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Old 09-11-2007, 10:13 PM
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VMware

Hi everyone, In another thread "VMware" was mentioned. I came across this article about them and thought this might be of some interest to some of you. No, I don't have any dough in the company. Take care, BOBB


VMware seeks to build on IPO buzz
9/11/2007, 7:33 p.m. ET
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Fresh off this year's hottest debut on Wall Street, trendsetting software maker VMware Inc. is hosting nearly 11,000 people clamoring to learn more about a computing twist that is turning into high-tech's next big jackpot.

VMware's three-day conference, which began Tuesday in San Francisco, provides the once-obscure company with an opportunity to build on the buzz created by its lucrative initial public offering of stock less than a month ago.

"This is their moment in the sun," said Erik Josowitz, vice president of product strategy of Surgient Inc., one of many software makers hoping to ride VMWare's coattails. "They have every reason to be having a very big party right now."

VMware's software steers a process known as "virtualization," which allows computers to harness more of their unused power and run more applications at once without a hiccup. More than 20,000 companies already use VMware's software.

Investors are flocking to VMware too. The Palo Alto-based company's initial public offering raised $1.1 billion, the most a high-tech company has pulled in since Internet search leader Google Inc. went public three years ago.

VMware's stockholders have enjoyed the ride as shares have nearly tripled from their initial price of $29. The stock hit a new high of $82.75 Tuesday before finishing the regular trading session at $76.65.

With a market value approaching $30 billion, VMware already is worth more than all but three publicly traded software makers — Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.

In January 2004, VMware was valued at $602 million — the price EMC Corp. paid for it then. Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC still holds an 87 percent stake in the company.

This week's conference, dubbed "VMworld," is another reminder of the company's rapid ascent. VMware's first customer conference in 2004 drew fewer than 1,500 people.

The central idea of WMware's visualization software is to turn a single computer into the equivalent of multiple machines, enabling companies to save money on the hardware and electricity needed to keep their data centers humming. Virtualization also is supposed to make it easier to recover information after computers crash.

Those benefits are expected to spur one of corporate America's biggest spending sprees on technology since the dot-com boom ended in 2000. Research firm IDC estimates spending on virtualization software and supporting services will swell to more than $15 billion worldwide in 2011, up from $6.5 billion last year. Billions more will likely be spent on compatible equipment.

"Virtualization has reached a tipping point," Hector Ruiz, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s chief executive officer, said during a speech at the conference Tuesday.

Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett agreed. "We are about to see a big shift in information technology. It's like the light bulbs are going off in everyone's heads all at once."

Computer chip maker AMD is angling for a piece of the action, along with a long list of technology bellwethers, including Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Dell Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.

None appears better positioned than VMware, which was founded in 1998 by a group that included entrepreneur Diane Greene and her husband, Stanford University associate professor Mendel Rosenblum. Greene remains VMware's chief executive and Rosenblum serves as chief technical officer.

Analysts predict VMware will earn $235 million on revenue of $1.27 billion this year, up from a profit of $86 million on revenue of $704 million last year. The company's growth prompted both Intel and Cisco to buy small stakes in VMware before the IPO.

"Diane Greene had a great vision. She has proven that virtualization is bigger than anyone ever thought it could be," said Vinod Khosla, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. He is investing in a startup, Xsigo, that specializes in virtualization hardware.

Greene, 52, told Tuesday's audience she sometimes finds it hard to believe how quickly virtualization is gathering steam.

"A year ago, we were talking about virtualization becoming mainstream," she said. "Now, we are talking about a virtualization industry."

VMware's future looks so bright that some analysts believe the company someday could become as essential to the computing world as Microsoft is.

That's because virtualization relies on a "hypervisor" that resides below operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows and Linux, and makes key decisions on how computers run. VMware kicked off this week's conference by announcing deals to embed its latest hypervisor on the servers commonly deployed in data centers.

Leery of VMware's success, Microsoft plans to enter the virtualization market next year with its own software, currently code-named "Viridian."

Other rivals like Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix Systems Inc. could slow VMware's growth. Citrix signaled its intention to become a bigger player in the field last month with a $500 million deal to buy virtualization specialist XenSource Inc.

But VMware has a huge head start with 17 virtualization products already on the market and 22 patents that won't start expiring until 2018.

