Virtualization Without The VMware created the virtualization business, and emerged as a formidable rival. But now those giants are scrambling to confront challengers bringing fresh technologies and lower costs to a changing virtualization landscape.

EDITOR’S NOTE THE CHALLENGE WITH CONTAINERS, AN EARLY ADOPTER TO VMWARE AND MICROSOFT TRIES SEEKS CONTAINER MICROSOFT MULTIPLE FLAVORS SIMPLICITY EDITOR’S NOTE Microsoft, VMware Look over Their Shoulders

Unchallenged for so long, it’s under- writes about some of the steps Microsoft is HOME standable that virtualization’s biggest players taking on the container front, notably (but not EDITOR’S NOTE haven’t been on alert for technologies that solely) regarding the inclusion of container could spoil their fun. But here are VMware and features in Windows Server 2016. Also in THE CHALLENGE TO VMWARE AND Microsoft, reacting and regrouping in the face this guide is the story of how one California MICROSOFT of what could be a serious threat to their virtu- media company is using an emerging container

WITH CONTAINERS, alization dominance. technology from Rackspace to deliver content MICROSOFT TRIES Container platforms from CoreOS, Kuber- quickly and without complicated overhead. MULTIPLE FLAVORS netes and Cloud Foundry offer viable virtu- And if containers prove to be a less costly AN EARLY ADOPTER alization alternatives, and containers way to virtualize workloads, businesses will be SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY have attained super-hype status in the world compelled to seriously consider if those hyper- of IT. While VMware and Microsoft at first visors are worth the expense. did little to respond to the container challenge, It’s unclear whether containers will be adop- they are shrugging off that complacency in ted on a major scale, but VMware and Microsoft noteworthy ways. In fact, both are developing certainly view them as enough of a force that serious container strategies. ignoring them is no longer prudent. n This three-part guide examines those shifts, with TechTarget’s Ed Scannell looking specifi- Phil Sweeney cally at what VMware and Microsoft are doing Senior Managing Editor to close the gaps in their virtualization portfo- Center and Virtualization Group, lios. Windows expert Brien Posey, meanwhile, TechTarget

2 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR THE CHALLENGE The Challenge to VMware and Microsoft

VMware long ago established itself as the past glories and thinking the old days would HOME preeminent provider of server virtualization, last forever. At some point they have to get EDITOR’S NOTE reinventing the technology IBM first intro- out of the chair and show they can still run.” duced in the 1960s, and giving the technology These younger dogs that VMware needs THE CHALLENGE TO VMWARE AND new relevance in corporate data centers. For to chase typically have strategies that have MICROSOFT that, the company reaped rich rewards and at their core containers and bare-metal

WITH CONTAINERS, helped reshape the direction of corporate com- servers used in various combinations with MICROSOFT TRIES puting over the past decade. hybrid clouds. Many are born in the cloud MULTIPLE FLAVORS But in the past couple of years, newer, or on the Web, which means they don’t come AN EARLY ADOPTER more captivating—and certainly less expen- with the installation and support headaches SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY sive—alternatives have come onto the scene. that typically arise when dealing with a range As these recent arrivals push their way into of legacy systems. And there’s this: They cost the spotlight, they are threatening to shove significantly less. VMware into the shadows. Compounding “It seems VMware can’t push itself away the problem has been VMware’s reluctance from this love affair with premium pricing for to compete on price and its slow response to many of its core products,” said one IT profes- these emerging technologies. sional with a large manufacturing company in As one IT veteran who has seen a few indus- St. Paul, Minn. “I hope with the arrival of their try giants lose their once iron grip on a major newer technologies, like an NSX or the open technology puts it: “They (VMware) look like source things, they will become a bit more aging bulldogs sitting around talking about realistic.”

3 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR THE CHALLENGE USERS ARE A DRIVING FORCE pushing containers. As expected, Microsoft Until recently, top-tier vendors, including is tying containers to its flagship Windows VMware, were reluctant to put together serious Server platform, which bundles its Hyper-V container strategies because the widespread virtualization software. In the upcoming Win- adoption of such technologies would threaten dows Server 2016, the company has promised their core products—not to mention their rev- Windows Server containers and Hyper-V con- HOME enue streams. tainer technologies. EDITOR’S NOTE But given the growing user interest, most Microsoft also released its Azure Contai- legacy vendors have delivered at least their ner Service, designed to let larger IT shops THE CHALLENGE TO VMWARE AND first container products. It remains to be deploy and set up Apache Mesos to cluster MICROSOFT seen, though, whether these technologies can and schedule Docker applications across

