Data Center Strategies

SpringSource: VMware’s well-timed Acquisition

On Monday VMware announced that they will acquire SpringSource – a move that I believe was both essential and astute.

Let’s start with essential. Sure – it’s hard to argue against VMware’s merits as a hardware infrastructure-as-a-service (HIaaS) platform for both internal and external clouds. Note that for more information on cloud platforms and definitions, Drue Reeves’ paper “Cloud Computing: Transforming IT" is a great place to start. Living at the bottom of the stack (i.e., infrastructure) can only take VMware so far. Microsoft is confident that they can methodically chip away at VMware’s market share by tying their applications and management platform to their own Hyper-V-based virtual infrastructure. Richard Jones’ post “Virtualization Wars, what can VMware learn from the past?” talks about this issue in great depth. VMware’s infrastructure focus is its strength, but at the same time its Achilles heel. VMware needs to move up the stack to keep up with Microsoft long term.

I see the move as astute because SpringSource gives VMware the right platform at the right time. Chris Haddad – with our Application and Platform Strategies Service – detailed how a combined VMware and SpringSource platform will impact application development. Virtualization (i.e., server, client, application, storage, I/O, and network) and cloud are fundamentally changing the way that both server and desktop applications are delivered. Last year I wrote about how this transformational period creates opportunity for Microsoft’s competitors such as Apple. Cloud-based application delivery (both internal and external) is equally disruptive to traditional server application delivery models. What this means is that the time to redefine application delivery and to unseat the incumbents is right now.

At Catalyst, Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich talked about how virtualization is changing the way we think about OS and application delivery. Even Microsoft knows that the monolithic OS is not the platform of the future. From a platform developer’s point of view, the hypervisor represents the new hardware. OSs incapable of leveraging the dynamic nature of virtualization simply do not give applications the dynamic capabilities they may need. For example, suppose you want to add more compute resources to a Windows application. For stateless applications, you could deploy them in a network load balanced cluster and scale them out across multiple VMs. For stateful applications, scaling out isn’t as easy (some do this better than others). If you want to hot-add an additional virtual CPU, for example, the guest OS had better be Windows Server 2008 Datacenter edition. No other edition supports CPU hot-add. Clearly, this is an area that Microsoft will address, but it speaks to the problem. The same can be said for hot added memory. If the application requires a restart in order to take advantage of dynamically added memory, such features are of little value. While we’re talking about density and cloud, we also must think about efficiency. When deployed to a single physical box, application processing efficiency may not have meant so much for tier 2 or 3 apps. Put an app on a cloud-based infrastructure that uses consumption-based pricing (thinking future) and it’s another story. The more efficiently that an application and its underlying platform process data, the less expensive it is to run in the cloud.

Finally, I don’t see VMware as grabbing SpringSource to just have the “PaaS checkbox” to line up against Microsoft’s Azure platform. VMware has to think beyond that. Getting a platform for PaaS with a large install base and developer ecosystem gives VMware instant credibility, and broadens the services that can be offered by VMware’s service provider partners. Tomorrow’s dominant cloud providers won’t just have the checkboxes, but they’ll offer innovative, dynamic management, while being highly efficient (again the fewer the CPU cycles, the lower the cost). Microsoft, Citrix, and other competitors in the cloud space also realize that the opportunity exists for new cloud-centric platforms. Having a good core platform is clearly important, but tightly aligning applications and infrastructure to handle the dynamic nature of virtualization and cloud (e.g., dynamic resource add/subtract, distributed data access and potential latency, and security) is new territory. VMware’s core leadership, including Paul Maritz and Todd Nielsen have been there before, dating back to their time at Microsoft. The next steps that VMware takes will likely define how history repeats itself.

History will repeat, but which history will it be – Paul and Todd helping build the market leading software infrastructure? Or Microsoft using tight application, OS, and management integration to thwart competitors?

