By The Bell

Is VMware really committed to end-user computing?

 

"...as far as the industry is concerned, EUC is VMware's redheaded stepchild."

                                    - 03/11/13 Tweet by Tal Klein (@VirtualTal)

 

While I have much respect for Bromium’s Tal Klein, we don’t always see eye to eye. His recent Tweet prompted me to write a bit about VMware’s commitment to EUC.

Filling the Field Gap

VMware capitalized on a trend it was seeing of customers virtualizing their desktops on ESX, and coined the term VDI in 2006. Since then, the company has both grown and evolved the business to become much more comprehensive. Today, VMware End-User Computing (EUC) consists of a product family encompassing physical, virtual Windows, mobile and Web-based desktops.  

The analyst and media consensus is that VMware and Citrix combine to dominate the VDI market, though reports differ about which company has the highest market share. And while I disagree with Tal’s contention that VMware EUC is widely perceived as a red-headed stepchild, I do agree that Citrix has been more successful in capturing EUC mindshare. 

Unlike Citrix whose DNA is all desktop, VMware made its name in the data center and now also leads the industry in private cloud. This lack of EUC focus has been evident in the field where VMware reps typically fail to match the desktop acumen and evangelism of their Citrix counterparts.

VMware is now, with the biggest investment in its history, making an enormous effort to resolve this deficiency. The company is hiring hundreds of EUC focused sales reps and SEs (many of them from Citrix) across the globe. And while its existing reps will continue to also push EUC, this new dedicated
sales force is bound to give a lot more visibility to View Horizon and the other EUC products.

Commitment

At the recent VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) in Las Vegas, VMware prominently emphasized EUC as one of the company’s three primary initiatives with desktop-oriented keynotes, boot camps, solutions partner sessions, exhibits, eco-system partner presentations and executive summits.

 

VMware also has been investing in EUC technologies both internally and externally with recent acquisitions such as Wanova. At PEX, it announced an expanded EUC competency program that rewards VMware partners who devote the resources required to making their EUC practices successful.

The company is vigorously encouraging VDI partnerships with storage manufacturers by validating joint solutions as part of its recently announced Horizon View vFast Track Reference Architectures. And VMware continues to increase EUC collaboration with other leading industry manufactures such as Cisco with their joint Office-in-a-Box initiative.   

Organizational Challenges

The lack of a singular EUC focus does create some challenges for VMware that its competitor avoids. For example, VMware dominates the data center with an 85% virtualization market share. It should be leveraging this advantage by messaging an ability to utilize the same platform and management
tools from the server down to the desktop. 

VMware vCenter Operations Suite (vCOPs) is the fastest-growing VMware product of all time next to ESX. It would make sense for VMware to provide, at a minimum, a scaled down version of vCOPs for View with every copy of View Horizon. The company could then offer upgrades at an additional cost. 

But, the vCOPs business unit has its own P&L to manage. From what I’ve been able to gather, that unit has been unwilling to take a hit to revenues by providing a free version of its product as part of Horizon View.  

These types of organizational issues aside, VMware clearly is dedicated to the desktop market. Plummeting costs of VDI infrastructure along with new capabilities from products such as VMware Mirage ensure some exciting times ahead in EUC.  

See Also:

• The History of VDI. 06/27/2011. VittorioViarengo. Virtualization Journey 
• Cisco Office in a Box Solution. Cisco White Paper.
• Horizon Branch Office Desktop.  VMware brochure.

 

Cloud Wars: VMware vCloud Suite vs. Cisco IAC + Cloupia

VMware vCloud Suite and Cisco IAC + Cloupia continue to emerge as the two dominant commercial cloud stacks. Organizations adhering to Gartner’s advice not to mix and match when it comes to building a private cloud increasingly will face a choice between VMware’s “top-down” or Cisco’s “bottom’s-up” approach.

Best Friends

A Cisco SE told me not long ago, “VMware may be our best friend – but they’re not our only friend.” VMware’s July 2012 acquisition of the Software-Defined Networking company, Nicira, resulted in widespread media speculation that the two organizations would now find themselves at odds.  

But long before the Nicira purchase, Cisco and VMware were already engaged in a networking skirmish. When introduced in 2009, the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch was widely promoted to clients by VMware sales reps. Things quietly changed and for some time now, VMware reps have emphasized their own vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) instead of the Cisco product.

VMware hasn’t said much about how Nicira will impact VDS or whether it will be incorporated into its vCloud Suite. Meanwhile, Cisco has evolved the Nexus 1000V to become the foundation for its cloud networking stack. Increasing integration is now anticipated with Cloupia. 

And speaking of Cloupia, its November 2012 acquisition by Cisco set up a subtext of the brewing cloud stack battle since it competes directly against the July 2012 VMware acquisition of DynamicOps.

Coincidentally, both of these products overlap with the preexisting suite capabilities of their new owners which can lead to confusion as to when to utilize them. DynamicOps (now called vCAC), for example, provides both self-service catalog and chargeback – capabilities already available in vCloud Suite. 

Though Cloupia (now called CUIC) is not part of IAC, it is frequently sold in conjunction with the product. It provides overlapping capabilities with IAC such as a services catalog, orchestration and an automation framework.

Not unexpectedly, both acquisitions still require significant integration within the product family which further makes for difficult choices. As an example, vCAC does not yet extract all of the objects managed by vCloud Director. And CIAC has not yet integrated with the pre-built automation of Flexpod provisioning in CUIC.  

Differing Private Cloud Philosophies

Cisco maintains that everything starts with converged infrastructure. Its bottom’s up private cloud approach is designed to provide more flexibility in working with multiple hypervisors, APIs and management tools.

Cisco also says that specifically designed hardware and custom built ASICs provide superior  performance – especially on a larger scale. This is why switches replaced software bridging and why Cisco UCS does so well on the VMware VMmark benchmark scores. 

VMware’s messaging, on the other hand, focuses on the software-defined data center (SDDC). From VMware’s vantage point, abstracting all of the data center components from the underlying physical resources provides more flexibility and versatility. Specific networking, storage and compute equipment are no longer required. This top-down approach also allows for easier application of polices, such as security, across all hardware platforms. 

In reality, the VMware and Cisco cloud stack approaches are probably much closer than the organizations’ marketing would indicate. Both manufacturers are well aware of the requirement to support diverse software and hardware platforms.  

Choosing the Right Stack

An organization committed to VMware that utilizes network and compute products other than Cisco may be more inclined to implement vCloud Suite than IAC in order to maintain a consistent architecture. A committed Cisco networking shop, or one considering Cisco UCS, may find the Cisco story more compelling. 

Most organizations considering private cloud probably utilize both VMware and Cisco products. If they have heavy automation requirements, they may gravitate toward CUIC which has an advantage in terms of providing out-of-the-box automation. This is particularly true when utilized in conjunction with the NetApp FlexPod. Cloupia was one of the earliest FlexPod Validated Management Partners. 

Organizations with primary requirements for an easy-to-implement services catalog that centers around virtualization and virtual containers may be more inclined to go the VMware route. IAC is highly customizable, but can require more time to accommodate individual needs.  

These use cases aside, an organization considering private cloud should not get mired in comparing cloud stack features. A private cloud is pointless, after all, if the business units refuse to utilize it. Building a private cloud based upon products, technologies or architectures tends to lead to low adoption rates.  

Designing an optimal private cloud starts with identifying the business objectives and associated requirements. Only then should organizations seriously investigate the appropriate architecture and equipment, evaluating them within the context of the business objectives they want to achieve.

 

Thanks to Presidio’s Vishal Nangrani who contributed to this article.

See Also:

Martin Casado on Changing Networking. 02/14/2013. Stu Miniman. Wikibon.

VMware’s SDN Dilemma: VXLAN or Nicira? 01/13/2013. Greg Fero. Network Computing.

Cisco’s Nexus 1000V Evolves to a Networking Stack Foundation. 02/02/2012. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

Cisco UCS Sets World-Record Cloud Computing Performance. 09/08/2012. Cisco Brochure.

 

The time I called it really wrong

CRN's Joe Kovar published an article today about Seagate's EVault cloud storage business joining OpenStack. That reminded me of a story...

1998

In 1998, I ran a solutions provider business out of Benicia, California that was just beginning to focus exclusively on Citrix technologies. One day, a white-haired gentleman in his 50's named Phil Gilmour walked into our shop armed with an extensive list of products he wanted to purchase for his new venture.

Phil had recently acquired some backup software out of Canada. He told me about his vision of going around to the local banks and backing them up through the Internet. Phil's previous experience consisted of running his CPA practice for the past 25 years. It didn't seem to me that he knew much about banks - and he certainly knew very little about technology.

So I'm thinking to myself that this is a nice older guy who has the best of intentions, but that he wouldn't stand a chance in our cutthroat industry. I gave him maybe four months until he gave up either from lack of sales or from overwhelming technical frustrations or both.

"Look," I said. "There's no reason to buy so much equipment up front. Why don't you start small and then you can always acquire more products as the business warrants."

Phil followed my advice. He scaled back his purchase and went on his way.

Today

The company Phil started was called, of course, EVault. Within six years it had become one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America. Phil sold the business in 2007 to Seagate for $185M.

As Joe's article reveals, Phil's venture is still going strong though he has long since moved onto other things. And while I've frequently overestimated the potential of various firms during my many years as a student of business, EVault is certainly my biggest underestimate ever.

 

My 5 cloud and virtualization predictions for 2013

I’m jumping on the bandwagon and, for the first time, posting my virtualization/cloud predictions for the new year:

Increasing gravitation toward two primary Cloud stacks:
While Microsoft, OpenStack and CloudStack will all continue to gain customers, it will be VMware's vCloud Suite vs. Cisco's IAC + Cloupia (now CUIC: Cisco Unified Infrastructure Controller) as the two dominant platform choices for private clouds. VMware will leverage its virtualization dominance to remain the leader in private cloud, though lack of clear messaging around the delineation between use cases for vCD and vCAC (formerly DynamicOps) combined with Cisco’s strong converged infrastructure story will help Cisco’s solution grow more quickly.

VDI deployments will escalate: The continued increasing density advantages resulting from Moore’s Law combined with storage innovations such as converged infrastructure, flash and software-based accelerators will reduce the CapEx cost of virtual desktops to a tipping point where 2013 finally becomes the Year of VDI. A harbinger: Presidio just received word today that we won the Atlanta Public Schools VDI RFP which includes 24,000 zero clients and 8,000 concurrent virtual desktop users.

Virtual desktops will be integrated into private clouds: Today, like their physical counterparts, virtual desktops are typically treated as organizational silos. But expect one or more solutions that enable self-service provisioning and chargeback capabilities for virtual desktops.

The Multi-Hypervisor fad will lose luster: The use of multiple hypervisors itself will continue to slowly increase, but the hype as a cost-savings strategy will die off. Organizations will increasingly realize that other than in certain technology silos, the management and disaster recovery cost of maintaining multiple hypervisors far outweighs any perceived licensing cost advantages.

ROI/TCO cloud calculators will emerge: Financial tools and standardized metrics will emerge to help organizations make economic comparisons between virtualized environments and private clouds, and between private clouds and various public cloud alternatives.

My foreword to Desktops-as-a-Serivce: Building the Model

Desktops-as-a-Service: Building the Model, by Jason Langone, Kanuj Behl, Phil Ditzel and Dwayne Lessner, is now available for order on both iTunes and on Amazon. I was honored to be asked to write the Foreword for this excellent book, and with Jason’s permission, am posting it here. 

 

Is next year finally going to be the Year of VDI? Probably not, but it will reflect the continued momentum of desktops-as-a-service (DaaS).

I’ve been involved in the desktop virtualization space since the debut of Citrix WinFrame in 1995. The Novell networking reseller business I ran shifted our emphasis to desktops. We began to encourage our clients to replace their PCs with centrally hosted server-based computing solutions. We developed ROI modeling to show the savings resulting from eliminating PC upgrades along with remote office servers and supporting infrastructures. Although we were huge advocates of the technology and were named the Citrix Partner of the Year, we sold the business without ever seeing SBC go mainstream.

In 2005, I co-founded another consulting business focused on deploying VMware ESX. I thought I was done with desktops, but then VDI showed up and I’ve been back advocating the virtual versions again. “The year of VDI” is now a phrase smirked at annually by industry media. But while I agree with the popular consensus that VDI itself has limited market potential, I am very bullish on the prospects for DaaS.

Why the Time is Right for DaaS

More public cloud providers increasingly offer DaaS though, as the authors point out, they are somewhat handicapped by Microsoft licensing policies around multi-tenancy. The biggest DaaS deployments today are taking place within organizations. 

One of the appeals of DaaS is that it does not require much of a conceptual leap to make the jump from virtual desktops. When you think about it, the virtual desktop already exhibits most attributes of cloud computing: it can be provisioned on-demand from shared resource pools, accessed over the Internet, and scaled up or down instantly as required.  

Enabling self-service provisioning along with metering to facilitate chargeback transforms virtual desktops to DaaS. Multi-tenancy is added to the mix for most public cloud DaaS providers as well as for some internal IT organizations. 

DaaS, whether on-premise or publicly hosted, has many compelling benefits. For one thing, it addresses the reality that a “desktop” is no longer just a Windows-based machine. Desktops now include Web-based applications along with storage services such as DropBox for sharing corporate information. Computing devices run the gamut from smart phones to zero-clients to iPads, and are often owned by users as part of BYOD.

DaaS provides the framework for IT to ensure corporate standards are maintained around security, compliance and recoverability. 

Whether on-premise or via cloud providers, DaaS utilizes a chargeback system whereby users pay for the desktop resources they consume. The public cloud model enables organizations to eliminate capital expenditures entirely, while internal DaaS can potentially slash on-going operating expenses.

DaaS chargeback drives efficiency in two ways. Access to accurate desktop cost information helps business units more effectively plan and budget. And receiving a monthly bill makes users much more cognizant about optimizing resource consumption.

Both public and on-premise versions of DaaS benefit from the unrelenting consolidation efficiencies of Moore’s Law which states that the number of transistors per chip doubles roughly every two years. On the edge, this added power doesn’t buy us much – PCs already have more capabilities than most users will ever utilize. In the data center, though, we still deal with very expensive CPU, memory, storage and space/power.  

Doubling the number of VMs per server host every couple of years slashes the costs of moving virtual desktops to the data center. In fact, it’s really better than this. Continued industry innovations augment Moore’s Law with accelerating increases in virtual machine density, making DaaS still more economically attractive.

Building-the-Model

As anyone involved in the SBC or VDI space knows, implementing a successful enterprise environment is not easy. The challenge is that, unlike the data center, we now have thousands of users each with their own experiences, expectations and – perceptions. 

When it comes to users, perception is reality. One of our early SBC implementations was for a small school district in San Jose. It failed because during the pilot, a teacher’s keyboard happened to break. Although we gave her a replacement and showed her that her old keyboard had just suffered a natural death, she went around to all the other teachers telling them, “Don’t let them put Citrix in your classroom. It breaks keyboards”.

When rolling out DaaS, you only have one chance to get it right. Just one disgruntled user can potentially kill a project. When a bunch of users become upset because of poor performance, dropped sessions, or an inability to access their old information – they quickly generate a negative
vibe that is extremely difficult to overcome. While I don’t have the hard data to support it, I suspect that the majority of VDI projects (which are simpler than DaaS) probably slow or stall completely at the pilot phase.

A successful DaaS environment mandates that every element be well designed and tested from the context of its role in supporting the overall architecture. Langone, Behl, Ditzel and Lessner bring a wealth of invaluable field experience that enables both exceptional planning and implementation.

The authors cover basics such as infrastructure, connection brokers, multi-tenancy, user profiles, andapplications. They also dive into chargeback, identity management, and appliances. An entire section on the cost model facilitates the all-important financial understanding and justification of a DaaS initiative. Another section on the operational model shows how to monitor, manage and administrate the DaaS environment.

In Closing

This book describes the architectural, financial and organizational elements necessary for a successful DaaS initiative. It is written from the perspective of engineers and focuses on enabling readers to bridge the gap between VDI and DaaS.  I hope you enjoy reading the book and wish you success in building a robust and profitable DaaS offering.

Steve Kaplan

Pano Logic ceases operations

This has not been a resounding year for pioneering virtual desktop device manufacturers. First Wyse, the inventor of the Windows terminal, gets purchased by Dell, and now the originator of the zero-client, Pano Logic, has appeared to suddenly go out of business. 

I first came across Pano Logic when the VMware partner I ran, AccessFlow, was presenting at a small trade show on the San Francisco Peninsula in 2006. I was immediately intrigued with their shiny silver zero-client boxes and the illuminated blue on/off button.

We signed up as a Pano partner and once the units started shipping in 2007, I insisted that our salespeople carry them on all of their sales calls. In those days, non-IT people tended to have a hard enough time grasping the concept of a virtual server let alone a virtual desktop. The Panos were an easy, albeit inaccurate, way to convey the VDI concept.

When AccessFlow was purchased by INX the following year, we really started getting traction with the Pano devices. We were the number one Pano Logic reseller four quarters in a row – and a commemorative, but functional, gold-plated Pano was shipped to me each time. The Pano Logic company thrived and picked up a $12M investment from Goldman Sachs in 2008 and another $20M from Mayfield in 2010.

Pano Logic was a slick and very reasonably-priced solution, and the devices did indeed help facilitate virtual desktop sales. While there were, as with many new technologies, sometimes support issues, the company tended to be extremely responsive in resolving them. The Pano co-founder personally worked with our team to fix a problem in one particularly difficult situation. 

Pano Logic utilized its own connection broker which was fine in the early days, but which met huge resistance once VMware View started utilizing PCoIP. VMware reps began to perceive Panos as competition even though the devices required VMware ESX on the back end. But the loss of VMware field support negatively impacted the company's momentum.

Pano Logic's sales were further impacted when Wyse and other specialty thin-client manufacturers began to make PCoIP-baesd zero-clients. These units enabled the minimal maintenance benefits of Panos, but tended to provide better performance.

In retrospect, the death knell for Pano was probably rung once the manufacturing giants such as Cisco, Samsung and, most recently, LG, came on the scene with their own zero-client devices.

While I passed on the gold-plated Panos to our various offices that sold the most units each quarter, I do still have a commemorative golf club with a Pano device as a putter. When an artist dies, his works often escalates in price. I wonder if my Pano putter will be worth something now?

See Also:

The Strange Case Of A $38 Million Enterprise Company That's Gone Missing.11/01/2012. Julie Bort. Business Insider.

UCS Central facilitates global data center management

Since the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) first debuted in early 2009, I’ve written several articles on this site and for other venues extolling its unique value as a purposefully designed platform for hosting virtual infrastructure. Despite the previous lack of any server experience, Cisco is now tied IBM as the world’s #2 provider of x86 blade servers. Cisco upped the ante this morning with three new announcements enabling consolidated management of data center operations across the globe.

Cisco UCS Manager 2.1

The Cisco UCS B (blade) Series, despite initial widespread skepticism, now has a 15% market share for all blade servers by revenues. Designed under the direction of VMware co-founder Ed Bugnion, the UCS was built over a period of 5 years as a superior platform for hosting virtualized data centers. But the continuing evolution of virtualization and big data technology demands ever more memory, multiple adapters, specialized adapters and high disk spindle counts in local storage. These needs are better served by rack mount form factors.

UCS Manager 2.1 extends the unified fabric capabilities of UCS to provide “single-wire” connectivity to Cisco UCS C-Series rack servers. This enables a significant reduction of switch infrastructure and cabling requirements along with physical NICs and HBAs. Cisco says that its solution offers around a 50% per-node savings over a deployment of 100 typical rack servers.

UCS Manager 2.1 brings the operational benefits of blades such as rapid deployment, cable reduction, and common access to rack-mount servers. Virtualization architects now can focus on server resource requirements such as the ratio of cores to memory, spindle quantities, type of IO, etc. without concern for the shape of the sheet metal.

Another element of UCS Manager 2.1 is integration with a new Meta management product, Cisco UCS Central. 

Cisco UCS Central

The many unique attributes of Cisco UCS have contributed to the propagation of virtualization as the data center standard at even the largest enterprises. But this success has driven a demand for new capabilities. 

Large organizations may require multiple UCS units due to geographical or departmental considerations, or because of the scalability limitation of 160 servers per UCS. Each unit includes UCS Manager which enables policy-based control, but which inevitably overlaps with other UCS Manager instances. 

Cisco UCS Central acts as a manager of managers. It provides a policy repository that sits above the UCS Manager instances, creating global policies that can then be managed locally. UCS Central provides a single pane of glass into visibility across all global systems allowing centralize inventory, faults, logs and server consoles. 

Administrative settings are configured as global policies to which individual UCS Managers can subscribe. This guarantees consistent configurations for all domains.

The next release of UCS Central will introduce global service profiles. Applying service profiles from one geographic domain to another provides the foundation for a global disaster recovery solution.

UCS Central is free for the first 5 domains, and then is licensed on a per domain basis for the sixth domain onwards.

Storage Innovations and Ecosystem Support

Cisco UCS now supports three new storage capabilities: Multi-Hop FCoE from UCS environment to the Array, FC Zoning as part of UCS Manager 2.1, and Unified Connect to support multiple protocols (FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS) on a single port.  

Accompanying system management enhancements and integrations are provided by UCS ecopartners such as VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle, EMC, IBM, Cloupia and Splunk among many others.

UCS Central, UCS Manager 2.1 and the growing ecosystem support enable unified management of UCS domains and of thousands of servers across disparate data centers. This positions UCS as an optimized platform not just for hosting virtual infrastructure, but for hosting virtualized data centers and cloud computing on a global scale.

 

See Also:

Yes,Cisco UCS Servers are that Good. 09/27/2012. Bill Shields. Cisco Blog.

Cisco UCS Blades Outpace HP (and other facts). Cisco.com

UCS spurs shared virtualized data center vision for VMware, Cisco. 05/21/2009. Steve Kaplan. SearchVMware.com

Cisco UCS – a Disruptive Platform. 05/05/2009. Steve Kaplan. DABCC.

Would you like some cloud with that?

 

 

VMware’s vCloud Suite promotion is a brilliant move in the chess game of market share. It puts the foundational products for VMware’s cloud strategy into hundreds of thousands of customer environments while offering both a vision and tangible path for transformation to software-defined datacenters.

The Complexity of Selling Cloud

It is not uncommon for industry manufacturers to position themselves as cloud players simply through rebranding. The technical term is “cloudwashing”. My #3 favorite cloudwashing example is Oracle’s Exalogic Elastic Cloud. My #2 favorite is the renaming of HP’s BladeSystem Matrix to CloudSystem Matrix. My all-time favorite is the rebranding of Wyse’s thin clients as “cloud clients”. 

The plethora of marketing misinformation contributes to a widespread lack of understanding of the transformational capabilities of cloud computing. VMware needed to differentiate its offering while providing both a complete and tangible product-based solution. 

VMware’s answer was the vCloud Suite which bundles products representing the entire set of cloud infrastructure capabilities, but at a lower cost than the assembled piece parts – and priced strictly per processor rather than per VM. The suite comes in three versions: Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.

Until December 15^th, every customer with vSphere Enterprise Plus receives a free upgrade to vCloud Suite Standard, while every vSphere Enterprise customer can purchase the upgrade at a 71% discount. vCloud Suite Standard includes vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCloud Director and vCloud Networking and Security. 

The vCloud Suite promotion may not necessarily imbue customers with the vision for the business benefits private cloud enables, but it will prompt them to learn about its IT-specific efficiencies. For example, administrators can manage far more virtual machines, and downtime resulting from server failure decreases from five minutes to around a minute. Automating approval and other processes slashes VM provisioning times from an average of five days to minutes. 

The Software Defined Datacenter

VMware differentiates its approach to cloud computing by emphasizing the software-defined datacenter (SDDC). A Virtual Data Center (VDC) is a construct of vCloud Director that represents an entire data center. And just as a physical server can host multiple virtual machines, a SDDC can host multiple VDCs.

The SDDC defines an application along with all of the resources it needs and enables control of the data center entirely driven by software. In practical terms, the SDDC automatically maps a virtual machine to the appropriate resources such as storage, network, firewall, intrusion detection, load-balancers, availability, backup, DR, compliancy, etc.

The vCloud Suite enables the SDDC. VMware vSphere provides software-defined compute and memory. It combines with Site Recovery Manager to enable software-defined storage and availability. VMware vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) provides, of course, software-defined networking and security.

VMware vCloud Director enables secure multi-tenancy as well as placement and load balancing of software-defined datacenter services. VMware vCenter Operations provides automated cloud operations management. VMware vFabric Application Director (now AppD) enables automated applications provisioning and vCenter Chargeback provides metered chargeback reporting and accountability. 

VMware vCloud Connector is a free download enabling application migration between clouds while vCenter Orchestrator, included with VMware vCenter Server, enables orchestration with third-party systems. 

Although vCloud Suite only debuted at VMworld San Francisco in late August, VMware already announced significant management enhancements at VMworld Europe this week including “multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning” and “IT benchmarking”. Especially noteworthy is the inclusion of vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) which is based on DynamicOps. It will be interesting to see how VMware handles the overlap of vCACcapabilities such as catalog and chargeback with those of vCloud Director.  

While I haven’t heard anything regarding End User Computing and vCloud Suite, I would like to see integration there as well. Organizations should be able to automate and meter the provisioning of virtual desktops utilizing the same tool sets as they do for virtual servers. 

Upgrade Path

Those of us who sold ESX in the early days of virtualization spent a lot of time educating clients about the concept. But as the overwhelming economic advantages of virtualization quickly became well-known, the sale regressed into one of fulfillment rather than evangelism for many partners. Cloud computing is at a stage where the sale again is very conceptual in nature.  

Many cloud vendors emphasize automation and provisioning, but they really mean scripting. The rapid proliferation of vCloud Suite Standard in data centers across the globe will spur conversations about the policy-driven architecture and advantages of a SDDC. As customers increasingly understand the benefits, they will take advantage of the easy upgrade path to the more complete Advanced and Enterprise versions. This should help VMware leverage its dominance in virtualization to establish a similar position in cloud computing.

 

See Also:

VMware Fills Gap in Cloud Management with vCloud Suite. 10/10/2012. Chris Preimesberger. eWeek.

The Cloud Backlash Could be Deep. 10/06/2012. Mark Thiele. Gigamon.

VMware Showcasing vCloud Director in New Cloud Bundle. 09/11/2012. Kevin McLaughlin. CRN.

Managing the Software-Defined Datacenter. 08/27/2012. Kit Colbert. VMware Office of the CTO. 

