Business Tech

ESG virtualization guru Mark Bowker is keeping me abreast of the goings-on at VMworld Europe in Cannes. In between the merlot and brie, Microsoft and Citrix announced an interesting and potentially lucrative partnership for server virtualization and virtualization management dubbed "Project Encore."

Here's the deal. In spite of its recent release of Hyper-V, Microsoft remains behind VMware in terms of enterprise management features. To bridge this gap, Microsoft is teaming with Citrix to offer advanced server virtualization management through Citrix Essentials. Citrix Essentials builds on Hyper-V with management capabilities for storage management, physical/virtual server provisioning, and lab management automation. Both companies will offer Citrix Essentials through their channels.

The benefits of this partnership could be immediate and profound:

• Microsoft closes the functionality gap with VMware and can thus focus on getting its hypervisor installed everywhere. The goal? Make Hyper-V the Windows of hypervisors.

• Citrix follows Microsoft with advanced management capabilities that are tightly linked to its products. Citrix Essentials goes beyond Hyper-V support to provide some cool orchestration capabilities for XenServer, XenApp, and XenDesktop as well.

So does this mean that Citrix has given up on its own hypervisor? Not at all. In fact, Citrix just announced an aggressive program of its own to give away XenServer with central management and live motion support. Obviously, Citrix wants to build a beachhead of its own.

VMware is still the enterprise incumbent but this announcement may add pricing and margin pressure immediately. With the stock market and consumer confidence in the toilet, it is hard to argue with Windows economics and free hypervisors.

It's been a year since Citrix bought XenSource, the company created by the founders of the Xen open-source hypervisor, and integrated the business into its lineup of products delivering applications to desktops.

As part of the process, Citrix made the XenServer virtualization software central to its strategy, and appointed XenSource staff to senior executive positions.

ZDNet UK sat down with one of those executives, Ian Pratt, Citrix's vice president for special products, to find out how the integration is going and where Citrix is going with Xen-branded products.

Ian Pratt, vice president, Citrix

In the second half of our two-part interview, Pratt talks about the impact of the Citrix takeover, the competitiveness and future of Xen, and more generally about the prospects for virtualization in a recession. (For part one, see "Q&A: Citrix exec says cloud to carry Xen against VMware.")

Tell me what's been happening in the past year. You've gone from being an independent company to becoming part of Citrix. But from the outside, it sometimes looks more as if Xen has taken over Citrix. Half the company's products have been renamed--Metaframe became XenApp and Desktop Server became Xen Desktop--Simon Crosby is now chief technology officer, and you're vice president for advanced products.
Pratt: Well, we've benefited from a larger channel. There are 5,000 people selling Citrix. But we don't immediately get 20 times the volume--there's a lot of training to be done. XenSource has been doubling sales every quarter, quite happily. Now as a start-up, we thought we expected to multiply by 100 every quarter, but doubling our sales is just fine.

We are seeing real benefits from integrating with the Citrix technology. We can make sure that (Citrix's) Xen Desktop works well with XenServer, for example. XenSource is now a new division in Citrix, for virtualization management. The chief executive (Peter Levine) is now a senior vice president--and both Simon and I report to him.

In fact, we haven't changed that much. There is more process in a bigger company, but from an engineering point of view, we are the same set of folks who wake up every morning wanting to stick it to VMware. We still have a start-up feeling.

Have you been asked to become more commercial? Have you had to go over to "the dark side"?
Pratt: In Citrix, we have not been asked to do anything against our genes. The open-source community has no problem with what we are doing.

Xen.org is being run the same way as it was before--but one thing Citrix has done is to fund a full-time project manager for Xen.org. If Xen got a bad reputation it would not in any way help Citrix.

It's not the only open-source hypervisor, though. Red Hat has been talking of the advantages of KVM, having bought Qumranet, its creator. Among other things, they say it will have long-term benefits from being integrated upstream with the Linux kernel.
Pratt: KVM is an add-on to the Linux kernel. It's hosted, not a true Type 1 hypervisor. It can never be a true Type 1 hypervisor. (Editors note: A Type 1 hypervisor runs on the bare metal of the server, while a Type 2 hypervisor is hosted on an operating system. Both VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V are Type 1 hypervisors.)

With KVM you have the whole of Linux in the trusted layer. That includes device drivers and so on. And that is bad.

We also have broader support. You don't have to have Linux to run Xen. It runs on Solaris or BSD. KVM requires Linux.

Does virtualization itself still have good prospects? Is it the recession-proof part of IT?
Pratt: Everyone is doing it, and they are still doing it. Virtualization is a mature technology and the benefits to the bottom line are clear. You do it to save money, and people will continue doing that. The savings are immediate.

Having said that, some use cases may get pushed further out. For instance, some green sales may get delayed, where the motivation is partly reducing carbon footprint.

That's just where the company's IT power budget isn't reported clearly, surely?
Pratt: Yes. If the chief information officer's budget includes energy usage, then the company is more likely to deploy virtualization. But there are still plenty of companies where energy is treated separately, as part of the facilities budget.

