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.

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!

VMware Inc. and Tripwire Inc. have co-developed a free, downloadable utility to address the leading security concern in virtual environments today: misconfiguration of the hypervisor.

Portland, Ore.-based Tripwire ConfigCheck is a free Windows and Linux based utility that assesses the security of VMware ESX 3.5 hypervisor configurations compared to the VMware Infrastructure 3 Security Hardening guidelines, which were released in February.

The Security Hardening guidelines explain in detail the security-related configuration options of the components of VMware Infrastructure 3 and how security affects certain capabilities.

Tripwire ConfigCheck makes sure ESX environments are properly configured according to these guidelines and lends insight into vulnerabilities in virtual environments. It also provides the necessary steps towards full remediation.

Dan Schoenbaum, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Tripwire
said the utility is being offered for free to encourage the proliferation of VMware’s Hardening guidelines and to increase virtual machine (VM) security.

Tripware hopes that by giving a taste of their technology for free, users will become familiar with them and invest in their software products with more security capabilities, Schoenbaum said.

Colorado Springs, Co.-based Configuresoft Inc. also provides a toolkit for compliance with VMware’s security hardening guidelines. The toolkit consists of a set of rule-based templates, reports and dashboards that plug into Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM).

As this long running thread in the VMware forums indicates, many users are frustrated with VMware’s lack of support for a Linux-based Virtual Infrastructure client to manage VI3 environments. Currently, the VI Client will run only under Windows (as it’s written in .NET), so Linux shops are forced to purchase and install Windows to run it. An alternative web interface does exist; however, it can only manage virtual machine operations and not the ESX hosts which severely limits its usefulness to VMware administrators.

While VMware has not officially announced any plans to develop cross-platform versions of the VI Client or any of its other Windows-only applications, the above-mentioned thread includes one response from a VMware employee who hints that VMware may eventually release a Linux version. A Linux version of a VI Client would be considered a welcomed addition by many VMware customers, if not as an essential feature for those that are using ESX servers in non-Windows environments.

Many customers have also been wanting a Linux version of VirtualCenter, VMware’s centralized management product for ESX,  and support for open source databases like MySQL. VirtualCenter will only install on a Windows server and its required database only supports Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases. You can also use SQL Express with VirtualCenter, but it is not recommended or supported for production environments. Because of this limitation, customers that wish to use VirtualCenter must also plan on the additional expense of Windows operating systems licenses for the VirtualCenter server as well as a database license if they do not already have an existing SQL/Oracle database server that they can use for the VirtualCenter database.

Unless more customers speak up and request that VMware produce cross-platform versions of their current Windows-only applications, they will probably not end up developing them. If the demand exists, there’s a better likelihood of it happening. Having Linux versions would also help VMware compete in an increasingly competitive virtualization market. If you would like to see VMware develop a Linux version of the VI Client and other applications, contact your VMware sales representatives and let them know.

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 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.

Continuing our review of Hyper-V, the recently released Microsoft virtualization product for Windows Server 2008, we focus on the management aspect of the hypervisor. In two other recent blogs, I took a quick look at the Hyper-V Manager  and the simple creation of a virtual machine. Also on SearchServerVirtualization.com, fellow contributor Anil Desai gave advice on using the Hyper-V Manager. Now we’ll take a closer look at System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

I installed the System Center Virtual Machine Manager, or VMM, for the management of virtual machines within Windows Server 2008. Installing the VMM is fairly straightforward, but it is worth noting the following pre-requisites:

• .NET framework 2.0 to start the install, which is automatically upgraded to version 3.0
• PowerShell from the Windows Server 2008 release environment
• A SQL Server database instance (can be a local SQL Server 2005 Express edition or hosted database)
• Domain membership

After some quick iterations of the VMM install, you will have the console application available. From there, you can add a host to the console as I have done below with the HYPERV-TEST-RWV host:

Inside of the VMM console, I added the single host to the same server that the console is installed and spent most of my time afterwards navigating the help file. Surprisingly, the VMM help file (C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007\help\Help.chm) is quite comprehensive and provides a good starting point for most configuration tasks in a single resource. One of the best initial observations of the VMM console is the Windows integration for delegated security and rights options. Within the VMM, this is referred to as a self-service policy. These policies offer one option above the competition in that you can assign users to be local administrators through the self-service policy. In other products, this is easily addressed by group policy. Below is the configuration of a self-service policy:

Like other virtualization platforms, the management layer is the key to an enterprise implementation. System Center VMM is no exception, and this initial release has support for migrating virtual machines and shared storage. However, this part of my evaluation of VMM will not focus on these components just yet, so stay tuned for my next entry on Hyper-V.

