A general rule of thumb in virtual environments is to always treat virtual machines the same as you would physical servers. While this rule holds true in many cases, IT administrators should be aware of some exceptions to this rule. Let’s go over some reasons that you would not treat your virtual machines like physical servers:

• Patching – You should apply all the same operating system and application patches to a virtual machine as you would a physical server. However it is best to stagger your patch deployments so you do not patch and restart all of your virtual machines at the same time. If you did this concurrently you can cause excessive resource utilization on your host servers which could impact other virtual machines running on the host.
• Securing – Secure the virtual machine operating system as you would physical servers, in addition you should ensure that you have proper security setup on the host server’s management console that allows access to the VM as well as on the virtual machine files located on the host server’s disk system. It does no good to have tight security inside your VM and have weak security outside.
• System Monitoring – This is one area that can be very different for virtual servers. There is no need to monitor virtual machine hardware, if you have converted physical servers to virtual machines you should make sure you un-install any hardware management agents from them. In addition virtual machines boot much faster then physical servers. Because of this, many monitoring systems will not detect server re-boots because the boot process happens quicker then the monitoring interval. You may find that you need to adjust your polling interval for virtual servers so you can detect the faster re-boots.
• Performance Monitoring – Another area that is very different from physical servers. Traditional operating system performance reporting tools are often inaccurate when used on virtual machines because they are unaware of the virtualization layer and the underlying physical hardware. You should always use virtual server specific reporting tools to accurately measure performance on virtual machines.
• Anti-virus – Make sure you install anti-virus software on all your virtual machines the same as physical servers. Again one thing to be careful of is to stagger any on-demand scans and definition updates as to not overwhelm the host server. Having all your VMs running a full scan at the same time can completely bog down a host server.
• Backups – It’s OK to backup your virtual machines using traditional operating system backup agents. Always make sure you do not backup too many VMs on a single host at the same time. There are more efficient ways to perform backups in a virtual environment that you may look into to either complement or replace traditional backup methods.
• Disk defragging – You should periodically defrag virtual machine disks using traditional operating system tools for maximum performance. However be careful not to defrag a VM that has a snapshot running, doing this can cause the snapshots rapidly grow in size and degrade host performance. As usual do not defrag more then one VM on a host at a single time because of all the excessive disk activity that is causes.

Be careful not to do too many of the same operations concurrently. With physical servers, only a single server is effected, but in virtual environments many other servers running on a host server can be impacted.

So, earlier this week I wrote a blog about Clabby Analytics Analyst Joe Clabby’s report spelling out a handful of reasons why Microsoft’s Hyper-V is going to take the lead in the virtualization market away from VMware Inc. over the next five years.

I received a lot of feedback on this blog from people defending VMware, and thought, why not get some Hyper-V users to talk to me about the product - how it performs, its related management tools, features, etc. I asked Microsoft’s press team to send some users my way for interviews, and about a week later Microsoft’s “Rapid Response” team sent me a couple of links to case studies.

Thanks, but I would like to interview some users myself, outside of Microsoft filters. How about at least sending me the contact info for the users profiled in these case studies?

Microsoft’s response was, “Unfortunately regarding direct contact information for the Hyper-V case studies, we have no further information to share.”

What? Really?

This strikes me as odd because Microsoft’s competition, VMware and even smaller virtualization companies like Virtual Iron refer me to real users to interview about their products.

Does this mean that Microsoft doesn’t have the same level of product confidence as the competition? VMware has offered plenty of customer references, and while those users do complain about the acquisition cost of VMware’s software, I don’t think I’ve heard any serious gripes about the product itself.

So I am interested in hearing from Hyper-V users about its performance, because as users and analysts have said, Microsoft won’t sail past VMware on price alone.

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.

Now that Microsoft has finally delivered Hyper-V, everyone is waiting to see how many VMware shops will make the switch. Are there any compelling reasons for a company that already has a large investment in VMware products to switch to another product? Here are some reasons why companies may or may not make the switch from VMware to Hyper-V:

Some reasons why companies may choose Microsoft Hyper-V:

• It’s Microsoft. Companies that mainly use Microsoft products could switch to get better support for running their products running on virtual hosts and to not have to rely on a separate vendor for virtualization.

