I thought that this was a good post. I read it in a Google Group dedicated to Cloud Computing, but I think the quote applies broadly to high-tech.
“Economics follow technology, not drive it. Private airplane, charter airplanes, business airplanes, and airline use the same technology with radically different business models and costs. But business models have no effect on aerodynamics.”
BriForum 2008 – Geekfest
I recently attended BriForum 2008. This, if you’re a desktop virtualization newbie, Microsoft Terminal Services pro , or Citrix Presentation Server (now renamed) devotee is THE SHOW.
There were about 450 attendees (it is ongoing as I write this, but I had to return home to deal with some important corporate matters) representing some major firms. Case in point, I had lunch randomly with a gentleman from a large company in charge of desktop architecture for 90,000 people. That is a big job. He was there. There were also consultants the specialize in terminal services, entrepreneurs posing as consultants, and of course Brian Madden – “the guy” when it comes to Terminal Services and now desktop virtualization.
The first session I attended was given by Steve Greenberg and Joe Shonk on OS Virtualization vs. Hardware virtualization. This was a “basics” presentation, attempting to define virtualization. Since Steve used to work at NeXT, he was giving away t-shirts from his alma mater. I’ve got a drawer full of old t-shirts and a rack of coffee mugs that reads exactly like my resume – I was thinking of putting them on craigslist, but maybe they will be useful if someone offers me a speaking opportunity as a contest giveaway. Steve did prove that IT guys will put a great deal of effort into something if there’s a free t-shirt involved. (Marketers: Take note!) Even if it’s a historical t-shirt. I wonder what people would do for my old Netscape developer program t-shirts? Old Tally Systems Y2K t-shirts anyone?
So, with the help of the audience Steve was able to come up with a definition of virtualization – encapsulating OS and emulating hardware – and then went on to discuss how OS virtualization does not equal hardware emulation, but rather how OS virtualization such as that practiced by Virtuozzo actually leverage the first loaded copy of the OS to spawn subsequent instances of the OS.
Steve went in depth about Virtuozzo, stating that eache virtual machine OS instance is a complete instance of Windows, but these instances share running services, kernel, etc.
He then compared this to code sharing in Windows Terminal Services whereby 1 copy or instance of Word.exe can be used by many users simultaneously. The real gain here is efficiency in memory usage.
He went on to demonstrate this. He showed, by loading 10 instances of Windows Server 2003, how each copy only used 45 MB of RAM and 50 Mb of disc space. How does that compare to your physical servers that are running in 2-4 Gb of RAM and 12Gb of disk?
The audience was heavy into virtualization – one of the participants claimed to have an infrastructure that was 90% virtualized. His images for each of the virtual servers were 12Gb a piece using vmware. I have no opinion about that. Actually, I do. Storage is relatively cheap, and vmware, I hear, is pretty stable – so one has to make their own decision about whether the virtuozzo approach is right for them, or whether vmware is the right choice – or any of the other players that are in the space.
In my opinion, the discussion was biased toward Virtuozzo, and with no vmware people in the room, there was nobody to defend their solution.
As for comparisons made by the speaker – and you can make your own judgements here these differences were highlighted.
Vmware
Virtuozzo
And then for good measure, use case scenarios for when it is best not to virtualize were given. These include:
I didn’t get a clear sense of why the latter group was not suitable for virtualization, but it was offered.
The next session I went to was Brian Madden’s “VDI Smackdown” where
Citrix XenDesktop
VMWare VDI / VDM2
Qumranet Solid ICE
Quest Provision Networks
Ericom Powerterm Webconnect
Were discussed. Interestingly, fully, 20-25% of the audience were Sales Engineers from the vendor community. Everyone behaved and the interplay between Brian and the SE’s was very, very good and informative. Citrix must have gotten there early, because they had a lot of the front row – but then they had one of their top “Citrite’s” in from Australia specially for the occasion.
Brian did a quick poll about VDI usage in production:
10% of the audience was using VDI in one of its permutations in production. Remember, this was a session on VDI, which I think self-selects and skews toward the enthusiasts.
Roughly 30% of the audience has intentions to purchase something in under 24 months. 40-50% of the audience admitted that their timeframe was somewhere above 24 months, but that they indeed had plans to purchase.
Briefly,
Citrix XenDesktop – offering a VDI only solution that can run XP or Vista instances. Consisting of a bundle of ESX (to create the environment), VDM (the connection broker), and Virtual Center (for management). For application delivery, VMWare’s Thinstall acquisition was mentioned as a solution.
Qumranet Solid ICE – is a new solution with a hypervisor, a connection broker, and a transfer protocol call SPICE, which is optimized for LAN connectivity. This is cool stuff. Even Brian Madden gave this a “thumbs up”. This product uses “KVM” which up uintil yesterday meant keyboard, video, and mouse in the world where we all live, but is now being redefined as “Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM)” I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this.
The Qumranet solution is “tuned for desktop loads” and support a higher density – more virtual machines per box in the server room – with one helpful SE in the audience claiming that on an “ordinary 8 core processer box” (think dual processor Quad Core machine), 52 simultaneous end user sessions can be supported with little to no degradation of performance. Quick question: How much memory in that box? It may have been discussed, but I didn’t catch it. Still, that’s pretty impressive.
Quest (Provision Networks) Virtual Access Suite. Provision Networks has a long history with this market, and indeed their roots are in making enhancements for Terminal Services. These guys now make tools to support VDI and Terminal Services, Application and Desktop Virtualization. This was probably a smart buy for Quest. They do seem to have their act together with acquisitions in a way that other companies like CA and Citrix might want to follow. Anyhow, the use case scenario is when you want 1 interface across all platforms that can natively support ESX, Virtual Iron and soon Hyper-V, and Virtuozzo. This is cool stuff that merits looking into as we all become more sophisticated in our deployment and management of virtualization. I’m looking forward to getting a demo of this software at some point.
Ericom PowerTerm Connect – these guys are positioned and have been essentially a low-cost alternative to Citrix and are now offering products to enable VDI with application and desktop publishing support. The product is hypervisor agnostic and uses the Teradici PC over IP protocol – which is hardware based – meaning that the sender and recipient of the session display needs to have the proper decoding chip.
Other random notes and opinions:
Madden opined,
“certain that Hyper-V will be the most popular hypervisor in a few years” .
“I don’t see anyone choosing one product over another for its management tools and user interfaces” To me this means that this is still an early market. I was in a room full of enthusiasts, and desktop virtualization hasn’t yet, to borrow an overused Geoffrey Moore term, “Crossed the Chasm”.
There is going to be a battle over protocols used in desktop virtualization. There is RDP (Microsoft, others) , ICA (Citrix), Net2Display, RGS, SPICE, and others – each with its own plusses and minuses. A session is scheduled to have a protocol smackdown.
More notes on vendors, what they were showing:
Appsense – user environment mgmt. These guys had been iQurious previously.
Datacore – storage
Expand Networks – wan acceleration, applied to exchange, notes, virtualization, consolidation.
EG innovations-application monitoring for all 7 layers of the OSI model.
RES software – user workspace management for xendesktop.
Tricerat – end user preferences management.
Symantec – desktop streaming.
RTO – discovery and monitoring. New, virtual profile management.
Ericom- cool, presentation virtualization. 3rd year at the show.
Computer Lab International – a thin client maker that targets verticals.
AEP – ssl vpn provider;
