Virtualization – a feature not a platform

When it comes to defining the role of virtualization, there are two camps:

1) Virtualization is a platform – represented by VMware

2) Virtualization is a feature – represented by Parallels, Microsoft, Citrix, IBM, SUN, Novell, Oracle

VMware knows that only software companies that are platform vendors survive in the long run. VMware’s only asset is virtualization, so they have to position their own virtualization as replacement for someone else’s existing platforms. In this interview, Mendel Rosenblum says that hypervisor will not replace the OS, but in the next sentence he says that the OS as we know it, will cease to exist. Instead, it will be reduced to an application-specific library. VMware prays for it, while others are concerned – but this subject deserves a separate post. VMware goes against all established players, makes huge bet with a huge risk – when the base virtualization technology is free – and it will be free when Hyper-V and Xen, both free products, become more mature – VMware will have hard times charging the price premium they charge now. Their management suite only works with their hypervisor, while in the system management world being heterogeneous is the basic condition for success.

Second camp is saying that virtualization is optimization of existing platform. For Parallels, virtualization is a very important but only a component of the overall automation platform. For Microsoft, Citrix, IBM, SUN, Novell virtualization is very important, but it is still only an enhancement of their existing platforms and ecosystems. Parallels Virtuozzo and Parallels Server are a big part of Parallels automation/SaaS platform, but not really the main value. Hyper-V, Xen and others alike are very important capabilities, but again, not the main value of what the established players offer. When Simon said that virtualization should be a part of, not “the” infrastructure and all the disruption caused by VMware products is not necessary, an anonymous (why???) VMware employee went berserk.

I’m with the “feature” camp. In my opinion, virtualization layer is more or less similar to the OS kernel – it’s a foundation for everything else, but it’s not a deciding factor for choosing a platform.

Just as very few people would decide to buy a car based on how good the navigation system is, even fewer people would make their Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac decision based on how fast each OS creates a process or performs a context switch. Rather, they look at the value of entire platform and total cost of ownership.

VMware tries to convince otherwise. For example, take a look at the argument about importance of a patented memory enlargement method. The memory ballooning feature allegedly helps greatly improve the density of virtual machines and save on the hardware costs. However, as many opponents pointed out, it was a great debate about something not really important. Memory is cheap and hardware costs are a minor components of the TCO. Management cost is by far the biggest TCO component and VMware suffers from VM sprawl with or without memory ballooning. Parallels Virtuozzo, on the other hand, eliminates VM sprawl and delivers huge TCO savings. Not to mention that in situations where density really matters – light-weight web/LOB applications or VDI – Parallels Virtuozzo, with its true dynamic memory allocation, consistently delivers at least 3 times higher than ESX on VDI scenario and at least 5 times higher for light-weight web apps.

Anyway, what do you think – platform or feature?

Parallels is not for sale

Yesterday, there was a not-so-funny April Fool’s day joke about SUN acquiring Parallels for $205 million.

Normally, I would not even comment on something like that, but surprisingly enough (to me at least) we have received some inquiries asking if this is true.

So, to set things straight – no, it is not true.

1) $205 million price is WAAAAAY TOOOOO LOOOOOW for Parallels. This amount is far off based on our annual revenue, profitability and growth and it would be very strange to expect a company with leading positions in two hottest industry segments – virtualization and automation – to be sold at that price.

2) SUN is a really strange acquirer. Our products are for Windows, Mac and Linux, and SUN is not that focused on the first two. Also, SUN is really not that much into automation, so again, not a good fit. If Microsoft or VMware or even HP or IBM was mentioned – it would make some sense, but not SUN.

3) All of the above is actually irrelevant anyway because we are just not planning to sell right now. We do receive offers, but we feel strongly that being independent is a better choice for us and more fun, too.

The rest of the rumor – I mean the part about Parallels being a fast-growing company with a strong product portfolio in the two hottest segments – is true. It’s just we are not selling out, definitely not to SUN and certainly not for $205 million.

Virtualization vs. multi-tenant architecture

For software developers, SaaS is typically associated with "multi-tenant architecture", which many believe is a prerequisite for a SaaS application.

