Data Center Strategies

Back To The Future (2) – Oracle + Sun

In my previous post on this topic I promised to take a look at how a more “vertically integrated” set of IT suppliers might change things. In this post we’ll look at the challenges faced by a combination of Oracle and Sun.

The first challenge that any company will face is that a modern IT organization is orders of magnitude more complex and diverse than in era when IBM ruled the data center. For example, most IT organizations today run tens or even hundreds of applications from a wide variety of vendors on a diverse set hardware. That’s a far cry from the IBM era when an organization might have one or two computers and a handful of applications. So the big question is whether true vertical integration all the way up the hardware and software stack for the entire enterprise is even possible today. I’m inclined to think not, because even Oracle only has a handful of the applications needed by a modern enterprise

So if full vertical integration isn’t an option, the key questions are “how far up the stack can Oracle go?” and “does the convenience of vertical integration for part of the IT environment offset the issues of vendor lock-in and higher upfront purchase costs?”

The answer to the first question is that Oracle could offer a well integrated stack for Oracle databases and any applications from Oracle that live on top of that Oracle database. Using Sun’s hardware and operating system (along with OEM products like the Hitachi Data Systems enterprise arrays) they have access to a complete suite of enterprise hardware and system software. The problem is that much of that hardware is not widely used in the enterprise and many IT organizations have long since made the choice of another supplier, so Oracle has to persuade them to rip-n-replace a significant chunk of their infrastructure in order to benefit from integrated Oracle solutions.

The answer to the second question will depend a great deal on the previous choices made by an IT organization. For example an IT organization running Oracle on Sun hardware using Sun storage products may find the idea of tighter integration quite attractive. On the other hand an organization using HP servers and EMC storage to underpin it’s Oracle applications may not be interested at all.

An area of particular concern is the hypervisor, given Oracle’s recent acquisitions, it’s clear that they want to be a player in the server virtualization world. The problem is that many large enterprises are already deploying VMware ESX and to a lesser degree Microsoft HyperV and Citrix XenServer along with a suite of tools to manage the virtual environment. If Oracle fails to displace these products and becomes a “virtualization island” with it’s own set of management tools, then much of the vertical integration advantage disappears, as IT organizations are forced to work with two sets of tools, one for Oracle solutions and one for everything else.

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Cisco Adds Rack Mount Servers

When Cisco launched it’s UCS blade system in March, they were adamant that they did not plan to get into the rack mount server business. As I pointed out at the time (see here) the lack of rack mount servers would be a significant barrier to entry in the Enterprise because:

1. Many customers are still wary of the vendor lock-in, limited scalability, and pricey nature of blades and continue to buy rack mount servers in large quantities.
2. IT organizations try to keep the number of hardware companies they deal with to a minimum in order to maximize their buying power and simplify support for the server infrastructure. Telling companies to buy blades from Cisco and rack mounts from another supplier is not likely to fly with many customers.

So guess what, today Cisco announced a range of 1U and 2U rack mount servers designed to complement the USC blade systems. I suspect that this is the result of early feedback from potential resellers and end users, i.e. “if you want to be taken seriously, then you have to bring more than blades to the data center gunfight.” Given the short timeframe between this launch and the March UCS announcements, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Cisco always had a contingency plan here, and just hoped they wouldn’t need it.

The range of servers is still limited compared to the major server vendors, but 1U and 2U dual processor systems are certainly the sweet spot of the market, and should help the get a foot in the door at many enterprise IT organizations. Of course, this is all moot until Cisco actually has general availability on USC and its rack mount cousins, at the moment they seem to be as rare as rocking horse droppings outside of Cisco data centers!

Posted by: Nik Simpson

Back to The Future

As you may have gathered by now (see [1],[2]), I’m skeptical about Oracle’s plans to create a one stop shopping experience for IT organizations by combining their software offerings with Sun’s hardware. But let’s assume for the moment that I’m wrong and Oracle really does plan to go down that path.

Such a move would attempt to turn the industry clock back 40 years or more to an era when IT companies were vertically integrated and IT organizations sourced pretty much everything from one mainframe vendor. At that time there was very little in the way of an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) community, you bought your hardware, operating system and applications from the same place. Over time vertical integration gave way to the horizontal integration that we have today, were companies pick and choose hardware, operating systems, and applications from a wide variety of vendors.

