Microsoft recently pushed back the BETA release of Viridian from early 2007, to late 2007. For those of you that don’t know, Viridian is the code name for Microsoft’s upcoming hypervisor.

Does this delay surprise me? No. VMware has had 9 years to develop their virtualization technologies. Microsoft can’t expect to steal, oops, I mean develop, comparable technology in 6 months.  Even when the technology is released, they are going to need time to mature it, and beleive me, it will need to mature.

Technorati Tags: Viridian, Microsoft, hypervisor, VMware

Lately I’ve had a few questions that keep flying around my head:

In the datacenter of the future, where does the operating system fit, and what’s it’s role going to be?

As virtualization becomes a standard, and our virtual machines become more “appliance-like” will we concern ourselves with operating systems as much as we do now?

Will the operating system be something provided by application vendors?

These are important questions, and their potential answers are a threat to companies like Microsoft. If in the future, more and more companies leverage virtualization to bundle operating system and applications to create “virtual appliances” then the need to purchase Windows lessens. As this starts to happen Microsoft looses control of the industry and more companies have the ability to compete in the market.

Many believe that they are already loosing grasp. Consider the Microsoft/Novell deal. Microsoft is attempting to claim IP rights over software licenses by the GPL. Years ago I had a customer tell me he wouldn’t use Linux because Steve Ballmer allegedly told him that Microsoft already had a legal case prepared against the Linux community for IP and patent infringement.

Does this mean that virtualization can change the world? I wouldn’t go that far, but it can definitely change the IT industry.

Technorati Tags: virtualization, Microsoft monopoly, Steve Ballmer

My buddy Bob over at http://lonesysadmin.net/ recently weighed in on CA’s article about virtualization project failure rates.

http://lonesysadmin.net/2007/03/30/for-best-results-add-virtualization-slowly/

Technorati Tags: lone sys admin, CA, server virtualization

CA just released a report that states “44 percent of respondents who said they had deployed server virtualization technology were unable to declare their deployment a success”

To quote the article:

According to the study—which surveyed 800 organizations around the world—44 percent of respondents who said they had deployed server virtualization technology were unable to declare their deployment a success. Inability to quantify ROI was a key factor in their reticence to definitively claim positive results.

The study also revealed that 71 percent of organizations that have moved ahead with virtualization have deployed, or plan to deploy, multiple server virtualization technologies—including operating system and hardware virtualization, operating system partitioning, para-virtualization, and/or clustering. In fact, 60 percent of organizations consider clustering a type of server virtualization, adding to the heterogeneity of virtualized environments.

I have to agree in part with Alessandro Perilli. The reason that this is such a high number is because too many companies underestimate virtualization projects. They also do not invest enough time learning about how virtualization changes your environment. There are some “best practices” that just don’t work right in a virutalized world.

I think as more and more companies virtualize, and virtualization best practices become more developed, this will change.

Thanks to http://www.virtualization.info/ for this article.  You can read the full CA report here.

I was checking my site statistics and noticed that the Microsoft Virtualization Calculator has been downloaded 110 times so far this month!  This is pretty cool.  I’m glad people are finding it useful.

You can find it here.

Also - if you download it and like it, leave a comment.

Thanks!

I was catching up on some blogs I read when I came upon this post over at TarryBlogging. He was responding to an article on ZDnet written by Dana Blankenhorn.

This article (found here) is regarding Xen, Open Source, and virtualization. Apparently Mr Blankenhorn recently interviewed Xensource’s Simon Crosby and wasn’t impressed.

Like Tarry, I don’t get Dana’s point. In fact, I’m not even sure why ZDnet published this. It really lacks any point. I think he’s trying to make a point without really understanding the technology. Or any technology for that matter. I read some of his other articles, and he doesn’t seem to get any where. It’s like he’s writing inside jokes that only he understands. In his articles, he starts to go somewhere but never goes there.

