VMware: Virtualization frontrunner, part of EMC stable

Company: VMware
Entry: vSphere
Morning Line: 4-1
Tip sheet: Virtualization frontrunner, strong storage and management bloodlines as part of EMC stable

If you're visualizing the next-generation data center, 100% virtualized, then VMware more than likely fits into the picture.

The company has taken the idea of a fully virtualized data center to a new level with the latest release of its core virtualization platform, vSphere 4. The company describes vSphere 4, an update from Virtual Infrastructure 3, as a cloud operating system that will let enterprises centrally manage servers, storage and networks as if one big resource.

With this new platform, VMware's core hypervisor should now be able to handle large databases and other more demanding applications. VSphere quadruples the amount of memory available to virtual machines, triples network throughput and doubles the maximum I/O operations to more than 200,000 per second, the company says.

"With Vsphere, customers are realizing they can virtualize every application. And if you can virtualize every application, then you can build a data center model assuming a virtualization layer on top. This doesn't just span one use case, like test and dev, it's something that is a baseline of capabilities that straddle the entire data center," says Chad Sakac, vice president of the VMware Technology Alliance at EMC.

Toward that end, VMware has worked with Cisco and EMC for deep integration of vSphere and the networking and storage infrastructures, respectively. In effect, the result is a network, server and storage infrastructure that is effectively invisible, Sakac says.

From a storage/backup perspective, vSphere includes three new features: VMware Fault Tolerance, which creates a live replica of an application on a different server that can be used in the event of a hardware failure; vStorage Thin Provisioning, which allows less physical storage to be allocated to a virtual machine; and Distributed Power Management, which can consolidate virtual machines onto fewer machines during periods of low usage.

"You wouldn't provision a bunch of terabytes, fill those, and then add more. … All you do is provision virtual machines, and you say, 'This one is low priority and this one high. This one is going to get this amount of megabytes per second, and this one that amount. This one I want to replicate off site, and this one I don't care.' You create [service-level agreements] at the VMware layer and they'd automatically by applied at the storage layer," Sakac says.

With this type of fluidity in mind, EMC is rethinking its storage strategy top to bottom. For example, it recently redesigned its flagship array, the Symmetrix, Sakac says. The new array, called the Symmetrix V-Max comprises industry standard components assembled into building blocks, each with their own cache memory and I/O. The building blocks perform as a single, virtualized, array.

"We started first with V-Max, but with all of our platforms we'll automatically be able to move where the data lives to be able to deliver more or less performance without the administrator needing to do anything," Sakac says.