Virtualized market
Virtualization, virtualization, virtualization. This buzzword flashes in the news headlines of all industry and business publications, is broadcast at all conferences for IT professionals, becomes a fix idea for strategists of major corporations. Those products and solutions for virtualization that were previously offered only to their traditional customers - hosting providers and holders of huge distributed LANs - are now actively promoted to the masses.
Passions have already reached such a critical level, when taxi drivers and girls from the personnel department are about to speak about virtualization. Microsoft, not stint on any resources, began a real arms race with competing companies. A massive marketing attack in support of its Hyper-V is countered by a VMware counterattack with its free ESXi Server.
To understand the flow of information from Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, from VMware and other companies, I took a few interviews and visited a breakthrough of explanatory events, and Philip Gladkov ( Bukasa ) even went for a few days to Barcelona TechEd IT Professionals. If virtualization does not concern you directly, but like us, you want to understand who is who in the world around it - we did it for you too.
Brad Anderson, head of Microsoft's management and solutions department, who spoke in the capital of Catalonia to listeners from dozens of countries, incendiaryly described how Redmond sees virtualization. According to him, the use of virtualization in the IT infrastructure of any enterprise kills two birds with one stone:
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- cuts costs due to a more complete and rational use of hardware resources of servers and PCs, and thus reducing their fleet. Now, according to the company, the average server is only used at 25% of its capacity. And several virtual machines can occupy it all;
- cuts costs to qualified personnel, because it is easier to administer virtual machines, which means that massive demand for sysadmins with inhuman knowledge and abilities disappears. They, however, can go to work with application hosts and data centers, reassured us Microsoft’s chief virtualization strategist Zane Adam.
Microsoft wants to make virtualization as cheap as possible, Anderson says. Their hypervisor (a program for managing computer hardware resources and distributing them among virtual machines) Hyper-V, however, was developed only for 64-bit machines with hardware-assisted virtualization. Vasily Malanin, virtualization manager at the company's Russian representative office, says that this is because “most customers already have a fleet of such machines” and adds that “you can work on Hyper-V with both 32-bit and 64-bit virtual by cars. For systems that do not support hardware virtualization, the company has the products Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Virtual PC 2007, on which you cannot create 64-bit virtual machines.
Virtual Server 2005 remains a server virtualization solution for legacy servers and will not develop further, completely giving way to Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. And Virtual PC 2007 is a virtualization system for client systems that will be updated further and will be significantly refined over the coming year.
It is difficult to put a boundary between the corporate and consumer virtualization market. Rather, it is a market of server virtualization and desktop virtualization. Technologically, these areas of divergence. If we talk about the use of virtualization as such, then all virtualization products can be used both in the corporate infrastructure and on a home PC or server. ”
VMware, which was the first to launch mass-market virtualization solutions in 1999, is not so actively working for the public for its popularity. Although the ambitions of this Californian company extend far. Its VMware Infrastructure 3 package today is, in fact, an operating system, albeit with poor functionality in all but the actual provision of virtualization.
The package consists of components such as the ESX Server hypervisor (and its free equivalent ESXi), the vStorage VMFS file system, the Vmotion utility for imperceptibly moving a virtual machine from one server to another and others.
Competing with Microsoft and Linux in the platform market, VMware behaves accordingly: their list of advantages of virtualization is much larger and is served to much better trained listeners. Still feeling great as a leader in both sales and implementations in server virtualization, the company also occupies niche areas. This is a familiar VMware Workstation for many people to run “guest” OSs from under the shell of another OS on a PC and, for example, Fusion - which does the same, but only on a Mac and of course in a very user-friendly key. In all niches, VMware successfully competes with products of both Microsoft and smaller companies.
Of these, for example, the Russian company Parallels. It considers that competition with such giants on the platform field is a “dubious idea.” Therefore, they focus on operating system virtualization in the Virtuozzo Containers package and the Windows launcher for Mac applications — Parallels Desktop for Mac, which is the most popular in its field.
In addition to all of the above, there are, of course, dozens of other solutions, including the open XenSource hypervisor, which was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2007. Based on it, XenServer Enterprise Edition is quite popular and has capabilities in many ways not inferior to VMware Infrastructure. About him, however, you are unlikely to hear - Citrix marketing works selectively and to the point, without being sprayed on mass advertising.
