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Opinion: Respect For Customers Still Counts In The Virtual World: Page 2 of 3

  • IBM last week rolled out the Virtualized Hosted Client Infrastructure, a blade server that employs virtualization to allow a single blade in the hosted environment to support up to 15 users, whereas blade servers without virtualization technology typically map one blade to one client. Another significant feature in IBM's approach is its inclusion of key partners to deliver this new solution: VMware's virtual-infrastructure software and Citrix's Presentation Server are integrated into the product.
  • Earlier this month, Altiris introduced a type of management software called Software Virtualization Solution, designed to accelerate PC-based application rollouts by eliminating application conflicts. The company said its intent is "to create virtual applications": "We're looking to decouple the application from the operating system to create virtual applications that can basically run without an installation process."
  • A new storage-virtualization system from IBM is allowing a bank to consolidate multiple disk storage arrays into a single virtual-storage pool, which was an essential breakthrough for a business with a rapidly growing base of online customers demanding increasingly sophisticated and time-sensitive banking and bill-payment services. Also driving the new approach was the sheer bulk of storage capacity needed to meet the needs of those customers: in the past year, the bank's storage capacity has soared from 2 terabytes to 12 terabytes.
  • But to me, the most intriguing of all these recent virtualization efforts comes from Microsoft because while its imminent move certainly involves cool new technologies, it also includes an upheaval in pricing strategy and licensing terms, two topics that have become sources of increasing irritation among customers. Microsoft has traditionally licensed its server software based on the number of processors in a hardware server, even if, as often happens within virtual computing environments, the software isn't always running on all of the available processors. Rather than saying, "Too bad, so sad," Microsoft is acknowledging that some customers end up paying license fees for software that's often inactive, and is changing the pricing model so that customers (starting Dec. 1) will have the option of specifying how many virtual processors the Microsoft server software will actually run on, rather than having to pay for all of the actual processors that the hardware happens to have.
  • Check out this quote from Andy Lees, Microsoft's VP of marketing for its server and tools business, when asked by my colleague Rick Whiting how the company can enforce the licensing plan to ensure that a customer paying for a four-processor license isn't running it on an eight-processor system: "The same way we do today. We trust customers to do it."