VKernel

Vmware DRS - over exaggerated claims

2009-07-09T09:20:00.006-04:00

Yesterday VMware issued a press release called "VMware vSphere^TM Provides Nearly 50 Percent Application Performance Improvement With VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

VMware DRS Enables Optimal Performance of Virtual Environments, Enabling Higher Consolidation Ratios and Lower Cost per Application

While I agree that load balancing in a virtual datacenter is a must have, I do find some of the claims in this press release a bit over exaggerated. The press release states that "These tests demonstrate how VMware DRS optimizes efficiency while providing guaranteed levels of performance. ". Guatanteed levels of performance? Vmware ESX platform does not provide a guaranteed level of performance. DRS will do its best to balance the worloads by moving VMs from one resource constrained host to a less constarained ESX host if one exists, but if there are no resources available, performance will quickly degrade.

Futhermore DRS only considers memory and cpu resources. In a typical Vmware ESX environmrent the most common resource constraint occures not in memory nor CPU. The most common bottlenecks occures in Storage I/O. As more VMs are added to ESX data center, I/O performed by additional VMs causes problems because all VMs roughly speaking read and write to the same disk. You may say that why would people put all or most VMs on the same disk or more specifcally common storage. The reason is VMotion. In order to take advanatge of vmotion, VMs have to be on common storage.

The press releases then goes on to say "DRS has eliminated the need for administrators to monitor CPU and memory for bottlenecks". Wow. I wish this was the case, but the reality is that DRS is not a substiture for capacity monitoring and capacity planning. Capacity bottlenecks can occur in memory and cpu at level ie. in VM in a host and in cluster or resource pool. what happens when you max out memory or cpu resources in a cluster created by multipe hosts. DRS moving VMs from one host to another will not ease the capacity over load if memory resources are maxed out.

We all love VMware ESX, but I think it is important for our customers to know the truth

The Need for a Capacity Manager

2009-06-30T15:43:00.003-04:00

In this latest article in Computerworld, "Hot Jobs: Capacity Manager," it states that many organizations are looking to add a capacity manager to make sure the right amount of IT resources support the business and that the IT infrastructure is fully optimized. Virtualization is the primary driver for this need as the dynamic nature of the virtual environment goes beyond traditional capacity planning.

"The rapid adoption of virtualization technology, the cloud computing trend and the pressure on CIOs to get the most return on investment from IT purchases have helped to make this a "hot job" in recent years."

With more and more of the data center becoming virtualized, the capacity planner and capacity manager positions are now increasingly more important. But in order to more effeciently do these jobs, automated tools that can help continually monitor and manage capacity and ongoing and changing resource utilization are a must. Even with dedicated people in place, manual processes of making sure there is the right balance of capacity to meet performance metrics and usage demands cannot keep up in the dynamic data center. The companies that will succeed with virtualization and achieve the ROIs that they desire will be the ones that best address capacity management with people, processes and tools.

VKernel Secure $7 Million in Round B Funding

2009-05-12T09:33:00.002-04:00

Today, VKernel is announcing we have secured $7 million in Round B funding led by new investor Longworth Venture Partners and joined by existing investors Hummer Winblad and Polaris. The entire VKernel team is very excited about this latest round of funding as it validates the hard work and countless hours everybody has put in over the last year and half. To receive this level of funding in these economic times shows that top-tier investment firms believe in our company, our people, our products, and our overall direction.

Longworth posted a Blog entry, "Our investment in VKernel," on its site this morning that captures the essence of why they chose to invest in us.

Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel, offers this statement about why VKernel is different from the other virtualization management vendors and what the funding means to the company.

"From the start, VKernel made the decision to take a different approach to this market using a high velocity sales and marketing strategy to offer low-cost, simple-to-use products that deliver instant value,” said Bakman. “As a result, we are quickly becoming a ‘go-to’ company for organizations wanting to optimize their virtual data center investments. This latest round of funding is validation of our strategy and our success to date.”

To learn more about VKernel and how we can continually help you optimize your virtual data center, visit www.vkernel.com.

