The Virtual Data Center

DISCLAIMER: This is long and the opinions are mine.I’ve written a good bit here about the various ways Microsoft and Citrix overlap in the hypervisor space, ranging from topics like shared code base through competition for the desktop space. To me, these two players have always been the underdogs battling for the right to go head-to-head against VMware in the main enterprise (and now cloud) virtual data center event. I’ve long said here that I think Microsoft is in the best position to make that move, but to be honest, Citrix currently has better technology. In other words, Microsoft has a better strategic play, Citrix a better tactical play. The announcements that came of out Synergy last week prove that. Citrix knows what it’s doing and they know how to build virtualization products to compete with VMware.As has been asked many times before, here and elsewhere: What would happen…what would be the benefit to the market…if Microsoft were to acquire Citrix and merge the best strategy and tactical solutions into one? The idea and rumor has been around for a while, so why am I revisiting it today? Since these rumors first started to really circulate in September of 2008 (around VMworld) there’s been very little advancement from the Microsoft camp on Hyper-V, and a tremendous amount of advancements from Citrix and the Xen products. We’re also seeing a few cases where the two have opted to work together. Case in point: the Essentials family for managing XenServer and Hyper-V VMs and storage. Citrix has made some excellent headway in the VDC with product announcements this year; that’s the real reason to take another look at this idea.For better or for worse, Microsoft and Citrix are already collaborating, both individually and to an extent togeter, to go after VMware. In the grand scheme of things why continue to do that on their own when they can do it together, mount one single offensive with one single goal, and bring enough technology to actually make a dent in VMware’s VDC footprint? Join forces and all that 2 against 1 stuff. Let’s look at a few categories where this makes sense, where Microsoft acquiring Citrix technology would go head to head against VMware and actually have a chance of winning:

• Networking and Application Delivery: To me recent movement from Citrix in this space is the paramount camel’s straw/tipping point for why Microsoft should finally take the leap. Citrix’s application delivery product line, NetScaler, has been a good appliance-based product for Citrix. Not a market leader, but they’ve held their own against F5 and Cisco. They manage application delivery well enough. With the announcement last week of NetScaler VPX, their virtual appliance version of MPX, NetScaler has made the leap into software-based application delivery, ala Zeus. This is huge for the acquisition discussion. First of all it could bring networking and application delivery into Microsoft’s world, something they’ve avoided with Hyper-V to date. Customers use virtualization for applications and they need to deliver those applications outside their data center. Couple VPX with the new software switch Citrix announced to compete against Cisco’s Nexus 1000v and you have the critical missing pieces for application deliver via Hyper-V (as well as another angle for Microsoft to compete against Citrix). And then add in the Citrix desktop and access-related apps for the non-MS platforms, like the iPhone, and Microsoft makes a huge push owning the application delivery stack from the VDC to the client, any client.
• VDI: Citrix has done an amazing job on virtualization geared towards the client. Going back to Metaframe and Presentation Server and then today with the work they’re doing with Xen on client virtualization, Citrix has always been focused on the client. Ironically, even though Microsoft is the de facto enterprise desktop client (in a sense), it hasn’t addressed the client virtualization markets too well. App-V is a step forward, but MED-V (with desktop virtualization code based on Virtual PC rather than Hyper-V) is a step back. VMware is making a huge push in this market with VMware View; if any player is going to win the VDC space completely they have to include a VDI solution, one that works locally and remotely, in their portfolio. Citrix could help Microsoft make that push by combining their respective solutions for hypervisor and application virtualization technologies. Many of the enterprise desktops and apps are Microsoft; the underlying technology running those desktops and apps in the data center and over the network are Citrix.
• Cloud Platforms/Providers: Xen owns a good bit of real estate in cloud and service provider data centers. Although Microsoft has good presence with customers running Windows operating systems, it doesn’t have the same exposure for Hyper-V as a platform that VMware and Xen have. I think MS is looking to change this with Azure but it will still be limited to the MS-only solution (for the short term anyway). Acquiring Citrix would give Microsoft that cloud provider mindshare by name alone. They could then take that business and technology model that Xen has built and create a best of breed service provider platform between Xen and Hyper-V for customers that want to run non-Windows apps on Xen and .Net-based apps on Hyper-V. This could drastically help Microsoft’s Oslo application lifecycle plan moving forward with cloud providers while not alienating non-.Net apps.
• Application Virtualization: As you know, I’m a huge fan of a true application virtualization model, something that I believe App-V will ultimately be able to deliver. However it will most likely be focused on .Net and Microsoft apps only and is still a few years away from full delivery and even more from adoption. In the mean time we have this bridging technology between VDI, client virtualization, and streaming apps. VMware is getting there with tools like View and ThinApp, but Citrix is staying in lockstep. Microsoft could use a Citrix acquisition to springboard App-V into a multi-focused application delivery platform, taking what’s good today with streaming apps and client virtualization and continue to work on true application virtualization for all apps.
• Customer/Device Support: And as a roll-up benefit of the above categories, we have application delivery to devices. I don’t want to place too much emphasis on supporting remote access via the iPhone, but when you look at Microsoft’s historic relationships with Apple and Linux (as a whole), of which Citrix has obvious ties into both now, that’s an appealing way for Microsoft to jump right into those groups. That doesn’t mean they’ll keep the momentum alive, but at least it would give them more opportunity than they have today. The overlap between VDI, XenApp, secure remote access, and the iPhone is an extremely appealing proposition for mobile users; a turn-key solution for Microsoft to cover a huge gap in their overall cloud and virtualization offerings.

