Mike D’s Blog

Today, Microsoft announced that it will buy VMware for $2.5 Billion in a combined stock and cash transaction. This news really came as a shock to me. I was here when EMC bought us and was shocked then. Over time it grew on me and now I really love our parent company. Now though I’m not so sure I’m happy. It’s Microsoft after all. Look at my previous employers – Inktomi (competed on the search side of the house), Novell (enough said), VMware (enough said). I’m also an avid Apple fan. I guess I’ll have to give that up. This really has me going nuts at the moment.

I guess in the end it makes some sense. Paul takes the company home to his roots. Still, Microsoft? I never thought I’d see the day. If the economy wasn’t so bad I’d probably look for another job. Anything is better than going to work for Evilcorp. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Well, if you’ve read this far down then you’re either out buying VMware stock like mad, crying like a baby, or checking your calendar to see if it’s April 1st. Good that it’s the later. Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! And no, I don’t think we’ll ever see the day where this post is real.

P.S. I won’t be posting anything else today for fear that people might think it’s a joke.

Brief and to the point.

VMware announces a stellar 42% year over year growth in revenue. Everyone keeps their jobs.

Microsoft announces a flat 2% year over year growth in revenue. 5,000 people lose their jobs.

Citrix announces a marginal 4% year over year growth in revenue. 10% of the company loses their jobs.

Enough said.

As has been reported by Andrew Dugdell and James O’Neill, Microsoft has updated their licensing policy so you don’t need Windows Server 2008 CALs if you’re just running a bunch of Windows 2003 or other non-Windows Server 2008 based VMs.

The issue of needing Windows Server 2008 CALs was first brought to light by the VMware competition team back in mid-December. I also reported on it the next day.

Microsoft has now updated their policy. In a nutshell you no longer need Windows Server 2008 CALs if you’re accessing non-Windows Server 2008 VMs on a host that’s only used for virtualization. Full documents outlining the changes can be found here.

I have to applaud Microsoft for changing things around so quickly. They continue to do a good job changing their licensing to work better with virtualization technologies. Now if we can just get the to concentrate on the desktop side a little and change VECD to be much more economical and allow you to assign VECD and Microsoft Office to users instead of devices.

UPDATE (January 23, 2008) – The VMware competitive team just weighed in with their thoughts on this subject. They pretty much wrote what everyone else did – why this makes sense, this was a good move, etc. However they also wrote about things they’d like to see changed. I’ve pasted that short list below because I’ve heard many customers asking for the same things. Maybe if we all ask together Microsoft might get this message as well.

1) Provide customers an option for all Microsoft OS and application licenses to be assigned to the virtual instance (instead of physical hosts) so customers can take full advantage of VM mobility.
2) Allow third parties (ex. ISVs) to have an ability to distribute demo and production VMDK-based Windows virtual appliances so customers can deploy them in their virtual datacenters.
3) Lift restrictions in VECD where customers must pay a significant premium for virtualized desktops in exchange for “expanded license grants” that they do not necessarily need (or want). Currently, VECD works for a limited number of sophisticated customers, but makes the use of Microsoft products in virtual desktops very expensive for customers seeking simple, uniform deployment of consistent desktop environments.

Eight new ESX configurations have been approved by Microsoft for support under the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). The new configs allow up to 64 GB memory in any virtual machine. This is an increase from the previous 4 GB limit, and will be useful to customers deploying Exchange Server, SQL Server, or any memory-intensive application. All future SVVP configs will be listed at our product’s maximum memory limit.

Under SVVP, any customer will be supported by Microsoft when running any of a long list of Microsoft products on VMware. Any version of Windows back to Windows Server 2000 SP4 is also supported, including all OS roles such as Active Directory, File Services, etc.

Four new ESX 3.5 update 2 configurations are posted now for both Intel and AMD processors. Four more ESX 3.5 update 3 configurations should appear before mid-month. ESXi configurations for u2 and u3 are in progress as well.

Microsoft’s formal support policy for virtual platforms is here. VMware’s web page describing Microsoft support is here.

These new configurations now allow full Microsoft SVVP support for maximum VM sizes on VMware’s platform. They also exceed all other competitive hypervisor certification levels. Kudos to the team at VMware for the hard work on these certification tests as well as to Microsoft for a great certification and support program. As always, I hope other large ISVs take note of this and follow suit soon.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen a trend at customer sites. Nearly every customer I visited in the New York city area told me the same thing when the competition was brought up. It went something like this:

Customer: I would love to use VMware but the cost savings in Windows licenses from Microsoft with Hyper-V makes it a deal I can’t pass up.

Me: What do you mean by that? Licenses cost you the same for Windows no matter what virtualization solution you’re using.

Customer: That’s not what my Microsoft rep told me. They said I could get unlimited virtual machines with Datacenter Edition of Windows only if I used Hyper-V.

Me: Ah. I see. You know, they’re lying to you, right?

Customer: No. They never lie to me. Where’s the proof.

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Wow! This new post by the competition team at VMware is really interesting.

Here’s the scenario: Say someone’s got existing Windows Server 2003 licenses (non-OEM versions) and CALs. He wants to use these licenses and CALs to run a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine. Seems pretty straight forward – as a 2003 CAL is being used to access a Windows Server 2003 environment – and a good way to save money since he’s already paid for the Windows Server 2003 licenses and CALs – right?

