It’s easier to manage a group of things than individual objects.  Consider filesystem directories as a way to organize and secure files, or Active Directory groups as an efficient means of assigning rights to users.

VMware vSphere Resource Pools — introduced in VI3, circa 2006 — give administrators a way to aggregate resources from multiple hosts in a cluster and then subdivide them to meet a range of business needs.  After creating pools of CPU and memory with reserves and limits, virtual machines are simply dragged as necessary to guarantee performance or prevent less-critical workloads from causing interference.

Resource Pools are a proven means to reliably share infrastructure.  So much so that vCloud Director uses them as the foundation for virtual datacenters, separating multiple tenants in a cloud environment.

Hyper-V Hardware Silos

One can learn a lot about Hyper-V by reading Virtual PC Guy’s Blog — Ben Armstrong cuts through the marketing fog and provides clear technical information on a range of Microsoft virtualization topics.  Thanks to his recent recent series on CPU resource management, it’s quite clear that Hyper-V has a long way to go before it can match the flexibility and ease of VMware vSphere.

For now, Hyper-V administrators that need to manage resources in a shared environment have few options.  Without any means of grouping CPU and memory resources, the only alternative is to manage individual virtual machines — one by one!  That could mean a significant manual effort any time a VM is added or removed.  Such a process contradicts the desired efficiencies of cloud computing and is infeasible.  To achieve guaranteed resources in a multi-tenant cloud would therefore imply silos of physical Hyper-V clusters.

Top Hyper-V Resource Management Weaknesses

After looking at the differences between resource management in VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, it is clear that the Microsoft offering has a number of disadvantages:

• CPU reserves, limits, and shares are specified on a VM-by-VM basis — no grouping or pooling
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 cannot even configure reserves and limits, forcing administrator to turn to an alternate management interface (so long, single pane of glass!)
• When resource reservations are calculated, it appears that:
  • Host (parent partition) CPU resource requirements are either not considered or hidden from view — administrators can reserve 100% of host resources for virtual machines
  • Logical, hyperthreaded CPUs are treated as  full physical cores — on a host with 8 cores and hyperthreading enabled, a VM with 4 virtual CPUs will only reserve 25% (not 50%) of the total system resources:

Concluding

VMware vSphere provides Resource Pools to group and control virtual machines according to resource requirements and are configured through the same user interface used for all vSphere management tasks.  The hypervisor host is given an explicit reservation to ensure reliable scheduling and I/O operations, and hyperthreaded cores are not double-counted by treating them as full physical cores.

VMware offers the only platform that enables reliable shared infrastructure through resource pooling and is the best foundation for your private cloud infrastructure.

Related posts:

1. VM Resource Management: Hyper-V versus SCVMM
2. Don’t know much about resource pools
3. SCVMM Damage Control
4. New: vSphere Resource Distribution Chart

But that’s not what caught my eye today as I was sifting through some old RSS feeds.  The real point that stood out was his keen observation about VMware hybrid clouds:

It reminds me of the early days of fax machines when people needed the exact same fax on both sides of the line in order to make the fax magic work. Same goes for VMware: vSphere on both sides and then customers get hybrid cloud.

It appears that Mr. O’Rourke may have jumped to a faulty conclusion — perhaps not unlike his recent SLES for VMware analysis.  If you’ve already standardized on the world’s best virtualization platform for your private cloud, what is the downside to bridging your enterprise to a highly-compatible public cloud?

I seem to have overlooked the Microsoft hybrid cloud solution that interoperates with other platforms — the only private cloud announcements from Microsoft so far have been for the release-date-slipping, repeatedly-renamed  mouthful called SCVMMSSP2.  But to truly appreciate the hypocrisy of his statement, just take a look at this Hyper-V fax machine demonstration.

Who can shed some light on the Microsoft hybrid cloud panacea?

Related posts:

1. Cloudy with a chance of vaporware
2. OpSource Cloud Experience — Introduction
3. Microsoft Private Cloud: No CSV Allowed!
4. vComeback Contest: Microsoft Cloud Power Billboard

I thought it would be interesting to go back to MMS 2009 and take a look at some of the futures Microsoft was selling in the virtualization space.

MMS 2009 Day 1 Keynote Demo

One of the big demos on stage during the day 1 keynote session was the seamless integration of public and private clouds — possible only with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager technology, according to the script.

Now, there is nothing wrong with a vendor demonstrating visionary technology in a setting like this.  But if you actively call out your competitors as being incapable of offering a particular solution, a higher level of scrutiny is certainly warranted.

