Guild Companies--VMware Debuts VMotion, VirtualCenter Add-Ons to Partitions

VMware, the company best known for its virtual machine partitioning software for 32-bit X86 workstations and servers, started talking in mid-July about products it would be rolling out to make X86 servers more malleable and controllable than they are today. This week, the VirtualCenter product (developed under the name Control Center) is available, and so is its adjunct, a nifty program called VMotion. Both programs give Wintel and Lintel iron something akin to the flexible partitioning technologies that are available on Unix and mainframe servers.

The product naming and packaging of VirtualCenter and VMotion may have changed, but the underlying ideas of these related programs have not. These products build on VMware GSX Server or ESX Server, which allows a single machine to run multiple instances of different operating systems on a single Intel-based server. VirtualCenter 1.0 is a systems-management and provisioning tool that lets system administrators quickly provision and reprovision servers with any number of virtual partitions running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Linux 2.4, and NetWare 4, 5, or 6. This is very useful, and it helps companies consolidate multiple physical servers that are running at 10 to 15 percent of CPU down to many virtual machines, running on fewer physical machines that might use 70 or 80 percent of CPU capacity. Just installing GSX Server or ESX Server partitions helps cut costs, but the lower administration costs that come from having one control center and fewer administrators is where the big savings come from.

With VMotion, which is being sold as an adjunct to ESX Server, VMware is truly innovating, going beyond simply making dynamic partitions that grow or shrink as workloads dictate. ESX Server is distinct from GSX Server in that ESX Server goes down to bare iron and creates virtual machine partitions that can support Windows or Linux. GSX Server runs inside an existing Windows or Linux instance, and it creates virtual machines akin to a DOS window running on Windows platforms. These GSX Server guest environments can run a full Windows, Linux, or NetWare operating system. With VMotion, VMware is actually allowing administrators and VirtualCenter to move virtual machine partitions from machine to machine, as conditions dictate. On the fly. As real workloads are running in the partitions. Without stopping them. This is a bit scary, but it's also very cool. Unix servers can't do this (although the "zone" partitions that Sun Microsystems is talking about for Solaris 10 will be able to do this, too). Being close to the iron is what makes this possible, which is why GSX Server cannot support VMotion.

VirtualCenter is comprised of two parts. Customers have to deploy VirtualCenter Management Server on a designated hub in their network of machines; it costs $5,000. Each additional server that is to be managed has to run agents, called VirtualCenter Management Packs, which cost $300 per managed processor. VMotion, which allows active partitions to be teleported around the network, costs $700 per processor. VMotion requires ESX Server, which costs $3,750 on a two-way Intel-based server. Over 250 customers beta-tested the VirtualCenter/VMotion combo, according to Michael Mullany, director of product management at VMware, and to date, VMware has over 2,000 customers using one of the server variants of its partitioning products.

VMware also has announced a special bundle of its software aimed at customers deploying blade servers, called the VirtualCenter Suite for Blade Servers. The bundle includes VirtualCenter, ESX Server, Virtual SMP (which allows a virtual machine to span multiple processors), and VMotion. It costs $10,000 per two-way server, which is at a discount compared with the cost of the software when acquired separately. Mullany says that the software bundle can be installed on regular rack-mounted Intel servers as well, and is not restricted to actual blade server architectures, despite its name. IBM and Hewlett-Packard, the dominant players in the corporate blade server market (as distinct from the high-performance-computing and telco-blade markets), are endorsing the new VMware software in general and the blade bundle in particular.

In addition to the new software, VMware has announced the VMware Software Development Kit, which allows third-party programs, such as IBM's Tivoli, HP's OpenView, Computer Associate's Unicenter, and dozens of other system management programs, to plug into all of this VMware code. This SDK will allow physical machines to be managed in synch with the virtual machines that run on top of them. The SDK is based on SOAP and WSDL, which means developers can integrate system management programs and other programs with VMware's software, using Java, .NET, or Perl, just to name three popular options. The VMware SDK will be available early next year.