Peter Christy

Let the Hypervisor Wars Begin!

Microsoft seems to be feeling reasonably good about Hyper-V. Microsoft VP Bob Muglia reports it is functionally complete and performance complete and what remains is ringing out the bugs (as far as I can tell the stability is pretty good already). Mu said it was very surprising to him when they did their first performance testing against VMware ESX last fall and found the HV performance to be in the ballpark. When I first met Bob he was a Windows NT product manager. A key workload for NT was File Server and the competition was Drew Major's NetWare (as regular readers will now, Drew is in my pantheon of software gods). It took Microsoft until NT 4 to be performance comparable with NetWare so you can imagine Mu's surprise and pleasure to find HV Alpha code in the ballpark. The comparison between HV and ESX is complex. Microsoft knows it will take some time to catch up with the full VMW functionality. On the other hand, out of the box HV is supported by System Center, a much more comprehensive management system than virtual center. And just make things interesting and weird, MS announced and demonstrated System Center managing ESX, and MS support for management of key UNIX variants (along with OpenSourcing the integration technology). So this time MS is the heterogeneous, embracing vendor (that clearly tickles Mu too). How this all plays out is yet to be seen. MS points out that they know how to coordinate virtualization with Windows and key MS applications better than anyone and that should be quite valuable (e.g., to make virtual infrastructure memory management more efficient). In any case, MS is cranking up all the MS sales and competitive engines so things should get lively. When I pressed Mu at the MMS analyst meeting to say how we should observe competitive progress he said that after 18 months in the market if they weren't shipping more hypervisors than VMW he would be very disappointed. "Microsoft is very good at high-volume, low-cost software you know" (Hyper-V is priced at $28 if you missed that). Game very much about to be on.

System Center -- Front and Center

I've been attending the Microsoft Management Summit for three years now and the evolution is worth watching. The management effort began in earnest five years ago when Bob Muglia faced the fact that manageability was a liability for Windows server and hired Kirill Tatarinov from BMC to fix the problem. Kirill and his team developed a 10 year vision around the "dynamic systems initiative." The initial reasoning for the effort was that with good systems management Windows Server could have superior overall cost-of-ownership compared to alternatives like LINUX. The management systems team developed a pretty good plan and Muglia put his money where his mouth was. I think it's fair to say that five years into this ten year plan systems management is now a Windows Server asset rather than a liability. A little over a year ago the discussion started to move to focus on System Center (the Microsoft branding for the whole product line) as a profitable line of business rather than just a Windows Server asset. From what we heard at MMS we're estimating that the product line will close this year just south of $1B certainly a credible number even within MS. Perhaps more interesting, System Center (in turn built on SQL Server) is becoming a focal point for the virtualization strategy (virtualization management integrated with hardware, operating system and application management in contrast to VMware's "virtualization is everything" strategy) and also now at the core of Microsoft's Forefront Security as well. Muglia still describes it as five years into a ten year vision, and speaks to more sophisticated model-based applications (I'm expecting that some of these ideas will become clearer in the forthcoming Oslo release). The analyst meetings at MMS are getting a lot more popular (they used to be intimate little events).

Ray Ozzie Meshes Things Up

The services shoes that I spoke of around the MIX 08 conference are starting to drop left and right. Microsoft has begun a technical Beta for the Live Mesh service and put some quite informative videos up on the Web. I've known some of Ray's core team since back in our mutual DEC days (the team started at UIUC earlier, and really coagulated at Iris Associates, the group that did Lotus Notes). Then some of them moved on to Groove and hence to Microsoft. Ray has been doing "sync" for a long time through many generations and refinements of products (at the core of Notes and Groove for sure). Not unexpectedly sync is at the root of Live Mesh (as Ray said would be the case earlier). When I told one of our networking friends he should really take at look at Live Mesh, his answer was "It's just file replication, right?" to suggest his disinterest. It is about file replication. But if you think about it, intelligent file replication is at the core of how we use computers. In Live Mesh you can define a Mesh of devices or people that share specific information. At the simplest you mesh together your computers, phones and MP3 players and share music and photos. In business applications you can collaborate using various forms of documents (IRG runs on Groove collaboration of this form). Notes was a heavyweight structure with high administrative burden. Groove is still pretty heavyweight in terms of the client size but doesn't require any IT admin. Live Mesh is much lighter weight on the client end in part because it's a refined and elegant design and in part because a node in the cloud is a necessary part and the greater complexity can be put there. So in addition to syncing your devices and friends, there is a cloud version that's always up to date and can be accessed via a browser. If you have an application that can run on your PC then it uses a local version of the meshed data and synchronizes it back to the mesh as changes are made (analogous to how modern Outlook cached operation works with Exchange). You can run a PC application in the cloud (they provide a version of .NET Framework that runs in the Live cloud). Or you can write the application in a Web 2.0 mode (more natural for the cloud) and MS supports running it locally on the PC. Very interesting! But wait, there's more. Suppose Microsoft sold a subscription to an up to date Windows and Office "image" and every time you accessed the cloud with one of your computers it was automatically updated with no burden to you (now we have sort of the mōka5 version). Or if you merge it with what MS is doing with SoftGrid (a strong part of the desktop virtualization portfolio) it becomes applications on demand. It's all just file replication but if you do file replication elegantly (as Groove certainly does) it is way cool technology.

Debra Unveils More About Live:

The final keynote at MMS was Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Windows Live Operations, speaking about all those data centers Microsoft has been visibly building. Debra is getting increasing exposure as Microsoft rolls out Live services (Debra is also scheduled to speak at the upcoming Google developer meeting). She's a delight to listen to if you get a chance (accurately describes herself as a WYSIWYG kind of person). She confirmed the sense I got from talking to the Cloud Data Services team at MIX 2008 -- it's definitely game on in terms of services. Debra said MS is adding 10,000 servers a month. The MS total server count is much smaller than Google's -- maybe a third of a million to GOOG's 2M -- but to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, 10,000 servers here, 10,000 servers there, after a while it starts to add up to real compute power! The next 18 months are going to be fun to watch not to mention to experience.