ment from. Ask whether the management you need today can be sufficiently provided by your vendor—whether that is the hardware partner, a third party, or the direct vendor.
Is the Microsoft hypervisor going to perform slightly better with small-packet operations than the other competitors? Maybe, but that is just for this release; it’s ephemeral. By the time you’ve installed it, the competitive matrix has changed, so realistically you don’t care. It all comes down to the fact that management technologies change slower than hypervisor technologies. CREEGER It’s like the TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council; http://www.tpc.org/) wars of the early 1990s. Vendors would jockey back and forth after every release, but at some point customers realized that they could not pick a vendor based on who was ahead at any given moment.
As Gustav mentioned, some companies are putting management tools together over the cloud, and Microsoft is developing a multi-hypervisor management console. STEWART Microsoft is an established system-manage-ment company and looks at managing systems holistically. Initially we focused on the workload and were moving the VM based on its performance. Now we’re looking at the workload that’s running in the VM and making decisions based on that. BISHOP This is the hard part. You want to make the decision based on application behavior, not on VM behavior. CREEGER You want SLAs (service-level agreements). BISHOP The problem is, by and large, SLAs are not available today. STEWART And that is totally our focus in the system-management space. BISHOP All you’re going to do is change the problem. Will everybody build all of their applications using Microsoft tools? No. All we’ve done is change the context in which we address the SLA. STEWART Actually, in the Microsoft Systems Center world, we don’t require you to do that anymore. We do require that you have some knowledge about the actual application, and ISVs are building in that knowledge.
Once you have that knowledge, you can then make decisions based on that knowledge.
CREEGER Should we expect that over time vendors will define standards around instrumentation for service-level responsiveness but that it’s going to take a long time to get there?
CROSBY I don’t think so. Somebody show me a metric that everybody cares about. Somebody tell me what this means. BISHOP It’s capacity, throughput, and response level. STEWART One of the ways you do that is by standardizing higher up in the stack. When developers are building these applications, this SLA model is composed with the application.
BOURNE One of the things that I have heard from NANOG (North American Network Operators Group; http://www.nanog.org/) is that you are nuts if you’re running your desktop in a nonvirtual-machine environment and visiting random Web sites. My question is, do you see security on the desktop as a model?
CROSBY Yes. There are two layers of virtualization that are useful. One is the isolation between applications and operating systems, where applications are streamed to desktops. The other is having separate VMs for different contexts—one for a user’s personal context, which can be thrown away and restarted, and another for the user’s corporate work.
People like me want applications to work on an airplane. Another category of user is the task worker. I think there are a ton of different technologies that could provide viable solutions, but it’s too early to comprehensively understand which ones apply to specific user categories. GUSTAV I think you will see the browser itself evolve into a VM architecture. Ultimately the browser will offer the option of either resetting or keeping state.
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