Virtualization news for the channel community and you !

Following our post on December 19th last year on virtualizing XenApp on XenServer, VMware and Citrix are at it again. VMware recently posted an article on the performance of XenApp on ESX and XenApp on XenServer.

It may not be a suprise that the VMware findings were boldly in favor of ESX and not in favor XenServer. It would be one step to far in this world that vendors confirm that their product might not be a good a fit to virtualize a specific application. Following the VMware post, Simon Crobsy (CTO Citrix) took his pen and opened the virtualizing-olympics with the following statement and challenge:

So I’ve decided to issue an open challenge to VMware CTO Stephen Herrod: Steve, it’s time to rein in the monkeys behind the keyboard, end VMware’s indefensible EULA restrictions and allow independent performance comparisons of your products with others, by third parties with a vested interest in accuracy and independence.  

Both posts resulted in a flood of responses of the virtualization-community, but there are some general correct remarks in all these responses from the community:

• Why virtualizing XenApp? It obviously performs better natively (even proven by the VMware tests)
• Benchmarking should be done by independent companies/organization like http://www.virtualrealitycheck.net (2 experience system engineers working with Citrix and VMware)
• Selecting a virtualization platform for your XenApp, if you decide to do so it is not only abou performance, decissions will aslo be influenced by investement in the virtualization layer, automation, management, …

One thing however keeps me wondering … why virtualizing everything? Todays server come (in most cases) with 2x 4 cores, offering 8 cores which enables you to provide XenApp to more than a decent number of users. When adding virtualization to the stack for sure you will lose some performance (wether it is hyper-v, xenserver or esx).

I strongly believe that for those users that haven chosen to work with XenApp as a strategy a minimum number of XenApp servers should be physically, use a virtualized XenApp as escape-mode when something goes wrong. Furthermore keep in mind that when it comes to automation you might require an automatic launch system to rollout new servers in second.

Perhaps both CTOs need to read a report released by Aberdeen today on the advantages of virtualization and what about business critical applications, a quote from a researcher: (full report)

“Even though organizations could experience significant cost savings from conducting virtualization projects, these benefits could diminish if they don’t have capabilities in place for effective management of application performance. One of the key challenges for these organizations is that the effective management of application performance in virtualized environments requires a set of capabilities and functionalities that were not required when these organizations were looking to achieve same performance goals in physical environments. Understanding what these capabilities are is making the difference between success and failure of virtualization projects as measured from business prospective,” said Bojan Simic, research analyst, Aberdeen.