Tag Archives: VMware

BYOD Tools

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In a bid to make virtualisation and cloud computing more palatable to enterprises which have a high concentration of mobile users, or are implementing a Bring your Own Device (BYOD) strategy, VMware has launched a fistful of new products and a public beta of a system that offers what it describes as “Dropbox for the enterprise”.

The products available today and later this year bring to life the product roadmap that VMware outlined at its major user conference last year. According to Tim Hartmann, senior manager of systems engineers for VMware in Australia; “If you look at all the releases they dovetail into BYOD in a big fashion.”

At the heart of that is the release of VMware View 5.1 which offers IT managers a caching methodology to take the load off the underlying storage systems that are accessed by end user devices. By removing the bottleneck Mr Hartmann said it was possible to have a higher density of systems attached, which led to a lower cost per desktop.

The company claims that the total cost of ownership associated with a virtual desktop infrastructure could be cut by up to 50 percent thanks to optimising storage loads. The tool also provides a single management console from which IT managers can control provisioning, con?guration management, connection brokering, policy enforcement, performance monitoring, and application assignment.

VMware has also launched Horizon Application Manager. Since buying TriCipher in 20120, VMware has been offering that tool in the US. Horizon however has been recast for the global market.

“This is a way of creating a single sign-on … for whatever cloud based applications you are using,” said Mr Hartmann.

The system uses Active Directory to handle the authentication for each user. Instead of needing user IDs for each cloud service a user subscribed to, Horizon now manages that access.

“From an administrator’s perspective you can say yes you are allowed to use this service – but also if someone leaves then you can turn that of with the flick of a switch,” said Mr Hartmann.

VMware has also launched its vCentre Operations for View tool which provides IT managers with a traffic light style dashboard to illustrate the end user experience and identify problems.

While this form of insight has been available for virtual machines in the data centre for a while, this extension of the tool allows IT managers to monitor how their end users’ devices – whether desktop, mobile, virtual or BYOD – are performing, and where necessary tweak the system to improve that performance.

Finally the company has launched a public beta of its Project Octopus programme, which Mr Hartmann described as “Dropbox for the enterprise.” Originally three local companies signed up for the private beta pilot of the programme, but Mr Hartmann says that there are now 20 companies trialling the system, which has been made available as a public beta from today.

It will be launched officially later this year.

“It presents you with a folder and that becomes your document repository, which can be made available to other nominated users,” instead of emailing large files around an enterprise, he added.

Author: Beverley Head
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What Is Desktop Virtualization?

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Desktop virtualization is the use of several virtualization technologies, either together or separately. Let’s look at each of these cases in turn:

  • When “desktop virtualization” is used to describe making it possible for people to access a physical or virtual system remotely, access virtualization technology is used to capture the user interface portion of an application. It is then converted to a neutral format and projected across the network to a device that can display the user interface and allow the user to enter and access information. This means that just about any type of network-enabled device could be used to access the application. Suppliers such as Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware offer client software for tablets, smartphones, laptops, and PC, making it possible for users of those devices to access the applications running elsewhere on the network.
  • When “desktop virtualization” is used to describe encapsulating an application using client-side application virtualization technology and then projecting it in whole or piecemeal to a remote system for execution, the application could either remain on that client device or be deleted once the user completes the task, depending on the settings used by the IT administrator. This means, of course, that the client system has to run the operating system needed by the application. So, Windows applications, for example, would need to run on Windows executing on a PC or laptop.
  • When “desktop virtualization” is used to describe encapsulating the entire stack of software that runs on a client system, the phase starts to take on a great deal of complexity. That encapsulated virtual client system becomes highly mobile. Here are the possibilities:
  • One or more virtual client systems could execute on a single physical client system. This allows personal applications to run side by side with locked-down corporate applications.
  • Local execution. Virtual client systems could run on a local blade server. The user interface is projected to physical PCs, laptops, or thin client systems using access virtualization technology.
  • Remote execution. Virtual client systems could run on a server that resides in the organization’s data center. The user interface is projected to physical PCs, laptops, or thin client systems using access virtualization technology. Since the industry is using the same phrase to describe all of these different approaches, the concept of desktop virtualization can be quite confusing to those unfamiliar with all of the different types of technology that could be pressed into service.

