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VMware-Microsoft Battle Looming
An anonymous reader writes "VMWare released a white paper detailing its concerns with license changes on Microsoft software that may limit the ability to move virtual-machine software around data centers to automate the management of computing work. Two choice quotes: '"Microsoft is looking for any way it can to gain the upper hand," said Diane Greene, the president of VMware.' And, '"This seems to be a far more subtle, informed and polished form of competitive aggression than we've seen from Microsoft in the past," said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. "And Microsoft has no obligation to facilitate a competitor."'"
I manage 100s of VMs with VMWare's Virtual Infrastructure, and I call bullshit on your whole post my good man.
... poor. On other side, the people who have developed their own management for cheap (e.g. blade) hosts farms - feel least urge to switch to VMs from real hosts. For well managed environment with redundant hardware it is really waste to burn CPU cycles of emulation. (*)"
"Actual state of management software is
The actual state of the management software is excellent. Have you used Virtual Center 3? Care to elaborate with your details? I can: it's easy to organize a huge farm of VM's, prioritize them based on their CPU and RAM needs, move VMs from one physical host to another on the fly, generate alerts on nearly anything and customize actions based on those alerts, on and on. There is only one thing I don't like so far about VC/VI, and that is how LUNs on the ESX hosts are managed.
"VMs solve no particular problem, but just propagate problem of poor OS management to another level - hardware/emulated hardware."
It solves two problems off the top of my head: hardware proliferation, and hardware failure.
We have a glut of CPU speed and RAM space, but the chasses surrounding those chips are still expensive. Not just expensive in terms of the box itself, but in the cost of powering and cooling the server as well as the spacial cost of having it in the rack. The solution is to have one physical server do more than one job. The way to do that safely and sanely is to virtualize.
Another major problem VMs solve is hardware failure. Right now, in my own virtual datacenter, I pretty much don't care about anything less than a whole blade going down. If there is a single blip in the hardware, Virtual Infrastructure migrates the VMs off of the faulty hardware automatically, *without interrupting the VMs*. In other words, for 99% of all hardware failures, my VMs keep running and I can swap out the bad physical server without disturbing anything. Zero downtime. I still cluster at the OS level, too, so in reality I am only worried about my whole datacenter being nuked. Similarly, I don't care too much about hardware replacement cycles anymore either. When a warranty expires, I push all the VMs off of the box and unrack it. We unpack the replacement box, rack it & install ESX, and that's it. The Virtual Center will automatically shuffle VMs onto the new hardware.
"In the end, when box is plain hardware you can always pull the plug. Try to emulate that with compromised/erroneous VM which started hogging all system resources from other VMs - and management interface too."
Hehe. 'You try to open the door, but *there's too much blood on the knob!*' You are defining an extremely specific problem and treating it like it's a general issue with virtualization, but I will play along.
Here is what would happen in my environment. First the VC would automatically migrate all of the other VMs away from the crazy VM. Once the crazy VM was isolated, I could pull the plug on the box if I felt like that was my only option. Then I would activate a clone of the VM (I clone every freshly minted server and put the clone on ice--try doing that with nothing but "OS management"), restore data from backup if necessary, and away we go on an fresh, uncompromised server. Meanwhile I can go back and examine the crazy VM at my leisure and have it completely sandboxed.
The state of the art in virtualization is not a single server running a few linux instances, sir. Check out where VMWare (and probably Microsoft) is heading and you will see that things are rapidly evolving. I'm talking a quantum leap in datacenter management here, the biggest thing since commodity hardware.