News Analysis

The gloves are off

With Microsoft throwing its hat in the server virtualization ring, things just got more crowded in hypervisor town. Does Redmond’s offering have what it takes to unseat incumbent, VMware ESX? Read on to find out. By Prashant L Rao

When is a server, not a server? Well, when it is a virtual machine (VM). Broadly speaking, server virtualization seeks to reverse the server sprawl that resulted from the three-tier architecture that has been popular for many years now wherein you have a Web tier, an application server tier and a database tier. Using a virtualization product—be it from VMware, Microsoft, Sun or Novell—you run multiple workloads, that would usually run on separate Web- or application-tier machines, on a single server. This dovetails neatly with the growing power of x86 servers, a quad-CPU machine already offers 16 cores and that proposition is going to get better in the next six months.

For long, the Gold Standard in server virtualization has been VMware. Today, that company, now owned by EMC, is under siege. A fairly exhaustive look at the hypervisor market leads to certain conclusions.

Choosing a hypervisor

Firstly, you have to choose between running the hypervisor directly on top of the hardware in the so-called ‘bare metal’ mode or you can choose to run it on top of a server OS. If you take the latter route, then the choice of hypervisor depends on which server OS you are already running. If you are running Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V seems like a logical choice. Similarly, if you are running SUSE Linux you will probably be best off with Xen. On the other hand, if you are a Sun shop, xVM is the way to go.

However, if you want to run the hypervisor in bare metal mode, then VMware is probably your best choice as it is fully functional in bare metal mode. All you need is a supported server and storage box and you are in business. In contrast, Hyper-V needs to run on Windows Server 2008 to be fully functional.

ESX vs. Hyper-V

Although it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison vis-à-vis cost of acquisition of a hypervisor, let’s give it a shot. Simply put, if you are already running Windows Server, then Hyper-V is free. In the case of VMware, you can run ESXi for free but if you are serious about deploying it, you’ll want to go for VMware Infrastructure, which adds high availability, consolidated backup and tons of other features. That product is a commercial one costing about $1,540 onwards. Nevertheless, if you are not running Windows server, you have to add the cost of Windows Server licenses ($999 onwards) and SCVMM (Microsoft’s management product for virtual machines) to the cost of acquiring Hyper-V. In which case there’s not too much of a difference when it comes to the cost of acquiring either solution.

Microsoft has, what it argues, is the most complete virtualization story—from the desktop, through applications, to the server. This is partially true; the company already offers server and application virtualization and it will offer desktop virtualization in a couple of

months as well. However, VMware already offers Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which it describes in its datasheet as Organizations use VMware VDI to replace traditional PCs with virtual desktops that run on servers in the data center. Administrators can provision new desktops in minutes, giving users their own personalized desktop environments while eliminating the need for retraining and application sharing. That sounds a lot like what Microsoft is gearing up to offer in partnership with Citrix and others.

Hyper-V’s target audience

This is not to underestimate the capabilities of Microsoft’s virtualization solution or its likelihood of making inroads into Corporate India’s server sprawl. Every year we do a survey of SMBs looking at their IT usage and projected investment patterns. Every year we find that Windows Server is the most popular option across verticals with Linux and UNIX coming second and third. Considering this, it is quite likely that Hyper-V will ride on the coattails of Windows Server 2008’s adoption and take up a large portion of the still emerging hypervisor market in the country.

The company’s partners are, understandably, gung ho about Hyper-V’s prospects. Ashok Tripathy, GM and Business Head, Wipro Personal Computing Division, said, “The maximum server sprawl is at the edge and our customers are usually running Windows Server there. What better solution than Windows Server 2008 which has virtualization bundled in. From a TCO or acquisition cost POV, it's an attractive option.”

