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Blog

VMworld 2008 is an essential event for any IT professional looking for the latest products and innovations in virtualization technology – and we are readily preparing to demonstrate what we’ve got.

As a result of increased adoption and further consolidation, the virtualization market has grown tremendously, increasing the spectrum of presenters and attendees alike. Based on this growth, I expect to see more value-add products, more new start-ups and technologies. In previous years, the attention has been on hypervisors. Now, I think the emphasis will be on tools and layered products that sit on top of the hypervisor, such as availability, management and monitoring tools.

Are you a VMworld Rookie? Here’s a tip – Past shows have left me feeling that a lot of vendors make grand claims regarding their products and services, but many are still very early in the development stage. Everyone uses similar buzzwords – business continuity, disaster recovery, high availability, management, etc. These are all fairly broad terms and vendors use some form or hybrid of each at their booths and in their presentations to lure you in to hear “the pitch.” Finding solution providers who have real customers, products, references, and established technology is a much more productive approach when attending the event.

When it comes down to it, a lot of past VMworld happenings involve the issue of hype vs. reality. The challenge for anyone who is going to walk the halls, talk to vendors, and attend sessions is the ability to validate what is reality vs. what is hype.

I’ll be attending several sessions at VMworld, but I am most eager to attend the session where VMware will announce their fault-tolerant technology. I think that will be a beneficial session to all event attendees. Our assumption at Marathon is that it will be something like a fault management or fault handling system –something on a similar level to what we do. But this is definitely an advantage for us – it helps to validate what we have been saying for 18 months. As the market leader in virtualization, VMware sees the same problem as Marathon – customers need and are requiring more protection for applications that get consolidated. Traditional failover environments aren’t sufficient for the higher value applications.

If you have any recommendations for VMworld sessions, please leave me a comment and let me know – I’m always open for suggestions. And if you have any questions or if you see me walking around, don’t hesitate to reach out - I’d love to connect with you.

A research report by IDC’s virtualization guru, John Humphreys, The Future of Virtualization: Leveraging Mobility to Move Beyond Consolidation highlights the fact that the automatic restart used by most high availability solutions for virtualization fails to deliver what most customers really want and need. Here is what John has to say:

“To address unplanned downtime today virtualization companies are providing an automatic restart capability if the hypervisor or host go down for whatever reason. While this is a good start to trying to combat the lost revenue associated with unplanned outages, ultimately knowing what is happening at the hypervisor and hardware layers fails to deliver customers what they most want — application-level awareness and action. In this way, current HA solutions in the virtualization market are "blind from the waist up." That is, they do not know what is happening inside the virtual machine. They do not know if the operating system or application has stopped working, and that is ultimately what IT professionals charged with delivering application services most care to know.”

If you would like to learn more about high availability for virtualization, how to get application-level awareness and what that can buy you, we encourage you to join the webinar Thursday, June 26 at 11:30 EST. with John Humphreys (IDC), Simon Crosby (Citrix) and Jerry Melnick (Marathon).

For more information or to register visit here.

A common question we get from analysts and something that continues to come up in discussions (see Brian Madden’s blog) is why we developed everRun VM for XenSource and not VMware. One of the biggest obstacles in developing a version of our software for protecting virtual environments was making a strategic decision on which hypervisor platform to develop for initially. Some of the key factors that weighed in on our decision were:

• Virtualization platform market share
• Robustness of the virtualization platform
• Performance of the virtualization platform
• Openness of the architecture
• Virtualization vendor’s approach to partnerships
• Compatibility with future Microsoft virtualization platforms

Although VMware was the clear market leader, for most of the criteria, XenSource (now Citrix Virtualization and Management Division) was a much better fit. To acheive the superior availability that everRun VM uniquely provides, it had to be tightly integrated with the hypervisor, the openness of the architecture was very important. And since our solution would be directed at virtualizing applications that weren’t being virtualized yet, in part due to concerns about their performance in virtual machines, the near “bare-metal” performance of XenServer was also a major advantage. XenSource’s philosophy of growing through an ecosystem of technology partners gave us the confidence that they would get the technical, management and marketing support required to achieve our time-to-market objectives. Finally, because of the company’s relationship with Microsoft and the planned interoperability between the XenServer platform and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, we are confident that developing for XenServer now would provide the shortest path to supporting Microsoft Hyper-V when it becomes available.

If you have any additional questions feel free to leave us a comment.

The environment in which a hosted operating system runs on top of a hypervisor, providing the abstraction of a dedicated machine. By employing virtualization software, “space” is created within the host operating system allowing the user to install another guest operating system utilizing Windows, Linux, etc; which acts independently from all other virtual machines on that host.

A virtualization platform that allows multiple operating environments to run on a host computer at the same time. The term hypervisor, as depicted here, is said to have been coined by IBM back when they first introduced the virtualization concept.