Users Draw Up Virtual Wishlists

The holidays and virtualization go together like, well, cranberries and RAID arrays, perhaps. Still somehow, the season calls out for punishing analogies, especially as users check in with their wishlists for server virtualization products -- functions and capabilities that for now they can only dream about (or undertake as expensive, cumbersome work-arounds, which would defeat the purpose).

In this instance, the wishes are almost completely confined to VMware and its ESX virtualization software that creates virtual machines to wring new efficiencies from existing servers.

Storage and IT professionals talk about server virtualization almost like magic beans for the data center. It reduces the enterprise's equipment footprint, and in tandem, cuts electricity and cooling costs, not to mention administrative overhead.

So where might virtualization and other software vendors still fill in some blanks? Generally their concerns fall into three areas: better management, improved support for external storage, and richer disaster recovery capabilities.

The Federated View
Credit report giant Fair Isaac Corp. in Minneapolis has been using VMware software for more than three years. That's given Gary Tierney, senior manager of technology and solutions delivery, plenty of time to bang on ESX and see where it works well in his organization -- and where it could be improved.He's most interested in some finetuning of the management capabilities. One piece harkens back to the manager-of-managers concept. "Id like to see a federation of Virtual Centers -- right now, you end up with multiple Virtual Centers, and each gives us a view into what it controls," Tierney says. "But there's no central point of control for all of them, no one pane of glass to see the total picture."

He'd like to see VMware increase the core count or memory count per host. "Right now it’s 16, and as we look to get into larger systems running quad cores... we'll need the memory to manage that, pushing as high as 200 Gigabits," Tierney explains. What exactly will that give Fair Isaac? If they can fit more VMs onto an ESX instance, they can also reduce overall management overhead (and possibly licensing costs, too).

Virtual USB
What IT pro hasn't stuck in some sort of external hard drive when budgets or other constraints wouldn't allow a more robust choice? Problem is, you can't plug in a USB hard drive to a VM very easily. "You can do it, alright, there are workarounds. But it's not so easily done inside ESX," says Jared Beard, associate director of information technology labs for the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University in Bloomington.

"Most people answer that with iSCSI, or a LUN, or additional storage," he adds. "We don’t have the budget for that, so we work through a USB a lot of time."

Beard says that ESX handles network-based USB devices with more agility, but that support for hardware-based USB devices (which he says have superior throughput to network-based USB) is "mediocre," at best."I can cheaply and easily put in hardware-based USB for backup, but the support is very limited," Beard says. "They have to address that issue."

'True' DR
When is disaster recovery not true disaster recovery? For Chris Snow, coordinator of IT engineering at St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y., when it's "high availability" data.

"Right now, what you have are two servers side by side, where one picks up for the other," in the event of failure, Snow says. And that sort of "high availability" configuration works fine, depending on your data center configuration.

"We'd like to see VMware do true disaster recovery -- we want to be able to do 'high availability' across the county, state and country, if we have to," he says. Data would be replicated at a remote location, rather than just at an adjacent server. That sort of capability is important for the hospital, which has one data center but 20 remote locations in the metro area, Snow adds.

It's unclear how soon VMware may address these issues. Maybe it's the legal guidelines around future-looking statements and being a publicly traded company now. Or maybe it's the pressure of competition and dominating a market sector as much as VMware does with server virtualization.Regardless of the cause, the vendor was reluctant to say what it's doing in these areas and wouldn't talk future products or features it's developing and planning. "We can say that we've been working closely with customers to get their feedback and deliver features and products that meet their needs," a company spokeswoman said in an email.

In other words, customers can create all the wishlists they like. But this holiday season, they may have to get a little more Zen about it and let go of any desired outcome -- or content themselves with a virtual stocking stuffer that arrives several months late.

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