The Setup

Microsoft has secretly replaced some of the regular icons in SCVMM with cloud icons.  Let’s see if anyone notices…

Whoops, the keynote presenter let the cat out of the bag:

The host with the cloud icons are part of the public cloud hosted by Maximum ASP, while the host with the regular cloud server icon are part of my private cloud.

Wow, public and private cloud — two great tastes that taste great together.  And the significance?

Vendors like VMware want you to believe that you have to revolutionize both the data center and the cloud in order to take advantage of scenarios like this. They want you to rearchitect your entire infrastructure. Our existing System Center customers have the foundation today by which to seamlessly move from the private cloud to the public cloud.

This preview of a future release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager shows you the potential of the integration of the private cloud with the public cloud. You can get started today by taking advantage of Maximum ASP’s public cloud hosting capabilities.

Okay, I get it.  Someday SCVMM will be able to talk to a Hyper-V machine at some web host and you won’t have to rearchitect anything — and you can get a taste of it today somehow by signing up with MaximumASP.

What a difference a year (didn’t) make

I recently contacted MaximumASP (i.e., a year later) to see how things are going with their public-private cloud.  This was the response:

The public-private cloud is not a product we are offering at this time. During the demo it was simply a POC that was constructed with Microsoft.

Well, we all knew it was a POC.  But why would Microsoft make such a powerful point that VMware cannot offer this capability?  Is this FUD?

The recap

A year ago, Microsoft attacked the virtualization industry leader for not offering a feature equivalent to a fake concocted demo they highlighted during their keynote.  Surprisingly, a year later, Microsoft and their hosting partner are still not offering the convoluted capability.

Frankly, this is not cloud computing — public or private.  This stunt merely highlighted the fact that you can place a hypervisor host at a remote location and manage it from the same console that you use to manage the other hosts in your datacenter.

Oh, and as for the web server VM they migrated from the “private” to “public” cloud — no details on just how the clients of that service would find it in the new location… but that’s another topic.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft likens vSphere cloud to ancient fax machines
2. OpSource Cloud Experience — Connecting
3. OpSource Cloud Experience — Introduction
4. Hyper-V Dynamic Memory: Not Quite Ready to Demo!

Virtualization management tasks such as cloning existing virtual machines or deploying new ones from templates often involve slinging around multi-gigabyte chunks of data.  It’s preferable to move or copy data on the SAN instead of the LAN because it can be faster, but more importantly, doing so reduces impact to other services that rely on the LAN.

Use the SAN, ESX!

VMware ESX will transfer VMs and templates over a SAN connection whenever possible but, if necessary, it also does a fine job of moving those bits over a standard LAN.  This goes for VMs as well as templates because with VMware vSphere, templates live on SAN datastores, too — shared among multiple ESX hosts — not on network file shares.  If templates were stored on a file server, there would be no choice other than to copy those multi-gigabyte files over the LAN and potentially impact other production traffic.

Nice design choice, VMware!  [Actually, if you go back to the early days of VirtualCenter 1.x, templates could also be stored directly on the VC server and deployed over the network.  That option was removed as of VC 2.0.]

So far, so good.  Let’s take a look at how Hyper-V stacks up.

Obfuscating the Inequalities

In the tradition of the recent storage hot add/remove claims, Microsoft has again gone the extra mile to give the appearance of feature parity.

Take a look at this excerpt from the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 What’s New page:

SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts: This allows virtual machines to migrate into and out of clusters using a SAN transfer, which saves the time required for copying the virtual machine file over the network.

And the features page is even more dramatic, proclaiming:

Virtual machine images can be large and difficult to move over the network. VMM auto-detects SAN infrastructure and enables copying of virtual machine images over fiber at fast speeds, thus leveraging SAN investments.

Sounds good, just like VMware — and at one-sixth the price!  But there is a small problem: it is not true.

Hyper-V uses the BITS service to transfer VMs over the LAN in almost all cases.  There is a scenario where SCVMM can orchestrate the disconnection and reconnection of a SAN LUN, “transferring” a VM to another host.  Enabling the feature requires additional configuration and some software from your SAN vendor.  Of course, it also means going back to one VM per LUN and foregoing the wonders of CSV.  Any takers?

The SCVMM Library Server

SCVMM 2008 R2 provides VM template functionality for Hyper-V.  Templates  and ISO images are stored in a Library, which uses standard Windows file services.  Obviously, that means no SAN copying for template deployments, either — kind of like VMware VirtualCenter 1.0.

Conclusion

“SAN LUN disconnect and reconnect” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “SAN transfer” but I’m not sure that is sufficient justification for these misleading marketing claims.  And to use the word “copying” is simply dishonest.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming Hyper-V is just like VMware ESX.  Compare for yourself — seeing is believing.

