Zachmann.NET
Virtues and Vices
The cleanest wins for virtualization come not in production
infrastructure, but in development platforms.
Sure, Microsoft's intense development and marketing efforts around virtualization are, at least in some part, about regaining leadership and market share from VMware. Sure, there's no question that VMware, founded just 10 years ago in 1998, has raced ahead of Microsoft. VMware's data center and desktop virtualization products are more widely used and generate more revenue than the Microsoft alternatives. Redmond is playing catch-up in both market share and underlying technology.
But Microsoft's virtualization product and technology push is more than just a response to a savvy competitor. Some very smart people at Microsoft recognize just how important virtualization is to the future of client and server OSes.
Microsoft is right to make virtualization a central element of its operating system platform strategy. It recognizes the importance of virtualization management as part of the overall network and systems management of the enterprise IT infrastructure. And it realizes that there's more than one form of virtualization that matters. Microsoft has done a great job identifying and publicizing the six key aspects of virtualization:
- Virtualization Management
- Server Virtualization
- Desktop Virtualization
- Storage Virtualization
- Presentation Virtualization
- Application Virtualization
The Quiet Campaign
Microsoft has quietly undertaken a campaign around virtualization similar to those around the Internet in the 1990s and security in the early part of this decade. In both cases, inspired by a competitive challenge, Microsoft made a push to drive the capabilities related to the challenge deep into Microsoft's operating system and application software.
The challenge from Netscape inspired Microsoft to make Internet Explorer and Internet Information Server the market-leading browser and Web server platforms they are today. The challenge from Java application servers -- and other platforms claiming superior security -- eventually put Microsoft into the anti-malware business. It also encouraged Microsoft to vastly improve the security of its products.
If past is prologue -- and more often than not, it is -- there's every reason to expect that Microsoft will achieve comparable success with its virtualization push. The released to manufacturing of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and shipment of Hyper-V Server and Microsoft Application Virtualization, are important steps down this road for Microsoft. Each new release improves and strengthens Microsoft's case as a comprehensive supplier of the entire spectrum of virtualization platforms and tools.
Some of the biggest and most direct financial payoffs of virtualization derive from its use in facilitating application and storage server consolidation. In general, the greater the lack of past planning and discipline in an IT shop, the greater the payoff will be from using virtualization to consolidate servers. Less kindly put, the sloppier an IT organization has been, the better the business case for cost savings through virtualization.
So the good news is that astute use of virtualization can often reduce total server infrastructure costs. The bad news is that enormous cost savings nearly always mean that someone was not doing a very good job using IT resources in the first place.
The flip side of this coin is that virtualization is neither inherently lower in cost nor inherently more efficient in using resources relative to non-virtualized systems. On the contrary, virtualization always brings incremental costs in system resources. Even in its most efficient forms, virtualization adds another resource-consuming layer to the system stack. Virtualization always, fundamentally, costs more. It justifies its incremental cost, not by reducing total resource loads, but by using resources more rationally and more cost-effectively than they have previously been used.
Developer Imperative
There are substantial financial benefits to be gained from investments in your virtualization infrastructure. Realizing those benefits, however, requires that the benefits of virtualization exceed the costs. You can't naively assume that virtualization will automatically reduce your total resource requirements. It does not.
Actually, the cleanest wins for virtualization come not in production infrastructure, but in development platforms. This is where the least ambiguous, if not the largest, benefits are found: using virtualization to create development and test platforms far more versatile than anything possible without it.
Do you need to load up and test entirely different system configurations, including totally different operating systems with different software versions, back-end storage and even hardware configurations? Then virtualization is for you. Virtualization is a developer's dream. It gives developers readily adaptable development, test and deployment platforms far more easily and cheaply than any prior alternative.
This reason alone is more than enough to make it worth your while -- as a developer -- to get to know Microsoft's newest generation of virtualization capabilities.
About the Author
William F. Zachmann, born before the modern digital computer was invented, has lived with them (and made his living off of them) all his life. He was director of research for The Forum Corp. in the mid-'70s and senior vice president of corporate research at International Data Corp. (IDC) in the '80s. He has a copy of Windows 1.0 that Bill Gates signed for him the night it was rolled out at Comdex Fall '85. Zachmann is now director of Canopus Research Inc. He programs in C# using Visual Studio 2005 with a focus on ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005.