Business Tech

On the one hand, vendor analyst events are a good opportunity to spend focused time diving deep into individual products, roadmaps, and corporate initiatives. On the other, they're a useful forum for getting the feel of a company's overall zeitgeist in a way that narrower discussions don't. EMC's event, held last week in Franklin, Mass., was no exception.

(Credit: EMC)

Perhaps the single thing that struck me most about the event as a whole was the full integration of VMware into the discussion as a whole. I've been following both companies since before EMC acquired VMware in 2003. In the years since, although there were the obligatory nods to joint development work and "better together," VMware aggressively maintained a distance that was hardly limited to the 3,000 miles between VMware's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters and EMC in Massachusetts. VMware's presence at EMC analyst events was largely relegated to a few off-hand mentions and perhaps a desultory breakout session given by a junior marketing person.

This year couldn't have been more different. VMware was very much woven into just about every discussion and one of VMware's senior technologists shared a panel with representatives from EMC and Cisco Systems. One thing that has changed, of course, is the ouster of VMware founder and CEO Diane Greene in 2008. It was Greene who most vocally kept EMC at arm's length. It's also the case that virtualization is increasingly at the center of everything that EMC does, so how could VMware not be an integral part?

This pervasive virtualization theme carried through to EMC VP Jon Peirce's discussion about EMC's internal IT infrastructure as well. EMC IT is using VMware to virtualize as much as possible. This includes doing database testing on a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) in advance of a planned migration off Sun E25000 UltraSPARC-based servers.

An initial Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment also uses UCS in the form of a vBlock--a preconfigured package that combines products from Cisco, EMC, and VMware. EMC has about 200 users on VDI today and expects to roll out to several thousand next year starting in their Franklin facility. VDI and associated forms of desktop virtualization are a favorite technology of CEO Joe Tucci, who would like to move toward a platform-agnostic client strategy.

The ultimate goal is what sometimes goes by BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC), in which employees provide their own notebook computers, perhaps purchased with the help of a stipend. Even today, many of the EMC execs at the event were sporting Macs, even though IT doesn't officially support them.

Another hot topic at the event was multi-tier storage, in this case automatic storage tiering that intelligently moves data between Flash-based storage and conventional disk drives. EMC's technology here is called FAST and will roll out on Symmetrix V-Max arrays.

Flash drives can be much faster than SATA disks--or even high-performance Fibre Channel drives--but they're also much more expensive on a per-GB basis. The idea behind FAST is to automate the placement of data based on the way its accessed. For example, a database index that is frequently read and written to will migrate to high performance flash while older data that hasn't been touched for a while will move to slower, cheaper disks.

Disks being used to store rarely accessed archival data can even be deduped, compressed, and even spun down to reduce overall data center power consumption. Tape isn't part of this vision; Tucci opined that "Backup to and recovery from tape is dead."

The idea of storage tiering isn't new. Hierarchical storage management (HSM) has been around for well over a decade. However, in practice, it's mostly ended up being about moving old files to tape for archive purposes. (EMC itself has a product in this vein: Legato DiskXtended.) FAST is something more transparent and more dynamic.

There are analogs between FAST and the storage pooling that is part of Sun Microsystems' ZFS filesystem. EMC argues that the function belongs on the storage device rather than the server because the array is where data access from multiple systems and applications come together.

It's unsurprising that EMC wants storage to be at the center of things. This is a company, after all, whose tagline is "where information lives." It is, however, worth remembering that this is a different lens through which to view the world than system vendors tend to choose--and, for that matter, than VMware chose historically.

The cost benefits of virtualization are well-documented, allowing enterprises to significantly reduce the space and electrical power required to run data centers and streamline the management of an ever-growing number of servers.

Virtualization also provides means for expedient scalability. Given today's economic climate and cost-cutting mandates, it is not surprising that analyst firm Gartner recently predicted that 50 percent of workloads will run inside virtual machines by 2012.

What many organizations fail to understand, according to Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO of virtualization security provider Altor Networks, is that collapsing multiple servers into a single one with several virtual machines inside eliminates all firewall, intrusion detection, and other protections in existence. Physical security measures literally become "blind" to traffic between VMs, since they are no longer in the data path.