• Cost. It’s definitely cheaper then ESX, but I’m a firm believer that you get what you pay for. Yes, Hyper-V is a lot cheaper then ESX but it lacks the maturity and high-end features that ESX has. It’s probably just a matter of time though before VMware lowers its cost for large enterprises as they have already done with the SMB market with its bundled foundation acceleration kits.

• Versatility. Hyper-V will pretty much run on any hardware that Windows will run on. ESX only supports a very specific set of hardware. VMware has recently expanded their hardware support and will continue to do so.

Some reasons why companies stick with VMware ESX:

• Cost (again). Companies with a lot of in-house VMware experience will have to re-train staff to learn Hyper-V and basically start from scratch. There is a large pool of skilled and experienced VMware architects and administrators available today as well as many VMware consulting firms and business partners.
• Less features. ESX and VirtualCenter have a very rich tool set including vMotion, DRS and HA. Hyper-V lacks the ability to team NICs on vSwitches and their Quick Migration feature requires downtime.
• Less third-party products. A large number of 3^rd party products and add-on’s are available for ESX to enhance it. It will take time for vendors to release products for Hyper-V.
• It’s VMware. ESX is a mature, stable product that has been around for many years, Hyper-V is a 1.0 product that will take to develop and get all the bugs out of it.

Will I make the switch? Probably not anytime soon. I’ll definitely be looking at Hyper-V and will make my own comparisons, but the lack of certain features is a show stopper for me right now. I’ll keep an eye on Hyper-V to see how it develops, re-evaluating it later as new versions are released.

The competition is going to be great in the virtualization market, as it helps to drive down costs and force vendors to innovate. The race is on between VMware and Microsoft with VMware already miles ahead. Nevertheless, Microsoft has a lot of money and the determination to be on top (take Lotus Domino, Novell Netware and Netscape as examples). Expect Microsoft to slowly whittle away at VMware’s dominance as their product matures and to see VMware to do whatever they can to maintain superiority in the virtualization market.

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!

On Monday, June 9, Symantec Corp. of Cupterino, Calif., announced the release of Veritas Virtual Infrastructure (VxVI), a server and storage virtualization product built on Citrix Systems Inc.’s XenServer technology. By exploiting Veritas’ block storage management model, VxVI hopes to compete with VMware-Infrastructure-3-in-production environments by offering increased capabilities for storage and availability-critical systems.

The new Xen-based virtual infrastructure platform from Symantec provides storage management and high availability with cross-platform connectivity for the virtual data center. It’s essentially XenServer with the Veritas storage management layer on top — all wrapped in a Symantec management console.

According to Symantec Senior Vice President of Storage and Availability Management Rob Soderbery, the time is right for a product that addresses the needs of testing and development, needs that have been underserved by VMware. “Users understand the storage management challenges with VMware,” he said. Symantec has delivered something “fundamentally new” in how server virtualization works with storage management, he noted.

The key difference between VMware and Veritas is in how each handles virtual machines (VMs). Soderbery argues that the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) file-based system that VMware uses can’t compete with the block storage system of Veritas VxVI.

As enterprises build out the x86 data center, Symantec’s product seeks to serve those who want to bring physical capabilities into the virtual environment. Veritas Virtual Infrastructure brings dynamic storage layouts, enclosure and array mirroring and storage-area network (SAN) multipathing/load balancing to server virtualization, adding features such as shared VM boot images with which Symantec hopes to lure VMware customers that are not satisfied with the storage capabilities of the leading server virtualization platform. 

Soderbery says that VxVI will work well with Microsoft’s forthcoming Xen-inspired hypervisor, Hyper-V. “Microsoft has done something pretty interesting here in being open to the Xen community and encouraging the Xen community to be open with Microsoft,” says Soderbery. “Veritas Virtual Infrastructure is technology that we can apply across the Xen ecosystem and Hyper-V as well.”