Finding the Root Cause of VMware Capacity Bottlenecks

2009-04-22T09:03:00.002-04:00

With the initial release of our Capacity Analyzer about this time last year, we were helping our users get visibility into their resource utilization to better manage and optimize their CPU, memory, and storage capacity. The feedback we have received has been very positive. Over time, the biggest request we continued to hear was ‘can you show me where bottleneck problems are occurring and how can I quickly fix them before performance is drastically impacted?’

Yesterday, we released Capacity Analyzer 4.0 to our internal sales and marketing database. The public press announcement is planned for 4/28. This latest version is a major upgrade that you can download now. With Capacity Analyzer 4.0, we are now showing you the root cause of your capacity issues, where they are occurring, and providing suggested recommendations on how to quickly resolve them.

With deep drill down capabilities and advanced predictive analytics, Capacity Analyzer 4.0 helps users:

Find an average of 20% or more capacity in your existing VMware ESX data center by right sizing VMs and removing bottlenecks
Predict problems, set alerts, and proactively monitor performance and capacity
Save time, reduce costs, and relieve the headache of trying to find where your bottlenecks are

All of the functionality that has made Capacity Analyzer extremely popular and valuable has been enhanced to provide even more detailed information. Here’s a sampling of some of the new enhancements:

Peak usage analysis – see utilization peaks, averages, and when they occur
More CPU statistics – usage, peak usage, CPU ready, CPU ready peak, I/O wait
More memory statistics – usage, peak usage, swapped, swapped peak, balloon, balloon peak
More disk/storage statistics – latency, latency peak, queue latency, queue latency peak, throughput, throughput peak, swap, swap peak, I/O wait, BUS resets, commands aborted
Setting importance levels for VMs – resolution recommendations can be based on importance levels
Role based access management for different types of users
Filtering objects by name to find information faster

To see more, check out this quick overview and “how to use” video by Chris Chesley, a VKernel senior systems engineer. And, if you would like to try Capacity Analyzer 4.0 for free, you are welcome to download it today.

OVF 1.0 is Finalized

2009-04-15T09:37:00.000-04:00

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) recently released the first finished Open Virtualization Format version, OVF 1.0. We are excited about this because VKernel has been shipping its virtual server management products as virtual appliances using OVF from day one.

While we have had to educate the market about what OVF is, users of our software instantly see the benefits. Technology advances and virtualization in particular are designed to continually make things easier and more streamlined. The OVF format does exactly that by making virtual appliance deployment ever so simple and fast.

The news about OVF being finalized was quite sparse for such an interesting topic and technology. David Marshall covered it in this article, DMTF OVF Standard Reaches 1.0. And, Mark Bowker and Jon Oltsik at ESG had this to say, Why not more talk about Open Virtualization Format?

To see just how easy it is to deploy a virtual machine using OVF, we welcome you to try our products that will help you better manage your virtual infrastructure.

Documenting a VMware ESX Data Center

2009-04-06T15:16:00.001-04:00

We recently released a new free tool called SnapshotMyVM that allows users to quickly document all VMs in their VMware ESX environment. While we thought it would be a popular download, we were extremely surprised to see just how popular it was. After thousands of downloads of SnapshotMyVM over the last few weeks, we’re pretty certain that there is a big need for a tool that automates the process of documenting VMs.

From a lot of the feedback we’ve been receiving on this tool, it’s apparent that documenting VMs either is not happening today or a lot of manual work is being spent trying to do it. Documenting physical servers was difficult enough. Now, in a truly dynamic environment, there is no way to keep up with all the changes unless you use automated tools.

The idea for SnapshotMyVM came from one of our customers. There was a need to have documentation that showed VM name, server hardware, guest OS, and resource configurations. We’re enabling you to get this data and about a dozen more attributes. You can also save your data to XML formatted files to run more detailed and graphical reports in MS Excel. Having updated documentation is important for knowing what’s in your environment, troubleshooting problems, and showing you are in compliance.

