Virtualization: The New Math

For starters, in early July the vendor of virtualization software teamed up with application optimization specialist Genilogix to integrate VMware's newly released edition of Lab Manager with the VAR's software testing offerings, which are built around the HP Quality Center standardized testing platform.

Then in late July, VMware and 10 other vendors completed the first phase of a broad benchmarking initiative under the aegis of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), a standards body for performance benchmarks.

At the same time, VMware released VMmark, its own benchmark system for measuring the performance of applications running in virtualized environments, available for free on the vendor's Web site.

VMware introduced Lab Manager last December as an add-on to its Virtual Infrastructure 3 platform. Lab Manager 2.5, which was released in late July, features several additions to the technology that VMware gained with the acquisition of Akimbi Systems last June.

The latest version features an ROI calculator for resellers to project savings for potential customers; the Genilogix integration with HP Quality Center; a similar integration by Borland with its own Silk Central Test Manager software; more storage support; expanded operating system support to include 64-bit and SMP systems as well as Solaris 10 and Microsoft Windows Vista; and additional server maintenance and cleanup features.

While cost savings remain the core value proposition of VMware's virtualization solutions, the flexibility gained by going virtual is a "more interesting" selling point, according to James Phillips, VMware's senior director of virtual software life-cycle automation solutions.

"If you virtualized your data center using VMware, you're going to lower the cost of infrastructure, operating costs, cooling and power, etc. But the second promise is more interesting. If you virtualize your data center, that level of flexibility can create solutions to problems in IT management that were previously unimagined," Phillips says.

"Lab Manager builds on top of [Virtual Infrastructure 3] in a way that leverages the ability to chip away at problems associated with application development."

The new Genilogix product is called VMware Lab Manager Add-in for HP Quality Center. The Blue Bell, Pa.-based VAR will bundle any purchase of Lab Manager or Quality Center with the other, says H.B. Farris, practice manager of function testing services at Genilogix.

"Our client base is primarily companies that have testing organizations, any company that needs to test vendor software or their own in-house developed applications. The beta version [of Lab Manager 2.5] was very impressive and the feature set was wonderful, where you can quickly provision applications. One of the key benefits between the VMware tool and Quality Center that our add-in addresses is coordination between the testing environment and the actual testing processes," Farris says.

"This add-in gives you the ability to deploy a virtual testing environment and the ability to run unattended automated tasks in off-hours," Farris adds.

The starting price for Lab Manager 2.5 is $15,000, in addition to the necessary Virtual Infrastructure 3 licenses, which cost $1,000 per dual-core server.

VMware, Palo Alto, Calif., is offering a $35,000 bundle that comes with Lab Manager, five two-way Virtual Infrastructure 3 licenses and five two-way Lab Manager agent licenses, and 10 copies of VMware Workstation.

Meanwhile, VMware joined other key vendors on the SPEC benchmarking project to get answers to key questions about how to best run a virtualized environment, says Andrea Eubanks, senior director of enterprise and technical marketing at the virtualization software vendor.

"For example, our partners need to know: 'What's the best practice for the number of machines I can run on a virtual platform?' We've been answering this for years," Eubanks says.

VMware collaborated on the project with a wide range of vendors, including Advanced Micro Devices, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and SWsoft.

The collaboration was undertaken in a working group formed last October by SPEC.

Of the nine milestones to reach in the organization's rigorous benchmarking process, the working group recently passed the first, the investigatory phase, according to Eubanks.

But with the process still in its first stages, friction between the participating vendors is already evident.

While open-source operating systems can be readily packaged as virtual appliances, the same can't be said for Windows due to licensing restrictions, Eubanks said.

"But we expect users to pressure vendors with restrictive licensing schemes to open their licenses to allow this," she says.

Asked if she was specifically referring to Microsoft, Eubanks said, "Yes. That's who I'm referring to."