So virtualization isn't absolutely recession-proof. Nothing is. But it has very good prospects.

Now is a good time to have a product that is a better value of solution. It's not a good time to be buying Rolls Royces. It's time to be buying Priuses. (Editors note: Earlier, Chief Technology Officer Simon Crosby compared Xen to a Toyota Prius and VMware to a Rolls Royce.)

As vice president for advanced products, what are you looking at?
Pratt: Client virtualization is an area I'm spending time on. It's an area where Xen leads--despite some bluster from VMware. It's an area where we can make a difference, and it will be driven by application delivery.

There will be virtualized smartphones on the market in the not-too-distant future. ARM has built virtualization into its processors; they didn't put that in for fun.

Virtualization in the embedded market will follow a similar playbook to virtualization in the x86 market. Client virtualization is going to happen quite quickly. It won't go through the phase where users have to choose their virtualization solution, because virtualization won't exist as a category. It will be part of the device when you buy it.

My other main area of interest is cloud computing. Between client and cloud, I have quite enough to do. They are both areas where Xen is a leader, and historically any area that wins on the client, ends up winning on the server.

A Xen presence on clients will bolster what we are doing on the server. And the cloud will help Xen, because it makes it easier to move virtual machines into the cloud. It will be possible to bridge from the cloud to the enterprise, so resources can be added dynamically.

Why pay for machines in the server room, when you can push them out into the cloud? In particular, functions like test and development, and disaster recovery, can be in the cloud. And if that cloud and the server room are both Xen, then it is much easier to do.

Peter Judge of ZDNet UK reports from London.

Citrix aims to beat VMware at virtualization. A year ago it bought XenSource, the company created by the founders of the Xen open-source hypervisor, and switched the Citrix business focus to virtualization.

Ian Pratt, vice president, Citrix

Citrix made XenServer, the commercial system based on Xen, central to its strategy, and applied a Xen brand to other Citrix products involved in delivering applications to desktops. XenSource staff gained senior positions at Citrix and have been setting the company's future direction.

Ian Pratt, the original project leader of Xen and a founder of XenSource, remains a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, but is now also vice president for special products at Citrix--and remains chairman of Xen.org.

ZDNet UK spent a day at Citrix's U.K. headquarters with Pratt and his colleague, Simon Crosby, who has moved from chief technology officer of XenSource to become chief technology officer of Citrix. After lengthy briefings on Citrix products and the future of virtualization, we sat down with Pratt to understand where Citrix is going and why.

In the first of what will be a two-part interview, Pratt discusses how Citrix hopes to make headway in the virtualization market.

At the moment there is a lot of publicity for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Is there a danger XenWare will be overlooked--especially as it is difficult to measure market share in virtualization? Could XenWare become the Liberal Democrats of virtualization?
Pratt: In the market, there is obviously a big incumbent player, VMware, and Microsoft has a very basic product that covers the low end. And then there is XenServer, which is going head to head with VMware, with an enterprise feature set.

If you look toward the cloud, all the cloud vendors use Xen. It gets used in all the largest deployments, by folks like Amazon and other large providers, because of all the features it offers.

It is very hard to judge what the market share is. With VMware, you just look at VMware's bank account.

But if you are looking at market share for Xen in general, you've got XenServer, Virtual Iron, XenApps, and products from other companies. And then there are all the Linux distributions that include Xen, most of which are free, and no one really has any idea of how many copies are in use.

Even with something like XenServer, because there's a free version, we keep stumbling into customers--particularly people doing software as a service, where it all runs on XenServer Express Edition (the free unsupported version of XenServer).

They haven't paid us any money as yet and they have thousands of servers running it. But we'd much rather they were running our stuff than VMware, because it's an opportunity for us.

With the Cloud Edition we recently announced, there will be lots of people wanting to pay for support and get features added.

If cloud providers are mostly on the free XenServer, is this the whole reason for the Cloud Edition--to turn them into "real" customers and start getting some money in?
Pratt: Simon Crosby has this analogy, that Xen is an engine and needs a car built around it. (The point of the analogy is that the Xen hypervisor is open-source, with a GPL license, so users can make additional technology outside that hypervisor and keep it proprietary, building commercial products that work with Xen.)

If you are a cloud provider or a big software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, you can download the open-source engine and build your own car around it. That's fine if you have the engineering resource to do that, but a lot of this stuff is going to become more commoditized. SaaS vendors don't all have very particular needs. They don't have to do this for themselves--they have just had to do it that way until now.

Cloud Edition gives them a standard framework, so they can just concentrate on the value-added bits that they are interested in.

So it's just like many software developments in the past, where it's become obvious that everyone is doing the same thing, and a supported version of that is produced?
Pratt: Yes. And they just switch over to the supported version.

So VMware is the big competitor, then. What is the state of things between you and VMware at the moment?
Pratt: VMware has been really successful as a virtualization vendor. But virtualization as a category will disappear. The basic use of virtualization--server consolidation--is now a commodity.

Virtualization will be included in every operating system and on every server. XenSource Express is built into every HP and Dell server, on a USB stick soldered into the box. Users can run multiple virtual machines on those machines out of the box.