If you haven’t downloaded and tried the free SnapshotMyVM tool, get it here today. We will be releasing a much more comprehensive Inventory tool this quarter that will address even greater issues.

vmware performance and wasted resources

2008-11-10T10:50:00.007-05:00

I am amazed at how many environments I see where expensive hardware resources are just plain wasted in the name of improving Vmware performance. The common areas of waste include:

-Storage. Often VMDK are allocated much bigger then they need be. This is especially painful to see on expensive fiber channel SAN storage at $30 to $50 per Gig!!

- Memory. The typical scenario is that when a server gets virtualized, admins allocate the the same amount of memory as it did when it was physical. This is a very common mistake especially if you are running similar workloads and are getting the benefit of memory reduction in ESX via TPS ( transparent page sharing)

- VMs that do nothing. They were deployed at one time and still occupy memory and storage but do nothing. Not a lot of talk about taking VMs down!

Now granted, Vmware perfomance is almost 100% dictated by available resource capacity in the core four: memory, cpu, network and storage, but blind overallocation of hardware resources is not going to help improve performance if for example you are having a disk I/O bottleneck.

Maximizing Performance with Minimal Resources

2008-10-30T11:33:00.001-04:00

Mark Bowker, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), visited VKernel earlier this week to meet with us and hear the details of VKernel’s business. He immediately turned around this Blog entry, “Investing in Virtualization With an Economic Headwind,” which really captured exactly what VKernel is trying to help our customers accomplish.

With the economy making us all nervous, organizations are taking many drastic financial measures to limit the impact on their core businesses. As a result, IT budgets are shrinking or being frozen. So despite the need to further virtualize their infrastructures to take advantage of cost saving moves, IT departments will need to find ways to do this without additional large hardware, software, and storage expenditures.

The good news is that many organizations have way over-provisioned their virtual infrastructures as a means to initially ensure optimal performance levels. There is plenty of available resource capacity out there; they just need to know where to find it and how to effectively use it. Mark Bowker does a great job of describing this for us in his blog entry.

To find out for yourself how VKernel can help you maximize performance with minimal resources, thus lowering your cost per virtual machine, we welcome you to try our products.

VirtualCenter Update 3 Release

2008-10-14T10:39:00.003-04:00

I was waiting for a new VMware update to come out - after ESX 3.5 Update 2 experienced its issues, I wanted to see if the next one would come out smooth - all looks smooth so far.

This one has some resolved some notable issues and alot of them are specific to the VI client as well as VirtualCenter.

Flex License Upgrade (upgrades the Flex License Server to 10.8.6) - but what's interesting is that existing license servers require a standalone installer - Hmmm....
WebAccess component JRE goes to 1.5.0_16 (due to security fixes).
Fixed the VirtualCenter password diplaying in clear text (only on VC 2.0 with VIC 2.5)
Connecting to an ESX Server host through VirtualCenter will not upgrade a localized VI Client (affects the Globalized Version of VC not the english only version)
VirtualCenter Server Remains Responsive with More Than 2400 Virtual Machine in a Folder Structure
Permissions Can Be Configured for Individual Virtual Machines and Resource Pools in VI Client via direct connection to an ESX server.

Virtualization and the Current Economy

2008-10-10T13:07:00.002-04:00

In his recent Blog post, “How can virtualization help when the economy falters?,” Dan Kusnetzky discusses some of the ways organizations can use virtualization technologies to reduce costs, but still provide services needed to successfully operate the business.

One of the topics he jotted down in his bulleted list strikes a chord with VKernel. He wrote, “Management and security software for virtualized environments may be the area having the biggest opportunity for cost reduction.”

Despite needing to overcome virtualization management issues, organizations continue to virtualize their data centers because of the promise of cost savings. What we are hearing from our customers is that without specific management tools cost savings and other efficiencies are not being realized. Part of the problem is understanding shared resource allocations and capacity, so that hardware can be better utilized and lower costs per virtual machines can be achieved. Fear of performance problems is now holding back IT staffs from fully utilizing the capabilities of expensive new servers that could potentially handle 50% or more added virtual machines.

VKernel’s suite of systems management solutions (Capacity Analyzer, Chargeback, Modeler) provides users with detailed insight into resource consumption and allocations to help them proactively prevent performance issues, better plan and optimize their virtual infrastructures, and maximize their investments. Our solutions provide the confidence needed to gain control of the virtual infrastructure as well as eliminate overspending by leveraging their existing equipment.

