VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

This week I got the question if I could draw up a short lists of pro’s and cons for MED-V. Since I’m doing virtualization in the widest possible way, this fits well in my job description.

But heck, what a question! Before I could even try to  answer the question I really had to dive into the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization solution (hence MED-V) which is part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). Sure, I already seen some comments on the internet about MED-V and I already was somewhat biased. Still I tried to make it an objective report.

Let’s start with what it is not in my opinion. Although it enables management of virtualized desktops it is not a full blown desktop virtualization solution like XenDesktop and VMware View.

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At the end of May of this year we wrote a article concerning Hypervisor comparisons and we got a lot of positive feedback on it. The downside to that is that people want an update as soon as one of the companies launches a new version of its product, and who can blame them. However the issue is that this takes a lot of research and because of that, a lot of time. And because two of us are ill and in bed wearing a sombrero and the other two are extremely busy, we simply don’t have that time right now.

However, Scott Lowe has written an excellent article on the feature comparison between VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 which is a must read for everybody who’s advising customers on hypervisors.

It’s not as extensive as the Enterprise hypervisor comparison we did earlier but it gives you a good image how both products relate to each other. To extend the picture I added a list of supported operating systems.

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Last Friday we had a session with Microsoft about ‘the Cloud’. We already heard a lot about clouds, but I must admit that both Microsoft presentations that day were refreshing.

Every cloud provider does his best to bring cloud thinking to the mind, but what exactly is ‘the Cloud’ ? There seems to be more than 76 different definitions for cloud computing.  While Googling for some background information I came across a quote from Larry Ellison (Oracle) which he did at Oracle OpenWorld:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing [..] The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

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Yesterday I attended the ‘TechNet – Get Ready for all Microsoft virtualization products’ session in Utrecht (NL). This was a new style paid (€99,-) Technet session, max of 20-30 professionals in a classroom. The program consisted of Hyper-V, App-V, Med-V, Terminal services and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Hyper-V
We started with an introduction to Hyper-V, luckily the trainer had updated his lab to Hyper-V 2, so we could check out the new features which should compete with VMware. After explaining the architecture, networking and storage it was very obvious that this was the standard Microsoft propaganda. They were comparing Hyper-V 2 to VI 3.5, which were practically the same, but of course Microsoft’s hyper-V solution was much cheaper. Grrrrr! Again, when you do a comparison, do a fair comparison and compare Hyper-V to vSphere 4 (because the release is not far away I will allow Microsoft to use Hyper-V 2 in this comparison). Then the numbers are very different and maybe the VMware solution costs more but obviously you will get a lot more.

I also disliked the insinuation that when they compare a microkernel hypervisor to a monolithic hypervisor Microsoft  makes it look like VMware’s hypervisor is one out of the stone ages. Play fair, win the fight based on your own strong points.

When he explained the Hyper-V I/O architecture with the parent partition, VM Bus, synthetic drivers, etc, I asked him if this didn’t introduce a singe point of failure and a possible I/O bottleneck. In true MS fashion he denied both, claiming that I/O was tested and you shouldn’t install Exchange in the parent partition. Duh!

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Browsing through Planet V12n I stumbled upon a great article by Steve Kaplan, which I didn’t want to keep from you.

As we all know we’re in the midst of a hypervisor battle. VMware vs (Microsoft / Citrix).

VMware focuses on their broad range of products for server-, desktop- and application virtualization including the necessary management and automation tools and disaster recovery solutions to enable the virtualization of a complete data center and desktops.

Microsoft focuses on the cost perspective and claims that their Hyper-V solution is cheaper then VMware’s vSphere.

No problems so far but if you want to compare cost, keep the fight clean and do an honest comparison. In his article Steve points out the areas were he thinks the comparison is not fair or not clear. I’ve read the comparison multiple times and I must agree this is one of those cases where Microsoft does not play fair as we encountered earlier with Citrix’s misleading comparison of HA, 2.

In my opinion a great job by Steve and a must read article.

As you may have noticed, we at VMGuru.nl have been extremely busy the last few week. Tons of work accompanied with the right amount of stress, illness and personally the build of my new house. This certainly shows in the amount of article we posted lately.

But I try to keep up-to-date, certainly with the release of vSphere 4. So today I read a great article on vTeardown by E. Horschman which I did not want to keep from you.

The article describes the quick migration feature in Microsoft’s Hyper-V, compares this to the live migration feature in the new version and warns customers on the  ‘Quick’ features provided in the next version of Hyper-V.

