The Edge of Chaos: Virtualization in a Multivendor Environment

By Gail Dutton
published: Thursday, August 14 2008

Virtualization, too, is poised on the edge of chaos, but of a different kind. Disruption is inevitable, but unlike challenging Niagara Falls, the advantages inherent in this new paradigm outweigh the risks. New players are entering the virtualization arena at a pace that some have called alarming. 

The alarm comes from the perceived lack of standards coupled with a nearly infinite number of potential product configurations and interactions.  Companies, seeking to minimize incompatibility issues, may find themselves locked into proprietary architectures with suppliers that may not have the breadth of capabilities clients may need as they continue to grow or as they virtualize more aspects of their operations.

The situation is stable today mainly because VMware, by virtue of controlling the lion's share of the market, has become the de facto standard.  Citrix, Microsoft and others, however, are challenging that supremacy. "People will move away from VMware unless they keep a very strong technological edge," predicts Geva Perry, chief marketing officer at GigaSpace Technology. "Maintaining that edge will be difficult because of the move to commoditize virtualization."

Microsoft, for example, may have an edge in the hypervisor market because its hypervisor is being bundled with Windows Server 08, thus reducing the price. Other vendors, however, may well have stronger applications. In choosing, "Look for the long range, varied, robust solutions," advises Lew Smith, virtualization product manager for Interphase Systems.

Standards

In an effort to bring order to chaos, the first virtualization standards were released last November to deal with standard methods to create virtual systems and to manage them. Winston Bumpus, president, Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) calls them standards for "start/stop/pause." He says another standard, the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), will be released in late August or early September to simplify interoperability, security and lifecycle management for virtual infrastructures.  "We're dotting the I's and crossing the T's right now, but have a work in progress version available on the DMTF web site," he notes, for those who need a head's up. 

The OVF standard is advocated by leading vendors and the user community. Later this year, the DMTF plans to develop a certification process to interrogate applications to ensure metadata is consistent, understood and deployable.

A standard, however, is not a panacea. Its value depends upon the details within those standards and how soon they are widely adopted by the myriad new players entering the virtualization space. To ensure maximum flexibility, IT shops must plan now for their future. "

Standards give customers more choices, lower costs of managing heterogeneous environments and increase intraoperability," Bumpus says.  While the standards themselves may be designed for developers, customers would be well-advised, he says, to buy applications designed to the OVF standard and to buy tools that support OVF to increase their operational flexibility as the virtualization market expands and matures.

Flexibility

One logical approached, adopted by Google, focuses on modular development as a way of ensuring maximum flexibility. As Perry points out, Google built an adaptive infrastructure using off-the-shelf components and then created mini-applications that function as self-sufficient units. Rather than handing off aspects of a given transaction to multiple servers, transactions are completed within their own modules, thus simplifying the process of failover, growing, shrinking and moving those modules, he explains.  Moving to such a modular infrastructure is a critical step in standardizing the computing environment, and virtualization is critical in implementing  an adaptive infrastructure.

In such an environment, Perry says, "your choice of virtualization technology isn't that critical...because it doesn't affect the applications themselves."

It may not be critical, but it is confusing. Chris Farrow, director of product strategy at Fortisphere, says his customers are grappling with flexibility issues and ways to determine the best options from an ever-changing field of compelling choices. And, the final choice may affect other aspects of the IT infrastructure.   For example, Farrow says, "A Citrix virtualization platform isn't compatible with VMware or Microsoft, so you can't easily share data. VMware has a good product suite, but only for its own offering." As Smith adds, "there's no one-stop shop."

A host of vendors are devoting themselves to developing robust, platform agnostic management systems based upon policy, in an effort to reduce the confusion. Fortisphere's approach works with VMware, Microsoft and Xen platforms to provide one place for visibility, control and automation, using inventory, configuration and policy-based management of virtual machines in real time.   As Farrow notes, "I can define polices and systems so resources behave  the way I want, based upon the resource's content or purpose (testing ,versus production, for example) .