I know this seems kinda harsh, and in all fairness I found some articles written by him that are very interesting:

Like this one on former Open Source Initiatives general counsel Larry Rosen’s stand on the GPL.

Or this one discussing wether GPL v2 or GPL v3 will emerge as the open source standard.

All I can say is edit your work and make sure you are making the point you want to make.  (Good advise I should probably take myself.)

Technorati Tags: ZDnet, Dana Blankenhorn, Xensource, virtualization

I received a call from a customer yesterday in need of a little help. They had installed a Comtrol Rocketport multiport serial card into an ESX 3.o.1 server and were attempting to use with some test VMs. When they tried to add the devices “/dev/ttyRX” there was no option to do this in Virtual Center.

When you add a serial port to a VM, you receive 3 options. You can configure the virtual serial port to communicate over a physical port, a “pipe”, or a file. (In UNIX and Linux, everything is a file.) The customer had tried using a “pipe”, they had tried specifying the device file name in the file option, and since the appropriate devices were not listed in the physical port option the customer was at a loss.

In the end, the answer was simple. Use Virtual Center to create the virtual serial port and attach it to one of the standard “/dev/ttySX” devices. Then, before powering on the VM, go into that VM’s *.vmx file and modify the serial port config line so that it uses the correct “/dev/ttyRX” port.

As for configuring the Comtrol Rocketport in the Service Console, I wasn’t privvy to how they did that. I do know that they had to manually install the proper module.

I hope this helps someone out.

I know that I have been very suspicious of Microsoft’s recent moves into the virtualization space, citing what they’ve done in the past to companies like Netscape. Having said that, I believe competition in the marketplace is a good thing. In the end, I’d hope that customers would have a choice of virtualization platforms.

I bring this up because I recently found an interesting video on Microsoft’s website that discusses their vision of virtualization. You can view the video here:

Network World has just named VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 as the #1 product for “Building the New Data Center”.

The article states, that in 2006, after surveying 1800 customers they found:

* 43 percent of customers surveyed are currently standardizing on VMware Infrastructure
* 61 percent of customers surveyed expect to virtualize more than half of their x86 servers within three years
* 32 percent of customers surveyed had already upgraded to VMware Infrastructure 3 within four months of its general availability, and another 45 percent stated that they plan to upgrade by June 2007

Congradulations VMware!

You can read the full article here.

Starting next month I am going to be hosting a webinar series focused around VMware virtualization technologies.

Introduction to VMware & Server Consolidation
Tuesday, March 6 – 10 AM | Tuesday, April 10 – 4 PM

The first of our series details the benefits of VMware Infrastructure 3, the next generation of industry-leading infrastructure virtualization software. See how you can virtualize your servers, storage and networking, allowing multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources.

See how VMware & Kovarus can optimize your infrastructure while lowering total cost of ownership by:

* Increasing hardware utilization by 50-70%
* Decreasing hardware, software, and operating costs capital costs by up to 70%

Leveraging VMware for Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
Tuesday, March 13 – 10 AM | Tuesday, May 8 – 4 PM

While most organizations recognize the importance of business continuity, their ability to provide high availability and disaster recovery for key applications is often constrained.

In part 2 of our series, learn how VMware & Kovarus can help you:

* Reduce downtime due to both planned and unplanned outages.
* Lower cost of business continuity projects.
* Provide high availability for applications with standard server hardware.

Simplify your Test /Dev Cycle with VMware
Tuesday, March 27 – 10 AM | Tuesday, May 22 – 4 PM

Both small development shops and large, globally distributed software team can enhance development efforts, while optimizing your software development lifecycle with VMware’s Technologies.

This final part of our series will show you how you can:

* Share software configurations reducing duplicative provisioning.
* Capture configurations; reproduce & resolve defects on demand.
* Clone a configuration in production and effortlessly for testing by QA.
* Push a staged configuration into production following testing.

Each session is 30 minutes

You can view the invite here, or click here to register.