This echoes comments made by Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald, who wrote in a recent presentation titled "Securing the Next-Generation Virtual Data Center" (subscription required), that "most virtual machines you deploy will be less secure than the physical systems they replace," and that "virtualization will radically change how you secure and manage computing environments."

VMware recently launched a partner program to help ISVs develop solutions certified as "VMsafe." VMsafe provides API sharing through a secure container, enabling partner companies to access virtual environments. This virtual security technology provides fine-grained visibility over virtual-machine resources, including monitoring every aspect of the system with the ability to address previously undetectable viruses, rootkits, and malware before they can infect a system.

I spoke to Ben-Efraim to better understand the issues around VM security and for what users should be on the lookout. According to him, there are two common approaches that use existing methods to secure virtual-network traffic: using VLANs to separate and control communication between VMs; and taking software-based firewalls and running them as agents on each VM. Unfortunately, both of these approaches fall short.

VLAN segmentation extends the notion of LAN resource segmentation to include VMs. The approach essentially requires that VMs, which can naturally be grouped (i.e. by function or user base), be isolated from other VMs by use of virtual switches and routing (i.e. the human resources VLAN contains HR-serving VMs). However, VLAN segmentation is not a permanent solution to securing environments because of networking complexities, performance degradation, and security limitations of the approach, Ben-Efraim said.

Although VMware got its start with a desktop virtualization product aimed at developers, the company today is best known for bringing server virtualization to the mainstream.

Creating multiple virtual servers on a single physical system lets IT departments consolidate applications onto fewer computers and thereby cut costs. Over time, server virtualization has also enabled a variety of products and approaches that can simplify IT operations and generally make data centers more flexible.

VMware has continued to invest in virtualization aimed at the client. This includes client-side hypervisors such as its original VMware Workstation product. However, products and technologies associated with delivering applications and user desktops to the client are really the main focus.

Application and desktop delivery sometimes makes use of client hypervisors but it's a largely separate category of technology that's fundamentally about centrally managing user applications and/or operating-system images. In VMware's case, virtualized desktops fall under the VMware View name.

On Monday, VMware announced VMware View 4, the latest version of its virtual desktop portfolio.

Much of VMware's development focus with View 4 was in the area of the user experience--that is, making applications and desktops delivered from a central location perform with the same responsiveness and fidelity as if they were installed on a local PC, in the usual way.

Historically, this user experience has been one of the stumbling blocks for desktop virtualization in general. Older forms of Citrix Presentation Server (now rebadged and modernized under the XenApp label) and initial virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations very much tried to simplify management and otherwise deliver direct benefits for IT operations. Whether users liked using the products was secondary.

As a result, desktop virtualization has been mostly something used by what are often called "task workers." Think call centers and other groups of users with specific jobs to do and not much say about the tools they use to do it. In general, desktop virtualization promoters have focused too much on delivering benefits to IT and not enough on delivering benefits to users. (They've also arguably paid too little attention to keeping up-front costs down and relied too much on promises of soft cost savings down the road.)

One of the technology pieces that VMware is leaning on to improve user experience is the PC over Internet Protocol (PCoIP). PCoIP was originally developed by Teradici to improve the responsiveness and display quality of virtual desktops. However, in Teradici's initial implementation, specialized hardware was needed on both ends of the wire. This effectively made it a premium solution for situations in which cost wasn't a factor, such as for financial traders and government agencies for which security considerations are paramount.

VMware has worked with Teradici to create a software-only version of the protocol. Desktop virtualization Chief Technology Officer Scott Davis goes into a lot of the details on his blog.

It's a User Datagram Protocol-based server-side protocol that transmits compressed bitmaps or frames to the remote client. This has the advantage of being able to make real-time adjustments to account for the available bandwidth and latency of the communications channel; the display quality degrades, if there isn't enough bandwidth but things still "work."

