The Art of IT: The Virtual Battleground

These are busy times here at NWC. May marked our re-entry into the events business with a four-city road show on data center design. We talked about trends in power and cooling, virtualization as well as service and performance management. Executive editor Bruce Boardman, lab director Ron Anderson and I played to packed houses, and were particularly impressed with the Q&A sessions that followed our presentations.

It seems data centers are hot (pun intended) these days. We found a good many of you have a handle on the nuances of power and cooling. You can no longer depend on pressurized raised floors to deliver sufficient cooling for today's high-density servers and storage systems, so we had some excellent discussions on alternatives.

Virtualization is another matter. There's a good deal of confusion about the pros, cons and even the definitions of processor virtualization and operating system virtualization. Both have been around a while, but processor virtualization has received the bulk of attention lately, through the growing popularity of VMWare and Xen, and the recent virtual technology hardware advances announced by Intel and AMD--which should improve performance and security.

OS virtualization, which provides each application with its own view of OS resources such as memory, I/O, shared libraries and--in the case of Windows--the registry, has gotten less press, but can be just as useful. If the goal is protecting apps from each other and creating an environment where it's easy to move applications (versus the application and its OS) between systems, then OS virtualization is attractive. On the server side, Polyserve and SWsoft's Virtuozzo are products to watch. On the client side, Softricity and Altiris have made the most noise.

Microsoft's Virtual Road Map

I bet most data centers will end up using both technologies, and it turns out I'm not alone. In late May, Microsoft made some noise of its own by announcing its virtualization road map at its WinHEC conference. Microsoft revealed it will include processor virtualization with Vista server--albeit 180 days after the initial release. Also as part of that road map, Microsoft announced its intention to purchase Softricity and announced availability of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which was known as Carmine during its development.

Carmine is an answer to VMWare's VirtualCenter, the market's current leading virtualization management tool. As with most Microsoft version 1.0 products, a lot of work must be done on System Center Virtual Machine Manager before it catches the competition, but the product has the right fundamental base--and it's never a good idea to count out Microsoft from any market it wants badly enough.

Although Microsoft's road map makes sense otherwise, its positioning for Softricity is bizarre. The release claims Softricity technology will allow for application streaming to Vista, which should speed the transition to the new OS. Because Softricity runs applications in containers, we can assume Microsoft is telling us not all Windows applications will run on Vista. That's quite a revelation, but it's also probably not quite true. My guess is that Microsoft bought Softricity to help with its software-as-a-service efforts (otherwise known as all things "Live"). The Softricity technology would let Microsoft easily download not-so-thin client applications onto any client running Windows, thereby providing a reasonable way to deliver highly responsive client-side apps.

Whatever the real reason for the Softricity purchase, Microsoft's road map will leave the market with even more options to ponder. VMWare, the Xen community and Microsoft will be locked in a battle for the foreseeable future. That's good news for us: We'll be back on the road in the fall with another four-city tour on these topics.

Art Wittmann is editor in chief of Network Computing. Write to him at [email protected].0