Each model has distinct advantages and disadvantages:

• Vertical integration: Buying everything from one company as an integrated package should certainly be easier to manage and gives IT organization “one throat to choke” when things go wrong. On the other, it’s likely to be more expensive to purchase because the IT organization is heavily committed to a single vendor’s solution which weakens their bargaining power.
• Horizontal integration: The large and competitive selection of vendors for every aspect of a horizontally integrated IT infrastructure means that prices are low and there is considerable scope for “let’s make a deal”. On the other hand, a horizontally integrated IT infrastructure will require more on site integration and ongoing management attention.

If Oracle is right and the industry is ripe for a move back to vertical integration, then we have to ask the question “how will this impact existing vendors.” That’s a big subject and too much to cover in one blog, so I’ll tackle in a series of blogs over the next weeks. The vendors I plan to look at are:

• Oracle + Sun
• Cisco + EMC + VMware
• Dell
• HP
• Microsoft
• IBM

Posted by: Nik Simpson

NetApp buys Data Domain

Just got this email:

“A few minutes ago, NetApp issued a release announcing that NetApp and Data Domain have entered into a definitive agreement under which NetApp will acquire Data Domain common stock for $25 per share in cash and stock. The Data Domain portfolio brings a complementary offering to NetApp, expanding NetApp’s reach in the market for heterogeneous disk-based backup. The Data Domain acquisition increases NetApp’s ability to capitalize on the growth of disk-based backup adoption, a trend accelerated by the economics of deduplication. “

So what happens to Netapp’s existing VTL products? – I have no doubt we will find out soon. One thing for sure, data deduplication is capturing the hearts and minds of enterprise customers and NetApp wants to be part of that in a big way.

Certainly Data Domain will add significantly to the bottom line for NetApp. Can it net out to more business wins than both companies could have done on their own? According to NetApp, there was not significant customer overlap. So maybe not initially, but if NetApp integrates Data Domain function into its own management applications and both companies match up customer sets, this could be a big win for customers and make the whole more than the sum of its parts.

This is all about market presence and share, not so much about technology. Data Domain brings a lot of customers to the table to match NetApp’s primary data customers. NetApp’s own VTL products are simply too weak to go head-to-head with the width and breadth of Data Domain’s product set.

Posted by Gene Ruth

Oracle Changes its Position on x86 Hypervisor Support (Unfair Licensing Remains)

I’ve been covering Oracle licensing and support issues in x86 virtualized environments for quite some time, beginning with the January 2008 report “Virtualization Licensing and Support Lethargy: Curing the Disease That Stalls Virtualization Adoption.” You can also view these earlier blog posts for additional background:

• Oracle and the Big Elephant (August 2008)
• A New Year’s Resolution for Oracle (December 2008)
• Oracle Honors its New Year’s Resolution: Non-Oracle x86 Hypervisors are Now Supported (May 2009)

A few weeks ago one of our clients pointed me to a recently published Oracle support article (Metalink 794016.1 published March 27, 2009), which prompted me to write my previous post. That’s when the fun really began. After my last post on May 6th, Oracle published a completely revised version of the Metalink document on May 8th. The document was referenced by the same document ID (794016.1), but had a completely different title and content.

For context, the March 27th version of the Metalink document was titled “Platform Vendor Virtualization Technologies and Oracle E-Business Suite” while the revised May 8th edition of the document was titled “Hardware Vendor Virtualization Technologies on non x86/x86-64 Architectures and Oracle E-Business Suite.” If you recall, the first iteration of the document described how x86 virtualization technologies were supported with the following statement:

The use of platform vendors’ virtualization technologies (both software and hardware based) to host Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and R12 is covered by Oracle’s policy with regards to 3rd-party products – that is, they are ‘not explicitly certified, but supported’.

The support document listed Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix as examples. In the May 8th edition of the support document, the above statement was revised to:

The use of hardware vendors' virtualization technologies to host Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and R12 follows the same policy as Oracle's policy with regards to customizations - that is, they are 'not explicitly certified, but supported'.

Examples of x86 virtualization hypervisors were replaced by the following statement:

This document provides a statement regarding Oracle E-Business Suite (11i, R12) support of Hardware Vendor Virtualization technologies on non x86/x86-64 systems.

The bottom line – the revised support document went from describing support for x86 hypervisors to ignoring them altogether, with the exception of Oracle’s hypervisor Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM). I was told that the revisions were needed to address confusion, but feedback I received from numerous Burton Group clients made it clear that there was no confusion until the May 8th revision was published.

