The raw speed of VMware vMotion live migrations for moving single and multiple virtual machines has been a huge timesaver for our customers. Speedy concurrent vMotions let system administrators quickly evacuate the VMs off hosts before a planned server maintenance session so they can get home on time, rather than spending extra hours at work to swap a server power supply or do a firmware upgrade. vMotion also has a minimal impact on VM performance, so mission-critical VMs can be moved during production hours without generating user complaints.

vSphere 4.1 introduced support for up to eight concurrent vMotion migrations per host and 10Gb vMotion networks. vSphere 5 boosted the raw speed of each vMotion over 1Gb and 10Gb networks and added the ability to utilize multiple network links. Now, thanks to independent lab tests conducted by Principled Technologies, we can show just how fast vMotion operates.

Principled Technologies compared vSphere 5 vMotion performance to live migrations conducted with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 SP1. The comparison to Hyper-V was of special interest to us because we’ve seen claims from those in the Hyper-V camp that allowing multiple concurrent vMotions couldn’t possibly be faster than Hyper-V’s one-at-a-time live migrations because Hyper-V can saturate a network link with its live migration memory copy traffic. The Hyper-V advocates discounted the advantages of concurrent vMotions, arguing that they would be bottlenecked by the network.

The results of the Principled technology tests show those arguments are flat wrong. Using identical hosts connected over a single 10Gb network link, a host evacuation simulation where 10 VMs running SQL Server were migrated between hosts showed that vMotion completed the task 5.4 times faster than Hyper-V. vSphere reached its peak capacity of eight of simultaneous vMotions during the test, proving the benefits of concurrent live migrations.

Principled Technologies then looked at live migration of a typical large Tier-1 application. Their test migrated a single 16GB, 4 CPU VM running a heavily loaded SQL Server database. Customers might shy away from such a demanding live migration during production hours. However, the results from Principled Technologies show that vSphere 5 users can migrate Tier-1 apps with confidence, but Hyper-V system administrators might want to plan on some late-night overtime. vMotion migrated the large VM 3.4 times faster than Hyper-V.

Maybe more importantly, vMotion’s shorter migration window minimized the impact of live migration on application performance. Compared to a Hyper-V live migration that disrupted the SQL application with long periods of zero throughput, the vMotion VM was able to process 63% more transactions during the migration window.

Please take a look at the full test report from Principled Technologies to get the complete test details as well as their findings that vMotion showed perfect reliability, but Hyper-V live migrations resulted in occasional, but reproducible, VM blue screens. With differences like these, it’s no surprise that Microsoft is now talking about augmenting a future release of Hyper-V with concurrent live migration capabilities. As with so many other features that are vSphere exclusives, VMware customers will be enjoying their benefits, while Hyper-V users, waiting for Microsoft to deliver on promised enhancements sometime in the future, will be enviously glancing at them.

Every year, about the time VMworld starts, Microsoft can be counted to release something and it’s not one of their software products. Instead, they’ve made it a tradition to issue a plea to customers to overlook the VMware products that clearly deliver the best virtualization and cloud solutions and choose Microsoft offerings despite their shortcomings. At VMworld 2008, it was Microsoft’s poker chip fiasco. Last year, Microsoft took out full-page newspaper ads asking customers to wait for their products to mature instead of deploying VMware clouds. This year, right on cue, Microsoft published inaccurate, unsubstantiated comparisons to VMware in the form of a whitepaper purporting to evaluate private cloud economics and a big-budget spoof video that was reviewed as “backfiring on itself.â€

As regular Microsoft-watchers might expect, the claims made in their private cloud whitepaper of cost and capability advantages are exaggerated and easy to pick apart. Here are a few of the most blatant inaccuracies:

Microsoft inaccuracy #1: Compare (double) discounted Microsoft prices to VMware list prices and leave out the management server costs

For starters, Microsoft is comparing double-discounted Microsoft prices to full list pricing for VMware’s products. Not only is Microsoft basing their comparison on “Open License†prices that already have volume discounts applied, but they go on to apply “ECI†discounts as well, even though the configurations in their examples are far smaller than the 50-processor minimum required by Microsoft’s own ECI rules.  Microsoft’s next trick is omitting the cost of the multiple System Center management servers needed to deliver the capabilities they claim, even though they include the cost of a VMware vCenter Management Server in their VMware totals. Adding the System Center management server license and support costs and the Windows Server licenses needed to run them and using list prices is enough to more than double the cost of Microsoft’s example private cloud configuration from $18,480 to $41,141, as shown below (we’re still applying their ECI discounts, even though the configuration is too small to qualify.)

*Microsoft ECI Datacenter bundle purchase rules require minimum purchase of 50 processor licenses making Microsoft’s two-node cost example invalid.

**Seven Windows Server 2008 licenses are required for the System Center management servers.

Microsoft inaccuracy #2: Compare unreleased future products to shipping VMware products

Microsoft always likes to sell their roadmap of future promises rather than the products customers are stuck with today. Their private cloud whitepaper is no exception as it describes cloud features that won’t be available to users until Microsoft ships the next versions of System Center at some unspecified future date. Every component of our Cloud Infrastructure Suite – vSphere 5, vCenter Operations, vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5, vShield 5 and vCloud Director 1.5 – has been recently updated and is shipping today. VMware customers are building and running private clouds today and telling their success stories while, on the other hand, Microsoft doesn’t include any customer stories in their private cloud whitepaper. Once again, Microsoft is asking users to wait for yet one more release to get them the features they need.

