18 September 2008

Mike Neil, Microsoft’s general manager of virtualisation strategy, explains why virtualisation is no longer a technology for tomorrow, but for today.

Around 14,000 IT professionals, developers and technology providers attended this year’s VMworld 2008 virtualisation conference. This figure suggests that the industry is fully aware that virtualisation has matured into a priority for many enterprises, because it allows businesses to reduce their IT costs and be more nimble in responding to changing IT needs. Mike Neil told OnWindows more.

One of the key issues that have prevented some businesses from implementing virtualisation in the past was cost. But now many vendors seem to be lowering costs or offering special promotions. Why is that?
The virtualisation market has become fiercely competitive, and that’s commoditising hypervisor prices. But virtualisation is about more than the hypervisor; it’s also about management software, and that’s where vendors differentiate themselves.

Microsoft’s comprehensive server virtualisation and management solution – which includes management capabilities for both physical and virtual environments – costs about a third of VMware’s competing product. And the upcoming Hyper-V Server 2008 hypervisor will be available for no charge, which makes it even more cost-effective to employ virtualisation.

Enterprises that virtualise their IT operations can expect substantial long-term savings thanks to server consolidation, lower power consumption and other economies. But some vendors’ wares will require a higher total cost of ownership than others. For example, because our virtualisation software runs on the familiar Windows platform, it integrates easily into most enterprises’ IT environments, and customers have told us that training is faster and less expensive as a result. And being able to manage both physical and virtual servers from one management platform, as you can with Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, is another long-term cost savings.

Two other factors that can have a major impact on TCO are interoperability and management efficiency. Most enterprises have heterogeneous IT environments, with software and hardware from dozens of vendors. So we’re working with a number of vendors – such as Citrix, Novell and Sun – to ensure both technical interoperability and coordinated product support. Our work with Citrix, for example, is aimed at making sure Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer interoperate and that customers who use the two solutions can easily move virtual machines between the two environments.


You mentioned management efficiency as another important cost factor.
Yes. In the heterogeneous IT environments I’ve just been talking about, holistic management is essential to keeping operating costs low. I’m talking about being able to manage, configure, provision, deploy and back up all of your assets – physical and virtual, server and client, regardless of vendor – from a single ‘pane of glass’, if you will.

Only Microsoft bridges all the management islands common in datacentres today. Our System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which will be released shortly, allows customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and centrally manage their virtualised infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware ESX.

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions are available today in beta with support for the HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems. And System Center Operations Manager also allows customers to fine-tune and monitor the health of applications that are running both in a virtual machine and on a physical machine.


Can you give us a real example of how a company saved money by virtualising?
One is HotSchedules, a Texas company that provides online labour scheduling services to the restaurant and hospitality industry. HotSchedules offers employees access to their work schedules on the Web and lets them trade shifts online. With nearly a quarter of a million users and four million logins per month, HotSchedules has been experiencing phenomenal growth – doubling in size every year for the past few years. But as the company acquired more customers, it had to deploy more servers to support its expanding network, and it quickly ran out of space and began experiencing rising power costs. In the past five years, its monthly energy bills tripled.

Working with Microsoft, HotSchedules has been able to increase its server utilisation tenfold, reducing its application servers from 120 to 12. This has allowed the company to cut power costs 77 per cent and maximise its margins, making it more competitive.


What other areas of virtualisation are becoming popular today?
Most people associate virtualisation with servers, but application virtualisation is really heating up. Application virtualisation offers capabilities like dynamic provisioning, which allows end users to connect to their applications from multiple devices. Think of it as applications on demand: IT maintains management control over the applications, and users have instant access to them without worrying about software installations, application management or potential software conflicts.

Microsoft’s latest application virtualisation package, Microsoft Application Virtualisation 4.5 (App-V 4.5), was released and will be available soon as part of MDOP 2008 R2. App-V 4.5 is a big step forward toward making application virtualisation a universally deployed desktop technology. We’ve included new capabilities that will help IT pros support large-scale virtualisation implementations across many sites and provide multiple delivery options, including over-the-Internet application delivery.

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