With another Xen-based virtualization product on the market engineered to be more compatible with the forthcoming Hyper-V, VMware may feel the pinch as users see more options with the other big players in the server virtualization market. But will the $4,595 per two-socket server for Veritas discourage VMware users from even running a demo?

What do you think? If you plan on deploying Veritas VxVI, we want to hear from you. Send us your thoughts via email.

If Hyper-V doesn’t convert the VMware faithful as soon as Microsoft makes its hypervisor generally available later this year, it may get a little help from its friends: Xen-based virtualization platforms.

Some like IT consultant Ardalan Dlawar believe that Microsoft will leverage support for Xen-based platforms to increase competition with VMware. “And Xen will have more third-party support and fewer compatibility issues,” according to Dlawar.

Despite user arguments that ;Hyper-V will have to deliver more than a lower price tag to win users, Hyper-V will certainly get consideration from many VMware customers. While organizations want to maximize their VMware investment, especially enterprise customers which deploy tens or hundreds of VMware virtual machines, Hyper-V evals will most likely be deployed, according to Andi Mann, the research director at Boulder, Colo.-based Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

Based on a survey of more than 600 enterprises, EMA found about 30% of enterprises have already planned a Hyper-V deployment even with Hyper-V’s general availability several months away. In addition, Microsoft is actually within 10% of VMware in current and planned enterprise deployments according to EMA’s data. Also consider this EMA finding: Xen-based platforms already account for more than 40% of current or planned deployments, the data suggests that the market demand for VMware alternatives won’t disappear.

“VMware is still way out in front in server virtualization,” said Mann, “but both Microsoft and Citrix Systems are definitely catching up.”

Of course, VMware and Microsoft aren’t the only options available. As managers continue utilizing toolsets available from Xen-based products such as Citrix’s XenServer and Virtual Iron Software, VMware and Microsoft are both working on tool sets that enable users manage their virtualization counterparts respectively.

“Both VMware and Microsoft understand that they are not going to be the only players on the market, they recognize that customers are leveraging their competitors’ technology in different parts of their businesses,” according to Adnan Hindi, the VP of operations at ScienceLogic in Reston, Va. Hindi said that companies like his, which produces cross-platform appliances, will benefit from multiple-platform virtual landscapes. As shops continue to see benefit in the utilities that Xen-based products offer, Hindi sees a universal virtualization tool set ultimately working itself out; these tools would essentially equalize platforms in the market and dilute decision making in choosing a virtualization platform largely down to cost.

Over the past year, there’s been a lot of talk about VMware’s cost of VMware. But the price of VMware Server is right for small businesses, said Brett Riale, an IT consultant in Pittsburgh, who feels “truly blessed that programs as functional as VMware Server have been released for free.” Riale is hesitant to trust another Microsoft virtualization product after “the debacle” that was Virtual Server 2005. “Unless it absolutely outperforms VMware,” Riale said that he won’t consider Hyper-V in the near future. And Dave Baughman, a systems administrator for Muncie, Ind.-based Ontario Systems, thinks that his ESX system is “a consistent platform” and that the price of support is worth their investment. “Most of the cost is for support and (VMware’s) support is very good,” says Baugham.

But what will happen when all the Microsoft customers with enterprise agreements get a taste of Hyper-V support? Or if Microsoft offers more third-party support for Xen?

Howard Holton, a system engineer, said that market share will shift in Hyper-V’s favor.

“Hyper-V is an excellent solution for many of those that cannot afford the steep cost that ESX server requires,” says Holton, who has already has a positive experience working with the release candidate and points out that for most data center operations, VMotion’s High Availability (HA) is overkill. ”Hyper-V fits into the market below VMware for hosts that do not need true HA.” 

Holton said that in the long run Hyper-V might win out over VMware because Citrix’s XenServer has finally given Xen a roadmap. XenServer is the spoiler, with a lower TCO than VMware. Although price hasn’t deterred Holton from delivering VMware to his customers in the past, he predicted that Hyper-V will only increase in value.

“As a value-added reseller in the small to midsized space, VMware is the leading virtualization product that I offer. That is changing.”

Microsoft announced that the beta release of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM 2008 ) will now provide the ability to manage Microsoft Virtual Server, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX platforms as part of the expanding Microsoft System Center family of products.