Microsoft inaccuracy #3: Equate ECI to VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite

The most glaring exaggeration in Microsoft’s private cloud whitepaper is their assumption that the products included in their ECI Datacenter bundle (Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, System Center, Forefront) provide private cloud capabilities equivalent to the VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite. In fact, Microsoft’s cloud solution is far less complete and capable as the comparison table below illustrates.

Microsoft inaccuracy #4: Use unrealistic scaling assumptions for Hyper‑V

Another exaggeration Microsoft makes in their whitepaper is to claim the costs of a private cloud based on Hyper-V somehow remain flat, even as the VM density increases substantially. Even with the advent of “Dynamic Memory†in Hyper-V, Microsoft’s ability to scale up the VMs per host lags way behind vSphere. As shown in independent tests of vSphere 5 and Hyper-V R2 SP1 conducted by Principled Technologies, vSphere outscales Hyper-V enabling higher VM densities. The shortcomings of Dynamic Memory were clearly apparent when the testing showed total SQL Server throughput of a Hyper-V host declining as VMs were added while a vSphere host continued to increase its throughput as VM density grew. That means that rather than scaling from 252 to 1260 VMs with no additional hardware as the Microsoft paper implies, Hyper-V users will be steadily adding servers and all their accompanying costs as their cloud grows. A simple example that assumes six VMs per processor (realistic for Hyper-V) and Microsoft list prices shows that the flat costs claimed in Microsoft’s paper are absurd and the real costs of a Microsoft private cloud will steadily grow as VMs are added.

Microsoft inaccuracy #5: Make unsubstantiated claims of “best in class†performance

The Microsoft whitepaper declares, “Hyper-V provides best-in-class performance and scalability for Microsoft applications like SharePoint, SQL, and Exchange,†but no head-to-head benchmark test results are provided to support the claim. The truth is VMware vSphere 5 provides superior scalability and performance with mission-critical, demanding applications, including Microsoft’s, and we have the third-party benchmark test results to prove it.

Other distortions that need correcting

Those inaccurate claims found in the whitepaper aren’t the only ones coming from Microsoft lately. We’ve seen them making these other statements below in various places. Our customers know they’re absurd, but we need to set the record straight.

·         VMware sells virtualization, not cloud – False. Customers need to make the journey to cloud computing at their own pace and server virtualization is the most common first step, so of course VMware offers virtualization for small and large enterprises. VMware also has the products and partnerships today to deliver real cloud solutions. Microsoft can only ask customers to wait while it works on promised cloud support in future System Center releases, so we’re not exactly sure what it is they’re selling now.

·         VMware can’t see deep inside apps – Wrong. Microsoft is hoping customers accept their notion that only Windows apps running on Hyper-V can be fully monitored and managed. The truth is apps running on vSphere and VMware clouds are just as manageable, whether it is with VMware tools like vCenter Operations, vCenter Configuration Manager or vCenter Application Discovery Manager, or with Microsoft tools or third-party products. Microsoft’s suggestion that their hypervisor provides deeper insight into Windows apps is nonsense.

·         VMware doesn’t have its own public cloud – Not true. VMware hosts, manages and supports Cloud Foundry,  the world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that doesn’t lock users into a single framework, single set of application services or a single cloud as Microsoft Azure does. In the more mature area of IaaS clouds, VMware’s approach is to cultivate a strong ecosystem of dozens of vCloud hosting provider partners that can match customer needs far better than a proprietary cloud like Microsoft Azure that locks in your workloads with no way out.

Before we head out to VMworld, I want to share with you some fascinating test results just published by Principled Technologies that compare vSphere 5 performance and scalability to Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 SP1.

When Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, they added a feature called “Dynamic Memory†that they claimed brought them into parity with vSphere in VM density – the number of VMs doing useful work a host can support. We’d tested previous releases of Hyper-V without Dynamic Memory and found that, without the ability to overcommit memory, Hyper-V would hit a VM density brick wall far before vSphere reached the point of diminishing returns. Would Dynamic Memory yield a breakthrough improvement for Hyper-V? We had our doubts because of Dynamic Memory’s reliance on in-guest ballooning as its only way to reclaim memory from guests to support memory overcommitment. We knew from our history with ESX, ESXi and vSphere that getting good, predictable performance when VM density gets high and host memory is overcommitted requires more than just ballooning. We’ve built an array of technologies into vSphere that have been optimized for over a decade to make it a platform our customers feel comfortable with when pushing resources to the limit.

To get an answer, VMware commissioned Principled Technologies to do a side-by-side comparison of vSphere 5 and Hyper-V R2 SP1 throughput when running a SQL Server workload under high VM densities. They used the well-respected DVD Store Version 2 benchmark to measure total throughput delivered by a host running 24 VMs, and then 30 VMs. With 24 4GB VMs, the 96GB host was just reaching full memory commit, and 30 VMs pushed it to 25% memory overcommit – familiar territory for vSphere users.

