VMware Makes Bid for Virtual Desktops
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Company releases two new products: VMware Fusion for Mac lets Windows applications run on the Mac OS; free VMware Player 2 runs virtual appliances on Windows or Linux.
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(InfoWorld) - The president of virtualization software leader VMwareÂ on Wednesday questioned the strategy of rivals that are integrating virtualization functionality into their operating systems. Diane Greene made the comments at the third and final day of the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. VMware, a subsidiary of storage vendor EMC, doubled revenue in EMC's latest quarterly report, compared to the year ago quarter, as enterprises embrace VMware's virtualization software to make more efficient use of the servers in their data centers. Rivals such as Red Hat and MicrosoftÂ have responded to VMware's dominance by integrating virtualization into coming new operating systems. Red Hat isÂ introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5Â next week and Microsoft's new Windows server OS is due later this year. But Greene, in discussing virtualization with analysts for the investment firm, said she wonders how effective the competition's virtualization features can be. "Traditionally, the operating system manages the hardware and manages the application. Once you virtualize with a hypervisor, that is now what is managing the hardware, not the OS," Greene said, in a presentation that was distributed via webcast. "Now the operating system is just managing the application. So certainly Windows and Red Hat are moving to integrate virtualization into their OS, but part of the value proposition seems to be lost when you do that." Spokespeople for Red Hat did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman for Microsoft said its OS easily supports virtualization. "Resource management has always been part of operating systems. Today, vendors such as Sun, Novell, and Red Hat incorporate virtualization into their operating systems," wrote Patrick O'Rourke, a senior product manager for Windows Server, in a prepared statement. "We are making investments across Microsoft to offer our customers a complete set of virtualization products from the desktop to the datacenter. All assets, both virtual and physical, [are] managed from a single platform." VMware is a strong contributor to the earnings of parent company EMC, which also sells storage hardware and security software. Greene also is executive vice president of EMC. Revenue for VMware increased to $232 million in the fourth quarter of 2006, 101 percent more than a year prior. The growth comes from increased demand for VMware Infrastructure 3, a virtualization software suite for servers and storage networks. VMware's growth prompted EMC to recently announce plans toÂ spin off 10 percent of VMwareÂ in an initial public offering of stock. EMC executives said they anticipate releasing the prospectus later this month for the IPO, expected about midyear. Greene noted the stock sale will benefit VMware employees as well as potential shareholders. "Our stock-based compensation will track our performance and that is the ideal model," she said. Also at the Morgan Stanley conference, Greene acknowledged that virtualizing servers, which helps them use more of their designed capacity, may suppress server sales growth. But she said many customers are upgrading servers as they introduce virtualization into their operations. Those new servers are more high-end products, with greater processing power, and should yield higher margins for server vendors. EMC reported fourth quarter 2006 financial results Jan. 23, posting net income of $389 million, or $0.17 a share, on revenue of $3.21 billion. It edged out analysts estimates of $0.16 a share.
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Dec. 23, 2004. VMware on Thursday rolled out a public beta of its Workstation 5, the newest edition of its desktop virtualization software.
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Dell has announced the availability of virtualization services that aim to help enterprises draw up and implement their virtualization plans -- and it'll help you choose from its own hardware and software portfolio too of course.
