Big players in the virtualization world griped about the absence of performance benchmarks for virtual machines on CIO Talk Radio yesterday and discussed some of the issues surrounding virtualization standards.

Guests on the show included: Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer of the Virtualization and Management Division of Citrix; Tom Bishop, Chief Technology Officer, of BMC Software; Dr. Tim Marsland, Sun Fellow, Chief Technology Officer, for the Software Organization at Sun Microsystems Inc.; and Brian Stevens, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering at Red Hat.

The glaring ommission in this lineup: VMware, Inc.

The panelists on CIO Talk Radio didn’t mention VMware by name, but did complain that some companies aren’t being open with their performance data, thus prohibiting the virtualization industry from publishing comparative performance data.

VMware’s licensing agreement for ESX allows users to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, and allows those users (and not unauthorized third parties) to publish or publicly disseminate the data provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study.

Users that have published benchmark data, like Sr. Systems Engineer Mark Foster did on his blog, have had to unpublish results because of VMware’s stipulations.

VMware introduced its own free benchmarking tool, VMmark, last year for certain applications.

Meanwhile, the SPEC Virtualization Committee has been working to create standard benchmarks for VMs. The committee’s goals are to deliver a benchmark that will model server consolidation of commonly virtualized systems such as application servers, web servers and file servers; provide a means to compare server performance while running a number of VMs; and produce a benchmark designed to scale across a wide range of systems.

SPEC expects these benchmarks to be available by the end of this year, but the timeline is not set in stone, according to the website.

Sun’s Marsland said benchmarking progress has been slow because there isn’t an easy way to define a workload, and a large number of benchmarks are required.

“We are talking about a virtual computer, with lots of aspects that need to be benchmarked,” Marsland said. “Every component that gets virtualized needs to be benchmarked.”

Having an open, standardized way of benchmarking is expected to push virtualization further into the mainstream because it will eliminate false perceptions about performance, panelists said. For instance, “there is the thought that I/O intensive workloads can not be virtualized, and the absence of benchmarks prevents us from proving otherwise. It is important for us to have good benchmarks out there,” one panelist on the show said.

Though users look at benchmarks, this type of data is most useful to vendors and OEMs who can use the performance standards to improve the technology, and of course, market their products.

“More open scrutiny of performance results will help us to improve as an industry overall,” Bishop said. “There are ways to measure performance in non-virtual environments, and people are adapting those techniques to get the most out of their virtualized environments.”

In terms of application performance in virtual environments, the issues differ depending on the data center infrastructure. The network, the servers and the storage all affect performance, said Stevens of RedHat.

“The areas that have to progress are around I/O. Intel and AMD are improving around page tables, and we will see improvements around I/O adapters soon,” Stevens said.

Another problem with virtualization? There are support challenges. If an application running in a VM starts acting wacky, the application vendor may not support it, Crosby said.

Licensing and support in virtual environments has been a major gripe with Oracle, for example, which does not support running its applications with VMware.

“It is a reasonable concern…right now there is irrational market based control. Some folks are abstaining from supporting certain apps [in virtual envionments]. As customers demand support, things will hopefully get rational, by next year I hope,” Crosby said.

The following is a guest blog written by Schorschi Decker, an IT professional specializing in virtualization and enterprise-level management with over 25 years of experience in the industry.

Operating system isolation or hypervisor-based virtualization remains popular, but are we settling for less than what we should? Hiding its limitations in modest incremental effectiveness, hypervisor-based virtualization persists because it continues to hide an ugly secret: poor quality code.

Many who have worked with hypervisor-based virtualization may already knows this, but anyone who has attempted implementation of application instancing undoubtedly see where hypervisors fail. Replication of the operating system within a virtual instance is waste, waste driven by bad code. Faster cores, more cores per package, limited improvement in memory and device bus design, marginal increases in mechanical drive design and shared storage models have all contributed to mask how hypervisors inefficiently utilize processors.

If customer adoption rates are an indicator of success, past attempts at application instancing have not been successful to any consistent degree (there are no buzzwords for an application instance method.) To be clear, homogeneous applications have benefited, such as Microsoft SQL and ISS, Oracle and even Citrix. However, in the case of Citrix, application instancing has been environment-dependent to a degree.