The results won’t surprise vSphere customers – here’s how the VM-by-VM score looked:

When Principled Technologies added up the throughput of each VM, vSphere 5 delivered 19% more aggregate throughput (orders per minute as measured by DVD Store) on the host running 30 VMs.

Findings that really pleased our vSphere engineers became evident when Principled Technologies dug into the benchmark results a little deeper. One of the key behaviors we seek with vSphere is fairness across the VMs. Assuming equal resource shares and limits, we want each VM to perform as well as its neighbors. Too much variability would be unfair to your users who might get their workloads stuck on an underperforming VM. vSphere 5 came out ahead in fairness as shown in the figure below with a tighter standard deviation in throughput across the 30 VMs as the smaller height of the vSphere box shows in the chart below.

Another striking validation of vSphere 5’s scalability advantage over Hyper-V R2 SP1 was shown when Principled Technologies compared aggregate DVD Store throughput for the 24 VM and 30 VM cases. For Hyper-V, its throughput dropped by 3% when six VMs were added. Evidently, Hyper-V with Dynamic Memory doesn’t hold up so well when you make your VMs do some real work once the host memory becomes overcommitted. In contrast, vSphere 5 throughput increased by 11% as those six additional VMs were added. vSphere 5 is clearly handling the 25% memory overcommit condition with ease.

So, thanks to Principled Technologies, we have the answer to our question: vSphere 5 holds up better under workload and memory pressure to let our users reliably achieve higher VM densities and that means better scalability and lower costs. You can access the full report from Principled Technologies titled, “Virtualization Performance: VMware vSphere 5 vs. Microsoft Hyper-V R2 SP1†on their Web site here, or we’ve also posted a copy on our site here.

During the recent Microsoft Partner Conference, slides were presented at a session to service providers comparing the costs of hosting with vSphere versus Hyper-V.  These slides eventually made their way to the public and got picked up by the press.  However, the information presented was fundamentally incorrect.

Based on the slides that became public, it is clear that Microsoft is continuing their quest to distract customers from their lack of available product with an easy tagline to remember: “Microsoft is 1/3^rd 1/5^th 1/6^th 1/4^th the cost of VMwareâ€.  Too bad none of these claims ever stand up to scrutiny.  It is also clear from the slides that Microsoft has not figured out the difference between vSphere pricing and the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) pricing as they are quite different.  Besides these obvious errors, the comparisons are simply useless because they are essentially trying to compare the cost of apples to the cost of fruit baskets.

Let’s start with the first slide regarding the total cost of ownership (see here).  The slide is supposed to portray how the vCloud Premier bundle is 4 times the cost of Microsoft’s Service Provider program.  But what exactly is included in the Microsoft program as depicted?  Licenses for Windows Server Datacenter Edition and System Center Server Management Suite.  What is included in the vCloud Premier Service Provider bundle? 

It is always difficult to perfectly line up different vendors’ product offerings, so let’s look at it piece-by-piece based on the features and capabilities that a service provider wants and benefits from, starting with the virtualization platform.

Virtualization Platform

The foundation for cloud computing is the virtualization platform.  For service providers who need rock hard stability and reliability, the choice in platform is vital to the success of the rest of the solution.  That is why the Premier bundle includes the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5 that carries all of the most advanced features of virtualization.  These unique features to Enterprise Plus are unmatched by any other virtualization vendor. 

vSphere remains the only virtualization solution able to deliver live storage migration without any downtime, saving SPs from application downtime for storage maintenance.  That technology has been further enhanced to enable Storage DRS – automated load balancing of VM files among storage arrays, which further improves storage efficiency.  And, to simplify how storage is managed, VMware Profile-Driven storage allows SPs to streamline storage provisioning and save on both capex and opex by optimizing VM placement across the tiers of storage pools.

With Auto Deploy, SPs can deploy bare metal vSphere hosts “on the fly†saving hours in provisioning time.  Once the environment is up and running, Auto Deploy also helps cut down on patching time by pushing out updated images rather than scheduling patch windows.

VSPP also offers a Standard bundle that includes the Enterprise edition of vSphere and distributed network switch.  The Enterprise edition of vSphere is still far superior to Hyper-V but it would make for a closer comparison than Enterprise Plus:

Cloud Provisioning

VMware vCloud Director gives customers the ability to build secure cloud infrastructures that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere, the foundation for cloud computing architectures, VMware vCloud Director changes the way IT delivers and manages infrastructure services and the way users access and consume these services by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as a catalog-based service

In comparison, Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal (SCVMM SSP) lacks the capabilities necessary for building cloud environments such as – support for multi-tenancy on shared infrastructure, automated resource provisioning, and application catalogs.

Chargeback

An integrated chargeback solution is necessary for SPs to accurately track and charge their end customers.  VMware vCenter Chargeback is a fully-integrated chargeback solution that can track costs for power, cooling, real estate, software licenses, and maintenance, while allowing the service providers to customize and configure costs for their business model.  Designed specifically for vSphere and vCloud Director, vCenter Chargeback can meter resources like broadband network traffic, public IP addresses, and other services (e.g. DHCP, NAT, firewall) in addition to standard CPU, memory, and storage metering.  vCenter Chargeback is included in both the Standard and Premium bundles.

