VMTN Blog

IBM's Massimo Re Ferre' with another long thought-piece on the philosophical differences between traditional custering (application- and OS-dependent, complicated) with approaches like VI3's High Availability (HA) (treats workload as a virtual appliance, simpler). Massimo works directly with customers, so although he recognizes that paradigms are changing, he looks at the strength and weaknesses of both approaches, and alludes some of the organizational and operational changes you'll have to make to get there.

Link: IT 2.0 Main Blog : VMware HA Vs Microsoft Cluster Server: we are at the inflection point.

If you stop for a minute and think about what it is happening in this x86 virtualization industry, you'll notice that many infrastructure services that were typically loaded within the standard Windows OS are now being provided at the virtual infrastructure layer. An easy example would be network interface fault tolerance: nowadays in virtual environments you typically configure a virtual switch at the hypervisor level, comprised of a bond of two or more Ethernet adapters and you associate virtual machines to the switch with a single virtual network connection. What you have done in this case is that you have basically delegated the virtual infrastructure of dealing with Ethernet connectivity problems. This is a very basic example and there are many others like this such as storage configuration/ redundancy/ connectivity.  ...

We are clearly at an inflection point now where many customers that used to do standard cluster deployments on physical servers (which was the only option to provide high availability) are now arguing how to do that. They now have the choice to either continue to do so in virtual servers as opposed to physical servers (thus applying the same rules, practices and with little disruption as far their IT organization policies are concerned) or turning to a brand new strategy to provide the same (or similar) high availability scenarios (at the cost of heavily changing the established rules and standards). The reason I am saying we are at an inflection point is because I really believe that the second scenario is the future of x86 application deployments, but obviously as we stand today there are things that you cannot technically do or achieve with it. Plus, there is a cultural problem from moving from an established scenario to the other.