 

Getting private cloud? Better change your funding model

The traditional data center is a mishmash of equipment, tools and operating systems – and project-based funding is largely to blame. This budgeting anachronism was sustainable when servers were physical, but causes problems in a virtualized environment. It’s anathema to private cloud.

Transitioning to private cloud requires a chargeback funding model. Chargeback aligns with the dynamics of shared resource pools and facilitates both improved budgeting and planning along with more efficient resource consumption. 

Funding Physical Infrastructure

Organizations often start upon the virtualization journey with “low hanging fruit” servers and gradually work up to Tier 1 machines. IT tends to approach their mixed physical and virtual environments from a mostly physical perspective. Much of the architecture, tools, processes and equipment utilized to run the physical data center continue to be applied to the virtual environment. 

Some of these physical data center vestiges, such as traditional servers, backup products and security processes, may not be optimal for a virtual infrastructure – but they at least work. The outcome is  more painful when continuing to utilize project-based funding. 

Project-based funding generally includes an annual budget enabling current IT services along with projected growth. Business units requesting new applications or technology projects provide additional monies, but frequently insist upon the specific equipment they feel best meets their individual needs. Little importance is placed upon how the products interoperate with the data center environment as a whole.  

The result is a data center full of silos containing overlapping or redundant equipment that is both expensive and difficult to manage efficiently. Seventy percent of the  traditional IT budget goes just to “keep the lights on”. It is rather humorous to recall that Gartner’s number one energy saving recommendation at its 2007 Data Center Conference was to turn off servers that appear idle and see if anyone complains (searchcio.com:Top 10 ways to save energy in the datacenter). 

Funding Virtual Infrastructure

Project-based budgeting works in a physical data center despite the drawbacks because each business unit “owns” its servers and generally utilizes local or otherwise dedicated storage. But this model quickly becomes problematic as organizations virtualize.  

Virtualization eliminates the need to purchase departmental-specific resources. Business units can no longer even identify their equipment: Virtual machines migrate across hosts; storage moves between shared arrays; virtual switches direct and monitor traffic; and virtual load-balancers and firewall appliances replace their physical counterparts. 

IT fulfills new project requests by simply increasing resource pool capacity. At least, this is often possible in the initial stages of virtualization. But virtualized data centers become subject to a phenomenon known as Jevons Paradox whereby reduced technology costs lead to increased demand. User quickly figure out that IT can now “spin up a VM” rather than going through an extensive and expensive procurement cycle, and their server requests escalate.

As resources reach capacity, IT has no option but to ask the next service requestor to bear the burden of required expansion. Pity the business unit with a VM request just barely exceeding existing capacity. IT may ask it to fund a whole new blade chassis, SAN or Nexus 7000 switch.

This does not bode well for cloud. Rather than gaining instant and automatic access to the required infrastructure, the business unit either has to cough up the monies for far more capacity than it  requires, or wait until either the next business cycle or until other departments fund the purchase.

Private Cloud Advantages

Organizations implement private clouds for two primary reasons. The first, and most important, is the ability to align more flexible and cost-effective computing capabilities with facilitating business objectives such as increasing top-line revenues.  

The second major driver for private cloud is to remedy virtualization inefficiencies such as lengthy provisioning times. Sure, a virtual machine can be spun up in minutes, but putting it into production is a whole other matter. A 2011 study sponsored by CA Technologies, The State of IT Automation, showed that 47% of the virtualized organizations queried reported taking a week or longer to provision a virtual machine. In some extreme cases, departments frustrated by delays, have been known to revert back to purchasing cheap pizza box servers.  

Provisioning a production VM first requires that the requester obtain approvals. Then the server team needs to acquire the necessary LUNs from the storage group, the VLANs from the network team, and the firewall configurations from the security folks. Management, load-balancing and regulatory compliance requirements can cause further delays. 

A private cloud takes all of this process and standardizes, automates, and optimizes it in a repeatable manner. The time to provision a virtual machine, along with the associated storage, network and security components, decreases from days to minutes.

Funding Private Cloud

Virtualized organizations often utilize Capacity management in conjunction with modified budgeting processes to ensure adequate resources for upcoming projects. While this model can work well for a virtual data center, it is insufficient for private cloud.

The very definition of cloud, as stated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), includes “measured service” as one of the five primary attributes. NIST emphasizes, “Typically, this is done on a pay-per-use or charge-per-use basis”. Yet a survey conducted late last year of 257 IT managers showed that only 40% of those with or planning private clouds had or were “developing some kind of chargeback method” (@joemckendrick 04/12/2012 ZDNet).

Another term for private cloud is IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS). IT must mirror public cloud providers by charging users for resource consumption. An effective chargeback environment reduces time-consuming negotiations and interdepartmental budgetary meetings. A BU purchases computing resources as needed and when the project completes, billing stops. Knowing resource costs in advance is advantageous for BUs in terms of budgeting and planning as well as in pricing products dependent upon IT capabilities.

Without the natural consequences resulting from a pay-as-you-go model, users tend to over-consume. A chargeback model drives efficiency because users naturally want to minimize their costs. When a BU manager sees, for example, that her department is being charged each month for the 20 VMs they no longer use, she takes the initiative to have them decommissioned.

Embracing Cloud Competition

Public cloud ensures the end of the competition-free environment that IT has enjoyed for decades. Business units are increasingly considering cloud-based alternatives such as SaaS and IaaS. IT, rather than fearing or resisting the public cloud, should embrace it by implementing an efficient and effective hybrid cloud strategy.

Providing an accurate chargeback model to make it easier for business units to compare internal costs with off-premise options. IT can lead the way by helping them evaluate which venues make the most sense for hosting various workloads while still ensuring corporate standards of performance, security, compliance and disaster recovery.

 

Link Alander, CIO of Lone Star College System; Rob Bergin @rbergin, a systems administrator at a Fortune 100 company; Thomas Gamull @MagicalYak at Presidio and Jeremy Oakey at Presidio all contributed to this article.

 

See Also:

Podcastwith VMware CTO, Steve Herod. 08/22/2012. Dana Gardner. BriefingsDirect.

The SoftwareDefined Datacenter. Video on www.vmware.com

The New Challenges of Capacity Management In Virtualized Cloudy IT.06/11/2012. Taneja Group.

Virtual Machines put the ‘Fun’ in Dysfunctional. 05/22/2012. Enterprise Networking Planet.

Cloud Computing: Why You Can't Ignore Chargeback. 11/05/2010. Bernard Golden. CIO.

Cisco Nexus 1000V evolves to a cloud networking stack foundation

A private cloud is built upon a virtualized network, along with storage and compute, resources. Many virtual networks are overlaid on top of the shared physical network, logically separating tenants on the shared resources.  One challenge is that the physical network lacks visibility into the topology of the overlays. A second obstacle is that network overlays utilizing standard vSwitches do not allow for security and network policies to live-migrate with virtual machines.

While both VMware’s Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS) and the Cisco Nexus 1000V mitigate these barriers, the Cisco virtual switch also incorporates the physical network. The Nexus 1000V has evolved to become the foundation for a cloud networking stack that integrates both physical and virtual networking resources. It introduces virtualization-awareness or intelligence to allow for the added complexities of VM-mobility, dynamic resource allocation and virtual services.

Cloud Performance Challenges

Organizations across the world have utilized the data center consolidation capabilities of virtualization to reduce facilities, power and hardware costs. But provisioning new VMs often still requires significant time and manual processes by the server, storage, network and security administrators.  A 2011 study sponsored by CA Technologies, The State of IT Automation, showed that 47% of the virtualized organizations queried reported taking a week or longer to provision a virtual
machine.  

                  From The State of IT Automation: UBM TechWeb 2011
 
Of course even a week to provision a VM is typically much faster than the time to procure a physical server, and the cost is only a fraction its physical counterpart. On the other hand, rather than satiating the business needs, quicker access to less expensive computing generates still more demand. This phenomenon, known as Jevons paradox, makes it still more difficult for IT to keep up with business unit requirements.

Private clouds can eliminate bottlenecks by automating the provisioning of virtual machines, but they introduce much greater demands on the underlying physical networks, and automating tasks for a wide variety of applications and policies can be challenging. The physical infrastructure must be very flexible to allocate the proper resources quickly and efficiently to meet the changing, dynamic demands. It must be able to support the amount of virtual workloads coming in along with increased requirements for security and multi-tenancy in a highly dynamic environment.

Hybrid clouds necessitate still greater demands on the network which now must facilitate workloads moving dynamically between private and public cloud providers. The network must be able to scale to the cloud while the underlying physical infrastructure grows to support it.

Cloud Management Challenges

When standard vSwitches are deployed in the application server (resident within the hypervisor), server administrators typically install and manage virtual switches. The network team understandably becomes apprehensive as they lose visibility into the network and security policies, while requiring extra effort to retain visibility to network traffic at the new network edge. They remain responsible for the integrity of the network, yet no longer can apply policies and quality of service (QoS) that remain consistent as virtual machines migrate throughout the environment and resource allocations ebb and flow.

This lack of visibility and control commonly results in restricting the type of applications that can be virtualized to the less impactful and less mission-critical. This in turn limits the organization’s ability to implement a private cloud and achieve the business benefits of large-scale virtualization.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V

Cisco introduced its Nexus series switches in early 2008. The Nexus 1000V is the virtual edge (or access layer) switch in the portfolio; it shares the same NX-OS as the physical models,and thus the same features and management interfaces, making it appear as a seamless extension of the physical network. In VMware environments, the Nexus 1000V requires VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus Version 4.1 or later, and it replaces the standard VMware vSwitch embedded in the hypervisor.

While Nexus 1000V started as a layer 2 virtual switch, it is now a switching platform supporting a variety of virtual services. It has really come to mean the entire virtual network stack including virtual services, policy management, orchestration and network programmability.

The Nexus 1000V enables tighter integration between the physical and virtual network and puts control of the network back in the domain of the network experts. The network administrators gain both virtual traffic visibility and can now apply network and security policies that follow virtual machines as they vMotion between hosts. The networking and security teams are consequently much more likely to support virtualizing Tier-1, mission-critical and regulated servers without compromising compliance objectives, reliability or performance.

The ability for the network team to monitor, manage and troubleshoot both the physical and virtual networks with the same familiar Cisco commands and tools can significantly reduce administration time and learning curves. They can instead focus their efforts on driving increased business value via the orchestration and automation as part of a private cloud.

Some of the Nexus 1000V attributes include:

ROI: Virtualization enabled data center consolidation provides a huge ROI by increasing resource utilization and reducing costs. This ROI is further realized by the Nexus 1000V which provides the virtual network requirements to lower the cost to deploy a virtual machine.

ROI is enhanced by enabling virtualization of Tier-1, DMZ and regulated servers and by vastly simplifying administrative requirements across both physical and virtual networks. Savings are also increased by enabling virtual workloads to migrate over larger resource pools including public cloud for at least some of the organization’s capacity.  The Nexus 1000V reduces costs by providing operational consistency and visibility throughout the network, while providing the same level of application services and security for mobile workloads as have been traditionally deployed in physical data centers.

Scalability:  The Nexus 1000V enables better performance for large virtual networks. It also starts up very easily. And since it is a flat configuration file, if a problem occurs, just the configuration file needs to be restored. By supporting Cisco Data Center Interconnect (DCI) technologies like LISP and OTV, the Nexus 1000V overlays can support live migrations between data centers and cloud locations.

Security:  While the VMware Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS) enables vSphere host control of VM traffic, the Nexus 1000V provides VM port control. All of the other Cisco IOS features are also made available to VMs such as NetFlow, port security, access control lists, etc. The Nexus 1000V also supports a virtual ASA firewall (the ASA 1000V), as well as the Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) firewall that allows access rules based on VM attributes.

Multi-tenancy: Network traffic isolation is achieved with VXLAN tunnels that represent the individual network overlays. VXLANs operate similar to VLANs in the data center, but are thousands of times more scalable for these larger cloud environments. VXLANs can also extend over Layer 3 networks for greater scalability. The Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a collaborative effort between Cisco, VMware Cisco and Red Hat.

vPath: vPath is a feature of the Nexus 1000V virtual switch that can redirect traffic to virtual application services before the switch sends the packets down into the virtual machine. It avoids the necessity of running an appliance such as a firewall or zoning appliance, on every host, or of directing traffic to physical appliances with VLAN stitching.  Rather than consuming host resources, vPath allows virtual service nodes to be located on a Nexus 1010 services appliance, again giving the networking team better control and visibility of the deployment of network services and policies.

VMware vCloud Director integration: VMware vCD enables instantiation of many vApps on demand, requiring network segments for each instance of applications. The combination of vCD and Nexus 1000V enables self-service isolated network provisioning for multi-tenant environments.

Cloud Migration:  As organizations implement cloud computing, they are forced to consider the integration of the physical and virtual networks. The Nexus 1000V, rather than requiring a rip-and-replace of the physical layer, enables management and features consistency across both environments. This enables a smooth transition between physical and cloud.

The Cloud Future

As organizations become cloud ready, they no longer just think about hypervisors and switches. They instead focus on services, management and orchestration pieces.  The virtual network focus similarly will be on programmable components, not on individual switches or routers. Traffic is logically isolated enabling each business unit to feel as if it owns the entire network, even all of the BU virtual networks are overlaid on top of same physical infrastructure.

The Nexus 1000V owns the edge of the network. It is programmable, meaning that because it has APIs it incorporates the advantages of Software Defined Networking (SDN).  Cisco’s cloud stack not only will facilitate extremely rapid application deployment and orchestration of applications in a private cloud, but also between private and public clouds. 

 

Jeremey Oakey of Presidio was a significant contributor to this article.

Teradici RDSH expands VMware View scenarios

The industry may be abuzz about VDI, but Microsoft RDS deployments still comprise the majority of hosted Windows session connections. Teradici Remote Desktop Services Host (RDSH) capitalizes on this “legacy” market by delivering PCoIP capabilities to Microsoft Windows Server RDS environments. The Teradici solution provides a useful bridge for combining RDSH and VMware View virtual desktops.

The Teradici RDSH Market Opportunity

The PCoIP protocol’s close association with VMware View makes it is easy to forget that the manufacturer is a separate company, Teradici. The protocol is not exclusive to View, but Teradici RDSH enables PCoIP support for RDS sessions only through VMware View Manager.

The new Teradici product, slated to ship in December of this year, will enable organizations to seamlessly integrate their legacy Terminal Services desktops as part of their VMware View environments. It will also allow direct access to RDP sessions via PCoIP-based zero clients.

Gauging the market share of VMware View vs. Citrix XenDesktop is rather nebulous, but leading analysts such as IDC in its Worldwide Desktop Virtualization 2011 Vendor Analysis indicate that the two industry leaders have fairly equivalent VDI sales. This contention is supported by data from Wyse and HP – which together command about 75% of the thin-client market.

                                             Source: IDC 2011

Wyse and HP report that 15% of their thin-client devices are connected to VMware View (PCoIP) and 15% to XenDesktop (ICA/HDX), leaving close to 70% connected to either native Terminal Services or to Citrix XenApp (some also connect to RDP based VMware View). Extrapolating across all client connections indicates a large target market for Teradici's new product.

Implications for Citrix XenApp

Although the Teradici RDSH press release makes no mention of Citrix XenApp, the solution should appeal to a segment of the XenApp user base.

Citrix XenApp is a mature technology offering advantages over VDI such as denser scalability and application publishing. But XenApp is an extension of Terminal Services which lacks VDI capabilities such as accommodating the “long tail of apps” common in most organizations. RDSH also has, as Brian
Madden recently wrote in a comment on my blog post, The VDI Delusion illusion, certain idiosyncrasies.

Unsurprisingly, many organizations intend to migrate their XenApp deployments to virtual desktops. Cost, timing, culture or even software vendor restrictions often require running both environments in parallel for some time. In healthcare, for example, Epic is only supported on XenApp at this point.

XenDesktop is an appealing VDI option for organizations running XenApp which can be brokered and managed using its HDX/ICA protocol. But VMware View can be an attractive alternative – particularly for organizations running vSphere in the data center. They may want to leverage the same IT skills and tools (such as VMware vCOPs) from the servers to the desktops.

VMware published a paper earlier this year titled, Enhancing a Citrix XenApp Implementation with VMware View and ThinApp, which states, “VMware View readily incorporates XenApp into its infrastructure.” The gaping disadvantage, remedied by Teradici RDSH, has been the necessity of running two separate protocols.

            Citrix XenApp Integrated with VMware View and ThinApp

Teradici RDSH Use Cases

VMware View, or at least the intention to deploy it, is a prerequisite for Teradici RDSH. Organizations can purchase the lowest cost View Enterprise add-on version license of $90 per seat (list), and the Microsoft virtual desktop licensing components such as VDA are not required. Naturally, RDS CALs still must be purchased just as with XenApp. Teradici has not yet announced pricing for its product.

Terminal Services: Organizations running Terminal Services without XenApp often either have simple requirements or are… let’s say “frugal”. But if they utilize VMware View, they are excellent candidates for Teradici RDSH which brings PCoIP performance, consistency and security to their Microsoft RDS sessions.

VMware View: VMware View customers may utilize Teradici RDSH to run certain applications or desktops on RDSH. This reduces cost and achieves greater scale – at least in the short term. The relentless increases in VM density enabled by Moore’s Law will render scalability a non-issue in the long run.

Expiring XenApp: Teradici RDSH presents an interesting option when XenApp, particularly older versions lacking some of today’s features, is considered a temporary solution on the way to virtual desktops. Teradici RDSH brokers and manages the XenApp desktops with VMware View, enabling the latest PCoIP capabilities.

VMware Horizon Application Manager: Horizon brokers desktops, RDS apps, XenApp, and SaaS apps. It will broker RDSH RDP desktops as View does today, but not RDSH PCoIP desktops. Teradici RDSH and Horizon Application Manager are consequently very complimentary for enterprises with both RDS and View desktop pools.

XenApp & PCoIP Zero-Clients: Rather than pay extra monies to Teradici and VMware to achieve PCoIP integration, organizations without plans for VDI migration and with up-to-date XenApp deployments will likely be content to run them in parallel with View. The exception could be those firms wanting to standardize on versatile PCoIP-based zero clients such as LG and Samsung zero client monitors. The ability to run PCoIP-supported XenApp desktops on these terminals may warrant the added cost of the Teradici solution.

            LG’s Integrated Monitor/ & Zero Client Device

Cisco, a Teradici partner, makes zero clients that include call flow optimization – unifying virtual desktops with voice and video. But native support for PCoIP, HDX and ICA removes the incentive to purchase Teradici RDSH unless organizations are running only Terminal Services and not XenApp.

Cisco Virtualization Experience Client 6215

 

Tipping the Connection Broker Scale

Teradici RDSH may not be positioned as a competitive solution to Citrix XenApp, but some firms will inevitably consider it as an alternative. And organizations already running XenApp may be influenced as well. By eliminating the requirement to broker XenApp with HDX/ICA, Teradici RDSH may, in certain environments, shift the connection broker migration decision from XenDesktop to View.

Thomas Gamull of Presidio contributed to this article.

Cloud: If you can't beat it...

A CIO recently told me that one of his business units was threatening to move all of its servers to Amazon Web Services. This bears out a statistic I read not long ago claiming that over half of the virtual machines on AWS are now purchased directly by business units via credit card. IT, though, remains responsible for the performance integrity and regulatory compliance of all of the organization’s servers, wherever they reside.

Striving to control all technology adoption ensures that the organization bypasses IT as it seeks new revenues and efficiencies. Rather than compete against the cloud, successful CIOs will leverage its unparalleled opportunities for increased productivity and efficiency – while still ensuring adherence to enterprise standards. This requires a Teutonic shift in the manner with which IT works with the business – evolving from a position of technology controller to one of partnership.

IT-as-a-Bottleneck

IT generally has not had a reputation for stellar customer responsiveness; it is often referred to as the “department of no”. But to be fair, IT has had to contend with data centers that evolved from years of purchasing decisions driven and funded by individual departmental projects. The resulting mishmashes of equipment, tools and processes require 70% of the typical IT budget just to keep the lights on. Not much remains for innovative customer care.

Virtualization would seem to be the resolution, but rather than satiating the business needs, access to faster and less expensive computing generates still more demand. This phenomenon, known as Jevons paradox, makes it still more difficult for IT to keep up.

Jevons paradox is exacerbated by the “Consumerization of IT”. Employees, used to accessing cloud-based applications via their personal devices, expect the same type of instant gratification and flexibility from corporate IT. But CIOs must be able to guarantee enterprise security, privacy and compliance. The result is an increased perception of IT-as-a-Bottleneck (ITaaB).

 

DILBERT © 2008 Scott Adams. Used By permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.

Corporate IT cannot realistically scale to meet escalating computing demand. CIOs must instead leverage the public cloud and other external resources. In this manner, they can both fulfill business requirements while also enabling scarce internal IT resources to be judiciously applied to the core organizational mission and services.

The Changing Role of the CIO

Simply managing and delivering technology has become the ante up. CIOs now must focus on data whether in-house, outsourced or delivered via public cloud. They must secure the enterprise and mitigate data and privacy breaches without requiring all technology to run through IT.

This is not to say that control, compliance, and security are passé; the CIO will continue to be the focal point for these activities. It is just the method that changes. In order to avoid IT-as-a-Bottleneck, CIOs must strive to position IT as an enabler. Then the business will come to IT.

Enabling the business means becoming a partner with it. The CIO, by gaining a deep understanding of its core objectives, can work together with the business to find solutions. They can then evaluate the best way to implement those solutions – whether internally or externally.

CIOs need to be able to influence and affect change that is outside of their direct control. The soft skills of influence and relationships are much more important to success than being the best at delivering technology solutions.

The CIO will evolve from the controller of technology into the broker of information, the enabler of innovation, and ultimately the trusted advisor to the business. The future CIO must be tuned into the wants and needs of the customers, both internal and external, and focused on rapid delivery on those wants and needs.

CIOs will seek to deploy new technologies in ways that enhance business processes, agility, and value. As the organization increasingly views the CIO as a partner and enabler, the CIO in turn gains visibility into all processes affected by new technology adoption, thereby increasing the likelihood that security, compliance, and performance issues are addressed as part of the adoption process.

Trusted advisor status, the ultimate goal for any CIO, results from standing at the confluence of organization process knowledge, master data management, and vendor relationships. Properly used, this vantage point, really this aggregation of information, uniquely positions the CIO to drive business value.

In order to both avoid ITaaB and to maintain relevance, CIOs must evolve from heading the department of “no” to leading the department of “know”.

Vijay George, CIO for the Texas Comptroller’s Office, and Philip Parker, Consulting Healthcare CIO, were both major contributors to this article.

See Also:

Compiling CIO Insights From IBM’s CEO Study 2012. 07/19/2012. Alexander Peters. Forrester.com.

Why CMOs and CIOs Need a Shared Agenda. 07/11/2012. John Kennedy. IDG Connect.

Evolution of “Hybrid Cloud”. 07/02/2012. Brian Gracely (@ bgracely).  Clouds of Change.

Jevons Paradox. Wikipedia. Thanks to Ian Massingham (@IanMmmm).

 

 

Microsoft recycles same old VMware smack

“I’m a virt guy, it’s all I know.” VMlimited’s polyester wearing head salesman, Tad, proudly touts his shortsightedness as part of the extensive Microsoft advertising campaign mocking VMware. Tad warns about the “hidden bummers of going too far beyond virtualization” from highway billboards, banner ads, paid keyword searches, print ads, and the vmlimited site itself.

The premise that VMware is stuck in the virtualization past is nonsensical, but Microsoft may be striving for “cool” rather than reason. Perhaps the folks in Redmond are still smarting from the famous “I’m a Mac” campaign and consider VMlimited as their opportunity to play the hip underdog role this time around.

Comparative Cloud History

“Microsoft believes that, rather than undertaking a costly revolution, you should evolve your environment in a way that preserves and extends existing investments...”

              - Microsoft Virtualization Delivers More Capabilities, Better Value than VMware

The amusing irony of the VMlimited campaign is that Microsoft has always played catch-up to VMware. Its Palo Alto rival was pioneering Cloud solutions before the software giant could even spell virtualization – literally. “Virtulization” was featured in the title of its famous 2009 Myth Busters video.  

Microsoft’s own virtualization site didn’t even mention Cloud as recently as three years ago.  In contrast, VMware’s home page already emphasized Cloud as transforming IT. Then, as now, VMware’s site educated viewers on private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, cloud security and management.

While VMware was promoting its cloud services and products, Microsoft was still struggling with basic virtualization vision: “At Microsoft, virtualization means helping IT departments maximize cost savings and improve business continuity.”  

Perhaps most tellingly, in 2009 Microsoft was still advocating a cautious, evolutionary approach to virtualization – boasting that its solutions “address both physical and virtual infrastructure.” Conversely, VMware was encouraging 100% virtualization while emphasizing the ultimate end goal: “Virtualization is the essential catalyst for cloud computing”.

As recently as mid 2011, Microsoft still promoted virtualization as a feature of the operating system. It suggested these revolutionary virtualization use cases:

    You can use Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 for the following scenarios:

• Test and Development
• Server Consolidation
• Branch Office Consolidation
• Hosted Desktop Virtualization (VDI)

            -    Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Home Page (July, 2011)

Microsoft Advantages

Microsoft marketing is nothing if not persistent. For over three years it has criticized VMware for the same two “weaknesses”: a supposed higher cost and the inability to manage multiple hypervisors.

Higher Cost: Microsoft has been relentless over the years in using its Web site, videos, white papers, etc. to loudly proclaim VMware costs more. Even its Private Cloud Economics Tool compares costs with VMware.

In a recent rebuttal, VMware makes a strong case not just for cost parity, but superiority. But the true value is not measured by deltas in licensing or even operating costs. VMware enables organizations to more easily, quickly and effectively embrace Cloud.

Managing Multiple Hypervisors: Tad’s antics perpetuate Microsoft’s tired refrain that System Center effectively manages vSphere. It does not. More importantly, it’s a bad idea to have multiple hypervisors to begin with from a unified data center objective. It’s an even worse idea if considering Cloud.

Lone Star College System – one of the nation’s largest community colleges with over 100,000 students – runs a very efficient vSphere-based private cloud with only two administrators. A recent internal analysis showed that adding Hyper-V would require a third administrator, making it unfeasable.

Cloud Industry Leadership

Microsoft swaggers as if it leads the Cloud industry, but its actions speak louder than words. The company’s continued refusal, for example, to grant Service Provider Licensing or allow multi-tenancy for virtual desktop Cloud providers severely restricts Desktop-as-a-Service.

Desktop guru, Brian Madden, recently relinquished his long-time Microsoft MVP declaring, “So that's it. Microsoft is screwing this entire industry with their asshole policies. I'm embarrassed that I supported them for so long. I just don't have the respect for them that I did in 2004.”