In the past Microsoft claimed that their Quick Migration feature was enough and Live Migration, as VMware’s vMotion, was not needed.  In vTeardown’s article you can see how quickly Microsoft changes its opinion as soon as they have finally added the feature themselves.

‘Now that Microsoft has live migration on their Hyper-V roadmap, we’re starting to learn that they never really thought much of Quick Migration themselves.  I heard Mark Russinovich, one of their technical luminaries who gave a talk about Hyper-V R2 futures, actually come out and say what we all knew to be true, “Quick Migration was our first attempt to do a live migration, and to put a nice spin on it, we called it Quick Migration. [...] Even though we said, [...] ‘trust us this is really cool, this is what you want, you don’t want instant, that’s not as good as this, this is quick,  but people didn’t seem to buy that, so we ended up [...] implementing live migration, so that Quick Migration stuff is crap, this is really good.’”  Mark’s honesty got some laughs from the packed session, but it puts us on notice that we should be skeptical when Microsoft tags a feature as “Quick”.

Not very trustworthy in my opinion. E. Horschman agrees and adds a warning to beware of Microsoft’s ‘Quick’ features as they now use the same b*lls*!t motivation on their new Quick Storage Migration feature.

So check out ‘When Microsoft Says “Quick”, Do They Really Mean “Crap”?‘.

The last few weeks many blogs and forums have spend time on hypervisor comparisons and I have read tons of articles on the subject. Many only compare hypervisors based on performance, features or cost. I think it’s a bit more complicated then that. After Citrix announced that their XenServer product is available for free I spend a fair deal of my time explaining to colleagues and clients that this is a hoax and that cost is not the only reason to base their decision on. Especially in the case of XenServer the choice and the long term effects make it a little bit more complicated.

When I read Chris Wolfe’s article on ‘Production-class Hypervisor Evaluation criteria‘ and saw his VMworld Europe 2009 presentation (DC15) I found someone who read my mind. Chris knows what he is talking about and uses the right criteria to select the right hypervisor for the job. Now you probably think ‘These VMGuru.nl guys are VMware fans so here we go again‘ but the opposite is true.

Like Chris I think every situation has its own ideal solution and you should select the hypervisor based on well-considered selection criteria and because my employer, Centric, focuses on clients with 500+ workstations/employees these criteria are Enterprise-class hypervisor selection criteria.

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Although this has nothing to do with virtualization I do not want to keep this from you. This weekend I tried to update one of my desktops from Windows XP to Windows 7 build 7077. Under the assumption that the Windows 7 setup would warn me in case this was a not supported upgrade path I inserted the DVD and started the setup.

All looked well and the setup started normally. I was somewhat surprised that I could upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7, on the other hand Vista has never been very populair so it could be a wise move from Microsoft to provide a direct upgrade path from XP.

This joy and happiness didn’t last very long as the Windows 7 setup reported that this upgrade was not supported. Again I was a little bit surprised as the setup did start and it even started to copy new files to my Windows XP hard drive. Joy and hapiness were certainly out the window when I discovered that the Windows 7 setup destroyed my boot record/settings and my previous OS would not start.

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Last March I wrote an article on vendors  trying to market their products by bashing the competition and not having a clean discussion. At that moment I thought ‘Am I the only one making this into a problem?’  Today I read a great post by Gabrie van Zanten of Gabes Virtual World and it seems I am not alone!

Gabrie watched a video on Microsoft’s Virtualiztion Team Blog in which two gentlemen try to bust 10 VMware ESX vs MS Hyper-V myths. I intentionally use the word ‘try’ because they do a pretty terrible job.

They compare the current release of VMware ESX 3.5 to the R2 version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V which still has to be released (release 2010(?)). Now this is something that sounds familiar, this is exactly what I commented on in this article. Citrix comparing VMware and Citrix HA and not explaining that Citrix HA is Live Migration. If the MS gentlemen want to do some real mythbusting, try comparing VMware ESX 3.5 U4 to Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 (both out now) or compare VMware ESX4/vSphere to Microsoft Hyper-V 2.0 (both not publically available yet).  But I think they’re too chicken to do that and they are right. Microsoft would come out way behind if you do a real comparison and claiming to have an enterprise ready hypervisor.

In my opinion in these kind of marketing campaigns you can recognize good vendors/product from bad ones. When you are not operating out of your own strengths and weaknesses but need to stoop down to bashing the competition to try to look good, you’re a myth yourself.

Want to see what all the fuss is about read the complete article in which Gabrie busts some mythbuting himself, look here!

So , Gabrie thanks, I’m not alone any more