The Hypervisor doesn’t matter

Most presentations from company reps focus on just how great their product is and how much it is what all the others are not.  When I hear a company man saying something else it is certainly refreshing, and it happened again recently in a conversation with a Senior Engineer on the Windows Server team.  His responsibility pretty much covers the virtualization space, and this is the second time I’ve heard him talk about Hyper-V (notes from the first session here, here and here).  And just like last time this session was a very insightful look at the Microsoft product as well as the direction the industry is heading overall. 

The most poignant comment that was made throughout the session was that the industry has had far too much focus on the hypervisor and not enough on the actual value of virtualization.  The vendors have all pretty much agreed that the hypervisor itself is a commodity – there just aren’t that many differences between them and any differences that there are will be wiped out in the coming months as the vendors continue to improve their products.  The key is to look past server consolidation towards the areas where virtualization can truly start improving the performance of an environment, not just cut down on the number of physical servers in your environment. 

So how will that happen?  Part of it is more efficient and functional management tools.  The ability to manage workloads rather than just servers (i.e. shift a workload to a different server to account for a hung process within a single server) is a huge component of this next step in management tools improvements.  The other big aspect of improved management tools is efforts that are being made to improve the server deployment process.  Today’s process is pretty much to deploy a sysprep’d server image and then spend a couple hours adding various components and configuration settings and then finally loading the server application(s) on the system.  Microsoft is putting efforts in to streamlining the deployment process.  So you can indicate that a virtual server will be an Exchange 2007 Hub Transport Server and it can know to install the .net framework and other various components as part of the provisioning process.  This idea of “composing” a server rather than installing apps is going to be a major piece of Microsoft’s push in their management suite and application installation process going forward.

Of course, I’m not all that surprised to hear Microsoft calling the hypervisor a component, particularly since theirs isn’t one of the best out there right now in terms of overall functionality (e.g. no live system migration/Vmotion, though supposedly that is functional but didn’t make the cut for the RTM release).  Still, the move towards actually making better use of the the virtual environment beyond just reducing physical server count is a rather notable goal.

Some other minor notes from the session:

• Don’t expect any further cooperation between AMD and Intel to allow guest OS sessions to migrate between servers running the different processor families anytime soon.  Not likely to happen.
• Multi-core VMs are almost always a waste because so few applications are written to support multi-threaded operation.  Nothing new here, but it is worth repeating.
• The next version of Windows Server probably won’t scale up all that much more in terms of processor core support.  Today’s 64-core support seems to actually be sufficient for 98%+ of the server hardware or implementation needs in the world.  The next version might up the number to 128 or 256 cores, but there really isn’t all that much of a need for it as best as anyone can see.
• Server consolidation doesn’t do much for server application availability.  Remember that next time you’re trying to sell the benefits of virtualization to someone and they ask what the benefits are.

More notes from the session next week.  In the mean time, start getting used to the idea that the hypervisors are all pretty much commodities and that the management aspects are the most important thing to look at when you’re planning a new environment.  And you’re ultimately probably going to want to mix and match to get the best benefits from all the vendors.