What's more, VMware's high-flying stock gives it the financial clout to expand through acquisitions. Toward that end, VMware disclosed Tuesday that it has bought another virtualization software specialist, Switzerland-based Dunes Technologies, for an undisclosed sum.

VMware "is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, but I think we are a long way from game over," Josowitz said. "This thing is just getting started."

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
© 2007 Michigan Live. All Rights Reserved.

Last edited by Bobb; 09-12-2007 at 12:24 AM. Reason: posting
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Old 09-12-2007, 12:13 AM
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Old 09-12-2007, 12:26 AM
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Thanks for the reminder Nick. Take care, BOBB
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Old 09-12-2007, 12:49 AM
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Hmm, I don't see how anything is possible with "virtual infrastructure" that is not currently possible without it. Virtual machines and emulation are hardly a new idea, and even with virtual machinization it's not going to increase the ability of the hardware to multi-task.
Once the other companies release their own versions of the hypervisor, VMware's stock is going to plummet. I don't see any use for this at all outside of large server-side businesses and if anything it will bog down a system that uses more than 30% of it's resource at any given time.

You can see on their own site, on their own benchmarks, increased performance hits it's peak early, and begins to fall almost as rapidly not unlike multicore processors.

http://www.vmware.com/overview/perfo...enchmarks.html

I suppose if you run a VM you can run a secure "whatever" where ever fairly risk and worry free, but it seems pointless to me.
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Old 09-12-2007, 12:13 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NikFu S. View Post
Hmm, I don't see how anything is possible with "virtual infrastructure" that is not currently possible without it. Virtual machines and emulation are hardly a new idea, and even with virtual machinization it's not going to increase the ability of the hardware to multi-task.
Once the other companies release their own versions of the hypervisor, VMware's stock is going to plummet. I don't see any use for this at all outside of large server-side businesses and if anything it will bog down a system that uses more than 30% of it's resource at any given time.

You can see on their own site, on their own benchmarks, increased performance hits it's peak early, and begins to fall almost as rapidly not unlike multicore processors.

http://www.vmware.com/overview/perfo...enchmarks.html

I suppose if you run a VM you can run a secure "whatever" where ever fairly risk and worry free, but it seems pointless to me.

Basic virtualization is nothing new, but VMWare has taken the idea and built some interesting things on it. You can have a farm of VMWare servers and they can share virtual machines based on resource demand. Imagine having a server that can spread its processing load among multiple servers during a burst, then scale back down to one when demand slows. You can pull one physical server out for maintainence and all of the virtual servers stay live.

For building server/client systems it is a dream. I always build new servers in a VMWare session first, with many snapshots so if something I install breaks something else, I simply revert to a previous snapshot and restart the installation of the guilty product to debug.
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Old 09-12-2007, 07:12 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NikFu S. View Post
Hmm, I don't see how anything is possible with "virtual infrastructure" that is not currently possible without it. Virtual machines and emulation are hardly a new idea, and even with virtual machinization it's not going to increase the ability of the hardware to multi-task.
Once the other companies release their own versions of the hypervisor, VMware's stock is going to plummet. I don't see any use for this at all outside of large server-side businesses and if anything it will bog down a system that uses more than 30% of it's resource at any given time.

You can see on their own site, on their own benchmarks, increased performance hits it's peak early, and begins to fall almost as rapidly not unlike multicore processors.

http://www.vmware.com/overview/perfo...enchmarks.html

I suppose if you run a VM you can run a secure "whatever" where ever fairly risk and worry free, but it seems pointless to me.
Disclaimer: I do VMWare for a living and am a VCP (VMware Certified Professional). As a result, I DO have a vested interest in the success of the company and product... but I'm also Citrix Certified and working with Xen a lot... so take that for what it's worth, too...

Contrary to your comment, virtualization DOES increase the ability for a given physical box to multitask. Particularly when dealing with Windows systems, the ability for the OS to arbitrate tasks falls apart as you scale up (number of applications). That's why most people actually end up scaling out; that is adding additional systems instead of having multiple processors and so forth. Typically, each server in an environment only runs one or two major tasks, with the rest of the system committed to running the rest (authentication, disk subsystems and so forth).