Since early last week, I have had numerous calls with Oracle on the subjects of both licensing and support, and unfortunately the news isn’t all good. Let’s start with the positive. According to Oracle, VMware’s ESX hypervisor “has been supported since November 2007.” As proof, you can view Oracle Metalink document 249212.1 (note that you’ll need an Oracle support account to view the doc). The document states the following:

Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized
environments. Oracle Support will assist customers running Oracle products on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware.
If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware for support. When the customer can demonstrate that the Oracle solution does not work when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume support, including logging a bug with Oracle Development for investigation if required.

The statement goes on to say that Oracle RAC is not supported on VMware environments. If you’re looking for additional background on Oracle support for VMware environments, I suggest reading the following other perspectives:

• “What the Oracle / VMware support statement really means...and why” (Jeff Browning)
• “Oracle on VMware – a manifesto…” (Chad Sakac)
• “EMC attacks Oracle on its VMware support policy” (Alessandro Perilli)

Regarding VMware support, here’s the translation – if you call for support and you have a known bug, you’re good to go. If you’ve found a new (previously unknown) bug, you’re first going to have to reproduce the fault on physical hardware before Oracle will help you. Compared to other vendors that support enterprise applications on VMware or x86 virtualization environments, this is one of the most restrictive policies out there. Most enterprise software vendors only require faults to be reproduced on the bare metal if they are directly related to performance that could be attributed to the virtualization layer.

The recent Virtual Iron acquisition further cements the fact that Oracle is serious about virtualization. Microsoft and Citrix both have clear public support statements about virtualization and the hypervisors they support (I’m mentioning these two vendors because they’re both virtualization vendors and enterprise software vendors). Oracle needs to loosen its support restrictions for VMware and all x86 virtualization environments, and needs to broaden its list of supported (but not certified) hypervisors to include Microsoft, Citrix, Novell, and Red Hat.

Finally, as I previously mentioned, the larger problem here is licensing. Oracle is requiring customers who wish to deploy Oracle products on x86 hypervisors to license Oracle software by physical server CPUs. Suppose you had two Oracle Database VMs (each with two virtual CPUs) running on a two-node ESX cluster that uses two four-socket servers. Since it’s possible that you’d have a VM on each node, you’d need to purchase licensing to cover the 8 total sockets. If you ran Oracle’s hypervisor, you could license by virtual CPU, however this is only allowed if you pin the VM to fixed CPU cores by hard coding CPU bindings. You can read more about that here. This does create a slight advantage for OVM over competing products, but by binding a VM to one or more physical CPU cores, you have to give up advanced virtualization functionality such as live migration. If I’m using application-level high availability features, this configuration may not be a big deal and would in turn favor Oracle; however it is far from ideal.

Oracle’s competitors in the database arena allow their products to be licensed by virtual CPU without requiring physical bindings (see Microsoft’s and IBM’s policies), and so should Oracle. Doing so allows VMs to move about the physical infrastructure as required to support IT operations. Binding enterprise software licenses to physical assets is a legacy licensing model, and Oracle is practically alone in their licensing policies.

Oracle’s strategy with regard to licensing is one that I’ve seen before. Oracle is effectively taxing organizations for running Oracle Database in a VM. In most cases, organizations will have to pay increased licensing fees. This policy hurts the customer, and in my opinion is an attempt to stall market adoption while Oracle finishes building out its own x86 virtualization platform.

Oracle, it’s time to classify all x86 hypervisors as “hard partitioning.” Our clients are increasingly deploying enterprise applications on x86 virtualization hypervisors. You’re putting them in a tough position, and many consider the virtual infrastructure the foundation for their cloud architecture. Some clients have told me they are now considering moving forward with DB2 or SQL Server because they are unwilling to pay a penalty to run Oracle on any x86 hypervisor. In the end, our clients shouldn’t have to make that choice. They should have the freedom to run the applications they want on the platform they want. This licensing policy is affecting the bottom line of our clients and could ultimately affect your bottom line too. It shouldn’t have to come to that. Let’s just "right the wrong.” Besides, your “Partitioning” document which describes software licensing for virtual environments was last updated in January 2008. In response to my last blog post, you were able to revise a support statement within two days. How about taking the time to revise a licensing policy that is clearly outdated and places an unnecessary burden on our clients?