Resource management within a common operating instance has not significantly changed since the introduction of mainframe logical partitions (LPARs). Solaris zones is a container-based model, whereas AIX micro-partitions follow a truer application instancing model. Even Apple computer introduced simple memory partitioning in the Macintosh Operating System 7.x. DEC (yes, Digital Equipment Corporation) leveraged Microsoft Job Engine API, effectively a processor affinity layer, in a ground breaking concept product that Compaq buried. Does anyone remember that product?

The hypervisor foundation resulted from heterogeneous application partitioning failures. For Windows, application instancing has stalled at times or has otherwise been over shadowed by operating system instance isolation techniques. Windows SRM is a weak attempt to crack the hypervisor foundation, but it is so immature at this point it is useless. Microsoft SoftGrid, now Microsoft Application Virtualization has a greater potential but is just not well accepted at this point. Should Microsoft provide it for free to drive acceptance?

The technology industry has attempted some rather interesting implementations to offset the impact of operating system instance isolation, for example, thin-disking and image-sharing which are based on eliminating disk partition under utilized space. Several attempts at addressing the DLL and .Net issues (e.g. Microsoft SoftGrid as well as Citrix) have been implemented to support heterogeneous application instancing but have masked the true issue that has always existed, the lack of quality code.

Why do I make this point? Because the hypervisor is essentially a band-aid on the boo-boo of bad coding. Quality code makes for stable environments. With a stable and predicable environment, applications can be run without fear of crashing, and it is this fear that gives hypervisor virtualization its strength.

Did someone just say “operating system isolation”? Case in point, the recent Symantec Antivirus issue with VMware ESX OS. Code quality is going to become a green issue, just as watts per core and total power consumption has in the data center. Enterprise customers who purchase significant code-based products will demand better code as a way to reduce non-hardware oriented costs. Just how many lines of executed code is redundant processing when hypervisor-based virtualization is leveraged? Billions? Wake up and smell the binary-generated ozone! Those cycles cost real money and introduce a very big surface area for bug discovery.

Poor software quality makes hypervisor-based virtualization more expensive than it should be and the publishers of operating systems love it. After all, the total number of operating system licenses purchased has not gone down with hypervisor virtualization. The industry has known for years that poor quality software has been an issue. One radical solution is to hold software publishers to a higher standard, but that idea has not gained enough grassroots support – yet. When it does, the hypervisor will be history.

For organizations with an established server virtualization environment, future virtualization projects are looming on the horizon. Whether it is desktop or application virtualization, much deliberating will undoubtly be given to the best product for the new virtualization endeavor — as it should.

The next wave of virtualization projects should always be best of breed for the requirements and functionality you require for your particular environment. For example, say you’re an organization with a successful VMware-based server virtualization environment using VirtualCenter and ESX 3. Does this mean that VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is the default selection for a virtualized desktop project? Don’t be fooled into thinking that a single-vendor environment is going to translate into an efficient one.

Identify the best solution, even if you can’t afford it. That also includes your host environment hardware for the next virtualization project. Your next virtualization project may require a decision between blades versus general purpose servers for virtual hosts. Taking the time and effort to identify the best solution after making full comparisons for of potential environments will also prepares you for any unforeseen element in post-implementation inquiry.

Make no mistake, there are plenty of advantages to going with what’s familiar: Price discounts, vendor relationships and non-disclosure access are all strong reasons to select the same vendor, but only after due diligence in your decision process should you make another commitment.

In following with Joe Foran’s recent blog about virtualizing Citrix Presentation Server (PS) systems, I too have had success with this practice. I took the approach that, for certain PS configurations, there can be great virtualization candidates depending on how you use Citrix. A web interface for PS is a great candidate for a virtual system if it is on its own server, but additional criteria determine what can be configured for a virtualized Citrix environment.

Based on my experience, the deciding factor for virtualizing PS systems is how many sessions will be concurrent for your published applications. For published applications that are rarely used or will not have very many sessions, this is a good starting point for virtualized PS systems. An example would be a line of business published applications that would not expect more than four concurrent users. A few of these types of applications on a virtual machine in ESX can work very well.