Microsoft does not have a chargeback solution.  Service providers are left with developing their own solutions or purchasing tools from 3^rd party vendors. 

Security

One of the main concerns of cloud computing is security.  VMware revolutionized virtualization security with the introduction of the vShield family of products – a leading virtualization-aware security solution designed specifically for vSphere.  Service providers can utilize the perimeter protection, port-level firewall, and NAT and DHCP services that are built directly into vCloud Director as part of the Standard bundle.  With the Premier bundle, SPs get upgraded to the full vShield Edge suite that adds site-to-site VPN and load balancing.

Microsoft does not offer a comparable security solution to protect virtualized infrastructure, relying on traditional physical security solutions that come at an extra cost to service providers.

Support

Lastly, the VSPP bundles include Production Support and Subscription (SnS) to provide SPs the confidence that VMware is ready to help.  Production SnS provides global 24x7 support with fast response times and unlimited support requests.  SPs also have access to all product updates and upgrades during the active terms of the contract.

Microsoft’s SPLA does not offer technical support.  Technical support must be purchased separately as described in the license agreement:

“Obtain support from Microsoft under a separate agreement (Microsoft Premier Support or support services through the Microsoft Professional support program) or through a third-party support services provider.â€

Comparing Apples to Fruit Baskets

Microsoft’s SPLA is by no means comparable to the full suite of solutions offered in VSPP.  It is a hard stretch for Microsoft to even consider comparing the SPLA to the VSPP Premier bundle on the basis of vSphere’s Enterprise Plus edition alone:

Going back to Microsoft’s cost comparison, it is more representative to look at the Standard bundle even though there is still a huge feature mismatch. Microsoft does not publish their SPLA pricing so we will use the figures and configurations from their slide.

SPLA licensing is per processor while VSPP licensing is per GB of reserved virtual RAM. The VSPP pricing shown below is based on list price for the Standard bundle and assumes that 100% of the virtual memory is reserved. With VSPP however, service providers can choose to optimize their resources by reserving less so calculations are shown for pricing at 80% reservation and the minimum of 50% reservation. Additionally, this VSPP pricing does not take into account discounts offered when providers commit to a minimum monthly usage level.

Under VSPP, service providers are only charged for powered-on VMs so although a provider maybe charging end users a flat monthly rate for resources regardless of usage, VMware does not charge the provider until a VM is powered-on. Since the SPLA licensing is per processor, the service provider does not get this benefit.

Microsoft makes further claims in this slide here that VSPP pricing rises exponentially while SPLA rises linearly. Microsoft is again trying to fool customers by increasing the VM count while also increasing the size of the VMs. Based on the same size VM, VSPP pricing increases linearly as the VM count rises.

Based on this configuration under VSPP, a service provider could deploy at least another 200 VMs on the same hardware.

Summary

Don’t be fooled by Microsoft’s latest claims. The vCloud Service Provider bundles are feature rich offerings designed to include all the necessary components for building a true cloud service. With VSPP you get the entire fruit basket and not just a bad apple. Microsoft is not even close to offering the core virtualization platform, cloud provisioning, chargeback, security, and support capabilities offered through VSPP. Additionally, VMware gives service providers access to over 250,000 customers who have already built their infrastructure on compatible VMware technology.

Memory management in VMware vSphere

Sophisticated and effective memory management has always been a key strength of the ESX (and now, ESXi) hypervisor that powers VMware vSphere.  Back in 2001, when ESX first came out, 2GB was a lot of RAM in an x86 server, so it was essential for a hypervisor to economize on memory to deliver the server consolidation benefits customers were so eager to realize.  Back then, the big attraction of server virtualization was running several lightweight utility and test/dev servers in VMs on a single host and memory was usually the resource that limited consolidation ratios.  Today, x86 machines are pushing 1TB of RAM, but because our customers have now virtualized their most memory-hungry production database, messaging and application servers, memory resources are just as critical as ever.

ESX and ESXi have been able to keep up with these huge increases in memory demands because our hypervisor has always employed a multi-layered approach to memory management that delivers the most efficient memory management, best VM densities and lowest costs to our users.  The methods employed are detailed in an excellent VMware technical paper and I’ve summarize them below.

Let users provide critical VMs with guaranteed memory.  The memory “Shares†and “Reservation†settings let you prioritize memory allocated to each VM and reserve enough host RAM for the active working memory of each guest OS.