And let’s be honest: Microsoft has had some challenges with their virtualization solutions and their overall direction. Client virtualization based on Virtual PC and no enterprise VDI solution? Hyper-V management hiccups through SCVMM/SCOM and delaying live migration for so long? Azure wanting to change the way applications run and are written on-premise? These raise questions in my mind, a lot of “Why?” questions. Citrix, on the other hand, is heading squarely in the right directly for virtualization solutions.  Citrix continues to plow ahead against VMware at a good pace, whereas Hyper-V isn’t quite at that same pace. The virtual switch announcement from Synergy last week is an excellent example; we haven’t seen any movement or advancements on virtual switching or networking for Hyper-V at all. Sophisticated virtual networking and switching management is an absolute critical component for virtual and cloud-based platforms, IMO. Moving internal roles and tasks to VMs running on the platforms is something we’ve seen for a while with VMware, even going so far as to running the full version of ESX 4.0 in a VM on top of ESXi 4.0. Citrix is doing the same with their Dazzle product. In other words both VMware and Citrix are finding optimized ways to use their own technology for their own benefit. We’re not seeing this today from Hyper-V. Again, there’s nothing to say that Microsoft acquiring Citrix would change that, but at least it might help grease the skids a bit towards internal product unification. Citrix knows how to do it well.To be clear, I am not being critical of Microsoft technologies or business practices (as any long-time readers of my blog will undoubtedly know). I am suggesting that when compared on a chart, Citrix is closer today to where the market and VMware are going for virtual platforms, and if the goal is to compete with VMware for both enterprise and cloud virtual platforms then Microsoft could benefit in leaps and bounds by acquiring Citrix for both Xen and their networking products. Microsoft would get virtual platform, application, and networking tools that they don’t have today.I’ll leave you with one final thought on how compelling a Microsoft/Citrix acquisition could be: Imagine a year from now if Azure launched out of beta running on both Xen and Hyper-V. This would be the best of both worlds: Microsoft could continue to push it’s current developer-based approach to Azure, SaaS, and application cloud computing, focusing on .Net and helping to push users to re-write their current and new apps. They could also support non-.Net customers by allowing them to run their services on Xen in Microsoft’s cloud. Customers wouldn’t have to choose based on their app needs. That would be the ultimate competitor to both Google and Amazon for cloud mindshare, bridging the two cloud models together and backed by the Microsoft brand.  Awesome. Will we ever see it? I hope so for market and customer needs.“Wish You Were Here” Image © 1975 EMI, Storm Thorgerson

As reported by Practical Technology yesterday, Citrix has announced that it will be giving away XenServer (the hypervisor portion of their acquired Xen solution) for free. Very similar to the VMware model, they will continue to charge for management and advanced features as add-ons to the XenServer platform but the core virtualization technology will be available for free. Will this have any impact in their market share or their stake in the virtual data center? I’m skeptical for a number of reasons:

1. Free doesn’t always mean better, and usually it’s the exact opposite. I’m reluctant to think that enterprise customers and mission-critical cloud providers will take the free route solely to save money. Maybe that’s more likely this year than last but I’m still not sold it will make that much of an impact, especially since this won’t be an OSS offering ala XenSource. They’re also competing up-stream against VMware’s ESXi and Hyper-V, both of which have value-add above and beyond the hypervisor. For Citrix to make this move work they’re going to have to prove that they have the same type of value-add with XenServer that the other two big players offer. And free doesn’t count as value where your mission critical apps are concerned.
2. They’re relying heavily on management solutions to bring in the money for XenServer customers. We all know you can’t deploy a truly reliable virtualization solution without having management. In practice free deployments of XenServer will be few and far between, instead they will be bundled with some management solution. But which one? If MS System Center will manage both Hyper-V and XenServer, then we’re back to that value-add question for MS shops. If I’ve already deployed MS SCOM/SCVMM then what’s the value in deploying a Citrix solution instead of Hyper-V — which is also integrated into my server platform? VMware shops will stick with VMware because they’re the only company that has an end-to-end solution today. So is management the golden ticket for Citrix?
3. They’re announcing a new partnership with Microsoft. Excluding their existing partnership (whether that partnership has benefitted Citrix is a decently debatable topic so let’s gloss over those particulars for now) — Has a partnership with Microsoft between competing companies ever worked out for the non-Microsoft partner? Yes, MS is an excellent partner resource for technologies that don’t compete, but really, this partnership (and the ability to manage XenServer) will drastically benefit Microsoft by extending their heterogeneous virtual management solutions with Systems Center. I don’t see it going the other way for Citrix. Again, we’re going back to the value for a complete solution and who offers the most value here: Microsoft or Citrix? My vote is very strongly printed in the Microsoft column.

Maybe this will work in Citrix’s favor by at least getting XenServer in more hands to play with, and maybe their technology value will bubble to the top. But how many times have we watched a better technology (assuming XenServer is better) go by the wayside because they didn’t offer enough business value? In this case, I question whether a free XenServer offers any business value above and beyond what Hyper-V or VMware ESXi already offer.

I know analysts get a bad rap; a lot of people aren’t fans, to say the least. I typically don’t agree with that negative viewpoint. It’s been my experience that most technology analysts tend to actually be the experts they purport to be. I talk to a lot of them and am routinely impressed with their understanding of the markets and technologies I work in. A good amount of their criticisms come from their business model, but nothing in life is free. I would be more critical of analysts if they just gave away their knowledge; we all get paid for something (except my friend who retired from Google a few years ago, but that’s a story for a different day ;). But every now and then I do run into a comment from an analyst that’s just plain wrong and causes big problems.

Case in point: Gartner analyst John Enck’s comments over on SearchServerVirtualization re: Hyper-V and Xen. Here’s the quote:

Citrix has a strong working relationship with Microsoft, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V is built on the Xen engine, which makes the two platforms interoperable, Enck said.

Now I don’t know if the author mis-quoted John or if John really believes this, but the above just ain’t true. Hyper-V is not built on top of Xen nor are the two platforms interoperable or interchangeable. This is a rumor that’s been floating around for at least 8 months, mostly based on the MS XenSource announcement in 2006, and although the rumor is completely false, there is some overlap in their technologies. According to Chris Stirrat over at the SCVMM team, their plan as of Sept. 2007 was to include management support for both VMware and Xen with the Carmine SCVMM release. The key term here is manage Xen, not run on Xen. But even that hasn’t happened yet. SCVMM only supports managing VMware deployments; it does not yet support managing Xen.

I’m sure there was some development assistance that came from XenSource to help MS run Linux-based guests on top of Hyper-V. Xen is a paravirtualized hypervisor, meaning that guests must be aware that they’re running on a hypervisor. Hyper-V has also implemented a paravirtualization architecture. Paravirtualized Windows guests would be easy for Hyper-V since MS owns the host kernel, the hypervisor, and the guest kernel; paravirtualization makes complete sense if you own all pieces of the puzzle. My guess is that anything they got from XenSource has do with supporting non-MS paravirtualized guests on Hyper-V, which is why their Linux support is currently limited to only one distro: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server v10.