Author: Dan Kusnetzky
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Verizon To Offer Virtualised Android Phones

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Telefonica and Verizon will become the first operators to offer Android phones running VMware’s mobile hypervisor, the companies announced on Wednesday at the VMworld 2011 Europe conference in Copenhagen.

VMware has previously said that Verizon would offer the service, without disclosing details about timing, but this is the first time Telefonica has said it plans to offer phones with the hypervisor.

Users of phones with the VMware product will find two profiles on their devices: one for personal use and one for business use. The setup allows for the isolation of enterprise apps from apps available on the open Android Market that could be malicious.

The operators will be making slightly different offerings, said Steve Herrod, chief technology officer for VMware.

Dual subscription

Telefonica will make its offering available initially on the Samsung Galaxy SII. Unlike Verizon, Telefonica will allow users to have two phone numbers, one for business and one for personal use. That means a user will be able to have two voice and data subscriptions on one phone.

Telefonica is able to make that offering using dual-SIM cards. Such a setup would be more difficult for Verizon, which will only allow one phone number on its service, because of its network technology.

IT managers will be able to remotely control the business side of the phone using software from VMware. That software lets administrators remotely wipe just the corporate applications and data, push applications to the phones and set policies for the corporate profile. Telefonica will offer the IT management features as a hosted service.

Verizon will instead offer that software to enterprises to run from inside their firewalls, Herrod said.

Toggle interest growing

Verizon’s offer will initially be available on LG phones. Phone makers must build part of the necessary software into the phones before they hit shelves, meaning the selection of compatible phones initially is likely to be small. LG and Samsung are the only two manufacturers to have announced their support of VMware’s technology.

Neither operator is announcing specific launch dates or pricing but say the service will be available in the coming months.

VMware first started talking about its mobile hypervisor late last year. Interest in the concept of separating business applications from personal, particularly for Android phones, appears to be growing.

Last week, AT&T launched a service called Toggle that allows users to separate work applications from personal applications on Android phones. It’s based on technology from Enterproid, which is different from VMware’s in that applications must be built using Enterproid’s technology in order to be separated from the rest of the phone.

OK Labs is pushing a similar concept for isolating certain applications. Last week, Red Bend started talking about its own virtualisation technology, which would work similarly to VMware’s, but it hasn’t announced phone or operator partners yet.

Author: Nancy Gohring
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10 Ways to Cure Your Virtualization Ills

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Tis the season to fix your virtual environment and there’s no better way to start that process than with a “to do” list. And, you know you need one. So, here’s your list for those dog days of summer, when you want to heat things up even more. You won’t solve all ten of these items in a day or in a week. It’s an ongoing process but you need to get started now, so here, here’s your license and your permission to fix what’s broken and put yourself in a better strategic position to expand and grow.

1. Virtual Host Updates – You need to update your virtual host systems on a regular basis. What’s regular? You need to check quarterly on the high side and monthly on the normal side. Remember that using Distributed Resource Scheduling, when you put a virtual host system in Maintenance mode, its VMs scatter like rats on a sinking ship, so you can perform these updates during normal business hours.

2. Firmware Updates - Yes, you need to keep firmware up to date on physical servers, blades and enclosures. Some of these are critical so don’t slack on them. Quarterly to twice yearly should be sufficient to keep new hardware features and fixes coming your way. The easiest way to maintain these updates is to place yourself on vendor mailing lists for them. Every vendor worth its salt has lists that you can join to keep you abreast of critical updates.

3. Operating System Updates – Yes, the dreaded OS patching rears its ugly head again. This necessary evil can drive you to the brink of homicide. There are new patches, security updates, service packs and updates of some kind landing in my email on an almost daily basis. In larger environments, it’s advisable to have a separate team to manage patching. Depending on the severity level of the patch, this could be a weekly exercise. Monthly is probably the correct frequency for most patching needs.

4. VMware Tools Upgrade – Do you see that exclamation mark in the system tray on top of your VMware Tools icon? That means you need to update the tools package. It requires a reboot on Windows operating systems so plan accordingly. The update doesn’t takes a few minutes per system to perform but it’s worth it for the enhanced drivers and new hardware. This update needs to be performed when updates become available.