Traditionally, there would be only one instance of an application running on a server, and this instance would only serve one customer a.k.a. tenant. In the SaaS world, giving each tenant a dedicated server is a huge waste of resources and service providers want to put as many customers on the same server as possible. However, many applications (on Windows – most applications), by design, cannot have multiple instances on the same server.

To solve this problem, software developers came up with "multi-tenant architecture". The application is redesigned in such a way that a single physical copy of an application provides multiple "virtual" instances – each tenant gets an instance. Compared to several independent instances, using the same physical instance allows extensive sharing of data and metadata between instances/tenants

Multi-tenant design is considered to be more efficient than multi-instancing, but in reality, as always, your mileage will vary. And to make the estimation process easier, I'd like to shed some light – from the ISV's point of view – on the "dark side" of the multi-tenant approach:

• Cost of transition – There are no good recipes for converting a traditional single-tenant application to multi-tenant design. Empirical data shows that typically the process takes 12+ months and requires resources of nearly the entire development organization. The existing feature development is essentially frozen.
  
• Ongoing costs – Current generation of software – development tools, middleware, management tools – do not natively support multi-tenant paradigm. For traditional applications, mundane development tasks were taken care of by frameworks and tools, and mundane management tasks were taken care of by management solutions. None of this software natively supports multi-tenant paradigm, so an ISV will have to develop a lot of plumbing-ware from scratch.
  
• Skills mismatch – The ISV must deliver complex services outside their area of expertise – hosting, SLA enforcement, monitoring, data protection, security, etc. The expertise associated with running a large-scale datacenter is not something that can be acquired overnight.
  
• Limited customization – It's very hard to efficiently implement per-tenant database schema customization in a single database, and it's not possible to use standard DBMS tools – like built-in indexing. Plus, the multi-tenant application cannot use script-based customization of the internal logic – what if a buggy script loops infinitely?
  

  SmoothSpan Bob Warfield and Unreasonable Men argued that customization capabilities are often excessive and there is little harm in removing much of that flexibility. For newly written applications, it might even be true. But if an ISV has a customer base to migrate to SaaS model, telling customers that their solutions will be broken because some of the customizations don't work anymore is hardly an option.
  

• Weak isolation – Because all tenants run inside the same application instance, one tenant can bring down everyone else on the same machine – due to a security breach, memory leak, "infinite loop" bug – you name it. It is technically possible to build some resource management capabilities into the application itself, but the existing development tools – languages, frameworks – do not support safe multi-tenancy and hence don't provide resource management capabilities.
  
• Inflexible service levels – Finally, lack of resource management means that you cannot provide and hence monetize service level guarantees.
  

Virtualization – The silver-coated bullet

There is no silver bullet, but in this case, there is a silver-coated one.
Virtualization technology provides a solution to all the problems mentioned – put the application in a virtual environment and ship it – in unchanged state – to the service provider's datacenter. If the front-end is not web-based, use a VPN. This topic has already been discussed by Bob Warfield and Phil Wainewright who cites a real success story. Hardware virtualization, with single-digit real-life consolidation ratio, will probably not be good enough. But a light-weight server virtualization technology that can host 100+ instances on a single server - Virtuozzo – provides very cost-effective solution. Even if you are very determined to pursue multi-tenancy, Virtuozzo will buy you enough time to make the transition smooth and successful. However, in the majority of cases, further transition will not even be necessary because the Virtuozzo-based solution works well for most customers.

Shameless plug – check out my SaaS blog.

Comments on Gartner Top 10 technology list

Just before its annual symposium event, Gartner published a list of the Top 10 strategic technologies in 2008. We wanted to add our perspective because SWsoft plays is a significant role in three of those areas. We welcome your comments with your perspective.

Green IT – Higher density means fewer servers and the lowest possible power consumption. Virtuozzo providers several times higher density – number of workloads running on a single server – as compared with VMware or XEN. Take a look at the
customer testimonies here.