WITH CONTAINERS, smoothly integrate with and meet the techni- multiple virtual hosts. In addition, this ser- MICROSOFT TRIES cal requirements of legacy systems and, at the vice makes it possible to accommodate Linux MULTIPLE FLAVORS same time, compete with some of the born- containers. AN EARLY ADOPTER on-the-Web alternatives. Some analysts applaud Microsoft’s response SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY VMware, long criticized for being uncom- to the raft of new competitors, while noting promisingly proprietary in its approach to that the tech giant’s latest offerings are only a virtualization software, surprisingly unveiled start. two open source offerings in 2015. Project “Microsoft seems to be playing catch-up with Lightwave focuses on identity and access their strategy around Hyper-V,” said Andrew management; Project Photon looks at man- Smith, a software analyst with Technology aging containers and VMs on a single plat- Business Research. “[It] may need to rational- form. VMware hopes each offering will help ize the messaging around Hyper-V containers nudge its user base to develop cloud-native vs. Windows containers, because [it is] lagging applications. behind the Linux ecosystem in adopting next- Microsoft, too, has been more active in generation containers,” he said.

4 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR THE CHALLENGE MICROSOFT AND VMWARE STRIKE BACK The Open Container Project (OCP), in Wool- Once they can see through the fog of hype lacott’s view, should go a long way toward surrounding containers, IT professionals can driving the industry to one or two container better determine the ideal mix of workloads deployment methodologies that will func- and where and how those workloads should tionally merge several of these competing be hosted or deployed. Smith said he believes approaches. HOME vendors such as Microsoft and VMware will OCP so far has signed on both allies and EDITOR’S NOTE then be better able to compete with the newer, enemies alike, including Google, EMC, Amazon less expensive packaged offerings. Web Services, HP, IBM, Microsoft, THE CHALLENGE TO VMWARE AND Still, other analysts question if these and VMware. MICROSOFT attempts by Microsoft and VMware will be

WITH CONTAINERS, enough. MICROSOFT TRIES “Mature vendors’ message for these products THE BARE METAL, WORKSPACES OPTIONS MULTIPLE FLAVORS highlights the built-in, enterprise-grade secu- Meanwhile, RackSpace has unwrapped Carina, AN EARLY ADOPTER rity, but also positions them as alternatives to a container as a service designed to make SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY offerings from native cloud competitors,” said deployment easier. IT shops can access Docker Geoff Woollacott, an analyst with Technol- Swarm clusters using native Docker to ogy Business Research. “But are they secure create container applications. The service is enough and [do they] balance the competing hosted on bare-metal servers, a market Rack- requirements of end-user flexibility, IT secu- space jumped into in 2014 with its OnMetal rity and stability? The questions still remain.” Cloud Servers. There are several major core container plat- One reason to believe bare-metal comput- form alternatives to VMware, including Docker, ing—yet another alternative to VMware’s CoreOS, and Cloud Foundry. traditional approach to virtualization—can VMware’s Project Photon will be shipped with carve out a profitable niche is corporate users’ the Pivotal Cloud Foundry. growing emphasis on collecting and analyzing

5 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR THE CHALLENGE mountains of big data. And with the blos- download customized desktops from any soming popularity of the of Things HTML-enabled device. Workspaces are being pouring data through every crack and crevice offered by Google and , of large corporate accounts, the trend won’t be among others. slowing anytime soon. “It’s a very simple solution, but there are some downsides like limitations on the kinds HOME HTML Workspaces, which of software you can run,” said Steve Brasen, EDITOR’S NOTE allow users to log onto a Web research director with Enterprise Manage- ment Associates. “You are running on HTML, THE CHALLENGE space and download customized TO VMWARE AND so anything that is graphics-intensive is going MICROSOFT desktops, are being offered by to be a problem. But for basic use, it is a solid Google, AWS and others. WITH CONTAINERS, solution,” he said. MICROSOFT TRIES Much of the growth for workspaces is driven MULTIPLE FLAVORS “The speed you need for analytic queries by medium-sized companies that do not have AN EARLY ADOPTER lends itself to fast RISC or CICS processors, so the financial and support resources required to SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY you want to strip out the overhead that bogs build and manage a full down the CPU through the software extraction environment. “This is why (midsize) compa- layer. So using bare metal to get a faster analyt- nies go with outside managed services to bring ics engine is a good use case,” TBR’s Smith said. in those capabilities,” Brasen said. “Research Another alternative on the rise is HTML the last year or so has shown a broad increase Workspaces. While not considered desktop in [desktop as a service] as well as cloud- virtualization, the technology essentially hosted desktop virtualization,” he said. allows users to log onto a Web space and —Ed Scannell

6 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR MICROSOFT’S MULTIPLE FLAVORS With Containers, Microsoft Tries Multiple Flavors