Catalyst Server Virtualization Wrap-up Part I

After taking the weekend to catch my breath and get some much needed rest, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the highlights from last week’s Catalyst North America conference. I’d like to start with recaps of last week’s opening day cloud and virtualization sessions.

Wednesday AM – Defining the Cloud
Drue Reeves chaired the Wednesday morning cloud track and offered his thoughts on the morning here. The morning offered some very interesting perspectives from early cloud adopters International Hotels Group and Eli Lilly. Later in the morning, Drue challenged Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research at Salesforce.com, on the fact that Salesforce.com does not offer customers an SLA. I received feedback from many clients who were glad that Drue asked the question. Peter indicated that Salesforce.com has thrived in spite of not offering an SLA, and it’s hard to argue with their success. However, I don’t know of many Burton Group clients who will consider putting production workloads on cloud-based infrastructure as a service solutions without an SLA. Amazon – I hope you’re listening. Speaking of service providers, I found the announcement from VMware’s Raghu Raghuram that VMware now has over 700 service providers on board to be impressive. None of VMware’s competitors are anywhere near that number. Sure – it’s very early in the public cloud era (too early for most of our clients to put production resources on it due to security/compliance concerns), but it’s clear that VMware is being very aggressive. I’m curious to see how many VMware service provider partners are locked into exclusive agreements with VMware, as that may impact Microsoft and Citrix’s ability to rival VMware when it comes to provider choice.

Wednesday PM – Server Virtualization: The Foundation for Cloud Infrastructure

The afternoon track focused on server virtualization topics as they relate to public and private cloud infrastructures. During my opening keynote, I highlighted the following points:

• The time to rework business processes to support a service-oriented model for IT service delivery (i.e., internal cloud) is right now. IT must own the physical infrastructure assets and offer them as a service. In 5-10 years, public cloud providers will compete against internal IT for the rights to host business applications. IT organizations that do not build out a service delivery model may find themselves like many US factory workers, and be faced with the realities of unemployment.
• Improvements in x86 hardware (e.g., hardware-assisted memory virtualization) are allowing most top tier x86 applications to successfully run in VMs. Application owners should now have to justify why an app cannot run in a VM, instead of the other way around.
• Tools that can fully visualize the data path are important for application troubleshooting as well as security/compliance auditing and enforcement. End-to-end (i.e. network and storage) views remain a challenge today, and additive virtualization layers (e.g., storage, network, and I/O) can further complicate visualization efforts.
• Development practices need to evolve so that applications can leverage dynamically allocated resources within the virtual infrastructure. Sure, unaltered apps run in the virtual infrastructure, but they could run more efficiently (more on that shortly).
• Burton Group is working with several vendors and end user organizations to build reference architecture models for internal cloud. You can see a preview of the initial work here.

Mark Templeton (CEO, Citrix)

Mark Templeton (Citrix CEO) followed my presentation by sharing his vision of cloud-based infrastructure. Templeton spent considerable time outlining how IT organizations must move to a service-oriented model. IT creates and advertises services. Users and business units purchase them (like ordering a channel package or pay-per-view movie). Templeton made a great point when he stated that to improve IT efficiency and reliability, you need to eliminate parts. According to Templeton, IT service delivery should have the following characteristics:

• Any-to-any, secure when needed
• Device, network & content independence
• Self-service desktop & app provisioning
• Elastic service capacity & infrastructure
• Consumption-based, variable costs

During the Q&A, an attendee asked Templeton about XenClient (Citrix’s bare metal client hypervisor) on a Mac. Templeton’s response - “Ask me again by the end of the year.” Templeton hinting that Apple is ready to support a Mac client hypervisor with the ability to run Mac and Windows OSs side-by-side is very big news. If Citrix gets the client hypervisor on Mac (and VMware doesn’t), it could tip the scales for desktop virtualization dominance in Citrix’s direction. Citrix hinted at much of its Mac strategy at their Synergy conference, and I’m looking forward to hearing what VMware has to say at VMworld.