Now, as you scale out like this, the problem becomes one of load. A typical Windows server is less than 8% utilized (and this is from my own studies, not VMWare's). This means that for an average server-based application you're wasting 92% of the server's computing power. Note here that I take computing power to be a combination of all factors; memory, CPU and I/O utilization... not just CPU utilization. For a company paying $10,000 for a server, that's a loss of $9,200 per server in the datacenter.

VMWare allows you to stack 6 or 7 of these systems on top of one another, leaving some overhead for growth in one physical box. It maintains all the advantages of outward scaling (application isolation, multitasking and so forth) while getting rid of the down side (wasted computing cycles).

Now the reality is obviously a LOT more complex than this. If it were this simple then we wouldn't need people like me. However, as a rough guide this is good enough.

I build systems that run in an high-availability backbone, each physical node running (normally) 15-20 guest machines... mostly Windows but some Linux and at least one Solaris box that I know of. So, across our current farm with 160 Virtual Guests, we have nominally 10 big beefy servers instead of 160 2U boxes in our racks (our standard stand-alone server used to be a DL385).

Now, we actually run our VMWare on highly powered IBM blades connected to a SAN. In fact, with technologies like VMotion (look it up!) we can actually take down a server for patching or hardware replacement without taking down ANY of the hosts on the server itself. Put it in maintenance mode, move them to other nodes and we've just moved a client-accessed server to another physical server without downtime.

I'm sure you can see the value in this to corporations. It's huge, and I paid for my own VCP exam because I believe in the future of virtualization. Maybe I sound like a zealot... but it REALLY is cool tech.

MSG me if you want ot discuss further...
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Old 09-13-2007, 10:30 AM
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Noir likes VMware.

that is all.
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Old 09-13-2007, 06:29 PM
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Now, as you scale out like this, the problem becomes one of load. A typical Windows server is less than 8% utilized (and this is from my own studies, not VMWare's). This means that for an average server-based application you're wasting 92% of the server's computing power. Note here that I take computing power to be a combination of all factors; memory, CPU and I/O utilization... not just CPU utilization. For a company paying $10,000 for a server, that's a loss of $9,200 per server in the datacenter.

VMWare allows you to stack 6 or 7 of these systems on top of one another, leaving some overhead for growth in one physical box. It maintains all the advantages of outward scaling (application isolation, multitasking and so forth) while getting rid of the down side (wasted computing cycles).
I've narrowed what would be a kinda long post down to one question.

How does it not also waste computer cycles?

--
While thinking about it I drew myself a little diagram to help understand.
If you can make sense of it and alter it to better represent what VMware does that would be helpful since the sites just use a lot of e-jargon without really demonstrating any actual application.

I was also under the impression this was new but you guys are all using it.
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Old 09-14-2007, 11:48 AM
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It doesn't waste computing cycles because it uses them IYSWIM. Wasted processing capability is when a system is sitting idle X% of the time instead of actually doing real work. Sort of like when people surf the web at work

Now, consider that for an average application, a server is sized to handle PEAK load, not AVERAGE load. As such, a server that's spec'd out to handle massive peak loads for only an hour or two a day sits idle for 22-23 hours every day. That's massive waste since it's chowing up power and pumping heat into a datacenter that needs to be removed. If we could figure out a way to harness these idle times and use them...

Of course, virtualization is one of many answers to this question. If correctly load-balanced (i.e. being careful about the systems that are being hosted on a single virtual server) you can ensure that multiple systems get access to that same peak load capability but at different times, sort of timesharing. Thus, instead of a $10,000 server that sits idle 22-23 hours a day, now you have one server hosting a number of guest servers that process at different times of day and thus meaning said system may sit idle for 4-5 hours a day instead (oh look; a backup window!). Though VMWare costs licensing costs, you can see a singificant savings. A server such as this might cost $10,000 with $3000 of VMWare licensing... but then you've got the "bang" of 6-7 of the same servers for a fraction of the cost.

Note that typically in IT you wouldn't put multiple applications in the same instance of a server OS because you wouldn't want a failure of an application to affect others. This is true of physical and virtual machines, and is sadly a lesson we all learned from Microsoft.

Now, obviously workloads aren't usually spread out like that but the concept is still usable. Virtualization generally can be seen as "timesharing" for systems, but instead of hours of timesharing blocks we have timesharing blocks that last only fractions of a second. During a single fraction of a second, statistically it is unlikely that most servers will actually have any work to do, so the physical system then goes to the next guest instance and see if IT has anything to do. If it does, it takes the load, does the processing, hands it back and moves to the next. It's "timeslicing".