Make sure to read the whole post at the source. It’s interesting because there’s a huge, hidden cost to using Hyper-V for shops that aren’t upgrading to Windows Server 2008 right now. I know, some people are going to comment that everyone is upgrading already. No so. As a matter of fact I was just with a customer in Ohio today that is just beginning the process of upgrading from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003. No, that wasn’t a typo. This is a pretty major customer out there too – not your mom and pop shop.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft talks its way out of this one. Even if it decides to change it’s CAL model that’s going to be pretty complex. If anyone does have some constructive comments on ways to get around this CAL upgrade requirement I’d love to hear about it. Just drop your info in the comments for all of the readers to hear.

UPDATE (January 18, 2008) – Microsoft has recently changed their licensing structure so you don’t need Windows Server 2008 CALs anymore if you’re accessing non-Windows Server 2008 VMs. Read more here.

This post is sponsored by IT Knowledge Exchange. Visit ITKnowledgeExchange.com today to ask your toughest virtualization questions and get answers from your peers.

Gabe over at Gabe’s Virtual World has done a pretty nice job of looking at some of Microsoft’s claims about Hyper-V and how they really fit in a customer’s datacenter environment. There’s a 2 part series so far. Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here. Definitely worth a read.

In Part 1 Gabe looks at the HCL for Hyper-V and VMware ESX. Microsoft often touts how the Hyper-V HCL i unlimited allowing it to run on pretty much anything while the VMware ESX HCL is extremely limited. The point Microsoft doesn’t bring up is that the HCL for VMware ESX is large enough that the vast majority of shops will definitely find a server on the list that they are running. Unless you’re looking to run laptops as your virtualization host then you’re all set. Heck, if you are looking to run laptops then there’s always VMware Server or VMware Workstation.

In Part 2 Gabe looks at memory overcommit and support for different operating systems. The operating system support is a huge one that’s often overlooked. As I highlighted in my comment I run into older Windows installations such as Windows NT and Windows 2000 all the time. They are usually prime candidates to virtualize since they’re running on much older hardware usually, they are underutilized, and most of the time they’re critical to the company’s operations and yet can’t be upgraded to a more recent OS. Since Hyper-V doesn’t support these older flavors of Windows you’re really looking to VMware to solve the problem. Hey, even Citrix doesn’t support these older Windows flavors.

I won’t go into too much on memory overcommit since Gabe already pointed out how useful it is (saved 102 GB of RAM). I also talked about it some more in my comments. Needless to say I think it’s been shown how useful this is at this point.

Definitely an interesting series. Make sure to subscribe to posts on Gabe’s blog to keep up with the series and other interesting stuff that Gabe has to talk about.

I was reading through a bunch of past articles and came across one about Microsoft patching a SMB security flaw from 7 years ago. Normally this wouldn’t concern me a lot for a couple of reasons:

1) There’s a lot of security holes that are less critical or never get exploited and so companies take a while to patch them. I’m not saying that’s a good thing – just that it happens.

2) I’m a big believer that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I work for a software company and as long as your software is running there could be a security issue. That’s just the nature of complex pieces of software. I don’t like to point out other’s vulnerabilities because it will just circle back around to hit me again.

With that said, this one sort of shocked me. A long time ago I used to do security audits for a living while working for a VAR. One of the very first things I’d do is crack out a tool that exploited the SMB issue referred to in the article to grab the SAM and thus a bunch of great passwords (including Domain Admin). It usually took all of about 5 minutes and worked every time. There are dozens of hacker tools out there on the web that include this exploit. This brings up the question of why Microsoft waited this long to fix a hole exploited by the #1 tool in my arsenal.

I haven’t done any audits in the past 6 1/2 years so maybe this little trick just stopped being used. Maybe people didn’t like the fact that you had to be on the network behind the firewall in order to use this attack. At schools and universities this just meant jacking in at the library or something. For corporations I would usually just setup some fake meeting during lunch, miss the person I was meeting with, and wait for them in a conference room – again behind the firewall. The point is you can’t always trust that just because something is behind a firewall that it’s protected so it really shocks me that this vulnerability is just getting patched.

Hoff, if you’re out there and reading, or any other security minded people please let me know what was up with this one.

In April 2007 Massimo posted a long but interesting post on how he thinks the whole Microsoft/VMware thing will play out. At that time Microsoft was just promising a bunch of stuff and hadn’t even cut features out of the product yet. Still, Massimo thought that Microsoft wouldn’t overtake VMware anytime soon if VMware could just execute on a few things. Here we are towards the end of another year and just like I’ve been looking back at some predictions Massimo did a follow-up piece on how his prediction is shaping up. No surprise here – Microsoft is still promising stuff and VMware is changing the game and executing. It will be interesting to see this at the end of next year again.

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)
• 32 logical processors – Supported in VMware since 2006 (4 years late)
• Hot-add virtual disks – Supported in VMware ESX 3 (4 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.

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…

All in good fun – Happy Halloween or something…”

Read on for the actual ad.

(Via Virtual Reality.)

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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.

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.

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.

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).”

(Via VCritical.)

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.