Virtualization 2.0 – According to Gartner, 2.0 means supplementing virtualization technology with automation – which is exactly what SWsoft has been delivering since 1999. In fact, back in 1999, Virtuozzo was developed as a part of our automation suite. Many virtualization companies started with solving an interesting engineering problem of virtualizing a non-virtualizeable computer architecture. Now, as they have the hammer, they are looking for the nails. At SWsoft, we first looked at the issues in the large scale data centers and then created a solution, where virtualization and automation work together.

Web Platform and WOA - This is a real 2.0 for us – SWsoft 2.0, if you will. We are trying, with our Open Fusion initiative and a set of SaaS enabling technologies, to help transform the web hosting industry into a SaaS delivery industry. It seems our message of automation and virtualization as equally important pillars of the SaaS infrastructure is finally getting through. However, there is a lot more work ahead to make the transformation a reality.

Virtuozzo for Amazon

I just read that Xen-based Amazon EC2 suffered major faults, and based on the information provided, I think that Virtuozzo can be a perfect solution for Amazon:

• Very easy to build high-availability solution – no lost data
  
• Zero performance overhead and much higher hardware and power efficiency – several times more environments on the same server
  
• Strong security isolation – virtual environments can't see each other's data
  
• Resource management – when some application starts misbehaving, other tenants remain unaffected. CPU, memory, network bandwidth – everything can be throttled dynamically
  

Virtuozzo was specifically designed to meet the extremely high – and ever increasing – performance and isolation standards of service providers and large-scale datacenters, not as technology for consolidating a few legacy applications on a single server. And it has been used this way successfully since 1999.

Some of our customers shared their experiences – take a look. Perhaps it's time for Amazon to take a closer look at Virtuozzo.

Parallels Desktop benchmarked

Just recently I wrote about virtualization benchmarking. My point was that a good benchmark has to

• Be based on real-world use cases
  
• Be vendor and technology neutral
  

VMmark was certainly neither – based on an artificial workload mix and designed to work best with ESX and not work at all with Virtuozzo.

CNET recently did a performance comparison between Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Surprisingly enough, their benchmark also suffered from unrealistic scenarios and vendor bias.

Pretty much everything about this test is upside down:

• It does not make sense to use an exclusive monster 8-core desktop for benchmarking Windows on Mac. Most people use laptops with 2 CPU cores and 2GB of RAM at most.
  
• Since Mac OS is the primary OS, it does not make sense to give both cores to a Windows VM that runs Word, Excel and Outlook. Office applications don't benefit from multiple CPUs. Perhaps that's why default configuration of Fusion is a single-CPU VM. Come on – most of the VMmark (server benchmark) workloads run in a single-core VM. Yet, desktop benchmark is run with dual cores – does not make much sense to me.
  
• It does not make sense to use Vista inside a VM. Most people run XP because Vista license only allows the most expensive Vista SKUs to run inside VM, not to mention application compatibility issues.
  
• It does not make sense to run QuickTime and Photoshop inside Windows VM. Why use Mac OS in the first place if not for running Mac OS-native multimedia apps?
  

Actually, some people noted that the benchmark looked strange. Some even took time to run some tests for themselves.

The results show that Parallels actually performs better than Fusion on most tests and on the overall benchmark. And, as you already know from CNET test, Fusion could not even run the 3D gaming test. Yet, I'm sure my colleagues at Parallels are already working hard and the next Desktop update will improve responsiveness and performance so that even artificial tests will pass wellJ

Finally, I wanted to remind you that Parallels has always been focused on the real-world productivity. It is the time wasted on extra clicks, not raw speed that affects productivity the most. And it is the real-world scenarios – running real software applications on real hardware configurations – that need to be reflected in the benchmarks.

Citrix acquires XenSource

Citrix just announced the acquisition of XenSource for $500 million. XenSource was obviously for sale – trying to avoid being between a rock (VMware) and a hard place (Microsoft) – but the buyer and the price were a big surprise for me. Which raises few questions:

• Is Citrix desperate? – The core business of Citrix – presentation server – is being threatened by VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and other Citrix businesses are still small in comparison. Citrix needed a hypervisor to make its VDI stack complete. Did it need it so desperately that it justified paying half-billion dollars for a company with tiny revenue?
• Will Citrix cross Microsoft? – Good relationship with Microsoft was very important for success of Presentation Server, but is much less important for success of the VDI business, especially when Citrix owns the hypervisor.

