For things that have no physical existence, virtual applications (VAs) are big and getting much, much bigger. With Microsoft announcing that it will ship demonstration VAs with SQL Server and Exchange running on virtual systems, and BEA saying that it will be revealing details of bundling the operating system in with the application at its user conference in Beijing in December, the idea of bundling a complete virtual setup capable of running a particular application on a virtual machine is catching on.
VMware says that it has 330 VAs available for free on its website, with one being downloaded every minute. Zeus says that by shipping applications as VAs it can cut down on support costs, speed the evaluation time by clients, and bypass a lot of the expense those clients have with hardware inventory management.
To further invigorate development, VMware has updated its VMware Technology Network site to include the Virtual Appliance Marketplace. This adds certification and purchasing to the site, with the company taking a small percentage of sales revenue.
Another big theme of the day has been power management. California-based utility Pacific Gas and Electric announced a scheme to reward customers who embraced virtualisation. "We'll give our customers a cheque for every server they unplug," said PG&E director Roland Risser.
Risser explained that it was cheaper for his company to reduce demand rather than build new generator capacity, and that increased energy efficiency was the most effective way to reduce emissions. He said that up to $1,350 (£708) per server was available in rebates, up to a cap of $4m per customer. This figure includes money for the servers themselves plus the drop in energy use due to reduced cooling requirements.
VMware itself provided figures of $250 a year — or 3,000kWh — saved for each server virtualised in server power costs, with a further $310 — 3,800kWh — removed in cooling costs. These are conservative figures, says the company: it quoted customer Covenant Health which claimed a reduction in annual power costs from $43,000 (£22,500) to $3,000 due entirely to virtualising older systems on new platforms.
Virtualisation showcase
Several interesting products were shown off during the day, too, both by VMware and by partners.
VMware's Lab Manager was launched on Monday and had its first public outing. This is a set of services managed by a web interface designed to automate a number of the harder problems confronting applications developers within large enterprises. Modern applications are built on top of a number of interacting, complex services usually running on their own servers: the configuration of these services changes between each stage of enterprise software development. At the moment, developers ask IT for one mix of servers, the test labs ask for another and deployment needs yet another.
Also, it is very difficult for testers to deliver exactly the right conditions to developers to replicate any bugs they find. It's far from uncommon for a bug found during testing to be impossible to repeat by the developers — so it goes unfixed until it surfaces when the system goes live.
Lab Manager adds a set of agents to a collection of virtual machines. The Lab Manager application itself collates these agents: when a developer or a tester wants a set of servers to create the right environment for a task, they can ask the Lab Manager to deliver them. The virtual machines wake up or boot up, and their consoles appear...