Microsoft resources for VMM
System Center is a comprehensive set of products that can manage components including Systems Management Server (SMS) and other pieces. VMM is a piece that can function as a stand alone or with the rest of the pieces in use. Microsoft has a nice video that showcases how VMM will fit into the management space for the virtual machines. If you are familiar with virtual machine management, this will be somewhat introductory. But towards the end of the video there are some quick tasks performed on-screen to give a feel for the process of managing the virtual machines in the VMM environment.

We continue our first look at Hyper-V technology in Windows Server 2008 . While Windows Server 2008 has been released, Hyper-V is still in pre-release form. Hyper-V is scheduled to be officially released later this year. For now, we’re really looking at a beta version of Microsoft’s new virtualization technology.

All interface-driven tasks are done through the Hyper-V Manager MMC snap-in. This snap-in is added when the Hyper-V role is added to the Windows Server 2008 system. My evaluation of Hyper-V takes place in a full install of Windows Server 2008 Standard, x64. After populating a few virtual machines into Hyper-V, a nice feature caught my eye, one showing the virtual machine uptime. The Hyper-V Manager snap-in is shown below:

Creating a virtual machine
Creating a virtual machine is wizard-driven within the Hyper-V Manager. The wizard asks the following questions while creating a new virtual machine:

• Virtual machine name - This name is used within the virtual management piece, not the DNS name or computer name of the virtual machine.
• Storage location - Hyper-V has a default location for the virtual machines, whether that be local or remote storage. A different location can be specified during the wizard.
• Memory amount - Hyper-V will give a default amount of RAM at 512, which can be changed in the wizard.
• Networking - The network assigned to the virtual machine.
• Virtual hard disk selection and size - Where the virtual hard drive is assigned on the file system. Hyper-V gives a generous 127 GB virtual hard disk size for the virtual machine, but does not allocate that footprint entirely on the file system.
• Installation options - A boot media can be assigned from a physical optical-drive or .ISO image file.

Once the virtual machine is created, you can turn it on and the virtual BIOS splash screen will appear and the virtual machine will start. The virtual machine starting up is shown below:

The virtual machine created is available to run and have an operating system installed at this point.

I hope to answer all of your questions about this virtualization platform. Please post them in the comments section below. And don’t forget to come back to the SearchServerVirtualization blogs for my next entry where I look at the Hyper-V manager and how it will fit in the enterprise.

Edit: The command line interface in the core edition of Windows Server 2008 is not PowerShell but a core prompt: Different than the normal CMD, but nowhere near as functional as PowerShell.

I have been evaluating Windows Server 2008 since the recent release of the base product to retail sale. The highly anticipated virtualization hypervisor or Hyper-V is not part of the commercial product currently available, but Microsoft plans to have it available within six months of the initial product release. In this first installment of a series of SearchServerVirtualization blogs, I’ll go through my steps as I am taking a look at the beta implementation of the Hyper-V environment.

Evaluation installations of Windows Server 2008 with the beta Hyper-V are available for download from Microsoft. Installation of the base operating system is indistinguishable from the current retail versions. If you are going to evaluate the virtualization platform, start with Microsoft’s release notes and make sure you have adequate hardware available for the environment. The Hyper-V release notes outline specific system models and configuration items that need to enabled to permit operation of the hypervisor. If you are even remotely considering a Microsoft virtualization implementation, start with the release notes to get an idea of the operating environment requirements.

How does Hyper-V fit into Windows?

The Hyper-V hypervisor exists as a server role to the Windows Server 2008 installation. In my lab scenario, I will be using Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition, 64-bit with the full installation (instead of the core installation, which is explained later). For the Hyper-V beta, 64-bit processing is required. For the server role, adding the Hyper-V role is like most other roles in the Windows Server configuration, through the Server Manager as shown below:

The Hyper-V implementation on Windows Server 2008 is uniquely different from other enterprise virtualization products in that the virtualization engine may exist in line with other roles. For example, you would not want to make your VMware ESX server a file server or install a networking role like DNS or DHCP. The difference is that the other platforms are purpose-built environment only, where Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 will integrate with other roles should you want to on your virtual environment. This configuration would be a full install of Windows Server 2008.

The alternative is the core installation of Windows Server 2008, where you can install Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 without a Start Menu and Windows Explorer environment. The core installations of Windows provide only a PowerShell command line interface and specified server roles, including Hyper-V.

Now that I have your attention, I need to keep you on the edge of your seats until next week. As I’ll have some exposure to virtual machines running on the Hyper-V. You will see it here for more information on the beta Hyper-V!