On Aug. 26, VMware, via a blog entry, quietly announced its acquisition of PacketMotion, a network security provider concerned primarily with user activity management. Perhaps key to the deal for VMware is PacketMotion’s April release of its PacketSentry Virtual Probe, a tool designed specifically to provide visibility and access control in communications between virtual machines. The implementation, releasing the tool in the form of a low-impact guest VM, provides a key enabler to visibility on what users are accessing within a virtualized environment, augmenting with identity characteristics the monitoring VMware had in place with its own vShield solution.

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIP reports when they are fist released? Sign up here for TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

This is VMware’s second significant security company acquisition; last year at around the same time it accounced its acquisition of dual-factor authentication solution provider TriCipher. This two-time trend raises an obvious question: Which security company will be the buy for next year’s VMworld?

Advanced Anti-Malware, Incident Response

In TheInfoPro’s Information Security Wave 14 Study, PacketMotion cracked the roadmap list with one implementation in the advanced anti-malware and incident response category.

Based on this lack of penetration in the enterprise market, as with TriCipher, we believe VMware’s acquisition in this space is a straight technology acquisition, designed to complement its existing virtualization offerings and remove yet another security roadblock, visibility, to server virtualization implementations.

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Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

This is the first edition of the bi-weekly Cloud Computing Thursday’s TIP that you are entitled to receive in exchange for participating in TheInfoPro’s Cloud Computing Study. This week we are highlighting the three leading roadblocks/inhibitors to successful cloud projects: change management and learning, complexity, and upfront costs.

Fifty-two percent (52%) of those interviewed said that change and learning represented the largest roadblock or challenge to the implementation of their cloud projects. Teaching people to do things differently is always challenging, but the disruptive nature of cloud computing brings another dimension that makes embracing change even more difficult. Many IT pros feel that cloud computing represents a likely trip to the unemployment line as companies consolidate through virtualization or move projects to a third party. This makes it harder for IT pros to embrace the cloud as a net positive for their organization. In our interviews several respondents stated that their employees were often “reluctant” or that the cloud represented a different “cultural mindset.” In addition, many noted that the cloud represented a new technology and a new model for procuring and managing technology, which often requires employees with a different skill set.

Reduced complexity and lower cost are often cited as benefits of cloud computing; however, respondents to our study highlighted both cost and complexity as leading inhibitors. In fact, 32% percent of respondents cited complexity and 15% cited cost among their top three roadblocks to cloud project success. Our definition of complexity encapsulates many of the technical challenges associated with integration and interoperability, virtualization management, and migration. Our findings also highlight that although a cloud solution is often cheaper in the long term, it’s not free in the short term. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of respondents cited cost reduction as a leading driver of cloud adoption. In the same study, 52% of respondents said cost is a leading roadblock, as many struggle, in an increasingly challenging economic environment, to justify and secure the budget (largely for private cloud) needed for the up-front implementation and ongoing management of a private or public cloud solution.

The struggles associated with cloud projects often map to those found in most traditional projects. Moving to a new system or supporting one is always going to result in a certain amount of disruption. However, structural changes, like in staffing or operating models, will be an increasingly daunting management challenge for many organizations in the long run. With this in mind, the largest service providers and vendors in the world are lining-up with pre-integrated cloud-in-a box solutions and other professional services capabilities needed to make the transition to the cloud as easy as possible. However, let’s not forget that we have been here before. Can anyone spell ERP or transformation?

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Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

Despite the buzz around desktop virtualization, its demand and usage are still incidental – the technology is on an evolutionary path. While 25.7% of large enterprises and 19.6% of midsize enterprises are considering desktop virtualization, deployment growth is modest, and the footprint within organizations is expected to remain small for the vast majority. Usage tends to be concentrated toward offshore developers and contact centers.

TheInfoPro’s research specific to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) shows blended approaches to the desktop evolving over time, which includes desktop virtualization, application virtualization and web services. From an adoption perspective, desktop virtualization is not yet mainstream, with 47% in use. The vendor landscape is interesting, with Citrix and VMware in a near tie for in use; however, VMware is the leading vendor in pilot or in plan. Interest in Microsoft VDI solutions decreased substantially in the second half of 2010.

