The Console

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Product Management and Market Development

As we close out 2007, I wanted to take a few moments to jot down some thoughts on virtual appliances in terms of accomplishments in 2007 and challenges we need to overcome in 2008.

2007 YiR

A virtual appliance as a software distribution and management paradigm is relatively new. VMware first talked about this paradigm in the context of launching the VMware Technology Network in June 2005. Six vendors (BEA, Oracle, RedHat, Novell, IBM and Spike Source) pre-installed and pre-configured their applications in virtual machines for easier demos. We created a website (www.vmtn.net) for customers to easily find and download these virtual machines. That was the modest beginning of virtual appliances and Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

Since then this paradigm has been getting more attention. We ended 2006 with about 300 virtual appliances available through the Virtual Appliance Marketplace (vam.vmware.com). Customers were downloading appliances at the rate of one every minute. ISVs were starting to sell production-ready virtual appliances by mid-2006. Even though many tech-savvy professionals were starting to talk about the benefits, validity and long-term outlook of virtual appliances, the vast majority, including press and analysts, took a wait-and-see approach to this initiative. Virtual appliances received more attention in 2007 and below are some of the significant highlights from this year:

1. Virtual appliances outside the security space became a reality with many tier 1 ISVs building virtual appliances. BEA launched their LiquidVM initiative. Business Objects, IBM, McAfee and others have all joined in with virtual appliance editions of their software stacks.

2. Customers were starting to buy production-ready virtual appliances. I’ve met numerous customers who bought virtual appliances and swear by the simplicity and ease of management they offer. Our marketing team will be posting quite a few success stories shortly.

3. Several leading analysts initiated coverage on virtual appliances. Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Yankee Group and others are actively tracking virtual appliances.

4. JeOS (Just Enough OS, pronounced “juice”) started to get traction within the OS community.

   
   Ubuntu JeOS is already available – kudos to the Canonical team for being the first OS vendor to take on Virtual Appliances. RedHat announced their intention to offer their version. Even though Microsoft hasn’t really participated in the virtual appliance space, their latest OS offers users the ability as part of Server Cores to install only those components that are required for each server installation and if they can get their licensing and pricing right, they could be a huge player in this space as well. I’m sure Novell and other OS vendors will eventually get on the bandwagon as well.

5. Leading vendors including Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource collaborated on Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), which was submitted to DMTF as a standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances.

6. The ecosystem around virtual appliances started growing with many startups either getting in or getting traction. rPath, virtualappliances.net, JumpBox, cohesiveFT stick out in this category.

7. Several vendors mimicked VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace with their own. Parallels introduced their VA Directory. RedHat rolled out RHX.

8. Microsoft joined the party with the VHD Test Drive program (launched in November 2006) to allow ISVs to redistribute Windows in a virtual machine for 30-day evaluations.

Challenges

While the progress in 2007 was tremendous, there are still some challenges that need to be addressed before virtual appliances become the defacto standard for distributing and managing software. The challenges can be broadly categorized into the following sections:

1. Lifecycle Management Tools: Even though many aforementioned startups and existing vendors offer some tools to create virtual appliances, the general feeling is that this area is still in its infancy. Customers frequently ask questions such as: how do I patch a virtual appliance? Can I use my existing patch management infrastructure to patch virtual appliances? Can I use my existing systems management tool to monitor and manage virtual appliances? At the same time, ISVs are now having to support OS patches as well, which they have not traditionally had to deal with. So they are looking for tools to track, test and roll out appropriate OS fixes in a timely manner. There is a bit of chicken-and-egg problem here with some customers not deploying virtual appliances until these issues are resolved while systems management vendors are reluctant to add these capabilities to their product until they see a wide-scale adoption of virtual appliances in their customer base. Better tools will help break the logjam.

2. Processes: More than the lack of tools, the real issue that comes up often times is that the industry is still trying to figure out how to manage virtual appliances. This paradigm completely changes many processes we have learnt and mastered over the years to manage our data centers. Customers are trying to answer some very basic questions such as: who do I call for support? How do I monitor and manage these virtual appliances? Will my existing tools work? If each virtual appliance has its own OS, how the heck do I manage this complexity? There are viable answers to all these questions but paradigm shifts don’t happen overnight. Vendors pushing virtual appliances will need to communicate a lot more to address such concerns.

3. Microsoft Windows Redistribution: Traditionally Linux has been the OS of choice for most hardware appliances. Vendors have not used Windows as much due to price and lack of modularity. On top of that, Microsoft does not allow ISVs to redistribute Windows in a virtual machine for production use, which really puts a damper on shipping Windows-based virtual appliances. For some ISVs this is an insurmountable problem because the cost to port the application to Linux is too much to swallow. As noted above, Microsoft launched their VHD Test Drive program, which allows ISVs to ship Windows-based virtual appliances for evaluation use only. This is definitely a step in the right direction but until they change their licensing policy around redistributing Windows in a virtual machine for production use, most virtual appliances will only be viable for ISVs who support both Windows and Linux. Once licensing and redistribution issues are resolved, Microsoft will need to work on a different pricing model for Windows shipped in virtual appliances. This will be especially interesting because a typical virtual appliance will only use a small part of the OS and this varies across ISVs so pricing it appropriately would be challenging.

Where do virtual appliances go from here? Will they turn the corner in 2008? Will the developments in 2008 be the tipping point?  2008 sure promises to be an exciting year for virtual appliances. Stay tuned and if you haven’t downloaded a virtual appliance, visit vam.vmware.com.

Happy New Year!