Related posts:

1. IGT Part 2: SAN Misers
2. Storage vendors unanimously applaud SCVMM innovation
3. The Truth About Storage Hot Add and Remove
4. SCVMM to VMware: You will be assimilated

• vStorage VMFS Volume Grow
• Hot Extend for Virtual Disks
• Hot Virtual Disk Add/Remove

With these capabilities, if space gets tight in your vSphere environment, it is easy to be proactive and address the issue before anyone notices.  The process goes something like this:

• Allocate additional physical hard disk space on your SAN to an appropriate LUN
• Grow your VMFS datastore onto the newly added free space
• Extend, or add new, virtual disks for the VMs that need more storage
• Expand the volume inside the guest to create more usable space

All without a reboot: zero downtime.

Not All Virtualization Platforms are Created Equal

Don’t jump to the conclusion that all hypervisors offer the same flexibility.  Perhaps you are wondering about Hyper-V capabilities?

First, let’s take a look at some Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM) marketing statements:

The What’s New page announces:

Hot addition/removal of Storage: Allows the addition and removal of storage to virtualized infrastructure without interruption. Additionally, “live” management of virtual hard disk (VHDs) or iSCSI pass through disks, allows administrators to take advantage of additional backup scenarios and readily use mission critical and storage-intensive applications.

The Top Benefits list proclaims:

Hot addition/removal of storage: With this capability, administrators can quickly and efficiently respond to changing storage requirements of virtual machines. This ability to hot-add additional storage eliminates the previous need to take the host down to upgrade storage thus increasing business continuity for end users and reducing complexity for administrators. Additionally it allows administrators to confidently deploy mission critical applications (in which up-time is of paramount importance) that may have rapidly changing storage requirements such as web, database or other business applications.

An IT decision-maker just might get the impression that both ESX and Hyper-V have essentially the same features. They do not.

You may be surprised to find out that all of the descriptions above merely refer to adding a new virtual disk to a VM — providing the conditions are right.  You cannot grow an existing VHD, and you can’t safely remove a VHD with SCVMM.

Plan Ahead

First things first.  If your Hyper-V VM does not have a virtual SCSI adapter — templates and VMs from Hyper-V R1 do not — you won’t be able to hot add a new VHD until you correct that shortcoming.  Hello downtime.

SCVMM can add a new blank virtual disk to a VM or it can copy an existing one across the network from the Library — if you copied it there beforehand, but there is no way to add a VHD that may already be present on your SAN — even if it is already sitting right next to the destination VM.

Removal?

Up-time may be of paramount importance, but preventing data-loss was evidently not part of the original design.  Removing a VHD with SCVMM results in the immediate deletion of the underlying VHD file.  Ouch!  Thankfully, a recent patch improves administrator job security by throwing up a warning before this happens, providing an option to cancel.  There is no way to simply disconnect a VHD using SCVMM.

It turns out that if you really want to take advantage of those “Additional Backup Scenarios” by hot adding and removing virtual disks, you need your trusty Hyper-V Manager utility.  Still think System Center is a single pane of glass?  And that’s not the only task that requires administrators to switch between Hyper-V interfaces.

Conclusion

Microsoft is trying hard to ride the coattails of VMware ESX.  The latest release of Hyper-V R2 still does not have capabilities enjoyed by VMware administrators since the ESX 3.5 days.

Don’t believe the obfuscated marketing literature.  VMware vSphere is for real.

Related posts:

1. Responsible Thin Provisioning in VMware vSphere
2. Easy recovery from a full VMware ESX datastore
3. vSphere Thin-Provisioned Disk Performance
4. The Truth About VM SAN Transfers

Not much.

First Things First

Before you can use PRO to Live Migrate virtual machines between hosts (which is sort of the whole point), you need to first configure Hyper-V, failover clustering, and Cluster Shared Volumes — something eWeek found to be significantly more complicated than VMware ESX.

After Hyper-V and Live Migration are up and running, the next step is to install SCVMM 2008 R2 so you can integrate it with your System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM) environment.

What’s that?  You don’t have SCOM deployed?  Go ahead and set it up.  Come back in a few days when you’re ready to go to the next step.

Integration Time

After your environment has both SCVMM and SCOM up and running, it’s integration time! If you have ever thought that the next-next-finish Microsoft wizards were boring, then this is the task for you.  You’ll get a chance to make configuration changes to various systems and possibly even Active Directory — haven’t you always wanted to learn about the SetSPN utility anyway?