Although details differ, there are similarities to Sun's Appliance Link Protocol--which is well-regarded for its ability to deal with poor-quality connections. (A downside of server-side protocols is that they consume processing horsepower on the server, where it tends to be more expensive, rather than on the client.)

VMware will continue to support other remote display protocols, most notably Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol. However, VMware is clearly positioning PCoIP as its favored technology and a point of competitive differentiation for VMware View in general.

Also in the graphics area, View 4 adds "multimonitor, adaptive display support--resolution optimization for each monitor, with an option to pivot and rotate the display output, supporting rich audio and video content with increased performance."

Other user experience enhancements generally relate to better integration with the overall desktop environment. For example, View Printing automatically discovers local printers without the need to install print drivers. View Limited Access provides a single point of authentication across VMware View environments, Windows Terminal Servers, Blade PCs, and remote physical PCs.

VMware View 4 comes in two editions. The Enterprise Edition includes the basics: VSphere 4 (the back-end server virtualization product), VCenter 4 (management), and View Manager 4 (for provisioning user access). It's priced at $150 per concurrent connection.

The $250-per-concurrent-user Premier Edition adds ThinApp 4 (for delivering ad hoc applications that aren't part of a master image) and View Composer (for managing images), both capabilities that would typically be desired in a large or sophisticated deployment.

VMware as a whole approaches the world from the perspective of the enterprise data center. Delivering desktops from that data center was somewhat of a sideshow. Is it now as focused on application delivery as, say, Citrix? Not really. But that said, desktop virtualization has moved beyond the sideshow stage at VMware.

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware announced Tuesday a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product.

The venture will sell and provide maintenance and service support for the product, which is called V-Block. It will combine EMC's storage equipment, Cisco's virtualized servers and networking equipment, and VMware's virtualization technology.

The deal had been rumored since September, when the Wall Street Journal reported the companies were working on a collaborative effort code-named Alpine. Talk of the deal heated up late last week and early this week.

The joint venture will market and provide maintenance for the product. But the cloud infrastructure will be built by all three companies.

Cisco and EMC already have a partnership to collaborate around Cisco's new data center platform, which the company calls Unified Computing. And EMC owns nearly 85 percent of VMware.

The companies will provide more details about the joint venture during a press call scheduled for 8:30 a.m. PT.

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware are expected to announce this week a new joint venture to sell data center products and services using virtualization technology, according to report in the Wall Street Journal.

The new products called "V-Block" combine EMC's storage equipment with Cisco's new virtualized services and networking equipment along with VMware's virtualization technology.

In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that Cisco and EMC were in talks to form a new services venture code-named Alpine. V-Block may be this same service.

The products will either be sold as an end-to-end solution that companies can install in their own data centers, or customers will have the option of subscribing to a virtualized service, according to reports.

Cisco has been reselling EMC storage gear for years. It also owns a stake in virtualization software company VMware, which operates as a unit of EMC. So it makes sense that the companies would team up on a new services venture.

Earlier this year, Cisco announced a new data center architecture it calls Unified Computing, which includes new virtualized servers. It also includes coordinated support and software integration from partners such as Intel, Microsoft, EMC, and VMware.

Cisco sees the data center market as a multibillion-dollar opportunity. The company anticipates a greater need for storage and high-speed networking within data centers as more services and content come online. Cisco's corporate customers have also begun to virtualize their data centers to make those operations more efficient.

The joint venture will have its own CEO, according to the Journal.

Representatives from Cisco, EMC, and VMware have declined to comment.

The new joint venture is expected to be announced Wednesday before Cisco releases its fiscal first-quarter results.

Goldman Sachs IT Spending Survey

(Credit: Goldman Sachs)

IT spending may be tight, but chief information officers plan to increase their budget allocation to a select group of virtualization vendors, including VMware, Citrix, and Red Hat, according to a Goldman Sachs CIO survey released Monday.

It's not surprising that virtualization is top of mind and wallet for CIOs, but things look particularly rosy for Red Hat, given its position as the market leader in open source and a strong challenger in virtualization.

