Clabby Analytics analyst Joe Clabby is 100% convinced that Microsoft’s Hyper-V will take over VMware in market share over the next three to five years, and makes some strong points for this in his recent report, Six Reasons Why Microsoft’s Hyper-V will Overtake VMware to Become the Major Player in the x86 Server Virtualization Marketplace.

The report came out prior to the shake-up at VMware on July 8, when the company announced that its Board of Directors replaced VMware co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was being replaced, and then lowered its revenue forecast.

VMware had the vision to see the value of virtualization and took the technology to the top unchallenged due to strategy, innovation and sales execution, but that ride is about to come to an end, Clabby said.

“With the introduction of Hyper-V by Microsoft, VMware is about to experience some very serious competition from a vendor with deep pockets, with a massive worldwide marketing and sales organization, with major market penetration across Fortune 500 and small and medium business markets, and with extensive and complementary infrastructure and management product depth,” Clabby reported.

Among the reasons Clabby believes Microsoft will crush VMware are that Microsoft already has an expansive installed base, a mammoth network of direct sales and indirect business partners, and is offering lower prices alternatives to VMware’s hypervisor and related infrastructure/management software products.

Unfortunately, I have to agree. History tends to repeat itself, and this has been Microsoft’s strategy for a very long time: see a great technology, copy it, and outprice the rest of the market.

Vanity Fair’s July issue had a great article that illustrates this, called “How the Web was Won” that looks at the eveolution of the Internet over the past 50 years, including details of how Microsoft took over Netscape Navigator by developing Internet Explorer.

The computer programmer known for founding Netscape Communications, Lou Montulli, told Vanity Fair, “From a scientific point of view none of us really respected Microsoft. There was definitely a sense of: They’ve put out of business three or four major companies, and they did it simply by copying what they did and outpricing or outmaneuvering them in the market. This is a general feeling of computer scientists everywhere, that Microsoft doesn’t tend to innovate as much and really just enters the market late, takes it over, and then stays at the top.”

Pricing aside, Microsoft already has a massive installed base.

“It will leverage this installed base, and price its products to out-function/undercut VMware’s pricing,” Clabby wrote. “The computing industry saw this same situation arise when Citrix built a leadership base for its terminal server products — only to have Microsoft enter the market and claim significant marketshare after Citrix pioneered the terminal server marke umbrella. Almost the exact same situation is about to happen again — this time between VMware and Microsoft.”

Microsoft also has a packaging advantage with its Hyper-V hypervisor, as it can be delivered with every single version of 64-bit Windows Server 2008, and installing Hyper-V is a cake walk, according to Clabby.

“A box simply needs to be checked during installation and Hyper-V becomes active. By not requiring IT buyers to find/acquire/download additional virtualization software, the job of deploying and testing virtualization within a Windows Server 2008 is greatly simplified. VMware cannot counter this packaging advantage,” Clabby wrote.

The most damning problem for VMware, according to Clabby, is product depth.

Though VMware has the advantage of technologies like VMotion, to move live VMs, and all of the handy add-on management and infrastructure software integrated into VMware, Clabby said Microsoft’s management and infrastructure is far deeper.

Microsoft’s Systems Center product portfolio inlcludes systems management tools like Configuration Manager; Operations Manager; Data Protection Manager; Virtual Machine Manager; System Center Essentials; Capacity Planner, and the list goes on, ad nauseum.

Besides all of those points, Microsoft is a $51 billion dollar software company and VMware’s revenue is just over $1 billion.

In short, given its deep pockets, large installed base and virtualization strategy, it is safe to say Microsoft will, once again, be laughing all the way to the bank.

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.

I am blogging from the inaugural Technosium Global Conference and Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I’ll be signing on intermittently to provide you with everything I consider beneficial to the virtualization space.

First off is storage business continuity. I had an opportunity to attend a breakout hosted by Eric Herzog, the vice president of operations for Asempra Technologies. While business continuity is a topic we all are familiar with, attendees had the chance to look at the building blocks of a successful strategy for continuity, and how it applies to storage for virtualized systems. What I took away from this breakout was that there needs to be clearly defined goals that the business requirements define the following within an organization’s service level agreement (SLA):

• Ability to measure availability and uptime
• Data loss tolerance for your business needs (financial and operational)
• Disaster recovery time frames made specific to your environment
• Solutions that reduce costs with combination of technologies with reduced complexity
• Ensuring that the SLA leverages the existing infrastructure (hardware, software, networks) as much as possible
• Ensuring that there will be usable data on first recovery

Traditional approaches to data continuity to virtualization systems tend to respond with multiple technologies, various products, limited manageability and control, increased costs and expense, and a cumbersome process that limits successful execution of the SLA. While each storage business continuity strategy has positives and negatives, the right solution will depend on your virtualization availability requirements. Among the newer storage technologies are drive snapshots, data deduplication, and remote replication. Some solutions address actual virtual machines, where some address the shared storage systems that host virtual environments. Remote replication provides the fastest recovery time for a virtualized storage system, but also at the highest expense.

In summary, the business continuity strategy for virtualized systems needs to resolve primarily around the technology behind the storage systems in use. The other challenge to virtualization management is to define the goals of virtualization continuity via an SLA.

Fortunately for me, my job never requires me to determine vendor awards. However, Alex Barrett and the SearchServerVirtualization.com staff aren’t so lucky. While it’s great to have the power to name Products of the Year, it also means that you’re stuck hearing complaints from everyone that wasn’t named. In case you missed it, Alex recently published the SearchServerVirtualization 2007 Products of the Year.

