Dell to Push VMware ESX Server on Windows Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you don't own your own operating system stack and you don't own your own hardware architecture, you have to partner to bring all of your technologies to market. This is something that Dell is a master of, and it is one of the few companies that has minimized research and development costs while at the same time profiting off of industry standard hardware and software. That's why Dell's announcement that it would be going to the VMware unit of EMC for its server virtualization software is not a surprise. Dell has neither the time, money, nor inclination to invent its own virtual machine partitioning.

What the company does want to do, however, is co-opt the virtualization that is all the rage now in the IT market and graft it onto its scale-out, clustered server strategy. To that end, Dell and VMware announced yesterday that Dell would be deploying the ESX Server virtualization software on its two-way and four-way servers as part of an alliance between Dell and EMC. These two companies have already forged a big partnership for entry and midrange storage arrays, which are designed by EMC, made by Dell, and sold by both parties. Once EMC bought VMware, a tighter relationship between the two was almost inevitable. However, because VMware has to keep its partnerships with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and other platform providers alive and thriving if it is to not get sidelined by Microsoft as that company readies its own server virtualization software, called Virtual Server 2004, for market, EMC has to be careful that its relationship with Dell does not alienate the other X86 platform providers in the market.

Pete Morowski, vice president of software development at Dell, said yesterday that the company would be ESX Server and related programs on preconfigured and pretested systems to try to speed up their adoption into the marketplace.

Specifically, Dell will put VMware's ESX Server 2.0.1 on its PowerEdge 6650 servers, which have up to four of Intel's "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors and up to 32 GB of main memory. ESX Server provides an abstraction layer that allows up to eight virtual machines per processor and up to 80 virtual machines per server (obviously with eight-way machines that Dell does not sell, but IBM and HP do) to be put onto a server. These virtual machines are isolated and can support Windows, Linux, NetWare, and other operating systems. As part of the preconfigured setup, Dell and EMC are throwing in their CX300 and CX500 midrange disk arrays, a two-way PowerEdge 1750 that runs the VMware VirtualCenter Management Server. The setup also includes the VMotion feature that VMware announced last year, which allows applications running inside virtual machines on one physical server to be moved on-the-fly to a completely different physical server as they are running. This is made possible by using a SAN storage architecture, which is implemented by the CX series arrays, on the storage side and by a relatively high-speed interconnect linking servers to each other.

As part of this deal, Dell and VMware will support any configuration that customers require that are also in the Dell catalog, such as two-way machines running as the primary node in a cluster of machines, but companies that have these machines are probably more suited to the GSX Server virtualization technology, which allows multiple guest operating systems to be hosted inside a single instance of either Windows or Linux. ESX Server is more costly, at $3,750 for a two-way machine, than GSX Server, which costs $2,500 for a two-way machine. Dell says that a PowerEdge 6650 with two Xeon MPs, base main memory and disks, and ESX Server enabled for two processors will cost $30,579. Dell is going to be the level one service and support contact for this bundle, and the two are working on other bundles.

Dell did a few benchmarks to show how ESX Server and VMotion performed. In one test, it took two four-way PowerEdge 6650s each using 2.8 GHz Xeon MPs, configured with 4 GB of main memory, three Gigabit Ethernet NICs, and a Fibre Channel SAN array with 38 73 GB 10K RPM disk drivers and then moved a running SQL Server database processing 100 orders per second from one machine to the other using VMotion. Specifically, VMotion knew it was going to move the workload, reached out across the network and created a new virtual machine on the secondary server, set up the complete state of the Windows-SQL Server stack on that new partition, and moved it all over in 48 seconds. Because of the clever way VMotion works, end users only saw a few seconds blip as the SQL Server app was moved to the second machine.

In a second test, Dell showed that two four-way PowerEdge 6650s configured with 16 GB of main memory and running a SQL Server workload could handle 31,665 operations per minute at a cost of $92,000 compared to a competitor's eight-way box using the same 2.8 GHz Xeon MPs and 32GB of main memory, which only handled 28,984 operations per minute and cost $107,000. While this is 27 percent better price/performance, only Oracle and IBM have thus far been able to mask the complexities of clustered databases with their respective Oracle9i RAC and DB2 8.1 databases. Clustering SQL Server is not transparent, and the Dell comparison did not take this complexity into account. It would be more interesting to see how Oracle9i RAC or DB2 8.1, which are cluster-friendly, would perform in the same comparison. And while Dell's tests focused on the Windows platform, there is no reason to believe that similar benefits would not be possible with clustered Linux servers running Oracle or DB2, and when it becomes available, cluster-ready MySQL.

When pressed about Dell's plans to support Microsoft's future Virtual Server 2004, Morowski gave the predictable answer that Dell would evaluate what to do with that product when Microsoft started shipping it and as customer demands dictated. Given the vast installed base of Windows software, Microsoft's desire to see its own software used by its installed base, and Dell's closeness with Microsoft, it seems reasonable that Dell will push Virtual Server 2004, too. But Microsoft's product does not have anything like VMotion or Virtual SMP (which allows a VM to span two processors), and that will limit its appeal in the data center.