The number of desktops being supported by desktop virtualization tends toward the extremes, either less than 200 or more than 900, which indicates that VDI has yet to gain significant traction as a mainstream IT initiative. That much said, there is a definite trend toward increasing the number of servers and virtual desktops supported in 2011, implying a transition from pilot projects to production deployments.

As a server pro, you may be interested in which IT trends your peers are adopting. At the end of 2010, VDI had attention but little commitment.

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• Larger vendors are leading in choice for infrastructure upgrades, points to potential M&A targets
• Forty percent (40%) of organizations are increasing security budgets in 2010
• Sixty percent (60%) of organizations already utilizing cloud-based infrastructure services or intending to do so in the next two years.

New York – February 23, 2010 – TheInfoPro, an independent research company for the IT industry, today released the results of its Information Security Study, which showed that 40 percent (40%) of enterprises are planning to increase their 2010 security budgets. After a year of restricted spending and delayed projects, major infrastructure upgrade initiatives are finally happening for security IT departments. The study shows that enterprises are favoring the safety of one-stop, all-inclusive vendors, and consequently, the data shows Cisco rising as a formidable security provider.

Potential M&A Targets
As organizations embark on a comprehensive infrastructure refresh, Cisco is now leading in vendor selection for SSL VPN, network access control (NAC) and firewalls. Inside the perimeter, however, pure-play security companies still reign supreme, which could potentially point to them as suitable M&A targets in the coming months for the likes of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and other larger vendors.

“Check Point, McAfee and other similar providers would probably be the largest deals in the acquisition pipeline, each a leader in their respective, mainstream technologies, and each with a loyal customer base,” said Ivan Ruzic, CEO of TheInfoPro. “Smaller deals would most likely happen first, meaning that Blue Coat, WebSense and ArcSight could be to a larger organization what 3Com’s TippingPoint technology meant to HP.”

Key Security Concerns for Cloud
The study results, which are based on interviews with 259 organizations within the Fortune 1000 (F1000) and midsize (MSEs) market throughout North America, showed that 60 percent of organizations are already utilizing cloud-based infrastructure services or intending to do so in the next two years. Due to this growth, the largest area of concern for enterprises is how to deal with sensitive data being placed in not only an external cloud environment but also concern for data that is placed within clouds internal to their respective organizations. Nearly three out of four respondents (72%) cited being very concerned or extremely concerned about security in a cloud environment.

“Even with data pointing to a spending rebound, security professionals say they will spend cautiously and scrutinize each priority after many routine infrastructure updates were delayed,” said Bill Trussell, TheInfoPro’s Managing Director of Security Research. “Emerging trends in virtualization and cloud are driving much attention toward addressing data loss more aggressively.”

Enterprises Gear Spending Toward Protecting Data
For 2010, enterprise security professionals indicate that Symantec, McAfee, Microsoft and Cisco will be among the most likely beneficiaries of higher spending. McAfee has eclipsed Symantec as the most frequently cited provider of exciting security products, while Check Point returned to the list after being absent for more than a year.

TheInfoPro’s Technology Heat Index™ is widely regarded as effective measure of user “demand” for a technology, and from a vendor’s perspective, a good indicator of the relative size of the market opportunity. TheInfoPro’s Information Security Technology Heat Index cites event log management as the No. 1 priority in information security IT spending, with data loss prevention (DLP) and NAC ranking next, respectively.

DLP tops the IT projects list as well as the exciting technology solutions list. Security professionals have identified that both Symantec and McAfee are likely to be the preferred DLP vendors. Cisco and Microsoft still lead for NAC. LogLogic and Microsoft are top choices as vendors for event log management. For the first time in two years, NAC has fallen to the third spot, demonstrating that the technology has moved toward more mainstream adoption.

NOTE: Specific vendor data or full report downloads are available by contacting Ashley Pierce at apierce@theinfopro.com.

About TheInfoPro’s Security Study
TheInfoPro’s Information Security Study was conducted between September and December 2009 and takes an in-depth look into key trends occurring across all areas of the information security landscape, within disciplines such as network security, security management and infrastructure security. The study is completed biannually through one-on-one, hourlong interviews with 259 key security decision-makers, including directors of information security, global security managers and infrastructure team managers, within Fortune 1000 and midsize enterprise organizations. The interview results are collected in comprehensive research reports that provide continuous business intelligence within key areas such as technology roadmaps, spending plans and vendor performance ratings.

