• Vendor Support
• Performance

To be frank, when possible, I don’t tell users if the machine is virtual or physical. I’m not hiding this, but I don’t volunteer non-relevant information. Part of planning an application has to do with the sizing of the production environment. You read the system requirements and prepare the infrastructure accordingly. The application requirements usually state memory, cpu and OS requirements. They don’t state that you must run the system on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with dual Intel(R) XEON(R) E5420 @ 2.5 GHz quadcore cpus using “blue” network cables. Part of planning the application is taking the vendor’s information and adjusting it to account for your own infrastructure. Many companies run standard infrastructure such as: SNMP, VIRUS/MalWare protection and Systems Management software on all of their systems. They must account for this in terms of cpu and memory when sizing for a new application. Virtualization is “just” one more variable in the planning and sizing equation. Therefore informing the user that the machine is virtual is simply non-relevant.

I’ve been told that at Cisco all new systems are virtual and you must convince John Chambers, the current CEO, to allow you to use a physical machine.

Vendor Support
Many vendors have confusing support policies regarding virtual machines. I know of one vendor that does all of their development, testing and qa on virtual machines and then does not support running production on virtual machines.

In my mind, vendor support is an academic issue. I don’t volunteer the physical machine information to a vendor, so why would I volunteer hardware info about a virtual machine. If a vendor presses the issue, I can always reproduce the issue on a physical machine. To Date: I have never had to reproduce the issue on physical hardware.

Keep in mind that all major software vendors plan to support “Cloud Computing”. You can’t seriously support “Cloud Computing” without supporting virtualization. So if your vendor does not support virtual machines, they will begin to shortly or they will face technical obsolescence.

Performance
To be honest when it comes to performance, virtualization is your friend. That may come as a shock to you, so I’d better explain.

As I mentioned earlier, part of planning an application is sizing it for production. The sizing takes into account factors such as: memory, # of cpus, minimum recommended cpu speed, the number of concurrent users, the overhead of your common infrastructure and a “judgment factor”. The “judgment factor” attempts to account for business growth, typical usage patterns and historical vendor understatement of the hardware requirements . Over the years, I’ve seen many projects purchase way too much hardware. I’ve also seen projects that were struggling to run on the initial hardware within a year or two of the initial roll-out. This can be caused by a variety of reasons, including unexpected business growth or transaction volume due to a temporary business opportunity. Assuming that there are no application locking issues and that cpu or memory is holding the application back, then you are considering how to relocate the application to newer and more powerful hardware. When this happens physical machines become a “boat anchor” where virtual machines are a “lifeboat”.

• Why Physical machines become a “boat anchor”.
  It is often difficult and sometimes impossible to move an existing application to new hardware. In the best case scenario, you have to procure new hardware, install and configure the operating system,OS, “clone” the application to the new hardware, test the application to ensure the configuration is working correctly and then plan an outage to relocate the application permanently to the new hardware. This is at best a several week project. There can be some show stoppers. You may not be able to relocate the current version of the application, if you must use a later version of an operating system. This can often be the case with new hardware in order to obtain the necessary drivers. Now, you are potentially having to update your entire software stack as well as the application to run on a later version of the OS. You will probably have to retrain users on the new version of the application.
  What a nightmare!
  By the time you are done, you may have missed any temporary business opportunity or the business growth may have been impeded.
• Why virtual machines are a “lifeboat”.
  When you outgrow the virtual machine, you can allocate or dedicate more hardware to the virtual machine. If new hardware is required, then you simply migrate the virtual machine to the new hardware, intact. Often this migration can be performed live. Yes, it can be that simple. If you can’t perform a live migration, then an outage to copy the virtual machine from the old system to the new system will be required.
  With virtual machines, you really can throw hardware a some performance problems.

There are cases where you still need to use physical machines, but these are uncommon. In my opinion, you should always use virtual machines first and then determine that you really need dedicated physical machine.

If after all of this, your user still insists on having a physical machine, then are they also insisting that all programs be written in assembly language?

It appears that a “perfect storm” of events are “brewing” at the same time: Social Media, Web 2.0 and smart phones. I believe these forces will drive the delivery of application services to the cloud. What is clear, to me, is that “cloud computing” will use hardware virtualization as its foundation. Hardware virtualization turns a physical machine into a virtual machine, which resides on a physical machine. However, the virtual machine can be moved around. If the system requires more resources than what is currently assigned to it, then more resources can be added to ensure the system meets your customer’s service level agreement. One question in my mind is: are the underlying software licensing mechanisms keeping pace with these changes?

Prior to Linux and open source software, all commercial software was purchased and licensed by server and user. Many of the commercial software packages in use today use a cost structure that is based on some combination of the following:

• The number of servers.
• The number of cpus in a server.
• The total number of users that can access the system
  or the number of concurrent users accessing the system.

