Novell On Virtualization

Novell's Richard Whitehead and I sat down to a lively discussion on the trials and tribulations of VM management. Whitehead was good enough to remind me of Novell's open source chops on SUSE and Xen... I'm the first to admit that Novell doesn't come immediately to mind when thinking of the virtualization market. Then again, it has wholeheartedly embraced open source, released a supported SUSE-based Xen offering 18 months ago, and is pretty darn good at integrating NetWare, Microsoft, and Linux solutions.

While Whitehead and I worked hard to keep our Friday morning chat platform-independent for an upcoming piece on VM management concerns, a number of noteworthy points surfaced around Novell's history in this area and the company's recent acquisition of PlateSpin.

First up is the obligatory data blurb: Novell surveys revealed that its customer data centers are running at an average 15% resource utilization. Sound familiar to anyone else out there? When asked about motivators for virtualization, the No. 1 customer driver was to reduce physical space, No. 2 was cost reduction. Informally, many of Novell's enterprise customers are in the same boat as the rest of us; virtualization snuck into the enterprise via IT test labs and was quickly leveraged into production for all the standard reasons.

That rush to VM production often leaves the enterprise struggling with virt server "sprawl."

Personally, I'm feeling like we're back in the early '90s, deaaling with x86 server sprawl and lack of management discipline. Chargeback? Accurate inventories?Data center management and operations folks have spent a good deal of the last 15 years trying to move away from the one-app-per-server model; we all met customer expectations by throwing dedicated hardware at problems. This expensive lifestyle choice spawned an entire market niche for enterprise management products to ride herd on server farms. Sprawl also led us into the still-maturing managed service model, the novel concept where IT works to address actual business requirements.

So now we're into the 21st century. Systems management is working out. And ... x86 virtualization starts taking off. Cue to Big Iron and midrange folks sipping their coffee over ironic smirks.

Which leads us back to Novell; ZENworks (with a Z - long story) is its offering in the enterprise IT sphere. Recognizing the rising tide of virtualization, the folks from Provo are in the process of integrating new acquisition PlateSpin into their product portfolio.

The Xen/ZEN puns just won't stop: PlateSpin's headline reads Become One... Physical and virtual worlds unite.

PlateSpin earned its chops with P2V conversion solutions and management tools, rightly positioning virtualization as a key tool for disaster recovery. Novell will be taking the PlateSpin suite of offerings to a broader market, working PowerRecon and PowerConvert into enterprise customer sites. The specs for PowerConvert are snazzy: conversion where the source can be a anything from a ghost image, virtual image, blade server, or standard 1x1 box and the target VM platform can be VMware, Microsoft, or Xen (including Citrix or VirtualIron). This isn't your grandpa's P2V tool.Virtualization management is hot. All the major VM-host platforms are ramping up their own management tools. Traditional vendors in this space and new virt-only upstarts are working hard at multiplatform solutions for mixed environments. Despite marketing claims to the contrary, there is no front runner in this niche.

Novell is working to get its piece of the action. Good for it.

One last open source footnote; Whitehead sent me his slide deck in OpenOffice format, Novell's internal standard.