Bradley Whitt – Gleacher & Company, Inc.

I was curious if you’ve seen, notice any reaction from your customers and prospects to the VMware pricing changes on VSphere? And curious whether you’re seeing more Xen downloads, that type of thing?

David Henshall

We have. We’ve seen an uptick in downloads as well as direct inquiries coming in based upon what they did with their licensing. And we’re not headlong into the server virtualization space. And obviously, we’re doing well with that platform across desktop and networking and now in the cloud platform. But it’s not a focused go-to-market for us. So I’d say probably Microsoft with Hyper-V and System Center has probably seen a much bigger uptick as a result. But we have seen greater interest in XenServer.

Admittedly, Citrix is in a tough spot — they have to choose the path of least resistance, which in their case means de-emphasizing and cutting products and solutions that compete with their biggest partner.  Given this revealing perspective and the open source community shifting to KVM, it’s hard to see a future for XenServer.

Transcript from Seeking Alpha.

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1. vSphere Smokes Competitors in InfoWorld Shoot-Out
2. VMware vSphere 4.1 – the best virtualization platform yet
3. Hyper-V deployments suddenly drop to zero
4. Don’t Sysprep Me, Bro!

VMware vSphere still trounces the competition.  Paul Venezia, who drove this multi-vendor effort, considered many aspects of virtualization technology and concluded:

VMware still has advanced capabilities that the others lack. VMware also offers a level of consistency and polish that the other solutions don’t yet match. The rough edges and quirks in Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat aren’t showstoppers, but they demonstrate that these alternatives all have hidden costs to go along with their (potentially) lower price tags.

Here is the scorecard, summarizing the various categories tested:

Congratulations to the incredible team behind VMware vSphere – the original and still the best!

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1. Disingenuous Cost Comparisons
2. What is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization?
3. Multiple hypervisors? What about multiple SANs?
4. Citrix Not Focused on Server Virtualization?

With template deployment comes VM (or “image”) customization — each instance of an OS needs to have a unique hostname and, in the case of Windows, a unique SID (security identifier).

Not surprisingly, each vendor has taken a different approach to image customization.  Let’s take a closer look.

VMware vCenter Server Image Customization

With VMware vSphere and vCenter Server, VM templates are simply virtual machines with a special flag that essentially prevents users from accidentally powering them on.  In fact, you can clone and customize a new VM from a standard VM if you prefer — converting to template first is not even required.  Sysprep is only run on the new VM after it is cloned — the original template/VM is never generalized by Sysprep.

The great thing about this design is that it gives you the ability to instantly convert a template back to a standard VM.  That makes it very easy to update templates and, for example, minimize the exposure of deploying virtual machines in dire need of numerous security patches.

Of course, vCenter also supports Linux guest customization, unlike competitors.

Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Image Customization

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manger also has VM templates, but the workflow is quite different from vCenter.

When you create a template in SCVMM, the guest OS is generalized with Sysprep before it is copied into the library.  That effectively destroys the original VM and, in fact, this is what the warning message states when you create a template.

Maintaining a clone of every VM template obviously introduces some management overhead.  Another option you might consider: when it is time to update a VM template, simply deploy a fresh VM from the previous template, make changes, and then re-create a new template from the VM.  That sounds like it will work, but there is actually a problem that prevents it from being a viable solution. For technical reasons, Sysprep can only be run on a particular OS image a total of three times.  You can read all about the details in this TechNet article. UPDATE: Activated systems in a KMS environment are not affected by this limit.

Here is what happens when you exceed the Sysprep limit when attempting to create a template in SCVMM:

Looks like SCVMM administrators will either be maintaining master clones of all templates, or reinstalling VMs from scratch when updated templates are needed.  Kind of makes you think about the whole “managing physical plus virtual” thing, doesn’t it?

Citrix XenCenter Image Customization

Curious to know how Citrix handles Windows VM cloning and customization?  They just don’t bother — the documentation simply explains how to manually run Sysprep on a Windows VM before converting to a template.  All the disadvantages of the SCVMM model — without the automation.  Nice.

Summary

VMware vCenter Server is the only virtualization management platform that offers fully functional, non-destructive VM templates for both Windows and Linux guest operating systems.

What interesting VM/template strategies have you adopted?

With apologies to the “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!” guy.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM to VMware: You will be assimilated
2. Which guest operating systems can be customized by SCVMM?
3. Getting eth0 back in a SLES for VMware clone
4. Even GPL can’t make Hyper-V Linux VMs well