But John continues his downward spiral:

Thus Microsoft might be more likely to refer Linux-leaning prospects to Citrix than to, say, Novell’s virtualization technology because of Citrix’s additional features, he said.

First off, Novell’s virtualization technology is Xen. Second, what exactly is a Linux-leaning prospect? I’m sure that Microsoft would try to move all OS virtualization prospects over to Hyper-V; Microsoft doesn’t have a track record of referring anyone somewhere outside of Microsoft (and why should they). To be blunt, Citrix and Microsoft have always had a love/hate relationship: Metaframe/Presentation Server ICA and Terminal Server RDP; their joint Branch Office Box (BOB); Xen and Hyper-V. I can’t imagine Microsoft ever referring a customer to Citrix instead of going with one of their solutions. Is there room for technology overlap and sharing? Absolutely. But for MS to shrug its shoulders and turn over any customer that wants to implement Linux OS virtualization to Citrix isn’t going to happen. Virtual Server can run multiple flavors of Linux. SCVMM can manage Virtual Server, Hyper-V, and VMware. In the collective MS mind, there’s no virtual OS deployment that can’t run on or be managed by Microsoft products.

I guess my main beef is back to money. If a customer comes to John at Gartner asking which hypervisor solution should they deploy for their data center OS virtualization project, and John’s answer is “Choose Hyper-V or XenSource because they work together,” well that comment could end up costing the customer much more in the long run than just their annual Gartner subscription fees. Analysts are excellent authoritative resources, but always do your research, just in case one of them is a little off on their technical details.

Well, I’m finally getting back into the routine of things after MMS last week, and what a week it was. This was my first trip to MMS and it was definitely one of the best (if not the?) conferences I’ve ever been to, right up there with various SANS shows. And props to having it overlap Interop, which gave it an excellent contrast point: small, focused show vs. large, all-encompassing show. I had a great time with my session, got some good questions, and already looking forward to next year.

There’s been a lot of talk about what MS revealed in their keynote and launched last week:

• SCOM Cross Platform Support: The ability to manage non-Microsoft platform. This is an excellent first step for building a complete data center management platform. They’re opening up their platform all of us that have heterogeneous data centers. I bump into an extremely small number of people that have standardized on one platform in the data centers, so this is officially a Good Idea(TM). And beyond the obvious, the fact that the *nix agents are open is another smart move.
• SCVMM Supports VMware: The big news from the show, although we knew it was coming from Rakesh. And if you combine this with an OpsMan agent, then you can spin up *nix images through VMware and manage them as soon as they come up. Very cool.

There’s obviously a lot of good that came out of last week for all of us, especially as we all tread down our respective paths towards building the true Virtual Data Center. However, it wasn’t all roses; there were some key pieces missing from the System Center suite. Chris Wolf sums up what System Center is supposed to do perfectly:

“System Center provides management of the entire software stack: application, OS, hypervisor, and hardware.”

Chris is spot-on about SC, but that’s not the entire software stack; the two key missing components are Network and Storage. And likewise, these were the two conspicuously absent categories from the keynote and announcements last week.

As I’ve said before (I actually think it follows “Good Morning” to my co-workers every morning along with my coffee;), data centers are built for application delivery. It’s great if you can manage the server and hypervisor running the apps, but if you can’t manage the applications as they go in and out of the data center then you really don’t have a complete software or data center management solution. And even though they brought in some extremely cool, necessary, and market-changing technologies to the SC family last week, they need to also bring in the network and storage (in front of and behind the app, respectively). Before you tell SCVMM to spin up a new image because your Sharepoint app is unresponsive, you need to know what’s going on with the network. Then you need to know what spinning up that new image is going to mean to the storage and network services. Are there VLAN issues? Can your new image access the correct portion of your iSCSI network?

Bottom line from the show: there was a ton of buzz around SCVMM in general and everyone was talking about how to use SCCM, SCOM, and SCVMM to create a complete solution. And those three pieces can provide a complete solution - build, monitor, manage, and deploy - if the rest of the application stack was part of the solution. Networking and storage are critical to all apps, and thus critical to managing a complete application delivery infrastructure. Now if you wanted to give the System Center + Network + Storage solution a name…oh I don’t know…say, the “Virtual Data Center”, then it would be ok with me.