Matt Lavallee (Director of Technology, MLS Property Information Network)

Matt Lavallee followed Templeton and provided a great amount of detail on his multi-site Hyper-V implementation. Lavallee is using iSCSI over 10GbE using software initiators using 802.3ad NIC teaming, and orchestrating management activities using System Center Operations Manager.

That’s it for Part I. In the second part of my server virtualization recap, I discuss “The Thrilla in California,” Mark Russinovich’s thoughts on new development trends, and hypervisor competitive differences.

Catalyst Server Virtualization Wrap-up Part II

In the second part of my Catalyst server virtualization coverage wrap-up, I reflect on three sessions:

• Mark Russinovich – New Trends in Application and OS Development for Virtual Environments
• Simon Crosby and Scott Drummond – The Thrilla in California
• Richard Jones and Chris Wolf - Hypervisor Competitive Differences

Mark Russinovich (Technical Fellow, Microsoft)

Mark Russinovich spoke about the importance for developers to understand the nuances of virtualization and to write code capable of taking advantage of virtualization’s dynamic resource management capabilities. He specifically made the following recommendations:

• Applications must be able to adapt
  • Avoid relying on hypervisor services that expose underlying physical hardware or topology
  • Use operating system notification services to monitor changes to I/O, memory and CPUs
  • Separate state to enable composition scenarios
• Operating systems must adapt
  • Leverage hypervisor services to enable dynamic resource assignment
  • Enable virtual disk as both physical and virtual image format
• Management tools must adapt
  • Include system load balancing, migration, and dynamic resource allocation policies

I’ve been pressing clients for months to use RFPs to press software vendors on how their applications support dynamic resource add (without a restart, of course). I asked Mark about Microsoft offering a best practices guide for developers on MSDN, and he said this was something they would look into. MSDN already has good information on Large Page Support, a feature that when leveraged by the application, can significantly improve memory performance on platforms that support Intel EPT or AMD RVI.

The Thrilla in California (Simon Crosby – Citrix, and Scott Drummonds – VMware)

Many at the conference called this debate their personal conference highlight, and you can view it online if you missed it. There were plenty of sound bites in the debate, including this one by Scott Drummonds -

“You guys aren’t even benchmarking your own product. Why are you going to benchmark ours?”

When talking about Project Virtual Reality Check’s benchmark results and VMware’s benchmark requirements, Simon noted -

“That methodology that Scott has espoused basically prohibits the notion of the legitimacy of that result.”

I have watched the replay three times and still have a hard time declaring a winner. I liked the factual data presented by Scott and his advice on leveraging industry standard benchmarks to assess workloads for applications such as Exchange, Oracle, Apache, and SQL Server. However, a couple of attendees commented that they were surprised that Scott would compare VMware to Oracle when defending VMware’s EULA restrictions on public benchmarking. Many attendees voiced displeasure over Oracle licensing and support for virtual environments while at the conference. Simon’s point that user experience is what matters most is also true, but you need quantitative methods to measure something that can be very subjective. That’s why I have been a fan of Project VRC. I’d like to see VMware address their issues with Project VRC so that we’ll have at least one independent standard we can use (albeit for virtual desktop and terminal services workloads) before the SPEC Virtualization benchmark is released. VMware has done a very good job showing performance results of enterprise apps (e.g., Exchange and Oracle) on VMware infrastructure, while providing a community to share best practices. I’d like to see something similar from the folks at Citrix.