Epiphany on The Road to Santa Clara?

Ever since the Oracle/Sun deal was announced (see my comments here), the rumor mill has been working fulltime on the issue of what Oracle will do with Sun’s Hardware business. Last week, in an interview here, Larry Ellison tried to put rumors of the imminent demise of Sun’s hardware business to rest. The gist of the interview is Oracle is going to embrace Sun’s hardware business with the zeal of a convert.

Unfortunately, the effect of these protestations of undying hardware love were somewhat undermined this week when Sun made the details of it’s courtship of Oracle public (see here for the gory SEC details). Apparently, all Oracle really wanted was part of Sun’s software business and a minority stake in the company, apparently Sun turned that idea down.

Plan B was to go in with an unnamed hardware company (HP according to most sources) with Oracle taking the software and HP getting the hardware business. That plan failed as well, leaving Oracle with two choices, walk away, or buy Sun with its hardware baggage and all, and sort it out later.

Apparently buying the entire company was preferable to walking away. Subsequently, on the road to Santa Clara to finalize the deal, Larry had a religious experience and became a born again hardware geek.

Of course, you cynics out there might be thinking that Oracle had to say nice things about the hardware business, at least for now. The last thing they want is to confirm a Sun customer’s worst nightmare and SPARC a mass exodus.

Posted by: Nik Simpson

EU Slaps Intel with €1.06 billion ($1.45 USB) Fine

By now, I guess everyone has seen the incredible news that the EU has levied a €1.06 ($1.45USB) fine on Intel for "illegal sales practices". As you can imagine, Intel was unhappy about the news, while AMD applauded the move.

From a technical analysis perspective, there are no immediate implications. Intel will still continue to ship it's entire portfolio of processor products, including the new Nahalem (XEON 5500 series) processor. Well, at least for now. However, one has to question the long term implications, including whether or not Intel has the cash to sustain these product lines given the fine. Intel, like many other companies in this economic climate, are watching every dime. Will this fine affect their ability to produce product in sufficient quantities to meet IHV demand? These types of issues make IHVs (e.g. Dell, HP, and IBM) very nervous. Often times, there simply aren't enough chips to go around in the server market. That's why every IHV scrambles to be "on stage" with Intel when they announce a new processor...to guarantee they are "first to market" and corner as much of Intel's capacity as possible. The more processors the IHVs have on hand, the more serves they can manufacture... and the easier it is to keep the competition from shipping similar servers. It's been this way in the server market for years. How many times have customers attempted to purchase a server from an IHV, only to find out that the ship date is extended 3+ months?

Another question: will this judgment hinder Intel from making more investments in future products? Chips design is a long process. New processors are on the drawing board 5+ years in advance. If Intel is forced to make hard decisions, R&D may be the place.

Part of what we've been blogging on here in DCS is the increasing competition within the IT industry...including Ciscos's entry in the blade server market with UCS and Oracle's Virtual Iron acquisition. We think it's an inevitability that larger companies will begin to compete across technical, geographical, and vertical market boundaries. Companies that were once "close partners" are now suspiciously watching each other from across the table. Stands to reason the the governing agencies will be closely following these unfolding events.

[posted by: Drue Reeves]

Oracle's Virtual Iron Acquisition: More Implications

As Richard has already pointed out in an earlier blog, Oracle acquired additional server virtualization technology today by purchasing Virtual Iron. This acquisition had long since been in the works and predicted not only by Burton Group, but by several other organizations too.

The big question on everyone's mind is: why? After acquiring Sun Microsystems earlier last month, one would think that Oracle has all the virtualization technology they need. Richard has already pointed out several reasons why Oracle made this move... including SMB customer acquisition, better management tools, and the ability to sell Oracle's new found virtualization technology as a standalone product. All good points...I'm sure these were on the top of Oracle's list. There is another potential reason -- to keep VirtualIron out of the hands of a potential competitior such as RedHat or Novell. In fact, Oracle may view VirtualIron as another item on their grocery list of companies to acquire that includes RedHat. By purchasing Virtual Iron, Oracle prevents RedHat from acquiring additional virtualization technology, perhaps in attempt to keep RH's price low for a future acquisition. It also prevents Novell from buying VirtualIron's technology, which uses Novell's SuSE Linux for it's services partition.

There are other implications too.