While the percentage of CIOs expecting to increase IT spending has grown since Goldman Sachs' last survey in June 2009, a full 69 percent expect to maintain or decrease their IT spending.

Against this backdrop, Goldman Sachs sees Red Hat boosting its share of IT spending as the open-source leader claims the lion's share of a Unix-to-Linux server shift that "remain(s) in the early innings." Equally important, Red Hat is seen as a critical integration and distribution point for other vendors:

Red Hat is positioned well for the emerging cloud-computing ecosystem, given its open-source background and current positioning in data centers, including enterprises as well as cloud providers such as Amazon. In addition, Red Hat's strategic importance to others is also increased by its platform capabilities that provide a beachhead for many other software products into the corporate data center. That being said, cloud computing remains a nascent opportunity with little revenue contribution to date and an increasing competitive landscape.

To date, Red Hat has mostly resisted the temptation to expand its product portfolio beyond the operating system, and directly adjacent opportunities like virtualization and cloud computing. However, as the company further strengthens its balance sheet and grows in confidence, we should finally see Red Hat use its dominant brand to give CIOs more reasons to pay Red Hat money.

(Credit: Goldman Sachs)

Intriguingly, Red Hat may be pushed to this step by the increasingly ambitious VMware, which has far more cash and a strong interest in being the foundation for enterprise's cloud-computing technology. According to the Goldman Sachs report:

VMware is a leader in three important growth themes in IT: server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and cloud infrastructure. We also believe that as virtualization penetration increases, the company has an opportunity to take significant share of the large systems management software market. Microsoft's increasing focus on the space is a risk; however, our latest checks give us greater confidence in VMware's customer loyalty and the company's significant technology lead. We also see room for significant ongoing margin expansion as the company matures.

With the recent acquisition of open-source vendor SpringSource, VMware can deliver on the powerful "Build-Deploy-Manage" mantra that SpringSource championed to its 2 million developers.

Both companies should thrive as IT budgets remain lean. But which will ultimately benefit most is a question of execution and ambition.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

SAN FRANCISCO--If the average person has heard of virtualization at all, the idea probably left little impression beyond something to do with running corporate data centers packed with computing hardware.

But the era in which virtualization directly affects ordinary folks, too, is on its way.

The company in the forefront of the technology, an EMC subsidiary called VMware, drew 12,488 people to its VMworld conference here this week, and one theme of the show was the growing push to move the technology beyond the server realm. Initially that means PCs, but the company demonstrated its technology on mobile phones, too.

What is virtualization? Simply put, it lets a single computer run multiple operating systems at the same time in compartments called virtual machines. Each instance of an operating system runs on a virtualization layer rather than on the actual computer hardware. The company in charge of that foundational layer has tremendous power in the computing industry.

VMware CTO Stephen Herrod

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

VMware has competition from Citrix, Red Hat, Microsoft, and others, but for now its head start, corporate alliances, and solid technology give it a lead in the market. Most of VMware's business comes from virtualizing servers, which lets companies replace a host of largely idle machines with one that's running full tilt, but the company is working to expand into many new markets.

Employee-owned IT
Before it met its present success in the server market, VMware got its start on PCs. Virtualization proved useful, for example, for developers who wanted to switch rapidly among different versions of an operating system to test their software or different versions of a browser to test their Web pages. VMware also can help people run Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X on the same machine--but again, that's not a mainstream need.

But as VMware sees it--and I think there's some merit to this belief--virtualization could become more widely used as a way to smooth the differences between people's own computer preferences and their employers' needs.

In the "employee-owned IT" vision, virtualization could let people put a corporate-managed virtual machine on an personal computer. The corporate partition would run only company-approved applications and could connect to the company network; the personal half could run the chaos of other programs that cause corporate IT folks to grind their teeth.

VMware has a technology--formerly called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and now sporting the more palatable name of VMware View--that also could fit into this idea. With it, the brains of a PC actually run on a central server, with a person's local machine serving as a mechanism to show the display and capture mouse clicks and keystrokes. So an employee's corporate PC could actually be housed at the corporate and piped over the Net to wherever the employee happens to be.

