My Virtualization and Cloud Computing resource blog
Is Microsoft really that stupid…
Or are they just playing for stupid???
Today I was reading a blog post on the Windows Virtualization Team Blog, on their 3rd story about Microsoft’s Quick Migration and VMware’s VMotion. It is just too funny to see how Microsoft is dealing with a lack of functionality. According to their research customers are not changing their patterns, even when they have the option to manage physicals hosts in their environments during the day without any form of downtime for their Virtual Machines, they (according to Microsoft research) still want to delay physical server maintenance till the evening hours. Thanks to this research Microsoft is claiming that being able to move virtual machines around physical servers is really not something useful to have. The thing that really amazes me is that I see Microsoft (and others) often make assumptions based on the old-fashion one-app-per-one-physical-box time era. Please wake up! Virtualization is a Disruptive Technology… You shouldn’t be working in the wonderful world of IT is you are not willing to move forward (at least in my opinion). I do know for a fact lot’s of customers are using VMotion (or live migration) in production… sometimes helping them to do server maintenance… and really daring and probably red bull drinking extreme sport IT managers even try this during the middle of the day…
But guess what… the ability to move virtual machines while running without downtime solves MORE then just silly hardware maintenance!!! It creates an environment where workloads can actively be rebalanced so you can better serve your application needs and the end-users using them. And I am sure this new innovative (well at least 3 years ago when it came out) technology is being welcomed by many extreme sport red bull drinking IT managers It is even better to see that technology is not sitting still again… Storage VMotion, a recent released technology, now-a-days also allows you to dynamically balance storage across different tiers of storage as well (No, Microsoft, this is not just a feature to help prevent storage hardware maintenance). With a bit of patient we will get our hands on the continuous availability technology VMware has demonstrated at VMworld events where a VM can be continuously replicated across a simple network cable, so that when a server does die on you, the VM will keep on running without a hickup… Long live innovation… for the IT people preferring to maintain their hardware in the evenings… I guess you must not live in a neighborhood like mine with a nice strip club
P.S. Just to clarify, before everyone flames me, yes I work for VMware… But I work for technology, not for a company, so I choose to work for VMware because I like their technology (I am free to switch jobs any time I like). No one in VMware asked me to write this and feel free to comment if you disagree or agree you might even convince me to apply for a job at Microsoft
| Print article | This entry was posted by Richard Garsthagen on April 29, 2008 at 1:58 pm, and is filed under Platform Products. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
Comments are closed.
about 5 years ago
I can’t agree with you more. Their arguments and so called facts are twisted. And any decent system engineer would move all machines away and fix the host before everything goes down.
about 5 years ago
Totally agree, they seam to be changing there strategy more and more just to accomidate what they can not currently do with there software. I for one have used vmotion and storage vmotion as a tool, moving servers (yes during the day MS) to change hardware, sans or to upgrade the underlying version of the OS, eg 3.02 to 3.5
Drop the political games and give the users what they need, i guess the guys at MS like the overtime of coming in at night to perform maintenance !
about 5 years ago
You haven’t seen the most annoying part yet….
Wait until they finally put a vmotion equivalent into their product, it will suddenly become the best feature ever!
about 5 years ago
Balance what you think you know about Microsoft tactics with what you find in Jennifer Edstrom’s book “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates”. The book is 10 years old. Microsoft seems incapable of articulating its differentiating idea, and doesn’t seem to have changed in 10 years.
about 5 years ago
I have a different perspective. I am an instructional developer at Microsoft MediaRoom, which is the next iteration of IPTV. I see how things here are run, and from a business-unit perspective, I have nothing but respect for a well-run operation. I read the history of MS-Dos in a book here, and have realized that it is merely a difference in operational attitudes.
This company succeeded on mudularity, it has always had distinct business units, and each unit has its own preferences, attitudes, and policies. Even teams within units have different standards and conventions. And this was accepted at Microsoft in the past. This operating paradigm is now being modified for the better, but changing the direction of a huge ship is not an overnight process. Companies like Apple and Oracle (even despite acquisitions) present a unified face because it is an important survival and image issue for them. Microsoft has other things to worry about, and if it means that developers have to learn different conventions across an OS, or even across the same product’s different functional roles, then so be it. It is unfortunate, but it is the fact. And the sooner we learn to live with it and accept it as “the way things are” the sooner we’ll realize that we can only change ourselves, and to lament about the change someone else would benefit by will not necessarily hasten that change.
I wish you well.
Abbas
about 5 years ago
The real question is who did they talk to? Is this just a “MS funded study” or is this a real study?
I work with VMware every day. The crap that they are trying to spread about “we wait to do hw maintenance until night time and don’t use VMotion” sounds like something a CIO would say. Not the person down in the trenches who is keeping that CIO’s environment up over 99.9% of the time. (As is the case with what I do.) Yes I might not work on the hardware until night time maintenance zones when I have our vendor come in and do it. The SECOND I get an alert that there’s a hardware problem that machine gets all its production VMs moved off of it. (These are business stopping and ending critical systems too so time is of the essence.) They are VMotion-ed. That host then is no longer used until its fixed and tested and validate to be stable.
*deep breath*
I can’t tell you the number of VMotions we do a month as I stop count after about 5000. I don’t know a single person that uses VMware that doesn’t use VMotion. Its just TOO powerful and useful.
Its like saying no to using the chain saw as I only chop down trees with a hatchet.
about 5 years ago
Three years ago when I saw VMotion for the first time I realized this was a game-changer. It was one of the most awesome game-changing technologies I had ever seen, and still is.
about 5 years ago
Storage VMotion just saved us about 6 hours of downtime as we migrated our VM’s from one disk array to another. Great Job!
about 5 years ago
Hi Richard,
First of all: nice new look (not sure how long it has been like that, but anyway)
Second: I agree with you (you know I hate that, but I don’t have a choice in this case) and I think that it’s more self-defense than anything else.
For those who want to read some more about Live OS migration, academic-style, I’d recommend: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2005-migration-nsdi-pre.pdf
Although two of the authors work for Citrix (XenSource), it’s a pretty neutral document, it’s also written with their Cambridge University hats on. The document was written in 2005.
Joel
PS You working for MS? Yeah right…more likely you come back to us
about 5 years ago
Reminds me of an argument I got into with one of the senior managers. He said that VMotion need to be change managed. I explained that VMotion had been in place a year before change management was implemented and hadn’t caused a single issue. I asked if he wanted to put change management on how routers route packets too. I won that argument.
about 5 years ago
I think this explains best what’s happening:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
Massimo.
about 5 years ago
Hi Richpo,
thanks for your comment, I love your comparison to what a router does and not needing change management for that either, think I will steal that sample from you
about 4 years ago
I would think a bit more carefully about comparing vMotion to a router if I was you – ie. don’t unless you are talking about DRS.
The difference that a service/change manager cares about is the human intervention. Some companies have a rule that any change performed by a human requires a change record, because we humans are crap at doing things correctly – bring on automation, like DRS. They use the change record to point the finger when it all goes tits up.
With DRS, this is just like a router because it is automatic, and the change/service managers are usually happy that the migrations are logged and can be tracked back and no RFC is required.
about 4 years ago
Amen. We have an ESX server and no VMotion, it was just recently put into production and I love virtualization. I’ve used it several times to try things out and to test fixes for servers that have issues. The ability to move an environment on the fly is absolutely valuable! Being able to balance server load in a moments notice with only a slight disturbance is “priceless”. MS will eventually get more lax like Novell did and lose it’s grip on the desktop world. Hopefully VMWare will be able to continue to innovate