Microsoft’s private cloud messaging makes System Center 2012 appear to be a comprehensive system. But a proclamation does not a true solution make. All eight System Center components must be purchased, and once installed are not even aware of each other.

While Microsoft manufactures an extraordinary variety of products ranging from word processing to video games, VMware remains focused as “the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure.” Over 100 VMware vCloud service providers enable the world’s largest community of compatible public clouds, and 20,000 people attend VMworld, now one of the largest IT conferences.

Trash Talk in Lieu of Substance

Microsoft never bashed Lotus when it knocked off Lotus 1-2-3 with Excel. It didn’t bad-mouth Word Perfect when it took over word processing. It didn’t denigrate IBM as it supplanted Notes with Exchange. It never knocked Netscape, didn’t take potshots at Novell and didn’t sneer at Sony.

Rather than talk smack, Microsoft simply developed good products that quickly surpassed the market leaders. It has taken a very different tact against VMware, and the VMlimited campaign is its most extensive and expensive salvo yet. VMware nonetheless continues to dominate the industry and is a rapidly growing $4B business with no signs of slowing down.

The only other manufacturer that I can recall Microsoft publicly attacking is Apple – and that didn’t work out so well. While its I’m Not Cool Enough to be a Mac Person and Apple Tax campaigns are completely forgettable, the Steve Ballmer video scoffing at the iPhone remains a classic.

VMlimited is Microsoft’s attempt to ridicule VMware using humor. But the campaign underscores the company’s continued attempts to meet the high standards VMware sets. The folks in Palo Alto must be chuckling.

Whoops – got to run. My pager is going off.

 

See Also:

Sorry Microsoft; Not Only Does vSphere Cost Less to Buy, It Also Costs Less to Operate. 05/16/2012. VMware.com.

VMware CTO reveals future directions in VMUG vid. 05/09/2012. Simon Sharwood. The Register.

4 Ways Microsoft is Screwing the Desktop Virtualization Industry, and Why I’m Quitting the MVP Program. 03/01/2012. Brian Madden. Brianmadden.com.

Microsoft Makes it Challenging for Cloud Providers to Host Virtual Desktops. 02/21/2012. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

The Multi-Hypervisor Fallacy. 02/25/2010. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

Is Hyper-V a Casualty of Microsoft’s Innovation Dearth? 02/11/2010. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

Don’t Believe Any Numbers You Don’t Make up Yourself. 06/03/2009.  Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

Microsoft Conjures Imaginary ‘Apple Tax’. 04/11/2009. Rick Myslewski. The Register.

Microsoft ad: I’m Just Not Cool Enough to be a Mac Person. 03/26/2009. Mary Jo Foley. ZDNet.

 

Author Disclaimer. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not reflect those of my employer which is both a leading VMware and Microsoft partner.

 

The VDI Delusion illusion*

 

“Gartner is literally being overwhelmed with VDI inquiries regarding real deployments; can't hire analysts fast enough to meet demand”

      - Tweet by Gartner’s Chris Wolf (@cswolf) April 02, 2012

 

VDI has leapt the chasm that Terminal Services never managed to cross and is on the way to becoming a mainstream computing alternative. In The VDI Delusion, authors Brian Madden, Gabe Knuth and Jack Madden make a strong argument that VDI is over-hyped. They maintain that Remote Desktop Session Host (i.e. Terminal Services/SBC) or even PCs are frequently the better call. But while virtual desktops may have only a 1.5% share of the total enterprise desktop market today, they continue to gain huge mindshare and momentum.

VDI has Greater Appeal than RDSH (Server-Based Computing)

The RDSH technology that Brian Madden advocates for shared desktop sessions has been around since 1996 (or longer if you count Citrix WinFrame’s 1995 debut). Commonplace in specialty line-of-business application delivery, RDSH has never managed to gain traction as a mainstream desktop replacement.

Gartner’s Gunnar Berger recently wrote, “I believe that virtual desktops are gaining traction not because they are the best technical choice, in many use cases they aren’t, but because virtual desktops bring benefits to the employee that are hard to measure.”  Berger argues that the VDI gives users a unique desktop, providing them with a sense of empowerment that, “…lets [them] work the way they want to work”.

Users don’t want change, but they do want USB devices, dual monitors and multimedia. VDI’s close approximation to a physical desktop eases their concerns. Users quickly come to appreciate ubiquitous desktop access without performance decrease caused by viruses or Windows rot. Even a power outage leaves their desktop sessions intact the next time they’re able to connect.

Most IT administrators also prefer VDI over RDSH; working with virtual desktops is easier than running Windows Server as a client. Administrators don’t face application incompatibilities, user session lockdown, printer driver problems or a crashed service such as the print spooler affecting all users on that problem server. Pristine desktops are spun up on the fly and then vaporized when users log out – eliminating viruses, spyware and user installed software issues.

A larger organization often has hundreds or thousands of apps used by only a few people, and a handful of apps used by everyone. VDI is far more flexible than RDSH in handling this “long tail” scenario.

 

           A small part of a typical long tail of apps as shown by Systrack

 

VDI Enables More Secure and Better Managed Desktops

VDI critics argue that PCs can be just as secure and easily managed as virtual desktops. But a well-managed PC environment is the exception, not the rule, and unmanaged physical desktops cannot match the security of a cenntralized virtual desktop environment. Corporate information – rather than maintained on hard drives of PCs and remote office servers throughout the enterprise – is all kept in the data center. Skilled IT administrators oversee physical security, IDS/IPS, firewalls, perimeter and multi-tier AV and malware protecton, SIEM tools, etc.

 

  
        Typical Desktop Strategy?  (via Ron Oglesby of Unidesk)

 

Critics contend that IT organizations lacking the motivation or budget required to institute desktop PC-based management won’t fare any better with virtual desktops. But VDI demands a strategic approach, otherwise it will stall out at the pilot phase or fail completely.

Virtual desktops directly impact hundreds or thousands of users, each with individual expectations and perceptions. Just one unhappy user can kill a huge VDI project. A poorly designed VDI pilot is likely to spell the kiss of death.

Identifying business objectives and use cases, assessing environmental and user characteristics, and rigorous design and planning, are all mandatory for a successful enterprise VDI deployment.

Macro Trends

Enhanced management, security, disaster recovery and remote office infrastructure consolidation, among other advantages, are driving VDI adoption. The sense of urgency is heightened by three macro trends: Windows 7, BYOD and Cloud.

Windows 7: Windows XP goes end of life on April 8, 2014. Organizations planning to migrate to Windows 7 often require hardware upgrades. VDI enables IT either to add years of use to PCs and laptops by repurposing them as thin-clients, or replace them with inexpensive thin or zero-client devices.

BYOD: IT faces the challenge of allowing employees to utilize personal computing devices in the workplace yet still ensure security, compliance and aggregate productivity. Incorporating virtual desktops as part of a desktop-as-a-service strategy facilitates both objectives.

Cloud: Legacy, locally-hosted Windows applications are no longer adequate for many organizations. Employees insist upon Web-based apps, SaaS and even cloud-based storage platforms such as DropBox. Integrated virtual desktop offerings such as VMware’s Horizon Application Manager and Octopus enable efficient, reliable and secure consumption of both Cloud and Windows applications.

Moore’s Law Equals More Virtual Desktops

The VDI Delusion discusses the BriForum 2010 talk by Atlantis Computing founder, Chetan Ventaskesh. Ventaskesh believes that Moore’s Law, by doubling the number of virtual desktops that can run on a physical server every two years, makes it increasingly expedient to move the desktop to the data center.

Referring to Ventaskesh’s talk, the authors write, “All these technological advancements mean that running Windows on VDI in the data center will be able to deliver a better experience than what’s possible when running Windows on a client.”

Atlantis ILIO, Cisco VXI, VMware Storage Accelerator and many other innovations in the thriving VDI space further augment Moore’s Law. Even an organization not realizing an immediate financial advantage from embracing VDI today will benefit in two or three years. Savvy IT professionals increasingly deploy a virtual desktop architecture rather than continue to invest in refreshing PCs and laptops.

Summing it Up

 “Experts saying VDI isn't taking off need to spend less time talking, more time getting heads out of the sand. Tons of deployments going on”.

              -Tweet by Gartner’s Chris Wolf (@cswolf) April 02, 2012

VDI, after years of hype, is finally building significant momentum. Advantages to both users and IT staff make virtual desktops an attractive alternative to either PCs or RDSH. Declining data center costs resulting from both Moore’s Law and technology innovations ensure that VDI will rapidly grow to become a much bigger part of the corporate landscape.

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* I’m having a bit of fun with The VDI Delusion title which itself appears to be a play on Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion. The authors, contrary to the title’s suggestion, do not rail against VDI, but only the hype surrounding it. The book is both very well written and informative.

 

Thanks for contributions and/or review by @carydahl (Presidio), Alan Kaplan (NetBlaze), Trevor Pott (@cakeis_not_alie), Michael Fraser (@vdispace), Greg Kuchar - @Koocar (Presidio), @salinasdan (Lakeside Software), Tyler "T-Rex" Roher - @T_REX_VDI (Liquidware Labs), and @Guise_Bule (TuCloud).

 

See Also:

Is it the Year of Desktop Virtualization Yet? 05/09/2012. Barb Darrow. Gigaom.

I was wrong about how VMware View 5.1's new "Storage Accelerator" works. It's way cooler than I thought!  05/07/2012. Brian Madden. Brianmadden.com

The Reality of Virtual Desktops. 04/17/2012. Gunnar Berger. Gartner.

Which are More Secure, Virtual or Physical Desktops? 04/05/2012. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

Virtual Desktops are the Gateway to Cloud Computing.02/26/2012. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

BYOD as part of a Desktop-as-a-Service Strategy. 01/08/2012. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

The Why of VDI. July 2011. Steve Kaplan. Presidio White Paper (4 MB pdf).

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View. May 2011. Ian Song. IDC White Paper.

VDI vs SBC: ROI Case Study. 12/19/2010. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

The ABCs of VDI: User Perception = Reality. 02/20/2010. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

Which are more secure, virtual or physical desktops?

Not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. My laptop picked up the Secure Shield Virus at VMware Partner Exchange, and I ended up sending it back to Corporate IT for reimaging. 

A virtual desktop (vDT) does not prevent laptop malware infection – at least not if local browsing is permitted, but it does leave a user’s corporate desktop unimpaired. Not withstanding this example of the type of security benefits vDTs can provide, a debate continues as to whether or not virtual desktops are on a whole more secure than their physical counterparts. 

Gaps in Physical Desktop Security

Security requires both IT visibility and control, but these capabilities diminish once a corporate laptop leaves the building and is no longer on the network or Wi-Fi. The device becomes susceptible to malware, can become a gateway to the corporate network and can be lost or stolen along with sensitive organizational information.

Data breaches, whether on a stolen laptop or on a hacked remote office server or desktop can be very costly to organizations to remediate, and they can create irreparable damage to corporate brands and reputations. Computer encryption is touted as the solution, but in practice only 1/3^rd of laptops are encrypted according to a 2009 Ponemon Institute study. Encryption software costs money, must be managed and can make the user experience less productive.

BYOD exacerbates security challenges by making it difficult to monitor whether or not employees are conforming with organizational policies and regulatory requirements. A jailbroken iPhone, for example, is particularly vulnerable to attack. Litigation can lead to discovery and forensic review which then raises privacy issues as employers gain access to employee personal information and Web viewing habits.

VDI Benefits

By virtual desktops, I mean the centrally hosted variety as part of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). The vDTs are housed, administered and backed up in data centers – regardless of access. This centralized model is more easily managed than a distributed environment where users can download applications and store corporate data on their local machines.

Technologies such as VMware OffLine or Citrix XenClient allow for local instances of virtual desktops, but centralized control is lessened as VMs and/or data now travel back and forth between local devices and the data center. Some users demand access to corporate information when data center connectivity is unavailable, such as when flying. But rather than make exceptions to a centralized desktop computing model, users can work on other tasks during the flight, or to book aircraft providing Wi-Fi.

VDI enables desktop control similar to the mainframe and VAX days when applications were accessed via dumb terminals, except that users can create Excel reports in minutes rather than wait for months in an MIS Queue. And, of course, users can securely access their vDTs from almost any type of device whether PC, Mac, Zero-client terminal, tablet or Smart Phone.

Virtual desktop session recording enhances IT visibility into user level activities and can provide an audit trail showing both who is accessing senstitive corporate information and how it is being accessed. IT can prove, for example, that a solen laptop never had access to senstitive information thereby negating the onerous requirement to notify customers of a potential breach.

The VMware View and Citrix Xen Desktop connection brokers provide useful information such as IP addresses, connection times, and whether or not a USB stick was plugged in and, if so, what type. Connection broker policies can be set to disable copy & paste and printing. They can also prevent mappings of USB devices or local drives to the virtual machine, thereby making it difficult to extract corporate data.

Additional tools enable further protection. VMware vShield, for example, can wrap around a VM to prevent malware from coming in. Varonis provides log-on information about files opened, Web sites hit, etc. Tools from RSA can scan the copy/paste buffer and then flush it if it sensitive information is detected. RSA Envision produces a report of access to all sensitive information.

One of the most compelling VDI benefits is the elimination of common BYOD concerns surrounding security and privacy issues. As an example, IT no longer needs to be able to remote wipe a personal device in the event it is lost or stolen. The employee’s corporate desktop and data continue to reside securely in the data center; a simple password change prevents unauthorized access.

VDI Risks

On the downside, VDI, as Brian Madden points out in a April, 2010 SearchVirtualDesktop article, “moves your unpredictable users from out in the field into your data center.” The article goes on to provide some good practices for addressing this risk.

VDI also can mean increased susceptibility to a single point of attack since all vDTs run on a data center hypervisor. Once past the perimiter, a skilled hacker can get access to the IP addresses of the other VMs. A product such as VMware vShield can mitigate this risk by creating a firewall allowing VMs on the same desktop pool to speak with designated resources, but not with each other. Today’s version of vShield requires substantial effort to set up the rule, though tighter integration at the VMware View level should be able to largely automate the process.

So is a Virtual Desktop More Secure than the Physical Version?

Virtual desktops, out of the box, may not be more secure than a well-managed physical desktop environment; however, in my experience this type of environment is uncommon. Physical desktops demand significant IT resources for provisioning, image management, upgrades, patches and for desk side troubleshooting service; security often lacks the attention it should have.

In not-so-well-managed environments, just the process of centralizing desktops and data is, on balance, going to be more secure. Virtual desktops, unlike the physical varieties, are not susceptible to loss, theft or physical attack. Hackers are limited to keylogging and screen scraping, and third-party tools can help minimize these risks. VDI can also potentially reduce risks of access/attack and regulatory noncompliance of remote office servers and desktops by virtualizing and consolidating them back to the data center as part of a VDI architecture.

Even well-managed physical desktops do not offer the control and visibility options available with VDI, and they lack the advantage of a much more flexible virtual environment. IT, for example, can address HR security concerns by providing each HR employee with two vDTs: The first prohibits access to a sensitive HR application while the second only allows access to the designated application and prevents Internet browsing.

VDI cannot guarantee data security – employees can perform malicious acts such as taking pictures of their screens. But VDI does enable IT to piece together the big picture with a forensic approach determining when the user was logged in, what was accessed and how long it was on the screen.

IT Staff Resources

Attempting to tighten down the physical desktop environment is not only costly, but can create user satisfaction and productivity issues as well. VDI eliminates the need for desktop upgrades while slashing administrative and troubleshooting requirements. IT has more resources to devote to security as well as to integrating vDTs into an overall IT-as-a-Service strategy for making their organizations more innovative, efficient and competitive.

 

Huge thanks to Mike Foley (@mikefoley) of RSA and to Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) of VMware for their assistance with this article. Please see some of Foley's direct thoughts on this topic below.

 

See Also:

Securing Virtual Desktops. 02/09/2012. Mike Foley. The Cloudcast

Virtual Desktops and Security – Leverage, Control, Enable. 01/27/2012. Mike Foley. – I’m Tellin’ Ya Now!

Why BYOD Isn’t a Trend. 12/05/11. David Strom. ReadWrite Enterprise

How VDI Can Make Your Desktop Security Worse. 04/24/2010. Brian Madden. – SearchVirtualDesktop

 

Dell's acquision of Wyse marks the end of an era

Dell’s acquisition of Wyse indicates that server-based computing has transitioned from a niche market primarily around application delivery to a mainstream industry building on virtualization’s overwhelming success.

Citrix created the hosted desktop category which it called thin-client server computing, starting with the O/S2-based WinView and followed by its break-out product, the NT 3.51-based WinFrame which debuted in 1995. But by the time Citrix held the first Thinergy user conference in 1998, Wyse had been selling its Windows terminals for nearly four years. Wyse Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Jeff McNaught, and current Wyse CEO, Tarken Maner, co-invented the Windows Terminal to work exclusively with Citrix back in 1994.

Through the 1990s, the number of thin-client hardware manufactures continued to proliferate and rather than risk confusion, Citrix renamed the hosted desktop category “server-based computing” (SBC). IBM briefly joined the fray of thin-client manufactures, but most were small specialty players. Wyse continued to dominate the industry segment it created, and also promoted the SBC category as a whole with catchy slogans and educative materials.  All of the leading Citrix channel partners I knew in the late 1990s to mid-2000s were also Wyse partners.

My firm began selling Wyse WinTerms in 1995, but I’d never made the pilgrimage to the San Jose headquarters until 1998. Wyse was still quite small at that point, and I met with the CEO who was impressed that we had a business of 40 employees focused on implementing Citrix server-based computing. Shortly after the visit, we closed the largest Wyse deal in the world up until that point – 1,800 WinTerms for ABM Industries.

SBC and the associated thin-client business continued to grow over the next several years, but it wasn’t until VMware’s introduction of VDI in 2006 that the hosted desktop model began to go mainstream. IT decision-makers previously wary of implementing an enterprise desktop replacement with XenApp/TS were more willing to consider entending their virtual server success to the desktop.

Virtual desktops no longer required a device OS, and Pano Logic introduced the first zero-client device in 2007, followed by Wyse among other specialty manufacturers. The last few years have seen the giant Korean manufactures, Samsung and LG, come into the business with low-cost monitors integrated with PCoIP zero-clients. 

Dell’s acquisition of Wyse likely reflects the decline in PC sales along with its expectation playing a leading role in the rapidly growing virtual desktop industry despite its PC roots. My guess is that Cisco will eventually discontinue its OEM relationship with Wyse/Dell and begin manufacturing its own zero-client devices as part of VXI.

Wyse still leads the virtual desktop device market with sales of $375 million last year, followed closely by HP – although HP does not make its own zero-client units. Wyse’s remarkable 18-year leadership run is unlikely to be repeated by another small company. We’ll undoubtedly see the virtualization/cloud device future shaped primarily by giant manufactures such as Dell, Cisco, HP, Samsung and LG. While it may be a bit sad to witness the end of an era, the industry will grow more rapidly and broadly as a result.

 

Virtual Desktops are the gateway to cloud computing

Virtual desktops (vDTs) are not typically perceived as harbingers of Cloud Computing. For one thing, Microsoft makes it challenging for Cloud providers to host them. And cloud computing frameworks generally do not include virtual desktops – even VMware vCloud Director lacks integration with VMware View. Nonetheless, virtual desktop deployments are increasingly acting as gateways to cloud computing.

Virtual Desktops are Already Cloud-Like

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides five characteristics of cloud computing:

• On-demand self-service
• Broad network access
• Resource pooling
• Rapid elasticity
• Measured service

Virtual desktops may not yet be provisioned via self-service, but they certainly can be deployed rapidly and on demand from resource pools. And while most cloud monitoring tools such as VMware Chargeback do not specifically address vDTs, relatively easy modifications should enable this capability.

Transitioning from physical to virtual desktops already entails an IT staff shift to a cloud-like mindset. Centralized vDT administration enables improved security and regulatory compliance without encrypting data on local devices. The vDTs are more easily managed and can be replicated off-site for disaster recovery purposes.

Virtual desktops also introduce users to the idea of accessing compute resources from a remote pool and the benefits that this cloud attribute enables. They now can run their applications and access their data from nearly any device at any location with network or Internet connectivity. Downtime due to hardware maintenance or troubleshooting issues is significantly reduced or eliminated altogether. New employees can receive their virtual desktops instantly rather than wait days or weeks for the physical versions to be requisitioned, delivered and deployed.

VMware’s expanded perception of the desktop contributes to a VDI-driven cloud experience. VMware maintains that the desktop should extend to the cloud, and considers the traditional Windows-based desktop as “legacy”. Under the VMware scenario, IT provides users with secure and high quality consumption of both cloud and Windows applications.

Consolidation of Remote Office Infrastructures

Remote offices may have their own servers, back-ups and UPS devices that do not easily integrate into cloud computing frameworks. But VDI often enables consolidating the remote office servers and supporting infrastructures back to the data center as part of the virtual architecture. A potential side benefit is the alleviation of the “step children” syndrome since the remote offices no longer must make due with hand-me-down equipment, inadequate disaster recovery plans and limited IT support.

VDI is Hot

A surprisingly high number of organizations are piloting or considering VDI. Some cloud-savvy partners (I like the term “cloud integrators”) use virtual desktop inquiries as door-openers to discuss cloud computing. While they can emphasise obvious cloud benefits such as financial savings, faster time-to-market and scalability, the most important advantage may be slashing the time sink of infrastructure planning, administration and troubleshooting. The IT staff can instead work with technology to make their organizations more innovative, efficient and competitive.  

Implementing virtual desktops on an enterprise scale enables similar time-saving benefits for the desktop IT team. Cloud integrators can mesh the two technologies in one conversational thread, potentially leveraging the initial VDI discussion to result in a cloud computing implementation.

 

Mark Vaughn (@mvaughn25) of Presidio contributed to this post.

Microsoft makes it challenging for cloud providers to host virtual desktops

Microsoft has both licensing and multi-tenancy restrictions that make hosting virtual desktops a cumbersome and potentially costly service for cloud providers to offer. Fortunately, a couple of work-arounds that can help ease the pain.

No SPLA for VDI in the Cloud

Microsoft hosting providers typically sign up for the SPLA program (Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement), but SPLA is not available for virtual desktops. Cloud providers consequently have two choices: they can either pay the annual $100 VDA license for their customers and hold the licensing for them, or customers can transfer their VDA licenses to the designated cloud provider. VDA is not required in the event that the customer is both running Microsoft Subscription Advantage and utilizes a Windows-based machine to access the virtual desktop.

In order to get around the onerous VDA licensing requirements, cloud providers can potentially utilize Windows Server OS as the client OS. Leostream takes this approach by leveraging the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 licensing agreement with Amazon to provide customers with Windows Servers that can be utilized as desktops.

No Multi-Tenancy for VDI in the Cloud

Micrsoft licensing prohibits two customers from sharing the same server resources when accessing hosted virtual desktops; cloud providers must dedicate a server for each individual VDI customer. This policy actually represents a huge concession on the part of Microsoft who, up until a few months ago, did not even permit shared storage. Still, the loss of server multi-tenancy can disrupt the cloud providers’ hosting models.

The multitenancy restriction can be overcome by purchasing very low-end, inexpensive servers and pulling them in and out of resource pools as required – but never having more than one customer on a given server. An automated ability both to monitor server usage and move the physical hosts in and out of resource pools as appropriate makes this cloud model more tenable.

SPLA for Microsoft Office

Cloud providers can offer Microsoft Office via SPLA at a cost which is reputed to be around $10/user per month (as a comparison, Office 360 starts at around $6.33/user per month). Without SPLA, cloud providers can still offer Microsoft Office on a purchase basis: either customers transfer their licenses to the cloud provider, or the cloud provider purchases the license on behalf of the customers.

How Does OnLive Do It?

OnLive recently introduced a free Microsoft Office application for the iPad including 2GB of storage which reportedly quickly jumped to the number one ranked free iPad application. The cost goes up to $9.99 per month for 50GB storage. Given that the cost for a VDA license alone from Microsoft is $100/year, and when factoring in the multi-tenancy restrictions, I am perplexed as to how OnLive (and another provider, CloudOn, with a similar offering) can do it.

Gabe Knuth speculates on BrianMadden.com that OnLive may be using dedicated hardware. It could, for example use many individual blade servers that then host only one OnLive desktop session at a time. But even in this case, both Windows and MS Office licensing is still required. I am baffled.

 

See Also:

Understanding more about Desktop Virtualisation–VDI and RHSD and how to license it. 02/12/12. David Overeton. davidoverton.com

OnLive’s train wreck: Office on the iPad. 02/07/12. Galen Gruman. InfoWorld

OnLive loose ends: Are they using VMware?  Dedicated Hardware?  Custom Licensing? Plus, are they on Microsoft’s Acquisition Radar?  02/03/12. Gabe Knuth. BrianMadden.com

Are single user Terminal Server VMs running on Windows Datacenter a loophole for VDI without SA? 11/07/11. Brian Madden. BrianMadden.com

Microsoft Virtual Desktop Licensing Guide. July 2011. SearchVirtualDesktop.com

Microsoft Desktop Virtualization: Frequently Asked Questions. March 2011. Microsoft Web Site

Why Microsoft Hates VDI. 03/02/11. Brian Madden. Brianmadden.com

 

Overcoming the Obstacles to Cloud Computing

While cloud computing has garnered exceptional mindshare – even outside of IT, most organizations are unprepared to adopt it on an enterprise scale. They first must overcome technology, organizational and process hurdles.

Barriers to Cloud

Cloud utilizes virtualization as its underpinning technology, but most organizations get stuck along the virtualization journey – typically somewhere around the halfway virtualized server mark, thereby making enterprise cloud adoption unrealistic.

Of course, cloud is much more than just adding specialized products such as VMware vCloud Director and vCenter Chargeback to a virtualized environment. Cloud, also known as IT-as-a-Service, encompasses multitenancy, auto-provisioning and a cost model based upon resource consumption. A services catalogue should enable users to automatically provision the infrastructure required for their applications – including the appropriate performance and security attributes. Continuous monitoring and appropriate governance are essential cloud components along with a chargeback or showback system in order to encourage efficient utilization. 

Despite the appeal, and perhaps inevitability of cloud computing, most IT organizations are not in a position to embrace the technology because they continue to be mired in the vestiges of physical data centers. Backup and archival processes, for example, utilize agent-based solutions rather than superior array-based alternatives. Firewall and intrusion detection appliances built for the physical world do not perform well in a dynamic virtual environment with migrating VMs. Disaster recovery utilizes manual tape transfers. Change management processes don’t address virtualization induced issues such as VMsprawl. Applications are still purchased and developed utilizing legacy architectures resulting in an inability to support cloud bursting, horizontal load-balancing and active/active data centers. 