In this beta release, VMM 2008 can interface into VMware Virtual Infrastructure to perform migrations and use a new feature called Intelligent Placement. This feature will identify the best host for a virtual machine using the key components of network, memory, processor and network usage information. Intelligent Placement will interact with a pre-defined set of business rules configured in with VMM 2008.

This beta is available for download now from Microsoft. The release is a welcome addition to the growing management space for virtualization platforms, including cross-platform solutions.  A summary of the new features available with VMM 2008 are available in a downloadable PDF document and from the System Center VMM website.

The decision whether to adopt virtualization often comes down to the corporate bottom line. CFOs want to know how long it will be before they see return on investment from virtualization, and there are many considerations in determining ROI.

Yesterday, I spoke with Stephen Fink, senior infrastructure architect for the global IT consultancy Avanade, about a comprehensive tool he created that takes just about every inch of data centers under consideration to determine what the ROI for virtualization will be.

Fink has 14 years of experience as a consultant and created the virtualization model for ROI as a tool for his own clients, but it made its way around the company and is now used as the way to determine ROI by Avande consultants, he said.

There are 125 inputs in the Microsoft Excel-based tool - such as power and cooling, cabling, network, CPU, servers, floor space, and staffing costs - and each helps determine the impact of implementing virtualization at a customer’s location, he said.

“There will never be a one-size-fits-all solution, and there has to be a business case for virtualization; I look at their environment from a high-level approach and asses the inventory. We look at their apps, their network, the annual power costs, licensing costs for software, etc., to see what they pay for their environment, and we can now give a really good idea of the ROI with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware,” Fink said.

Avande, which is partially owned by Microsoft, has the benchmark information on Hyper-V from the most recent release candidates and uses that to determine Hyper-V ROI. Hyper-V is scheduled for release in August.

“We look at the net costs of the environment without virtualization versus what they would pay if they virtualized, with specific server types, running ESX or Hyper-V. We can tell you how many systems can be virtualized, and you can see the cost of your virtual servers, the cost per OS and the cost of your virtual hosts, to determine your annual cost reduction from virtualized guests,” Fink explained.

Fink said consultants like him are often used to determine whether virtualization is worth the initial acquisition and licensing costs, which depends on businesses’ expectations when it comes to ROI. “If a company already operates efficiently and has a portfolio of apps that make them a poor candidate for virtualization - like very high CPU and high memory consuming apps or data base severs, virtualization may not be the answer for them,” Fink said.

Avanade uses the tool as part of its consultancy, and it is only available through Avande consultants - which, of course, comes at a cost to businesses.

Other virtualization calculator tools are available for free, like the one from VMware, but these aren’t as precise as Fink’s tool from what I can tell.

There are also plenty of experts offering advice on determining virtualization ROI that won’t cost you anything.

According to IT security and virtualization technology analyst Alessandro Perilli , to calculate ROI, “you need to apply simple math to the costs your company could mitigate or eliminate by adopting virtualization.”

He reported that virtualization can reduce some of the following direct costs:

* Cost of space (leased or owned) for physical servers
* Energy to power physical servers
* Air conditioning to cool the server room
* Hardware cost of physical servers
* Hardware cost of networking devices (including expensive gears like switches and fibre channel host bus adapters)
* Software cost for operating system licenses
* Annual support contracts costs for purchased hardware and software
* Hardware parts for expected failures
* Downtime cost for expected hardware failures
* Service hours of maintenance cost for every physical server and networking device

Scott Feuless, a senior consultant with Compass, based in Texas, wrote about how to quantify virtualization ROI recently, and IT consultant John Hayes of Avnet Technology Solutions also had some advice on figuring out the cost of virtualization that could help make the case for virtualization.

Hypervisors and VMs are becoming commoditized, resulting in a shifting emphasis towards user interface and management tools. In other words, anyone can make a virtualization platform but the platform that survives Hyper-V’s entry into the virtualization space is the one that develops stand-out management features.

Virtualization pro Andrew Kutz discusses the components of an evolving virtualization ecosystem.