Efficiently reclaim memory from VMs when needed.  Simply carving off a VM’s full memory allocation from the host’s physical RAM is tremendously wasteful since VMs rarely use all their virtual RAM.  Instead, ESXi borrows or “reclaims†memory from less active VMs when it is needed by other VMs.  We use four techniques for memory reclamation:

What about “Dynamic Memory�

The days of ESX being the only hypervisor that could support memory oversubscription are over now that Citrix and Microsoft have added a feature they both call “Dynamic Memory†to their products. But how effective is Dynamic Memory compared to the multi-layered memory management technologies in vSphere?  In both XenServer and Hyper-V, Dynamic Memory relies on just a single method – guest ballooning – to reclaim memory from guests when the hypervisor needs to find more memory for other VMs once physical RAM is fully allocated.  As we found when engineering ESX, ballooning is important, but it isn’t fast enough to cope with rapid spikes in memory needs or times when all your VMs are using their full memory allotment.  That’s why we designed ESX and ESXi with all four levels of memory reclamation technology, including the last resort safety net of hypervisor swapping, which is essential to avoid guest freezes when guests are all working hard and memory is under pressure.

Ballooning alone isn’t sufficient.  The Taneja Group took a look at XenServer 5.6 and its performance under conditions of memory oversubscription in their “Hypervisor Shootout†study of VM density. The results were striking.  XenServer 5.6 with Dynamic Memory was able to keep up with vSphere 4.1 VM density, but only when the guests were running a light load.  When the workload in the guests was increased, XenServer suffered, “a performance penalty that was surprisingly high and unfortunately consistent.â€

Will the new “Dynamic Memory†feature Microsoft has added to Hyper-V R2 SP1 fare any better when memory is overcommitted and VMs are busy?  According to Microsoft, Dynamic Memory improves their VM density by 40% over the previous version that maxed out before memory could be overcommitted.  It’s an improvement, but it won’t be enough to catch up to vSphere 4.1, which showed in Taneja Group’s testing, “an overall VM density advantage of two-to-one.† As seen in XenServer 5.6, reliance only on ballooning hits a wall when your VMs actually need all the virtual RAM you’ve allocated to them.  You can see signs of that effect in the painfully slow 2 second max response times in the VDI test Microsoft ran to justify their 40% improvement claim.  Apparently, entire Hyper-V R2 SP1 hosts can also find themselves frozen by memory shortages when Dynamic Memory is enabled.  Just as Microsoft has reluctantly come around to adopt the VMware way of doing things such as live migration and ballooning, perhaps we’ll see them grudgingly admit that hypervisor swapping and memory compression are essential to handle those times when memory pressure hits a peak.

Other Dynamic Memory Curiosities.  To permit many VMs to be packed onto a Hyper-V host, Microsoft has come up with a scheme where VMs are powered on with a low “Startup RAM†setting (512MB is recommended) and memory is then hot added as the guest needs it.  You can probably think of lots of reasons why this is a bad idea.  How about:

With VMware vSphere, VMs look and act just like physical machines .  Any guest OSs and any apps or monitoring tools in the VMs see a consistent, fixed amount of installed RAM.  We thought it would be easier for everyone if we put the memory management intelligence into our hypervisor rather than relying on the guest OS to perform some unnatural acts to enable good VM density.

There’s no need to disable Windows security to get great VM density with vSphere

Lastly, I’d like to clear up some confusion on Microsoft’s part.  They’re claiming that VMware is telling customers to disable a security feature in Windows guests called Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to improve VM density.  ASLR is intended to make things harder on malware writers by scrambling the locations of Windows processes in memory.  [Whether it’s meeting that goal is up for debate as Microsoft’s own security team has acknowledged that the bad guys have figured out how to bypass ASLR.]  ASLR makes it somewhat more difficult for the ESXi Transparent Page Sharing feature to de-duplicate memory, so you’d expect that turning it off would boost VM density in vSphere.  The Project Virtual Reality Check team confirmed in their September 2010 report that disabling ASLR produced a modest 16% improvement, but the authors clearly warned, “that Project VRC does not blindly recommend disabling ASLR. This is an important security feature.† I thought the Project VRC findings were interesting and I mentioned them in a session I gave at VMworld 2010 Europe called, “Getting the best VM density from your virtualization platform.† I also cautioned that disabling ASRL would reduce security and was best reserved for isolated testbeds where absolute maximum VM density was desired.  Here’s exactly how my slide put it:

Note the “lessens security†warning.  Somehow the folks at Microsoft read that as a recommendation by VMware that our customers put themselves at risk to use our product.  Maybe they’re also the sort of people that see hot coffee as an unacceptable danger to society.  However, I think most would agree that the indignant posturing is just a way to distract users from the less than dynamic qualities of “Dynamic Memory.â€

The film industry awards season is just reaching its peak, but the software industry’s own Oscars for 2010 have been handed out and VMware finished up with another great year.  Here’s a sampling of the recognition VMware received from the IT trade press in 2010:

Those same members of the technical press had some very nice things to say about VMware and our products in 2010:

and my favorite…

The analysts also directed much praise our way in 2010.  Gartner came out with their eagerly anticipated Magic Quadrant for x86 server virtualization and one look at the upper right corner of the chart would warm the heart of any IT manager who selected vSphere to be the foundation of his company’s virtualization and cloud efforts.  In December, I was in attendance at Gartner’s annual Data Center Conference where audience polls showed 87% of attendees were using VMware as their primary x86 virtual machine solution in 2010 – only 2% were using the nearest competitor.  Even better, when asked which virtualization provider they would be using in 2015, the Gartner attendees picked VMware by a 5:1 margin over the nearest alternative.