Insufficient funding is a glaring obstacle to cloud computing. Legacy departmental budgeting models continue to drive myopic purchases of equipment and software even as IT infrastructure shifts to shared virtualized resource pools. Departments used to purchasing their own equipment are often reluctant to fund shared cloud initiatives out of their budgets. 

Traditional IT organizations, particularly larger ones, commonly are comprised of silos such as Windows, database, storage, networking and server teams. They may report up to different managers and operate their domains in relative isolation. Server administrators are unconcerned with network switch configuration. Storage administrators dole out LUNs as they see fit. The network team controls all traffic. New technology initiatives must be pushed by the championing department to all the various silos for approval consensus. This stovepipe IT model is not conducive to cloud computing where interdependencies demand constant and effective collaboration. 

Successfully Adopting a Cloud Computing Mindset 

Embracing cloud computing requires a new mindset enabling IT organization transformation. Here are five recommendations: 

1)      Establish a single entity or small group of architects that are well versed in all key data center operations including virtualization, Microsoft applications, Linux, storage, compute, network, desktop and voice. All technology should roll up to this person or group who has the top level responsibility for making quick decisions.

2)      Change the funding model to reflect IT-as-a-Service with an aggregated budgeting process. Ease the initial investment requirements by utilizing leasing programs or public cloud providers, thereby enabling a positive cash flow from the start.

3)      Address the edge environments and technologies that eventually should become part of a cloud architecture. Remote office server infrastructure and desktops can often be consolidated through a virtual desktop initiative. PBX voice can move to IP telephony enabling incorporation as virtual machines.

4)      Complete the virtualization journey to implement ITaaS. This entails scrutinizing legacy equipment, tools and processes to ensure adequate cloud support. Evaluate tools and products based upon best fit for the designated architecture. Implement processes supporting the new demands for security, performance, compliance, recovery and availability.

5)      Approach application purchase and development as a Platform-as-a-Service to enable enterprise software decisions consistent with overall cloud architecture. Newer SOA/SOAP/RESTful (aka Web 2.0) application architectures, for example, scale and virtualize much better, are readily supported as VMs, can run seamlessly in the cloud and better enable active/active data centers. 

Cloud Integrators

The former reseller niche of Solutions Integrator is morphing into the newly designated role of “Cloud Integrator”. A competent Cloud Integrator can help transition to the cloud era by implementing a private cloud infrastructure that is both flexible and agile and which seamlessly integrates to appropriate public cloud providers whether SaaS, PaaS or full-blown IaaS. 

Cloud integrators can also assist with tasks such as operational readiness assessments that identify the key infrastructure processes requiring revision in order to support cloud. They can help with architecture design as well as with selecting the optimal tools and products for achieving enterprise objectives. 

See Also:                                                                                                                                                                  . VAR Point of View: How I Became a Cloud Integrator. 03/07/12. Steven Burke. CRN

 

Chris Reed @Creedom2020, Jeremy Oakey and Mark Vaughn @mvaughn25 of Presidio all contributed to this article.

 

BYOD as part of a Desktop-as-a-Service Strategy

BYOD increases productivity. At least that’s a common justification for acquiescing to employee demands that they be allowed to use their personal devices in the workplace. But while working with familiar computing devices may make individuals more productive, the resulting lack of device and data respository standardization can mean productivity reduction on an organizational level. Fortunately, just as server virtualization has helped unify data center computing, so can desktop virtualization – when implemented as a desktop-as-a-service strategy, mitigate the BYOD computing inefficiencies.

BYOD

Bring Your Own Device continues to build momentum. According to a July 2011 Forester Research, Inc. report, a BYOD policy is already in place for nearly 60% of companies. Without a counteracting plan in place, the resulting lack of standardization must equate to increased IT support costs. And issues often arise from a lack of clear delineation of responsibilities between the organization and users.

Does the employer, for example, have the right to remote wipe the device? Does IT provide support for personal, but potentially work-related applications? Who bears the cost for maintenance, connectivity and upgrades? And what obligations do employees have in terms of conforming with organizational security policies and regulatory requirements?

A more insidious byproduct of BYOD is an aggregate decline in productivity as not only the number and variety of devices proliferate, but also the number of applications and associated data respositories. While some organizational information is likely to be stored on the devices themselves, some also ends up in cloud-based services such as Google Docs,  iCloud or DropBox. The ability for employees to work efficiently is consequently limited by lack of easy and secure access to the information they require.

IT-as-a-Service

Disjointed  organizational computing  is, of course, nothing new. The traditional data center is generally composed of a hodgepodge of equipment and applications purchased over the years based upon individual departmental projects and associated budgets. The resulting “technology islands” data center model is both expensive and difficult to operate. It is rather comical to remember that Gartner’s number one energy saving recommendation at its 2007 Data Center Conference, prior to the proliferation of data center virtualization, was to turn off servers that appear idle and see if anyone complains.

Virtual servers on their own engender significant savings and benefits, but the greater promise is to utilize virtualization as a platform for transforming the data center into a unified and dynamic environment with common pools of compute, storage and network. This computing model, known as private cloud or IT-as-a-Service, automatically provisions not only servers, but also the storage, network and security components based upon application requirements. Entirely new product categories have arisen to assist in this transformation including cloud frameworks (VMware vCloud Director, OpenStack), cloud orchestration tools (such as ones from CA Technologies, BNC, Cisco), and integrated computing stacks (VCE Vblocks, NetApp FlexPods, HP CloudSystem Matrix, etc.).

Desktops-as-a-Service

Virtual desktops, like their server counterparts, enable significant organizational benefits. They sit securely in the data center where they are always backed up, managed, and replicated off-site for DR/BC purposes. Users can access their desktop from any device, anywhere at any time – as long as IT gives them permission to do so. Access can immediately be discontinued, for example, for a terminated employee or contractor. The requirement for separate help desk, configuration and support staff is often reduced or even eliminated.

While desktop virtualization is a terrific solution for internally hosted Windows machines (what VMware refers to as “legacy desktops”), it doesn’t address the touch interface capabilities of most smartphones and tablets. To meet user expectations along these lines, the desktop concept increasingly must extend to the cloud with redesigned cloud based applications, SaaS applications, etc.

As with virtual servers, virtual desktops have the greatest potential for transformation when integrated as part of the overall ITaaS architecture. Thinking in terms of desktop-as-a-service helps delineate the new role of desktops as just another set of virtual machines, yet recognize the unique aspects of those VMs as well as of the necessity for incorporating the Web. New products from VMware (Horizon, AppBlast, Octopus) and others provide this capability. IT can consequently allow employee-owned devices while retaining control of environmental variables important to the organization.

Aligning IT with Business

One of the long-standing complaints about Corporate IT has been a lack of adequate customer service – often attributed to a misalignment with the business. But when looking at the hardware and systems mishmash of the traditional data center, it is easy to see why 70% of the typical IT budget goes just to keep the lights on. This hasn’t left much over for innovation or creative customer care.

Fortunately for the status quo, there hasn’t been any competition. Today the cloud offers plenty of alternatives to users frustrated by an IT organization not nimble enough to quickly meet their requirements. I read a statistic a few months ago that claimed over half of the virtual machines hosted on Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud provider, are now purchased via credit card directly by business units – bypassing IT entirely.

BYOD is another threat to traditional IT. But rather than fight the inevitable, IT should embrace BYOD by incorporating a DTaaS strategy. Instead of spending their time on hardware-based tasks such as upgrades, patching and troubleshooting, the IT staff can  take a step back and approach desktops strategically. They can define what the nature of the organizational desktop should be in terms of local and cloud-based applications, storage, backup, collaboration capabilities, etc. They can enable solutions that make sense not just for individual productivity, but for overall organizational efficiency, security and compliance.

 

See Also:

BYOD: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet. 12/29/2011. Galen Gruman. – CIO

Consumer Devices are Coming: People, Get Ready. 12/15/2011. Matthew Stibbe. – BCW

BYOD: Bring Your Own Disaster. 12/14/2011. Joe Onisick. – Network Computing

Developing a BYOD and Mobile IT Strategy. 12/13/2011. Jim Lynch. – Techsoup.org

BYOD and IT: The Tail Wagging the Dog? 12/09/11. Chris Hopen . – TechNewsWorld

Why BYOD Isn’t a Trend. 12/05/11. David Strom. ReadWrite Enterprise 

After BYOD, What's Next? It's the Apps, Stupid. 10/30/2011. Eric Lai. – Forbes.com

Go Ahead, Bring Your Own Device to Work. 10/10/2011. – AT&T Web Site

Cisco Connected World Technology Report. 2011. – Cisco Web Site.

 

 

When it comes to virtualization, do organizations really care about “green”?

The annual Educause conference is the “must attend” event for higher education IT. Link Alander, Associate Vice Chancellor Technology Services for Lone Star College System, presented an Educause conference session in Philadelphia last month titled, “The Lean and Green by Design”.  Despite Lone Star’s widespread reputation for IT innovation and despite Link’s celebrity (he filled a huge lecture hall to standing room only the previous month at VMworld), the session was lightly attended. This didn’t surprise me. After years of pushing the green benefits of virtualization, I long ago realized that it’s not much of a driver for IT decision-makers.

Virtualization and Global Warming

My efforts to promote virtualization as a “green” enabler shifted into high gear after hearing Al Gore speak at the first annual Climate Protection Summit in San Francisco. The self-proclaimed “former next president of the United States” made a strong case for the danger that global warming represented to the planet. Since data centers are the number one consumers of electricity in the country, I sniffed an opportunity to help shed awareness on the issue while boosting virtualization sales at the same time.

I wrote an article for SearchServer Virtualization titled, “A Convenient Truth: Virtualization’s eco-advantages”.  I followed this up with a comic book titled, “VirtualMan Powers Down” (1.87 MB).

We held a series of “green” seminars in conjunction with PG&E. We even came up with T-shirts encouraging clients to “Join the Fight against Global Warming”. But we consistently had trouble getting many IT personnel to show up at our events…the “green” that they care about saving is a very different shade from the environmentalist version.

 

PG&E Virtualization Rebates

In 2005, I approached PG&E about giving rebates to organizations that virtualized their servers. I worked with the utility to set up a program that eventually included desktops as well and which later was adopted in various forms by other utilities across the country. Ironically, the first organization to actually receive a utility check for virtualization was our client, 1*800*Radiator. As the CIO said when he spoke at one of our seminars, “Steve gave me a global warming T-shirt and I was thinking, what the heck is this for?  We’re a radiator company. We like global warming!”

A footnote on the PG&E rebate initiative: I’ve made it a policy during my entire career to freely share my knowledge with others – both inside and outside of the organization. When I wrote my first book on Citrix MetaFrame in 1999, I took some heat from our staff who felt that I was giving away our secrets to our competitors. But I believe that sharing knowledge is good for the industry, good for the organization and good for the individual. It raises the bar and challenges us to come up with more innovative ideas.

My one glaring exception to this policy, though, came about with the virtualization rebates. I felt that this program represented a true competitive advantage and other than discussing with a couple of our VMware reps who were sworn to secrecy, I tried to keep it quiet. But PG&E called VMware directly and at VMworld 2006, VMware CEO Diane Green brought the PG&E CEO on stage to announce the rebate program to the world. I realized that I had missed a potential opportunity for publicity and fanfare by trying to be petty with information sharing.

The Real Power of Power Savings

While I’m convinced that green initiatives and even the modest utility incentives are negligible drivers when it comes to virtualization, power savings in general can absolutely make a difference.

For example, one of INX’s clients, Concentra, spoke at this year’s VMworld about the challenging situation they faced. The organization had 40 VMs with which they were thrilled, but still had around 350 physical servers remaining. The physical machines were consuming so much power that a data center upgrade would soon have been required. Concentra was renting a back-up generator for $6,700 per month, and they’d already had an A/C unit fail. Yet the most monies the IT staff could typically get from Finance were $10,000 or $20,000 at a time for more memory, licensing, storage or maybe a new ESX host.

We assisted Concentra with an ROI analysis, but since the firm rarely upgraded servers, the normal dominant hardware refresh savings were not available to help IT make their case. The CIO realized, however, that the cost reduction resulting from slashing power usage alone would justify the virtualization initiative. This economic advantage was further augmented by selecting Cisco UCS as the virtualization platform which not only minimized power consumption, but which also provided a higher density of virtual machines.

IT put together a presentation for senior management and, after years of struggling to obtain monies for virtualization, received a quick go-ahead for a 7-figure project to virtualize the entire data center and begin moving to a private cloud.

The Why of VDI - use cases

My recent post, The Why of VDI, discusses the importance of taking a why-how-what hierarchical approach to enabling a successful virtual desktop initiative. But what are the use cases where an organization should even consider virtual desktops at all?

Legacy Desktops

Managing, securing and maintaining legacy desktops is frequently, well, a pain in the butt. Updates, patches and malware scans all take time and can be tedious even when utilizing sophisticated desktop management products. PCs and laptops may also require CPU and memory upgrades in order to run new versions of Windows or applications and to accommodate ever growing resource demands. Eventually, Windows Rot tends to become an issue where desktops start slowing down as toolbars and other miscellaneous software items are installed. Other pain points include users inadvertently deleting files or corrupting data.  The list goes on.

 

                      Traditional (Physical) End-User Computing

 

VDI

VDI decouples the desktop experience from the physical hardware.  It can be deployed either as a 1 to 1 persistant virtual desktop or, much more commonly, as a non-persistent virtual machine. Non-persistent VMs include the individual constructs of stateful persona and application layered on top of a stateless desktop operating system. In other words persona (profile, application settings, and personalization) and applications (virtualized streaming, virtualized presentation based, and fat) are held in database-driven systems to be layered upon a desktop and is generated upon log in. The desktop returns to the original vanilla configuration after logoff, wiping out any malware or undesired user changes.  

A virtual desktop architecture is an administrator’s dream – providing increased  control, dependability, and security when compared to traditional desktops. Now the entire company can be updated, for example, from Office 2003 to Office 2010 without upgrading or even touching any individual desktops. Indeed, both Office application versions can be accessed simultaneously for a period of time if desired. Entire remote offices can be set up in an hour with just some zero client devices and an Internet connection. If running non-persistent VMs, users can get a pristine desktop every time they log on, with a number of options for preserving their persona between sessions.

 
                                               Virtual End-User Computing

 

VDI Use Cases

My Why of VDI white paper discusses the importance of defining the objectives for a virtual desktop initiative as well as drilling down a bit into the technology and architecture. The following list provides some of the more common use cases driving VDI deployments:

• VDI is hot: This may be the #1 driver. Organizations are looking into virtual desktops because everyone else seems to be doing it.
• Security: Just having all the organization’s data secure in the data center will make ISOs sleep better at night. But virtual desktop security can provide many other advantages as well – if the environment is architected properly. Examples include data security – including IT theft and information privacy issues, malware prevention, and even discontinuing IT system access by ex-employees.
• Scalability: Virtual desktops are vastly easier & faster to scale up or down as required.
• Better Service Delivery Model: Rather than managing and deploying myriad desktop images onto disparate hardware, VDI lets administrators focus on application delivery, user experience and productivity. Upgrading to Windows 7, for example, can rapidly be accomplished organization-wide even on very old PCs. Virtual desktops eliminate the requirement to deal with myriad desktop images as well as with the unique and co-dependent nature of every application and profile to each image.
• Centralized Management: Even the best physical desktop push-down management solutions are more difficult to administer than a properly designed and deployed VDI environment. Virtual desktops enable end-user self provisioning and expendable operating systems which typically reduces calls to the help desk. Similarly, reduced configuration complexity allows help desk to assist with user productivity. 
• Facilitating IT Governance: Centralized control makes it much easier for management to set and enforce organizational standards and to align desktop computing with overall business objectives.
• Regulatory Compliance: Innovative VDI solutions such as location-aware desktops can help achieve HIPAA and other regulatory compliance.
• Software  License Management & Compliance: The benefits of centralized management as well as VDI ecosystem players such as AppSense can not only help organizations comply with software licensing, but in some cases lower the cost while also providing a secure application environment.
• Fits Better with Cloud Objectives: The on-demand provisioning nature of VDI is already cloud-like. Increasing integration of virtual desktops into cloud platforms (i.e. VMware View into vCloud Director) further enhances their appeal.
• Disaster Recovery: Organizations ignore the desktop component of DR/BC plans at their peril; physical desktops configured with the client-server software required to access failed-over data centers may themselves be unaccessible in the event of a disaster. VDI enables virtual desktop replication to DR facilities along with virtual servers. As long as users can get to a browser, they can access their desktops, applications and data. Architected correctly, VDI only necessitates replicating the application delivery, user persona and Golden Image which can then spawn new desktops.
• Workforce Mobility: Capabilities include remote access, follow-me desktops, location-aware virtual desktops, etc. Even traveling employees without Internet access can continue working utilizing capabilities such as VMware View Client with Local Mode which streams the encrypted virtual desktop down to a laptop, synchronizing back to the data center VM upon log-in.
• User Productivity / Employee Empowerment: Among other advantages, employees obtain ubiquitous access, workspace flexibility and decreased downtime.
• BYOD: VDI helps facilitate the exploding trend of consumerization by abstracting the corporate desktop from the user-owned device. Employees and contractors gain secure access to their applications and data without concern for the underlying OS. PCs, Macs, iPads, Android devices all can access the organization desktop.
• Remote Office Computing: It is often possible to run virtual desktops at smaller remote offices, consolidating their network infrastructures back to running as virtual machines in the data center – thereby enabling cost savings, high availability, disaster recovery and an increased level of user support. Bringing user sessions close to the server data can also enhance performance in some situations. Connectivity redundancy can be inexpensively achieved in many cases by utilizing an MPLS network as the primary WAN with inexpensive Internet connectivity as a back-up.
• Green Initiatives: Replacing PCs with thin-clients or zero-clients and eliminating network infrastructure at remote offices can significantly reduce power consumption.
• Acquisition Assimilation: Acquired organizations can quickly plug into the new parent’s information system simply by accessing the corporate virtual desktop.
• Converged Desktop Facilitation: Cisco, for example, produces zero-client devices including asics that will enable voice flow optimization. Users can attach the devices to their phones and plug in their monitors, keyboards and mousepads thereby utilizing one device as the virtual desktop, phone, video and eventually telepresence terminal all running as a VM  in the data center.
• Reduced Cost: This includes desktop support, management costs, endpoint hardware, software licensing (in some cases), remote office infrastructures and energy costs.

Employee Empowerment

One of the overarching benefits of a virtual desktop environment is the ability for employees to feel more empowered in their jobs. Users have less downtime, no longer need be concerned with aging desktops and can get their work done anywhere from any device. Remote office workers no longer feel like second class citizens receiving hand-me down servers and having less access to the organization’s IT staff. The desktop teams are freed up to engage in more advanced and beneficial organizational projects, thereby elevating overall job satisfaction while potentially enabling technological and process innovation.

 

Author Note

Morgan Hamilton of INX was a major contributor to this article. Mark Vaughn and David Jolley of INX both contributed/reviewed.

See also:

The Client Virtualization Imperative. 09/11. Forrester white paper.

 

 

The Continuing Evolution of Man

Thanks to Matthew Riley of INX for the idea

The Why of VDI

If you don't know where you're going, you will wind up somewhere else."
      - Yogi Berra

Despite the huge industry fervor around VDI, virtualizing desktops is much more challenging than virtualizing data centers and encompasses both technical hurdles and a less apparent ROI. Also factoring in are hundreds or thousands of users with differing expectations and perceptions. Yet, the most common question I get from organizations considering a virtual desktop deployment is whether to use VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop. Some even kick off their VDI efforts with a Proof-of-Concept comparing the two connection brokers side by side. Taking a product-centric approach to VDI, however, is likely to create unnecessary difficulties and can potentially result in project stall or outright failure.

The Why of VDI: Objectives

Approaching VDI on a strategic level is necessary for a successful enterprise deployment. The reasons for virtualizing desktops in the first place need to be identified and, where appropriate, quantified. This includes evaluation of the anticipated impact that virtual desktops will have on both business and IT objectives as well as the part they will play in the overall enterprise desktop strategy and in the data center virtualization/ITaaS plans. The architecture to best enable achievement of the prioritized objectives can then be designed. At this point, individual product choices will often be self-evident. When they are not, product comparisons and TCO studies can be performed, but always within the context of optimizing the desired architecture.

The versatility, agility and scalability of virtual desktops enable use cases that in many cases exceed what is practical in a physical desktop environment. That being said, common reasons for implementing VDI include: management, security, disaster recovery, workforce mobility/user productivity, contractors, BYOPC initiatives, green initiatives, remote office computing, acquisition assimilation, voice and video convergence, and reduced costs.

The How of VDI: Architecture

We ideally want to design a virtual desktop architecture that will optimally support the organization’s objectives for  virtual desktops as well as factor in existing environmental variables, staffing capabilities and budget. Paramount to the type of architecture requried  is the scope of the initiative along with requirements around availability, redundancy, security and performance. And rather than limiting preparations to a virtual desktop, embracing the concept of an “enterprise desktop” can incorporate physical or hybrid situations as appropriate.

A detailed assessment of the existing desktop and data center environments should include not only tools that identify desktops, applications, resource utilization and usage patterns, but also interviews with different user groups and IT personnel. Among other components, the information collected should encompass applications, user categories, use cases, data center environment, PC/Laptop environment, remote office components and management structure.

After gathering the infrastructure and user information, the environment can then be designed including elements such as scope, management/security, storage, network, compute, persistent vs. nonpersistent desktops, application delivery, availability, scalability, client devices, etc.

The What of VDI: Products

 

Comparing and contrasting product attributes, features and costs in isolation can lead to conclusions unsupportive of the ultimate architecture and organizational objectives. Products need to be mapped to their ability to support the desired architecture not only in isolation, but with some indication of their interfaces and interactions with each other as well as with appropriate infrastructure functionality outside the scope of the proposed VDI environment. These mappings can include attributes such as staff familiarity, integration with the management platform, compatibility with the planned security construct, etc. The following table shows some of the variables requiring consideration for effective product selection.

 

IOPs & other storage requirements	User acceptance of change	Existing computing devices
Capacity requirements	Unified communications	Tablets, Smart Phones
Management	Data center  integration	User experience
User personalization	Bandwidth	User perceptions
App requirements	Use cases	BYOPC initiative
App categorization	User categorization	Contractor requirements
Graphic load	Security requirements	Acquisition requirements
App virtualization	Compliance requirements	Remote access requirements
App delivery	Disaster recovery requirements	Budget limitations
App performance	Availability /Redundancy	Off-line usage

 

Avoiding VDI Stall

Determining the objectives behind a virtual desktop initiative adds clarity, achieves funding and provides guidelines for architecture design. Requirements or SLAs around performance, security, availability, regulatory compliance, user productivity, etc. will, in many cases, dictate which products best support the optimal architecture for achieving the desired objectives. This enables far better decisions and, ultimately, a much higher probability of project success.

 

Author Note

This post is composed of edited excerpts from my recent white paper, The Why of VDI.

 

See Also:

• The History of VDI. 06/27/2011. Vittorio Viarengo. Virtualization Journey
• Adopting IT-as-a-Service Mindset to Overcome Virtual Stall. June 2011. INX white paper.
• Brian Madden’s State of the Desktop Virtualization Industry. 05/27/2011. BrianMadden.com
• Top 5 Obstacles to Wider VDI Adoption. 05/04/2011. David Marshall. InfoWorld
• Five Nines Availability for VDI: No Way. 04/09/2010. Steve Chambers. ViewYonder.
• The Desktops May be Virtual, but the ROI is Real. 06/27/2009. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell

 

 

 

Desktop-as-a-Service as a Subset of IT-as-a-Service

IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) as a concept is well defined with many players and products in the space such as VMware vCloud Director, Cisco Intelligent Automation, CA AppLogic, VCE Vblock, etc. Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), on the other hand, tends to invoke thoughts of a cloud provider offering hosted Windows desktops. But when approached as a subset of ITaaS, DaaS enables greater synergy, efficiency and agility.

Just another Set of Workloads

Given traditional isolation of physical desktops from the rest of the data center, organizations naturally tend to treat virtual desktops as a silo as well. This tendency is reinforced by the scarcity of current solutions integrating desktops as part of private clouds. Even VMware View is not yet integrated into VMware vCloud Director. But when you think about it, virtual desktops already have some cloud-like properties such as the consolidation of resources into centralized pools and the ability to provision many non-persistent desktops on the fly.

And while virtual desktops certainly have different requirements than virtual servers around performance, security and reliability – at the end of the day, they’re just another set of workloads. It makes economic sense to leverage, where reasonable, the same back-end infrastructure management console, tools, processes and IT staff expertise from the server to the desktop.

The concept of DaaS extends beyond internally hosting Microsoft applications and extends to the cloud. An IT administrator, for example, may decide it makes more sense for the organization to host its Exchange server with a trusted public cloud provider. Or perhaps it is preferable to move away from Microsoft all together and use an Exchange compatible cloud-based solution such as VMware Zimbra, or possibly one offering a different look and feel such as Gmail. A desktop is, after all, just a means for accessing applications.

Poor IT Reputation for Customer Service

IT has generally not had the best reputation for customer service. But to be fair, it has been saddled with the huge inefficiencies, rigidity and high costs of a traditional physical data center. Studies show that 70% of the typical IT budget goes to just keeping the lights on. This doesn’t leave a lot left over for innovation or for creative customer care.

Until fairly recently, IT hasn’t really had any competition. Now, however, there is the cloud. User desires are no longer necessarily stymied by IT constraints. I recently read a statistic claiming that over half of the virtual machines on Amazon Web Services are now purchased via credit card directly by business units – bypassing IT. Of course, IT is still responsible for the security, integrity, and regulatory compliance of the organization’s servers and desktops wherever they are located. The cloud, unmanaged, poses a true threat to that mission.

By embracing both ITaaS and DaaS as a subset, IT introduces extensive automation and efficiencies enabling a much higher level of customer service. An accompanying reduction in cost allows IT to compete more effectively from a pricing standpoint with external public cloud providers. Utilizing a portal to monitor workloads wherever they may be hosted facilitates IT’s ability to embrace the best of private and public cloud platforms while maintaining a large measure of control.

A New Era of IT Productivity

Reducing the need to spend so much time babysitting equipment and performing mundane repetitive tasks enables the IT staff to instead focus their talents on using technology to achieve organizational business objectives such as increasing top-line revenues, acquiring more customers and enabling more customer stickiness. Not only does this benefit the organization, but it also is good for the IT staff. For one thing, the job becomes a lot more fun. The staff also acquires more valuable skills and, in the process, enhances their own career paths.