VMware's View demonstration featured graphics acceleration using Microsoft's DirectX 3D graphics and full-motion video--albeit a with some jerkiness. Hardware support in newer Intel and AMD processors also speeds virtualization performance.

VMware View is latest twist on a technology called thin client computing. That approach has found a solid niche in some large businesses but that never has caught on widely. In my opinion, though, the greater challenge comes from an entirely different way of attaining the same centralized goals: cloud computing.

Cloud computing, in which applications run over the Web in Web browsers rather than natively on PCs, provides another way to provide access to corporate resources. It can't do everything, but it's gradually maturing as a way to run software. And it has the advantage of requiring only a modern browser rather than VMware's software.

VMware showed Google's Android system running on a Windows CE mobile phone through VMware virtualization software.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Virtual phones
At VMworld, Chief Technology Officer Stephen Herrod and Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of emerging markets, also demonstrated virtualization on a mobile phone. Specifically, they showed a mobile phone using Windows CE 6.0 run Google's Android operating system, too.

"Why not virtualize the phone itself?" Herrod asked. "It's really becoming more of a mobile personal computer."

Why bother? VMware has two arguments.

Wyse Pocket Cloud and VMware View means people can get to their PC desktops with an iPhone.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

First is a mobile-phone version of the employee-owned IT vision, where a mobile phone could run corporate programs and access corporate resources in one mode and be used for personal tasks in the other. VMware touts two basic approaches--one in which the second operating system runs at the same time and one in which the phone could switch between the two modes.

The second is programming. Coders face a minefield of complexity when it comes to writing software that can work on many phones. Visa, which demonstrated a mobile application for checking credit card transactions running with VMware's mobile virtualization technology, expressed support for VMware's help in this domain.

The variety of "handset manufacturers, infrastructure, and telco restrictions...makes the mobile space--while exciting--very daunting," said Peter Ciurea, Visa's global head of product development. "Anything that opens the possibility of easy portability we're very excited about."

But here, too, VMware's ideas face complications. Offering a simplified foundation to programmers doesn't mean complexity vanishes--it just means VMware has to shoulder the burden through its software. And virtualization takes computing horsepower.

Of course, hardware steadily improves. Krishnamurti's demonstration used a phone with 256MB of memory, but he said in an interview VMware's technology works with 128MB, too.

VMware also showed Wyse Pocket Cloud software running on an iPhone in conjunction with VMware View to give a view of a Windows PC desktop--though the demonstration showed nothing more than panning around the desktop view.

More expansion
So VMware won't have a simple time conquering clients, though it has a credible shot at it. Fortunately for the company, it's also got many other irons in the fire.

Many of these are closer to VMware's core server virtualization business. The company is gradually expanding from its initial phase of adoption, in which virtualization was used to increase server efficiency, to a more elaborate idea in which the technology leads to a more flexible data center.

For example, virtual machines can be moved off busy servers to idle ones during peak ours of activity, then they can be moved back and the idle ones can be shut down when demand slackens. Increasingly, that sort of optimization is an automated process governed by policies set up in advance.

Srinivas Krishnamurti, VMware's director of emerging markets

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

VMware also is trying to stake a claim on another facet of cloud computing, in which companies can shift workload from their own data center's virtualization foundation to one housed at a remote data center operated by a third party. At VMworld, the company announced that AT&T, Savvis, Terremark, and Verizon Business all are offering that cloud service. VMware also said it's trying to standardize its cloud-foundation interfaces through a standards group called the Distributed Management Task Force.

All of this means VMware is competing more than ever with Microsoft. That's not just because Microsoft offers virtualization software, but because Microsoft is accustomed to being one of the primary software foundations of the computing industry.

VMware is usurping Microsoft's position with many of its products. It has relationships with those who make computer hardware for computers, storage, and networking, and it's building ever-stronger relationships with corporate IT administration staff. Windows and management tools for it hardly are being relegated to the sidelines, but VMware's approach can make them more peripheral.

The company has plenty of work to make its full vision a reality. But it's working from a position of some strength.

