Users Talk Virtual Tension

Spiraling costs, backup issues, and lack of third-party support are among the challenges facing VMware users as they look to reap the benefits of virtualization.

Increasingly, VMware is touting virtualization technology as a way for users to streamline their data centers by sharing compute and storage resources across their standing hardware. (See VMware Unveils New Suite and VMware Certifies Compellent.)

But some users want the vendor to take a long, hard look at its strategy. "They need to really re-evaluate their price point - they have begun to price themselves out of the market," says Chris Valentino, a member of the Washington DC Area VMware User Group.

Pricing for the vendor's basic VMware Infrastructure package, which includes the ESX Server hypervisor, starts at $1,000 on a two-way server. A full-featured version of the package, including volume management, resource scheduling, and VMware's Consolidated Backup software starts at $5,750 on a two-way device.

But Valentino tells Byte and Switch that he typically pays much more than that to run VMware on his Intel quad-core processors. "It can range anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 depending on the options you put in it," he says, adding that backup features often come at a premium.Cost issues have already prompted Valentino to take a look at open-source virtualization from XenSource. (See XenSource, Egenera OEMs XenSource, and Users Search for Virtual Reality.) "I just purchased a two-socket version of Xen for $480 for a one-year subscription," he says. "That's a huge difference."

VMware, however, is not planning to change its pricing anytime soon, according to Raghu Raghuram, the vendor's vice president for product and solutions marketing, who urges users to do some serious thinking before they deploy virtualization software.

"The cost-benefit analysis is critical," he says, adding that any number of factors can influence virtualization costs. Users, for example, should consider whether the software is running on traditional servers or blades, as well as the type of storage used. "If you look at a high-end Fibre Channel box, that could be relatively expensive," he says. "NAS boxes tend to be cheaper" for deploying virtualization.

VMware's Consolidated Backup, however, is also coming in for user criticism. The software was introduced earlier this year to remove the need for users to install software agents on each of their virtual machines, something which caused major backup bottlenecks.

But at this point, Consolidated Backup can only handle Windows images, and at least one user would like to see VMware extend this to Linux. "It would be nice to be able to access the entire SAN, open up a disk image for anything, and back up the files incrementally," says Nicholas Biggerstaff, Unix systems administrator at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.Performance management and capacity planning are also emerging v-headaches for users. "That seems to be a hot issue for a lot of people -- there seems to be either a gap in knowledge or a lack of tools," says Ray Brady, technical manager of the computing services division at Johnson & Johnson, and co-leader of the Philadelphia VMware Users Group.

VMware, according to Brady, could do a much better job of marketing its own capacity planner product, which checks what machines are most suitable for virtualization. "Very few people are aware of that -- I don't think that VMware have talked about that a lot with customers.

"You're basically rolling a dice," says Brady. "Not being able to do something around performance management or capacity planning makes [consolidation] difficult because you don't know the exact performance of the servers."

VMware's Raghuram told Byte and Switch that the firm is using its Systems Integrators and channel partners as part of its efforts to make people aware of capacity planner. "We always continue to ramp these things up," he says.

Another headache for users is lack of VMware support from third-party application vendors. "A lot of vendors balk when you tell them that you are going to put them on a virtual machine," says an IT manager from a utility firm in the Southwestern U.S., who asked not to be named. "About half of them are concerned because it's new and they don't want the challenge of supporting it."The exec explained that, although satisfied with VMware, he has had issues with vendors of SQL Server, order management, and GIS applications who have been unwilling to go virtual. The vendors, he adds, are typically concerned about the cost of the support tools they will have to develop.

These sentiments are echoed by Jamie Orth, network manager at Citrus & Chemical Bank, and a member of the Tampa Area VMware User Group. "We still have a couple of applications running on physical servers, [and] the application providers will not support their application running on VMware," he explains.

Backup is also a sticking point when it comes to third-party vendors. "The backup tools need to be more robust -- they need to support more timely and comprehensive backups," says Greg Schulz, an analyst at the StorageIO Group.

A number of backup vendors, including CA, CommVault, EMC, Tivoli, and Symantec, have already pledged their support for Consolidated Backup. But at this stage, Schulz says, most vendors are yet to deliver on their promises. "The whole ecosystem is racing to catch up with this moving target. More tight integration needs to occur." (See VMware Gets Support, CommVault Extends Support, Avamar, VMware Team.)

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch