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Rumor: Microsoft Office Virtualization Edition

April 17, 2009 4 Comments

I heard an interesting rumor this week that Microsoft is planning on updating their licensing model in the near future for Microsoft Office to introduce a virtualization version. The way it was described to me is that if you want to migrate your physical desktops to virtual desktops and run Microsoft Office on them, you will need to purchase a special Office Virtualized Edition.

What I haven’t heard is if this will be an additional license fee for Office or not (the way it was described to me made it sound like it was an additional cost to upgrade your current office to run it on a virtualized desktop).

(Note: I’ve pinged numerous contacts familiar with Microsoft licensing and no one else has heard this…)

Since I am in discussions with a number of my clients about desktop virtualization, I’ve gotten some exposure to the ins and outs of Microsoft licensing. I know that many large enterprises have been pushing Microsoft for a per user licensing model for software applications, and this could very well be just that. Or is this a sign that Microsoft is concerned that virtual desktops could cut into their profit margins and they are taking a proactive stance to prevent that?

After all, if I have 6000 call center workers spread out around the world in three different time zones and they all need to have MS office on their desktop, today I have to pay Microsoft for 6000 Office licenses. With virtual desktops I can run 2000 virtual desktops in a data center that all my call center workers access and only have to pay for 2000 Microsoft Office licenses (as one center shuts down another center spins up and re-uses the same virtual desktop).

Microsoft isn’t going to sit by and lose all that revenue. So hearing about this doesn’t surprise me. It also won’t surprise me if Microsoft ends up charging more for the Virtualized Edition. Which leads one to wonder if this is truely a new licensing version or just a virtualization penalty? Time will tell…

Twitter & Derivative Markets Commonality

April 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

While catching up on some email today, I came across an confluence in my inbox. First, I catch the following Computerworld headline in a technology industry email newsletter:

As rumors swirl, Twitter says no rush for business model

A few email later, I run across a humor email (that I’m sure everyone has seen by now) that discusses derivative market explained for laymen. It starts off:

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers – most of whom are unemployed alcoholics – to drink now but pay later.

My first raction to Heidi’s business plan is ‘how acinine, she’ll never see any money by loaning drinks to alcholics.’ By now we all know the rest of the story about the derivative markets, banks kept giving Heidi loans based on her debt assets only to never see their money come back.

And now we switch over to the alcholic users of the web 2.0, where everyone can get drunk for free off of their favorite services. So, will Twitter’s VCs and Investors ever see their investement dollars turn into the lucrative cash flow that Heidi’s bankers thought they had? Or will Twitter end up with some risk manager calling in the marker and cause the fall of the micro-blogging derivative markets?

Guess Twitter needs to determine which definition of business they want applied to them:

3. a person, partnership, or corporation engaged in commerce, manufacturing, or a service; profit-seeking enterprise or concern.

or will they keep focused on features and building more mass market appeal adding more noise to the signal until they reach

11. excrement: used as a euphemism.

Round and round we go…last call, drink up!

vCenter Server as a Tier 1 App

April 13, 2009 5 Comments

As virtualization becomes more and more pervasive across the data center, many of my customers are now considering their vCenter Server as a tier 1 application. This means more focus is being places on maintaining the availability of vCenter Server. To quote Gene Kranz:

“Failure is not an option.”

vCenter Server is central to the following aspects of a virtualized data center:

provides DRS & DPM monitoring and host load management
enables vMotion (central to both DRS and DPM)
centralized management portal for all VMs and ESX server running in a cluster (ESX and VMs still run without vCenter, but management become much more cumbersome)
feeding data from VMs and ESX to other IT management platforms
hosts SRM plugin for VM business continuity between data centers
provisions desktops for View (desktop virtualization)

There are a number of different strategies that can be taken to provide availability of the vCenter Server, these typically fall into one of two categories: a cold standby server or a warm standby server. Since the time needed to manually bring up a cold standby server for a large vSphere deployment can easily reach into the hours, most large organization tend toward a warm standby scenario and leverage some software automation to trigger the fail over. There are many options here that fall into the general categories of clustering or host replication. These tend to be complex and not always application specific.

To fill this gap and provide the monitoring and fail over needs of running vCenter Server as a teir 1 application, VMware recently released vCenter Server Heartbeat, which provides monitoring and automated fail over of both the vCenter Server and (optionally) the vCenter database.

Key aspects of Center Server Heartbeat:

Monitors application (vCenter Server and optionally vCenter Database), network, and OS
- underlying technology licensed from NeverFail for vCenter Server and SQL Server awareness and fail over
Supports VM or Physical deployments of vCenter Server
Uses replication engine to replicate data and transactions to standby server
fail over of vCenter and Database across wan or LAN
Protects from Split Brain scenario if a network outage were to occur
Fail over of IP address so all hosts/VMs continue to function with vCenter normally
Easy to configure, auto cloning of vCenter Server VMs (if deployed virtually) to create stand by server

My recommended approach to providing Tier 1 availability of the vCenter server

Ideally: run your vCenter server as a VM and utizliae vCenter Server Heartbeat to monitor and fail over vCenter. All accomplished with the minimal amount of configuration due to vCenter Server Heartbeat’s VM cloning capabilities.
Minimally: run vCenter server as a VM and configure a HA pair for that VM. vCenter HA operates independantly of vCenter Server and will function even when the vCenter serer fails. Becuase it is designed to provide general HA for a wide variety of situations, it is not application aware like vCenter Server Heartbeat. Also, many architects don’t prefer this solution becuase the fail over is being provided by the tool that you are trying to protect. But, it is better than no fail over solution for vCenter Server.