Virt + InfoSec + BC/DR

2008-10-07T10:22:00.008-04:00

AT&T has an interesting study on 2008 Business Continuity practices - its of larger enterprises - revenues larger than $25 (and I agree - smaller companies have BC Practices to but it's their survey).

"Two-thirds of IT executives predict that hacking will be the biggest threat in the next five years. "

This is pretty consistent, with infosec spending being up

"INPUT’s “Federal Information Security Market Forecast, 2008-2013” predicts that government information security spending will rise from $6.6 billion in 2008 to $9.6
billion by 2013...contract spending on information security will grow at 7.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), rising $3.0 billion over the next five years."

Information Week's 2008 Stategic Security Study also backs this up

"95% will see their budgets either hold steady or increase this year."

The industy is blending business continuity and information security together - both solving a common problem - encounter a fault or an problem and keep the systems running.

If 66% of the faults or problems are caused by hackers then BC/DR becomes intertwined with Infosec.

I want to add a third layer to this puzzle - virtualization.

It's on the rise - three big companies making virtualization products, companies are virtualizing servers and desktops as fast as they can and one of the biggest features and benefits - encounter a fault and keep the VM running.

With Site Recovery Manager, Vmotion, and newly announced stuff like VMware FT and if we add VMsafe - we want these VMs highly available, highly secure, but flexible enough to move between datacenters (SRM) or hosts (VMotion) or SANs (Storage VMotion) and we want users access them from anywhere in the world (VDI).

My concern is performance and assuring that performance levels remains the same or if it operates a dinimished capacity in a BC/DR environment, that IT shops have a mechanism and tools to keep an automated eye on resource utilization and resource capacity.

Friday Afternoon Links

2008-10-03T14:43:00.003-04:00

So I don't post a link round up that often but we had a bunch of good ones come through the system today.

This one is a bit older but if you are looking for a short intro video to XenCenter (think Xen's version of VirtualCenter).

VKernel's tools (Capacity, Chargeback, Modeler and Search) are all built on the VIM API.

So we move on to the XEN API (vs. the XenCenter API).

Finally kudos to Roger Levy for pointing out the Mono project - where folks can run .NET applications on non-Windows (i.e. Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. ) hosts/vms.

For fun, imagine a use case scenario where you to run .NET on Windows using MONO vs. Windows.

On to other Hypervisors (well Hyper-V's) - Microsoft announces a free download of Hyper-V servers - thats Microsoft-based Virtual Machines without any Windows 2008 in the way.

Lenovo announces their server lineup.

“With ThinkServer Lenovo delivers exceptionally engineered hardware and easy-to-use software all developed specifically for the SMB customer,” said Marc Godin, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Business Unit, Lenovo.

I love when a VP of Enterprise Business is the quote used for SMB customers.

A sturdy horse pulling the wagon.

2008-09-30T09:23:00.005-04:00

Steve Ballmer was at the Churchill Club last week, some video of it, some live-blogging and the transcript.

"If you want virtualization on 80 percent of servers instead of 5 percent of servers, you better not charge three times as much as the price of the server for the virtualization,"

So he is speaking at the latest hurdle - why has server virtualization stalled - but it sounds like he is calling out VMware as being capable of only getting 5% of the servers virtualized. And Microsoft is going to virtualize 80%.

And you have to love it when a competitor flatters then criticizes in the same sentence.

"For certain high-end applications, the approach that VMware has used is a perfectly good approach, but it's not an approach that is going to lead to virtualization of a high percentage of servers."

But my favorite has to his answer for why less than 5% of the worlds servers are virtualized:

"...Servers are managed in a variety of different ways. Frankly speaking, the virtualization software in the market has been extremely expensive. My opinion, the way you manage virtualization has deviated from the way you manage everything else in the data center."

So he thinks its two parts - VMware is expensive and hard to manage.

VKernel announced our plans to support Hyper-V and deliver our world class management solutions for chargeback, capacity analyzing and modeling and hope we can help everyone manage all of their virtualization.