About TheInfoPro
TheInfoPro is a leading advisory and research firm that provides real-world perspectives on the customer and market dynamics of the information technology landscape by using a unique research methodology that harnesses the collective knowledge and insights of leading IT organizations worldwide. Through a combination of expert advice, actionable analysis and our extensive network of IT professionals, TheInfoPro serves as a conduit between IT decision-makers, technology providers and institutional investors. Founded in 2002 by alumni of Gartner, Giga, EMC and Bell Labs, TheInfoPro is headquartered in New York City. To learn more, visit www.theinfopro.com or email info@theinfopro.com.
info@theinfopro.com.

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Vendors claim you can pack dozens of virtual machines inside one physical server. But that’s a bad idea for heavy-duty applications.

As virtualization stretches deeper into the enterprise to include mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, IT executives are learning that double-digit physical-to-virtual server ratios are things of the past.

Virtualization vendors may still be touting the potential of putting 20, 50 or even 100 virtual machines (VM) on a single physical machine. But IT managers and industry experts say those ratios are dangerous in production environments and can cause performance problems or, worse, outages.

“In test and development environments, companies could put upwards of 50 virtual machines on a single physical host. But when it comes to mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, that number tends to plummet to less than 15,” says Andi Mann, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates Inc. in Boulder, Colo.

In a 2009 study of 153 organizations with more than 500 end users, EMA found that, on average, enterprises were achieving 6:1 consolidation rates for applications such as ERP, CRM, e-mail and databases.

The variance between the reality and the expectations, whether it’s due to vendor hype or internal ROI issues, could spell trouble for IT teams. That’s because the consolidation rate affects just about every aspect of a virtualization project — budget, capacity and executive buy-in. “If you go into these virtualization projects with a false expectation, you’re going to get in trouble,” Mann says.

Indeed, overestimating physical-to-virtual ratios can result in the need for more server hardware, rack space, cooling capacity and power consumption — all of which cost money. Worse yet, users could be affected by poorly performing applications. “If a company thinks they’re only going to need 10 servers at the end of a virtualization project and they actually need 15, it could have a significant impact on the overall cost of the consolidation and put them in the hole financially. Not a good thing, especially in this economy,” says Charles King, president and principal analyst at consultancy Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif.

Why is there a disconnect between virtualization expectations and reality? King says that up to this point, many companies have focused on virtualizing low-end, low-use, low-I/O applications such as test, development, log, file and print servers. “When it comes to edge-of-network, non-mission-critical applications that don’t require high availability, you can stack dozens on a single machine,” he says.

Bob Gill, an analyst at TheInfoPro Inc., agrees. “Early on, people were virtualizing systems that had a less-than-5% utilization rate. These were the applications that, if they went down for an hour, no one got upset,” he says.

That’s not the case when applying virtualization to mission-critical, resource-intensive applications — and virtualization vendors, on the whole, have been slow to explain this reality to customers, according to some analysts.

Once you consider applications with higher utilization rates, greater security risks, and increased performance and availability demands, consolidation ratios drop off considerably. “These applications will compete for bandwidth, memory, CPU and storage,” King says. Even on machines with two quad-core processors, highly transactional applications that have been virtualized will experience network bottlenecks and performance hits as they vie for the same server’s pool of resources.

Here are four tips for avoiding server overload.

1. Start With Capacity Analysis
To combat the problem, IT teams have to rejigger their thinking and dial back everyone’s expectations. The best place to start: a capacity analysis, says Kris Jmaeff, information security systems specialist at the Interior Health Authority, a British Columbia government agency.

Four years ago, the data center at Interior Health was growing at a rapid clip. There was a lot of pressure to virtualize the 500-server production environment to support a host of services, including DNS, Active Directory, Web servers, FTP, and many production application and database servers.

Before starting down that path, Jmaeff first used VMware tools to conduct an in-depth capacity analysis that monitored server hardware utilization. (Similar tools are also available from Cirba, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, PlateSpin and Vizioncore, among others.) Rather than looking at his hardware environment piece by piece, he instead considered everything as a pool of resources. “Capacity planning should focus on the resources that a server can contribute to the virtual pool,” Jmaeff says.

Already, the team has been able to consolidate 250 servers — 50% of the server farm — onto 12 physical hosts. And while Jmaeff’s overall average data center ratio is 20:1, hosts that hold more-demanding applications either require much lower ratios or require that he balance out resource-intensive applications.

Jmaeff uses a combination of VMware vCenter and IBM Director to monitor each VM for telltale signs of ratio imbalances such as spikes in RAM and CPU usage, or performance degradation. “We’ve definitely had to bump applications around and adjust our conversion rates according to server resource demand to create a more balanced workload,” he says. If necessary, it’s easy to clone servers and quickly spread the application load, he adds.

“Because we did our homework with ratios of virtual servers by examining the load on CPU and memory and evaluated physical server workloads, we’ve been pleasantly surprised with our ratios,” Jmaeff says.

2. Monitor Performance Continuously
At Network Data Center Host Inc., a Web service provider in San Clemente, Calif., the IT team quickly learned that when it comes to virtualizing mission-critical applications, you have to consider more than just RAM. “We originally thought, based on available RAM, we could have 40 small customers share a physical server. But we found that with heavier-used applications, it’s not the RAM, it’s the I/O,” says Chief Technology Officer Shaun Retain.

The 40:1 ratio had to be pulled back to no greater than 20:1, he says. To help with that effort, the team has developed a control panel that allows customers to log in and see how their virtual machines are handling reads, writes, disk space usage and other performance-affecting activity. In addition, NDC Host uses homegrown monitoring tools to ensure that ratios aren’t blown by a spike in a single VM’s traffic.

3. Test for Application Stability
King says companies should also conduct rigorous testing on their virtualized mission-critical applications before and after deployment. “You have to make sure that in terms of memory and network bandwidth, each application is stable at all times. For instance, if you know an application is harder-hit during certain times of the year, you’ll want to account for that in establishing your ratios,” he says.

Testing will also help IT teams determine which virtual workloads will coexist best on a physical host. “You have to make sure that a physical server isn’t running multiple VMs with the same workload. Otherwise, if they’re all Web servers, they will be contending for the same resources at the same time, and that will hinder your consolidation ratio,” says Nelson Ruest, co-author of Virtualization: A Beginner’s Guide and founder of Resolutions Enterprises, a consultancy in Victoria, British Columbia. Instead, IT staffers should make sure that workloads are heterogeneous and well balanced based on peak usage times and resource demands.

Ruest also warns IT teams not to forget the spare resources that host servers need so they can not only support their own VMs, but also accept the workload from a failing host. “If you’re running all your servers at 80%, you won’t be able to support that necessary redundancy,” he says.

Most organizations will find that they need to dedicate at least a month to the capacity planning and testing phases to determine the appropriate physical-to-virtual server ratio for their environment, Ruest says.

4. Get Real-world Benchmarks From Peers
Finally, EMA’s Mann advises IT teams to get involved in local user groups or attend large annual conferences, like VMware’s VMworld or Citrix’s Synergy, to meet peers with similar application environments. “Most attendees are more than willing to share information about their environment and experiences,” he says. Rather than relying on vendor benchmarks, get real-world examples of what has worked and what hasn’t at organizations with profiles similar to yours. “You’ll have a better chance at setting realistic expectations.”

Gittlen is a freelance technology writer in the Boston area. Contact her at sgittlen@verizon.net.

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld’s print edition. It’s an edited version of an article that first appeared on Computerworld.com.

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• The top concern regarding server virtualization continues to be performance under load, or the question of just what can be colocated with what on a single physical system. Applications that use little of a given system’s resources, such as general-purpose packaged applications, are a natural safe bet to virtualize.
• Users reported that 23% of their virtualized servers are currently allocated to packaged applications, increasing to 25% by year-end 2010. This percentage has been rising steadily in each wave in which we’ve asked users this question.

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For several years TheInfoPro has tracked a move to the commoditization of certain infrastructure elements (e.g., servers, low-cost storage tiers). The economic crisis has made companies work hard on “optimizing” their infrastructure, as demonstrated by technologies related to this scoring so high on the TIP Technology Heat Index®, which gauges the immediacy of user need and planned spending.