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(InfoWorld) - While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes. On the x86 server side, Nationwide reached 5,000 servers two years ago, running all sorts of departmental applications, notes Scott Miggo, vice president of technology solutions. "We were growing at a steady pace, so we wanted to control the server space and the costs for new development," he says. "A lot of our servers had only a 10 percent utilization rate," he notes, wasting much of the server capacity. Roughly half are production application servers and half are test-and-development servers. Today, there are 3,500 physical servers in operation but still 5,000 instances under management. The VMware servers typically host a dozen instances per physical server. "We assume every new server or application can be virtualized," Miggo says. He expects to have more than 1,000 virtual servers running on 89 physical servers by 2009. His team works to tweak I/O requirements or settings for virtual servers that may have trouble supporting I/O needs in their default state, and it works with vendors to support VMs where possible, before falling back to dedicated servers. Lotus Notes and database applications are examples of where the I/O requirements make virtualization not an option. Although it's easier to deploy servers in a virtual environment by using predefined images, "our staffing has stayed pretty much the same," Miggo says, because the same number of servers must still be monitored. The slight reduction in management overhead is offset by the need for VMware experts to manage the VMware environment, in addition to the server instances. And Nationwide learned the hard way that it needs to monitor both its virtual and physical servers, then correlate the two to identify potential trouble spots, Miggo says. Not doing so can make diagnosis hard, since a VM issue may be caused by a physical issue that a server monitor application running in only the VM won't detect. There's also more overhead needed for Miggo's shared-services group to coordinate all users (such as developers and application managers) of a physical server, as changes to the physical server could affect them all -- and because adjustments to one VM's application mix could affect I/O and other physical server performance characteristics. "We now have to coordinate with 12 users," Miggo says. "People were used to having their own boxes and doing their own thing. Now they're more tightly controlled, which they don't like. But they have to follow control processes like code management and release management since what they do could affect others," he notes. The use of EMC's VMotion software to load-balance and failover VMs across physical servers might reduce management, but the insurer is still exploring that technology. One barrier: Its requirement that all server instances run on physical servers with the same CPU family, requiring a consistent server pool to be in place. Nationwide runs its Web servers in a zLinux environment on IBM zSeries mainframes, supporting 650 guest operating systems (VMs) today, with space for another 650 before additional hardware frames would be needed. Often, using z/VM to support the virtualized Web servers requires a different strategy than using VMware to support virtualized Windows servers, Woeckener notes. For example, you might add memory, CPUs, or network cards to increase I/O on a VMware server. On a zSeries, the CPUs just handle executables, offloading physical I/O (such as network bandwidth and resource scheduling) to dedicated processors, so you don't need to worry about performance-sapping overhead incurred by server resource management. Another difference: Increasing heap size can improve performance in a Windows application but also degrade it in a zLinux application, Woeckener says. That's because Linux steals resources wherever it can find them, so any extra heap space is used by Linux for its own purposes, degrading application performance. When the heap size is reduced, Linux seeks resources elsewhere, giving the full heap to the application and improving performance. In both the VMware and z/VM environments, the ease of deploying new virtual servers has led Nationwide to align demand with real needs, as well as to encourage the use of VMs rather than physical servers. Virtual Windows servers cost a requestor $750 per month versus $2,000 per month for a physical server. And zLinux VMs add a per-MIP rate for weekday usage exceeding 15 MIPs. This overage charge steers batch processing to overnight and weekend periods, when overall demand is less, and forces developers of applications in use during the business day to optimize for performance, saving datacenter resources at the same time. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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InfoWorld - A Silicon Valley startup claims to boost computing security and reduce electric costs with a virtual desktop PC that uses no software or processor.
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InfoWorld - In 2006, many enterprise IT groups saw the potential in virtualization, rushed to consolidate servers and subsequently propelled&#160;VMware&#160;software to a market-leading spot. As 2007 begins, VMware&#39;s prices are under attack, just as more CIOs look to virtualization to control server and storage sprawl and tame data center power costs.
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The software giant announces several changes and plans for its Virtual PC software, which lets Windows run on Apple machines.
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VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, announced 4-Way VMware Virtual SMP (symmetric multiprocessing).
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Both VMWare and Parallels update their virtualization software.
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Software maker says users will be able to run Home versions of Vista within a virtual machine. Company had briefed reporters in June on such a move, but then changed its mind.
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VMware, the EMC subsidiary whose software lets a computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously in separate &quot;virtual machines,&quot; has grown a step more ambitious.
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Diane Greene, president of VMware, said she wonders how effective an operating systems-based approach to virtualization can be.
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The software company is now looking to the red-hot virtualization market.
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Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced several moves it says will help its business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualization, and in the process help the software maker catch up with VMware Inc., the frontrunner in that area.
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Attempting to move in on Parallels' turf, VMware on Tuesday announced the pre-order for a previously announced product that allows users to run any x86 operating system simultaneously.
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(Source: VMWare) VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Connects Bell Canada for Optimized Customer Care. Learn how Bell Canada deploys and manages 1,700 server hosted desktops with VMware.