Two Disclaimers:

1. This is nothing more than an “I’m catching up with a ton of stuff after two weeks off the grid and I’m tired” rant, so you’ve been warned.
2. I’m not in the habit of slamming things. Everything has a purpose somewhere. More specifically stated, one of my rules with technology is “Don’t blame the technology because of the implementation.” This is not a slam, just a frustrated observation.

I truly do believe that Parallels is onto something with their technology. Virtual containers are going to fill the void between full OS virtualization and straight application virtualization (app hypervisors, streaming apps, SaaS, etc). OS virtualization is usually overkill (although still good for what it does when it’s absolutely needed; remember, I don’t blame the technology… ;). Having a stripped down portable virtual kernel environment is going to be critical for applications that can’t run virtual-aware. Sure, initiatives like Oslo are going to great for excavate and rebuild applications, but we all know that those aren’t viable alternatives for most apps (goodness knows that’s true in the security market, which is why we have WAFs today). So containers (or kernel virtualization as I usually refer to them) are a good alternative. And Parallels, with their acquisition of Virtuozzo, are primed to lead that front.

However (and it’s a big however), they need to get their marketing and publicity ducks in a row. To me, a company’s website is the de facto place for technical information about their solutions. Let’s face it: implementing virtualization is a technical task, not a marketing task. When I want to find out how Parallels has implemented kernel virtualization with Virtuozzo, I expect to find that information on their site. When I want to know, in under 3 minutes, why I should choose Virtuozzo over ESX or Hyper-V, I need to be able to read it on my own. I’m a big boy, I can make my own decisions; I don’t need someone from the company to call me and explain it.

So what am I getting at (I’ve almost forgotten in my spun-up rant state)? Parallels has, IMO, mislead me twice now on what their technology does (or rather what their technology doesn’t do). Both of these events have stopped my testing dead in its tracks:

1. Virtuozzo Containers only runs on very specific Linux distros and Windows platforms. You may be thinking “hey, that’s no big deal,” and I would mostly agree with you. But they don’t mention that on their site. No kidding, I had to call them to get a list of which distros would work. To boot (no pun intended), they do a terrible job of separating technologies based on host platforms. I run a data center, I want to know what software will run on which host platforms immediately. I don’t have time to download, install, and try only to find out I have to repeat that process because they don’t document their running environment. Just tell me up front so I don’t waste my time. If you have to run on Win2003 because you own the kernel and you can’t run on Vista with 2003 support enabled for the binaries, or you don’t like the I/O kernel patch I installed in my RHEL farm, then just tell me.
2. Parallels Server Beta 4 won’t run Leopard virtually on a Win platform but will on a Mac. Ok, again, I’m sure there are good technical reasons for this. But for the love of all things holy, please don’t send me an email that generically says “now runs Leopard on Leopard!” and a link to download a Windows binary without an explicit explanation.

I can find a podcast on their site on how to protect my business in 3 clicks. Why can’t I find a quick list of what they do and what they don’t do, what they support and what they don’t support? What are they trying to hide? Sure, if I’m a Service Provider CIO and I tell my IT staff that I just head about this Parallels thing and want to find out if it will work for our customers, great. But I’m not. Like the IT staff, I dig through the weeds to test this technology, and after today, I think I’m done with Parallels. Fool me once, you’re fault; fool me twice…

Nothing gets me more frustrated than bad marketing; it’s not rocket science. They’re already fighting a huge uphill battle. Why do they sink to these levels?

And please remember: this is just one person’s tired and frustrated opinion. It’s entirely possible that in my excitement to test these new technologies that I glossed over some disclaimer text about platforms, but I know that Hyper-V requires Intel VT-x enabled to run, and that ESX won’t run on laptop SATA drives. How do I know? Because the vendors clearly state it in their marketing and on their websites. So when I build an ESX box, I make the correct choices from the get-go. Don’t make me jump through hoops and waste time to test your software; tell me how you work out of the gate. Otherwise I get frustrated and write a blog rant about it, although I still know how to be up front with disclaimers.