Donate to help Andrii Nikitin's son Ivan

2008-09-28T22:36:00.004-04:00

One of the best things about the Internet is how it can connect alot of previously unconnected people together (ignoring the metaphysical that we are all connected).

So when MySQL put up an request for donations to help one of their MySQL engineers out, I wanted to help spread the word.

Donations are requested to help Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine, provide for his son Ivan who requires a bone marrow transplant operation. The cost of this operation is expected to be between €150,000 - €250,000 ($235,000 - $400,000). Please help us provide Ivan a chance to live.

All of our virtual appliances - Chargeback, Capacity, Modeler and Search - all run on MySQL.

I hope we can help them out.

VMworld: In Quick Retrospect

2008-09-24T11:51:00.006-04:00

Four days on our tired feet, limited natural light, and a great effort by the VKernel team over the course of VMworld produced incredible results for us – increased awareness, incredible lead generation, and market validation. Right from the start, the VKernel booth was buzzing with activity. Our four demo stations showing off our Capacity Analyzer, Chargeback, Modeler, and SearchMyVM virtual appliance solutions were always 5,6,7,8…people deep checking us out. Our systems engineers had no voice left by the end.

Thank you to everyone who came by to see us. We gave a way a lot of swag and three lucky people went home with some fantastic premium gifts. Congrats to Mike Green at Bayer, who took home the ultra-compact digital camera, Rob Ruiz at Bio-Rad Laboratories, who won the iPod Touch, and Mike Berthiaume at TJX, who grabbed the Nintendo Wii.

To download and try the VKernel products you saw at the show, just go to our download page. All of our products are fully-functional and available for 30-day trials.

To V or to v???

2008-09-15T12:21:00.002-04:00

Everything is now V - it was virtual or virtualization - now it appears that everything is v (lowercase).

So VMware has gone the road of the iPod (lowercase i) and dropped Virtual to a v.

But maybe not everywhere???

In today's press release we see it on some stuff but not the VDC-OS (uppercase V) but in vCloud (lowercase). We did see a presentation with a vCenter (maybe new name for Virtual Center?)

And we pick up - vServices, vApp, vNetwork Distributed Switch, wow - lots of lowercase v.

I am looking forward to more v or V or both.

Live from Las Vegas - it's VMworld!!!

2008-09-15T12:18:00.002-04:00

All - the VKernel team has landed in Las Vegas and is looking forward to the biggest VMwold ever (14,000+ people).

VMworld press releases should start to hit the street today and all week along with alot of announcements from other partners (including VKernel).

Check out Search and Modeler, both are being show at the show and we look forward to tons of feedback from you!

Performance Lifecycle Management

2008-08-26T11:17:00.002-04:00

In his latest Blog post, Dan Kusnetzky discusses his introduction to "Performance Lifecycle Management" by VKernel. The concept here is helping organization architect their virtual infrastructures and continually monitor their environments to assure optimal performance levels. There are so many little things that can impact shared resources and when those capacity constraints are exceeded, significant performance problems can and will occur.

VKernel is providing pre-production and post-production point solutions that enable organizations to build their infrastructures right from the start, proactively maintain performance, and predict where future problems will happen. The lifecycle includes modeling, monitoring, analytics, validation, and chargeback. Proactive performance assurance throughout the lifecycle will allow organization to virtualize more and reap greater benefits faster.

If you're heading out to VMworld next month in Las Vegas, be sure to stop by the VKernel booth #647.

Congrats on your VCP!!!

2008-08-25T09:04:00.005-04:00

I can't attribute this quote to anyone other than Tom Eppenberger Jr's mom. These simple words seemed to sum up why made our products.

"The more you know the more comes your way."

VKernel helps ESX administators know more about their Vmware environments and that knowledge helps them with their organizations to get more to come their way.

Our Chargeback product focues on the financial management of Virtual Machines, how many resources are they consuming, how much is costing me and can I chargeback to the consumers for the resources. By demonstrating sound financial management, IT can show to the business why spending on VMware makes great sense - how it impacts specific Virtual Machines and specific Business Services.