The biggest question becomes virtual machine provisioning from the memory and processor standpoint. If you have a baseline of your current Citrix usage, that is a good starting point for estimating the concurrent session usage. Take the following observations of a Citrix environment:

• Each PS session takes 16 MB of RAM
• Each published application within that environment requires 11 MB of RAM
• There are 4 published applications on a server, that have not exceeded 5 concurrent sessions

Just under 3.5 GB of RAM is required to meet the same environment requirements from the Citrix session perspective. By adding the base server and Citrix PS memory requirements to this calculated amount, you have identified the provisioning requirements of the Citrix server for the virtual role. From the processor standpoint, I generally provision the frequency limit at the rate of the physical system processor.

The good news is that Citrix is licensed by client connection and not the number of servers. Therefore, distributing virtualized Citrix servers in a VMware environment is well poised to meet performance and availability requirements.

With virtualization adoption teetering on mainstream, I am sure it is difficult for VMware to find the balance between what to explain about the technology and what is considered common knowledge.

Judging by a show of hands, a lot of what the 40-or so IT admins who attended VMware Inc.’s Virtualization Seminar Series at the Hilton Hotel in Providence, RI Tuesday morning heard was the latter. The seminar was a low-level look at VMware technologies on the market and those coming down the pipeline. It also had some case studies supporting virtualization, and a snore-inducing spiel from their sponsor, data networking company Brocade.

The case study that seemed to be of most interest to attendees was about the technology team at IntelliRisk Management Corporation (IRMC), a company with call centers and clients all over the world, deploying VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

Using VMware’s VDI, IRMC was able to centralize its global data center operations by giving their employees access to applications, operating systems, etc. via virtual desktops.

One unimpressed system administrator at the seminar asked, “And this is different from Citrix how?”

Peter Marcotte, VMware’s Systems Engineering manager, said the good old server based computing (SBC) environments from Citrix Systems, Inc., where each user connects to a remote desktop running on a Microsoft terminal server and/or a Citrix Presentation Server, doesn’t offer the kind of flexibility VDI does. He also said applications don’t run as well in SBC environments as they do in isolated virtual desktop machines.

Independent Technology Analyst and Blogger Brian Madden wrote an analysis of VDI and SBC that weighs their pros and cons and when to use each.

Madden wrote that VDI offers better performance from the users’ standpoint, it doesn’t have application compatibility issues, and offers better security than traditional SBC.

In the case of IRMC, they deployed virtual desktops and can add a new PC image in less than 10 minutes. All of the virtual desktops can be managed from one location through VirtualCenter. After deploying VDI, IRMC saw an annual return on investment (ROI) of 73%, with a payback period of 1.37 years, the case study shows.

On the flip side, Madden wrote that SBCs have the maturity advantage — it’s been around for a decade — and it is easy to manage.

“With SBC you can run 50 to 75 desktop sessions on a single terminal server or Citrix Presentation Server, and that server has one instance of Windows to manage. When you go VDI, your 50 to 75 users have 50 to 75 copies of Windows XP that you need to configure, manage, patch, clean, update, and disinfect. Bummer!” Madden blogged.

Of course, VMware’s Marcotte didn’t mention that Citrix announced its own VDI product, Citrix XenDesktop back in October 2007 to compete with VMware’s VDI offering.

The seminar was helpful to some people I am sure — there were questions here and there - but overall I am a bit annoyed because by definition, seminars are supposed to teach us something and I’m not sure this one accomplished that.

Additionally, I, unlike most attendees, who either left or used the time to catch up on emails via Blackberry, sat through Brocade’s commercial for their Advanced Fabric Services, expecting a “Live Customer Testimonial” to follow as scheduled, but that part of the program never happened.

Hearing an actual user talk about their experiences with virtualization is far more helpful to other users than seeing vendor slide presentations. Users could have asked about snags during deployment, positive results and gotten some good advice.

Hopefully other VMware seminars include the Live Customer Testimonials; it would make the time more worthwhile for attendees.

I’ve recently been through a number of operating system upgrade experiences on the small network I maintain to learn about new technologies, and it’s really made me hunger for an all-virtual future. I just installed Windows Server 2008 in a VM (VMware Server) and contrasting that with the pain of upgrading several machines to Vista, let me just say that I have seen the future, and it’s vastly superior to the present.

The ideal scenario, IMO:

Every machine ships with a virtualization layer, or at least that’s what you install on bare metal.

Every operating system comes as a VM, in a file, with a script to customize it as needed.

Every application comes in a virtual application machine — I’ll call it a virtual application component (VAC) to avoid confusion. Adding it into a VM CANNOT kill the base OS or paralyze other apps in the odd ways that apps sometimes do.

