match to our needs to create a single integrated desktop—DaaS, or Desktop as a Service: one vendor for the presentation layer, a different one for application virtualization, and a third one for the hypervisor.

The more interesting point is that from an IT management point of view, the hypervisor is getting less and less interesting. Worry less about where you get your hypervisor from and more about where you get your management 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.

mache cReeGeR: It’s like the TPC^c 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.

It was mentioned that some companies were putting management tools together over the cloud, and that Microsoft is developing a multi-hypervi-sor management console.

aLLen ste WaRt: Microsoft is an established system-management company and look at managing systems holistically. Initially we focused on the workload and were moving the VM based on the performance of the VM. Now we’re looking at the workload that’s running in the VM and making decisions based on that.

tom BishoP: This is the hard part. You want to make the decision based on application behavior, not on VM behavior.

mache cReeGeR: You want service-level agreements (SLAs).

tom BishoP: The problem is that by and large SLAs are not available today.

aLLen steWaRt: And that is totally our focus in the system-management space.

simon cRosBy
virtualization is
a feature set, not
an objective. it’s
a technology that
we should look at
in the same way
as compilers or
tcP/iP stacks.
it’s a passing fad.
the real benefits
will come out of
the overall ability
to compose
and manage
an application
throughout its life
cycle.

c http://www.tpc.org/.

tom 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.

aLLen ste WaRt: Actually in the Microsoft Systems Center world, we don’t require you to do that any more. 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.

mache cReeGeR: So should we expect that over time vendors will define standards around instrumentation for ser-vice-level responsiveness, but that it’s going to take a long time to get there?

simon cRosBy: I don’t think so. Somebody tell me a metric that everybody cares about. Somebody tell me what this means.

tom BishoP: It’s capacity, throughput, and response level.

aLLen ste WaRt: And one of the ways
you do that is by standardizing higher up
in the stack. When developers are build-
ing these applications, this SLA model
is composed with the application.
steve BouRne: One of the things that
I have heard from the NANOG^d guys
(North American Network Operators
Group) is that you are nuts if you’re
running your desktop in a non-virtu-
al-machine environment and visiting
random Web sites. So my question is
do you see security on the desktop as a
model?

simon cRosBy: Yes. There are two layers of virtualization that are useful there. One is the isolation between applications and OSs, where applications are streamed to desktops. The other is having separate VMs for different contexts—a VM for a user’s personal context, which can be thrown away and restarted again, and another VM for their corporate work.

People like me want applications to work on an airplane. Another category of user is the task worker. I think there’s a ton of different technologies that could provide viable solutions but I think it’s too early to comprehensively understand which ones apply to specific user categories.

d http://www.nanog.org/.