So what can we take from this event as we triangulate the CIO’s comments with our data from interviews with decision-makers who represent more than $23 billion in buying power for IT infrastructure? Several threads become apparent:

1) Spending on Optimization:  Investments in technologies that drive down the ratio of spending on IT infrastructure have dominated the top quartile of our respective Heat Indexes for the better part of the past 18 months and will continue into 2010. These include: 

• WAN Optimization – Our guest CIO cited his company’s WAN being 50Mbps, and it is optimized to 400-   600Mbps. 
• Thin Provisioning – This is enabling storage teams to increase their utilization rates dramatically, and to put off purchases. 
• Deduplication – Well-documented success for backup environments. Look for more primary storage to leverage this in 2010. 
• Server Virtualization – Nearly ubiquitous today for non-mission-critical applications, we are starting to see more discussion of production applications moving to virtual environments.
• Replication – Low-cost replication solutions are starting to minimize the use of expensive backup solutions.
• Unified Communications – Leveraging  this (e.g., VoIP) continues to be deployed in an evolutionary fashion.

2) Cloud Computing: Internal vs. External? The discussion of external cloud usage has been a catalyst for the move to drop the ratio of infrastructure spending. Many organizations are able to show that the cost differential to move external is minimal. In addition, the ability to allocate more spending to the applications allows IT to be a better business partner and to help drive revenue-generating activities.

Caveat emptor – the shift to internal cloud computing architectures does not come without some pain, specifically around licensing costs. As software companies try to use the move to more processing power via internal cloud in a virtualized environment to mean more money for them,  this is becoming a contentious point. This is one of the primary drivers for more things being considered to run on open source. Stay tuned for more work on this issue.

3) Open Source: Linux continues to grow in the enterprises mostly at the expense of Unix. One key reason is the software licensing issue mentioned previously; companies are trying to avoid additional licensing costs as more processing power gets shared by an application in a virtualized/cloud environment.

4) Standardization:  From 2002 to 2008 we saw a lot of  “flavor of the month”/“one of everything” mentality.  This has changed dramatically and will continue to do so. Operating expenses have been decreased dramatically since fall 2008, and standardizing is a means to lowering spending. In addition, the aforementioned move to internal cloud is also a driver to move to standard offerings.

5) Procurement Strategies: In our work with enterprises, we see firsthand the sophisticated techniques being deployed to drive down the spending with their infrastructure providers. As an example, expect reverse auctions to procure servers and storage to become common by the end of 2010.

The biggest challenge we hear in our interviews with the Global 2000 is the ability to manage this new cloud-like infrastructure – as our research has shown for the better part of the last year,  meeting SLAs, provisioning, lifecycle management – all come into play here and will be a key battleground for the vendors to provide an effective solution.

TheInfoPro has a research practice geared specifically to cloud computing and will continue the investigation of the storage, servers, networking and security markets. In 2010, we will report on the reality of the decreased spending ratio on infrastructure and how it is evolving. We suspect the trend toward changing the ratio of application to infrastructure spending will be a driver for more M&A activity by the technology providers who, not to sound cliché, are looking to become a “one-stop shop” and provide “one throat to choke.” More details on our M&A thoughts on this can be found in Barron’s October 2009 cover story: http://online.barrons.com/article/SB125633689630504703.html.

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It’s been a tough year for data center managers, who have battled against a global recession for the better part of 2009 and watched as their IT budgets went in the wrong direction, particularly as demand for services ramped up. But having weathered the economic storm, the suits in charge hope 2010 brings more money to the table to devote to IT.

“They’re hoping to see budgets again in 2010,” said Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates. “Some dough is what they’d like. They’re all for refreshing clients now that [Microsoft's Windows 7] is here, and generally shortening the average system life, but [they] have been severely constrained this year.”

Whether or not data center managers get this wish remains to be seen. According to research firm Gartner, worldwide IT spending slid 5.2 percent in 2009, while enterprise spending dropped nearly 7 percent. Sure, IT spending is expected to grow by 3.3 percent in 2010, but at the same time, more than half of all CIOs surveyed said they expect their budgets to remain flat or decline in 2010.

It’s not all about money, though. According to Bob Gill, an analyst with TheInfoPro, IT professionals put virtualization and cloud computing high on their wish lists.

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Virtualization is a pretty hot topic in enterprise IT these days. It’s safe to say that everyone has some sort of virtualization project going on. according to a survey by TheInfoPro more than half of new servers in 2009 will be virtualized compared to 30% in 2008.