 

Why VMware Continues to Dominate Despite Hyper-V Advances

    "If I were VMware, I would be looking to lower my prices". 

         Laura DiDio, an analyst with ITIC. (Reuters, July 6, 2009).

Microsoft crushed Novell with Windows NT. It obliterated Netscape with Internet Explorer. With the release of Hyper-V a little over two years ago, financial and industry analysts sounded dire warnings that Microsoft would commoditize the hypervisor and that VMware was in danger.

Hyper-V came out of the gate rather slow, lacking capabilities such as live migration that VMware had long beforehand made standard, but the product has continued to improve. The latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure includes Microsoft in the leader quadrant, albeit well west and south of VMware which moved still further to the upper right, but analysts again are speculating that VMware’s dominance may be vulnerable. Gartner, though, points out that Microsoft’s “success has been primarily occurring among midmarket customers new to virtualization.” And even in that space, “VMware appears to be winning at least 60% of new customers”, twice as many as Microsoft. VMware shows no signs of slowing down – revenues were up 35% to $634 million last quarter alone.

The obvious question is: how does VMware continue to defy the naysayers?

The Answer to How, may be WHY

The answer, somewhat ironically, may be found in the book that Mark Templeton recommended at 2011 Citrix Summit, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Author Simon Sinek makes a compelling case that, “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it”.

Go to VMware’s Web site, and the “why” is obvious. VMware is focused on Cloud as the virtualization journey endpoint. Every page educates viewers about the latest in cloud and virtualization technologies, resources and events. VMware attracts customers who share its passion for transforming their data centers into agile and efficient computing models.

Microsoft, on the other hand, advocates a cautious approach to virtualization, “…rather than undertaking a costly revolution, you should evolve your environment in a way that preserves and extends existing investments.” It has long promoted virtualization as a feature of the operating system.

This difference in philosophy permeates Microsoft’s home page which provides plenty of information on products such as Small Business Server, Windows Intune and Office 365, but nothing on virtualization. Even clicking on the Datacenter or Desktop tabs provides no clues that Microsoft is in the virtualization space. Only the Cloud tab enables an eventual navigation to the tired-looking (it’s hardly changed since inception) virtualization home page. Whereas the messaging two years ago was almost exclusively about how Hyper-V was less expensive than vSphere, the site now challenges readers with, “How far will you take virtual?”  The gist is that one can use Hyper-V to virtualize applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Share Point Server.  Revolutionary?  Not so much.

 

    When to Use Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

    You can use Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 for the following scenarios:

• Test and Development
• Server Consolidation
• Branch Office Consolidation
• Hosted Desktop Virtualization (VDI)

        From Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Home Page

  
Organizations sharing Microsoft’s perspective may find that Hyper-V is, in many cases, good enough. But when viewed as an enterprise platform, virtualization has the potential for enabling data center transformation. The Gartner magic quadrant report says that “virtualization is an extremely strategic foundation for infrastructure modernization, improving the speed and quality of IT services, and migrating to hybrid and public cloud computing.”

Effecting this transition is not a simple task – the majority of organizations struggle with virtual stall. Most are consequently unwilling to gamble on a solution that lowers the probability of success. When it comes to data center transformation, “good enough” simply isn’t.

Why Licensing Cost is an Irrelevant Metric

VMware’s ability to increase the likelihood of successful completion of the virtualization journey makes any licensing cost delta with Hyper-V irrelevant. This doesn’t stop Microsoft from indulging in a bit of comparison including white papers, brochures, videos, charts, price-oriented case studies, a Microsoft vs. VMware Cost Comparison Calculator and the Microsoft Virtualization ROI Calculator.

These licensing comparisons are made in isolation with no consideration of the many other, and some much larger, costs of implementing virtual infrastructure. Only a small increase in VM hosting density, for example, should much more than compensate for any licensing cost delta by reducing monies required for servers, rack space, power, cooling, guest VM operating system licenses, etc. Hyper-V’s dependence on Windows puts it at a disadvantage by subjecting it to performance and scalability limitations. Its requirement for using segregated physical hosts rather than tying security to logical boundaries also can require additional hardware.

Unlike Hyper-V, vSphere offers data center stability and security that is independent from the bloat, reliability and patching issues of a general-purpose operating system. Even Redmond Magazine, “The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community” gave its 2008 Editors Choice award for the most reliable IT technology to VMware ESX (the IBM mainframe came in #2). This exceptional reliability along with capabilities such as the vDistributed Switch further increase the VMware cost advantage by enabling the virtualization of more tier-1, DMZ and regulated servers.

Enterprise Capabilities, Security and Cloud Advantages

In a recent INX white paper, I discuss the problems that result when approaching virtualization with a physical mindset. These issues become more pronounced in the enterprise space; it is not surprising that VMware particularly dominates this market given its significant lead in enterprise capabilities, management and automation tools.

As organizations increasingly embrace Cloud, security becomes a critical aspect to success. But firewalls, intrusion-detection appliances, load balancers, and VPNs designed for a physical environment don’t work well with virtual machine mobility. VMware is unique in providing virtualization-aware security delivered from the hypervisor layer. Network access to the DMZ and regulated servers is controlled on a virtual machine by virtual machine basis. Security policies can be provisioned very quickly, yet they remain in place as Virtual Machines move across hosts. VMware’s approach also eliminates the the requirement for VLAN and port mapping rules that tend to result in VLAN sprawl.

“One emerging area of success for VMware is the cloud infrastructure service provider market. Thousands of service providers are now using vSphere, and a growing number are involved in the vCloud initiative.”

                        Gartner Magic Quadrant for X86 Server Virtualization

VMware has a huge lead in providing vCloud products that enable multi-tenancy, full virtual layer 2 networking, true support for logical resource pools and much more. VMware vCloud Director is positioned to quickly become a broad-based industry platform for enabling optimized cloud among both private and public service providers.

Here’s the Beef

    “We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else”

                                Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s

It is difficult, even for an organization with the talent and resources of Microsoft, to be all things to all people. The Redmond giant has a vested interest in maintaining the large Windows-centric architecture common in most data centers. If it were true, as Microsoft insists, that “Virtualization is simply a role within Windows®,” the company would be able to better leverage its strengths as a low cost, high volume software provider.

From the beginning, VMware has bet-the-company that virtualization is not just a Windows feature but is an enterprise platform. It has a laser focus on facilitating transformation of the inefficient physical data centers of the past into more agile and responsive IT-as-a-Service models.  Attendees at Microsoft's own TechEd 2010 voted VMware vSphere as Best of Show - Virtualization. And VMworld next month in Las Vegas is expected to draw 20,000 attendees, making it one of the largest IT conferences on the planet. VMware’s “why” continues to resonate.

 

See also:

Microsoft, Citrix Join VMware at top of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. 07/05/11. Jon Brodkin, NetworkWorld.

Is Microsoft Hyper-V Keeping VMware Up at Night? 01/21/11. Kevin McLaughlin, CRN.

Virtual Stall? Virtual Schmal… (esp. Andi Mann comment). 01/20/11. Bruce Hoard. Virtualization Review

Hyper-V is Underperforming says Gartner 10/20/10. Virtualization.Info

Hyper-V Security Comes Under Scrutiny. 07/31/09. Todd R. Weiss. SearchServerVirtualization.com

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a professional services company which is also a leading VMware partner.

 

 

Why a physical mindset and virtual infrastructure don’t mix

 

Author Note

This post is composed of edited excerpts from my new white paper, Adoption an IT-as-a-Service Mindset to Overcome Virtual Stall. The term “VMstall” was coined by Andi Mann of CA Technologies.

-----

 

VMware and others talk about the virtualization journey which chronicles the lifecycle of an organization from its first forays into virtualization until it reaches the private cloud end goal where IT is provisioned as a service.  But most organizations encounter a phenomenon known as virtual stall which derails their progress along the virtualization journey – typically south of the 50% virtualization mark.

  

While there are many individual contributors to virtual stall, the Approaching an enterprise virtualization initiative from a physical mentality tends to create problems in the following areas:

Inefficient Processes: Examples include: backing up data only at the application layer, OS imaging rather than VM cloning, etc.

Less Effective Disaster Recovery: Backing up VMs onto tape and transporting to the DR facility rather than replicating them for much faster RTO/RPO.

Insufficient Funding: Departmental driven budgeting resulting in a slow and painful virtualization journey.

Misaligned IT Organizational Structures.  Failure to adjust IT organizational models to reflect the demands of a virtual data center (vDC), i.e. isolated functional specialists.

Server Huggers: Failure to implement the architecture, tools, processes & senior management directives necessary to overcome application and database owner resistance to virtualizing Tier-1 applications.

Isolated Architectural Decisions: Purchasing IT equipment and software without considering the impact upon, or interoperability with, the overall vDC objectives.

Performance: Failure to account for the increased performance demands of resource-intensive Tier-1 and mission critical servers.

Lack of IT Staff Resources: Failure to account for increased complexity and demands on the IT staff resulting from a tactical approach to the virtualization journey.

Costly Licensing: Failure to apply the substantial virtualization licensing benefits to software of manufacturers such as Microsoft and Oracle.

VMsprawl:  Failure to control the additional cost, complexity and security risk resulting from VMsprawl.

Security:  Failure to account for reduced effectiveness of pDC security appliances and policies as virtual machines migrate throughout the environment via vMotion and DRS.

Outdated Application Selection/Deployment: Continuing to develop and purchase applications utilizing legacy application architectures resulting in less effective cloud bursting, horizontal load-balancing, active/active data centers, etc.

Resolution

One easy, yet pragmatic, way to avoid getting stuck along the virtualization journey is to simply start at the endpoint of a private cloud, also known as IT-as-a-Service. An ITaaS mindset doesn’t necessarily mean an organization will go from zero to private cloud in one shot, but rather that it identifies and quantifies the private cloud benefits, and implements a solid road map to achieve them.

An ITaaS mindset forces organizations to look beyond the technology and instead evaluate the business reasons for automating the data center such as reducing time to deploy strategically important applications, increasing top line revenues, facilitating increased customer stickiness, enhancing employee productivity and enabling true business continuity in the event of a disaster. These business drivers facilitate the navigation of the political, social and technical barriers to pervasive virtualization. They help smooth the progress of the organizational and architectural changes that must take place in order to effectively transform IT to a service.

 

 

Cisco UCS shatters the data center status quo

 

The first time I saw you I said, "There's no excuse for rebellion," and you said, "There's one - if you win!" 

         Lord Yoshi Toronaga. Shogun by James Clavell 

 

Traditional data centers tend to be segregated into feudal-like server, network and storage fiefdoms operating in silos with little collaboration among them. This stovepipe model of IT has long been supported by manufacturers operating comfortably within a demarcated territory – at least until two years ago when Cisco upset the established order. The Cisco UCS unified compute, networking, storage access and virtualization into the only platform designed for optimized hosting of virtual infrastructure. While some industry analysts and competitors predicted disaster, Cisco and its partners specializing in virtualization had no doubt that UCS was going to revolutionize the data center.

This week's IDC figures have vindicated both Cisco and the concept of pervasive virtualization in general. Cisco now holds the number three spot in worldwide x86 blade server sales with a 10.5% market share. But this market share figure is misleading because UCS is pitted against all server sales. If compared strictly against servers utilized for hosting virtual infrastructure, UCS would show even greater gains.

Cisco initially approached both HP and IBM around six years ago about jointly building a compute platform that would address the performance, management and resourcing issues that were bound to arise once virtualization progressed from a point solution to become the data center standard. After being turned down by both organizations, Cisco instead embarked upon the largest development initiative in the history of the company. It funded Nuova and a team of engineers which, led by VMware co-founder and former CTO, Ed Bugnion, spent 3 years developing the UCS. 

I’ve seen situations again and again where organizations deploying UCS virtualize not only their entire data centers, but increasingly their desktops and unified communications environments as well. UCS, with its myriad innovations, instills the confidence required to commit to an enterprise virtualization/IT-as-a-Service strategy. Anything other than UCS is simply a server designed for the physical world.

See Also:

• Cisco Makes Gains in x86 Blade Server Space, IDC Says 05/25/2011. Jeffrey Burt. eWeek
• Cisco UCS Market Share - Q1 2011 05/25/2011. Jeff Allen. Jeff Said So.
• Cisco UCS: Beating the Odds 05/24/2011. Anna Sui. Cisco Web Site
• Cisco Servers? They said UCS would never succeed…  05/24/2011. Soni Jiandani. Cisco Web Site
• Cisco Finally Releases UCS Market Share Numbers  05/24/2011. Kevin Houston. Blades Made Simple™
• They Were Wrong About UCS…What Else Are They Wrong About? 05/24/2011. Omar Sultan. Cisco Web Site
• Cisco UCS: There is a Movement 05/24/2011. Didier Rombaut. Cisco Web Site
• Is the success of Cisco UCS real? 06/06/2010. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell
• Cisco UCS – a Disruptive Platform 05/05/2009. Steve Kaplan. DABCC

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a professional services company which is also a leading Cisco partner

Business success means being able to say “no”

My former boss once told me that you know you are successful in business when you can afford to say no. When you’re worried about survival, it’s very difficult to turn away any potential business – no matter how ill-suited it may be. Smaller resellers in our industry often face questionable opportunities but end up, despite the warning signs, taking on projects that lead to frustrations, costly corrections and loss of good will.

One small reseller that doesn’t have this problem is Netblaze Systems, a 4-person shop run by my brother, Alan Kaplan, and his partner, Igor Akkerman for the past 6 years. The following email thread shows how Alan responded to a recent request generated from his Web site:

Brian: I'm an attorney. I want to start scanning in my legal briefs and notes. Do you guys offer a solution that fits this?

Alan: Hi Brian. We got your submission; are you available tomorrow morning for a call?

Brian: Can you offer the solution...yes or no?

Alan:  No.

Alan thought that was the end of it, but the next morning he received another email from Brian:

Brian:  Then this where we will end the conversation. Next time don't try to force a call when you know you cannot deliver.

Alan: [Expletive deleted]. Of course we can do what you're asking, but not for an asshole like you.

While Brian apparently works on his own, he undoubtedly would have received the same response even if he worked for a large law firm.

During my many years in the technology industry, I’ve continued to witness the paradox of increasing sales by turning down business. And while I’ve passed on many opportunies due to anticipated personality difficulties, I’ve never done it in quite this style – only the owner of a very small organization could get away with such bluntness. Still, it did give me a chuckle.

What does the future hold for IT skill sets?

I’ve visited a few large organizations where the server, network and storage functional groups had, for the most part, never even met. I’ve been been to many others where the different groups knew each other, but didn’t get along. Virtualization blurs the the former crisp lines of functional demarcation, rendering this stovetype model of IT specialization obsolete. Adoption of hybrid cloud environments brings additional pressures for change.

IT Organizational Gaps can be a Barrier to Pervasive Virtualization

CA Technologies’ Andi Mann and others have discussed various reasons behind the widespread problem of stalled virtualization projects. A common factor is a lack of IT processes geared toward a virtual environment. The CA-sponsored 2011 study, The State of IT Automation, showed that 47% of virtualized organizations still take a week or longer to provision a virtual machine. The server teams are stymied by the manual processes required such as procuring a LUN from Storage or a VLAN from the network group.

 
As virtualization breaks down the functional IT silos with unavoidable interdependencies, disagreements about domain responsibility can negatively impact effective collaboration. This dissonance will only increase with the convergence of desktop and voice as part of a unified virtual infrastructure fabric. Virtualized desktops, for example, typically run as workloads in the data center alongside the server VMs. So the question becomes, who is responsible for managing them, the desktop group or the server team?  A similar issue faces the VoIP group as their isolated physical servers become just another set of virtual workloads.

Even an absence of collaboration challenges does not preclude virtualization induced organizational disruption.  A former California local government agency CIO recently told me that most of his server administrators were directly tied to the physical servers for which they were responsible. They were uneasy (especially those less adept) with virtualization since server management now would become far more transparent. And the idea of moving the servers to the cloud would likely be perceived as an outright threat to job security since a virtual server in the cloud can be maintained by anyone, anywhere. There would be no need to for card-key access to press the on/off button for hard reboots, or to escort vendors in to upgrade memory, or switch backup tapes. The former CIO believes that government IT shops at all levels will play the “security” and “privacy” card if the talks get serious about moving their infrastructures to the cloud.

Integrated Stacks Reshaping Virtual Infrastructure Management

Organizational change is difficult to accomplish in either government or private enterprises. But new integrated computing stacks such as Vblocks and FlexPods are helping drive transformation by forcing roles-based and policy-driven administrative processes that span compute, network and storage. These stacks also eliminate much of the manual “rack and stack”, cabling and software installation required when purchasing the components separately – leaving the IT teams with more time to focus on productivity enhancements such as application optimization.

The integrated stacks enable the IT specialists to continue managing their own domains, yet collaborate far more effectively with their peers. But the writing is nonetheless on the wall that these specialists need to broaden their skill sets to incorporate a more holistic architectural perspective. The server team needs some understanding of IP routing. The network group should know how to do minor server troubleshooting and basic reinstalls. Storage specialists need familiarity with proper VMFS sizing and best practices. All three groups should understand the implications of how virtual infrastructure security affects their domains.

Organizations are adjusting to the requirement for cross-functional skill sets by changing reporting structures to effectively create a data center team. While this is a huge transition from the functional segregation model, many more changes are in store.

IT-as-a-Service Demands a Service Mentality

Data center computing appears to be heading toward a hybrid model that includes a private cloud for the majority of workloads but also federation to SaaS providers and public clouds. CIOs emphasize that the most appealing attribute of cloud computing isn’t a reduction in cost, but rather an increase in speed. Responding quickly to business requirements is imperative to maintaining a competitive advantage.

One of the objectives of cloud is the automatic provisioning of virtual infrastructure. Business units specify the SLAs of desired applications from a services catalogue. The required servers, storage, network and security components are automatically created and charged back based upon usage, thereby driving optimal utilization of corporate resources. Users should neither know nor care whether the servers are residing internally or with an external cloud provider.

IT must determine which workloads are better served in a private cloud and which are OK to outsource to public cloud providers. The recent Amazon outage illustrates that workloads cannot simply be placed with a public provider and then forgotten. Providers must be assessed on numerous criteria including performance, availability, recoverability, pricing, monitoring, reporting and clarity of invoicing – among others. Effective architecture of this environment demands knowledge around security, regulatory compliance, project management and negotiation. Applying additional safeguards to certain workloads may entail both provider transparency and alternative contingency plans. The IT staff must furthermore continually monitor, measure and test provider claims.

In addition to acquiring a broadened skill set, IT personnel also need to understand their roles as service providers to the business as a whole. This means adopting a mantra of “not giving no for an answer”, and becoming advocates for business unit objectives such as increased revenues and improved customer service. IT is in a prime position to help rapidly, yet economically, achieve them by creatively utilizing cloud computing capabilities.

 

Author Note: I will be speaking further on this subject at GTC West 2011 in Sacramento, CA on May 10^th.

 

See Also:

How Cloud Computing is Changing IT Staff Roles. 04/15/11. Crystal Nichols. Unitv.

Cloud Computing: Beyond the Buzz, Part 1. 03/18/11. Brent Weigel. Michael S. Kenny & Company.

How Cloud Computing & Web Services Are Changing the IT Job Market. 02/26/11. Gadget News Update.

Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Success: Adjusting the IT Mindset. Feb. 2011. Giorgio Nebuloni, Gary Chen. IDC White Paper.

The Organizational Impact of Converged Infrastructure. 12/02/10. Stuart Miniman. Wikibon Blog.

Professional Development and Staffing for the Cloud. 08/25/10. Joanne Kossuth. Educause.

How is Cloud Computing Changing the Role of IT. 08/05/10. Darren Cunningham. Informatica.

Wanted: New Skills for Cloud Computing Success. 06/23/10. Joseph Foran. SearchCloudComputing.com.

Cloud Computing will Destroy Jobs. 06/10/10. Pete Swabey. InformationAge.

Is ‘VM Stall’ the Next Big Virtualization Challenge? 06/01/10. Andi Mann. CIO.

These CIOs go Way Beyond IT-business Alignment. 05/24/10. Julia King. Computerworld.

Will UCS Unify IT Staffs?  07/24/09. Steve Kaplan. By The Bell.

 

 

Book review: Visible Ops Private Cloud: from virtualization to private cloud in 4 practical steps.

Authors Andi Mann, Kurt Milne and Jeanne Moran have written an IT Process Institute publication, Visible Ops Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps. This book is short, easy to follow and engaging.  It not only is worth reading, but essential for any IT leader considering virtualization or private cloud technologies.

Information gained from over 30 interviews with organizations that have implemented private cloud solutions along with ITPI research data provides the basis for the book’s analyses and conclusions, although the footnotes reflect many other studies and sources as well. The 60 plus years of combined author IT process management experience is evident in their ability to take a very complex topic and distill it down to an easily digestible format.

The book starts off defining a private cloud and how it differs from a fully virtualized data center. It also discusses the three primary advantages that private clouds have over public clouds. While it should be fairly obvious that a private cloud enables a level of security and control not easily matched by a public cloud provider, much more surprising is the authors’ contention that a well executed private cloud is around 30% less expensive. Private clouds also enable a degree of customization that public clouds are unable to match.

The remainder of Visible Ops Private Cloud provides a four-phased approach for implementing a private cloud:

                Phase 1: Cut through the cloud clutter

                Phase 2: Design services, not systems

                Phase 3: Orchestrate and optimize resource

                Phase 4: Align and accelerate business results

The first Appendix dives into Virtualization impact on audit and compliance, and the second covers Reducing private cloud security risks. Noticeably absent are references to specific technologies by leading private cloud companies such as VMware, Cisco and Computer Associates.

While 107 pages (including appendixes and glossary) is only enough to provide a general overview to the topic of private cloud, the four phases constitute a realistic high-level guideline for a successful implementation. I especially like the way each phase starts off with a matrix describing both the issues that are addressed along with narrative from an IT organization staff member that actually had to deal with the particular issue. The layout in general is done really well for a technical book and includes both figures and highlight emphases written with monotony-breaking cursive. Occasional cloud-based Dilbert cartoons help to further make the reading enjoyable.

Despite the book’s conciseness, redundancy shows up in places such a repetition of the four implementation phases in Appendix A. It stretches a bit at times in order to provide an adequate number of bullets, and it lacks a consolidated section extolling the benefits of private cloud. The authors repeatedly insist that not all servers are appropriate for a private cloud, but they don’t explain what workloads should be excluded.

These very small drawbacks, however, pale in comparison to the positives of Visible Ops Private Cloud. While I’ve been writing for almost two years about the issues around the phenomenon that Andi Mann coined as VM Stall, this book was particularly useful to me in providing greater insight into both the cause and remedy. Unfortunately, it was written too late to incorporate the CA-sponsored 2011 study, The State of IT Automation, which shows that 45% of organizations take a week or longer to provision a virtual machine, but it nonetheless gives plenty of reasons as to why the statistic should not be surprising. Adopting a private cloud not only has the capability to fulfill enterprise virtualization objectives, but to enable true data center transformation.

The Cloudcast (.NET)

Last week I had the opportunity to be a guest on The Cloudcast (http://www.thecloudcast.net) with Brian Gracely and Aaron Delp. On Friday, Brian Tweeted, “Steve gives much better answers than I ask questions.” I thought that was amusing because I normally am not too happy with my videos and podcasts, but was pleased with this recording as Brian's questions were both thought-provoking and insightful. It was really a pleasure to be on the show.

I spoke about ROI for Private Cloud, VMstall (giving credit to Computer Associate’s Andi Mann for coining the term), the future VDI convergence with Collaboration and the emerging new role of Cloud Integrator. Show notes, downloads and links to the podcast for iTunes and Stitcher can be found on the website.

 

A 40,000 foot view of VMware vCloud Director

 

It was almost seven months ago when VMware’s John Arrasjid (@vcdx001 on Twitter) contacted me about writing a new USENIX book. Together with four other senior VMware consultants, we co-authored Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director which should be published by the end of the month. As the only non-engineer among the authors, I nevertheless found the book quite helpful in explaining cloud computing and the benefits it provides. I struggled, on the other hand, to understand what vCloud Director really is, and more importantly, why an organization should embrace it – particularly at this juncture of a 1.0 release. While the answers can be discerned from reading the book, this post is geared toward my fellow non-techies who might appreciate a brief distillation.

Why the Need for a Cloud Computing Management Platform?

Many years ago, mainframe and mini users were commonly forced to wait in an MIS queue for months in order to get a report produced. The PC era brought computing power into the hands of the users, but left them still dependent upon IT to provision the back-end infrastructure – networks, servers, load-balancers, firewalls, etc.  Since applications tend to be driven by departmental budgets, IT infrastructures often end up as over provisioned mishmashes of equipment, processes and technology entailing excessive cost and huge inefficiencies.

Virtualization taken to its logical extreme results in a transformation of the traditional static data center to a monitored, metered, managed and automated environment where IT is dynamically provided as a service, otherwise known as Private Cloud. In the cloud model, computing not only becomes efficient, it makes another titanic shift to the user. Business units specify the levels of performance, reliability and security required for an application, and the required virtual infrastructure is automatically and very quickly provisioned and deployed. 

Accomplishing this transformation, though, is not by any means a simple task. A platform must be implemented that intelligently pools and provisions virtualized resources. Network isolation, enhanced storage requirements, new monitoring and chargeback capabilities, and increased requirements for scalability, resiliency and storage are just some of the challenges.

What Exactly is VMware vCloud Director?

The Glossary of Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director defines vCD as:  “A software solution providing the interface, automation, and management feature set to allow enterprise and service providers to supply vSphere resources as a Web-based service.”

VMware vCloud Director is a cloud computing management platform. It abstracts the virtualized resources to enable users to gain self-service access to them through a services catalogue. Tasks previously requiring significant IT staff resources and time to accomplish, such as configuring a network, are automatically executed in minutes with vCD.

Another aspect of vCD is its ability to utilize open standards and the vCloud API to enable federation between private and public clouds. Organizations can not only transform their own IT environments into a service, but they can move virtual machines back and forth to external cloud providers for purposes such as facilitating high resource demand or disaster recovery requirements.

From a product perspective, VMware vCloud Director is arguably the metamorphosis of Lab Manager into an enterprise platform. It is one component of the VMware vCloud family which also includes VMware vSphere, vShield Manager with vShield Edge, and vCenter Chargeback. Other VMware complimentary products such as VMware vCloud Connector, VMware Orchestrator, VMware vCenter Operations, and vCloud Request Manager add further useful functionality. Additionally, a whole ecosystem of hardware and software products is rapidly evolving to take advantage of the vCloud API including prominent infrastructure stacks such as VCE Vblock, NetApp FlexPod and HP Matrix.

