Discussing The ESX Server

By VSM News Staff
published: Tuesday, May 06 2008

JG: Well, ever since our founding, VMware’s mission has been to transform computing through virtualization. Our customers have really seen big savings, both in consolidating their environments, reducing their hardware costs, but also have seen improvements in the availability and affectability of their infrastructure. This has really been an evolution over time. When we first introduced the SX server back in 2001, it was really adopted by test and development organizations for small-scale consolidation activities and they saw some cost savings from that. However, when we introduced Virtual Center and V-motion, our customers really started to see some benefits around simplified provisioning, rapid provisioning and really reducing the planned downtime in their infrastructure. That’s when we really stated to see the VMware infrastructure really start to become mainstream and really used for wide-scale production consolidation projects. Back in 2006, when we introduced VMware infrastructure III, we really saw the virtual infrastructure become a mainstream architecture, really an enterprise architecture. When we introduced capabilities around high availability and resource management, now our customers are really thinking about this virtual infrastructure as an architecture for the whole enterprise. It turns out that 46% of our customers are standardizing on VMware infrastructure for all or most of their new server deployments. So really, at the end of the day, it’s really about this tremendous value that our customers are seeing in reducing the cost of their infrastructure, but also in increasing the scalability and flexibility of their infrastructure as well.

JG: ESX server 3i is a hypervisor, which means it partitions a single server into virtual machines, but what is interesting about ESX server 3i is that it’s a new architecture for our very popular and very widely deployed ESX server. It offers the same functionality and the same performance and the same capabilities as ESX server, but it does it with this very small footprint, 32 megabyte architecture that really requires minimal configuration and minimal setup. That makes it really easy for our customers to use and also very secure and reliable at the same time. So our customers don’t have a general purpose operating system that they need to manage and secure. The hypervisor becomes very secure and really focused on its very specific job of running these virtual machines. At the end of the day, our idea is that the hypervisor should really have the same kind of reliability and security that the hardware does. So we take this very small hypervisor and it becomes a very good candidate then for hardware integration. That’s really what we’ve been doing with our OEM partners now, is looking to integrate our ESX server 3i directly into server hardware, so that when customers buy a server now, they install it in their datacenter, they boot it up and it boots directly into the hypervisor and it’s ready immediately to run virtual machines. Really the goal here is to make deploying the VMware infrastructure really, really simple.

JG: The ESX server 3 and server ESX server 3i are really more similar than they are different. They both play the same role in the virtual infrastructure, they the both run on a physical server and create and run virtual machines and, with the right licensing, they both support the same virtual infrastructure capabilities like Vmotion, like distributed resource scheduling, but ESX server 3i really has this advantage around a small architecture and ease of use. Customers do tell us that they are very interested in this small form factor for the reliability and security it provides. A lot of the customers who have used the product or who have been in our Beta are really amazed at just how simple it is to use. We don’t expect customers to migrate immediately from ESX server 3 to ESX server 3i because ESX server 3 still provides some advantages around customization. It’s going to take some time for our service partner Ecosystem to completely move from a service console-based integration to one that uses the VMware API. So, in the short term, a lot of our customer will continue to use the ESX server when they want certain third-party applications that rely on the service console. Other customers who don’t have those requirements they’ll choose to run ESX server 3i instead.

JG: In the near term and really for the foreseeable future, VMware plans to support both ESX server and ESX server 3i. We recognize that customers will take some time to make the transition and our plan is to really support both products during that transition. We also plan to support mixed environments during this transition as well, so people can have ESX server 3 and ESX server 3i in the same cluster and Vmotion between them and we plan to support that. I personally believe that ESX server 3i really is the architecture of the future and that, over time, our customers will migrate completely to it as our partners also migrate toward integrating with our API instead.

JG: So I have to admit that the Microsoft/Citrix partnership is a little unclear to me. If I look at it, they are both claiming that management is how they’re going to make money with their virtualization products, so Microsoft with HyperV and Citrix with Xensource, and yet System Center and Xen Center are directly competitive products. They are both management products and they both do the same thing. So it really makes it hard for me to predict the future of that partnership because, frankly, I don’t really understand it that well, but that said, I think having both Microsoft and Citrix enter the market does present an opportunity for VMware as well as a challenge. I think the opportunity is that both Microsoft and Citrix will raise the profile of virtualization and help grow the market and grow awareness around the market, but I’m fully confident that when customers do evaluate our trusted products, they’ll continue to choose VMware. I do think VMware does provide a lower total cost of ownership when consider the management capabilities we provide, the built-in availability in the infrastructure and, frankly, we provide better consolidation ratios as well. It does become a challenge for us, and we, as VMware need to stay very nimble, very innovative, and we really have to think about the fact that we may have a significant technology lead right now, but we cannot and will not rest on these past successes, we need to continue to focus on bringing new products and new solutions into the marketplace. That’s really going to be the focus of our investment in the future.

JG: We’re very excited about both of the acquisitions you mentioned. Fotis is really going to help us support our partners in developing and delivering value-added professional services and helping customers ultimately deploy VMware infrastructure very successfully. Also, Thinstall is very complimentary to our virtual desktop infrastructure strategy and product line. It provides application virtualization and is a good fit when customers are trying to run desktop operating systems inside their data center. As we look to the future over the course of the next year, or couple of years, as we’re thinking about our partnerships and where we’re investing, we’re really focusing on four business areas. We’re focusing on building out capabilities around infrastructure management, so, helping customers take advantage of this virtual infrastructure they build, and automate their end-to-end management processes. We’re looking at business continuity and helping customers be more effective in how they plan their disaster recovery strategy, and manage those processes. Of course, virtual desktops is still going to be a big push for us and a big investment area. The last area is actually in software lifecycle automation, where we’re looking to leverage the power of virtualization and the power of VMware infrastructure to help customers be more effective in how they bring software from development through the multiple stages down to the production environment.

JG: Our near-term focus is really to innovate in the virtual infrastructure layer. So, with our most recent announcement of an update to the VMware infrastructure, we added a full set of new capabilities around update manager, which is a patch management solution, we added storage Vmotion, which like Vmotion, allows the seamless migration of virtual machines, but, in this case, of virtual machine disks sitting on storage. We plan to continue to focus on developing new products and new capabilities to transform IT infrastructure itself. Then we can leverage this very automated, highly-available infrastructure to broaden end-to-end management and automation solutions around the four areas I mentioned, again, infrastructure management, business continuity, virtual desktops, and, of course, software lifecycle automation.

JG: I was thinking about this and I was thinking about ESX server 3i and our view that over time, virtualization becomes pervasive and essentially just a built-in component of hardware, then with a whole set of layer of management products on top. Ultimately, there’s a fault way that people manage their infrastructure and I was thinking about the implications of that. I think one area that’s kind of young and recent right now is really in virtual appliances. This idea that you can pre-package your operating system and your application and distribute that directly from software vendors to customers and provide a lot of value actually to both ends of that chain. So for VDI’s, they’re really able to reduce their test matrix and get to market a lot faster, rather than testing their applications against all kinds of different operating system configurations. They can really optimize their application for a single operating system and not spend a lot of time porting code between different operating systems and really focus on the power and the capability of the application itself. Once they distribute that virtual appliance to a customer, it becomes super easy for that customer to deploy that virtual appliance into their infrastructure. Basically, a file, copied to their infrastructure, press go and they’ve just installed a new application. It’s a pretty big change from how application deployment works today and really can solve a lot of the problems that customers and organizations have in deploying new applications in their infrastructure.

Related Links:

VMWare.com, VMWare ESX Server 3i, VMotion, HyperV, Thinstall