Oracle is now in an interesting position. For many IT technology companies, Oracle has moved from being a strategic partner, to a potential competitor. With the Sun acquisition, both server AND storage companies -- who once happily sold Oracle database solutions -- have to wonder if Oracle will compete by offering highly-tuned servers and storage for their data base technology. Microsoft and Oracle have been competing for a while, but these two acquisitions open a new competitive chapter in virtualization and operating systems. VMware too, realizes there is a new player with deeper pockets in the virtualization space.

But one can hardly blame Oracle. Increasing competition is a sign of the IT industry times. How long could Oracle grow revenues with a single flagship product that has captured a large portion of the market? Oracle is doing what well-managed companies do...return value to shareholders. Cisco reached the same conclusion earlier this year, and has since expanded into the server hardware market with the UCS announcement. Yes, it's an interesting time in the IT industry, there simply isn't enough market share to go around anymore. Competition among the bigger players was inevitable at some point.

[posted by: Drue Reeves]

Oracle Buys Virtual Iron

This morning, Oracle announced its intent to purchase Virtual Iron with the acquisition expecting to close this summer.  I had blogged about this just over two months ago when some rumors had hit the street of a possible acquisition by Oracle and what that would mean.  So let’s recap what this means:
1.    First and foremost, if Oracle keeps the Virtual Iron product in tact plus its distribution channel, this will signal a move down market for Oracle.  Virtual Iron is a channel only product targeted at the small to medium enterprise market.  This is a market dominated by the likes of Microsoft and not Oracle.  Virtual Iron had done very well in this market until Microsoft launched Hyper-v at which time Virtual Iron’s market began.
2.    The move gives Oracle’s virtualization management tools a shot in the arm.  As I had mentioned in my earlier blog, Virtual Iron meets 83% of Burton Group’s required criteria for production worthy hypervisors.  The big missing piece for Virtual Iron was enterprise level support and support lifecycle – easily filled by Oracle.
3.    This gives Oracle a virtual machine management product not requiring their Enterprise Manager.  The biggest advantage is the ability to sell virtualization stand-alone.
4.    What does this mean for Novell?  Virtual Iron depends heavily on SLES 10 for its services partition.  The only answer I can see is that long term, this will get swapped out for Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) bits.  Still, how this plays out is in Novell’s hands.  Will Novell aggressively partner with Oracle?  Historically, Novell has not done so.

Let’s watch the first point above.  I believe this will be the hardest for Oracle to preserve, if they even intend on preserving Virtual Iron’s channel into the small to medium enterprise.  It is an opportunity for them to compete more with Microsoft down market, but it will require some additional pricing and product changes including pushing OVM into the down market channel without the rich management capabilities as the “starter pack” or free version to compete against Hyper-V, VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer 5 – all of which are free.

As the merger completes, we expect to see more clearly how the products will end up being positioned in the channel.

[Posted by: Richard Jones]

Amazon, Citrix, Xen, and KVM - the catalyst for change

A series of events have been unfolding over the past nine months that leads one to speculate on what Amazon will be doing in the future with its EC2 infrastructure.  For those not aware, EC2 is built upon an Amazon customized version of the Xen Hypervisor plus Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 code. 

Here goes my speculation:  Taking from where Drue Reeves left off in his blog on this subject earlier this year, Amazon has got to be looking for a way to reduce its engineering maintenance investment into the EC2 infrastructure.  What better way than to partner with a technology supplier.  The announcement on May 6th at Synergy of Citrix-Amazon collaboration on internal/external cloud interoperability has “we’re moving to Citrix XenServer as our EC2 hypervisor infrastructure” written all over it.  Let’s look at some interesting points:
•    XenServer with live migration is now free.  Amazon has got to like “free.”
•    Citrix is collaborating on the same API and hopefully AMI as EC2
•    RedHat is abandoning Xen in favor of KVM (see Drue’s blog)

Amazon can continue to use Red Hat Linux as the guest operating system for EC2 as Citrix and the community will supply Xen paravirtualized device drivers moving forward.

So what do you think?