Obviously then we take into account multiple CPUs and stuff things get complicated because we can have multiple instances processing at once. There's a lot of depth and complexity to this that I won't get into because I'm trying to keep things relatively laymans-terms here

Now, the virtual kernel itself that does the arbitration between the guest OSs DOES take some resources of its own. However, said kernel is really very small and is written unlike a typical operating system kernel in that it only has one job to do; arbitrate timesharing of the physical resources that are available. This simplified kernel does its job well because it's tuned for that job and that job only. It effectively acts as a proxy between the guest machines and the physical hardware. Each guest machine uses a standard method to access that kernel (emulated CPU, arbitrated disk access and so forth) and thus said arbitration kernel can chug along just taking care of making sure each guest has a fair share of time.

Note that there are also technologies that VMWare pushes like DRS, which allow dynamic scheduling and management of resource. This gets really complex in that a cluster of physical VMWare servers will then arbitrate guests not just within the physical machine, but within the entire cluster. This means that if a server is going to need resources for a job run, it can be moved to a system that is less utilized on the fly and actually end up running on a different machine dependent on load. It does all this completely dynamically and learns over time which machines load up at different times, which are going to need resources and so forth.

So, the upshot is that it reduces waste of computing cycles because it uses them. It allows a sysadmin to actually push their computing resources instead of having 500 servers that are utilized at less than 10% of their capacity, while having maybe a dozen servers that actually run at 50% or more. Over time this becomes a huge cost savings because you can take those 500 idle machines and "compress" them to (at worst) 50 physical machines of similar specifications... and in fact you can even do better than that. This saves rack space, saves floor space and reduces cost of electricity and cooling. It also means smaller datacenters.

Another nice thing is that since all the hardware is arbitrated away from the guest OS's (the ones doing the actual work), you can literally move a server to new hardware with zero changes and boot it up. This is even without VMotion, which allows you to do the same thing without even shutting the server down!

Damn, I should do a seminar at an SVX meet...
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Old 09-14-2007, 11:56 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NikFu S. View Post
While thinking about it I drew myself a little diagram to help understand.
If you can make sense of it and alter it to better represent what VMware does that would be helpful since the sites just use a lot of e-jargon without really demonstrating any actual application.

I was also under the impression this was new but you guys are all using it.
I'll take a look at your diagram when I get home tonight and do my best

As for new? Not really. Virtualization is an OLD technology; it's how mainframes did their thing in the "bad old days". It's a relatively recent thing in the Intel world though, and there are a number of technologies vying for supremacy here.

Here are some more good links for learning;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vmware

That'll explain concepts a lot better than some of the marketing materials you'll get from VMware
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Old 09-14-2007, 04:34 PM
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You actually explained most of what I needed to hear in your second post.
I didn't realize there was a difference between peak load and average load servers.
I already understood some of the other benefits of the ware but that was the big one I just couldn't get around.

Don't worry about laymans terms with me, I've had a proffessional IT education. It's hard being out of the loop for 4 years though.

What I meant by new is I thought VMware had just hit the market . I didn't realize it has been out for a while.
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Old 09-15-2007, 09:53 AM
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Originally Posted by NikFu S. View Post
You actually explained most of what I needed to hear in your second post.
I didn't realize there was a difference between peak load and average load servers.
I already understood some of the other benefits of the ware but that was the big one I just couldn't get around.

Don't worry about laymans terms with me, I've had a proffessional IT education. It's hard being out of the loop for 4 years though.

What I meant by new is I thought VMware had just hit the market . I didn't realize it has been out for a while.
Very cool... glad I could clarify some of this. Actually, virtualization in general is a really big deal in IT right now and is a VERY exciting field to be a part of. I'm really getting a kick out of it.

Of course, there are other benefits to virtualization, like running multiple OS's on a single machine. I run a Mac laptop, but can run Windows apps seamlessly on my desktop thanks to Parallels Desktop software. It's not emulated Windows; it's emulated hardware running a copy of Windows XP with those few Windows-only apps I still need installed. It sits in the background and is there when I need it. Isn't technology cool?
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