Our Capacity Analyzer product focuses on resource analytics, we extract, transform and load (ETL) the VMware Infrastrure SDK/API's to get data on Memory, CPU, Network and Disk usage from the Datacenter, ESX Host or Cluster, Resource Pool and Virtual Machine.

ESX Administrators love the Capacity Availability Map - it displays how many more VM's can be added to any level (Host, Cluster, or Resource Pool) based on existing resources and existing workloads. In addition - it allows you to see what is the constraining resource.

So if you gave a 4-node ESX cluster and each node has 32 GB of RAM, our Capacity Product allows you to identify resource thresholds, how many more VM can be added within the threshholds and what resource does it run out of first. In other words, if you run out RAM, we show you and if you add more RAM, you can add more VMs.

ESX administrators are using our tool to justify all sorts of resource purchases, decision making on adding memory vs. adding ESX hosts, etc.

I tip the virtual hat to Tom's mom and agree wholeheartedly - the more you know, the more comes your way.

VMware Remains Only Holdout on Multi-vendor Virtual Server Management

2008-08-10T11:02:00.002-04:00

Deni Connor from CIO.com has an article entitled "VMware Remains Only Holdout on Multi-vendor Virtual Server Management" and it got me thinking - Don't you think that Citrix and Microsoft have to manage VMware as well as their own products - they are the underdogs with little to no marketshare??

I don't have the latest numbers but VMware's got to be in the high 90% when it comes to Enterprise Virtualization (that's businesses running it in production or development) - I will try and confirm. They have published multiple APIs/SDKs for virtual infrastructure management with a whole bunch of great software companies making management tools.

Deni's saying that VMware doesn't manage Xen or Hyper-V but why do they have to?? Microsoft and Citrix have to manage Vmware to get a path to successful adoption. It's their products that need to live side by side with VMware and try and get converts.

When Exchange competed with Lotus Notes, they didn't have Management tools for Lotus - but when Windows NT competed with Novell - there was a whole bunch of strange tools like CSNW and GSNW, etc that promoted interoperability and integration but ultimately led to alot of migrations.

Yuen said it best that the management tools are to "get customers to convert to Hyper-V".

We have seen Microsoft in this fight before, Citrix didn't really beat anyone up to dominate in the thin client space - they sort of created it and owned it but did manage to hold off MSFT and Terminal services.

And I think its shaping up to be two battles - the Server Workload (both low end and high end servers) and the Desktop Workload.

Its also not just a Vitualization workload (so keep an eye on Moka5 and Desktone who make solutions for the desktop space) and don't forget IBM with RS6000 paravirtualization and/or Application Virtualization (Softricity (MSFT) and ThinStall/ThinkApp) and while we are at it - Storage Virtualization with folks like 3Par, XIV, etc.

Server workloads are going to require different management disciplines that desktop workloads - studies have already shown insane densities of virtual machine to physical in the desktop space - 100:1 anyone?

Server workloads are going to require more indepth management at network, storage and host level much more than the desktop level. These may reach new heights of 40:1 or 60:1 or it may be much lower levels 10:1 for higher I/O bound workloads.

VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0

2008-08-04T09:12:00.004-04:00

I first played with PowerShell with Exchange 2007 and it was the right blend of "old school" command-line and brand new technology.

VMware has shipped their VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0 which runs on PowerShell. Great for interrogated an ESX host about a specific VM or specific performance counter.

It's all CLI-based so those of you who want some of the functionality with a nice GUI, check out our CBA tool which is also using the VIM API to get resource/performance data out of VMware.

Hal's site also has great one-lines and an active forum on using VITK.

Seeking Simplicity

2008-07-21T14:03:00.004-04:00

Techworld has a nice writeup on VKernel.

Virtualization has solved a lot of data center problems, but it's created plenty more. That opens up a wide and complex market for vendors like VKernel.
VKernel is looking to grow by offering tools focused on two main issues: capacity planning and chargeback. They're designed to eliminate complexity and deliver actionable information.

