ToutVirtual Enterprise Virtualization - A Proper Virtual World

LifeCycle Wars? Gotta Be kidding… More Important Issues Remain To Be Resolved!

May 28th, 2008

Virtualization, Fine, Well Sort of? - Chapter 14

Gartner commented that every thing will change in 2008 in reference to virtualization? Well duhe. Guess the old crystal ball needs new batteries? But to be honest and fail, Gartner was right, in concept, but not in subject. Everything is changing in virtualization, it has every single year for the last five (5) or so years running. Virtualization and the associated tools, methods and platforms have been, in my humble opinion, been the most dynamic aspect of the information technology sector, no? Fine, dual-cores and quad-cores were expected, come-on! Of course, what has changed and how it has changed is also a matter of debate and exhibited by various perspectives echoing across cyberspace. Including my views, of which, having been quite outspoken, well duhe, again, are no secret.

VMware for example, has constantly improved the enterprise hypervisor based platform, cough 3i, cough cough ESXi, product to a significant degree, but this has been completely predictable. Adding more capacity per virtual instance, making shared storage a core requirement a la VMotion if not Storage VMotion, failed to develop enterprise scalable archival options, and taken almost forever to improve its management application suite? Yes, VirtualCenter has gotten new features and add-ins, but VirtualCenter as a framework, well, still is horrible. If you don’t believe me? Try using it at its quoted scaling capability? Better yet, try using at half its quoted scaling recommendation? It does not do well. Even VMware acknowledges this. Not to mention inconsistent 64bit support for the client? Which has been fixed! But only after a lot of customer heated feedback. This is not to say that VirtualCenter has not been improved, it has, but it, like ESXi is still not enterprise class… yet. When it is a true enterprise class solution… Watch out! It could be competition killer, cough, Microsoft you listening? Did some one say (System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)? Again, I have commented on this before, so why do I mention it now? Well because of VMware LifeCycle Manager of course! What? Did I lose anyone?

Yes, LifeCycle products are all the new rage, and if you widen the concept slightly, you get an entire range of related products, beyond VMware LifeCycle Manager. BladeLogic Operations Manager, IBM TPM, Opsware, and even VMware Lab Manager is/was a LifeCycle product for a focused niche. But the list goes on, ConfigureSoft Enterprise Configuration Manager, Encore, Vizioncore vCharter, and ToutVirtual has an entire framework devoted to LifeCycle concept for years, and I am sure I am forgetting a few others, but the list is sufficient for the point, all of these solutions support the basic features or concepts inclusive of total life cycle continuation of virtualization containers, in our biased view, virtual instances of course, right? Let’s itemize feature set at a high level a bit? Some key features for any life cycle product:

• Provisioning (Charge-Forward?)
• Retirement
• Configuration Management
• Security Management
• Patching
• Asset Management (Charge-Back?)
• Physical-To-Virtual, Well Ok

Provisioning and retirement are obvious no? The automated creation and destruction of instances makes sense. Once an instance exists it must be maintained, so functional configuration, security remediation, and patch management (fixing bugs, not just closing holes), all fall into place. Now, lets see, that is left? Oh, yes, asset management, which beyond inventory and capacity planning, tracking, and trending, that wonders of wonders, the charge forward and back model! Well, blah, blah, duhe, once more. There are quite of few CPAs I know that really do hate charge models, not because of the validity of the concept is not sound, but because establishing and maintaining such models is a pain, can you see blood? I even know one individual that equated capitalization and deprecated costing hang ups with virtual instances as… and I quote… spreading the peanut-butter. Of course I asked, smooth or chunky… the reply was… and I quote again… I don’t know, super chunky? Quite a few big scale clients of virtualization have even developed their own in-house LifeCycle solutions, why? Because enterprise class solutions took more than two (2) years to get to market in 2004 and/or 2005, and some products were/are incomplete, nothing but band-aiding VMware ESX as a Linux distribution into the same old gadgets, very un-cool. The one exception would physical-to-virtual (P2V) solutions, which have remained tight and focused on modest improvement objectives rather than chasing feature set expansion as the only valued goal.

The sad reality is that with all the rush to deliver LifeCycle solutions, VMware included, if debatable, late, the entire virtualization industry has not addressed some key issues. Many of these have been discussed in this same blog in the past, and quite a few other blogs. Including, but not limited to… we do not, and this true of just about every virtualization toting publisher, have enterprise class management tools from the market leaders, we do not have extensive options for archival, thin-disking, disk-instancing (read-only shared disk images) from many of the major storage venders, and the list goes on, heck, VMware has even removed features over time, rather than really improve them? The entire virtualization scope of the information technology industry is still developing new solutions, and not improving existing solutions. No one should be surprised; Gartner said they should make new products and add tons of new features, in order to survive, cough, Hypervisor Wars. So I guess everyone that develops Hypervisors reads Gartner? Can’t count the number of times I have heard customers say… improve what you have before you add new features, well for the last time, duhe. Seems like common sense, no? Not to sales and marketing gurus? Well, they read Gartner as well, right?

We have more clients, very day, going from 10s of virtual instances, to 100s, or from 100s to 1000s, and to be sure, more than a few going from 1000s to 10,000s in this calendar year, no? And what will they need? Oh lets see… very stable hypervisors, check. A fast and consistent management tool that work at significant scale, ah, not quite. Archival solutions that scale, well de-duplication is an initial step for that, so check, with a question mark. And for the 800 pound guerrilla, utility computing, leveraging application instancing, nope, this one is still not reality, well, except for Solaris Zones, or in the context of grid computing. Now, for crying out loud, is that not what we asked for in 2004, 2005, and 2006? And to think, Gartner told us in 2008, everything is going to change? Well has it? Duhe, oops sorry, said it again. Honestly, don’t see that virtualization has changed much at all; we still have the same basic problems we had years go.

Oh, Gartner, the new iBall (say Eye-Ball) still is not very accurate? But, remember, it has new features! To be fair, the newest iBall is an isolinear integrated, carbon based, globe, it glows in 16 million colors, at infinity minus one resolution! No more heavy lead-crystal from Baccarat? Going to miss that, to be sure. No realistically improved functionality, cough, accuracy? Why am I, not surprised, duhe, ops I said it again. It appears all the leading crystal ball makers read Gartner as well, and they have developed and retired three (3) generations of the popular predictive orbs, supported only for one (1) calendar year which is a shame. Purchase of sooth-saying devices has to be a significant capitalization for organizations like Gartner, right? So where do we ship the batteries, yes, batteries. Reading the datasheet, the latest iBall uses traditional chemical cells? Still? But, I just wonder about one more thing… Like the new smart-cars, does the iBall get even one (1) more additional hour of predictive premonitions, for the same size chemical cells? How environmentally green is the newest iBall anyway?

A Proper Virtual World, charge back, charge forward, provisioning, thin disking, virtual machine lifecycle, virtualization 201, virtualization problems

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