 Helpful excerpts from Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director include: 

•  “VMware vCloud Director is a platform that makes broad deployment of compute clouds possible by enabling self-service access to compute infrastructure through the ab­straction of virtualized resources.”
• “Think of vCloud Director as a centralized landing point for end users to access infra­structure resources through the Web browser. VMware vCloud Director provides the self-service portal that accepts user requests and translates them into tasks in the vSphere environment.”
• “VMware vCloud Director adds an additional layer of resource abstraction to enable multi-tenancy and provide interoperability between clouds that are built to the vCloud API standard.”

Who Should Purchase vCloud Director Version 1.0?

VMware vCloud Director at inception provides a starting point for vCloud – VMware is continuing to add capabilities. Right out of the gate, however, it is perfect for developers. Owners of VMware Lab Manager can exchange their licenses (which are based upon CPUs) for licenses of vCloud Director (which are based upon VMs). The product is also exceptional for organizations with requirements for building internal training or demo environments. Our Systems Engineers, for example, can use our internal deployment of vCloud Director to create an entire VMware View environment for demonstration purposes in about 10 minutes, and then blow away the environment when finished.

Caveats exist when using vCloud Director in production, but they do not seem to be slowing down its adoption. As an example, a current lack of integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) means that off-site VM replication and recovery needs to accommodate either manually or with other automation tools. Backup/recovery of the vCloud workloads can be accomplished, but some vendors require manual steps in the process. Other vendors are working on fully automated solutions by using the vSphere, vCloud, and VADP APIs.

On the very positive side, vCloud Director puts organizations firmly on the path to cloud computing where IT is provisioned as a service along with monitoring, metering, chargeback and a self-service portal for business units/end users.  The open API enables integration with other applications to quickly build a customized, automated and flexible environment.

Another interesting potential customer group for vCD is the emerging category of cloud integrators that is perhaps the next rung on the evolutionary ladder from Reseller to VAR to Solutions Provider. Cloud integrators can potentially customize vCD as an aggregation portal in order to provide an extremely versatile yet automated assortment of cloud-based services to their clients.

 

See Also:

Cloud Computing with VMware vCloud Director (Available soon on both Sage and Amazon)

Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4.  Amazon

VMware vCloud Director. VMware Web Site

vShield Products Packaging Explained (with a focus on vCloud Director). 03/14/2011 Massimo. IT 2.0

vCloud Networking for Dummies. 09/14/2010. Massimo. IT 2.0

VMware Lab Manager is Dead. Long Live vCloud Director. 02/11/2011. David Marshall. InfoWorld.

Introducing VMware vCloud Datacenter, provided by BlueLock.

 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to fellow vExpert, Mark Vaughn (@mvaughn25), of INX for his contributions to this article. And a special thanks to John Arrasjid (@vcdx001) and my other co-authors: Ben Lin (@blin23), Raman Verramraju (@ramantheman), Duncan Epping (@vcdx007), and Michael Haines (@michaelahaines).

What's behind the surge in HP Matrix customers?

At HP Summit a couple of days ago, David Donatelli, Executive VP, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking said, “How do we build this? Essentially from a sofware point of view, the cloud system is built upon HP’s BladeSystem Matrix which is a software technology now that we’ve been shipping for more than 18 months. We have literally thousands of customers running this around the world. It enables them to manage their entire infrastructure nondisruptively as one big common pool which is basically what a cloud is”. (http://www.visualwebcaster.com/HP/76709/event.html 01:35:35)

Partner Confusion

I was very surprised to learn that HP now has thousands of Matrix customers. Even in the presumably unlikely case that none have more than one unit, this means there are a whole lot of Matrix sales going on. I called several HP partners to get their perspectives. Most are not selling many, if any, of the BladeSystem Matrix. One who does appear to be having quite a bit of success with the product still would have guessed that Matrix customers might be in the hundreds, but not the thousands.

A Tweet yesterday morning by Stu Merriman’s (@stu) offered a possible explanation for the partner confusion. He asked HP about the Matrix, and the response he received was that most sales are made via HP’s direct sales force to large customers. While large enterprises are not our only focus, it does seem strange that we seldom run up against HP Matrix in our sales efforts, and I hear this same refrain from other Cisco partners. It would seem that with thousands of customers that the Matrix impact should be more prominent, and that we should see the Matrix showing up in more data centers.

Likewise, with such a quick ramp-up in sales, Matrix should be generating a much bigger buzz around the industry. As a comparison, Cisco UCS jumped from 900 customers last July to 4,000 at the end of last quarter. As might be expected, a Google Blog search on “Cisco UCS” returned 12,100 hits including many posts by integrators and customers describing their real-life experiences with the product. The same Google blog search on HP Matrix, however, produced only 306 hits. And I could find very few blog posts that reference an actual implementation.

Integrated Computing Stacks

The BladeSystem Matrix is HP’s entry into the new, but rapidly growing, category of integrated computing stacks. These stacks combine virtualization, computing, networking, storage, and system management in order to enable ItaaS, otherwise known as private clouds. While some products such as VCE’s Vblock and NetApp’s FlexPod combine solutions from multiple manufacturers, others such as HP Matrix, IBM Cloudburst, Dell Virtual Integration System and Oracle Exalogic rely on one manufacturer.

Integrated stacks, being a new category, are not necessarily easy to define as they vary greatly in composition between manufacturers. Making matters more complex are the differing ways in which manufacturers handle the inevitable customer requests for configurations that stray from the certified standards. It is my experience as a Vblock partner, for example, that VCE only will certify a Vblock shipped as such, and that only very minor alterations in the standard configurations are tolerated.

Initially and as recently as last July, HP took a similarly hard line approach with BladeSystem Matrix, requiring a 60 hour on-site engagement by HP Implementation Service. Partners were not able to be certified and customers were unable to upgrade any software or firmware in the solution and still be in a supported configuration. I estimated, after speaking with both current and former HP employees, that Matrix had no more than 60 – 75 implementations at that time.  

Since July, HP has appeared to take a much more relaxed approach in regard to what constitutes a Matrix. On December 10, 2010 HP announced the HP BladeSystem Matrix Conversion Services which appears from the brochure to be a 2-day engagement that, along with purchasing additional products, converts existing HP blades into “a complete, fully supported HP BladeSystem Matrix environment.” One possibility for Donatelli’s remarks, therefore, is that HP has very quickly converted thousands of blade customers into Matrix customers.

Waiting for the Answer

On Tuesday, I asked Burston-Marsteller, a firm that does public relations for HP, if they could explain Donatelli’s number. The PR firm promptly replied that they reached out to HP for clarification. I am eager to see what the official response will be, but my guess – and it is only a guess – is that some of the growth has been attributable to a direct sales force emphasis and some due to conversions, but the biggest increase is due to the way in which HP counts Matrix sales. Since the Matrix is essentially a rebranding of existing HP products, it would be easy to justify counting an organization with a substantial number of Matrix components as a Matrix customer.

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a leading Cisco partner.

Response to HP blog post on innovation

Brad Parks of the Worldwide HP Converged Infrastructure team, in response to the EMC announcements yesterday, just posted, "What do storage, convergence, and statistical physics have in common? http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Converged-Infrastructure/What-do-storage-convergence-and-statistical-physics-have-in/ba-p/86829.  His suggestion that HP originated the 70/30 IT split discussion “for over a year” is quite amusing. Here is an article, for instance, from Tech Republic from last May discussing how HP copied EMC’s messaging in that regard http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=4283. EMC’s (former) subsidiary, VMware, has been messaging about the majority of IT budgets going to “keep the lights on” at least since VMworld Europe in Feburary 2009.  

The theme of Brad's post is that HP is in the vanguard of breaking down IT silos, yet HP continues to propagate them by pitching Virtual Connect to server teams as a way to manage the switches without the inconvenience of network group oversight. EMC, on the other hand, partners with VMware and Cisco to enable a virtual infrastructure platform that both enables and encourages productive collaboration between functional teams.

Brad concludes by suggesting that the HP BladeSystem Matrix provides an answer to IT sprawl, yet from what I’ve been able to learn, it appears common for Matrix customers to become frustrated with the overwhelming complexity of the solution and instead revert back to using the Matrix as just a server.

VDI vs. SBC: ROI case study

The huge buzz around virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) may ironically drive more server-based computing (SBC) sales. Some organizations are considering, as an alternative to VDI, expanding and repurposing existing XenApp deployments used primarily for application delivery to instead facilitate enterprise desktop replacement. One such firm recently requested an ROI comparison for migrating its 1,700 (and growing) physical desktops to either virtual desktops or to an enterprise Server-Based Computing environment. The required investment and the 5-year Internal Rate of Return (IRR) was nearly identical for the two scenarios, but the VDI option had a slightly higher ROI along with a shorter  period required to payback the initial investment.

SBC and VDI Similarities

Server Based Computing (SBC) is a mature technology that has been utilized for over 15 years, but primarily for application delivery; it never really caught on as a mainstream desktop replacement. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), although only four years old, has quickly captured the interest of IT professionals already familiar with server virtualization. IT is generally more receptive to the simplicity of the virtual desktop concept than they’ve previously been to the idea of enterprise server-based computing.

VDI and SBC both enable the hosting of desktops on central server farms and use the same protocols to deliver application screen prints to users (VMware View also utilizes a protocol, PCoIP, developed especially for VDI). SBC typically incorporates Citrix XenApp along with Microsoft Remote Desktop Service (RDS – formerly called Terminal Server). VDI utilizes the virtual desktop running in a hypervisor, typically either VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop.

Both VDI and SBC desktops intelligently separate the personality of the user from the applications and abstract both from the OS. They enable a model of personal computing where the information belongs to the user; the device becomes a “choice” whether a PC, laptop, thin client, zero client, Mac, iPAD, iPhone, Android device or Internet café terminal. Users can securely access their desktops from anywhere that they can get to a browser. The desktop remains exclusively in the data center where it is secure, managed, backed up and replicated for redundancy.

SBC enables the use of thin clients, while VDI enables the use of either thin clients or zero clients (devices manufactured for VDI without any local OS). Both thin clients and zero clients are fairly inexpensive and have no moving parts, local drives or fan noise. The devices are configured simply by plugging them in, enabling quick and simple replacement in the unlikely event one fails. They eliminate the requirement for upgrading PCs or laptops on a regular basis as well as the necessity for users to double as desktop administrators. User productivity is enhanced while IT support time is slashed.

Both SBC and VDI can reduce anti-virus costs, slash power consumption (by using terminals) and reduce downtime while users await new upgrades or help desk support. They empower users – giving them a new level of flexibility and agility. They facilitate acquisitions by enabling quick assimilation of new organizations into the existing desktop infrastructure while still allowing them to run their existing environments in parallel. They enable fast set-up of remote facilities and reduce time to market by accelerating application provisioning.

Server Based Computing

The SBC concept originated with Ed Iacobucci who worked for IBM on the OS/2 development team in the late 1980s. Iacobucci came up with an idea for a multi-user version of OS/2 that he unsuccessfully pitched to IBM. Microsoft liked the idea, however, and helped fund his new company, Citrix. Citrix’s first Windows based multi-user product, WinFrame, debuted in 1995. Citrix originally called the concept of hosting centralized desktops sessions “thin-client server computing”, but renamed the category “server-based computing” as Windows terminal manufacturers appropriated the thin-client moniker.

SBC relies upon RDS which is a version of Windows Server that supports multiple users. While RDS continues to improve, issues can still arise regarding application compatibility. Making applications work correctly may require specialized IT administrative knowledge of RDS along with registry hacks, trouble shooting or application streaming.

Because all users on a server share a single Windows Server session, one user can potentially affect all of the users on a host server. As an example, a user could receive an email attachment that installs malicious code on the server itself. Application packaging may also be required in order to resolve DLL conflicts resulting from incompatible applications installed and working on the same server.

SBC requires connectivity to the central server farm in order for users to work. User personalization needs to be added through the use of products such as Citrix Profile Manager, AppSense or many others. Users may object to working on an unfamiliar Windows Server desktop rather than the Windows XP or Windows 7 format with which they’re familiar.  It requires an approximate one-time $110 Windows RDS license.

The maturity of SBC may also indicate a dwindling support structure as VDI continues to capture the major mindshare not only of new ecosystem partners such as Unidesk and Pano Logic, but of existing legacy SBC players. Neil Spellings, for instance, recently raised some questions about potential challenges Citrix may have in supporting the legacy XenApp product.

On the positive side, SBC is a very mature platform – particularly when utilizing Citrix XenApp, which includes advanced tool sets such as session shadowing along with years of proven ecopartner complementary products. SBC tends to scale much better that VDI in terms of compute resources and also requires less storage IOPs. Tasks such as patches and upgrades are easily applied at the server level which then instantly propagate to all users – administrators do not need to manage a lot of desktops.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

VMware coined the term "VDI" in 2006 in response to the increasing tendency of its customers to run desktop operating systems within virtual machines on their VMware ESX hosts. Gartner refers to the concept as Hosted Virtual Desktops (VDH) while IDC calls it Centralized Virtual Desktops (CVD). Cisco’s recent entry (building upon either VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop) is termed VXI for Virtual Experience Infrastructure. The VDI industry has huge momentum and now includes not only VMware and Citrix, but also Microsoft, Red Hat, Quest and many smaller niche players along with a rapidly growing ecosystem. 

VDI refers to hosting desktops on hypervisors. Persistent desktops are run as a complete image in the data center on a 1:1 ratio of desktop to user. While this approach provides the exact look-and-feel with which users are comfortable, it still requires managing the individual virtual machines as well as multiple identical copies of operating systems and user data. A non-persistent desktop creates a user’s desktop each time she logs in utilizing techniques such as parent/child pointers. While this approach enables consolidated management and storage, it loses the ability for users to customize their desktops. Ecosystem partners such as Unidesk and AppSense as well as market leaders VMware and Citrix themselves increasingly offer different approaches to enable the combined advantages of both approaches.

The ability for users to work on a familiar Windows XP or Windows 7 desktop is one of the most compelling aspects of VDI along with no worry about application incompatibilities. Other advantages include better security, fault tolerance, superior load-balancing, easier backups, off-line sessions and a potential pristine desktop every time a user logs in. VDI administrators do not need to be specialists in RDS or registry hacks, and can utilize standard Windows printing.

On the negative side, VDI requires a $100 yearly Microsoft Virtual Desktop Access license for thin-clients, zero clients, Macs and other non-Windows devices or for Windows clients not covered by Microsoft SA. It scales roughly about half as well as SBC on the compute side, although ever faster processors and optimized compute platforms such as the Cisco UCS increasingly will mitigate this negative. VDI also can potentially require significantly more expensive storage in order to supply the required IOPs.

VDI vs. SBC Matrix

 

ROI Comparison

The organization mentioned earlier is a financial services firm that will migrate 1,700 physical desktop users (growing to 2,200) to either a Citrix XenApp SBC or a Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View VDI deployment. The organization is running a small XenApp implementation today – primarily for application delivery, but the staff has significant XenApp SBC experience gained at other firms. The organization currently purchases quality PCs and laptops along with Microsoft SA, and refreshes them every three years. It maintains a server in each of its 20 remote offices that can be eliminated under either a VDI or SBC scenario without requiring increased costs for bandwidth. It runs VMware vSphere in the data center, but requires new shared storage for either solution.

 

 

The cash flow comparisons for years 1 – 5 reflect the difference in total expenses (CapEx + OpEx) between the existing physical desktop scenario and the proposed VDI or SBC scenarios, discounted for the firm’s cost of capital. The SBC solution includes Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition while the VDI solution utilizes VMware View Premier along with the required vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses. Both solutions assume identically priced thin-client devices that gradually replace PCs/laptops as they come up for refresh. VDI assumes increased storage costs of $410K while SBC incurs a little less than half that amount. Neither solution incorporates user productivity savings.

The organization would have to purchase either RDS licenses up front if going the SBC route, or SA licenses annually as it replaces PCs with thin clients if going VDI. Two additional full-time administrators were assumed to be required under SBC rather than just one under VDI. If only one additional administrator were required under SBC, the payback period would drop to 15.9 months while the 5-year ROI would increase to 228% and the IRR to 63%.

Choosing the Optimal Platform Requires Context

As with every key virtualization platform decision, I recommend taking a strategic approach. Start with an ROI analysis to first evaluate the economics of moving to a hosted desktop architecture whether VDI or SBC, but supplement it with an evaluation showing how the new technology will impact corporate objectives such as responsiveness, employee empowerment, disaster recovery, green initiatives, etc.

While industry analysts often contend that VDI does not offer a positive ROI, I have found that generally it does. Additionally, there may be benefits in terms of improved security, time to market and user productivity that warrant a move to hosted desktops even without a compelling ROI. A law firm with which I worked, for example, estimated increased billings of $1.6 M per year by enabling partners to bill more hours through remote desktop capabilities – an amount that easily overshadowed the projected savings.

Assuming the ROI and other benefits warrant a move away from traditional physical desktops, the best architecture can then be determined based upon environmental conditions and staff experience/expertise. An organization, for example, with a significant deployment of XenApp, even if used primarily for application delivery, might find it an easy transition to implement XenApp as an enterprise desktop replacement solution without requiring a significant investment in IT staff training or back-end infrastructure. A highly virtualized organization, on the other hand, may find that it makes more sense to extend its virtualized data center down to the desktop leveraging the existing infrastructure, licensing, management console and staff expertise.

Cisco VXI

Cisco’s recently announced Virtual Experience Infrastructure (VXI) has the potential for significantly weighting the VDI/SBC debate toward VDI by combining virtual desktops with unified communications. VXI takes a network-centric approach to addressing the gaps in enterprise scalability, performance and security that have contributed to a lack of wider VDI adoption. By both enriching the user experience and improving the economics of virtual desktops, VXI will make it easier for many organizations to commit to a virtualized desktop platform. The ROI analysis featured in this article was started before the advent of Cisco VXI; the Cisco convergence and other advantages were not considered.

The Decision

The financial services firm’s IT staff has yet to decide which hosted desktop solution they will implement. Given the similar ROI results of the two options along with the very positive experience the CIO had with an enterprise SBC deployment of Citrix MetaFrame at his last company, my guess is that SBC is going to win out.

 

Contributors:  Mark Vaughn, INX and Alan Kaplan, NetBlaze. Although Douglas Brown www.dabcc.com and I don’t always agree, he provided fantastic feedback (most of which I incorporated) and corrections.

 

References:

Server Based Computing vs. Desktop Virtualization Jeff Muir – Citrix Blogger

VDI vs SBC, like Gas Stove vs Microwave? James Rabev – The Citrix Blog

VDI is Dead, Long Live VDI-SBC! Christophe Corne – Business Computing World

VDI vs TX – What will you choose? Daniel Feller – The Citrix Blog

Terminal Services versus VDI: Brian’s presentation from VMworld Europe 2009. Brianmadden.com

Cisco targets virtual desktops with VDI. By The Bell

Cisco Unveils Virtualization Experience Infrastructure…  Cisco Press Release

The desktops may be virtual, but the ROI is real. By The Bell

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a leading Cisco/VMware partner.

VXI: Phase 2 of Cisco's virtualization strategy

Brian Madden ran a post last week titled, Cisco enters the VDI fray with “VSI” (Related: we have a new leader in the “most press for least actual prouct” race!) that  sparked some lively debate. While a bit early to make any defensible conclusions about the ultimate success of VXI, it’s reasonable to expect that it will shake up the under-performing virtual desktop market.

Redefining VDI

Madden dismisses VXI as a “reference architecture”, but this would be comparable to calling the VCE Vblock simply a reference architechture for a private cloud infrastructure. Vblock is already grabbing huge industry mindshare because customers are intrigued with the idea of a validated, preconfigured, certified solution that is supported as a single product.

Virtual Experience Infrastructure (VXI) is a solution initiated by Cisco, but it cleverly redefines the VDI category to include not only virtual desktops, but also voice, phone, video, Telepresence and collaboration. It incorporates contributions from ecopartners such as EMC, Wyse, VMware and Citrix along with legacy technologies such as WAAS updated to optimize VDI protocols. As with Vblocks, it also is built around the unique advantages that Cisco UCS brings as a hosting platform for virtual infrastructure. VXI leverages the UCS to enable denser VM capabilities, thereby enabling reduced infrastructure costs, along with cost reductions from consolidating voice and virtualization infrastructures.

Piggybacking off Cisco UCS Success

When Cisco UCS debuted last year, it faced skepticism from both competitors and the press who questioned its relevance. HP called it a “giant switch”. Byte and Switch called it, “next year’s servers…shipping this year”. According to ComputerWorld, a Dell executive referred to it as a “one-size-fits-all blade server”.  But in only 16 months of shipping, UCS now has 2,800 customers with an annualized run rate of almost $500 Million. UCS has disrupted the data center status quo, set the industry abuzz and is displacing long-term data center competitors seemingly at will because it instills CIOs with the confidence they need to virtualize their mission critical applications. VXI has the potential to similarly impact the virtual desktop space by addressing the enterprise performance, security, user experience and cost issues that inhibit their wider acceptance today.

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a leading Cisco partner.

Cisco targets virtual desktop ROI with VXI

Cisco’s  Virtual Experience Infrastructure (VXI) extends the concept of a virtual desktop to include voice, video, multi-media, and collaboration.  It takes a network centered approach to resolving current virtual desktop limits in rich user experience, enterprise performance, security and ROI.

VXI: Marketing hype or true innovation?

Cisco disrupted the data center status quo last year when it introduced the UCS, the first purposefully built product for hosting virtual infrastructure. The UCS has received tremendous industry and customer acclaim due to its myriad innovations ranging from converged fabric to stateless blades. Cisco VXI is a framework – or really a stack – for virtualized desktops that leverages the UCS along with other existing Cisco technologies. It incorporates unified communications capabilities such as telephony, video and Web collaboration applications but also introduces new innovations such as Cisco's new zero clients and Cius tablet. VXI includes partnerships with other manufacturers such as VMware, Citrix, Wyse, EMC and NetApp.

VXI shares an important attribute with UCS in that both technologies are geared to facilitating pervasive virtualization. UCS, as an enterprise hosting platform rather than just a server built for the physical world, helps organizations break through the phenomonon of VM Stall. It engenders confidence for virtualizing both resource intensive and mission critical applications. VXI similarly removes obstacles to large scale desktop virtualization by addressing the gaps in performance, security and user experience capabilities.

Desktop virtualization has been the subject of huge industry buzz for years, but adoption is well behind expectations. In 2007, for instance, Gartner predicted that all new PC deployments would be virtualized by the end of this year (see Virtual Strategy Magazine). SearchVirtualDesktop.com recently reported that Gartner now predicts only 4.5 million virtual desktops by the end of this year growing to 50 million, or 10% of the market, by 2014.

With VXI, the network maintains awareness of the virtual machine user session – QoS and security policies are applied at the virtual desktop level. Media and applications are prioritized within the virtual desktop session which benefits from optimized bandwidth along with optimized rich media, print services and other capabilities. Users gain secure access to virtual desktops and applications outside of the corporate office which can be regulated based upon their location. The user experience is enhanced while IT management, security and support challenges are reduced.

Enhanced ROI

Perhaps even more important to proliferating virtual desktops than improvements in performance, security and user experience is an abilility for organizations to easily identify the financial benefits. VDI can slash operating expenses through reducing administrative tasks, but these savings are likely to be far lower when compared against well managed and locked down PCs. And while thin or zero client devices can enable considerable power savings compared to PCs or laptops, they are more than negated by the annual Virtual Desktop Access license Microsoft charges for using them. Justifying CapEx reductions for VDI also can be difficult due to the increased backend infrastructure costs for compute, storage, network and licensing.

VXI addresses some of these cost challenges by incorporating the higher densities and lower operating costs of the Cisco UCS. More importantly, the convergence of unified communications and desktop virtualization technologies consolidates overlapping expenses. Separate backend infrastructures for voice and data are no longer necessary. Desktops, phones, video, Telepresense and collaboration all are enabled on a single device which  is accessing a virtual machine running on a UCS in the data center.

VXI Today

Phase one of VXI focuses on desktop virtualization. It includes a configuration of UCS optimized for VDI along with Cisco Cius and enhanced thin-client devices from Wyse. It emphasizes three primary areas of improvement: Performance, security and multimedia.

Performance: The industry leading virtualization performance of Cisco UCS are combined with addressing WAN bottlenecks with Cisco WAAS and offload of SSL encryption to dedicated hardware using Cisco ACE to increase server density, accelerate WAN traffic and both application performance and end-user experience.

Multimedia: Cisco Virtual Desktop Service (VDS) applies service priorities, QoS and optimized VDI traffic over the WAN to ensure that users receive a rich multimedia experience. Cisco enhanced endpoint devices further improve the experience by directly supporting not only virtualization but collaboration applications.

Security: Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000V and VN-Link technology provide VM-specific visibility and allow application of network and security policies to mobile virtual machines. Cisco’s ACS Server and Mobile Services Engine enable role and location based access restrictions.

VXI Road Map

Cisco has a five phase plan for VXI, and  Cisco will be introducting new capabilities such as location based services and advanced management tools. Unlike the server virtualization journey upon which the majority of organizations have been slowly traveling now for years, desktop virtualization is still in its infancy. Cisco’s  VXI enables a strategic approach to not only desktop virtualization, but to the entire desktop experience including voice, video and collaboration. It offers the promise of a more cost-effective and much quicker adoption of the technology on an enterprise scale.

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a leading Cisco partner.

Customers embracing Vblocks, but VCE sales harmony a work in progress

Skepticism was my first reaction upon hearing about the Virtual Computing Environment coalition (VCE). I’ve worked with a couple of large IT organizations where the compute, network, application and storage teams have never met. I’ve visited many other firms where the different teams know each other, but don’t get along. It seemed to me unlikely that these groups would agree to purchase a single solution set from Cisco, EMC and VMware. The typically dissimilar purchasing and depreciation cycles of the various VCE components would further amplify the resistence. Much to my surprise, customer demand for Vblock appears robust. On the other hand, some synchronization challenges are impacting the manufacturer side of the selling equation.

Vblock Customer Appeal

The VCE coalition, announced in December of last year, delivers Vblock infrastructure packages while Acadia, a joint venture funded by Cisco, EMC, VMware and Intel, “…was established to help partners and customers accelerate the transition to pervasive virtualization and private cloud.” Vblock sales numbers are not publicly available but both Rob Lloyd, Cisco SVP Worldwide Sales, and Joe Tucci, EMC CEO, have stated that VCE/Vblock activity is well beyond expectations. One positive indicator is the hundreds of recent requisitions for Vblock related positions at Acadia and EMC. Another is the credibility brought when former Compaq and First Data Corp CEO, Michael Capellas, joined Acadia as CEO this past May.