There was considerable coverage of the debate in the blogosphere, and you can read additional perspectives in these posts:

• Drummonds vs. Crosby on Virtualization Performance
• The Thrilla in California: Citrix Dukes it out with VMware over Virtualization Performance and VMware's EULA
• VMware/Citrix Hypervisor Performance Ding Dong
• Citrix and VMware Debate Hypervisor Performance at Catalyst - VIDEO
• FIGHT: VMware vs Citrix
• VMware vs Citrix @ Burton Group Catalyst event
• Hypervisor Performance Debate - VMware versus Citrix
• Debate between Simon Crosby (Citrix) and Scott Drummonds (VMware)
• Drummonds vs Crosby

Hypervisor Competitive Differences (Richard Jones and Chris Wolf)

Richard and I wrapped up the day with a talk about hypervisor competitive differences. We received some great feedback following the debate and are incorporating it into our upcoming competitive differences presentation at VMworld North America. Attendees were most interested in hearing about competitive differences between VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft server virtualization platforms. VMware and Citrix offer solutions that meet 100% of our requirements, and at VMworld we’ll be going deep on the small differences that exist between features that may appear similar on the surface. If you’ll be at VMworld in a few weeks, I recommend signing up for session TA2400, which is Tuesday September 1st at 4:00.

Thanks to all of the attendees for sharing your insights throughout the week. The next Catalyst conference will be in Prague in April 2010. Strong client participation helped make Catalyst North America a huge success. If you have suggestions for Prague or future conferences, please let us know.

Cloud Computing Morning Sessions at Catalyst

In cased you missed it, Cloud Computing was a big topic at Catalyst this year. This morning sessions were truly outstanding. Chris Howard kicked it off by discussing the business motivations to externalize IT. One of his main points was that IT tends to make (or build) the things that are "core" to the business and externalize (or expense) those things that are non-essential. This creates a "post-modern" IT model where the strategic is kept internally and uses the cloud to augment less strategic IT services...enabling IT organizations to focus on driving their core business.

After Chris, I presented Burton Group's cloud view -- discussing the value of cloud computing, defining a cloud strategy, cloud definition and tiered architecture model to set the stage for additional presentations today. Burton Group defines cloud as: 

The set of disciplines, technologies, and business models used to render IT capabilities as an on-demand, elastic, scalable service.

The tiered architecture model:

(Actually we declared these several months ago)

Next, Andrew Kaczorec from Eli Lilly gave an excellent presentation about how they leverage EC2 to ramp up compute power for scientific applications, but also how the cloud is a consideration for more enterprise IT applications in the future.

Bill Peer, from International Hotel's Group, spoke on developing your "inner cloud". If you haven't heard Bill speak, you must go! He's so entertaining, you almost forget your learning something. Anyway -- Bill spoke about how IHG is developing an internal cloud using VMware before moving to the external cloud. They have too many concerns over data security, availability, vendor lock-in, and poor SLAs to take the plunge just yet. But -- his point was -- developing an internal cloud is an excellent way to get ready for the internal cloud because it helps the entire organization prepare for service consumption.

Peter Coffee from Salesforce.com did an excellent job discussing PaaS, where Salesforce is headed with Force.com, and the added benefits for using PaaS over IaaS. Peter and I had a good discussion about SLAs (or lack thereof) with Salesforce. His point was that no SLA is going to reimburse the consumer for business lost...only for service outage at best. Also, that SF.com post their uptime record. My point was there are customers who simply won't do business with cloud vendors (or any service vendor) without and SLA. The SLA is not there to protect from business loss, but to serve as a mutual understanding of service quality expectation. That way, when a dispute arises, a third party (legal) can judge if there is a breach of contract. It also gives customers a level of surety that vendors will meet certain service level quality.

Finally, Raghu Raghuram -- GM for VMware's Server Business -- spoke on the Data Center of the Future. Raghu spoke about how the vSphere platform is the new cloud OS and they are enabling vendors and customers alike to build their own clouds.

All in all, it was a great morning. Tons of great customer questions.

BTW -- Burton Group is recording all of these sessions. They will be available very soon.

