From the VMware Field: Mike D's Virtualization Blog

VMware Earnings and the Value for Partners

Today (April 22) VMware announced 1st quarter earnings. The company did quite well and surpassed analyst expectations. Overall the company did $438 million in revenue for the quarter. What really gets me excited about this is the opportunity for the 14,000 partners out there selling VMware solutions. Every day I go to customers with partners or go to partner sites to do training. Whenever I'm with a partner they always want to know what's in it for them. Why should they be selling VMware when they're also Citrix and Microsoft partners and both of those companies have virtualization solutions. Here's my take....

Part II: Quick Migration vs VMware VMotion and Live Migration - The Financial Impact

In Part I of this series we looked at why TCP disconnects happen during a Microsoft Quick Migration and why they stay alive using live migration or VMware VMotion. In Part II we’ll look at he financial impact this has on two different customers I recently met with in the Northeast US. Hopefully this will show why Quick Migration really isn’t good enough for really any application you have in the environment. Hopefully it will also show why live migration or VMware VMotion is a key building block to a truly dynamic datacenter.

Part I: Quick Migration vs VMware VMotion and Live Migration - Why Things Fail with Quick Migration

There has been a lot of talk recently about why Quick Migration with Microsoft’s Hyper-V drops connections when it simply uses Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) to do the migration and MSCS by itself does not drop network connections. In a nutshell it really has to do with where the network stack is running and what happens during a cluster failover versus a Quick Migration. This two part blog will first cover why Quick Migration drops connections and then what the impact is from actual customers in the field. As always, your constructive comments are appreciated.

Virtualization is Easy Enough for an 11 Year Old

This is a story about perhaps our youngest customer to date at VMware. The story really doesn't talk much about Jon's experience with VMware until the very end but it does show how VMware (and virtualization in general) can be used in pretty much any environment by just about anyone with any kind of budget.

I'd like to wish Jon good luck in his future endeavors in the IT world!

As for Jon, he says he loves testing virtualization software like VMware and wants to obtain “A+ certification” by passing the computer-technician exam by that name developed by trade group CompTIA. “Hopefully, I can do that this summer,” he says.

[From NetworkWorld ]

A View from Customers

There are still statements coming out from emerging virtualization players that still need some correcting. Given the feedback I've gotten from private emails I believe there's more value in me leaving those corrections to others and instead providing some insight into what I hear from customers on a daily basis. Every day of the week I travel around talking with all sorts of companies. Some of them are long time VMware customers. Some of them are just getting started in virtualization. Some are very large (Fortune 10) and some are very small (a local church with 3 physical servers and 10 PCs). It's always interesting to hear the questions they ask, how they react to the technologies and solutions we pitch, and the very interesting ideas they come up with for new uses for virtualization.

For the benefits of the customers I will keep them anonymous. Please don't take that to mean that I'm making this stuff up. I will include the size of the company and what industry they are in and where possible I'll include where they are basically located. This will help to keep the conversations real and hopefully help others out there gain knowledge from what's happening with companies like themselves.

I hope this will be a beneficial transition of the blog. Please comment freely and ask questions. I will try to get the customers themselves to blog along with me but I'm not 100% sure if that will be possible due to most company's policies against public communication.

If you have a story that you would like to share or questions you would like answered please contact me here. I'll be happy to let you post your own entry.

PowerShell and VMware - The VI Toolkit

VMware has just released the first beta of the VI Toolkit for VMware. This is a really great set of CLI interfaces for those wanting to tak advantage of Microsoft's new and powerful Powershell interface. For those not familiar with Powershell you should go and try it out. Creating scripts for everyday tasks in Windows has never been easier. Now with the VI Toolkit creating scripts for everyday tasks inside of VMware has never been easier for the Windows admin. Here's an example:

VI Toolkit beta 1 is free to download and try out. Just go here.

Virtual PC Guy's WebLog : Hyper-V Terminology

Virtual PC Guy is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers. This time he has done an excellent job at defining some basic terminology for the Microsoft Hyper-V release. A lot of the terminology or at least the definitions hold over to VMware and other virtualization solutions so it's worth a read. Just go here: Virtual PC Guy's WebLog : Hyper-V Terminology.

Why Does Xen have a 64-bit Hypervisor

Scott Lowe asked a great question on his blog today - Why does XenSource tout having a 64-bit hypervisor? I mean really, what does it give them that VMware doesn't already have? More host memory support? No. VMware supports 256 GB and XenSource supports 128 GB. More guest memory? No. VMware supports 64 GB and XenSource supports 32 GB. More guest support? No. VMware supports more 64-bit guests than XenSource does. VMware was also the first virtualization vendor with 64-bit guest support. So what are the benefits of the 64-bit hypervisor that XenSource is touting.

I think Keith Adams from VMware told it best on why VMware doesn't need to go 64-bit in the hypervisor.

I’ve worked in VMware’s virtual machine monitor group since 2000. I’m part of the three-person team who initially brought up 64-bit VMs on AMD hardware before SVM in 2004, and I am the one person team who brought up 64-bit VMs on Intel hardware with VT in 2005.

Our “hypervisor,” the vmkernel, is indeed 32-bit in ESX 3i. However, we make a distinction between our “monitor” and our “hypervisor” that is unfamiliar to Xen folks. Our “monitor” runs at CPL-0 on the bare metal, but is instanced; there is one monitor per VM. The monitor is what actually emulates the CPU, constructs shadow pagetables, programs VT/SVM hardware if appropriate, etc.

Our monitor has been 64-bit (on capable hardware) since 2004. Since the CPU-facing part of the software is 64-bit, it greatly reduces the pressure on us to move the vmkernel to 64-bit. Our customers understand this. When Xen Source sales people try to sell Xen by saying “Xen == 64-bit == new hotness, VMware == 32-bit == old n’ busted”, our customers are right to make fun of them on their blogs, IMHO.

[From A Few Thoughts on Xen - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers]

So there you have it. Finally someone called XenSource out on more of their rhetoric. I'm sure I'll get a bunch of the XenSource fans flaming me on my blog too just like they did to Scott. That's fine. Just make sure you come with facts this time and not more rants.

DISCLAIMER: These thoughts are my own and are not reflective of my company or anyone or anything else on planet earth.

VMworld Europe 2008

VMworld Europe 2008 is right around the corner - next week! Exciting times. I'll be over there presenting session RW05 - Software Licensing Exposed on Wednesday and Thursday as well as session RW02 - Scaling Your Virtual Infrastructure on Wednesday. Schedule and descriptions available here. I hope to see you all over there!

Is VMware Killing the Storage Industry?

That seems to be the message still coming out of Virtual Iron. I thought Ed Walsh's conversation about this had died off a long time ago. Apparently I was mistaken since it came up at a customer again yesterday. Ed is the CEO and President of Virtual Iron. He gave a talk at Storage Decisions late last year that appeared on YouTube. He also recorded a rather humorous "cocktail hour" talk and posted it to YouTube as well. Both say basically the same thing - VMware is killing the storage industry. I really have a hard time believing that.