In some way, virtualization is a VMware world. Everyone from SAN to server to network vendors has some kind of tie in to VMware. VMware runs on over one-third of Cisco’s Unified Computing System units that have been deployed to date. Enterprise management platforms such as HP Insight are being extended to include deep support for VMware that simplifies and expedites the management of hordes of virtual machines. This is important because it keeps operations flowing smoothly and allows you to use a similar process to manage virtual servers as you did when managing physical servers. Everyone knows that process already and it will decrease the burden of migration and help achieve a faster ROI.

Far and away the most popular hypervisors are those made by VMware. The primary draw is the ubiquity of VMware. With the vCloud initiative you could build your own dynamic data center running VMware’s vSphere and vCenter and then automatically scale up and down using external Cloud providers. There are over 1,000 Cloud service providers that are “VMware Virtualized” plus countless others that have adopted VMware’s vCloud API.

There are two viable alternatives to VMware: Microsoft and Xen. That same TheInfoPro survey reported that 24% of the new virtual servers are Microsft Hyper-V. Thirty percent (30%) chose “other”, which in all likelihood means Xen or the free Citrix XenServer. All three have their strengths and weaknesses and certain applications may be better for one than the other. VMware and Microsoft don’t play well together. Xen plays well with either.

Sarrel’s Short List

Server virtualization revolves around the hypervisor, the software that sits on top of the hardware (either directly as “bare-metal” or on top of an OS), partitions the hardware into multiple virtual machines, and manages interactions between hardware and virtual machines. There are currently three main choices for a server hypervisor: Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware (ESX and vSphere), and Xen (an open source hypervisor supported by Citrix).

Here’s the skinny on choosing a hypervisor:
1. VMware should be at the top of everyone’s list because they’ve been doing virtualization for more than 10 years. No one doubts VMware’s ability to deliver a reliable hypervisor and extensible management tools. Developing a hypervisor with excellent performance, reliability, scalability, and manageability doesn’t happen overnight, and these are critical features for an enterprise computing environment.

2. Microsoft is a relatively new comer with Hyper-V and based on the success of SharePoint, I believe that anything Microsoft gives away with their server software has an excellent chance of being implemented. Like most Microsoft products, Hyper-V isn’t the best and will probably never be the best, but it is bundled and pre-installed so why not enable it and give it a shot?

3. Xen is an excellent choice for budget conscious shops that have implemented Linux servers. There is always a trade-off between cost and power/utility. During these times of economic hardship, companies are more willing than ever to make that trade. Also, if you rely heavily on Citrix for your server infrastructure, then their support for Xen should be an important purchasing consideration.

4. If your goal is to have dozens or hundreds of virtualized servers residing in multiple physical locations and forming both internal private and external public clouds, then your only real choice right now is VMware vSphere due to its scalability and manageability. VMware currently owns the high end enterprise virtualization market.

The Nitty Gritty

Microsoft Hyper-V – Microsoft provides a limited version Hyper-V free of charge plus there are various flavors that come with the various forms of Windows Server 2008. Hyper-V starts with support for up to 8 CPUs and 1 TB RAM in the host machine and goes up from there. Microsoft focuses on using virtual machines to increase application and server availability, therefore an important feature is live migration, or the ability to move running virtual machines from one Hyper-V physical host to another without disruption of service. If you are a Microsoft shop, then it may make some sense to get your virtualization feet wet with Hyper-V because you’ve already got it.

VMware ESX – This is the most widely implemented hypervisor today (most virtualization professionals cut their teeth on some version of ESX). The current version supports up to 64 logical processing cores, 256 virtual CPUs and up to 1 TB RAM per host and will run a broad range of guest operating systems including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and NetWare. Virtual machines can boot from local or shared SAN storage. VMware vStorage Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a clustered file system that allows multiple ESX hosts to access a single virtual volume concurrently, paving the way for shared storage via Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI SAN, or NAS.

VMware vSphere 4 – More than a hypervisor, vSphere 4 is a data center Cloud computing platform built on VMware ESX. There was a lot of buzz earlier this year when vSphere shipped because it promises to control internal and external virtualized Cloud environments by automating management and dynamically allocating resources to migrate live virtual machines across physical machines to minimize service interruption. For example, an application could automatically scale up and down using both internal and external virtual Cloud resources. An important consideration is there are huge numbers of API’s and third party add-ons, so industry support is strong and getting stronger for vSphere. sources.

