The Virtualization War — Who Will “Win”?

As we continue to push our virtualization practice forward in this constantly evolving ecosystem, more and more people are asking, and responding to, one very large question…will Microsoft’s Hyper-V “win” against VMware’s ESX platform? So, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to throw my hat (aka, my opinion), into the ring yet again.

For the record, I’ve stated my opinion publicly in our blog and other forums. I’ll continue to do so as many others do, but the more I read, the more I’m intrigued by one word that continues to pop up in many other articles. It’s the word “win”. In the world of virtualization, or technology for that matter, what does “win” really mean?

Here’s my definition of “win”, in the context of virtualization. Winning in virtualization requires the following criteria to be met.

1. Your solution is proven, trusted and runs in both pre-production and production environments.
2. You’ve taken a larger percentage of the virtualization market than your competitor “thinks” you should have. How do you define this? Grab any market segment and add “1%” to your current market share. Catch my drift?
3. Your name is either Microsoft or VMware.
4. Your customers, and partners, support your product, promote it, and reference it as if it was their best friend.
   

Basically what I’m saying is that, quantifying a “win” in virtualization is not holding 51% of the global market share. Ignore points 1, 2 and 3 and skip directly to point number 4. A true win is having the trust and support of your customers and partners.

Will Microsoft take more market share away from VMware? Yes!! Does that mean that VMware has a worse product than Microsoft? No!! Defining whether a product is “good” or “bad” depends on the requirements of the environment in which the technology will be deployed.

But, in the end, who will ultimately win? Personally, I really hope it’s the customer who wins, regardless of the solution they choose. If they’re not the true winner, virtualization will not be the topic of discussion. However, if you want me to get really aggressive and give a better prediction, see my prior posts or read the following.

The Winners:
Large Enterprise Winner = VMware
SMB Winner = Microsoft

Disagree? Let me know.

Top 5 blog posts of 2009

On the last day of 2009, we thought it would be a good time to look back at what we've done on the blog this year. We took a look at our stats and pulled out the top 5 most popular posts from the whole year. Drumroll please....

1. Can’t boot from your “embedded ESXi”? Here’s why...
2. Introducing Ready-IT for BioPharma!
3. Breaking news from VMware: vSphere 4 unveiled 
4. vSphere 4 -- Update 1: Thank you, VMware!
5. Looking ahead at IT trends for 2010

It's always interesting to look back at the big stories, so we wanted to share with you. And we're looking forward to seeing what 2010 will bring. Happy New Year!

Don't count out Microsoft and Hyper-V in 2010

This year has seen many new developments in virtualization, one of which involved Microsoft’s release of Server 2008 R2, along with many improvements to Hyper-V. Many have shunned Microsoft for attempting to compete in the marketplace, but why? 

VMware and Microsoft constantly compare their products from a feature set and cost perspective. VMware understands Microsoft’s capabilities, and Microsoft understands that VMware owns the current premiere product in the virtualization marketplace. A comparison of the two products is not an apples to apples comparison, but rather an exercise in understanding what is and is not important for your organization. So, here’s where the rubber hits the road…

The largest untapped area for virtualization, in my experience, is the SMB space. Small to medium businesses are now venturing heavily into virtualization, just as the larger enterprises have for years. These companies, however, have a constraint that is not as much of a barrier for the larger enterprises—cost. I’ve heard the arguments from Microsoft and VMware and understand their vantage points, but when all is said and done, Hyper-V is quickly becoming the most cost-effective solution for the SMB companies, as TechTarget's Colin Steele highlighted in his podcast on December 18th.

For the record, I also agree with Alex Barrett who hit the nail on the head in her 2010 prediction article. XenServer is NOT the future for Citrix. Just look at their XenDesktop focus and close relationship with Microsoft for further proof. Hyper-V is poised to take the market by storm in 2010. But if I’m wrong, I’ll eat my own words this time next year. That’s a promise.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know. Don’t get me wrong, I love VMware, but I’m also in the process of certifying myself on Hyper-V because of the growth potential. Keep an eye on the future trends, ladies and gentlemen!

Avoiding accidental server reboot with vSphere 4

During my last customer install of vSphere ESX 4.0 Update 1, I discovered an “undocumented” issue that causes some concern. It appears that with the introduction of vSphere (this was not the case with ESX 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5), the host can be rebooted using the Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard combination at the console login screen—with or without the system being logged in. This can cause some serious issues in environments that have the ESX hosts controlled by a central KVM solution that is also controlling Windows servers. The good news is that this “feature” can be disabled, and even completed without a host reboot. 