VCE members are overcoming data center politics by pitching Vblocks to the IT leadership level rather than to the individual IT groups. The CIOs are then driving the sales internally, encouraging and coordinating functional team acceptance of Vblocks regardless of previous brand and model preferences. CIOs grasp the bigger picture perspective of virtualization as the underpinning technology for private clouds and as the key to transforming the way that IT provides services to business. They understand that stack infrastructures are pivotal to enabling both rapid and successful pervasive virtualization.

The stack consolidation plays of manufactures such as Oracle, IBM and HP have also helped to increase receptivity to the VCE coalition. Vblocks allow CIOs to continue working with independent manufacturers while also enjoying the benefits of a preconfigured, certified solution that is quickly acquired, set up and integrated with existing systems – and which is supported as a single product. The icing on the cake is both the inclusion of management tools such as Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) as well as the lowered cost of implementation and operation.

Sales Incentive Challenges

It’s safe to say that the three VCE parties entered into the arrangement with eyes wide open. During the VCE announcement, Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, remarked that IT coalitions have a lower success rate even than acquisitions. But the VCE challenges that have arisen thus far appear to have more to do with education and with incentive and logistics adjustments than with onerous partnership roadblocks.

Misaligned quarter endings between Cisco and EMC, for instance, can result in the former just ramping up the selling process while the later is desperately trying to close business. But anyone who has dealt with EMC reps knows that these folks are not, let’s say, exactly happy-go-lucky when it comes to meeting their quotas.

EMC reps receive a significant uplift against quotas for Vblock sales while Cisco reps receive spiffs. VMware reps not only receive no additional Vblock incentives, they also are commonly under a misconception of a negative commission impact when VMware products are sold through VCE. Not surprisingly, EMC drives the majority of Vblock sales today, followed by Cisco with VMware a distant third. Despite the spiffs, Cisco reps appear far more interested in selling UCS than entire Vblocks.

Another difficulty facing the VCE sales reps is discounting. A single manufacturer such as IBM or HP has the flexibility to discount any component they deem to be particularly price sensitive knowing they can make up the lost margin on other components. The VCE players, of course, don’t have this option which can detract from the goal of a seamless and unified presentation of the unified stack.

The virtualization channel is also a bit wary of VCE/Acadia. A Vblock partner recently told me that while on a joint sales call, the EMC rep encouraged the customer to use Acadia for the Vblock implementation rather than his company. Acadia’s ability to bundle Vblocks with common channel services such as racking/stacking and cabling may also lead to conflicts.

FrankenBlocks

A potential pitfall of multiple manufacturers offering an integrated virtualization stack is how to accommodate inevitable customer requested scope changes while ensuring that a Vblock stays a Vblock. The three VCE manufacturers have addressed this issue by putting in huge efforts to develop a common reference architecture that provides enough flexibility to avoid reversion into a FrankenBlock.

Ironically, some of the competing single-manufacturer infrastructure stacks may lack this degree of forethought and flexibility. I’ve written, for instance, about the potential obstacles to simply applying a software patch to one one of the 16 software products comprising the HP BladeSystem Matrix.

Another problem with which VCE initially struggled was providing timely and organized delivery of the many different components from the different manufacturers. This difficult logistics issue is being resolved with an EMC manufacturing facility in Franklin, Massachusetts that has been retooled to just fulfill Vblock orders. A similar facility is being set up in Europe.

Vblock Market Opportunity

The Register reported this past May that, “The VCE founders think the total market for private cloud infrastructure, including the element that can be addressed by the VCE coalition, will be $85bn by 2015.”  In order to realize the Vblock full potential, the coalition members will need to continue fixing the incentive and logistical challenges. They should also address the marketplace confusion about where VCE leaves off and Acadia begins, as well as the channel apprehensions about working with Acadia.

The close partnerships between EMC, Cisco and VMware bode well for overcoming these issues as well as more substantial ones that may yet still show up as the coalition expands. Whatever these challenges may be, they should be be vastly overshadowed by the opportunities realized from allowing customers to quickly and efficiently complete their private cloud infrastructures. With Vblock as the architectural foundation, access to all applications whether physical, virtual or SaaS is enabled by simply connecting to a private cloud.

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a leading Cisco/VMware partner which recently became Vblock certified.

Who really invented virtual desktops?

A CIO article on 10/08/2010 by Kevin Fogarty sparked a Twitter debate this morning as to whether or not “VMware invented desktop virtualization” as claimed by VMware vice president of desktop products, Vittorio Viarengo. Andi Mann and Michael Keen both made the case that Citrix enabled desktop virtualization long before VMware. Keen tweeted, “Citrix ‘WinView’ circa 1993. VMW wasn't even a twinkle in Diane & Mendel's eye.”

Server Based Computing

The pre-XenDesktop Citrix Server Based Computing (SBC) products enable, similar to VDI, a hosted desktop solution by letting users view their desktops remotely using a special protocol. But unlike VDI, SBC is accomplished by sharing the operating system among multiple users. It is a completely different technology with entirely different ramifications than VDI which abstracts the desktop operating system from the underlying hardware.  

Starting with WinFrame, the Citrix messaging of its SBC products has emphasized access and application delivery – not centralized/hosted desktops. I suspect the underlying reason was that Citrix didn’t want to poke its all important partner, Microsoft, which stressed the importance of utilizing local PC resources.

One of my previous companies was an early reseller of Citrix starting with the OS/2-based Citrix WinView product, and we ended up being named the Citrix Partner of the Year for 2000. I spent four years as a Microsoft MVP for Terminal Server and co-authored several books on Citrix/Terminal Server along with dozens of white papers and articles. All of my writing, selling and messaging was always focused on using Citrix to run complete desktops from server farms because that is the by far the best way to achieve a tangible ROI story. When I read an article years ago by Ron Oglesby (now at Unidesk) explaining VDI, I was jazzed because I believed that as the virtualization technology matured, it would finally engender mass adoption of the hosted desktop concept.

Did VMware Invent VDI?

Denis Guyadeen tweeted that IBM had mainframe terminal emulation decades ago, but VMware created desktop virtualization with VMware Workstation. Mike Sterling pointed out that Connectix beat VMware by two years when it introduced Virtual PC in 1997. I don’t consider either product, though, to be an example of VDI which is typically associated with server-hosted virtual desktops, not local.

VirtualBridges unabashedly claims that it invented VDI. And, while its solution was very basic, I think it probably was first. But as VirtualBridges acknowledges in its Web site, it wasn’t called VDI at the time.

The actual term “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure” appears to be uncontested as VMware’s. The story I’ve heard is that some of VMware’s customers began virtualizing desktop operating systems on their ESX hosts around 2005. By 2006, VMware had noticed the nascent trend and figured that it could be a huge opportunity. Someone at VMware coined the term “VDI”, and a new industry was born.

Jumpstarting VM Stall

According to VMware, the endpoint of the virtualization journey should ideally be enterprise-wide IT as a Service. The lure of large cost savings, flexibility, and even the eco-benefits of a virtualized data center should be driving organizations to quickly expand their initial virtualization projects into enterprise implementations. But more often than not, virtualization deployments sputter, leaving the organizations with hybrid virtual and physical infrastructures.

 

CA Technologies’ Andi Mann recently coined the term “VM Stall,” defining it as “the tendency of virtualization deployments to stall once the ‘low-hanging’ fruit has been converted (typically around 20% - 30% of servers).” Mann observes that while some organizations “are able to power through it,” the majority become stuck (often permanently) in VM Stall. Mann and others pinpoint several possible causes, including risk avoidance, resourcing, scalability, manageability, process, and coordination issues, plus lack of ISV support, but I submit that the underlying problem is generally adopting a tactical, rather than strategic, approach to virtualization.

 

The Tactical Road to VM Stall

 

VMware started the virtualization revolution as a small company with a unique go-to-market plan: it strove to get an evaluation copy of ESX in the hands of every techie willing to take it for a spin. Inevitably, the techies would be enthralled by the product – and their enthusiasm became evangelism, resulting in additional purchases of ESX in pockets throughout the organization.

 

This strategy worked surprisingly well. VMware’s sales raced ahead as ESX quietly became the de facto virtualization standard. But even as the company matured and began pitching VI3, and then vSphere, as a data center platform, customers continued to commonly deploy it as a point solution for test/dev and low-impact machines instead of developing a comprehensive virtualization plan. These tactical implementations work great in limited deployments, but because they were designed without the requirements of enterprise architecture in mind, they tend to fail miserably when serving as a foundation for a virtualized data center (vDC). In addition to the scalability and management limitations that Mann highlights, these limited deployments typically lack the capability to remedy even basic enterprise virtual infrastructure concerns such VM sprawl, I/O performance issues, and efficient virtual infrastructure provisioning.

 

A Physical Mindset Leads to Data Center Gridlock

 

Because the huge costs and inefficiencies of existing physical infrastructure continue to consume the lion’s share of financial and staffing resources, IT administrators inescapably view their world through a physical filter, meaning that virtual machines are relegated to the status of tertiary infrastructure. It’s a case of the squeaky wheel getting all – or at least most of – the grease, and in the transition to a virtual data center, physical servers do a lot of squeaking: they still need upgrading, rack space, switch ports, UPS slices, cabling, power, and cooling. And tasks such as testing, adding hardware, remote access, performance monitoring, troubleshooting, patching, and capacity planning require far more time than in a vDC.

 

While the virtual machines clearly reduce some costs and staffing requirements, a hybrid physical/virtual environment leads to an overall increase in staffing demands and complexity. IT now has many more objects to manage, including virtual machines, virtualization hosts, vSwitches, and vAdapters –  all with resources typically limited by  the need to contend with physical infrastructure. Even simple bottlenecks in the virtual environment commonly force IT back to the well multiple times for additional licensing, memory, ESX hosts, or storage funds. This reactionary approach to virtualization ensures that any expansion of the environment will be slow and painful – assuming, of course, that it doesn’t stall altogether.

 

Accelerating the Virtual Shift by Emphasizing ROI

 

Doing virtualization right requires making a commitment to the technology as the data center standard. The virtualization platform must become the rule and the remaining physical servers the exceptions. Whether implementing innovative workarounds for lack of ISV support or facilitating effective coordination among functional silos, with a changed organizational mindset – and the necessary preparation – IT can address the challenges of a vDC by deploying the appropriate resources, equipment, tools, and processes.

 

An ROI analysis showing discounted cash flows on a yearly basis can convince senior management to change their way of thinking and invest in the hardware, software, and services necessary for a successful vDC. Financial people are familiar with this format, and it allows them to easily compare the expected return from a strategic virtualization initiative with other opportunities for the organization’s funds.

 

Fortunately, virtualized data center transformation tends to produce a remarkable return on investment that attracts a good deal of attention. The economic enthusiasm is augmented by emphasizing additional benefits in areas such as high availability, enhanced “green” initiatives, and superior disaster recovery. Including a roadmap to private cloud/ITaaS, complete with self-service portal, monitoring, metering, and chargeback can further excite senior executives and free up the funding with surprising ease. When the point of driving hard to a virtualized data center is made clear to those who hold the keys, VM Stall roadblocks are eliminated, dramatically accelerating the virtualization journey.

Is the success of Cisco UCS real?

Synopsis: Virtualization is an exceptional technology in that it enhances staff capabilities, reduces risk of downtime and significantly facilitates “green initiatives” all while providing a remarkable and easily measurable ROI. Organizations want the benefits while IT personnel want the technology – but many need assistance in getting past the VM Stall. Cisco UCS’s success will continue because it significantly accelerates the virtualization journey to the private cloud.

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In my frequent discussions with financial analysts covering the virtualization space, I inevitably bring up the important role Cisco UCS can play in facilitating data center transformation. The typical response is a query as to whether or not the UCS is for real.

 

Cisco UCS has only been shipping for around 14 months and its calendar 2010 revenues may amount to just 1% or so of the $40 billion in global server sales. But then again, Cisco UCS is not a server designed for the physical world; it was built as an optimized hosting platform for virtual infrastructure. The number of customers now deploying UCS has grown from approximately 70 at the end of Cisco’s FYQ1 (10/24/09) to 1,700 at the end of FYQ4 (07/31/10).

 

 

A promising indication of continued UCS success is its increasing role as the hardware foundation of key virtualization initiatives. For example, the leading storage manufacturer, EMC, is fiercely gearing up to handle the demand for Vblocks which combine UCS and VMware vSphere with its storage. The third leading storage producer, NetApp, has a similar offering called Secure Multi Tenancy.

 

Organizations delivering IT-as-a-Service gravitate toward UCS in order to solve the security and scaling issues associated with this transition. Hosting provider, Savvis, bases its private cloud service on UCS, and CSC includes UCS/Vblock as the foundation for its cloud computing offering.

 

Unsticking VM Stall

 

CA Technologies’ Andi Mann coined the term “VM Stall” as “the tendency of virtualization deployments to stall once the ‘low-hanging’ fruit has been converted (typically around 20% - 30% of servers).” Mann goes on to provide several possible causes for VM Stall including risk avoidance, resourcing, scalability and manageability.

 

Cisco approached both HP and IBM around five years ago about jointly building a compute platform that would address the performance, management and resourcing issues that were bound to arise once virtualization progressed from a point solution to become the data center standard. After being turned down by both organizations, Cisco instead embarked upon the largest development initiative in the history of the company. It funded Nuova and a team of engineers which, led by VMware co-founder and former CTO, Ed Bugnion, spent 3 years developing the UCS. 

 

Analysts tend to view UCS with skepticism because they don’t see how Cisco can possibly make much headway among what they perceive to be its firmly entrenched server competitors. But customers increasingly understand that the UCS is a new category of equipment designed to alleviate the unique performance issues and complexities that accompany a virtualized data center. The UCS instills the confidence they need to virtualize their production servers onto an enterprise hosting platform rather than onto just, well…servers.

 

Cloud Computing

 

According to VMware, the final stop on the virtualization journey is IT-as-a-Service, also known as cloud computing. Its new vCloud Director is designed to work in conjunction with vSphere to facilitate the construction of hybrid clouds by adding the automation, management, security, accountability and policies required.

 

But regardless of how capable vCD and its eventual software based competitors may be in facilitating a dynamic cloud infrastructure, organizations will still face the challenge of efficiently provisioning the underlying compute, network and storage resources. Not only does Cisco UCS incorporate all three elements as part of its stateless computing architecture, but the XML based API of the UCSM (UCS Manager) will enable a particularly symbiotic relationship with vCD.

 

Engineer Endorsement

 

Lacking the capability to actually configure and work with the various virtualization technologies, I rely upon the opinions of the engineers. The enthusiasm I hear for Cisco UCS is exceptional as exemplified by Mark Domel of Drilling Info.  It is this type of endorsement for the architecture, performance and capabilities of the Cisco UCS that ensures its continued rapid growth.

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a professional services company which is also a leading Cisco partner.

 

VMware introduces Solutions Enablement Toolkits for its partners at VMworld

At VMworld 2010 this week, VMware unveiled its new Solutions Enablement Toolkits (SET). SET represents a unique approach to empowering partner virtualization capabilities and reflects VMware’s years of experience in working with its virtualization channel.

 

Ready, SET, Go

 

While VMware has been around a long time (2010 VMworld is the 7^th such event) and while 50% of new servers are now configured as virtual machines, the typical organization is still only around 20% virtualized. The big stumbling block is inevitably the tier 1 applications such as Microsoft Exchange, ERP and database servers. Successfully virtualizing these mission critical applications requires a complex offering combining both products and services.

 

The SET framework is VMware’s attempt to accelerate what it calls the “virtualization journey” by providing VMware partners with a framework to enable productization of a combined product and services solution. Moreover, it allows partners to quickly add their own unique go-to-market approach and IP in order to customize their offerings.

 

The natural tendency of channel salespeople without extensive experience in an area such as virtualization is to simply grab all of the corporate resources they can when working on an opportunity. This results in both a considerable waste of effort as well as lost opportunities from misapplication of resources. The SET was developed to enable both identification and qualification of opportunities by the salesperson before engaging corporate resources.

 

Phase 1 of the formal SET release in addition to a vSphere jumpstart includes Microsoft Exchange, SAP and SQL solutions – all on vSphere of course. Two other SETs include a desktop virtualization assessment and a VMware View pilot. Additional SETs are planned for release each quarter.

 

Pilot Results

 

The SET templates were originally conceived as a result of VMware working closely with a group of select partners. The first templates were focused on simply upgrading VMware vSphere. The partners reported that the streamlined sales fueled accelerated growth.

 

The initial success of SET indicates it is likely to become a popular tool for VMware’s channel. The framework widens the competitive advantage when pitching a virtualization solution against Microsoft’s Hyper-V. It is the IP bundling component, though, that provides the most interesting opportunity. Partners that are able to capitalize on this aspect will be able to differentiate themselves with branded offerings.

VMware advertisement acknowledges the competition

As VMware has previously demonstrated, an advantage to being the market share leader is an ability to obtain disproportionately large benefits by promoting the category itself rather than combating specific competitors. I was consequently surprised last night to see a backlit display at San Francisco International Airport declaring that desktop virtualization with VMware View costs half as much as with Citrix XenDesktop.

 

Pacific Crest/Mosaic Conference

 

During the Pacific Crest conference in Vail a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak with nearly two dozen financial analysts about virtualization. Their impressions overwhelmingly were that Citrix has already assumed the VDI leadership mantle. As Perilli virtualization.info pointed out, this perception is likely due in part to the skepticism VMware expressed about the maturity of VDI in its latest earnings call. The XenDesktop mindshare also undoubtedly received a huge boost from the $60M in VDI sales and 1,000 new XD customers that Citrix reported last quarter.

 

I told the analysts that VMware is hardly out of contention for the VDI leadership role, and Goldman Sachs agrees, at least for the next couple of years. While I admittedly have a VMware bias, I continue to see hordes of customers adopting View as their virtual desktop platform. Treating the virtual desktop as an extension of the virtualized data center leverages their existing investments in licensing, equipment, management tools and IT skill sets. Reduced server, storage and administration requirements further make View a compelling solution. The good news for the two leading VDI manufacturers, though, is that the potentially vast virtual desktop market means both are likely to thrive.

 

You Can’t Read too much into an Ad

 

VMware ‘s advertising challenge is likely meant to stave off a fast growing competitor. On the other hand, Citrix peppered cabs and benches at the last San Francisco VMworld with its own advertisements. This campaign may just be VMware’s preemptive strike to reach VMworld attendees as they first come into town.

IT architect finds Cisco UCS capabilities and cost more compelling than servers

One of the fastest growing companies in Texas, Drilling Info, Inc. provides drilling and other data along with analytical tools and applications to over 3000 companies that together account for over 90% of U.S. oil and gas produced. After evaluating several options from traditional server manufacturers for hosting his VMware based virtual infrastructure, Drillinginfo IT architect, Mark Domel, chose Cisco UCS.

"In a typical blade solution," said Mark, "we would have needed to add all these points of management each time we added a blade chassis. We would have had to manage each switch, each chassis and also the SAN fabric by extending it onto yet another fibre channel switch. UCS gives us the flexibility to deploy additional chasses as needed without having to add additional points of management and without needing to configure network and storage switches."

Unlike traditional server products, Cisco UCS was designed from the ground up as a new type of optimized hosting platform for virtual infrastructure. Mark is confident in Cisco's abilities, "Cisco has been engineering and deploying modular and blade solutions for nearly 20 years. They're not behind the curve; they're way ahead of it. Factor in Cisco's history of pioneering technology and you've got a solid solution that's easy for IT architects to believe in. The way I see it is that UCS is about building a total solution, not just a response to a specific datacenter hardware need. Pair up matched virtualization and storage technology and you've got everything you need in a datacenter."

Drillinginfo Virtual Infrastructure Schematic

 

UCS Economics

Mark and the Drillinginfo IT team compared various VMware vSphere host options including Dell Blades, Dell Rackmounts, HP Blades, HP Rackmounts, IBM Blades, IBM Rackmounts and Cisco UCS Blades. He summarized, "As the apples-to-apples quotes starting coming in, we noticed that the UCS solution was significantly less expensive than the alternatives. Not only was the pricing more aggressive, but it required far less of an investment in the networking components as they were already included in the design. Also, UCS utilizes a 10Gb network as its base architecture. This gave it a significant advantage from a future proofing and simplicity of design standpoint."

The Dell Rackmount solution, while considerably more expensive than the Cisco UCS, was the most competitive of the non-UCS quotes in both price and rack space consumed. It allowed Drillinginfo to use the four onboard NICs with ISCSI TOE for the SAN and an add-in quad-port NIC for the LAN, although Mark said, "the cabling would still be a steep administrative burden."

Other Key Factors in the Decision Process

The competitive up-front cost of the UCS was just one of the many variables weighing in Mark's decision process. Other key points included cabling, implementation ease, growth, break-fix, administration, compatibility, supportability and size.

Cabling: "There's this great image floating around the Internet of a comparison between standard servers, a blade center, and UCS. It's really very telling. Having worked in a very diverse and segregated network environment and deployed both high density traditional servers as well as blade solutions I can tell you that neither are fun from a datacenter administrator's point of view."

 

Implementation: "In our case the time it took to un-box the solution, rack, cable, bring online, and install VMware was about six hours with two guys. We were building VMs and remarking at how fast it all went. Planning and managing cabling from a traditional blade solution to the storage and Ethernet networks is a usually a major task. However, with UCS it was all just as simple as choosing how much redundancy and performance we wanted between the 6120s and the chassis and then connecting the uplinks to the network and storage."

Growth: "It was very important to me that we have a solution that's simple to grow. UCS embodies that in a way none of the other solutions could. Adding another chassis is as simple as racking it and plugging in the interconnect and power cables. That's it! You don't have to configure the LAN, SAN, or individual chassis modules. Just plug it into the UCS fabric and you're off to the races, amazing. Additionally, I have pools configured such that if a blade server of a certain hardware specification is inserted UCS will automatically configure it to be a VMware host with WWNN, WWPN, MAC, and naming from pools. Being able to pre-provision storage and network security devices based on hardware id pools is just awesome."

Break-fix: "Replacement of a blade no longer means getting involved with anything other than simply replacing the gear. We can have the replacement blade shipped to our collocation provider, we put the blade in maintenance mode, they remove the defective, insert the replacement, and we assign that replacement blade to the defective's profile. UCS will automatically give that replacement blade the hardware identifiers associated with that profile. Simply put, UCS abstracts the hardware from the server. This requires boot from SAN, which is incredibly convenient."

Administration: "The UCS Manager interface is far and away the best of breed interface I've used. In comparing it to the Dell, HP, and IBM systems I've managed in the past, I certainly have developed a love for how logically it's laid out. A lot of what you'll pay extra for to buy something like IBM's Open Fabric Manager is included in the UCS solution – multi-chassis blade redundancy for example. It doesn't require a separate server and is already redundant as the solution is designed that way. UCS feels to me like it's more IT administrator centric than the counterparts that I've used."

Compatibility: "Microsoft guest operating systems on VMware virtualization on Cisco UCS blade servers with EMC storage generated the perfect union of compatibility for us. Every vendor involved is aware of our solution and accepts that it all works perfectly together."

Supportability: "Both EMC and VMware have support facilities with which most IT personnel are familiar. Cisco's TAC is pretty unique to network and security administrators. Well sys admins rejoice, you don't know how good the network guys have had it. TAC is a true gem in the support realm. Those guys are all-stars technically and Cisco's support model is the best I've encountered. Throughout my time as a network engineer I've always had comfort in knowing that TAC had my back if something hit the fan. I'm now so glad to see that as an architect I can put a solution in place that gives our team a strong safety net. When we call TAC about UCS, we do so knowing that that we'll be well taken care of despite the many technical disciplines that might be required to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. The typical TAC guy is going to be far more versed in Ethernet networking, storage networking and virtualization than when calling a traditional server manufacturer. I certainly don't trust any other server vendors to jump into the CLI of my production SAN switches."

Size: "Size is everything. Relatively speaking, we're a small shop. I couldn't commit to a solution designed to start at massive scale. We needed something that could start off just providing basic redundancy and scale to meet our needs over the next five years of growth. UCS fits the bill. There are tons of presentations showing how big it gets but I think Cisco sometimes forgets to show how small it works too."

Savings so Far

Drillinginfo was able to reduce its footprint from five racks down to two, saving nearly three-thousand dollars a month in collocation costs. Other cost savings result from decreased Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server licensing required under virtualization. About 70 VMs currently run on the three vSphere UCS blades, and according to Mark, "they're dramatically outperforming their physical counterparts. The savings in power consumption alone is enough to pay for those hosts and licensing within a year. We chose to install the SQL servers directly on the blades to take advantage of the full memory, CPU, and IO capabilities of the systems. We've reduced our licensing costs there dramatically by cutting the number of sockets by 75% and increased performance by 400%."

"So far we've seen an average of about four times performance increase by using virtualization on the new Intel Nehalem-class processors when compared to the two and three year old physical systems. This has reduced the quantity of our operating systems and applications by virtue of the new VM systems outperforming the old model, saving licensing dollars and IT administrative costs.

"Although I'm not aware of the numbers, I know we've saved monies in our travel budget by not having to reimburse admins for trips to the collocation facility. Between UCS Manager and VMware vCenter we're able to do just about everything remotely."

Future Drillinginfo Virtualization Initiatives

In addition to evaluating the potential virtualization of its desktop environment, Drillinginfo is also increasingly enabling cloud access to its customers in order to access data in a raw format. The company is considering eventually making VMware Lab Manager virtual machines available to customers to help them build their own environments. The UCS plays an important part in enabling its cloud activities by providing great flexibility for multi-tenancy environments. According to Mark, "…it lets the IT staff pre-provision a UCS slot to match a pool which is then automatically configured for the ESX host to provision storage, etc."

Mark believes that the success of the UCS will spur other server manufactures to step up their games. From this perspective, he compares the UCS with Apple's iPhone, "The iPhone package Apple put forward was so innovative, well integrated and high quality that everyone else had to take it up a notch. The same thing will happen with the virtualization market and everyone will benefit from Cisco's hard work."

