Virtualization Automation – A Proper Virtual World

What Now, The Year Is Almost Over!

June 30th, 2009

Virtualization Critical Comparison – Chapter 08

A few days ago, I had to call a friend of mine to discuss Hyper-V. This friend of mine is a smart guy, is a player, a mover, and a shaker, at the least when he voices an opinion about virtualization, vendors, a lot of vendors listen. It was once said, that when my friend and I agree, there is not a vendor on the planet that does not listen. True, it does not mean we get our respective wish or way with the vendor, but they do take serious note. Well, when we don’t agree, that is when things get interesting. And on Hyper-V versus KVM we do not agree, we see the points of each other respective perspective, but do not agree.

In short, Hyper-V is coming along well with the updates and changes in Windows 2008 R2, including CSV. However, also as I have said in this blog, KVM is coming along as well. With Xen and VMware on the side-lines, for different reasons, this is starting to feel like the finals in a World Cup Football (Soccer) tournament. Why? Well, everyone in the computing industry is watching, everyone. Regardless of whether they admit it or not, the finals are here. What? Wait, wait. I hear the calls and yells from the fans in the stadium, saying… What final 4? Parallels, Iron Works, etc. all are players. True, but did they make it to the finals this year? No. Virtualization container concepts took it in the teeth this year, this was the year of the mature platforms for virtualization, gearing up for cloud computing, the enterprise scale and, yes, and, hypervisor operating system isolation based big strikers.

This year is almost over, eyes are turning to 2010, and as KVM gains acceptance with the bigger life-cycle application vendors, Surgient, ManageIQ, and a few others that slip my mind at the moment, a bit limitation with KVM disappears. Whereas, Hyper-V paired with SCVMM could be seen as at a disadvantage, Microsoft has not as yet that I know of written a true virtualization agnostic management framework. Not when SCVMM has to drive vCenter, and vCenter has to drive ESX? The libvirt community is pushing but can only go so fast, although RedHat is going to change that to a reasonable degree, as well as IBM, when they drive more resources and gain results that support KVM, not Hyper-V. So where does that leave my metaphor for World Cup Virtualization, cough, Soccer, wheeze, Football?

After KVM and Hyper-V smash into each other, since they are on approximately on the same timeline/roadmap for parity in feature set, the winner of this clash will focus on VMware. Yes, yes, I know that regardless of what happens, neither KVM nor Hyper-V will really disappear, but someone has to be the true challenger to VMware. Oracle is still lost trying to figure out how to market Sun Microsystems technology, sad but true, that the precursor the true virtual containers in the modern age of virtualization, Solaris LDOMs (Zones) is cursed to oblivion. Sorry Oracle, but I have real trouble finding anyone that wants to pay a premium for Oracle and be locked into a narrow virtualization platform. Cost is a factor, interoperability is also a significant factor based on the informal questions I have posed to many of my friends in virtualization.

Xen, as much as I like the platform, is a spectator right now as well, Citrix has its niche, and will continue at some level but does anyone really think Xen will compete will with Hyper-V or KVM given the resources that Microsoft can bring to the arena of virtualization, or what RedHat can combined with IBM? Here is a radical idea… Parallels and Citrix should merge! The result is a mature virtualization container model combined with the now dominate application virtualization solution? That would be interesting, but the downside, is that it would cannibalize Xen. After all I do believe that operating system isolation cannot dominate the industry for much longer. The pressure to implement cloud computing with the absolute minimum disk footprint on SAN or NAS? Never mind the push to reduce processor packages per server node, and increase cores per package? That means, as least to me, lots of smaller, leaner servers hosting applications, databases, and very lean virtualization. Now where has that idea come from… Oh yes, PODS of course.

KVM fits this concept now, you run Linux application on the server, and when the given server has cycles free you run a few virtual instances, just a few. Radical but not unheard of, there have been quite a few operating systems that supported primitive application partitions while the parent partition/system did significant work. Hyper-V cannot do this effectively nor can VMware ESX notes on vSphere. Think I am crazy? Talk to your respective architecture teams, they are trying to figure out how to get the last 5 or 10 percent utilization out of dedicated application servers, as a dynamic resource to handle over flow capacity needs, in cloud, right?

Entry Filed under: A Proper Virtual World