One thing our customers can find especially satisfying from this recognition is it points out how they made the right choice with VMware.  Whenever a customer invests in enterprise software, they want assurance that they will see steady improvements – big and small – in their chosen product.  In the case of VMware vSphere, our users have really won the lottery.  For almost ten years, each update and major release of our vSphere product family has rewarded our customers with improvements in performance and scalability as well as a steady stream of new capabilities – things like Storage vMotion, Fault Tolerance and Distributed Switches.  I imagine our early adopters who selected ESX or VMware Infrastructure are feeling pretty good about how their decision was rewarded.

But 2010 is behind us and we’re now focused on investments in upcoming waves of VMware products.  Our current customers and customers-to-be can feel assured that we’re working to keep up our pace of innovation (and recognition!) on into 2011 and beyond.

We wanted to take a minute and respond to the recent blog post by the Microsoft Exchange team (Answering Exchange Virtualization Questions and Addressing Misleading VMware Guidance). In the post, Microsoft expresses concerns around particular VMware guidance for deploying Exchange Database Availability Groups (DAG) in conjunction with VMware HA.  We’d like to provide our perspective on this configuration and explain why it isn’t reckless (as Microsoft suggests), but all to the contrary can help our customers get greater value out of virtualizing Exchange.

The proposed solution consists of deploying Exchange DAG on a VMware vSphere cluster, and complementing DAG with VMware HA to maximize availability.

To clarify some of the apparent confusion on VMware HA in the Microsoft blog, VMware HA has nothing to do with VMotion or DRS.  VMware HA is a very simple mechanism that automatically reboots a failed virtual machine on any available host in the vSphere cluster in the case of a host failure.  From an application standpoint, the behavior of VMware HA is equivalent to a simple power-on of the machine on which the application is running.   It is completely transparent to the OS and the application.

In the physical world, when a DAG node fails, an admin will eventually power-on that node to restore the original availability protection.  VMware HA does exactly the same thing, but automatically.  Seems to us like that’s a pretty reasonable thing to do, and many of our customers agree and are happily using this in production.  Why?  For example, in a deployment with 2 database copies, if one of the DAG nodes were to go down due to a host failure, Exchange would be left ‘unprotected’ until the failed DAG node could be brought back up.  That could take quite a bit of time, relying on an administrator to detect the failure, and manually power on the failed node. VMware HA automatically takes care of that for you in the shortest time possible to restore the DAG availability protection.

Does this solution increase the cost of deploying Exchange?  No!  Compute requirements are unchanged, since VMware HA doesn’t rely on failover instances.   VMware HA also does not impact overall storage requirements.

Does this solution increase complexity?     Our customers think our solution makes Exchange a whole lot simpler.  When a DAG node fails, you no longer need to manually detect the failure and bring the node back up – VMware HA does that automatically.  And VMware HA doesn’t require any OS- or app-level configuration changes.

As to the support situation, we acknowledge that this is not an officially supported configuration under the Microsoft SVVP Program.  Should that stop all customers from using it?  Consider the following facts:

In some cases customer needs can go beyond the vendor’s official support positions or guidelines.  In these situations, it’s up to the vendors to step up and meet those needs.  We’re extending an open offer to the Microsoft Exchange team to help them better understand, test, validate, and support this valuable solution!

Alex Fontana and Scott Salyer

(Original authors of the Exchange on VMware Best Practices and availability docs)

As you may already know, VMware recently announced an OEM agreement with Novell to redistribute SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) to eligible VMware vSphere customers. Just a few hours later (wow – that was quick), Microsoft published its take on the Microsoft Virtualization Team blog. Unfortunately, fast is not always a synonym of well-thought out. The arguments presented in the Microsoft blog not only miss the point about the announcement, but are so far off base that it makes one wonder whether Microsoft has learned anything about virtualization or is just trying to generate some headlines for headline’s sake.

In either case, given the level of marketing spin in the Microsoft blog post, I feel obliged to address the most blatant misinformation and set the record straight:

Myth #1: “Looks like VMWare finally determined that virtualization is a server OS feature. I’m sure we’ve said that once or twice over the years ;-)â€

Our announcement is about providing SLES as a guest operating system (OS) and not as a hypervisor. Offering a more cost effective way to deploy SLES in VMware environments has nothing to do with the architecture of the hypervisor. Come on Microsoft – this is Virtualization 101 level stuff. VMware is committed to a hypervisor architecture that does not rely on a general purpose OS, unlike Hyper-V’s reliance on Windows, as it is a fundamentally better design that leads to higher reliability, robustness and security. This is why in our latest generation hypervisor architecture - VMware ESXi - we removed the console OS. Independent industry analysts agree that a slimmer hypervisor is the right approach – see “A Downside to Hyper-Vâ€. We certainly don’t plan to reverse our direction, quite the opposite actually. As we publicly stated multiple times in the future ESXi will be the exclusive focus of VMware development efforts. Thanks to the ESXi hypervisor architecture, our customers won’t run the same risks they would have to face with Hyper-V.

