Virtual unrealities exposed

"Previously, if you wanted disaster recovery, the hardware, operating system and applications were all tightly linked to each other, so in your secondary data centre you had to have the same hardware, applications and the rest, and keep them all in sync," says Raghu Raghuram, VMware's vice president for data centre and desktop platform products. "With a virtual machine, you can take that file, transport it by SAN or tape or what have you, to another data centre, and get it up and running immediately".

Shifting servers from one machine to another at will makes it easier to carry out hardware maintenance and load balancing. VMware says more than half of its customers are using a tool called VMotion for such services. Other advanced applications gaining momentum among VMware users include rapid provisioning of applications and virtualisation of desktop operating systems, which some companies prefer for the greater security it provides.

Newcomers: Microsoft and Xen
VMware is keen to point out such trends, as it believes competitors such as Microsoft and Xen are currently nowhere near it when it comes to management tools. Microsoft is just getting started in the field. And while Xen's hypervisor has reached a certain level of solidity — it's now launched version 3.0 after more than three years of development — there aren't yet Xen-based tools comparable with those found in VMware's just-launched Virtual Infrastructure 3. "At the end of the day, Microsoft and Xen are playing catch-up," says Gartner's Phil Dawson.

The shape of the virtualisation market is changing rapidly, however, with an unmistakable trend toward universally available virtualisation built into the operating system. Microsoft's latest offering, Virtual Server 2005 R2, running on Windows Server 2003, is available for free — a price that's somewhat difficult to argue with.Virtual Machine Manager, a management tool based on Virtual Server 2005 R2, is set for availability later this year. Most importantly, Microsoft is planning to build a paravirtualising hypervisor into Longhorn Server. "Virtualisation is now commoditised," says Alfred Biehler, product manager for management and virtualisation at Microsoft UK.

Xen is being built into several Linux distributions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 will ship with Xen integrated by the end of this year. Suse Linux Enterprise 10, planned for July 2006, will also integrate Xen. Sun is planning to support Xen in OpenSolaris this autumn, and its Solaris 10 version of Unix will get Xen support in the first half of next year.

"Virtualisation is going to be in the next release of every OS. It's game over," says XenSource's Crosby. "The question for VMware is, what the heck do they do about this? At the moment, we're no more than a really annoying gnat to them, but Microsoft is a truck coming full bore with its headlights on."

Gartner's Dawson agrees. "As soon as Microsoft launches their hypervisor, they're going to flood the market."

Industry observers agree that built-in hypervisors are likely to be a significant threat to VMware's bread-and butter business. But that doesn't mean companies should start pulling the plug on their VMware installations.

"Operating system vendors want to see virtualisation as a feature, but to the enterprise customers using VMware, that's not always the case," says RedMonk analyst James Governor. "It's a strategic platform to many of them. You can see that if you look at the job ads from many of the financial services companies — they're not asking for Windows skills or Linux skills, they're asking for VMware skills. Organisations are mature now in their use of Windows and Linux, and they're looking for more effective ways to run those on their boxes."

VMware has responded to the emergence of free competitors by dropping charges for some of its more basic software and specifications; VMware Server and Player are both free, for instance…