VMware has introduced a service for developers that want to test out building cloud-based applications that will work with virtualized environments based on its products.

The infrastructure service, vCloud Express, will be offered via a number of cloud service providers that have signed up as partners, the company said in its announcement at the VMworld conference on Tuesday.

vCloud Express is based on the company's vSphere virtualization platform. As with other recently launched services, such as the Xen Cloud Platform, it aims to allow a business' internal cloud to work with an external cloud. It offers developers a way to prototype and test applications using pay-as-you-go cloud services that are compatible with IT deployments based on VMware's platform. They can then run those applications in the cloud and on the business' virtualized infrastructure.

Terremark, BlueLock, Hosting.com, Logica, Melbourne IT, and several other cloud service providers, have signed up to provide vCloud Express. These companies are currently offering the service as a beta.

"Terremark's vCloud Express services will provide our customers pay-as-you-go, on-demand access to enterprise-class infrastructure that is flexible enough to offer unmatched compatibility with their own internal IT platforms," Terremark chief executive Manuel Medina said in a VMware statement.

Gartner research director Stewart Buchanan told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that enterprises could benefit from the flexibility and availability of the cloud, but he also warned against the pitfalls that could arise because of licensing terms.

"You have your operating system, your utilities and management tools--all the kind of things you would ordinarily run in-house on this virtual machine," Buchanan said. "Will you be able to lift them up and take them into the cloud? According to (most software vendors' licensing terms), the short answer is no."

Buchanan explained that with, for example, most vendors' databases, licensing is based on hardware capacity--the number of processors, cores, or hosts. He said that, unless software vendors themselves had a stake in the cloud, it would be "quite a difficult challenge" to take advantage of the cloud while respecting existing licensing models.

"As we move into the cloud, we are starting to see more cloud service providers being able to license technology," Buchanan said. "Instead of buying your software and running it on the cloud, we'll see a different model where you build your application but, instead of you providing the licenses, you will buy a license from the cloud service provider."

Buchanan noted that the current licensing environment would limit applications for vCloud Express to products that are safe to license to the cloud--particularly open-source applications.

"Open-source licenses tend not to have issue unless you want to have maintenance," he said. "You will need to negotiate an alternative solution with your maintenance provider, but, in general terms, licensing your product isn't going to be such a problem."

The majority of cloud service providers have been focusing on open-source implementations because of these licensing challenges, Buchanan said, suggesting that the maturation of the cloud market would bring more enterprise-class commercial offerings.

"As the cloud is (established) on a more commercial basis, we are going to see opportunities for companies like VMware to expand their presence through cloud implementations," Buchanan said. "VMware has a well-established brand in enterprise virtualization in the data center, but they haven't really exploited the cloud opportunity yet. That's effectively what they are doing now."

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

VMware on Monday will roll out a product family dubbed vCenter to automate data center tasks and manage to service level agreements.

The announcements will kick off VMworld 2009 in San Francisco this week.

VMware's vCenter products are designed to ride shotgun with the company's vSphere cloud computing operating system.

In a nutshell, vCenter is designed to automate tasks such as data center provisioning, monitoring, change and performance management. VMware added that vCenter is also designed to manage toward policies and service level agreements. Each virtual server that is deployed will operate to a specified service level.

The vCenter family includes:

• AppSpeed to manage service level reporting for virtualized applications;
• CapacityIQ to manage capacity levels of virtual machines resources and data centers;
• ConfigControl, which checks compliance and configuration states;
• Site Recovery Manager, which automates disaster recovery tasks;
• LifeCycle Manager, which automates virtual machines from provisioning to retirement;
• Chargeback, which allocates infrastructure costs;
• And Lab Manager, which aims to ease development, quality assurance and pre-production environments.

The vCenter apps will be sold a la carte per processor. Most of the vCenter family will ship in 2010.

Separately, VMware will announce VMware Go, a free beta service to get small and midsized businesses using virtualization tools quickly. VMware Go is a Web-based service that will walk customers through the ESXi, the company's free hypervisor. The VMware Go beta will start Monday and be generally available in the fourth quarter.