Xen – The Xen hypervisor is an open source alternative which provides efficient and secure virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, ARM, and other CPU architectures. It supports a wide range of guest operating systems including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and various versions of the BSD operating systems. It was developed in conjunction with engineers at over 50 data center solution vendors, including AMD, Cisco, Dell, Fujistu, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Network Appliance, Novell, Red Hat, Samsung, SGI, Sun, Unisys, Veritas, Voltaire, and Citrix.

Xen has a reputation for being lean and mean; high performance and not many management features like others mentioned in this article. You can add the Xen Cloud Platform to gain sophisticated management features similar to those found in VMware vSphere and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Keys to a Successful Implementation

Develop a clear business case in favor of virtualization that demonstrates an ROI and a reduced TCO. Start by assessing your current physical server environment. Where previously you scaled up by adding more physical servers, reduce costs by consolidating them into multiple virtual servers running on a single physical server. This not only reduces the resources needed today, but you can reap future rewards of more efficient scaling using a virtual platform. There’s also the potential of decreasing the cost of your business continuity program because, unlike physical machines, virtual machines can be pushed from one location to another.

Beware of potential licensing and support implications, however. It’s possible that a particular application’s licensing policy changes when run on a virtual server so look before you leap. Also, verify that the application is supported on your virtual platform and that tech support has the know-how to help if needed.

Allocate time and resources towards planning this wide-sweeping change in your enterprise architecture. Virtual servers are different from physical servers so policies, procedures, and concepts will have to adapt. It should go without saying to make sure there are backups and archives of physical systems. Try to get a handle on how much hardware is required for each virtual server and then make sure you allocate properly. Especially keep an eye out for “virtual sprawl”, or the sometimes magical ability of virtual environments to expand out of control until they are unmanageable. Finally, understand how the timing of this project affects other IT initiatives and make sure that all other projects include virtualization support.

Make migration as smooth as possible for end users. The best outcome would be if no one even noticed that you’ve gone virtual. In order to do this, monitor performance and availability of pilot and initial deployments. Upgrade hardware as needed to meet performance and availability goals.

Benefits of Virtualization

Virtualization can reduce costs related to underutilized physical servers. Many enterprises purchase servers with the plan that use will grow to fit the resources―if our application uses five percent (5%) of resources today then we’ll be good for a few years as it grows to 50%. But this means that you’re paying for tomorrow’s resources today and we know technology resources get cheaper over time so this excess capacity is basically wasted. Running a number of virtual machines on a single physical machine allows IT departments to use that extra capacity.

Running multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine also consolidates the physical server footprint in the data center. And fewer physical servers means less rack space, energy consumed and heat produced, plus the accompanying reduction in administration costs.

Virtualization provides a great deal of flexibility by divorcing the OS and applications from the server hardware. You can add or remove resources from the virtual machine without shutting down the physical server and disassembling it. Remember the agony of the last time an application was jeopardized by failing hardware? In a virtualized environment the application’s virtual machine could simply be pushed to different hardware. This flexibility facilitates more efficient scaling of server environments as business needs grow.

Matt Sarrel is executive director of Sarrel Group, a technology product test lab, editorial services, and consulting practice specializing in gathering and leveraging competitive intelligence. He has over 20 years of experience in IT and focuses on high-speed, large scale networking, information security, and enterprise storage. E-mail: matt@sarrelgroup.com. Twitter: @msarrel.

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As Microsoft rolls out its Windows Azure and SQL Azure public cloud services in January 2010, the first implementers will likely include those building greenfield Web 2.0-type apps as well those who develop and test software looking for capacity on demand. But for cloud computing to take hold in the enterprise for business-critical applications, Microsoft knows it must extend Windows Azure to integrate securely and seamlessly with internally hosted systems.

Hence, the next phase of Windows Azure will enable enterprises to build private and enable hybrid clouds with a new set of deliverables that will evolve throughout 2010 and likely into the following years.

The allure of cloud services is that they provide infrastructure on demand and remove the capital and administrative requirements of running internal systems. Yet the vast majority of CIOs say they simply can’t put certain types of applications and data into the current incarnation of cloud services.

