Bink.nu did a great write-up earlier this week on the future of Hyper-V. Hyper-V has been out for 4 months and yet we’re already talking about (and some people are waiting for) Hyper-V 2.0. Hyper-V 2.0 will be available when Windows Server 2008 R2 launches. According to most reports and Microsoft’s public website the product will be here in 2010. Sorry, Microsoft fans, you’ll have to play the waiting game again. I’m sure you’re already used to that after waiting 1 1/2 of slipping for Hyper-V 1.0 to come out. Below is a run down on the features that Microsoft has promised for Hyper-V 2.0, when VMware first had those same features, and how late Microsoft is to market with their roadmap.
Live Migration – Part of VMware (VMotion) since 2003 (7 years late)
Clustered File System – Part of VMware (VMFS) since 2001 VMFS (9 years late)
Hot-remove virtual disk – Not supported in VMware yet
SLAT (memory virtualization) – AMD RVI and Intel EPT supported in VMware today (2 years late)
Dynamic memory – Supported in VMware since 2001 (9 years late)
This just cements the fact that Microsoft is 5 to 6 years behind current shipping technology. Of course if you’d like to wait around for another 2 years to get the features that VMware has in the product today then be my guest – it’s your money that you’re wasting by not taking advantage of virtualization today. And who’s to say Microsoft won’t drop the very features you’re waiting for from the product before it ships like they did with so many features before.
The bottom line is you don’t have to wait for a roadmap. All of the features on Microsoft’s roadmap are here today with a proven technology used by hundreds of thousands of customers – VMware ESX. Go ahead and download a copy today to get started.
So after having some fun with the Hyper-V ad I had to post a new VMware ad that’s making the rounds internally. Here’s the background on what’s been happening.
VMware, Inc – Palo Alto, CA
October 30, 2008
In an attempt to protect the company’s intellectual property, VMware painted its logo on the members of its Turtle Think Tank. While the paint is non-toxic and completely safe for the environment, members of P.E.T.A. are up in arms. They feel that the turtles have been marked and have lost their individualism. Their other concern is the loss of camouflage. The Microsoft hawks will now be able to spot the tasty turtles from hundreds of feet in the air. P.E.T.A. feels they must get involved to protect the lives of the VMware turtles.
We have yet to hear from the turtle’s agent. He has been holed up in his shell for most of the day while a local cougar tries to find the secret opening.
VMware spokesperson and turtle expert, Jeff Goodall, replied to questions with the statement: “Virtualization – We can fit four turtles on one rock. What can you do with a rock?”
VMware: Virtual Reality: Microsoft Hyper-V Ads – Cool Robot!: “Check out this Microsoft Hyper-V ad that we found yesterday. I have to say, that is definitely a cool robot! But, perhaps they couldn’t find real customers to spotlight in the ads?
And what’s the robot drinking? Is that Microsoft Kool-Aid? Actually, what I found really interesting was that the Robot was named, ‘IT 24-7’, implying continuous uptime for applications and other IT services run on Hyper-V, but did you notice the asterisk? And when you read the fine print…
I had written a little while back about a conference coming up on November 4 about virtualization hosted by BrightTalk. For those wanting to hear my session which is at 2 pm on November 4th you can use the embedded player below. This will also take you to a recorded session after the event.
Calling all virtualization users!! Alessandro over at Virtualization.info decided to create an informal virtualization marketshare study. He’s seeing the same thing that I am – there’s a big discrepancy between the published IDC numbers and the published Gartner numbers. Make sure to go over to Virtualization.info to take the survey.
This actually opens up the discussion on how to create a good survey that reflects the market properly. I’m always skeptical of polls of any nature. I know that in theory you can create a good set of results from a relatively small sample size but I always question that. For example, how can we be sure that the survey hits customers of all sizes and all markets? How can we be sure the customers are actually using the products they are answering about and to what extent they’re using them? Once you get the data, how do you extrapolate the data to a much wider marketshare number instead of being stuck with the marketshare over the small group? All things to think about as we try and figure out this set of numbers.
Hey, at least we get visibility into the methodology this time. Hopefully I’ll get that out of IDC on my call with them later today.
A little over a week ago, IDC published some numbers on marketshare that I disagreed with a little. The whole thing actually got covered in the NY Times. I disagreed because the numbers I had seen from Gartner and my own experiences dealing with customers every day and talking with a lot of other people in the industry just said the numbers didn’t make sense. I actually reached out to the people at IDC to have a phone call and dig into the numbers a little more. I’ll make sure to post a follow-up on that when that call happens (hopefully this week).
In the mean time there was an article published about Virtual Iron where the graph below from Gartner appeared.
November 2007
It turns out that the graph is pretty old. I first saw the graph in December 2007. An anonymous poster on Virtualization.info (most likely from Gartner) actually stated it was from November 2007. Whatever the original date it was old. Gartner reached out to the original author and got them to post the updated chart below. For those with a Gartner subscription (or a checkbook) you can get the report this came from here.
March 2008
As you can see, the numbers match much better with what the last several reports have said from Gartner – VMware at 89% and Microsoft at 7%. Now you can see why I’m questioning the IDC numbers and why hopefully we’ll get visibility into their methodology very soon. In the mean time I’m glad we get a view of the Gartner side of the story.