5. Virtual Machine Hardware Upgrade – This one is a pain but necessary for better performance. When you update from an earlier version of VMware to vSphere, you’ll have to do this. There’s no easy way to do it either. It’s a lengthy process that requires multiple reboots and network reconfiguration on your VMs. If you’re running vSphere 4.x, check your virtual machine’s hardware by selecting a VM in VCenter and look at the Hardware version on the Summary tab. If it reads 4, you need to update. If it is 7, you’re cool.

6. Remove Orphaned VMDKs – This is one of those pesky housekeeping items that you absolutely must do. Disk files sometimes stay behind, when you delete VMs from inventory. And, once you’ve deleted a system from inventory, there’s no reason to keep any of its associated files around just burning up valuable space. Checking for orphaned VMs on a quarterly basis is sufficient to keep your LUNs clutter free.
How do you check for orphaned disk files, you ask? I use a PowerShell script that I found somewhere and modified to fit my environment. The script scans your environment for orphaned VMDK files and provides you a report on its scan. No files are deleted during the scan. You have to do that manually and it’s recommended that you double check the findings and remove the orphans after you’ve made that verification.

7. Adjust vCPUs – As I discussed in, The Late Great Virtual CPU Debate, you should inventory your VMs for multiple vCPU usage and do some serious pruning. Generally speaking, you should configure VMs with single vCPUs. Multiple vCPUs are for special cases and specific workloads.

8. Adjust Virtual Memory – You should take an inventory of your VMs, how much memory you’ve allocated to each one and adjust accordingly. You won’t necessarily adjust them downward but you probably will adjust a lot of them in the downward direction. Memory overcommitment is a big problem in virtual environments but it’s also a very popular thing to do. A wiser solution is to use performance data to determine what your VM’s memory needs are an adjust to best performance that doesn’t waste resources. Why allocate 4GB of memory for a test web server, when one or two is plenty?

9. Change Operating Systems – This recommendation won’t make a lot of people happy but it’s a good practice. But, why would it make such a difference? If you run a lot of Windows servers in your environment, you’re also burning a lot of resources (Memory, for one) that could be used for other workloads.

For example, Windows 2008 R2 requires a minimum of 512MB RAM (OK, try running on that) but realistically needs at least 2GB of RAM out of the box for just the OS. Add an additional two to four GB for each standard workload. Add more for more intense workloads.

If you switch your workloads to Linux, you’ll find that you’ll use from one-eighth to one-half the memory per VM. Plus, if you use Ubuntu Linux, you won’t have to deal with the extreme licensing fees from Microsoft. Better performance, fewer consumed resources and no licensing fees. No brainer?

10. Add Capacity – If you’re growing your virtual infrastructure, add capacity. Don’t wait until you’re experiencing outages, the DRS dance or growth stoppage. Add capacity now and expand into it. You have to stay at least one step ahead of your growth expectations by adding capacity before you need it. Add additional memory to your hosts, add CPUs or upgrade your CPUs and add disk space to resolve performance bottlenecks or growth slowdowns. Hearing the words, “We’re out of capacity,” is an unacceptable excuse.

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Want To Use VDI Over a Slow WAN? These Three Tools Can Help

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It’s been about two years since I wrote my first article on SearchVirtualDesktop.com about options for using VDI over a WAN connection. That article focused on options other than VDI, choosing the right display protocol, and using hardware WAN accelerators. While those techniques are certainly still valid today, if you want to use VDI over a WAN connection but don’t want to invest in a hardware appliance, we now have some great software-only remote display protocol acceleration tools available.

The first product is Ericom Blaze. You probably know Ericom as the makers of PowerTerm, a Remote Desktop and VDI connection broker. They’ve recently introduced the “Blaze” product that is a standalone software accelerator for RDP.

You simply install the Blaze software agent into your remote Windows desktop, and then add a plug-in to the Remote Desktop Client. Then RDP connections between the two appear faster and smoother to end users, with Blaze doing things like advanced compression, TCP multisession streaming, etc. And since Blaze is just a regular RDP plug-in, it works in any environment where you’re connecting with RDP, including Ericom, VMware View, native Microsoft Remote Desktop, Leostream, Virtual Bridges, etc.

Another software-only acceleration product comes from Quest Software. Quest’s full desktop virtualization product is called “vWorkspace,”
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and one of the features of vWorkspace is a set of enhancements to Microsoft’s RDP protocol called “EOP,” (Experience Optimization Protocol).

