The infrastructure’s virtual

VMware is the leader when it comes to x86 server virtualization globally and in India. The company wants to move away from being a provider of hypervisor technology to a ‘Virtual Infrastructure vendor’. By Akhtar Pasha.

If virtualization is one of the computing industry’s mega trends then Diane Greene, Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation and President of VMware, may just have the best seat in the house. There is no sign that the wave of enterprise adoption and its concomitant opportunity for software developers will slow down anytime soon. VMware’s success in India is best measured by its recent customer acquisitions—BPCL, HPCL, Aviva Life Insurance, ICICI Bank to name a few.

Bharat Petroleum is a significant customer for VMware. BPCL has fuelled its growth using VMware and the latter’s solutions have helped it rapidly deploy applications and save money through server consolidation. The company was using Intel-based tower servers that were more than five years old and occupied significant floor space in the data centre. Beyond space constraints, it became a challenge to manage the server sprawl. Anil Kumar Kaushik, Deputy General Manager, IIS Infrastructure, BPCL says, “Each of our applications was residing on its own dedicated server. There were 17 servers running 17 different applications. We have portioned a 4 CPU IBM server into 17 virtual machines and with additional CPUs and RAM, the server can support up to 30 virtual machines, allowing BPCL to increase server and CPU utilization dramatically. Overall, server consolidation was a major gain for us.”

The company was also rapidly running out of server resources to support its testing and production requirements. “Each of our in-house developers needed his own server for testing and development, the numbers kept growing,” says Kaushik. “We needed additional storage, RAM and processing power to meet their requirements.” VMware ESX Server met the company’s requirements enabling server consolidation, centralized management and rapid application development through virtual machines. Kaushik adds “We have reduced the recurring cost of additional servers for items such as annual maintenance, power consumption, administration and manpower, which is estimated to be approximately $30,000.” Additionally VMware ESX has helped in faster application testing and development time. VMware software gives BPCL the ability to quickly react to changing business needs. “Application developers and testers appreciate ESX because we can create a virtual machine immediately for them to work on,” Kaushik says. “Before we had VMware ESX Server, it would take up to three months to procure a server every time we wanted to test images (software testing). Now, we don’t have to wait for the hardware before starting our application development. We migrated the virtual machine application to the actual production server environment once the testing was completed.” Another benefit is the reusability of virtual machine resources. Once a testing job is completed, the virtual machine is available for other purposes thereby optimizing server resource utilization.

Pallab Talukdar, Director-Enterprise Business, Dell India says, “Virtualization is nothing but running a hypervisor (also knows as the virtual machine monitor) installed directly on top of the server hardware insulating the hardware, OS and applications on top of it. In this type of server virtualization, the hypervisor creates the interface through which the VMs interface with the hardware. Server OSs are created inside VMs or ‘containers’ created on top of the hypervisor. Hypervisors primarily assist in memory management and I/O virtualization.” In addition to server virtualization through consolidation (running multiple applications on single server) there are two key significant other benefits of using VMware’s ESX virtualization technology. One, VMware ESX Server provides supports to older technologies—say a customer is running an application on NetWare 3.1 and wants to use new hardware such as a Xeon quad-core which is not yet certified for the older server OS. By running VMware hypervisor, the customer gets the performance advantage of a new server protecting his investment in NetWare. Additionally using VMware’s VMotion, customers can move running virtual machines from one physical server to another with no impact to end users; we are talking about zero downtime here. “We have virtualized Firstsource using VMware ESX Server to run Oracle HRM on Windows Server on a Dell blade platform,” adds Talukdar.

Jim Lenox, General Manager-Asia South, VMware says, “Adoption of ESX Server has skyrocketed. With 20,000 plus customers and 80 percent of them are using the technology in a production environment—this encapsulates our success story.”