Drillinginfo's virtual infrastructure environment includes:

UCS

2x Cisco UCS 6120XP 20-port Fabric Interconnects

2x Cisco UCS 5108 Chassis

2x Cisco UCS B250 M1 blades w/ 2x Intel x5550 CPU, 48x 4GB PC3-10600 RAM, 1x Emulex M71KR-E 10Gb CNA

1x Cisco UCS B250 M2 blade w/  2x Intel x5650 CPU, 48x 4GB PC3-10600 RAM, 1x Emulex M71KR-E 10Gb CNA

3x Cisco UCS B200 M1 blades w/ 2x Intel x5550 CPU, 12x 4GB PC3-10600 RAM, 1x Emulex M71KR-E 10Gb CNA

2 x Cisco UCS B200 M1 blades w/ 2x Intel e5520 CPU, 12x 4GB PC3-10600 RAM, 1x Emulex M71KR-E 10Gb CNA

Switches

2x Cisco Catalyst 3560E-48 Ethernet switches

2x Cisco MDS 9124 Fibre-channel switches

Storage

1x EMC Celerra NS120

 - 2x Celerra NS40 Data Movers

 - 1x CX4-120 w/ 2x 300GB FC DAE, 2x 1TB SATA DAE, 1x 67GB SSD DAE

Software

VMware Enterprise Plus

Cisco Nexus 1000v

Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Datacenter

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise

Ubuntu Server 9.10 x64

Thanks to Brent Blaha and the INX Austin team for introducing me to Mark.

Use ROI to achieve virtualization success

Virtualization Zen Koan*:  If an organization virtualizes without an ROI analysis, did it achieve any savings?

 

* Xen Koan for Citrix shops

 

A CA funded 2007 independent global study found the most important factor to virtualization success as “being able to measure performance of the virtualized environment.”  The study also showed that 44% of the 800 respondents were, “unable to declare their deployment a success.”

 

As I wrote earlier this year, lack of an ROI analysis makes it less likely that organizations will adopt a strategic approach to virtualizing their data centers. Mixed environments of both physical and virtual machines instead continue to perpetuate the difficulties of a physical infrastructure while also incorporating new complexities of a virtual environment – straining the limited financial and staffing resources available.

 

The Risk of a Partially Virtualized Data Center

 

Virtualization is a very impressive technology with easily understood consolidation benefits. The low-hanging fruit of test/dev and minor impact servers can often be virtualized without a great deal of cost or effort. But once established, the virtual machine population inevitably undergoes pressure to expand. More intense demands for performance, scalability and reliability can quickly exceed the capabilities of the original equipment.

 

Tools and processes put into place to manage a limited number of non essential servers often prove inadequate for more mission-critical applications. New requirements for collaboration come into play for server, storage, network and development teams who may not be accustomed to working together.

 

Administrative complexity increases as well. The inefficiencies, troubleshooting and management requirements of a physical infrastructure remain along with administering a whole new set of virtual infrastructure components including virtual machines, hypervisors, virtualization hosts, vSwitches and vAdapters. Implementations can slow or even stall as IT leaders, already discouraged by continuous trips to the well for infrastructure upgrade funding, back off from their virtualization advocacy.

 

Using an ROI Analysis to Change the Virtualization Perspective

 

Going through the exercise of an ROI analysis leaves no choice but to see the big picture possibilities of virtualization. Rather than operating a physical data center with virtual machines, IT organizations can architect a virtualized data center (vDC) that runs some physical servers as exceptions. This flip in perspective can make all the difference in terms of the level of success achieved. 

 

Imagine, for example, someone asking if he should purchase a Ford T-Bird or a Chevy pick-up. The vehicle’s intended purpose is obviously the most important factor in making the best choice. IT organizations commonly lose sight of this truism as they ponder vDC architecture decisions without considering the ultimate objectives. They compare vSphere against Hyper-V, EMC versus NetApp and HP Servers against Cisco UCS based upon features or price instead of upon each solution’s relative ability to enable the desired end-state.

 

Quantifying the respective benefits and costs of an enterprise vDC implementation frees up the funding required to do virtualization right. Comparing discounted cash flows for a vDC against the projected return of other corporate initiatives enables senior management to gauge just how compelling virtualization tends to be – provided it is deployed effectively on an enterprise scale. Ensuring vDC success furthermore lays the groundwork for additional efficiencies from the automation and resource utilization transparency of a private cloud architecture.

 

Special thanks to David McNichols of Comstor who called my attention to the CA study referenced in the article.

 

How to discourage producers from producing

Imagine a company deciding to change its sales compensation plan. Rather than providing incentives for salespeople who achieve difficult quotas, it instead implements a sliding commission rate that declines as sales increase. The most talented salespeople would be the most severely impacted and human nature being what it is, they would certainly reduce their efforts accordingly. Business would decline.

The U.S. government is currently debating whether or not allowing expiration of the Bush tax cuts for high-earning individuals will reduce their incentive to spend. This, though, should be a relatively minor concern. The real problem is the reduced incentive to produce. I remember a friend of my father’s who was a renowned surgeon during the period of 70% top marginal tax rates. He would only work 6 months of the year – saying he refused to work for 30% of his money.

The taxpayers targeted by the current administration are the ones most instrumental to our economic success. Many of them are small business owners and, particularly in a credit challenged economy, need their profits in order to facilitate growth. Taxing away earnings leaves the owners with both less incentive and less ability to continue to invest in their companies. Small business is the primary driver of employment; meaning that the higher tax rates will continue to thwart economic progress.

Cisco UCS vs. HP BladeSystem Matrix: an Update

HP's Chief Architect for Infrastructure Software and Blades, Gary Thome, responded to my December 2009 post writing that HP "does not see UCS as comparable in functionality to BladeSystem Matrix, which we believe is in a category by itself." This argument is not without merit; either the EMC/vSphere/UCS Vblock or the NetApp/vSphere/UCS Secure Multi-Tenancy might better compare with the Matrix, particularly when purchased in conjunction with optional EVA storage. I nonetheless decided to maintain the Matrix vs. UCS face-off in this updated comparison for the following reasons:

1. Both customers and other industry players perceive Matrix as competition to UCS. Egenera VP of Marketing, Ken Oestreich, emphasized this in his blog post last month.
2. HP's Web site positions Matrix as competition to UCS. [see author update note below]
3. The Matrix press release last year closely followed the UCS announcement and included a jab at Cisco's data center strategy. Publications such as InfoWorld, CIO.com, searchdatacenter.com and The Register all ran articles spotlighting Matrix and UCS as competing products.

Technical Advances

One of my colleagues received the following unsolicited email a couple of months ago from an HP rep:

From: Citte, Chad (ESS Mid-Market Partner Specialist)

Sent: Monday, May 17, 2010 1:29 PM
Subject: IT Critics Declare HP Dominance Over Cisco

In recent IT competitive news, HP is capturing wins across the board. While Cisco is busy fighting for credibility with their “Unified Computing Strategy” (UCS), HP continues to advance without missing a beat. 

As can be inferred from the email, the Matrix has advanced since its debut including a tripling of the number of supported servers to 1,500 and support for VMware vSphere 4.0 (though not the VMware Virtual Distributed Switch). The full list of Matrix enhancements can be found in the new HP BladeSystem Matrix 6.0 Update 1 Release Notes, and an updated UCS vs. Matrix matrix follows at the end of this post.

Despite its enhancements, the Matrix remains a daunting assimilation of existing HP products including enclosures, blades, Virtual Connect switches and 16 HP Insight Software packages. The Central Management Server (or servers) is similarly comprised of HP SIM, Storage Works XP CommandView, etc. as can be found on Page 13 in the Compatibility Chart. Conceivably, the Matrix functionality could be built outside of the "Matrix". Unlike the Cisco UCS, however, which only automates the provisioning of virtual servers, the Matrix automates both the virtual and physical environments.

Cisco Fighting for Credibility with UCS?

The HP email claims that Cisco is fighting for credibility with its UCS, although evidence indicates otherwise:

• Sales: UCS sales continue to soar. A May 12, 2010 article in The Register said that Cisco's UCS sequential revenue growth last quarter was up 168% with the unique customer base doubling to over 900. A Cisco June blog post put the number of UCS customers at around 1,000. HP does not disclose BladeSystem Matrix sales, but discussions with both current and former HP employees indicate total implementations are around 60 – 75. Customers, though, are unable to upgrade any software or firmware in the solution and be in a supported configuration. Even a bug fix in one of the myriad Matrix components cannot be installed until the entire Matrix solution is tested and certified with the fix, which can take months. Many Matrix customers have apparently given up on dealing with the complexities and now run its blades as just standard servers.
• Partnerships: Cisco UCS is generating outstanding momentum with key industry players. Two of the top three leading storage manufacturers have strategic virtualization offerings that build upon UCS as the compute platform.
• Customer References: Customers rave about UCS. The hosting provider, Savvis, for example is basing its private cloud hosting strategy upon the UCS. Vince Stephens, TASER International VP of Network Operations, said, "We realized we couldn't build the data center of the future with yesterday's technology". Joe Onisick's post shows how UCS converted him from skeptic to advocate stating, "UCS changes the game for server architecture." Michael Heil says, "Terms that come to mind that describe UCS are simplified management, elegant design, paradigm shift, future of computing, time and cost saver, etc."
• Buzz: A Google Blogs search shows 8,553 results for Cisco UCS compared to 228 for the HP Matrix, and I could not find a single customer touting its Matrix experience. A Twitter search inevitably shows abundant UCS related Tweets. HP Matrix is generally nowhere to be found.
• Awards: Cisco UCS has garnered both awards and trade journal accolades including the VMworld 2009 Gold Award for Hardware in Virtualization, the Best of Interop 2009 Award and the Best Data Center Innovation Award at BladeSystems Insight 2009 Event. HP Matrix has won no awards.

Price Comparison

Some media stories have speculated that HP's low server margins will force Cisco to reduce UCS prices. The relative capability of UCS vs. Matrix to enable a successfully virtualized data center (vDC) and the associated huge savings and other benefits matters far more than any cost differential. But for a reality check, I compared pricing for both UCS and Matrix assuming 32 blades (UCS B200 M2 and HP BL 490c respectively) with 96 GB of DDR-3 1066 dual rank RAM. I used the lower of prices from the HP Web site or the HP BladeSystem Matrix TCO calculator and then validated that they were equivalent to, or lower than, the CDW Web site. I used Cisco's MSRP UCS pricing which customers should easily be able to obtain from their Cisco partner.

 
 
The table shows the UCS is less expensive for this configuration. Additionally, fewer switches and cables result in lower ongoing operating costs than the Matrix, while the Fabric Interconnect 10GB Ethernet switching capability helps further reduce comparative costs as the units scale.

Implementation

The Matrix requires a 2-week Implementation Service by an HP-Certified Matrix Professional from HP Engineering Services. The company is considering a partner implementation program; although one of the two partners with whom I spoke told me he was not enthusiastic about going through the arduous certification requirements. The other liked the idea, but said his company will probably continue approaching converged infrastructure from a best-of-breed approach rather than specifically promoting HP Matrix.

Cisco has certified its partners to provide UCS implementation since its debut, and customers can also take a 2-day UCS boot camp. Mark Domel of DrillingInfo, recently sent me an email describing his experience with installing UCS:

"In our case the time it took to un-box the solution, rack, cable, bring online, and install VMware was about six hours with two guys. We were building VMs and remarking at how fast it all went. Planning and managing cabling from a traditional blade solution to the storage and Ethernet networks is a usually a major task. However, with UCS it was all just as simple as choosing how much redundancy/performance we wanted between the 6120s and the chassis and then connecting the uplinks to the network and storage."

Virtualization Philosophy

Cisco UCS was developed from a clean slate over a period of three years under the leadership of VMware's co-founder and former CTO as an optimized hosting platform for virtual infrastructure. It supplements the hypervisor in managing the virtualization environment and provides an XML API to which anyone can write and orchestrate the entire compute and network environment. This will enable a particularly symbiotic relationship with VMware's upcoming Redwood (vCloud Services Director).

HP Matrix is designed as a self-service provisioning portal handling tasks from migrating virtual machines to managing VM lifecycles. These capabilities while ambitious, can put it at odds with data center architects striving to run a vDC as the standard with (if necessary) a limited number of physical servers as exceptions. For example, the Matrix' Virtual Connect component is pitched to server teams as a way to manage the switches without the inconvenience of network group oversight. And while Matrix includes Roles Based Access Control, once an HP enclosure is incorporated into the Matrix in production mode, the network team cannot even make changes such as VLAN configurations.

Wrap Up

HP makes great servers and recently passed IBM as the world leader in server sales. But unlike the UCS which is on its way to becoming a major player in the vDC space, the Matrix' tepid reception does not bode well. In order to avoid a fate as the "New Coke" of the virtualization era, future versions of the Matrix likely will need to incorporate the type of resiliancy and management ease that is contributing to the success of the UCS.

 

Cisco UCS vs. HP Matrix Matrix - Updated

Attribute	Cisco UCS	HP Matrix
Enterprise scalability	14 chasses (eventually 40), 112 blades – potentially thousands of VMs. Up to 5 UCS chasses in a rack.	1,500 total logical servers (or up to 70 VM hosts – whichever is less). Can combine up to 4 CMS to reach 6,000 logical servers, but no clustering or information sharing. Server profiles cannot be moved from one CMS to another unless using EVA with HP IR & like logical servers on both CMS servers. Up to two C7000 chasses in a rack (due to high power requirements).
Redundancy	All components redundant	Central Management Server has no fault tolerance or clustering and little or no redundancy.
System Management Software Packages Required	UCSM	Onboard Administrator, Systems Insight Manager, Virtual Connect, Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, Insight Dynamics VSE. (Note: ID-VSE has capabilities that UCSM lacks including trending/baselining, physical and virtual resource monitoring).
"Closed" Architecture Limitations	Cisco UCS requires Cisco servers, CNAs and Fabric Interconnects for optimal performance	Requires one of the following specific HP ProLiant blades: HP ProLiant BL260c, HP ProLiant BL460c, HP ProLiant BL465c, HP ProLiant BL490c, HP ProLiant BL495c, HP ProLiant BL680c or HP ProLiant BL685c.1
vNIC & vHBA Support	56 vNICs per server for every 2 port Palo Adapter	LAN – Ethernet 32 x 10 Gb downlinks to server ports with 2 Flex-10 modules & each server can have 8 FlexNICs. SAN – Fiber 16 X 8 Gb 2/4/8Gb auto negotiating server ports
Automated Server Provisioning	Virtual Only. Automated physical server provisioning requires 3rd party tools.	Both Virtual and Physical
Storage Support	Works with most leading industry storage manufacturers to enable automated provisioning, though requires 3rd party management applications. Particularly tight integration with both EMC and NetApp.	Automated storage provisioning only supported at this time for HP EVA – and only in experimental mode. Otherwise, storage must be manually provisioned.
Unified Fabric/Converged Network	Both Ethernet and Fibre Channel enabled without purchasing separate infrastructure components.	HP does not currently support the convergence of Ethernet and Fibre Channel in any Blade System products, although Flex Fabric has been announced which will converge Ethernet & FC within an HP enclosure, but which will not reduce cabling to or from the enclosure. Each enclosure requires 2 Ethernet and FC interconnect devices and these must be Virtual Connect Flex-10 modules.
Systems Management Software	None. Cisco's approach is to utilize the XML API to which anyone can write and orchestrate the entire compute and network environment. VMware's Ionix is an example, BMC Bladelogic another	Yes. Requires HP hardware and software.
Stateless Computing	Yes. UCS Service Profiles can capture the entire personality of the server and it's hardware configuration	Limited capabilities using Virtual Connect, but the hardware configurations must be identical. While VC does have Roles Based Access Control enabling the network team to configure VC, once it is in production as part of Matrix, the network administrators can no longer make changes.
Ability to deliver native network performance to VMs via hypervisor bypass	Yes	No
Network traffic monitoring & application of live-migration aware network and security policies	Cisco VN-Link / Nexus 1000V	None
Memory	96GB Half Width Blade and 384GB Full Width Blade (8GB DIMMs)	With HP BL490C half-height blades : 144 GB w/8 GB DIMMs, 192 w/16 GB DIMMs With HP BL685c (AMD) blades: 256 GB (NOTE: New HP BL620 AMD based blades have been announced with larger memory capabilities but are not yet part of Matrix)
OS Support for Management SW	No separate management server required	Windows Server® 2008 SP2/R22 Windows Server® 2003 SP2/R2
Database Support for Management SW	None required	Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP3, Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition - though only up to 500 systems and 5,000 events and no remote database support
Browser Support for Management SW	Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher; Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or higher	Internet Explorer 7 or 8 or Firefox 3.x (some limitations)
Runtime Environment for Management SW	Sun JRE 1.6 or later	None required
Added Prerequisite SW for Management SW	None	.NET 1.1 Framework, .NET 2.0 SP1 Frameowrk, .NET 3.0 Framework, .NET 3.5 SP1 Framework, AP .Net service, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash Player Version 9 or 10, MS iSCSI Software Initiator, SNMP, TCP/IP with DNS installed, Windows Automated Installation KIT (WAIK) Version 1.1; Windows Server 2003/2008
Hypervisor Support	Supports any X86-based hypervisor. Particular advantages from tight integration with vSphere	VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 Update 4 or 5 VMware ESX Server 4.0 & Update 1 VMware ESXi Citrix XenServer 5.5 Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V SP2/R2 Xen on RHEL Xen on SLES
Guest OS Support (server)	Windows Server 2003 R2, 32 bit, 64 bit, Windows 7 with Hyper-V, 64 bit, Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Standard and Enterprise Edition, 64 bit o VMware ESX 3.5 U4, VMware vSphere 4, 4 U1, 4i, 4i U1 o RedHat RHEL 5.3, 64 bit, RHEL 5.4 KVM, 64 bit, RHEL 6 KVM, 64 bit, RedHat Rhat 4.8, 64 bit, and Fedora Novell SLES 10 SP3, 64 bit, SLES 11, 64 bit, SLES 11 SP1 XEN, aSLES 11 XEN , 64 bit Solaris x86 10.x, 64 bit Oracle OVM 2.1.2, 2.2 Oracle Enterprise Linux XenServer Citrix	Windows Server® 2008/2003. Microsoft Windows Vista. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 Update 7: 32 bit Update 7: AMD64 and Intel® EM64T Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Update 3: 32 bit Update 3: AMD64 and Intel® EM64T SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3 & SLES 11 (Note: RHEL & SLES VM guests on Hyper-V are not supported by Insight Orchestration or Insight Recovery. Insight Recovery supports non-clustered Hyper-V Windows guests as a technology preview).
Distributed Virtual Switch Support	VMware vSphere vDS & Cisco Nexus 1000V	None – just standard VMware vSwitch
Guest OS Support (VDI)	All	None (No Matrix automated provisioning support )
VMware vCenter Integration	Yes	Limited
3rd party development	XML-based API	None
QOS	Yes	None
V2P Capability	No, unless in conjunction with certain storage partners	Yes
Switch Efficiency	One set of top rack switches manages up to 14 chasses (eventually 40).	One set of top of rack switches required for each rack.
Minimum cables required per chassis (inc. FC & redundancy)	2	6
Maximum cables potentially needed per chassis (inc. FC & redundancy)	8	34
FCoE	Yes	Limited – only within the chassis with FlexFabric.
Complexity and ease of implementation	Very fast set-up, though designing and fine-tuning service profiles and templates for optimizing virtual infrastructure provisioning/management can take time. Many Cisco channel partners are certified in implementation and customers can also take UCS classes.	60 hour on-site engagement required by HP Implementation Service – no partner certified implementers. Customers also unable to upgrade any software or firmware in the solution and still be in a supported configuration.
Ease of Support	Customers can apply their own patches and updates to individual components as appropriate.	If a bug is found in any one of the Matrix components, the customer is prohibited from installing an update until the entire Matrix solution is tested and certified.
Mfg. Support	3 -year	3-Year

 

¹ While the c7000 will work with any HP ProLiant blade, Matrix only works with the blade models listed.

²HP strongly recommends the use of Windows Server 2008 SP2, Enterprise Edition (64-bit version) on a ProLiant server with at least 32 GB memory

 

Author Disclosure: I work for a professional services company which is also a leading Cisco partner. I researched this article carefully, but welcome any corrective feedback.

07/22/2010:  Author Follow-up Note:  HP just changed its Web Site page titled "The Real Story about the Cisco UCS " that I linked to in my article. Here is the original page as a PDF on ViewYonder.

07/26/2010: Author Follow-up Note: HP’s Director Biz Strategy blogged in response to this post. I in turn commented back on his post, but my comment was taken off line (I assume it is going through some sort of standard review process). While I did not keep an exact copy, it is close to the following:

---

I am the blogger mentioned in your post. addressed the comparison issue at the beginning of my article, and still stand by it 100%.  In fact, unbeknown to me, searchdatacenter.com published an article the day before the publication of my post leading off with a grouping of Cisco UCS and HP Matrix.

In terms of access to HP experts, Jason Treu was my only point of contact. While Gary Thome personally and graciously had taken the time to speak with me following my first post, I know how busy he is and did not feel it appropriate to reach out to him directly. Instead I sent the following email to Jason. He never responded.

From: Steve Kaplan
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2010 6:41 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Questions for HP

Hi Jason,

Gary asked that I bring any questions to HP.  I am planning to write an updated post on UCS vs Matrix, and have the following questions:

1)   Ballpark # of Matrix customers

2)   Reference list of 3 customers to call

3)   Any information on the upcoming channel program for authorized channel implementation of Matrix

4)   Any other relevant updates/capabilities about Blade Server Matrix.

Thanks,

Steve

[my contact information including both office and cellular phone numbers]

Microsoft says VMware has determined virtualization is an OS feature. What?

The June 9, 2010 Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog is titled, VMWare (sic) figures out that virtualization is an OS feature. The post makes a rather inexplicable, and clearly incorrect, argument that VMware now has embraced Microsoft's perspective. It's remarkable not because of the misunderstanding of VMware products or strategies, but because it unabashedly proclaims what has previously been a less emphasized Microsoft assertion: "Virtualization is simply a role within the Windows® operating environment."

What's Wrong with Virtualization as a Feature of the OS?

VMware would certainly make a case that running virtualization as an OS feature not only incurs unnecessary bloat, but also results in less performance, reliability and security. Microsoft undoubtedly would claim the opposite. But more importantly than the technical arguments are the very different approaches to virtualization that result from the two perspectives.

VMware's promotion of virtualization as a platform mandates not only exceptional reliability and performance, but also encourages development of enterprise toolsets such as Fault Tolerance, Storage VMotion, vDS for virtualizing the network and many more. Gartner validated this advantage when it recently positioned VMware as the only firm in the Leaders quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.

On the other hand, I've written about Microsoft's advocacy of a slow, evolutionary virtualization journey designed to "preserve and extend existing investments", or in other words, maintain the status quo. The downside is that this approach incurs unnecessary expense, risk and inefficiencies. It also can lead to less than optimal architecture and product choices.

The Private Cloud

While inefficient, organizations can still be successful with deploying virtualization at a grass roots level and expanding the environment until they eventually end up with a virtualized data center. Despite Microsoft's advocacy to the contrary, this approach is not likely to be successful with establishing a private cloud.

Transitioning IT to a service where resources are dynamically allocated as needed and charged as consumed requires a commitment to new technologies, equipment and operations processes. Only an enterprise level approach will free up the economic and political resources necessary to effect the transformation.

 

 

Microsoft pushes virtualization partners to promote Hyper-V

"Growth in Hyper-V is inevitable. It wins with price sensitive customers, small customers, and customers new to virtualization."

    -VMware partner quoted in the MS Virtualization Profitability Kit

 

A Virtualization.info article this morning titled, Microsoft admits that VMware has been the only choice for partners so far, reported Microsoft's "call to action" beseeching the partner channel to promote Hyper-V. A Microsoft Virtualization Partner Profitability Kit claims the lower cost of the Redmond giant's virtualization offering allows partners to "sell more of it". The hypervisor huckstering approach, though, is not likely to be widely embraced by entrenched VMware partners.

Partner Profitability Model

The Kit, while primarily encouraging VMware partners to also sell Microsoft, includes a Partner Profitability modeling tool that calculates incremental revenues and margins from promoting Hyper-V products rather than vSphere. It emphasizes an assumed concentration on "more price-sensitive" customers.

The modeling tool's default assumptions, not surprisingly, show that a Hyper-V practice results in more business than vSphere – driving $111K of increased revenues the first year which increases to $1.1M by year three. A 2-month payback covers the $16,000 (2.5 days) of training required for converting two VMware engineers to Hyper-V prowess.

One of two primary variables determining whether the outcome will favor Hyper-V or vSphere, the assumption that lower Hyper-V licensing costs enable an upsell of additional hardware/software products has only a minor impact on the results. The implication is that spending less money on virtualization software frees up funds to purchase more of said software along with more hardware. But virtualization should be part of a strategic initiative that first calculates the overall savings and then works backward to determine the optimal architecture and associated products required to enable the savings.

The second and truly key assumption is that pitching Hyper-V results in a higher win rate in price sensitive segments. This is a huge stretch, especially since VMware continues to dominate the market despite the free inclusion of Hyper-V with every copy of Windows Server. It also disregards the significantly higher percentage of servers that can be successfully virtualized with vSphere due to superior performance and many more enterprise capabilities such as zero downtime and the ability to virtualize the network.

Partner Motivation

As Alessandro Perilli points out in his Virtualization.info article, Microsoft's channel entreaty is a departure from its messaging focus on customers. Microsoft is one of the savviest companies on the planet, and certainly understands the value of channel influence. I recently met with the COO of a sizeable Windows shop who opened the conversation with the declaration, "I've made my decision. We're going with Hyper-V". A few weeks and an ROI analysis later, however, the purchase orders were issued for VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus along with a large Cisco UCS.

The Profitability Tool Kit argues that increased deals and product sales more than compensate for the lower Microsoft revenues and margins. Offering a lower-cost Hyper-V solution enables partners to become trusted advisors. It also warns that increasingly customers "will choose the partner that offers them the lower-cost, feature-parity Microsoft solution".

Despite the apparent hullabaloo over Hyper-V vs. vSphere, virtualization plays a relatively minor role at Microsoft and virtualization revenues result only from associated management products. It is hard to imagine the Redmond giant truly fired up about Hyper-V with so much going on from Office 2010 to Xbox to Bing. VMware, on the other hand, lives or dies by its ability to provide the most innovative, high quality and and effective virtualization solutions. It spent over 3,000,000 engineering hours alone on developing vSphere over a period of three years.

Attending VMware Partner Exchange or VMworld quickly reveals both partner and customer fervor for the technology. But I doubt whether it is unbridled passion or the ability to make a little extra margin that drives partner loyalty. VMware provides the best and easiest way for organizations to achieve their overall business goals which, in the end, is the best way for a partner to build a successful and profitable consultancy.

 

Author Disclaimer: I work for a leading VMware partner and am VMware biased, but the opinions expressed in this article are my own and are not approved or endorsed by my employer.