Similar to Ericom Blaze, Quest EOP consists of an agent and a client plug-in which increases the performance of RDP through compression, media redirection, TCP multisession streaming, and the like.

Historically, EOP has only been available as part of vWorkspace, but Quest has recently made EOP available on its own, which you can then plug-in to any environment running RDP.

Finally, we should look at Wyse. While you probably think of Wyse only in the context of making client devices, Wyse actually has two software products called “VDA” (Virtual Desktop Accelerator) and TCX (Thin Client eXperience). Both of these products were originally designed to run on Wyse client devices, but they’re now opened up for sale and use on any client.

Wyse TCX adds features to RDP such as multimedia redirection and video acceleration. In fact, VMware licensed this technology from Wyse, which is now built-in to VMware View.

Wyse VDA, on the other hand, is specifically focused on making remote display protocols work better over highly latent networks (300ms and above). Since that’s a problem that isn’t exclusive to RDP, Wyse VDA can also plug-in to Citrix’s HDX/ICA remoting protocol. Taken together, Wyse VDA and Wyse TCX offer features that are similar to Ericom Blaze and Quest EOP.

So, which product is best for you? Of course, it depends. Fortunately, since these are all software-only solutions, it’s really easy to download demo versions and test them out for yourself. They’re really easy to install and use, and you might find that one works better for your scenario than another.

What’s also great about these software-only solutions is that they’re not too expensive and you can easily buy the exact amount you need. In other words, unlike a hardware acceleration appliance that’s basically “all or nothing” (which means it’s expensive since you have to buy it for everyone whether they need it or not), you can pick-and-choose (or even mix-and-match) these products and install them only in the virtual machines of the users who need them.

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How VDI Can Change The Desktop Management Game

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VDI can simplify the tasks that make desktop administrators hate their lives — the one-by-one operating system upgrades, Windows patch management, client hardware failures and end-user mishaps. But virtual desktops won’t solve any problems without proper planning and infrastructure.

In fact, many virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) proofs of concept fail because of infrastructure, said Tom Scanlon, CIO of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS).

When MCPHS explored a move from physical desktops to VMware View virtual desktops last year, Scanlon quickly learned that the college’s infrastructure needed serious upgrades to handle the higher bandwidth, storage area network (SAN) and CPU power requirements.

“I thought we could support 24 desktops with our existing infrastructure during a pilot, and I almost pulled the plug because the response time was awful,” Scanlon said. “But that wasn’t the software’s fault; it was our hardware.

“Once we went through and refreshed the hardware, it was like night and day,” he added. “You have to have the right equipment, [or] you won’t get a good interpretation of how [virtual desktops] will work for you.”

The case for VDI

Despite the added infrastructure investments, VDI still made sense for MCPHS because the school had to simplify desktop management for the 19 IT pros who support 4,000 students plus faculty and staff at its three campuses. Plus, the college’s computer labs are on an accelerated refresh cycle of new PCs every two years. That cycle is expensive not only in terms of hardware, but also in IT support, Scanlon said.

MCPHS hired Salem, N.H.-based integrator Mosaic Technology to redesign its infrastructure. It did a SAN refresh with Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage and updated IBM BladeCenter servers with six-core processors and maxed-out RAM, Scanlon said.

So far, the school has replaced about 700 desktops at computer labs in Boston, Worcester, Mass., and Manchester, N.H., with thin clients and VMware View 4.5 desktops using PC over IP (PCoIP). Scanlon said now that the virtual desktops are properly provisioned, the performance level is about the same as a regular PC, and it’s consistent.

“I haven’t had any complaints from the students, and believe me, if they weren’t happy, they’d be outside my office with pitchforks,” Scanlon said.

Scanlon chose View because MCPHS is already a VMware shop using ESX to virtualize servers. The lack of profile management in VMware View didn’t matter, because the college’s virtual desktops are all generic. A new desktop image is provided each time a new user logs in, and MCPHS uses Google Apps instead of locally managed Microsoft Office software to reduce storage requirements, he said.

The downside for end users is video performance, particularly over the wide area network (WAN), because View 4.5 doesn’t support PCoIP over the WAN. But PCoIP is supported over the WAN in View 4.6, which the college will upgrade to over the coming months.