“It’s going to be a tough sell,” says John Merchant, assistant vice president at The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., a large insurance company. “As a Fortune 500 company with highly regulated data and a very conservative outlook, it’s going to be difficult for any insurance company or any financial institution of any size to migrate any data to the cloud.”

On a panel in November at Interop New York addressing the top cloud engineers at Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft, Rico Singleton, deputy CIO for the State of New York, asked: “Can you give me a private cloud that can provide all the benefits that you provide now on my private network closed to the outside, and still be able to give me similar ROI?” The answer by top cloud engineers at Microsoft, Amazon and Google was a resounding: “Not yet.”

The melding of internally hosted systems with public and private cloud services is what many believe will drive enterprise cloud computing in the years to come. Indeed, a survey of 500 C-level IT executives by Kelton Research commissioned by Avanade Inc. found a 300 percent spike over the past nine months in plans to either test or start deploying cloud services.

Yet 95 percent of executives ultimately plan on a hybrid approach, which blends public and private clouds, according to the recently released study. “A hybrid model gets people comfortable in the shorter term,” says Tyson Hartman, CTO of Avanade, a subsidiary of Accenture that deploys Microsoft-based solutions.

A United Cloud
It appears that Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, Server and Tools President Bob Muglia and both their teams are well aware that enterprises will expect their cloud infrastructures to fully support the need for private and hybrid clouds.

“With Windows Azure, Windows Server and System Center, there’s one coherent model of managing this infrastructure as a service across Microsoft’s public cloud to private cloud to clouds of our partners who host,” Ozzie said in his keynote address at the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC09). Of course now it appears Ozzie’s roll with Azure may be diminished moving forward as reported.

At PDC09, Ozzie and Muglia explained how Redmond will enable hybrid and private clouds and outlined a new roadmap of deliverables. First is Project Sydney, technology that will connect services running in data centers with Windows Azure. Due to go into beta in early 2010, Project Sydney will include an IPV6- and IPSec-based connectivity agent that will utilize Windows Identity Foundation — code-named “Geneva” — Microsoft’s claims-based federated identity-management framework.

Another key deliverable that will support hybrid cloud capabilities is AppFabric, an application server extension to Windows Server and the Windows Azure cloud platform. AppFabric will be based on the app server preview released last year called Project Dublin and combined with the in-memory data caching server technology Microsoft has previewed for some time, called Project Velocity. With the two now melded, Microsoft released the first beta of AppFabric for Windows Server 2008 R2 at PDC09.

At some point in 2010, Microsoft will release a community technology preview (CTP) of AppFabric for Windows Azure with plans for commercial release by year’s end.

Both will share a common service bus, security model and developer experience for software running apps in this hybrid cloud model. “AppFabric will extend the environment that you’re very familiar with, with IIS, and provide you with a platform for building scale-out, highly available, middle-tier services,” Muglia said in his keynote address at PDC09. As reported, Microsoft sees AppFabric as the next layer in its stack.

The service bus and access-control components will support distributed and federated apps, while also enabling services that extend beyond enterprise boundaries. The AppFabric Access Control allows secure authentication via RESTful Web services that federate among different identity providers.

The AppFabric Service Bus lets administrators and developers choose how apps communicate, taking into consideration firewalls, network address translation, dynamic IP and different identity management platforms.

There’s much more to come, says Yousef Khalidi, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, in an interview (see Q&A). “Stay tuned,” Khalidi says. “We have a lot of IP involved here, but the dates and the like we haven’t discussed yet.” It is also worth noting that Microsoft is not necessarily talking up its plans to deliver private clouds per se.

Hybrid Hyperbole?
While hybrid clouds promise to address many of the concerns among skeptics, time will tell whether Microsoft and its rivals can actually address these concerns. “We’re debating whether a model like this with the right policy constraints can get the enterprise to a place where it’s cloud-like and eventually migrating toward a cloud environment,” said Alistair Croll, principal analyst at Bitcurrent, speaking during a panel discussion on hybrid clouds at Interop New York.

Still, some wonder whether that will make sense over the long term. “I think there’s value in private clouds and value in public clouds, but they are very separate things,” says Anders Lofgren, chief research officer at TheInfoPro, an IT research firm. “I think the hybrid cloud complicates something that’s already really complex.”

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