Every OS or app installation is instantly reversible and recoverable.

We’re not very far from that, eh? You can almost see Nirvana over the horizon. I’m sure I’m missing some key ingredient that will stop it all from happening (greed, maybe?). What do you think? Can we get there?

It does make me wonder what Microsoft’s Hyper-V strategy will be. Will Hyper-V be a candidate for that bare-metal layer? Or is that just going to be ESX or Xen, not that there’s anything wrong with them. Well, ESX is a bit much for desktops. Will Microsoft, in a short-sighted attempt at making sure you buy at least one copy of WS08, force you to install Hyper-V and the OS together?

Why I say short-sighted, among other reasons, is that if today’s computers had a Hyper-V layer, Vista would be having a different life. Or at least the possibility of one. There are many reasons why Vista hasn’t taken off, but at least one is the difficulties of upgrading. Here are some I’ve experienced:

1. If you had partitioned your hard drive for XP and created a boot partition with, say, 20GB, you couldn’t directly upgrade to Vista. Vista wants something like 19GB of free space to do an upgrade even though it doesn’t take up nearly that much space. If you had unallocated space on the drive, you probably couldn’t expand the boot volume into it, because for reasons I don’t  understand, most XP boot volumes can’t be grown. Nor does the Vista install routine have any special mojo to accomplish that. So you had to blow away XP and do a clean install, and then reinstall all your apps. Such fun!

2. Then there’s the strange upgrade policies for Vista itself. Now I admit that I haven’t tracked down all the ramifications of enterprise licensing, but at the retail level, it sure is screwy. Let’s say you have a machine with an OEM copy of a  lower version of Vista and you discover you need some of the features of Ultimate (oh yeah, I can’t live without BitLocker). You might think that buying the retail version of Ultimate would allow you to upgrade. Not a chance! Only buying a special upgrade version will do that — the full retail version can only be used to install a clean copy, once again forcing a reinstall of all apps. Who thought that was a good idea?

In both cases,  wouldn’t it have been so much nicer to snapshot your VACs to a network drive, install the new VM appliance, assigning it disk resources from anywhere, reconnect your VACs and go?  Maybe in the near future, your VACs would live on the network, either public or private, and the distinction between locally and remotely hosted apps would be somewhat transparent to the user.

Yes, I know there are all these nasty little issues of hardware compatibility and so on.  And then there’s the occasional “change in the driver model” that renders half your hardware obsolete. But if these problems are sorted and isolated into the right layers, I have to believe life will be easier. Call me a cockeyed optimist.

Today at the Technosium Global Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., I saw a cool demonstration of FastScale Composer at work deploying virtual (and physical) servers.

FastScale Technologies Inc., maker of Composer, is a VMware alliance partner. FastScale Composer is a tool that facilitiates building physical and virtual servers from bare metal with a configurable inventory of operating systems, applications and updates. FastScale Composer is suited for data centers with 250 servers or more.

I met with FastScale CEO Lynn LeBlanc and Richard Offer, vice president of engineering, who discussed FastScale Composer’s key feature:  a software component repository that contains operating system binaries, software packages, updates and user-configurable material available for systems.

Within the Composer interface, systems are allocated with your configured inventory to be used when they boot. The underlying technology for arriving new systems is a pre-boot execution (PXE) environment that will have the configuration for the system delivered. Composer excels at this step because the package that arrives to the new system is just what’s needed. For example, in a demo I saw, a base Linux install for a Red Hat system arrived to the system as only an 8 MB image via PXE. While that is not an entire installation, the full inventory is made available to the servers via the respository. 

What impressed me is this: Should any element of the system need something from the repository, it is automatically retrieved. Also, servers can be built without the need to retrieve from the repository if you want everything available locally or the repository not be available.

FastScale also has an interface into VMware. While you can perform traditional PXE builds on virtual systems as you would on physical systems, FastScale Composer’s Virtual Manager plug-in will populate new servers directly to VMware ESX. The Virtual Manager option to Composer will allow a virtual machine to be created as VMDK files and imported to ESX or VMware server. A small agent is required on at least one ESX server to receive the VMDK from Composer.

LeBlanc and Offer told me that a new version of FastScale Composer, coming soon, will incorporate Microsft Windows version support and an improved interface.  For more information or to arrange a demo, visit the FastScale web site.