The big benefit to students is that they don’t have to go to the college computer lab to run college-owned apps. “Now they can access all programs and applications from their own devices, from anywhere,” Scanlon said. “No one has to wait for a computer terminal anymore.”

Dustin Fennell, CIO of Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, moved to virtual desktops in 2008 for similar benefits. “Our primary reason was that the traditional black-box replacement cycle is expensive, inefficient and not sustainable when budgets are declining,” he said.

The college, which supports about 12,000 students per semester and more than 800 employees, uses Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp to deliver applications and data to remote students and faculty. Scottsdale Community also created a Web portal for end users to access college applications, including AutoCAD and Adobe Creative Suite 5, that are delivered from either XenDesktop 5 or XenApp, depending on the app.

“We moved to VDI because we want to get out of the business of managing desktops,” Fennell said. “Now we provide stateless personal desktops that follow users. And our apps actually perform better than they do on a brand-new computer, because we aren’t installing apps on the system, slowing it down.”

VDI also makes operating system upgrades much faster, MCPHS’s Scanlon said. In the past, his IT department used Symantec Ghost software to do Windows upgrades one by one. Now they can use that imaging tool with View to roll out multiple Windows 7 desktop images in minutes.

And when end users mess up their systems, IT can roll out a new desktop without having to touch the users’ machines. “Before, if someone had an application issue, we would have to take everything offline,” Scanlon said. “Now we can just update the image and tell the virtual desktop to rebuild, and the problem is fixed in a matter of hours.”

He said Scottsdale Community College is taking things a step further and moving toward an environment where there are no OSes on any client machines, and everything is virtual, Fennell said.

For a while, the college ran in hybrid mode, with some apps delivered from the Citrix environment and some apps running locally. Now, there are no locally installed apps, other than Microsoft Office on Windows. “Eventually, there will be nothing on the endpoint device,” he said.

VDI: An investment in efficiency

Moving to virtual desktops won’t reduce MCPHS’s IT costs for at least a few years because of startup expenses including licensing and infrastructure, but the college expects to see a return on its VDI investment within five years. For example, Scanlon said he spent about $300 per thin client, which is expected to last more than five years, versus $600 for the laptops that MCPHS bought every two years.

Scottsdale Community College funded its virtual desktop buildout using capital that would have been spent on PC replacements, and though VDI does cost more upfront, the long-term efficiencies are significant, Fennell said.

“Virtualizing your desktop environment may cost more, but if you think outside the box and look at what the end users want and need, between VDI and application virtualization, you can provide better access and better performance,” Fennell said. “We save $250,000 per year at this point, and now the IT department actually funds innovation grants…. It has been a transformational change for us.”

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Virtualization on Mobile Devices: What’s Taking So Long?

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Despite years of marketing pressure and products that are simpler to use and more widely available, desktop virtualization hasn’t taken off to the extent that vendors and analysts expected even a few years ago.

The bring-your-own-device movement among end users, on the other hand, has lit a fire under the market for mobile device virtualization.

A survey released last month by telecommunications giant Mitel showed 90 percent of respondents expected virtualization to become more important in their companies, with the priority being first in mobile phones, second in cloud computing and third in desktop computing.

A Frost & Sullivan survey released in this week showed that only 5 percent of the 18.3 million tablets sold in 2010 were used in business, but that number could reach 30 percent by 2015. A June, 2010 Frost & Sullivan survey showed 49 percent of respondents expect tablets and smartphones to become the end-user computing platform of choice within a few years.

Unfortunately, the number of virtualization products available to connect those devices securely to corporate networks is far thinner than it appears from the marketing and hype surrounding the technology, says Ian Song, research analyst at IDC.

“Virtualization on mobile devices requires some pretty low-level coding, especially because there are so many kinds of hardware and firmware, and it changes pretty fast,” Song says. “Even if you’re going to stick with just Android, like VMware plans to do, there are already a lot of different versions, and another comes every three or four months.”

Citrix and VMware Plans

Citrix and VMware are both moving fast on products that would make smartphones and tablets good virtualization clients, but the rival firms are taking very different approaches.

VMware, as part of its Project Horizon mobile computing effort, is basing its mobile client on the Mobile Virtualization Platform — a Type II hypervisor designed to run on top of an existing operating system to support one or more additional virtual-smartphone OS/application-sets on top of that. VMware’s MVP is also designed to manage multiple profiles, to allow customers to switch from work to personal to other virtual environments — without losing configuration or applications set up for each.