[Posted by Richard Jones]

Citrix Synergy Part 2: Perceptions & Breakouts

Citrix Synergy attendance was more heavily weighted on the side of Citrix partners, resellers, and other sales channel providers.  This has been a trend I’ve noticed in down turn economies – the tech channel is anxious for more information to encourage their customers  to invest and more end users are under tighter travel restrictions.  But then Citrix tends to focus on its partners and channel for the conferences it holds.  The overall attendance at the combined events appeared to be around 3200.  Synergy started with a partner summit on Saturday May 2nd with the main user conferences starting Tuesday May 5th.  Synergy is composed of four sub-conferences wrapped into one: GeekSpeak Live – A Citrix sponsored “unconference” including informal get-togethers on various topics, iForum – the traditional Citrix end user conference, NetworkWorld Live – focus on virtualization from industry visionaries and leaders (this is where I gave two sessions), and Virtualization Congress – the virtualization focused conference from Virtualization.info (where I gave one session).

First perceptions of the conference were: “Citrix users and partners are now warming up to the idea of virtualization solutions from Citrix.”  In my discussions with a number of attendees, one theme has been clear.  Virtualization from Citrix is generally new to them.  The lions share have been with Citrix since the Metaframe days (now XenApp) and that’s what they know.  Over and over I heard the comment “I was prepping a VMware roll-out and had no idea XenServer existed.  I need to take a look first, especially now that it’s free.” 

Additional perceptions:  Citrix has significantly increased its portfolio and is making aggressive moves in the virtualization market – not only with XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer, but with the new announcement of XenClient.  I felt that the two most important announcements were the creation of enterprise licensing programs for customers and the XenClient announcement.  XenClient is the last major component needed to complete the virtual desktop picture.  While XenClient isn’t new (see Virtual Computer’s NxTop offering), it will represent a client type I hypervisor integrated into the Citrix product line.  This gives added flexibility, manageability, and security to corporate desktops and laptops.  The keylogger demo in the keynotes illustrated the security improvements.

Of the three breakout sessions that I presented, the “Vendor hypervisor competitive differences” was the biggest hit.  Chris Wolf gave a preliminary version of this presentation at VMworld Europe.  The noteworthy point of this presentation is that if Citrix delivers on its promised features for XenServer 5.5 this summer, it will meet 100% of the required technical features, making it the second hypervisor to achieve this status behind VMware ESX 3.5U3 and vSphere 4.

My other two sessions were “Success with Storage Virtualization” and “Better, faster, cheaper disaster recovery with virtualization”  The key points of the storage virtualization session were:
•    Storage virtualization should be done in array and not in the hypervisor or guest if possible.
•    Storage management needs to be integrated with hypervisor and VM management.
•    Vendors are just now responding (VMware vStorage APIs and Citrix Essentials Storage Link) to improve storage and hypervisor management integration.

And the key points of the Disaster recovery with virtualization session were:
•    Virtualization can reduce your DR testing time in half.
•    Virtualization can reduce your DR testing staff requirements in half.
•    Consolidation increases physical system availability requirements.
•    Low cost high and continuous availability solutions are only possible with virtualization.

[Posted by Richard Jones]

Citrix Essentials for XenServer 5 Platinum

Just to illustrate how fast the x86 virtualization market is moving, Burton Group just published for its Data Center Strategies clients a product profile on Citrix XenServer 5.  However, within the same week, Citrix released its announced changes to the product stratification and branding with Essentials for XenServer 5.  The stratification change reduced the number of XenServer 5 offerings from four to three, and more importantly, the bottom level offering is now free – including XenCenter with live migration support.  The free version has XenCenter features that are not enabled until the customer purchases and adds one of the two Essentials offerings: Enterprise or Platinum.  Additional tools, such as Lab Manager and Workflow Manager are included in the Essentials offerings (features offered depend on the level selected).

The timing of Burton Group’s product profile was just not on cadence with Citrix’s update.  Therefore, Burton Group has just updated the product profile to reflect the new features and product stratification and branding change.  If you downloaded the product profile when it first released, please download again to get the updated version.  The newer version reflects Citrix’ improved standing in relation to Burton Group’s production worthiness criteria, however Essentials for XenServer 5 still isn’t quite there yet.

Citrix recently announced the next version, XenServer 5.5, that will add Directory Services integration for administrative authentication/authorization, role-based access controls, and improved auditing/reporting.  This will complete the required technical features for production environments.  The only missing requirement will be a published product lifecycle plan at product launch.  At Synergy, I got the chance to discuss this problem in depth with Citrix executives.  XenApp is the only product with a published lifecycle at launch, and they promised that general lifecycles for the other products (including XenServer) will be forth coming.