I think that Alex and the editorial staff did a great job with selecting products, but thought that I would take a moment to highlight some vendors with excellent products that did not make the list. After all, it’s just as much fun to debate the vendors that were not recognized as it is for those who were.

VMware

Yes, VMware’s on the list, but at the same time they’re not on the list. If you didn’t notice, VMware ESX Server 3.5 is nowhere to be found in the article. The SearchServerVirtualization.com editors informed me that ESX 3.5 missed the cutoff date for award consideration (November 30th), and therefore wasn’t eligible. Editors do need time to work with a released product in order to make a fair judgment, so I understand the reasoning for the cutoff. Still, ESX 3.5 was a significant release from VMware, with features such as Storage VMotion adding significant value to VMware deployments.

Novell

Novell quietly had a great 2007, from a virtualization product perspective. Novell was right behind Citrix/XenSource in achieving Microsoft support for their Xen-based virtualization platform, and was pushing the innovation envelope throughout the year. Novell was the very first virtualization vendor to demonstrate N_Port ID virtualization (NPIV) on their Xen platform. Novell was even showing their work with open virtual machine format (OVF) last September at their booth at VMWorld. When you factor in Novell’s work with their heterogeneous virtualization platform management tool, ZENworks Virtual Machine Manager, you’re left with a pretty nice virtualization package. The vendors mentioned in the virtualization platform category (VMware, Citrix/XenSource, SWsoft) are all worthy of recognition, and I think it’s equally fair to recognize Novell’s work in 2007 as well. Perhaps Novell’s heavy lifting in 2007 will result in recognition in 2008; however, it’s safe to say that Novell is going to have some stiff competition from VMware, Citrix/XenSource, Microsoft, Sun, Parallels, and Virtual Iron.

Symantec

I thinks it’s hard to leave Symantec Veritas NetBackup 6.5 out of the discussion. In fact, amongst backup products, I’d list them as first, right alongside CommVault. Symantec was the first major backup vendor to announce support for Citrix XenServer backup, while all other backup products officially supported one virtualization platform - VMware ESX Server. The NetBackup team was also very innovative with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), as NetBackup 6.5 includes the capability to perform file level recoveries of VCB image level backups. Typically, a backup product performs two VCB backup jobs - an image level backup for DR purposes, and a file level backup for day-to-day recovery tasks. NetBackup 6.5 provides the ability to do this in a single pass, which I found to be pretty innovative. Factor in Data-deduplication (extremely valuable considering the high degree of file redundancy on VM host systems), also available in NetBackup 6.5, and it’s hard to see how NetBackup could be ignored.

SteelEye

SteelEye is another vendor in the data protection category that I’m surprised did not make the list. VMware HA by itself will not detect an application failure and initiate a failover job as a result, as it’s primarily designed to monitor and react to hardware failures and some failures within the guest OS. SteelEye LifeKeeper, on the other hand, provides automated VM failover in response to application and service failures (in addition to guest OS and physical server failures). Many failures are software-specific, and products that can automate VM failover or restarts in response to software failures go far to improve the availability of VMs in production.I’m limiting my comments only to the award categories, hence I’m only listing some of the products I’ve worked with in 2007 that fit into one of the SSV categories. I hope that for the 2008 awards, we’ll see a higher number of award categories, so all products in the virtualization ecosystem are represented.

Do you agree with editors’ choice of winners? Which deserving vendors do you feel were left off the list? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Systems admin Michael Gildersleeve wishes for 100% uptime and wonders whether virtualization will bring him closer or further away from that goal. It seems to him that virtualization options only cover one server at a time. “What if I need to do an OS update or patch, or what if some critical hardware fails?” he asks. In that case, he feels a bit more comfortable with a cluster than with virtualization.

Gildersleeve is evaluating high-availability options for virtual machines. VMware’s High Availability (VMware HA) is on his list, but he’s not sure whether that product will work well with his legacy software. He’s also not sure whether HA is as mature and robust as other products on the market.

I’m answering his call for more information. I hope that you will too, either by commenting on this post or emailing me at jstafford@techtarget.com.

Gildersleeve works for a company that has a Progress database running on a Unix server. Hundreds of Windows clients and Web applications are attached to that database and server through Progress Brokers via service file ports. “I need to provide 365 by 24 by 7 uptime,” Gildersleeve said. “With our new Web business, East and West Coast facilities, and vendors managing our stock and replenishment, we need to be available all of the time.”

He wants to run his database across at least two servers, in a setup like an Oracle Real Application Cluster. He continued:

This would allow me to upgrade the OS, reboot a server or take a server down for maintenance without affecting the database or the users. So far I have only found solutions that will give me a two- to five-minute downtime between switching from one server to another.

Yes, Gildersleeve has looked a little at server virtualization. He’s evaluating server virtualization options and VMware HA to see whether he can reduce the downtime to nil.

What I have seen so far is that if I upgrade my Progress app to v10 (Progress OpenEdge), and then move to two Integrity servers running High Availability, that if one server fails or if we need to do maintenance on a server, we can manually switch to the second server; but the problem with this is that my users will feel the switch because I will need to bring one server down. They will need to log out and in again to the app, or whatever needs to be done to bring the ready server into production mode.

Gildersleeve is willing to evaluate Sun Microsystems options, if they are truly viable for running Progress. Microsoft operating systems are out of the question.

In his evaluations, Gildersleeve has come up with a lot of questions, and he’s looking for advice from HA experts. Can you provide some advice and share your experiences by commenting on this post or emailing me a jstafford@techtarget.com?