Its Project Horizon, announced in August, creates a cloud-based set of personal configurations, applications and data that users can access from anywhere, from any device. Though primarily a desktop virtualization product, it can also make BYOD setups far more flexible, by not relying on the phone to contain all the data and applications, according to VMware.

VMware’s approach is to work with individual phone manufacturers to build its hypervisor onto their devices, focusing only on Android at this point.

VMware and LG Electronics introduced a virtualized Android phone in December that is expected to ship sometime early this year, followed by other LG Android devices.

A Speed Catch?

Type II hypervisors worked well enough on PCs, but far slower than “bare metal” Type I hypervisors because of the additional layer of software on top of the operating system, Song says.

On phones, which have much less processing power, Type I hypervisors could work much more effectively, but they depend on the ability of the developer to code them to an incredibly wide variety of hardware, Song says.

That’s Citrix’s strategy, and has been from the beginning, according to Citrix CTO Simon Crosby. The company has been shipping bare-metal hypervisor clients in its Receiver product line since it shipped an Android version in April, 2010 and plans to continue expanding the line.

Citrix has committed enough developers and resources not only to building the hypervisors, but also doing it quickly enough that a new Receiver version will be available any time a major new device ships, he says.

Even that won’t solve the overall problem of having no standard hardware or firmware, however, Song says.

“With Android, because it’s open and its hardware architecture is open, it’s not that difficult to virtualize,” he says. “The question is what happens when you get to a more closed architecture; I’m not even sure it’s legal to virtualize an iPhone at the hardware level.

“And on software [with a Type II hypervisor], forget about it,” Song says. “Apple is not going to let you come in and virtualize it to run another OS.”

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VMware`s Mobile Virtualization Solution Available on Android

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VMware, a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, announced the launch of its mobile virtualization solution that is expected to offer a personal as well as separate secure profile for work applications on a single Android phone.

The virtualization software was demonstrated on LG Optimus Black at the Mobile World Congress. VMware is currently working with LG to pre-load the software. The company will start the trials of the software by the middle of this year.

The objective is to let employees buy mobile devices of their choice, but Mobile virtualization technology from VMware will allow corporate IT departments to manage sensitive data on those devices with enterprise-level security and compliance.

“We want to move to a world where the company is not buying you a phone,” said Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer, VMware, in a statement. “Buy what you like and bring it to work and we`ll give you a way to use it in an enterprise-safe way. As it is not possible to download the application later, so manufacturers need to pre-load the software in the device.”

The application will appear on the home screen of the phone and when the user touches it, it will launch the corporate version of the phone. VMware is offering flexible options to IT administrators. IT administrators can work in line with the company policies and may provide different employees with different capabilities.

In line with the security issues of the company, the user can shut off security sensitive items such as cameras, Bluetooth, GPS and cut/copy options. Removal of such applications will discourage employees from misusing of applications which are against the interest of the organization.

VMware offers a number of features. An enterprise could allow users to receive voice over IP calls from the PBX on the phones having different ring tones from the ones coming in their personal side.

VMware also offers dual SIM option. With dual SIM option, a user can have two separate corporate and personal accounts which may reduce data traffic for both.

According to VMware, the mobile virtualization application on the phone will be free but the enterprises will pay per user for the management software.

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Living in a VM World

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The big industry event about virtualization is VMworld, usually held in late Summer / early Fall. You don’t have to wait for VMware’s conference, however, to find yourself in VM World. We now live in it, every day.

It’s really quite amazing how quickly virtualization has swept through, and become ensconced in, IT. Data centers have–for decades–been famously conservative when it comes to introducing changes that might threaten to disrupt production applications. For years, whenever we’d ask operationally focused IT managers about introducing new control software–for workload management, service provisioning, automated orchestration, and so on–we always heard a deeply skeptical, go-slow attitude. That skepticism was mirrored by how gradually–some would argue, glacially–the software was adopted.

Until virtualization. VMware shipped its first server products in 2001. By 2003, its products were maturing and starting to get noticed. The idea of operating server workloads atop virtualized x86 was starting to spread. By 2005, there was widening excitement, along with strong uptake in secondary roles such as development and testing (“devtest”). By 2008, it was a wildfire, burning hot and spreading fast. And today–today virtualization is maturing into just how you do enterprise IT.