At least two of today’s leading software vendors, Microsoft and Oracle, obtain their revenue based on some combination of the above factors. In some cases, just adding a cpu to a server can make you responsible for a 2x increase in software licensing fees. Even if that server is an old Sun 420R with 480Mhz UltraSparc processors. For a service provider, in the cloud, managing licenses of software based on the above factors could be daunting. I imagine these providers will either use Linux and Open Source or negotiate some form of unlimited license. In order to understand why, consider the following scenario: you are a service provider and one of your customers is planning to run a promotion that requires 10 additional servers. They expect tens of thousands of users to access the promotion. The promotion will run for 3 months. After the that time they will not need these 10 additional servers. How do you the “service provider” acquire temporary licenses for this? What if that license is for a product that is no longer sold and marketed? I can hear the lawyers figiting in their seats.

In the above scenario, if the software was Linux and Open-source based, then managing the additional software licensing costs could be pretty straight forward. For Windows and non-open source software the “service provider” has a headache of managing server licenses and client access licenses, CALS. If users access the system anonymously then they do not need a CAL. However, if the users logon, then you must have a CAL for every concurrent user or purchase an unlimited license. The cost of windows and non-open source software licensing could add a nontrivial amount of cost to the “service provider” when compared to delivering the same application on Linux and Open source.

It seems that services on the “Cloud” will follow a “pay as you go scheme” similar to what the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud does. Does this give an edge to Linux and Open source software in delivering applications to the cloud? Probably. I do not know how significant this advantage is. I expect Microsoft, Oracle and others to adapt their software licensing to negate this advantage. No, it won’t be free. If they add $20 per user per month to a service providers base cost, then they will have a limited role in the “cloud”. Whereas, a 10 cent per user per month cost could be bearable to the service provider. If they don’t adapt their licensing, then this may mean that they are not going to be able to play a significant role in “Cloud Computing”. Oh, in case you were wondering, I haven’t even discussed the additional complexities that software activation brings to the party.

I’m pretty sure that Charles Darwin’s “theory of evolution” that was set forth in his book “On the Origin of Species“ applies to computer systems as well .

You are probably asking yourself; “So who and what is this feature for?”

I’m fairly excited about the following uses:

• Enterprises with Legacy Applications
• A vision of the future of Windows upgrades

Enterprises with Legacy Applications
In most Enterprises, there are some major applications like: ERP, CRM and HR that are only upgraded every 4 or 5 years. This is due, in part, to considerable costs with migration, training, hardware upgrades and testing.

The suppliers of these applications developed their currently deployed mainstream versions when the desktop OS release in use was Windows XP and Windows 2000. Based upon the suppliers product life-cycle, they often are just releasing their first version of product with Vista support. Many are just certifying support for IE 7 or Firefox 3. Oh, and by the way, the install programs of many of these products refuse to install on a version of an Operating System they do not expressly support.

For these companies and applications, Windows 7 and the Virtual XP mode allows the company to make new hardware purchases that are Virtual XP Mode capable. They can take advantage of the many improvements in Windows 7. At the same time, they can then install and run their existing legacy applications in the Virtual XP machine.

A vision of future Windows upgrades
Within a generation, or two, of PC computer upgrades the mainstream of PC hardware in use will have a CPU and BIOS that is virtualization capable. This means that it will be possible to keep existing applications when you upgrade your Computer and Operating System. After all, why should we have to buy new versions of every application that we own when we upgrade our Computer?

This means that my wife’s, Virtual Assistant, business will be able to continue to use QuickBooks Pro 2006 Professional Services Edition until she is prepared to spend the $$ to buy an updated version. There are many other applications that she has purchased and they work just fine. So I ask again; “Why should she have to buy new copies just because she had to buy a new computer“? Afterall, when I buy a new Home-theater system, I can use my existing speakers. Perhaps a better analogy is “I don’t have to buy a new car when I buy new tires.. An operating System is a lot like tires.

I call this a “Tool Chain”, where upgrading a key component requires the acquisition and installation of new components for all of your applications. This makes the expense and time investment much greater than changing a single part. Imagine if every time you changed the fuel filter in your car that you had to also replace the spark plugs, carburetor, fuel pump and the other components of the fuel delivery system in your car. That would be a lot of time and $$$, wouldn’t it?

Several years ago, I participated in a planning session with HP for my company’s software code generation products to target their new “Merced” chip. This later became Itanium. When it dawned on me that no existing software would run on this chip, we were done. At least, for the time being. I explained to the HP architects that we could not even start until there was a released or beta Operating System, C compilers and Relational Databases for their new chip.

If AMD had not introduced the 64-bit extensions,x86_64, to the x86 chip, then mainstream 64-bit computing would be years away. These extensions allow existing 32-bit code to run concurrently with new 64-bit code. The Virtual XP Mode in Windows 7 will provide a similar ability.

Conclusion
I’m recommending to anyone that is buying a new PC computer that when it’s possible they should ensure the CPU and BIOS are Virtual XP mode capable.

My final analysis is; “What Microsoft is doing, will overtime, make virtualization an assumed capability on a Windows system. This may turn out to be a game changer.”

Unfortunately, obtaining software licenses for the applications that we run on these servers can and does still take many weeks.  The procurement process remains basically unchanged.

Although we’ve been taking this into account and It may be obvious to many others, you’ll want to be sure that you take the software and license procurement time into account when establishing project plans.

As an aside, we have one “well-known” vendor that keeps sending us 90-day temporary licenses for a product that is paid for and the check has cleared the bank.