The IT Melting Pot!

The constant battle between the hypervisor and orchestration of  IaaS etc. is of course continuing! But it is really fun I must say that Microsoft is getting more and more mature with it’s offerings in this space, great job!

One of the things that I tend to think most of is the cost, scalability and flexibility of the infrastructure that we build and how we build it, I often see that we tend to do what we’ve done for so many years now. We buy our SAN/NAS storage, we buy our servers but lean towards Blade servers though we think that’s the latest and coolest, and then we try to squeeze that into some sort of POD/FlexPods/UCS or whatever we like to call it to find our optimal “volume of Compute, Network and Storage” that we can scale. But is this scalable like the bigger cloud players like Google, Amazon etc.? Is this 2013 state of the art? I think that we’re just fooling ourselves a bit and build whatever we’ve done for all these years and don’t really provide the business with anything new… but that’s my view… I know what I’d look at and most of you that have read my earlier blog posts know that I love the way of scaling out and doing more like the big players using something like Nutanix and ensure that you choose the right IaaS components as a part of that stack, as well as the orchestration layer (OpenStack, System Center, CloudStack, Cloud Platform or whatever you prefer after you’ve done your homework).

Back to the topic a bit, I’d say that the hypervisor is of no importance anymore, that’s why everyone if giving it away for free or to the open source community! Vendors are after the more IaaS/PaaS orchestration layer and get into that because if they get that business then they have nested their way into your business processes, that’s where ultimately that will deliver the value as IT services in an automated way once you’ve got your business services and processes in place, and then it’s harder to make a change and they will live fat and happy on you for some years to come! 😉

You have to look at what capabilities you’re after (scalability, performance, features like thin provisioning or dedup, live migration of VMs etc.) and see if all available options offer them or not per hypervisor and the whole stack (Compute, Network and Storage). Next thing is of course to see if the particular ones we’ve now targeted requires some sort of licensing… then look at what type of competence the customer/you have internally (can they for instance operate and automate KVM or will you spend all that money to get that working on consultants so that you could have just as well bought Hyper-V and System Center instead?), what operational capabilities does the hypervisor and orchestration deliver, what value does that have for your business, what are the costs, pick one! It’s at this stage where I see more and more now that Hyper-V actually is starting to deliver what most organisations need, and most of the time you’ve already paid for those Hyper-V licenses anyway because you’re in the end a Microsoft shop! So if Hyper-V delivers the capabilities you need and together with System Center has a really good end-to-end offering go with something else (and pay for that as well increasing your TCO)? It’s back to religion and comfort zone most of the times I think, or that you’re afraid of vendor lock-in (but wait, haven’t you already done that if you’re a Microsoft shop, or what are you doing then if you choose EMC/HP/NetApp storage, isn’t that also vendor lock-in on the storage part of the stack?).

Well well.. I’ll stop rabbling.. here is the really good blog post from BradAnderson and the Gartner report on how to choose between hyper-V and vSphere!

If you haven’t seen it yet, a Gartner report from last month* is really worth checking out.

Gartner calls out three key areas (Acquisition costs, Ease of management, and Functionality richness), and I recommend reviewing the entire report in detail.

You can read it here, compliments of Microsoft.

In the report, Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman advises clients what to consider when choosing the best offering for server virtualization, and discusses the evolution of this market.

According to Gartner,

The good news is this market, once dominated by a single vendor with the ability to charge anything it wanted, is now competitive. Take advantage of that.

Continue reading here!

//Richard