Considering the recent acquisition of Thinstall by VMware, I have to wonder: Is PortableApps next on the list of to-be-acquired companies? The two companies have one thing in common: They both have products designed to take entire applications and put them into a single container for portability and reduction in complexity. I’ve kept a number of PortableApps applications on my USB stick for a long time – it’s nice to have a quick set of tools to use without having to use somebody else’s settings, leave traces of my work on their systems, etc. Throw in VMware player and a stripped-down guest OS with PA’s software on it and you have a real winner. Take it to the next step and put PortableApps applications onto a server that distributes software via a thin approach (Citrix, 2X, etc.) and you have a hit in application virtualization. One big beef I, and many otherwise-fans, have about Citrix is the all-too-real potential for winding up DLL Hell. Applications to be served via server-based computing solutions like Citrix (or 2X, TS, etc.) often need to be isolated if they are mission critical (would you run your Peoplesoft app on the same Citrix server with your Office 2007 suite?), which usually means adding more Citrix servers. This, in turn, means a heavier workload for staff and host servers (if you virtualize Citrix).

Enter application virtualization. There are a lot of good brands out there, notably Softricity, which was swallowed up by Microsoft already. Thinstall is another application virtualizer (albeit via an entirely different process). Then there is PortableApps, which does much of what Thinstall does, just not as much of it. Thinstall 3.3’s product description reads (in part) as follows:

Thinstall is an Application Virtualization Platform that enables complex software to be delivered as self-contained EXE files which can run instantly with zero installation from any data source. The core of Thinstall VS is the Virtual Operating System, a small light-weight component which is embedded with each “Thinstalled” application.

PortableApp’s reads like this:

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind.

There are differences, of course, but the overall business models are very similar. PA is an open-source outfit, which makes it a bit more transparent than Thinstall, which has a mix of OSS and proprietary products. Since PA is purely open source, and relies a lot on the community to deliver portable-ized apps, its list of of programs is smaller and limited to open-source and other freely licensed software. Still, with the recent focus on OSS in the enterprise, one can’t help but see the value of a PortableApps version of OpenOffice sitting on a Citrix Server for thin-client and virtual desktop users to access.

Since Thinstall and PortableApps both provide OpenOffice (Thinstall does so as a demo), I took them for a spin. In my “everyman” test, which was certainly not scientific, I ran them both from a network share on the same NAS box over SMB to a Parallels virtualized XP machine with 512 MB of memory. The Thinstall demo downloads as a zip file that you extract to the desired location. The PA app downloads and installs (using an NSIS installer) to the desired location. Once extracted, I ran them three times each – the total time listed is until the app was usable. The Thinstall application (which uses v2.4 of OpenOffice) took 18 seconds on the first test to load up, 13 seconds on the second pass, and 16 seconds on the third. The PortableApps version, which uses v2.3 of OpenOffice, required setup information (your name, if you want to register, etc.). I decided to discount this from my scoring, but it took 17 seconds, in case anyone is interested, from launch to the registration screen. Once that was done, loading time until a usable screen appeared took 18, 22, and 17 seconds. The splash screens appeared at 10, six and eight seconds, respectively, for Thinstall; and six, eight and eight seconds for PortableApps (excluding the PA-promo splash, which took one second each time and is a separate splash from the OOO splash).

I moved them to the local drive and things got livelier. Thinstall loaded in six, three and three seconds (with splash at two, one and one seconds). PA loaded in six, two and two seconds (with splashes at one second each, but the PA-specific splash obscured them two of three times).

There are a lot of other interesting applications out there just ripe for the virtualization space; browser-based desktops like that offered in alpha by g.ho.st comes to mind. Expect a post on that sometime in the near future.

I recently received a press release from London-based TechNavio, the creator of a Web-based information and research tool, that outlines the top five virtualization trends. Here they are, along with my own thoughts on these trends:

1. Business process automation.
TechNavio’s take. “Virtualization is expected to speed up the wider movement toward business process automation and remote collaboration. The TechNavio findings appear to indicate that the market in general is expecting a major investment in this area within the next two to three years.”
My thoughts. On the subject of business process automation, if TechNavio means “scripting,” I can agree with this trend. SearchServerVirtualization.com contributor Andrew Kutz has received a few questions from readers about automation, which suggests that there are plenty of other IT pros with similar questions. Also, he increasingly writes tips about scripting for X or Y, often concerning disaster recovery or hot backups. Most recently I’ve seen questions about scripting virtual machines (VMs) to power on and off at a certain time.
Food for thought. If scripting VMs advances, what will happen to the number of system admins and data center managers needed to run a data center? Perhaps all you IT programmers should slow down the scripting process before you script yourself right out of a job!