Virtualization of volume servers “crossed the chasm” with extraordinary rapidity. No, that’s not quite right–with astounding, amazing, incredible rapidity. Never before have data centers and IT operations changed so quickly, so thoroughly. Virtualization entered at the same speed PCs and the Internet did–from zero penetration and little interest on the part of IT departments to near ubiquity–in a decade. And it did so in the conservative data center domain.

When you’re in the middle of long-term change, there’s never an incontrovertible moment to declare “we’ve arrived!” We’re still in the process of becoming, right? We’re still moving toward full virtualization; many organizations will be working on it for at least another five years. On the other hand, many organizations have already virtualized broad swaths of their IT estate. It’s easy to find shops with thousands of virtual machines, some near their goal–100 percent virtualized. And even among those that have years to go, almost all have at least started the transition.

I think it’s fair to say that, whereas five years ago we were living in a world dominated by physical servers, today we’re living in a VM world. Seemingly everyone has thousands. Buying a server without virtualization is already like buying a mobile phone without text service, or a car without airbags. It’s now impossible to buy a new server that isn’t at least highly capable of virtualization; most are now thoroughly optimized for it.

Every proponent would like to claim that their technology or approach “changes everything.” That is always hyperbole. But virtualization comes close. It’s not just the new platform for deploying apps and managing services. It’s also dramatically raised the level of efficiency, flexibility, maintainability, and availability we’ve come to expect and demand for every application. That IT professionals were–given the right lever–able to effect such thrilling improvements in such a short time emboldens us to seek out and achieve great things elsewhere.

I’m really happy we now live in VM world. It’s nice here.

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VMWare Shows Mobile Virtualization on Android

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VMWare is showing off a mobile virtualization platform that will let people run a personal profile and a separate, secure profile for work applications on the same Android phone.

VMWare CTO Stephen Herrod demonstrated the software on an LG Optimus Black at Mobile World Congress. The company is now testing the software internally and with partners.

The idea is that enterprises can let their employees buy an Android phone but isolate the personal applications from the corporate apps in order to reduce potential security issues.

“The goal for this product is a bring-your-own-PC type of world,” Herrod said. “So we want to move to a world where the company is not buying you a phone. Buy what you like and bring it to work and we’ll give you a way to use it in an enterprise-safe way.”

For now, a piece of the software required to use the virtualization platform must be installed on the phone by the manufacturer — it can’t be downloaded later — and so VMWare is working with partners like LG to preload that software. Once a worker brings the phone to the office, an IT administrator can use the management console to send over an additional application. That app appears on the home screen of the phone and when the user touches it, it launches the isolated corporate version of the phone.

IT administrators can set a variety of policies and allow different workers access to different capabilities. For instance, IT administrators can shut off cut and paste so that a user can’t copy something from their personal files and paste into a corporate file. Administrators can also opt to shut off the camera, GPS and Bluetooth.

They can also remotely wipe data only from the corporate side of the phone and include a corporate app store that includes approved applications that users can download.

The software includes a VPN so that people can use a protected connection to reach the corporate network from the work side of the phone.

Herrod envisions a variety of ways that the service can be deployed. An enterprise could allow users to receive voice over IP calls from the PBX on the phones. Those calls might have a different ring than those that are dialed to the user’s personal phone number.

Or, an operator could offer phones that have dual SIM cards so that a user could have two totally separate lines. Even with a single SIM, VMWare can create a virtual SIM that separates the data traffic into two accounts. “We are getting a lot of interest from providers because of the potential for two different data plans or selling a data plan to a customer who didn’t have one,” he said.

VMWare is working on offering the service through operators so that it can support the variety of approaches that the operators might want, he said.

VMWare imagines that the mobile virtualization application on the phone will be free but that enterprises will pay per user for the management software.

The company hopes to start field trials in the middle of the year but couldn’t predict when the commercial product might become available.

For now, VMWare is only working on an Android offering, since that is an operating system that many companies would like to let workers use but is too insecure for many. “The goal is to get the solution out and see the customer demand and go from there,” Herrod said.

VMWare first started talking about its mobile virtualization platform in December but is now demonstrating it on the LG Optimus Black.

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