Passions have already reached such a critical level, when taxi drivers and girls from the personnel department are about to speak about virtualization. Microsoft, not stint on any resources, began a real arms race with competing companies. A massive marketing attack in support of its Hyper-V is countered by a VMware counterattack with its free ESXi Server.
To understand the flow of information from Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, from VMware and other companies, I took a few interviews and visited a breakthrough of explanatory events, and Philip Gladkov ( Bukasa ) even went for a few days to Barcelona TechEd IT Professionals. If virtualization does not concern you directly, but like us, you want to understand who is who in the world around it - we did it for you too.
Brad Anderson, head of Microsoft's management and solutions department, who spoke in the capital of Catalonia to listeners from dozens of countries, incendiaryly described how Redmond sees virtualization. According to him, the use of virtualization in the IT infrastructure of any enterprise kills two birds with one stone:
')
- cuts costs due to a more complete and rational use of hardware resources of servers and PCs, and thus reducing their fleet. Now, according to the company, the average server is only used at 25% of its capacity. And several virtual machines can occupy it all;
- cuts costs to qualified personnel, because it is easier to administer virtual machines, which means that massive demand for sysadmins with inhuman knowledge and abilities disappears. They, however, can go to work with application hosts and data centers, reassured us Microsoft’s chief virtualization strategist Zane Adam.
Microsoft wants to make virtualization as cheap as possible, Anderson says. Their hypervisor (a program for managing computer hardware resources and distributing them among virtual machines) Hyper-V, however, was developed only for 64-bit machines with hardware-assisted virtualization. Vasily Malanin, virtualization manager at the company's Russian representative office, says that this is because “most customers already have a fleet of such machines” and adds that “you can work on Hyper-V with both 32-bit and 64-bit virtual by cars. For systems that do not support hardware virtualization, the company has the products Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Virtual PC 2007, on which you cannot create 64-bit virtual machines.
Virtual Server 2005 remains a server virtualization solution for legacy servers and will not develop further, completely giving way to Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. And Virtual PC 2007 is a virtualization system for client systems that will be updated further and will be significantly refined over the coming year.
It is difficult to put a boundary between the corporate and consumer virtualization market. Rather, it is a market of server virtualization and desktop virtualization. Technologically, these areas of divergence. If we talk about the use of virtualization as such, then all virtualization products can be used both in the corporate infrastructure and on a home PC or server. ”
VMware, which was the first to launch mass-market virtualization solutions in 1999, is not so actively working for the public for its popularity. Although the ambitions of this Californian company extend far. Its VMware Infrastructure 3 package today is, in fact, an operating system, albeit with poor functionality in all but the actual provision of virtualization.
The package consists of components such as the ESX Server hypervisor (and its free equivalent ESXi), the vStorage VMFS file system, the Vmotion utility for imperceptibly moving a virtual machine from one server to another and others.
Competing with Microsoft and Linux in the platform market, VMware behaves accordingly: their list of advantages of virtualization is much larger and is served to much better trained listeners. Still feeling great as a leader in both sales and implementations in server virtualization, the company also occupies niche areas. This is a familiar VMware Workstation for many people to run “guest” OSs from under the shell of another OS on a PC and, for example, Fusion - which does the same, but only on a Mac and of course in a very user-friendly key. In all niches, VMware successfully competes with products of both Microsoft and smaller companies.
Of these, for example, the Russian company Parallels. It considers that competition with such giants on the platform field is a “dubious idea.” Therefore, they focus on operating system virtualization in the Virtuozzo Containers package and the Windows launcher for Mac applications — Parallels Desktop for Mac, which is the most popular in its field.
In addition to all of the above, there are, of course, dozens of other solutions, including the open XenSource hypervisor, which was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2007. Based on it, XenServer Enterprise Edition is quite popular and has capabilities in many ways not inferior to VMware Infrastructure. About him, however, you are unlikely to hear - Citrix marketing works selectively and to the point, without being sprayed on mass advertising.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/46423/
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