IT Forum: Virtualisation market needs choice

The virtualisation software market, while dominated by VMware, has barely touched the surface of what can be done, and lacks the range of options needed in the enterprise, according to industry leaders.

Speaking at IT Forum in Barcelona following the announcement of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation technology, a panel of Microsoft and Citrix virtualisation specialists argued that the virtualisation market is not as developed as established vendors would claim.

"The virtualisation market generally is very immature. There is a lack of products and a lack of choice for the user. By bringing more products into the market and increasing competition, the market will mature and improve, and that can only benefit everyone in the end," said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer of the virtualisation division at Citrix.

"Customer choice is driven by the ecosystem, and a clear sign of the immaturity of the market is that potentially, there is not a robust ecosystem in place, so it is important that vendors such as Microsoft are doing what they are doing to contribute to virtualisation ecosystem," Crosby said.

Microsoft's planned launch of Hyper-V within Windows Server 2008 won't take place until the end of February next year, leaving the door open for several other vendors to get into the enterprise virtualisation market, or at least announce their intentions, ahead of Microsoft's revised product arriving. In the meantime, legacy products such as the existing Virtual Server product that grew from Microsoft's acquisition of Connectix, while capable of running virtual server instances, lack many of the features currently being looked for in terms of management and automated deployment.

"One of the big things missing from the market is management tool. It is one thing to be able to manage the virtual machines themselves, but with the potential for deploying so many instances of a machine virtually, it is essential that IT professionals have the tools necessary to manage the applications running inside those virtual machines," said Larry Orecklin, general manager for Microsoft's System Centre business.

"That is really what customers are trying to do. They do not care about what technology is in use, whether it is a virtual machine or a physical one, they need to manage it and ensure it is being productive," he added.

For end users, the aim is to make virtual instances transparent. Whether an application or the OS it is running on is running in a virtual instance is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that it works, and works well. The panel accepted that existing virtualisation vendors have set a strong benchmark in terms of reliability, but that the cost of entry to business-grade virtualisation for enterprise users remains unacceptably high.

"The other thing that is important is the economics of adoption. If you look at the business model that exists today in the [virtualisation] industry, the costs associated with deploying and using virtualisation solutions are extremely high today," said Orecklin.

One of the biggest changes in the virtualisation market is the move to hardware virtualisation, particularly on the desktop, with chipmakers adding virtual computing functionality at the processor and chipset level to improve performance and simplify the virtualisation deployment and initialisation.

"The move towards hardware-based virtualisation is going to help deliver a richer, more transparent user experience, and we fully support the efforts of both major chip makers to introduce virtualisation capabilities into their hardware," added Mike Neil, general manager of virtualisation strategy at Microsoft.

Demand for improved use of PC and server resources has created an explosion if interest in virtualisation on both desktop and server computers, with the likes of SWSoft spin-off Parallels making waves among Mac users by allowing them to run virtual Windows and Linux instances within Mac OS, while on the server side Microsoft and Citrix are being joined by Oracle and IBM, among others in trying to tap demand for software that will make maximum use of data centre resources.

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