Michael Warrilow at Hydrasight makes a strong case for why management tools need to support heterogeneous hypervisors. His strongest argument, in my mind, is the affinity of specific jobs to specific hypervisors. An example is Oracle’s database support only on Oracle’s version of Xen. In the realm of virtual lab management and the application lifecycle, the affinity of specific jobs to hypervisors couples with the natural heterogeneity of the production data center environment to make support for such heterogeneity a key requirement for replicating production application configurations in a virtual lab. We also believe that the ubiquity of Visual Studio as a development environment in the enterprise will result in broad deployment of Windows Server 2008 in development – which will give Hyper-V a strong initial foothold and will create new opportunities for using virtualization in unit, integration and functional testing.

What do you think?

Link: The inevitability of heterogeneous hypervisor management

David Marshall post on his InfoWorld blog regarding VMware’s lifecycle management announcements from VMworld Europe. David questions the fragmented approach taken by VMware and quote’s VMlogix’s Ravi Gururaj and Surgient regarding how we compete at this level with VMware.

InfoWorld | One of the big takeaways from VMworld Europe – management tools are needed| By David Marshall

I spoke yesterday to Cameron Sturdevant at eWeek regarding virtual labs and Surgient’s upcoming release schedule. One of the topics we got into was the struggle that IT operations teams seem to have reconciling their current chargeback mechanisms with a more dynamic virtualized environment. I suggested that RAM/hour or some other memory capacity-based approach worked best. Cameron wrote about it on his Permit/Deny blog.

Permit/Deny – - Chargeback for Virtual Infrastructure

Dan Kusnetzky at ZDnet talks about virtual lab management and Surgient as a precursor to lights-out fully automated datacenters.

What would a next generation datacenter look like? | ZDNet.com

Tarry Singh interviews Surgient’s Sameer Jagtap about the virtual lab management market, Surgient’s platform and product and other news from VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes.

Sameer Jagtap, VP Product Management with Surgient (Video Interview) | Virtualization.com

On Microsoft’s Startup Zone, Yi-Jian Ngo has a good post on why its important for both vendors and customers to focus on heterogeneous virtualization support in technology areas such as virtual lab management.

Yi-Jian Ngo : 18 Million Reasons

Surgient announced three new patents had been awarded. The patents cover fundamental methods of managing and coordinating virtual machines and virtualization infrastructure.

Surgient Awarded Three New Patents for Advanced Management and Coordination of Virtualization

Article from SearchServerVirtualization.com regarding VMware’s recently announced Stage Manager product. The product claims to cover the application lifecycle to help promote applications into and from production. My question is how is this different from Lab Manager?

Confusing to Lab Manager customers? For most enterprise applications, the environment employed outside of production is the test environment. Why would a customer use both VMware Lab Manager and VMware Stage Manager? Stage Manager seems the stronger of the two, and certainly closer to what we do at Surgient with our lab management platform and VQMS. Is this the death of VMware Lab Manager? How will VMware deal with confused customers, especially Lab Manager customers?

VMware only? Then there is the question of a tool that is meant to support enterprise apps but only supports VMware virtualization. Most enterprise data centers are heterogeneous environments, and the majority of applications are not yet deployed in virtualized containers. The shortcomings of Stage Manager seem to be its presupposition that the world be 100% virtualized in the short-term. Most customers we speak to are nowhere near that as a decision or a reality.

 What do you think?

New VMware Stage Manager tackles application lifecycle management

Laurianne McLaughlin at CIO has published the results of a survey of 300 CIOs on their use of virtualization. Lots of good data and analysis in the article (link below). Most interesting to me is the responses to the question of why people invested in virtualization:

Reasons to Virtualize Servers

Cut costs via server consolidation	81%
Improve disaster recovery and backup plans	63%
Provision computing resources to end users more quickly	55%
Offer more flexibility to the business	53%
Provide competitive advantage	13%

(Respondents chose up to three)
SOURCE: CIO Research

From the standpoint of virtual lab management, the fact that 55% of the respondents are trying to accelerate their ability to provision computing resources to end-users is a great sign. It maps to what customers are telling us – they are seeing tremendous returns from automating the provisioning of virtual machines for support, training, testing, proof of concept, evaluations etc. Those conversations suggest that a virtual lab environment is becoming a platform supporting a host of non-production activities that traditionally have been slow, expensive, and considered tactical distractions for the IT ops group. Putting an automated utility in place allows the operations team to spend their time on things that are strategic to the business, instead of being interrupt-driven with deployment and configuration requests.

Your Virtualized State in 2008 – CIO.com

ZD’s Dan Kusnetzky posts a response to the latest InfoWorld 2008 awards, noting a number of companies is missing. Surgient VQMS was a 2007 winner of the award and Dan notes that virtual lab companies such as VMlogix were skipped this year.

» Response to InfoWorld’s Choices on 2007’s Top Technology | Virtually Speaking | ZDNet.com