Tuesday, Nov 11, 2008 — Member News
Free Hypervisors May Not Be The Best Answer
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Even as virtual server software has downscaled to more mainstream, pedestrian platforms, it has retained one premium characteristic: price. While virtualization promises to reduce hardware acquisition costs by consolidating multiple servers onto one physical box, until recently, this came at a steep price, often running thousands of dollars per machine in software licensing. Those days are ending.
John Sloan, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research, notes that he and his colleagues “have been among those who have predicted that hypervisors—the software for carving a physical server into many virtual machines (VMs)—would essentially become a free commodity. In 2007, Info-Tech also predicted that 2008 would be a year that would see a significant increase in competition in the virtualization market. Both predictions have come to pass.” He says that the event triggering a restructuring of VM pricing was Microsoft’s recent release of the Hyper-V hypervisor as part of Windows Server 2008. Microsoft’s initial pricing of $28 per system ignited a price war with industry leader VMware which promptly undercut Microsoft with its free, ESXi hypervisor—a limited version of the company’s top-of-the-line ESX product.
Of course, there’s no free lunch, even in a world fueled by open-source projects and advertising-supported Web services. While the ability to create multiple virtual systems on a single piece of hardware has become a commodity, free for the downloading, the problems associated with managing a potentially chaotic virtualized environment with an exploding number of VMs has become the latest vendor battleground. In essence, virtualization has adopted an all-too-familiar business model, pioneered by shaving razors and blades, but since adopted by everything from inkjet printers to online applications. Give away the base product and make money on associated options, accessories, consumables, and services.
Basic Hypervisors: Tools For Server Consolidation
The ability to host multiple operating environments on a server is a necessary step to a fully virtualized environment, but not a complete solution. “Think of the hypervisor as an engine, not a car,” says Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix (www.citrix.com). Crosby, who founded XenSource to commercialize and augment the open-source Xen virtualization platform, now sees free open-source hypervisors as a development platform, not something suitable for production applications. “It’s analogous to buying a kit car,” he notes.
While free, open-source hypervisors appeal to the tech-savvy Linux cognoscenti, most enterprises are uncomfortable running production platforms on them and look to commercial alternatives. Fortunately, true to Sloan’s predications, hypervisors, the “engine” under a VM, have indeed become nearly costless commodities. Free products enable server hardware to host multiple guest operating systems with little to no performance penalty; however, they merely provide an inkling of the sorts of server management flexibility virtualization holds in store.
Sloan notes that there are actually two classes of hypervisor. Type 1, or so-called bare-metal hypervisors, run directly on a server without needing an intermediary OS. Type 2, or hosted hypervisors, require the support of an underlying OS. Type 1 products offer greater performance and higher consolidation ratios but have historically been more expensive; however, the recent Hyper-V-fueled price war has eliminated this cost premium. Yet Sloan cautions that “even with ‘free’ hypervisors, there is still a cost per VM for licensing” because each guest OS running Windows Server or a commercial Linux variant such as RedHat requires a license.
Crosby sees free hypervisors as an inducement to get IT shops familiar with virtualization technology and as a vehicle for basic server consolidation onto fewer, more capable systems. Unfortunately, this simplest form of server virtualization does nothing to improve administrative efficiency—even though you may be running 10 virtual systems on one physical server, you’ll still be managing 10 systems. Sloan notes that this scenario can still be beneficial for SMEs upgrading older hardware because virtualization allows 10 or 20 existing servers to be consolidated onto one or two new machines.
Create A Virtualized Environment With VM Management Software
Once IT departments become accustomed to running multiple VMs on a single system, the possibilities for enhanced reliability, capacity management, and disaster recovery become apparent. This is where commercial virtualization software vendors are now focusing their efforts. According to Galen Schreck, analyst at Forrester Research, “In addition to the hypervisor itself, you need two extra classes of tools to successfully deploy and manage a virtual environment: migration/capacity planning tools and a system management platform.” While he says that most vendors offer tools to migrate between physical and virtual servers at no cost, products to automate load balancing or disaster recovery of virtual servers or advanced capacity planning and management software are certainly not gratis.
“As hypervisors become more like a commodity, it is the management software for a virtual machine infrastructure that will be a differentiator,” says Sloan. “Free or nearly free hypervisors are not the same thing as free virtualization,” with competition moving from the realm of hypervisors to comprehensive virtualization management. While each vendor’s free product is adequate for a basic server consolidation project, companies looking to achieve other benefits of virtualization, such as disaster recovery, agile capacity management, and load balancing, will need to purchase a commercial product.
by Kurt Marko
Tags: info tech, info-tech research group, sme, virtualization, vm management