[posted by: Drue Reeves]

See the Thrilla in California on Catalyst Live

Feedback on the Thrilla in California indicated that the debate lived up to expectations. If you haven’t heard the news, at Catalyst North America today VMware’s Scott Drummonds and Citrix’s Simon Crosby engaged in a debate regarding how to effectively measure hypervisor performance. I thought that both speakers raised very good points and would like you to be the judge. Watch the video here and please vote for who you think won the debate by leaving a comment to this post. If you missed the early buzz, here’s a description of the debate.

The Thrilla in California: Debating Hypervisor Performance

For the past 2 years, Citrix and VMware have used the blogosphere as their virtual sparring ground for a debate on hypervisor performance. While each vendor has contributed a wealth of information on virtual infrastructure performance to the online community, both continue to passionately disagree on how their respective hypervisors stand up to enterprise-class production workloads, as well as how best to measure performance in virtual environments. In this debate, VMware and Citrix have offered their most knowledgeable and passionate voices in the realm of virtual infrastructure performance: Simon Crosby (CTO - Citrix) and Scott Drummonds (Manager, Technical Marketing VMware). In this fast-paced debate, come to hear both vendors take off the gloves and get to the bottom of where their hypervisors stand with regards to performance. Attendees will have an opportunity to provide questions for the debaters, and the following topics will also be addressed:

• Technical nuances that offer the greatest performance benefit/detriment to VMware and Xen hypervisors
• Effective methods for measuring hypervisor performance
• Barriers to performance scalability

Internal Cloud Hardware Infrastructure as a Service Reference Architecture Overview Webcast

Today at Catalyst North America I will highlight Burton Group’s work on a series of reference architecture templates for internal cloud hardware infrastructure as a service (HIaaS). I created a 30 minute webcast that provides additional background information on the reference architecture model which can be viewed below. We will be producing a series of subtemplates to accompany this top level template that will provide added detail. All feedback and ideas are welcome, so please feel free to send along feedback as a comment to this post or via email.Also if you are interested in joining the growing list of clients and vendors who are reviewing or contributing to the architecture models, please let me know.

Click here to view the webcast in a separate window.

Shhhh! Burton Group Website Easter Egg

Just in time for Easter, Burton Group has put an Easter Egg on the Catalyst Doorway page, offering a big discount for our Catalyst Conference coming this July.

If you've never been to Catalyst, then I highly recommend you go. As always, Catalyst is an intense, 3-day event that covers some of the most important topics in the IT industry. If you've been to Catalyst, then you know what I'm talking about....it's like drinking from an information fire hose. This year, I'm especially excited about our cloud and virtualization coverage. For cloud, we are launching our coverage in earnest (actually the launch is April 20th, another secret) by defining the cloud, discussing usage models, how to build an internal cloud, security, cloud economics, and pitfalls. For virtualization -- client, server and storage virtualization --  we'll delve into top-of-mind concerns such as storage connectivity, virtualization security, network connectivity and virtual switches, application development, new HW technologies, management....basically the whole enchilada.

As always, the DCS team (Richard Jones, Chris Wolf, Nik Simpson, Gene Ruth, and myself) will there to give our perspective and analysis on these topics, but we also have some killer speakers in Paul Maritz (CEO VMware), Mark Templeton (CEO Citrix), Bret Hartman (CTO, RSA), Simon Crosby (CTO, Citrix) there to discuss some of these important issues. 

OH -- and it's in San Diego again this year (my favorite Catalyst venue).

OK, to crack open the Easter Egg (and get the discount), here's what you do:

1. Go to the Catalyst home page (http://catalyst.burtongroup.com/).

Either: click and then drag your mouse off the logo and release the button. OR: roll over the San Diego button but do not click, wait about 20 sec.

2. A message will pop-up stating

"Congratulations! You’ve found an exclusive discount code for Catalyst 2009. Use promo code: Easter Egg and get General Sessions for only $999! Register today – this discount is limited to 50 users and could disappear at any time!"

3. Register.

That's it. Good luck and hope to see you at Catalyst.

[posted by: Drue Reeves]