Virtualizing x86 servers

Lenox says, “The big uptake because of the high growth witnessed by our Indian customers as well. We find that these BFSI, BPO and large manufacturing outfits have made substantial investments in x86 servers and they continue investing because x86 has become powerful enough with mainframe-like features coming in and is considered to have the best price-performance. We see this as an opportunity as most x86 servers are underutilized.” That a hypervisor helps in reducing TCO is a no brainier but this is only the initial factor. Going forward, customers are looking at optimizing their x86 servers to a large extent. This is where VMware will be focusing—a lot of automation is built into the hypervisor to support high availability, clustering, management, built-in backup, automatic space optimization and more. “We have dominated the x86 market with products such as the ESX Server hypervisor and going forward we plan to move away from being a mere provider of hypervisor technology to a ‘Virtual Infrastructure vendor’ with VMware Infrastructure Version 3 solution backed by our years of experience. This would be next area of focus,” adds Lenox.

Virtual Infrastructure

The VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) Enterprise suite has many features and standalone VMware products included. VMware Consolidated Backup simplifies the backup of virtual machines by offering backup vendors centralized, virtualization- aware capabilities to manage backup without running a backup agent in every VM. VirtualCenter is a management console for managing VMs, while VMotion enables the movement of live running servers from one server box to another, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler monitors utilization and adjusts resource allocation based on predefined rules. VMware File Systems (VMFS) is a replacement for other file systems to improve server virtualization manageability. VMware High Availability is a low-cost, good-enough alternative to hardware-based high-availability solutions. It monitors VMs and restarts them if they suffer a hardware or software fault. Having packed a slew of automation, server management and virtualization features into VI3 the company wants businesses to consider it as a Virtual Infrastructure vendor rather than as a hypervisor vendor.

Frank E Gillett, Vice President, Forrester Research says, “VMware’s current offerings, shipped in June 2006, focus on enhancements of related infrastructure technologies, such as backup and systems management, or offering virtualization-enhanced alternatives to existing products, such as file systems and high availability. VMware predicts that server virtualization will lead to a transformation of IT infrastructure that will include many updates and overhauls of existing technologies.

“Forrester agrees with this vision, which we call Organic IT, and believes that most of VMware’s sales have shifted from the standalone VMware ESX Server hypervisor, which is still available, to the VMware Infrastructure suite.”

Significant gains in India: fastest growth

As far as VMware’s growth is concern it has gained significantly. In H1 2007, the company shipped VMware ESX Server solutions to the top five BPOs in India. Banking continues to be the biggest revenue earner. It also names the top three telcos among its customers. Lenox says, “We are in talks with two automobile manufacturing giants in India—manufacturers of cars and trucks—for virtualization solutions.” Alliances with server OEMs such as HP, IBM and Dell have helped the company expand its market share. Lenox says, “Our channels are creating sales opportunities and alliance with server OEMs are supplementing these.” VMware has Wipro, TCS and HCL are its SI and Ingram Micro as its national distributors. Lenox adds, “Wipro is our global partner and has done a number of customer deployments globally.”

VMware is rapidly expanding its market presence. It has opened three sales offices in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai and is planning to open four new sales operations in other regions as well. “Most of our customers are aware of the benefits that come from virtualization and our products. The new sales offices will help us get closer to our customers, “says Lenox.

Management console for SMBs

VMware thinks that virtualization is not merely for big business. Small and medium businesses should embrace the benefits of virtualizing servers as well. “During the last six months we have been focusing on the whole of South Asia. We are expanding our SMB strategies with a new product called Starter Version,” says Lenox. To manage what it hopes is a proliferation of VMware Servers in the SMB segment, the company offers VirtualCenter for VMware Server. VirtualCenter is a single management console for configuring, provisioning, and managing virtual machines. It includes a high-availability module and a VMotion virtual machine migration module to go from one physical server to another. It also includes a dynamic resource allocation module for assigning memory, CPU cycles, and network bandwidth between virtual machines on a pool of physical servers. “We believe that this new bundle [VirtualCenter for VMware Server] will create an onramp for SMBs to virtualize their environments. The pricing and support aimed at SMBs is clearly intended for the ‘getting started’ category of customers,” says Lenox. He adds that the Starter Version will not have SAN connectivity.

Talukdar says, “There is excitement in the marketplace and virtualization has become synonymous with VMware and it is everywhere and continues to dominate the market.”

Gillett says, “Forrester believes that a critical mass of enterprises will switch from x86 virtualization projects to virtualized infrastructure strategies over the next two years, driven by VMware’s technologies.” Forrester reports that it will take at least two to three years for other vendors to match VMware’s products and during that time VMware will continue to expand its presence within the market.