VMworld 2008

2008-07-09T10:23:00.003-04:00

The VMworld 2008 session listing is up and VKernel is presenting:

1860 - How to Implement a Cost Visibility and Chargeback Process Using the Resource Consumption Model

Many organizations recognize the need for chargeback as they virtualize their infrastructures, but simply do not know where to start. In the new virtual data center where all hardware is shared, IT needs to develop new ways to report on and account for the usage of shared resources (CPU, memory, storage, network, etc.). Without cost visibility, it is impossible to put in place the financial controls necessary to implement virtualization effectively. This workshop will walk you through a step-by-step approach for implementing chargeback and gaining cost visibility in as little as a day.

The VMworld 2008 session listing is here.

VMware Leadership Changes

2008-07-08T11:00:00.004-04:00

Every blog needs a breaking news post.

This just in - VMware announces Diane Greene no longer the CEO. Her successor, Paul Maritz.

Maritz retired from Microsoft in 2000, after 14 years there.

During this period Paul managed the development and marketing of many of the company’s major products, including such major releases as Windows 95, Windows NT, Database, Tools and Applications as the Vice president of the Platforms Strategy and Developer Group. He also been called "the number 3 executive at Microsoft" by cnet (circa 1999)

In 2003, Paul founded Pi Corporation, a startup software company focused on building Cloud-based solutions for new ways of doing personal information management. Pi Corporation was acquired by EMC in February 2008, and Paul became President of the EMC Cloud Division.

PiWorx is pretty darn cool - I got introduced to it and really got the concepts - think a blend of Virtual Desktop, Backup Software (Mozy) with collaboration features (eRoom) and document management (Documentum) all protected by Security (RSA).

So Maritz may have came up with the Killer App to glue to bind all of the recent EMC acquisitions together, compete with Google Apps and attempt to deliver what people have been asking for - access to their information, their teams information, sharing information, securely and allow people to work smarter, not harder.

The press release had a quote from Joe Tucci.

“As one of the founders and the leader of VMware, Diane guided the creation and development of a company that is changing the way that people think about computing. The Board thanks her for her considerable contributions to VMware and wishes her every success in the future,” stated Joe Tucci, Chairman of VMware’s Board of Directors.

And its interesting that in the press release, Joe is titled as "Chairman of VMware's Board" - which he is - but he also is the CEO, and Chairman of the Board for EMC.

If EMC buys Pi, takes Pi's CEO and replaces VMware's CEO, then you would think of more integration between Pi and VMware and possibly other members of the EMC Sofware family.

So does this move squash any idea of EMC selling VMware?

I think it does but no one has asked me.

Getting a bit drunk on enterprise dollars.

2008-06-26T09:46:00.011-04:00

It's official - Gartner's Thomas Bittman thinks VMware might be drunk.

Denise Dubie has a great article on virtualization management capabilities and a great quote describing the upcoming battle between VMware and Microsoft for the x86 virtualization market, he is quoted as saying:

"The enterprise is going to be very leery of Microsoft, but the on-ramp to VMware is a bit steep for small businesses. VMware doesn't want to lose that potential business, but the company was getting a bit drunk on enterprise dollars," says Thomas Bittman, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst.

The abundance of enterprise dollars spent on virtualization is because virtualization fixes so many problems, reduces power, reduces physical requirements, makes x86 hardware more efficient, increases uptime, allows resource management at the OS workload level, etc.

One of my favorite reports is one that IDC did in 2006 – it depicted– IT investment to be higher spending in Year 1 on a VMware / virtualization project but that in Year 2 and Year 3 and possibly Year 4 – IT departments would avoid spending on server hardware – you would just fill up the empty capacity of the system you built in 2006.

It looked good on paper, spend more now, avoid spending later.

Unfortunately, multiple issues caused IT departments to run out of capacity, VM sprawl occurred, single core and dual core servers could not hold as many VMs as the equivalent quad core servers.

Often P2V migrations went unchecked, servers have excess CPU capacity but not enough Memory, VMs are consuming too many resources and as a result enterprises are oversizing virtualization projects or not driving up VM density to get the biggest bang from their investment.

Avoid the hangover from “getting a bit drunk” and having to purchase new hardware, more memory, bigger servers, etc. by getting a resource management tool in place and understanding what resources your VMs are using and where you have capacity in virtualized environments.