But don’t let me spoil the excitement by giving away the ending — pick up your own copy of the 34-page integration guide and experience the thrill for yourself.

Second Opinion

Some of you are probably thinking that this is an exaggeration, it can’t be all that bad.  Let’s take a look from another perspective, presented in the Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guide for SCVMM 2008 R2:

As you can see from the above excerpt, integrating SCVMM with SCOM clearly increases the time, effort, and complexity of your virtualization deployment.  And don’t forget that SCOM is required for monitoring your Hyper-V infrastructure, too.

Unlike the Microsoft virtualization conglomeration, VMware DRS is an integral part of vCenter Server — purpose-built for virtualization.  Talk about additional layers…

Related posts:

1. PRO Tips: pros only, please
2. Two thousand?
3. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management
4. Hyper-V Console Disconnects During Live Migration

Microsoft Hyper-V R2 derives HA clustering capabilities and Live Migration from the additional Windows Failover Clustering layer that can be added to the hypervisor.  With all that integration, you might think a remote console connection would seamlessly fail over along with the VM during a Live Migration.

Sorry, not in this release. Is it an omission, or just a bug?  Time will tell.

Now that System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 R2 (SCVMM) PRO tips can be used to automate Live Migration — if it is integrated with System Center Operations Manger 2007 (SCOM), that is — administrators connected to a remote VM console may find themselves suddenly cut off.

See it in action in this short video:

Oh, sure it’s not hard to go back into SCVMM, find the VM, and reconnect — but should you have to do that manually?  VM remote consoles may not be needed for day-to-day administrative tasks, but is that reasonable justification to ignore usability and integration?

Because the Microsoft Virtualization solution is a conglomeration of various components — Windows Server, hypervisor role, Failover Clustering, SCVMM, SCOM, etc. — it is much more difficult to provide a seamless experience.  This remote console issue is really just an indicator.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
2. Choose any two: Hyper-V, HA, Linux
3. PRO Tips: pros only, please
4. VMware vMotion: Over 5 Times Faster Than Hyper-V Live Migration

I first read of this particular issue on Network World today.  But unlike the official Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog, NW actually includes some details about this supposed ban — like this quote from an official VMware spokeswoman:

Yes, competing vendors are allowed to exhibit, including exhibiting competing products.

The VMworld contract was big news — back in May — but since then, like it or not, most competitors and industry watchers have conceded that the fine print in the VMworld contract is industry standard.  Just read the comments in that Virtualization.info article referenced by MSFT.

While it does make for pretty good drama, you should know that VMware has not banned Microsoft from exhibiting SCVMM 2008 R2.  I do admit, “Try the virtualization manager that VMware doesn’t want you to see!” does sound a lot more intriguing than “Here’s SCVMM R2, it does mostly the same stuff as the first release, and it can manage vSphere now — if you count VI3 feature parity.”

See you at VMworld.

Related posts:

1. Hello, SCVMM 2008 R2
2. How to get to VMworld 2009
3. Wild SCVMM 2008 R2 rumors and speculation
4. What’s New (and What’s Vapor) in SCVMM 2008

Just one week before VMworld 2009 — quelle coïncidence!

Related posts:

1. Is SCVMM 2008 R2 really banned from VMworld?
2. Wild SCVMM 2008 R2 rumors and speculation
3. SCVMM 2008 Management Pack Finally Released
4. Hyper-V Administrators Exhibit Advanced Memory Skills

And what customers are saying is, they have these existing VMware systems, our product, System Center, actually manages VMware. We do a world-class job of managing VMware, so they can use one pane of glass to manage their legacy VMware environments together with their Hyper-V system.

World-class job of managing VMware? Not according to my investigation.  And Network World found much of the same.

One pane of glass to manage VMware and Hyper-V? Not so fast — in order to manage just a Hyper-V environment, you need a whole array of tools:

• Hyper-V Manager
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Console
• System Center Operations Manager 2007 Console
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Console
• Third-party network interface teaming utility
• Server Core console configuration tools
• iSCSI configuration utility
• Failover Cluster Manager
• Perfmon
• … the list goes on

And oh, by the way, you also still need the vSphere Client because SCVMM cannot configure ESX host settings — hardware, storage, networking, resources, etc.

The easiest way to get “single pane of glass” management for Hyper-V is to simply redefine the “pane” to be an LCD display:

Presto!  Single pane of glass to manage VMware and Hyper-V.

Related posts:

1. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management
2. SCVMM Damage Control
3. VM Resource Management: Hyper-V versus SCVMM
4. Yes, NIC teaming is not unsupported