Well, allot has happened since my last update – which admittedly was some time ago.
In the arena of virtualisation, we’ve had Microsoft launch Windows Server 2008 R2 – which of course brings a host of improvements. Microsoft are shouting about these improvements, either claiming parity with VMWare, or claiming to be at least ‘right behind them’.
It seems Microsoft are effectively claiming their solution is now ‘Version 2’ – and therefore mature and proven. However, this is something of a stretch. The technology is version 1.1 at best, and many of the new features added are also unproven and stay firmly in the arena of ‘version 1’.
Microsoft are of course, very good at moving the discussion away from areas where they are weak, and onto areas where they have something to talk about. Primarily this focuses on high-level features – they’ll tell you they have live migration too, HA too, and load balancing too. They’ll also downplay features that they don’t have as being features customers don’t really need (think FT, DPM etc) – although you can bet that when they day comes when they do have those features, they’ll shout about it from the rooftops as if they invented it.
Talking about those high-level features though, is a little like a car showroom salesman talking to you about the Climate Control, Cruise Control and Power Steering of a car – but refusing to tell you anything about the engine. Look under the hood of a VMWare solution – and you’ll find ESX or ESXi.
VMWare’s competition have tried to neutralise the importance of the HyperVisor by giving it away free, as if to imply that it’s not a big part of the picture – but in fact, it’s the single most important part of the picture imaginable. It’s the thing that actually does the job of running virtual machines. If you’re looking at running your business on a virtual platform – you don’t run it on HA, or Live Migration or System Center – you run it on a HyperVisor: ESX or Hyper-V.
It’s still the case that by a long, long way, ESX is still far more well developed, more efficient and robust than Hyper-V.
‘Ahh – but it doesn’t really bring any practical benefits’ – they say. I beg to differ. The elegance of ESX is in all the enhancements and optimisations that have been made over the years, bringing about a solution that absolutely will be capable of running more virtual machines per box, and running them faster with a greater degree of confidence than Hyper-V.
Another area of competition is with management. Listen to Microsoft and you’ll sometimes be forgiven for thinking that if you buy into their virtualisation platform, that you’ll get management of your entire infrastructure as part of the package. This simply isn’t true. Products like Operations Manager and Configuration Manager are totally separate products from Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). VMM on it’s own does not provide anything more than the management of virtual machines and Hyper-V hosts – and it does so in a way that is far less capable than VMWare vCenter.
VMWare vCenter will absolutely give you visibility on your virtual machines – gathering performance data, offering patch management, and for any company with a heterogeneous environment, it just makes more sense to look to more vendor-agnostic tools to get your data.
Finally of course, there is price – well, this is one area where I’ll admit VMWare have a problem. In the world of VMWare, if you’re looking for something ‘cheap’ – then you better hope you’re only going to be deploying three dual-processor servers. Three is the magic number, as it’s the maximum number of servers you can have in VMWare’s ‘Small Business’ Essentials and Essentials Plus bundles – and they offer considerable discount over full product.
Even the ‘medium business’ Advanced Acceleration kit licenses you for – that’s right – three dual processor servers. After that the price jumps up with acceleration kits based around Enterprise and Enterprise plus licensing.
I’d love to see VMWare offer some five server ‘Essentials Plus’ and Advanced bundles. This would help bring about a massive shift for anyone looking to get into virtualisation.
Then again, I'd also like to see Microsoft competing fairly – the bargain basement giveaway approach they have to virtualisation clearly shows that they are determined to stop VMWare at any cost. That can’t be allowed to happen. We’ve seen before what happens when Microsoft ‘win’ a market – they stop innovating, and everybody loses.
Friday, November 6, 2009 at 3:31PM 