This is the only thing VMware does, and it has 100,000 customers. VMware is preparing for this to happen, by building management tools. But this puts them in direct competition with huge established players, like Tivoli and HP OpenView.

Citrix's approach is to concentrate on application delivery. The function of an IT department is to deliver applications, and we are doing it end to end, from the data center to the client device.

We don't need to do systems management, and we don't need to compete head on. It is all about application delivery. People won't buy virtualization--but they will buy high availability and fault tolerance.

Citrix has 200,000 customers. That's a pretty good beachhead to deliver more Citrix stuff to customers.

What is distinctively better about Xen's approach compared with VMware's?
Pratt: We don't want to create a class of people called virtualization administrators who you need to manage your virtual machines. That's how VMware works.

VMware is operating system virtualization--or hardware virtualization. That puts a lot of effort into a problem that is no longer there (since modern hardware from Intel and AMD has evolved to support virtualization).

What we did was to start out with the idea that hardware should support virtualization and the virtual machine should be aware. We call that para-virtualization, and Microsoft calls it enlightenment. That's marketing.

If you employ virtualization to get a separation not just in the hardware layer, then you can compose things dynamically. That's the way to bring down the real cost of IT.

We want to be as much of an appliance as possible. We've always seen Xen as an appliance that hosts virtual appliances. You want it to be an appliance and manage it like an appliance. It's like a Netgear router--you just plug it in and go. Adding a new machine to a XenServer pool should be as easy as that.

It is also quite hard to establish the relative performance of VMware's hypervisor and XenServer because of VMware's licensing terms. Are you working on a way round that problem?
Pratt: The VMware EULA (end-user licensing agreement) prohibits the publication of any benchmark results to a third party. We tried to publish results in 2002, and that clause has been in the VMware EULA ever since.

As XenSource, we might have had fun and games around the policy, but as Citrix, we have to be more circumspect. It's possible to publish comparisons against "Hypervisor A" and "Hypervisor B," though.

How about comparisons with Microsoft? Pretty soon, Microsoft will be able to claim that all the people who have Server 2008 have Hyper-V, won't it?
Pratt: Yes, but then there will be the question of how many people are using it, and how many people have the bits. If we wanted to measure Xen market share like that, we would be in great shape, because every Linux distro has Xen included in it.

Peter Judge of ZDNet UK reported from London.

LAS VEGAS--VMware's forthcoming ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor update will allow users to change the amount of RAM allocated to virtual machines without rebooting them, VMworld 2008 attendees here heard Tuesday.

In addition, the new hypervisor will enable businesses to configure virtual machines with eight virtual CPUs and a maximum of 256GB RAM, VMware product manager Carter Shanklin said in a technical briefing at the Las Vegas conference. The current version of ESX Server supports a maximum of 64GB RAM and four CPUs per virtual machine.

Although there have been several rumors about ESX 4.0 published by bloggers, until now, VMware has been tight-lipped about new features in the hypervisor update, which is expected to be launched next year. The ability to "hot-add" RAM to virtual machines should help companies avoid disruption or downtime when they have to make a memory switch.

Shanklin revealed the ESX 4.0 features during a demonstration of VMware's free VMware Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit 1.5, in which he showed how its integrated Microsoft's PowerShell command-line interface could be used to adjust the configuration of a virtual machine running Microsoft Exchange. In the demonstration, the Exchange server virtual machine was upgraded from 1GB to 4GB of RAM without a reboot.

"Microsoft PowerShell is designed for automating the management of Windows applications. All Microsoft server products must support PowerShell to some degree, so time spent learning PowerShell will be time well spent," Shanklin said.

Hot-add memory support is a feature of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.

The VI Toolkit runs on top of Microsoft PowerShell and includes 125 command-line tools for managing servers running VMware ESX 3.5 and ESX3i. It is available free of charge as a download from the VMware Web site.

Roger Howorth of ZDNet UK reported from Las Vegas.

Mr. Virtualization (aka ESG analyst Mark Bowker) called me Monday from the big Microsoft virtualization gala. From his description it was vintage Microsoft: company senior managers, partners, demos, and multimedia presentations. I kind of wish I was there for the demonstration of Buddy Guy's virtual guitar playing on a Gibson Flying V. (You had to be there.)

Microsoft's Bobs (Kelly and Muglia) kicked off the day with keynote presentations around customer case studies and Microsoft's technology vision. But what's most interesting to me is what Microsoft didn't say. According to Bowker, Microsoft hardly mentioned its recently released hypervisor (Hyper-V). Instead, the folks from Redmond focused on the virtualization environment highlighting best practices, management, implementation, and future growth.

To me, this strategy is very telling. One to two years ago, it was all about the hypervisor, and VMware ruled. Now it is about building and managing data centers and desktops built on any hypervisor. How will users deploy virtual objects? How will they manage and secure them? These are the real issues.

The hypervisor wars are over now. The real virtualization winners will be those that provide the best supporting services and technologies. Microsoft is demonstrating that it gets this.