It was evident from VMWorld 2007 that virtualization has gone mainstream in enterprise computing. Virtualization deals with the abstraction of hardware and software resources in a computing environment. The nine year old company, Palo Alto-based VMware, attracted nearly 11,000 people and scores of partners at VMWorld 2007 in September, a month after it went public. VMwares IPO was a spectacular success in stock market terms. And in her keynote, Diane Greene, president and CEO, VMware called it the IPO of the virtualization industry rather than VMware alone, and recanted its potential to work a revolution in computing architecture.

Diane Greene prides herself on VMwares role in building out the virtualization industry, which is now getting competitive. It is more than hypervisor wars, and Greene asserts that the hypervisor does not alone constitute the virtualization infrastructure. VMwares success has been built on what virtualization can do and the various applications thereof, she added.

Greene continued: Hardware is increasingly going to be delivered virtualization-enabled with a hypervisor pre-installed, and it can be up and running with virtualization in under two minutes. The hypervisor sits right on top of the hardware. A lot of times a hypervisor is seen as being in the same class as the operating system. But the operating system does far more than the hypervisorit manages the applications for the end user. The hypervisor just manages the resources, and the virtual infrastructure aggregates those resources and provides reliability and responsiveness for the software running in virtual machines.

For VMware, the hypervisor makes up just about 20% of revenues and the rest comes from products that help exploit the power of virtualization. The successful IPO whereby VMwares parent EMC Corp floated 10% of its equity public was designed to raise cash to support VMwares growth.

The Industry Rallies Around
Hardware vendors like Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu Siemens and NEC have endorsed VMwares new hypervisor. Both AMD and Intel exhibited their support in evidence of virtualization being the clear direction that enterprise computing is headed towards.

Hardware vendors are expected to begin shipping ESX Server 3i within their products by the end of 2007 and over the course of 2008. Pat Gelsinger, senior VP, Digital Enterprise System, Intel, said in a keynote, Virtualization disaggregates the OSit helps build a new data center operating system.

Other announcements centered around new product introductions in the virtualization infrastructure like virtual desktop, automation of disaster recovery, data centers, and virtual appliances.

The virtual machine is the new desktop platformits both a PC and a file, if you will

IDCs forecast for worldwide server virtualization looks promising. In terms of percentage of servers shipped with virtualization capabilities, the number has steadily grown from 5% in 2005 and is expected to touch 17% in 2010.

Saving on capital expenditure was the original reason for companies to take up virtualization. When VMware started 10 years back the industry was in a phase of massive hardware deployment and virtualization was one of the ways to keep up with compute capacity without proportional increase in server overheads. Such of those who didnt embrace virtualization experienced rapid growth in the number of servers spread across the organization and needed to consolidate the servers. Server consolidation thus became the driving factor for growth of virtualization. VMware believes that business continuity, virtual appliances, desktop management, and the need to rapidly provision new applications are some of the new drivers for the virtualization trend.

The broad value proposition for virtualization is therefore four-fold: improve server utilization, reduce/contain the number of servers, improve business continuity and disaster recovery efforts, and lower data center operational expenses.

On the Desktop
The hypervisor or ESX Server gives the power to manage desktops on the backend through a virtual machine called the virtual desktop. The virtual desktop can reside on a device with any form factor. Said Jerry Chen, senior director, Enterprise Desktops, VMware, The virtual machine is the new desktop platformits both a PC and a file, if you will. Virtual desktops have already reached significant installed base: about 500 mn in enterprises and 350 mn in consumers. The advantages of virtual desktops stem from the fact that they are hardware independent, can be isolated and are, therefore, inherently secure, and can be moved around like a file. There are two types of products: individually administered desktops and managed desktops. VMware has products in both categories. Notably, its Virtual Desktop Manager 2.0 is more than a managed desktop in that it also functions as a connection broker managing connections from remote clients to hosted desktops.

We are in the process of virtualizing 21,000 desktops using VMware VDI, said Tom Petry, director of technology at the District School Board of Collier County in a press communication. We have seen firsthand the manageability and control VDI brings to a desktop computing environment; including the security and business continuity benefits of centralizing our desktop infrastructure in our world class data centersno small thing in hurricane country.

IDC estimates the market opportunity for virtual desktops to be $2 bn by 2011. We feel virtual machines for desktop computing is one of the most exciting developments within the technology industry in recent years, said IDCs John Humphreys. We see significant opportunity for organizations to improve the efficiency with which they provide computing resources through the use of virtualized client computing technologies. With a solution like VDI, organizations have an alternative that not only provides a familiar user experience, but also helps to centralize desktops and improve data security and user productivity.

Automating DR
At the event, VMware also announced VMware Site Recovery Manager, a new product for disaster recovery automation. In a conference call prior to the event, Raghu Raghuram, VP, Products and Solutions, VMware said Disaster recovery is one of the key factors driving customer adoption and standardization on the VMware Infrastructure platform. VMware Site Recovery Manager introduces disaster recovery automation and management capabilities to reduce the risk, cost and complexity of organizations disaster recovery plans. Growing awareness of the business consequences of data center outages and regulations including SOX and HIPAA that mandate disaster recovery are helping to raise awareness of the importance and preparation required to ensure successful recovery. VMware and its storage partners including EMC, EqualLogic, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Lefthand Networks and Network Appliance are working to support the use of leading storage replication capabilities with VMware Site Recovery Manager.

After VMWorld 2007
In the days following VMWorld 2007, VMware announced a new hardware certification program for storage virtualization devices. Combined with the virtualization-enabling technologies in VMware ESX Server, this program is designed to enable customers to have more choice in deploying virtualized storage solutions with VMware Infrastructure. In a bid to cascade the benefits of virtualization down to smaller organizations the company announced three new VMware Infrastructure product packages tailored for SMBs in October. Most recently, the company also unveiled VMware Server 2, the next generation virtualization product which is free to use.

Ed Nair
mail@dqindia.com
The author is based in San Francisco

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