Myth #2: “The vFolks in Palo Alto are further isolating themselves within the industry. Microsoft’s interop efforts have provided more choice and flexibility for customers, including our work with Novell.â€

Who is isolating itself? Who provides more choice?  Let’s not forget that just a few months ago Bob Muglia, President of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools business unit, stated that the number #3 top competitor for his division in 2010 is Linux! And just this past week at TechEd 2010, Steve Ballmer listed “Open Source†as a top competitor for Microsoft. How is it possible that on one hand Microsoft touts “new interoperability†with Linux and on the other one wants to kill it? Something has got to give and I think I know which one it will be….

Myth #3: “As one of many examples of our work with open source communities, we’re [Microsoft] adding functionality to the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V. In fact, we have an RC version of the Linux Integration Services, which support Linux virtual machines with up to 4 virtual CPUs. In fact, we’ll talk more of this on June 25 at Red Hat Summit.â€

VMware has a track record of providing equal support to Windows and Linux operating systems. We have supported 4 virtual CPUs for Windows and Linux guest OSs since 2006 and added 8-way vSMP in 2009. The OEM agreement with Novell doesn’t change our commitment to guest operating system neutrality. Positioning the Hyper-V’s upcoming support of 4 virtual CPUs for a small subset of Linux operating systems as a big win only confirms that 1) Microsoft is failing to keep up with VMware, and that 2) Microsoft has treated Linux guests as second class citizens. Is it credible that this second-class status for Linux will somehow change given that Linux and Open Source are being classified as top competitors?

Myth #4: “This is a bad deal for customers as they’re getting locked into an inflexible offer. Check out the terms and conditions. [..] So be sure not to drop support or you’ll invalidate your licenseâ€

So, before customers had to purchase SnS for VMware vSphere and a SLES subscription for patches and updates. With this new VMware-Novell agreement, they only have to purchase VMware SnS. Help me understand how this is a bad deal for customers? Talking about “invalidating†licenses in the context of a Linux operating system doesn’t make much sense given how the Linux licensing model works. The SLES deal offered by VMware is about subscription to patches and updates and not about licenses. Applying the same logic to Microsoft Software Assurance, we should warn customers that Microsoft SA is a bad deal because it locks them in an inflexible offer that forces them to pay in order to get the next Windows upgrade.

Myth #5: “Last, the vFolks have no public cloud offering, like Windows Azure, like Amazon EC2. While we’re demoing and building capabilities so customers have a common and flexible application and management model across on-premises and cloud computing, they’re stitching together virtual appliances to fill the void.â€

Microsoft clearly “forgets†about VMware’s 1,000+ vCloud partners and public infrastructure as-a-service solutions based on VMware technology like vCloud Express . Our objective is to enable a broad partner ecosystem of service providers that leverage VMware’s technology to offer cloud services. This will give customers freedom of choice. We also want to make sure that companies retain control of their applications and are not locked in to any one particular service. Virtual appliances are a key component of this strategy, because that’s ultimately where the application lives. Microsoft isn’t interested in virtual appliances, because it isn’t interested in enabling application portability among cloud provider. Ultimately Microsoft’s strategy with Azure it to have customers run applications on Microsoft operating systems using Microsoft databases in Microsoft datacenters…. looks like the mother of all lock-ins.

Is Microsoft suffering from Hyper-Desperation R2?

Such an incredibly off-base reaction is clear evidence that the VMware-Novell OEM agreement struck a nerve at Microsoft. Could it be a sign of Hyper-Desperation R2? After all, the events of the past 2 months must have been pretty hard on the nerves of the Microsoft Virtualization Team:

But all of this aside, at the end of the day, what really matters is that VMware continues to show strong execution in our mission of simplifying IT and providing customers a pragmatic path to the cloud. Our agreement with Novell is another great example of how we’re delivering on our mission.

VMware has been exhibiting here at Microsoft TechEd 2010 and lots of VMware customers, plus those just starting the virtualization journey, have come by to talk to us - lots of questions about how to virtualize applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and Sharepoint on VMware vSphere, how to implement an effective disaster recovery plan for their virtual Windows environment, and how to leverage VMware View for their Windows 7 migrations. But also, a lot of folks come by simply to say hello and share how well their Windows environments run on vSphere. Thanks to those who came by our booth this week.

I must confess though, that even after talking to all these customers, I did not fully understand how many satisfied VMware customers are here at Microsoft TechEd 2010… here’s what I mean.

Wednesday night, the VMware team attended the Best of TechEd awards ceremony because VMware vSphere was a finalist in the Virtualization category. We won that award last year (Best of TechEd 2009) and were anxiously waiting to see if we would win again this year. We were very excited when the judges announced VMware as the Virtualization category winner for Best of TechEd 2010.

Soon after, the final award of the night came up – the Best of TechEd Attendee’s Pick Award. This award is 100% based on votes from the 10,000+ TechEd attendees (my guess, as I haven’t seen an official number) – no judges involved. Attendees got to choose from among all the IT products exhibited at Microsoft TechEd, not just the virtualization ones, basically everything in the world of Windows IT. Given this context, we were thrilled when VMware was announced as the winner of the Best of TechEd 2010 Attendee’s Pick Award! Wow, to be chosen by the attendees from among all the IT products at TechEd, was just the latest testament of the value that vSphere delivers to customers.

