on Citrix Systems Inc.’s XenServer virtual machines can now do so, thanks to VMLogix, which has added Citrix XenServer to the list of platforms supported by its LabManager offering.

Citrix XenServer joins a comprehensive list of virtualization platforms supported by VMLogix, including VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, and Microsoft Virtual Server; support for Oracle VM and Sun xVM is also forthcoming, said CEO Sameer Dholokia. For the time being, Dholokia said, the company has seen “a fair bit of interest in testing VMLogix on Citrix XenServer.”

The VMLogix offering competes directly with VMware’s Lab Manager and conceivably with the newly announced Stage Manager. In fact, Dholokia claims that VMLogix’s offering already includes much of the functionality included in Stage Manager and said that VMware customers may not understand the distinction between the Lab and Stage Manager products. “It will be interesting to see how they manage the confusion factor: ‘When do I use [VMware] Lab Manager, when do I use Stage Manager?’” Dholokia said.

Pricing for VMLogix LabManager is $25,000, plus a $2,500 agent fee per two-CPU server.