  Citrix could partner with Microsoft and use Viridian hypervisor, which will be out in about a year. Even though not as advanced as Xen, it will surely work wonderfully with Windows, and Citrix could care less about Linux. Instead, with Xen acquisition, Citrix followed VMware and entered the platform game, where it will be directly competing with Microsoft not just as VDI, but as a platform vendor.
  

• Is Citrix committed to Xen community? – Citrix is a proprietary Windows company. Xen, on the other hand, has relied on and enjoyed strong support from open-source Linux community. The two philosophies are vastly different and making them work together will be interesting to watch from the side lines.
  

Looking forward to your comments!

VMmark – comments

VMware recently announced availability of VMmark – the first virtualization benchmark that measures… well, some characteristics of workloads running in virtual machines.

Overall, VMmark is a step in the right direction. However, it has a long way to become a solid benchmark. Here are some of the issues:

• Virtualization platform scalability is not measured – The largest VM in the tile is 2CPU/2GB SQL Server VM, which is much smaller than the physical server itself. VMware ESX supports a VM with 4 virtual CPUs and 16GB of memory, yet – why??? – these capabilities are not used in the test.
  
• Workload mix is not realistic – There will always be different virtualized workloads running on the same physical machine, but all VMmark workloads are quite different. Such a mix could be more realistic for small/medium business consolidation scenario, but not the typical enterprise datacenter deployment.
  
• Performance of individual workloads is not measured – with such a wild workload mix, it is difficult to find out how well a server is suited for consolidating several instances of a certain workload – such as Exchange Server, SQL Server or file server.
  
• Mixing platforms is unnecessary – Mixing platforms on the same machine prevents running VMmark using Virtuozzo – not that I suggest it was done on purpose J In real life, enterprises typically run Windows and Linux on different boxes, and majority of the consolidated workloads are Windows-based.
  
• Aggregate score has no physical meaning - All workloads in the tile are throttled and never run at the full capacity. And, if the server is powerful enough that a single tile cannot load it fully, you are supposed to add another, which would double the number of VMs and probably skew the results.
  

A better approach would be a more traditional methodology that runs workloads serially:

For each workload, measure maximum aggregate performance with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 virtual environments. Normalize against the same workload on the same hardware without virtualization and average the results.

The benefits of this approach:

• A single VE test will measure scalability and performance of the virtualization platform – ability to use multiple CPUs, large memory, fast storage subsystems and network interfaces.
  
• 16/32 VE tests will measure realistic density limits for consolidating specific workloads on the tested virtualization platform.
  
• It will measure for each workload how virtualization overhead grows with density.
  
• Finally, Virtuozzo will be able to run the benchmark because only one OS is used for a single benchmark run.
  

Let me know what you think about pros and cons of each approach.

IBM adopts Virtuozzo approach in AIX

You may have noticed that IBM has just launched open beta for OS-virtualization-enhanced AIX. SWsoft introduced Virtuozzo OS server virtualization in 2001. Then, SUN introduced Solaris Containers and now it's IBM – it's said that imitation is the sincerest form of flatteryJ.

Two years after SWsoft, VMware gets Intel investment

The oncoming VMware IPO and Intel's investment were widely covered in the news. Having Intel's support is very important and extremely valuable. We know because we received it, along with investment from Intel Capital, back in 2005, and this support allowed us to deliver better products, faster. We view the VMware IPO and Intel's investment as good news for the virtualization industry and all related vendors because it emphasizes the high level of interest and market opportunity. It's worth mentioning that SWsoft is a clear #2 virtualization vendor:

• SWsoft software runs on 130,000 servers and 500,000 desktops;
  
• SWsoft virtualization business has a growth rate of more than 600%, as compared with VMware's 98% percent – according to IDC, the fastest growing virtualization vendor.
  

On a side note, we now have another blog – SaaS blog – dedicated to another hot topic in the industry – Software-As-A-Service. In my opinion, SaaS needs virtualization, so you might be interested in checking it out.