fine to be SMBs—you don’t care if it’s Xen, VMware, or Microsoft. You want simplicity, availability, security, and you want something that can be supported by your staff.

aLLen steWaRt: If you’re an SMB and already running Windows Servers 2008, you enable Hyper-V, use the same management tools that you have been using, and depend on the management construct to help you beyond the virtualization platform.

In the SMB market, Microsoft has pushed System Center outside of the enterprise to System Center Essentials. If you have a small amount of servers, buy Essentials, and you can inexpensively manage the platform.

existing player. They challenge the OS guys because virtualization separates them from the hardware; the storage guys because storage management for virtualization is done on the host and that threatens the whole Symantec/ VERITAS model; and the management players, too.

VMware confronts a lot of entrenched interests and threatens them. So VMware could end up as a systems management play, a storage management play, or a big brain that manages the future data center—and that would threaten Cisco or their competitors. The interesting thing for VMware is where does it go from here? Every step they take threatens an established ven-

us or other large enterprises today, but may at some future date. These are the real bleeding edge, radically thinking folks. One of the things we saw was that people are putting management in the software deployment layer on top of EC2.^a

My advice for SMBs able to tolerate offsite data processing is that management options, possibly from third parties, will be available in the not-too-distant future for EC2 and other cloud models and provide management flexibility similar to solutions from VMware, Veridian, and Xen. Even in the cloud, where you literally care about nothing, third-party vendors will come in to provide common abstractions.

tom Bishop

Pho TograPhs by jasoN gardNEr

tom BishoP: I think that’s right. I think you start with what you know, stick with the vendors you know and the technology you know, and it’s going to allow you to get the biggest bang for the least cost.

mache cReeGeR: If you run lots of Oracle would you work backward from Oracle and ask what would work best?

Gustav: No, I’d work backward from the OS level you manage because that’s really what you’re managing. But back to your point of “I’m not worried that there are three hypervisor vendors,” companies should worry less about that because hypervisors from all the vendors are slowly but surely providing the same functionality.

simon cRosBy: But then it’s about virtualization management. As the market leader in a new category, everything that VMware does challenges an

simon crosby

 

dor in an existing market sector.
tom BishoP: SMB players that pur-
chase management software will get
it from the virtualization vendors and
the rest will to do it by hand, which is
what they’ve always done. I am not say-
ing that their management functions
aren’t important. It’s just that the prob-
lems to be solved for the SMB market
are not big enough, hard enough, and
expensive enough for management
companies to address.

mache cReeGeR: Well, what happens to the management business when management companies cede it to virtualization companies on the SMB side and alternatively get squeezed by offerings from the cloud?

Gustav: It’s a counter-trend. One of the things we do at our CTO event in California is to bring in early-stage companies that have little chance to sell to

steve herrod

 

As a classic example, one of the things that I’m most interested in vir-tualizing right now is the desktop. I might actually use Citrix on top of Xen or VMware, or CXD on top of VMware to do that particular function.

The Citrix technology is much better for the presentation layer of virtualization. At the present state of technology, I find VMware’s framework for doing physical–to-virtual migrations and similar functions to be better. In addition to that, I may do an application virtualization layer with a Softgrid-like technology.^b

I might use all three major vendors, depending on their strengths, and

a Amazon’s cloud product offering—http://aws. amazon.com/ec2/.

b http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Appli-cation_Virtualization/.