Behind the virtual curtain at VMware

This week I met with Raghu Raghuram, vice president datacenter and desktop platform products at VMWare, to talk about the company’s recent decision to give away VMware GSX Server for free under the VMware Server name, its recent issuance of the free VMware Player and what’s behind the virtualization vendor’s free-for-all strategy.

This is a somewhat detailed recap of our discussion, so if you want to skip through it I’ve boldfaced the salient points.

GSX Server is VMware’s “hosted” virtualization software, which runs on top of an operating system such as Linux or Windows. The vendor’s high-end ESX Server product sits on the bare metal (no underlying OS required) and offers better performance and a suite of management tools for more advanced uses.

When VMware Server ships in the first half of 2006 and is in beta now; GSX Server will be discontinued. So why is VMware rechristening GSX to VMware Server 1.0 and give it away?

“It’s a market expansion strategy first and foremost. As more companies come up to speed we want to be there,” says Raghuram. As virtualization becomes more popular VMware wants customers to reach for its baseline product first – and not others such as the open source Xen or Microsoft Virtual Server. Initially administrators new to virtualization will use it for single-server partitioning, says Raghuram. From there he hopes they will step up to the premium ESX Server and the VirtualCenter product suite.

“Virtual infrastructure virtualizes a farm of servers. That’s where the value is going, the benefit of utilization, downtime avoidance, disaster recovery and those sorts of things,” he says. According to a VMware survey of 2,000 customers, 25% are standardizing on virtualization infrastructure for all of their x86-based server applications. “We have customers who have got what they call a VM first policy,” he says. The trend started last year, he says, and a few large customers have virtualized as much as 70% of their servers so far.

Once everything is virtualized, VMWare’s optional tools for managing across those VMs become much more attractive.

VMware Server
VMware Server isn’t just GSX Server warmed over. It adds support for 64-bit guest OSes, supports Intel’s Virtualization Technology (which gives a hardware-assist to virtualization software and will be available in its new processors), and it supports Solaris 10, Red Hat, BSD Unix and Windows. It also offers virtual SMP, a technology that lets administrators present two virtual CPUs to an application.

VMware may also be giving away the hosted VM store as a way to ward off future competitive threats from Microsoft and open source alternatives such as Xen. With the lion’s share of the market and a commanding technological lead, however, VMware has little to worry about on this front in the near future.

VMware Player
That brings us to the now ubiquitous VMware Player, which Raghuram claims has seen one million downloads since its introduction late last year. “This is full virtual machine technology.  We just took the run time environment and made it a free downloadable,” he says. Administrators can use VMware Workstation or VMware Server to generate virtual machines that are self-contained and can run on any Linux or Windows machine equipped with the VMware Player. This creates a new model for software distribution that analysts have compared to Adobe’s PDF format.

The VMware player creates a virtual appliance that overcomes installation hassles. “When you receive [a VM] you don’t have to install the software. You can just directly run it,”  Raghuram says, noting that Oracle has distributed 100,000 copies of its 10G product using the technology.

Using VMware player can isolate software to prevent security problems. The most popular security-related VMware Player application to date is the distribution of the Mozilla browser within a VM. “If you download malicious content you shut down the VM. It’s a safe way to browse the Internet,” Raghuram says. That application, and many other open source programs, can be found on VMware’s Technology Network Web site.

But the VMware Player also adds overhead to the encapsulated application. “The browser appliance is classic enterprise use case, says Raghuram, but it’s not going to a general purpose mechanism for distributing basic application sets in the enterprise.

The free Player is an entre to another product that VMware hopes you’ll pay for.  VMware ACE attaches what the company calls virtual rights management to each VM runtime. The catch: VMware player is “policy free,” so you’ll have to buy ACE for every client that you want to run policy-driven VMs. This strategy breaks a bit with the Acrobat/PDF model. I suspect that a more successful strategy in the long term will be one where the ACE tool is required to create rights-enabled VMs but anyone with a free player can run them.

The Future: Managing the Virtual Server Farm
The future looks bright for VMware. On tap for this year are the vendor’s VirtualCenter 2 and ESX Server 3 products. New features will include the long-awaited support for 4 CPUs in a box and up to 16 Gbytes of memory rather than the current 2 CPUs and 4 GBytes per VM. ESX 2.x will add support for IP-based storage, including NAS and iSCSI, in addition to traditional SANs.

The real power of virtualization – and the opportunity for VMware - will come when large collections of servers are virtualized. Its tools that help administrations manage large collections of VMs and the servers on which they run are well ahead of the pack. For example, it s Distributed Resource Scheduler manages a collection of servers running ESX as a single pool of compute resources. “Today if you deploy a virtual machine you deploy on a particular server. In the ESX 3 model you deploy a virtual machine to a farm of servers. The scheduler will automatically allocate the VM anywhere in the server farm. If there is contention it automatically moves it over to another box where the contention is nonexistent,” Raghuram says. The software will also let administrators divide a server farm into logical groups and offer each a collective capacity on the resource so that, for example,  30% of the VMs in the pool can be used by marketing.
           

VMware is also working on its Distributed Availability Services, a “clustering like technology” in ESX Server that automatically migrates and restarts VMs when a physical server fails. “It’s like putting clustering into the infrastructure itself,” Raghuram claims.

So are these collections of VMs starting to look more and more like a grid? Not quite. In a grid applications must be modified to allow work to be performed in parallel on different processors or VMs. Compute grids are more granular but will need to mesh with virtualized server farms. “As applications become distributed and server farms become distributed our software will manage that,” Raghuram says.