2010 Prediction: Mark Davis, Virsto
2010: Storage at the Forefront of the Virtualization Agenda
Virtualization makes loads of sense in good times. The grinding economy strengthens the impetus.
As experienced virtualization customers have the scars to prove, the pain of the unique storage problems caused by virtual machines grows as storage grows. And no matter how dire the economy, storage grows exponentially.
If you’re virtualizing in 2010, storage will be a problem for you. Sorry to bear bad news.
Hyper-V Rising
Another safe prediction: the virtualization platform with the most meteoric rise will be Microsoft Hyper-V. Even grudging competitors concede this.
What’s behind Hyper-V’s ascendance? If you want high growth, start with smaller market share. Being relatively late to market, Hyper-V has that going for it. Second, VMware’s decade of evangelism makes virtualization not a scary new thing, and therefore easier to adopt. Third, with Hyper-V being included in Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V management being essentially like standard Windows, and most applications being deployed on Windows, it’s pretty easy to take a test drive. Fourth, the latest R2 version exhibits stability and capabilities that make it ready for deployment in many environments. Finally, let’s not forget the magnitude of the brand behind Hyper-V.
Virtual Storage Challenges, Please Meet Hyper-V
Microsoft Hyper-V has a good deal to recommend it. Leading edge storage functionality is not one of them. With the exception of CSV (more on that in a moment), Hyper-V doesn’t deliver significant new storage capabilities. Instead, Hyper-V leverages existing storage features of Windows Server 2008, leaving room for independent software vendors to innovate.
The advantage of this strategy is that methods that worked for physical servers may also work for virtual servers. The unfortunate disadvantage is that the hopeful sentiment of the previous sentence isn’t really true!
When it comes to storage, essential assumptions that were correct for physical servers don’t hold up when we virtualize. As a result, techniques that sufficed for physical servers are woefully inadequate for a virtual server reality.
The aforementioned Clustered Shared Volume feature, recently introduced for Hyper-V, allows sharing of storage resources across hosts. However, the breadth of hypervisor-induced problems is hardly addressed by CSV.
As Hyper-V Hits Its Stride, Storage Trips It Up
Ask the folks at VMware. Storage may be the biggest problem area for virtualization.
Because Microsoft Hyper-V has notably less storage capability built in than VMware, the storage problems caused by virtualization are magnified on Hyper-V.
While we haven't yet launched our first product, we’re hearing loud, high fidelity resonance to these issues. Corporate IT professionals and cloud service providers don’t think current products come close to being adequate, or see current vendors getting outside their boxes to build truly innovative, breakthrough solutions. 2010 should be an interesting year.