VI3 stands for VMware Infrastructure 3 by VMware. It’s the product suite that everyone seems to be talking about and what most of the other virtualization vendors out there compare themselves to. The problem I always find is that vendors with 1/15th of the feature set of VI3 compare their lesser equipped and often less expensive products to the robust and proven technology in VI3. To help people understand what exactly you’re getting out of VI3 there’s a couple of resources I’d like to point you to.
1) The VMware EMEA team has put together a great video that walks through a complete demonstration on VI3. Get the video here: http://www.vi3demo.com/.
2) If you’d like to know how VMware differs from the competition then you can always refer to the public “Why VMware” site.
After reviewing these two resources you should have a better understanding of why 100% of the Fortune 100 and 95% of the Fortune 1000 use VMware today.
This is a brilliant post from VCritical. It’s a very funny read but hits home on the pains of SCVMM. It’s a must read!
VCritical · Storage vendors unanimously applaud SCVMM innovation: “In a cutthroat industry where there is little to agree on, execs from top storage vendors had no problem finding common ground on an aspect of Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).”
You read that right. Free software! For those that don’t know Codeweavers they make emulation software for the Mac (and games too). Basically you can run the software, load up a supported Windows app, and it runs “natively” on the Mac – no VM required. It sounds nice in practice and does work pretty well. Not every app is supported. Not every app runs well. However, those apps that do run and run well are pretty useful. I actually use it to run Siebel of all things. Siebel only runs on IE6 – both of which are completely horrible software packages by the way. Anyhow, I have IE6 loaded up in Crossover and now it runs on my Mac without having to buy a copy of Windows. Of course I use VMware Fusion for everything else I have to do in Windows.
Back to the free software part. The CEO of Codeweavers issued a challenge to President Bush to achieve something useful and impacting in his last days in office. Funny enough his first challenge of lowering the price of gas happened. It was more an accident than anything that President Bush did but now Codeweaver software is free for a day.
For more details see the Codeweavers press release. Personally I hope the next one on the list comes true so I can retire: Return the stock market to it’s 2008 high.
Sounds like something from a technophile’s Christmas list – PowerGadgets. It’s actually a set of tools to create some nice performance monitoring gadgets for the Vista sidebar. I’m mentioning them because yesterday I presented to the VMware R&D group on pains that our customers face when deploying in a Microsoft or Linux shop. This was an internal follow-up to my presentations at VMworld 2008 on the same topics only I tuned this presentation to let our R&D folk know what we could do to help our customers out.
A lot of customers have asked me if there’s a better way to get more performance information out of VirtualCenter or ESX itself. They want some sort of customizable graph they can put on their desktop. Enter this great writeup on how to use the VMware VI Toolkit and PowerGadgets to monitor host CPU and memory utilization. It’s worth a read and possibly even a use or two.
I’m still working with the R&D folk to see what other neat things we could possibly create. In the mean time if you’ve seen or written other nice utilities for monitoring performance then please comment and let the readers know.
One of the nice things about virtual machines is they are portable. That’s one of the reasons people virtualize – they find it easier to do HA and DR. Of course there’s a downside to portability since it’s easy to give your friend down the street a copy of your software. As we all know, that’s illegal.
While not directly the same thing there’s an interesting thing going on with Microsoft blacking out the background for pirated copies of Windows. It seems to have hit China the hardest although anyone using Windows illegally should be affected. I really love one user’s reaction to the screen being blacked out.
“If, when I’m programming, the computer screen goes black, that will probably cause some important information to be lost,” another commenter wrote. “Who will pay me for my loss then?”
Uh, let’s see. You didn’t pay Microsoft for the software and yet you want them to pay you if you lose data when a warning to buy a legal copy appears? I guess if that made it to a US court they just might side with you (yes, it’s gotten that bad here in the US).
But this begs the question, when is a user really a user? I mean do you count someone who pirates your software but is using it in your customer base? What about support for that user? Personally I’m with Microsoft 100% on this one. If you don’t like the price of the software then go find an alternative. There’s plenty of free Linux out there which is VERY usable.
There was a very interesting post over at VMHero a couple of days ago about creating an internal training course for users of virtualization. This wasn’t to train the people running the datacenter but rather all of the other people that had systems running on the virtual platform. I know this happens in some of the larger accounts I’ve dealt with but it’s a rarity. It’s good to see the topic come back up again.
Microsoft sure is keeping up their end of the deal on SVVP. They recently added SQL Server 2005 to the list of supported applications. I had always wondered why that one was missing since most customers hadn’t upgraded to SQL Server 2008 just yet. This is more good news for Microsoft support in a virtualized environment. I just wish the other major vendors out there (Oracle in particular) would get a clue and follow Microsoft’s leadership on this.
Are you deploying VDI? If so then there’s an article from Glenn over on Virtualization Information on lessons he learned when deploying VDI at a large pharmaceutical. Definitely worth a read to avoid some of the gotchas.
Good news at VMware yesterday when the company announced a stellar quarter. Way to go guys! A good recap can be found from Reuters. Maybe it was because of the billboard I saw in Times Square recently.
I work for VMware as a Principal Systems Engineer. The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by VMware and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of VMware. This is my blog - not a VMware blog.
Title:Presentation Zen
Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery Author: Garr Reynolds ISBN 10: 0-321-52565-5
This is my second read about creating great presentations. I love this book because it has sample after sample of really nice presentations and describes why they are great. For more good reads visit the Good Reads page.
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