K S Ganesan, Chief Technology Officer, Microland Ltd, had this to say, “Microland is a customer [of Microsoft]. We believe that application management is moving from the periphery of an enterprise to the core.” This dovetails neatly into the value proposition of Hyper-V that, like any other hypervisor, lets you consolidate workloads. He added that Microland had three-four pilots running at BFSI, manufacturing and retail clients.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, Director - Virtualization, Microsoft India, commented, “Less than 12% of servers are virtualized today. IDC says that companies will run 50% of their servers as virtualized workloads by 2011. We think that it will be more than that. They didn’t factor in Hyper-V.”

Most hypervisors support VMs that run other OSs as virtual partitions or guest OSs. In the same manner, Hyper-V supports Linux VMs. “You can run Linux as a virtual partition or Guest OS on top of Windows Server 2008 using Hyper-V,” said Tripathy.

Like VMware’s hypervisor, Hyper-V also runs sans Windows Server 2008. In Balakrishnan’s words, “Hyper-V is available as a download. You can run it bare metal or on Windows Server 2008.”

There are significant advantages to running the hypervisor on top of Windows Server, however. Balakrishan said, “The advantage of running it on Server 2008 is that you get the benefits of HA, clustering. Even in bare metal mode you can take advantage of HA on a VM but there’s limited physical failover.”

Desktop virtualization

On the desktop front, Microsoft has had Virtual PC for a while now but it’s still a bit nerdy for the average user. Now the company is moving to make things easier for end-users. Its VDI solution will take care of launching a VM and running an application on a guest OS without the user ever realizing what’s happened. As far as the user’s concerned an important application has just run seamlessly although behind the scenes it’s an application that doesn’t run on Vista and is running on an XP VM. Balakrishnan said, “With Microsoft desktop virtualization you will be able to run XP apps such as IE6 on Vista.” This new offering called Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) will be out in a couple of months. Microsoft is working closely with Citrix on this.

Application virtualization is one area where Microsoft has a robust product acquired earlier (SoftGrid) and it has deployments in the BPO sector (WNS).

Likely candidates

So who’s going to buy Hyper-V? Tripathy said, “BFSI, IT/ITES are the early adopters. BFSI has a lot of server sprawl. IT/ITES tends to do a lot of test and development and to this end they need different servers running different OSs making them a natural candidate for virtualization.”

He added that customers who already have Software Assurance from Microsoft could implement virtualization without having to learn a new technology.

Wipro has been running 18 applications on Hyper-V at its Microsoft CoE in Mysore for about six-seven weeks. Pilots are running at four of its customer sites in various stages of adoption at organizations that belong to BFSI or IT/ITES.

The folks at Wipro pointed out that with 16 cores per server on Intel/AMD boxes you do not need much more than a normal spec to virtualize a workload. The exact configuration depends on the number of applications and whether the applications are those running on the edge of the network or at the core. Basically, you wouldn’t be consolidating core apps right now as many of them still run on UNIX boxes and any virtualization you do will likely be on a UNIX box. However, you could move from, say, five application-tier applications each running on its own CPU to the same five applications running on a 3 CPU machine and push utilization up from 50% to 70-75%.

The folks at Wipro stressed that you can maintain high availability using clustering for both the underlying OS and the virtual partitions. Databases are usually centralized and they can benefit from this feature. Earlier, if you had to cluster you needed a second, identical machine. With this feature, using Hyper-V, you can cluster a virtual Linux partition on another Windows 2008 server without needing to do one-to-one mapping.

End run

Hyper-V will have a significant impact on the Indian market, largely because there is a lot of Windows Server usage in the country. It’s the leading server OS as far as the number of companies using it in some part of their infrastructure goes. While UNIX still rules the back-end, x86 gear is scaling up and both Windows and Linux are assaulting Mount UNIX. Considering all this, Hyper-V adoption will be widespread and while it won’t add to Microsoft’s revenues, it will prevent customers from defecting to other server OSs or hypervisors. Companies that already have Windows Server will naturally pick Hyper-V since it’s just a free download for them. So is VMware’s bare metal product but the full fledged one does cost money and IT heads running Windows-based setups are unlikely to be able to justify the extra cost unless of course, they’re consolidating core applications onto UNIX boxen in which case it’s a different ballgame altogether.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com