In order to change this so that Ctrl-Alt-Del will be ignored by the host:

1. Log in to the Host console
2. Edit the following file using VI or nano — \etc\inittab (ex. nano \etc\inittab)
3. Locate the line — ca::ctrlaltdel :/sbin/shutdown –t3 –r now
4. Comment out this line by placing a # character in the beginning of the text (ex. # ca::ctrlaltdel :/sbin/shutdown –t3 –r now)
5. Save the file
6. To make the change effective without rebooting the host, run the command init q (this will reparse/reload the file)

VMware is now aware of this problem, and I'm sure will be working to correct it. In the meantime, have you encountered this issue?

Tip for increasing Internet speed on Windows 7

As we've mentioned before on the blog, our team has been working with Windows 7 since the pre-beta days 18+ months ago, and have experienced great success with it. Over the past year, we have built a Windows 7 migration lab to assist our corporate customers in moving their users to Windows 7.

In our experience, Windows 7 definitely has improved overall responsiveness as compared to Vista (this is on the same hardware). However, one issue that we have encountered was that accessing our Sharepoint site seemed to experience a delay––enough to notice a difference. Once we investigated, we found that it wasn’t limited to Sharepoint, but overall when accessing the Internet including our Outlook Web Access, Sharepoint sites (both accessing them and downloading/updating information) and other Internet sites.

After some analysis, we discovered that the “Automatically Detect Settings” option within Internet Explorer attempts to download an automatic proxy configuration script (Wpad.dat file) from the local area network. By disabling this option, the machine bypasses the LAN checking and the speed of accessing the Internet is greatly increased.

To turn off the automatic configuration of IE settings for LAN connections:

• Start Internet Explorer 8
• Select Tools – Internet Options
• Select the Connections Tab, click on the LAN Settings button
• Unselect (clear the checkbox) for Automatically Detect Settings
• Click the OK button
• Close Internet Explorer 8
• Open Internet Explorer 8 and enjoy the increased speed

Let us know if this works for you, or if you're seeing any other issues with Windows 7 that we might have solutions for!

Did someone say VMware’s View 4 was released?

Maybe it was just me, but one of the releases I anticipated most this year was VMware’s View 4 desktop virtualization solution. However, there wasn’t as much publicity around it as I anticipated. After all of the hype, I actually had to stumble upon the VMware Web site on the day of the release in order to know it was out … that’s the only way I knew about it.

Regardless, today I received notification that our partner licenses for the full version are available. Tomorrow, I’ll be in the lab setting up View 4 so we can see first hand exactly what PCoIP is going to do for our customers.

When it comes to desktop virtualization, one of the largest concerns we’ve heard thus far is the way remote users (remote office/branch office) were impacted with prior versions. Bandwidth was not plentiful, yielding poor performance. The best way around this concern was to deploy a local View server. For many SMBs this was, and is not, a cost effective solution. Now, with View 4 this might be a different story to tell.

To quote a good friend, I’m nerdy excited about this one!

vSphere 4 -- Update 1: Thank you, VMware!

With any new release comes new constraints and challenges. This is not a dig on anyone, but simply the way many large scale software development projects go. VMware’s release of vSphere 4 brought along some much needed updates to handle a few of the larger constraints, while still adding improvements. Here are my personal favorites:

• Support for View 4, which also means View 4 has been released (separate blog post on this to come).
• Enhanced clustering support for Windows -- A BIG thank you for this one! No longer do you need to build separate resource pools for those MSCS VM’s. Just make sure you have all of the details, which are available here.
• Windows 7 and 2008 R2 support -- Included with this is the ability to run the VI Client from within a Windows 7 machine without the ridiculous batch workaround that was required previously. But, support for Server 2008 R2 has been critical as many people look to upgrade and stay just behind that Microsoft curve (known as the bleeding edge).

In addition, there is a large list of bugs/issues that have been corrected, some of which have caused us some pain during upgrades and deployments. Again, check out the details for all of these changes here.

Have you upgraded to Update 1? Let me know what your experience has been like. I’m off to the lab to upgrade one of our test hosts now …