On the subject of remote collaboration, I definitely agree with TechNavio. I wrote an article on emerging client-side desktop virtualization technologies. In response, I received comments from readers who said that they had found a surprising number of companies that are exploring client-side virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies for implementation in 2008. I think it’s due time for VDI; just consider the number of stolen or misplaced laptops, or CDs that went missing in the mail containing personal information. . . .I don’t know about you, but identity theft certainly isn’t on my holiday wish list. And I certainly would appreciate company investment in this kind of technology, considering the increasing mobility of technology.

2. Network-delivered computing.
TechNavio’s take. “Virtualization is also expected to boost the move toward network delivered computing or what is being termed PC-over-IP. This in turn will place vendors such as Cisco, NEC and Sun at the heart of the market, but interestingly leaves the door open for a host of innovative start-ups.” <br>
My thoughts. I would agree here as well. My aforementioned article discusses vThere, which focuses on primarily providing client-side virtual desktops via their own (i.e., third-party) servers that a client notebook would connect to when opening the virtual desktop. During interviews, my subjects all mentioned the trend of software vendors moving to providing their software via virtual machine. We have already seen a few virtualization companies provide beta versions of newer software via VM. As virtualization continues to grow in adoption, I can easily see all kinds of independent software vendors providing their products via virtual machine download.

3. Legacy applications and virtualization.
TechNavio’s take. “As application virtualization speeds up, applications development and maintenance or ADM, vendors have a real opportunity to grow into a new market defined as optimizing legacy applications for virtualization.”
My thoughts. We haven’t focused much on application virtualization on SearchServerVirtualization.com and SearchVMware.com, so I don’t have an informed opinion on this subject. Readers, do you?

4. Small and midsized businesses (SMBs).
TechNavio’s take. “The biggest long-term opportunity for virtualization vendors lies in the SMB space, specifically end-to-end solutions that allow SMBs to outsource and virtualize their entire network.”
My thoughts. I disagree here. Clearly. there is opportunity and space for virtualization in the SMB market, but to say it’s the biggest long-term opportunity? That’s a stretch. I doubt that larger businesses, once virtualized, will stop virtualizing. I think that a more accurate statement would be that virtualization vendors should target SMBs to further extend virtualization.

5. Labor market and skills.
TechNavio’s take. “As the market for server virtualization heats up, finding people with the right skills is set to get harder. With this environment TechNavio predicts that there will be increased opportunities for IT services companies as well as for IT staffing solutions providers.”
My thoughts. I don’t know if I agree that finding people with the right skills will become more difficult; it depends on the IT workers and their drive to stay on top of certifications that prove their worth. (Cough, the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) exam, cough, cough.) And whenever technology advances, desired skill sets change, so this prediction isn’t all that impressive. As far as increased opportunities for IT services companies, yes. It’s easier to go to a business and say, “Get me a sys admin with a VCP stamp of approval!” than it is to shuffle through résumés looking for those who are VCPs. And I definitely think that those who have the right credentials will find themselves in increasing demand: So stay on top of what you’re worth salary-wise given the move toward virtualizing mission-critical servers. Just because your current company doesn’t realize your worth, it doesn’t mean that Company Y — which has more virtualized servers and a greater need for those with virtual environment management experience — doesn’t.

TechNavio’s press release also included a quote after these “top five trends.” Co-founder of Chicago-based Infiniti Research S. Chand (who conducted the research for this report) said, “Currently the biggest beneficiaries of server virtualization are the enterprise users whose businesses tend to be dependent on running compute-heavy, high availability, application intensive data centers. These include: ISPs, hosting and managed service providers, bank’s trading divisions, gaming, online retailers and the like.”

So if you are looking to get the most (read: more money) from your virtualization experience, check job offers with companies that deal with these types of services.

Good-bye to pesky print drivers, hello to virtual printing. ThinPrint’s VDI-focused printing approach won recognition in the SearchServerVirtualization.com VMworld Awards’ Utilities category.