[Posted by Richard Jones]

Oracle Honors its New Year’s Resolution: Non-Oracle x86 Hypervisors are Now Supported

In case you haven’t seen, Oracle issued a major product support update last month - Platform Vendor Virtualization Technologies and Oracle E-Business Suite - Metalink Note 794016.1 (note that an Oracle support account is needed to view the update). The bottom line – Oracle now offers best effort support for all of its E-Business Suite applications on any x86 hypervisor. Shocked? Here’s a snippet of the support statement:

The use of platform vendors’ virtualization technologies (both software and hardware based) to host Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and R12 is covered by Oracle’s policy with regards to 3rd-party products – that is, they are ‘not explicitly certified, but supported’.

What this means is that while these technologies are not certified, Oracle will not turn away a customer reporting an issue solely due to the use of these technologies. When possible Oracle will triage and attempt to diagnose the issue reported – Oracle support may attempt to replicate the issue in a non-virtualized environment and work with the customer to verify if the problem exhibits in such an environment.

Any specific problem isolated to the virtualization software (i.e. a problem that cannot be reproduced in a standard, non-virtualized environment) will need to be referred to the specific vendor for resolution.

Customers should review all relevant Oracle documentation on the use of such virtualization technologies for known issues and limitations with respect to EBS technology components such as the database, RAC, etc.

Customers intending to use 3rd-party products covered under this policy in production environments should conduct appropriate levels of testing and also have contingency plans to revert to a standard certified configuration (that is, non-virtualized environment)…

So there you have it. Back in December I suggested that Oracle make two New Year’s resolutions:

• Offer best effort support for all major x86 server virtualization hypervisors
• Offer virtual CPU-based licensing for all of its server applications

The year isn’t even half way over, and Oracle can cross the first resolution off its list. Next up has to be software licensing. Oracle considers its own x86 hypervisor, Oracle VM (OVM), a platform capable of supporting hard partitioning (see the Oracle “Partitioning” document for more information). By its definition of “hard partitioning” Oracle allows virtual CPU-based licensing on OVM, but does not allow it on other popular x86 hypervisors such as VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Citrix XenServer. Oracle also allows virtual CPU-based licensing on Amazon EC2, which runs the open source Xen hypervisor (you can read more about that policy here). Updating the support policy was a great first step, and Oracle should be commended for responding to the needs of its customers.

Now how about knocking out New Year’s resolution #2 before the end of June? Oracle, I know you can do it. Your friends in the enterprise software space that offer CPU-based licensing, such as IBM and Microsoft, both allow licensing to virtual CPUs on any major hypervisor. Binding a license to a physical CPU is “so 2007.” Oracle, no doubt you’re in the middle of a major makeover, and acquiring Sun was a good move. I must say, with the Sun portfolio, I love your wardrobe. However, your licensing policy doesn’t reflect your new look or attitude. To stay with the wardrobe analogy, you’re wearing some great clothes, but you need to lose the mullet.

Oracle, let’s complete the makeover. Modernize your licensing policies and your body of actions will show that you are a company that is truly one with the times.

Posted by: Chris Wolf

Citrix Synergy Part 1 - Keynotes

For those of you who didn’t attend Citrix Synergy, I’ve summarized the keynotes each day.  I’ve not put them in chronological order to include the exciting stuff up front.

Citrix announced a number of new products soon to be made available across all their solution lines.

XenApp:  CEO Mark Templeton introduced a new self-service application deployment system called “Dazzel.”  IT administrators publish available applications to a web-based interface so that end users can simply click on the application icon they would like streamed to their virtual environment.  It includes a “star field” view akin to George Lucus’ Starwars episode introduction screens – application icons scrolling into outerspace.  The concept isn’t new (Symantec Altiris, Novell ZenWorks, LanDesk, etc. have a similar concept), but the solution is integrated with the Citrix XenApp delivery solutions.   Additionally, Reciever was introduced – a light weight client for accessing XenApp services.  This includes yet another iPhone App that is now available on the Apple iPhone App store.

XenServer:  On Day 2, Wes Wassen (Citrix chief marketing officer)  introduced XenServer 5.5.  Re-iterating the XenServer 5.0 stratification change to offer a Xenserver 5 with live migration for free.  XenServer 5.5 will add a consolidated backup infrastructure, directory services integration, dynamic load balancing, and improved reporting – all of which are required to meet Burton Group’s server virtualization hypervisor requirements.  Citrix also introduced a new certification program,  Open Storage Program – to certify third-party storage arrays with both Hyper-v and XenServer through Essentials.  Stage management (not shown) will also be included in 5.5 for either Hyper-v or XenServer.  Labmanager, available in Essentials for XenServer 5.0, can select resources for lab testing from Dazzle. 

