View From The Floor - Doug Lane Day 2 By VSM News Staff published: Thursday, February 26 2009
Moving Beyond the Hype on Day 2
Blogging live from VMworld Europe 09 - Doug Lane, Senior Director of Product Management, Virtual Computer
Day two is a wrap here in Cannes, and for many it was a time to dive a
level deeper into the technical details of the initiatives that were introduced
yesterday by VMware and other virtualization players in attendance. The day was kicked off with a keynote by
Stephen Herrod, VMware's chief technology officer. The session started with a bit of
muscle-flexing about VMware's performance and scalability improvements, with
specific examples of Oracle database, Microsoft Exchange, and web server
workload virtualization performance assessments. I am generally a bit dubious of
vendor-provided benchmark data, but there is no disputing that VMware's server
virtualization technology has evolved into a very mature platform that in
addition to its core function of hardware consolidation can now be applied to
scale applications to take full advantage of multi-core server hardware.
While there was quite a bit of focus yesterday on VMware's
client hypervisor initiative with Intel, it was clear in today's keynote that
VMware still sees server-based infrastructure as the center of the desktop
computing universe. A highlight was a
live demonstration of VMware's PC-over-IP collaboration with Teradici, which is
aimed at improving the user experience for thin client users accessing their
desktops over a LAN or WAN.
All in all, it was an impressive keynote. I always find VMware's view of the computing world
to be very technically and intellectually interesting. They have a very lofty vision of how
cloud-based infrastructure could become the core of personal computing. However, my interest is often tempered by the
complexity of it all. I am firm believer
that virtualization should make life simpler for IT, and while VMware's complex
vision seems to resonate with the "true believers" who made the pilgrimage to
Cannes, there is a risk that they will collapse under their weight of a
complicated architecture as they bring their solutions down market to mid-tier
and smaller IT organizations.
In the afternoon, I decided to carve out some time to attend
some of the breakout sessions. Amid the
VMware-focused sessions and paid sponsor speaking slots, a session called
"Hypervisor Competitive Differences: Beyond the Data Sheet" caught my eye. It is fashionable to call the hypervisor
itself a commodity these days, so I thought it would be interesting to see
whether that was really the case. The
session was conducted by Chris Wolf, a well-respected analyst from Burton Group
who works closely with all of the major virtualization vendors. I think I picked one of the winning sessions
of the day. Chris outlined a
virtualization vendor evaluation criteria that Burton Group recently developed
and will soon publish as a written report. The real fun came when he previewed how the
vendors stacked up when the methodology was applied. Here is the skinny:
- Not surprisingly, VMware went to the head of the
class and was the only vendor to achieve a 100 percent score on the "required"
elements of the evaluation criteria.
- Hyper-V scored respectably, but was dinged by
Chris for gaps in areas such as high availability, live migration, hardware-assisted
memory management, and failover.
- Citrix XenServer also made a strong showing, but
received some demerits for feature gaps such as 802.1q VLAN trunking, native
directory services integration, role-based access controls, and activity
logging.
- Virtual Iron had respectable scores, but Chris
questioned whether their product support intervals were sufficient to cover the
true expected life of a virtualization implementation.
I spoke to Chris briefly on the way into another session
later in the day, and it sounded like he had endured an afternoon of badgering
from the various vendors pleading their cases before the final report goes to
print. While I am sure Chris works hard
to avoid alienating the vendors he covers, the session provided the type of
vendor-neutral objectivity that is the exception rather than the rule at events
like this.
A final lesson of the day was that there are apparently a whole
lot of people in the world who are interested in learning how to make SQL
Server work well on VMware. I walked out
of an afternoon session to find a mob that was about twice the size of the room
capacity jockeying to get into "SQL Server Performance on VMware: Best
Practices, Recommendations, Tuning, and Troubleshooting." It wasn't really on the top of my list for
4:30 in the afternoon, but apparently there are some people out there with a
real need. Half of the VMworld staff
members manning the room were scrambling around trying to convince those who
couldn't get in that they will add another session tomorrow while the other
half took pictures of the whole spectacle.
One more day to go, and I am hoping to make at least one
more solid pass through the show floor to look for some smaller players who I
may have overlooked so far this week.
Related Links:
VMworld Europe 2009 Coverage , Virtual Computer, View From The Floor - Day 1
|
