Carl Greiner
VMware maintains focus on managing the virtual experience
At last week's VMware analyst event, the company discussed its current and future plans to simplify the management of a virtual infrastructure. Acknowledging the current IT directions toward mobility, SOA, 'cloud' and shared component based infrastructures, VMware is focused on delivering extended capability to effectively manage and enable the supporting infrastructure. In addition, a renewed focus will be on integrating with data center infrastructure and business service management software vendors to enable a complete and dynamic computing environment across all domains. Seemingly undeterred by Microsoft's venture into the data center virtualization and management space, VMware continues to build out its virtual infrastructure offerings. Targeting functionality addressing infrastructure, application, and management, VMware continues to set the bar as to overall functionality robustness. Stressing the creation of a dynamic, shared, always-on x86/x64 infrastructure environment, the company discussed current clustered pools of computing supporting over 2,000 virtual machines including cluster-wide policy management concepts that remain with each virtualized application. By enabling policies to travel with each application, VMware can more completely address the adaptability requirements of today's dynamic business requirements. Included within the stack are server, network and storage requirements as they relate to each virtualized application and the established service level. By leveraging technology partners as well as extended functionality, better virtual-to-physical ties will evolve, completing this dynamic infrastructure evolution in conjunction with meeting high availability and disaster recovery needs. VMware infrastructure management investments - a key area of focus for customers attempting to fully leverage their virtualization investments - will include provisioning, host profiles, change, orchestration, operations, planning, capacity/performance management and charge-back capabilities, and tie into most existing enterprise systems management tool sets. Stressing the need to separate application from the supporting infrastructure to address adaptability and dynamic capabilities including high availability, security and site recovery requirements, the evolution of VirtualCenter management capabilities will integrate these capabilities to become a full enabler of future dynamic (or elastic) x86/x64 data center requirements. Another interesting point was that VMware is now truly ready for mission-critical application requirements including input/output (I/O) intensive applications. Current VMware hypervisor overhead is in the 10-20% range and can support over 100,000 IOPS on a single VM, removing earlier overhead concerns. VMware has a rich hypervisor and virtualization management roadmap and, from what we saw at the analyst conference, is positioning the company and its technology partners to completely address the dynamic virtualization requirements of data centers. While Microsoft will attempt to challenge VMware, we believe that at the data center level VMware will maintain, at least in the foreseeable future, its dominance with timely and robust functionality/products required for a more managed, adaptable and scalable virtual infrastructure. VMware's strategy for several years has been to embed itself into as many large enterprise and, more recently, SMB customers as possible - so as to blunt any potential competitive impact once Microsoft begins to accelerate its virtualization efforts. From all the evidence seen so far, we believe that a managed VMware environment will cost roughly the same as similar products from Microsoft (including the hypervisor), making functionality, performance, high availability and ease of use the primary differentiators - and the areas to watch as the virtualization trend continues.