There were no acceptance speeches at the awards ceremony (which was probably a wise decision by the folks at Windows IT Pro), but some thank-you’s are definitely in order. To the 25,000+ VMware channel partners, thanks for educating and helping customers implement vSphere to solve their most pressing datacenter needs. To the 35,000+ VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs), thanks for managing all of the vSphere installations so they run smoothly, and for being the resident experts in your respective companies, sharing with everyone the value of VMware. To the 1,500+ VMware technology partners, thanks for working with our engineering teams to build tight, robust integrations between our respective products. And finally, thanks to the thousands of VMware R&D engineers who built VMware vSphere – great job team.

Sometimes, what one does not say, communicates a lot more than what one actually does say. That seemed to be the case last week when Microsoft released new collateral telling channel partners that they can achieve higher growth by selling Microsoft virtualization products alongside their existing VMware practices.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the blogosphere heard a different message:

Wow – talk about an unintentional message. Instead of Microsoft’s intended message, people picked up on Microsoft’s change in tactics from “sell Hyper-V because it can go head-to-head with VMware†to “why don’t you try selling Hyper-V in addition to VMware – we promise it will make you more money†(my paraphrase). To quote the Virtualization Review article, “While this is not tantamount to raising a white flag, it is a stark, public acknowledgement of VMware's deeply embedded pre-eminence.†Thanks Microsoft for reaffirming what VMware partners and customers have known all along.

Microsoft Tool: Partners Get Better Margins with VMware

But, unintentional messages aside, is there truth behind the claim that Microsoft virtualization products can make partners more money? To answer this question, I spent some time playing with Microsoft’s Excel model (the heart of the new Microsoft collateral) that compares the revenue and margins from selling VMware versus Microsoft.

First of all, Microsoft’s model states that partners generally make better margins by selling VMware (default assumptions in the Microsoft model).

Microsoft Tool Assumes Up to a 2x Win Rate Advantage over VMware – Quite Unrealistic

But if that’s the case, what is Microsoft’s argument for how partners can make more money selling Microsoft virtualization over VMware? As Steve Kaplan points out on his blog, the two biggest assumptions in the Microsoft’s model are 1) a higher win rate (i.e. closing more deals) when leading with a Microsoft virtualization offering, and 2) “upsell capture†where customers purchase more software/ hardware/services with the money they supposedly save with a Microsoft offering. (There are a bunch of other default assumptions that disadvantage VMware, which I list at the end of this blog, but higher win rate and upsell capture have the biggest impact on the model’s output.)

So what does the tool assume regarding win rates? The default ‘mature market’ assumption is that leading with Microsoft virtualization offerings will win 33% more Large Enterprise deals and 100% more Mid-market deals (2x) compared to if the partner leads with VMware offerings, resulting in partners making more margin with Microsoft virtualization. Those are pretty bold, and frankly, unsubstantiated assumptions given VMware’s dominant position in Large Enterprises (96% of the Fortune 1000 are VMware customers), VMware’s strong traction with our mid-market offerings (Acceleration Kits, Essentials Editions), and the fact that customers get a more reliable, more complete, and lower cost-per-application solution with VMware.

Just how sensitive is the Microsoft tool to the win-rate assumption? Let’s find out by making two simple adjustments to win-rate. Let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt with a higher win rate in mid-market (33% more deals), put us on parity in the Large Enterprise (same win rate), and leave in place the model’s assumption that customers will buy more hardware/software/services because of the money they save with Microsoft (an assumption that Steven Kaplan challenges in his blog, but that’s another discussion). Now the VMware practice makes $1,021,000 of margin at the end of Year 3 while the Microsoft practice makes $948,000 of margin – so the VMware practice now makes more money, even with a 33% higher win-rate assumption for Microsoft in mid-market!

Microsoft Tool’s Default Assumptions Are Just Not Credible

This simple exercise is revealing because it shows what partners would have to believe in order for Microsoft virtualization to make them more money, essentially, that customers would have to overwhelmingly choose Microsoft virtualization products over VMware by an incredibly higher, unsubstantiated rate, in spite of the fact that VMware delivers far more compelling benefits to customers:

Now, I realize that there are many VARs and consultants out there that have built very successful, profitable businesses selling Microsoft products, so my point is not about any channel partner’s existing Microsoft practices. But I do take issue with Microsoft’s claim that selling Microsoft virtualization is more profitable than selling VMware based on their “model†– Microsoft’s assumptions to make their case are just not credible.

VMware Channel Partner Ecosystem: 25,000+ Partners and Growing

To close, here are some facts about the ecosystem of VMware partners:

As you can see, VMware and its channel partners have a strong win-win relationship.

If you are a VAR or consultant and currently not a VMware channel partner, we invite you to check out the VMware Partner Network website to get information about how to become one. Let us help you grow your business by selling VMware while delivering the most trusted, most complete, lowest cost-per-application solution to your customer.

A Few Other Default Assumptions in the Microsoft Tool to be Aware of