XenClient:  Ian Pratt showed off Citrix client vision with a demo of the new dynamic client with Intel.  Both companies worked together to move Xen to client environment.  Work started in 2007, issues with power mgnt and all the client devices (3D graphics) have been overcome with the Xen type I hypervisor below 10MB.  The demo showed two VMs on the laptop, one is personal (Vista), and one is business (XP).  They showed full Aero experience of Vista.  Demoed support of hardware policy (only certain USB sticks, or lock down completely).  Integration with Dazzle to get the apps the users want.  Security feature demoed with a keylogger running, an app deployed through Dazzle is marked as secure, when launched it comes up within its own special windows (exposed from a private VM) inside of the insecure desktop environment (the window is in a thin a green box).  Keyloggers can't get to this secured app even though it appears to be running inside the insecure personal VM.  Mac users running Parallels will recognize this as similar to Parallels Coherence – a window from a VM running inside the active desktop, but in this case, the active desktop is a different VM on the machine.  The XenClient is planned to ship this by year's end.  Ian demoed streaming windows apps to a MacBook Pro OSx machine that was running XenClient.  No timeframe for this product was given.

NetScaler:  Wes Wasson announced NetScaler VPX product  - a virtualized appliance for XenServer for any hardware.  Customers can download XenServer for free and then add the preconfigured VPX appliance and associate it with individual virtualized applications.  This brings multi-tenancy to a new level.  Citrix threw out a challenge:  $10,000 award for the person/company to show the best innovative idea with VPX.    The Tech Preview of VPX will be available May 18th with general availability in Q3.

Cloud:  Wes and Mark both discussed cloud directions by adding to Citrix C3 Cloud.  Multi-tenency with VPX, virtual switching with XenServer, enable apps and desktops as a service, and adding pay as you go.  Citrix is partnering with Amazon webservices to allow C3 to interact with EC2.  Citrix announced a C3 lab integrated with EC2 compute and storage to include services of Citrix C3 blueprints  - best practices on how to do a public/private cloud environment with Citrix C3 being the private side integrating with Amazon EC2 as the public side.  Both Amazon and Citrix sharing the guidelines on how to do this as part of the partnership. Mark showed a list of the top SaaS vendors:  Citrix has achieved #4 with gotomeeting.  Over 1 billion connection minutes in gotomeeting in 2008.  Larger than Microsoft Livemeeting.  Salesforce is #1 still.  Mark discussed Citrix view of cloud economics:  Economics then flexibility, automation, and finally pay-go.  automation is self service, pay-go is external cloud connected for burst over, DR, and lab/test.

Partners:  Patrick Gelsinger of Intel introduced the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem)  He showed doubling of performance over the previous generation.  30 performance records broken.  168% virtualization performance improvement.  They delivered it with 50% less power consumption.  Intel calls the 5500: "Technology foundation for the dynamic data center"  Adding to the 5500 are SSDs, and 10Gb Ethernet - calling this combination the cloud technology of tomorrow.  Demoed 16 four-year-old XenApp servers consolidated on one XenServer virtualized 5500.

The conference was kicked off with a guest speaker on the Xen of Presentation: Garr Reynolds (associate professor of management at Kansai Gaidai University, Japan).  Garr talked about how to simplify presentations and user interfaces.

The keynotes concluded with a CIO panel lead by John Gallant of Network World.  It included CIOs from:  Arizona State University, Deloitte, and Credit Suisse.  Mostly the panelists extolled the virtues of app virtualization and re-iterated the importance of keeping costs down.  Practical advice was to set expectations of what you will get and what the business needs - keep from increasing costs.  Credit Suisse had increased productivity by allowing remote access for users after hours but still allowing some level of user customization.

In part two, I’ll talk about breakout sessions.

[Posted by Richard Jones]

Desktop Virtualization Webcast

I recently completed a webcast that highlighted Burton Group’s position on the state of the VDI market, along with an assessment of architectural alternatives and technical barriers. This follows the release of our desktop virtualization overview “Desktop Virtualization: Choices and Challenges.” If you’re interested, the webcast is approximately 45 minutes in length and can be viewed below (or click here to view it in a separate browser window).