Tomorrow: My thoughts on the MMS keynote announcements.

With all the technology we all work with and talk about, it’s the smallest things that remind us that everything is error prone. John Peterson, CEO of Montego Networks and blogger at vmwaresecurity.com, posted a comment on April 1st to my post about their new software switch security VMs and built-in hypervisor security. Well that comment was lost in the ether until today. So click on through to the original post to read John’s insightful feedback where he answer a good bit of my questions. And I love his (paraphrased) “it may not be elegant but it’s a great start” response; touche.

Now I’m off to find the virtual gremlin in Wordpress that’s stealing our comments. Makes me wonder how many more there may be…

WARNING: I’m all riled up today and in a mood, so this is going to get long. Read at your own peril, and grab some coffee.

In an alternate life, I was a Linux bigot. No computer was coming into my house or sitting on my desk that didn’t run Linux. My WiFi AP was a Linux laptop that bridged between two PCMCIA cards; I tried to convince my wife that Gnome had everything she needed; I spent all of my free time compiling new graphic drivers to make sure I had fluid transparency in my SSH connection windows. But Linux ultimately got it wrong: there are far fewer people that want to spend their weekends tweaking CLI arguments than want their computers to “just work,” and ultimately I realized I was wasting my life trying to figure out why my ethernet driver didn’t come back up after I resumed from hibernate. I wanted my computing (personal and professional) environment to “just work.”

So one day, relatively out of the blue, I sucked up my pride, dropped a new hard drive in the Dell Latitude, and installed XP. And oh my friends, how the sun shone that day! Within an hour, I had a fully functioning portable computer: the sound worked and didn’t phase in and out when I as accessing the network; I could access the full resolution of my graphics card and move beyond 800×600; I didn’t have to manually edit a text file when I moved from one wireless network to another; presentations and projectors miraculously starting working (Andre: I’ve been there many, many times). In fact, everything “just worked.”

And most importantly, I became productive. After tooling around with XP on the removable hard drive for a few weeks, I realized that with Linux I was wasting so much time fussing with my working environment that I was actually becoming counter-productive. And suddenly, my laptop became a tool to get my job done rather than a machine that always needed TLC. Now granted I’ve had to defend my “Windows is just better” decision to my close circle of Linux supporters (Tux tattoos and all), but it’s been so worth the inner-circle humiliation and ridicule. But it didn’t have to be that way: There was a time when Linux was <this close> to focusing on the why people use computers instead of how computers work. SuSE and Mandrake where the closest to building a plug-and-play Linux distro for the masses, but ultimately they forgot about the normal users. And don’t me started on Red Hat, who I personally blame for the Linux downfall (Full Disclosure: I am an RHCE, so I’m not just ranting and raving on this one).

And likewise, data centers are just larger tools. I’ve talked on here before about the VDC as a service, and it’s all the same thing: use a tool designed to solve a goal for that goal and then move on. So you can imagine how torqued up I get when I get in conversations where people say “Oh, well this solution would work better if it ran on Linux instead of Microsoft…” Maybe for some people, yes, but for others it would run better on Solaris, or in Java, or on z/OS. Who freakin’ cares what it runs on as long as it accomplishes the goal?! Imagine how productive we could all be with full VDCs that didn’t require us to spend all day trying to get one API to talk to another, only to find out that we have to do it again 3 times for 3 different APIs to support everyone’s virtual OS infrastructure.

If the VDC is going to emerge as the disruptive powerhouse I think it will, we all have to put our biases aside and focus on the end goal: A DC that sucks in requests and spits out responses. Sure, we’ll have the Linux team and the Windows team, the VMware team and the Hyper-V team, the Cisco team and the F5 team, the network tap team and the SPAN port team, the plenum cable team and the non-plenum cable team…you get where I’m going with this. The VDC can not become a reality if we’re all fighting religious wars. So check your biases at the door and choose a tool that solves the individual “baby step” problem you’re trying to solve in your VDC today, move on to the next problem, rinse, repeat.

Now back to my regularly schedule Apple virtualization research project: Words can not describe the size of the smile on my face when I found the Terminal in Finder and opened it in Pro mode. A 50% transparent command line with bash! ls -alFrt works! Oh sweet *nix, why did I ever leave you?