Containers are one of the most signifi- applications consume only a small fraction of HOME cant new features in Windows Server 2016. the resources that a modern server can deliver. EDITOR’S NOTE They are also among the most confusing, for Server virtualization was introduced to make two reasons. First, although containers have better use of the hardware by allowing multiple THE CHALLENGE TO VMWARE AND existed in the open-source world for quite MICROSOFT some time, they are a new concept for Win- In Windows Server 2016, Micro- WITH CONTAINERS, dows. Second, Microsoft is simultaneously soft is simultaneously introducing MICROSOFT TRIES introducing two different types of contain- MULTIPLE FLAVORS two distinct types of containers: ers: Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V AN EARLY ADOPTER Containers. Windows Server Containers and SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY To understand how containers work, you Hyper-V Containers. need a basic understanding of server virtual- ization. Containers are not the same thing as workloads to run simultaneously within VMs. VMs, but they are a form of virtualization. These VMs acted as isolation boundaries, with each VM having its own dedicated , virtual hard disk, memory allocation, HARDWARE’S POWERS AND LIMITS and so on. At one time, server hardware was relatively Over time, the pendulum began to swing modest in its capabilities. Workloads needed in the other direction. Whereas VMs were dedicated hardware to run. Over time, server originally created to improve hardware hardware became far more powerful; many utilization, users began spinning up so many

7 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR MICROSOFT’S MULTIPLE FLAVORS VMs that the hardware once again became other VMs because the virtual server acts as an the limiting factor. A physical server can only isolation boundary. host so many workloads before resources run The problem with VMs is they are larger out. than they really need to be. Think of an appli- As server virtualization matured, hypervisor cation server, for example. That application vendors looked for ways to increase the num- server contains the application and a dedicated HOME ber of VMs that a physical server could accom- operating system. This operating system con- EDITOR’S NOTE modate. These vendors introduced features sumes storage space, memory, CPU cycles and such as thinly provisioned virtual hard disks other hardware resources. While this might not THE CHALLENGE TO VMWARE AND and memory overcommitment. Containers are be an issue for hosts with a small number of MICROSOFT similar to these types of features because they VMs, imagine if a host had to run a large num-

WITH CONTAINERS, can help a server to accommodate additional ber of VMs and all of those VMs were running MICROSOFT TRIES workloads. the same operating system. MULTIPLE FLAVORS Containers seek to solve this size issue by AN EARLY ADOPTER using a single operating system instance that SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY CONTAINERS TRIM VIRTUALIZATION BULK all of the containers share. A container is simi- This raises the question of how virtual serv- lar to a virtualized application in that it stores ers and containers differ from one another. A the application’s binaries and configuration virtual server is designed to be self-contained, files. It differs in that it stores only operating having its own operating system, applications system components the application modifies, and hardware resources. If a problem occurs such as registry entries or application specific inside of a VM, that problem would not affect drivers.

A container keeps the application’s binaries and configuration files and stores only the OS components the application modifies.

8 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR MICROSOFT’S MULTIPLE FLAVORS CONTAINER CHOICES operating system binaries. Why is Microsoft introducing Windows Server The only real difference between a Hyper-V Containers and Hyper-V Containers? There are Container and a Hyper-V VM is that Hyper-V a number of different answers to this question, Containers can be managed by Docker, while but most come down to trust. Hyper-V VMs cannot. When Windows Server Containers are used, Containers are a mechanism for impro- HOME the containers leverage the host operating ving efficiency through the sharing of oper- EDITOR’S NOTE system. This might be OK for running trusted ating system binaries. Not only does this applications, but it would not be desirable for approach improve host capacity, it also makes THE CHALLENGE TO VMWARE AND running an untrusted application. Hyper-V patch management easier because there MICROSOFT Containers provide an extra isolation boundary are fewer operating systems to patch.

WITH CONTAINERS, where each container has its own copy of the —Brien Posey MICROSOFT TRIES MULTIPLE FLAVORS

AN EARLY ADOPTER SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY

9 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR CONTAINER SIMPLICITY An Early Adopter Seeks Container Simplicity

Rackspace is the latest to join the con- baked into the service, he added. HOME tainer-as-a-service market, rolling out a prod- “I would like to enable our authors and our EDITOR’S NOTE uct to simplify and speed deployments. talent to be able to deliver the sort of interac- Carina by Rackspace is a container service tive learning products [we produce] easily and THE CHALLENGE TO VMWARE AND made available in 2015 in beta for free on the quickly,” Odewahn said. “I don’t want to main- MICROSOFT Rackspace Public Cloud. It allows users to tain a bunch of infrastructure to do that or use

WITH CONTAINERS, provision Docker Swarm clusters with native something that requires a lot of expertise to MICROSOFT TRIES Docker APIs and create and deploy contain- get it running.” MULTIPLE FLAVORS erized applications. Rackspace manages the Businesses increasingly look to cloud service AN EARLY ADOPTER underlying infrastructure and offers the ser- providers to run test and development envi- SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY vice on bare metal. ronments, so being able to quickly stand up O’Reilly Media was an early adopter of instances has a number of benefits to help get Carina. The tech-education publishing and resources more quickly and save money, said conference-hosting company wanted to use Colm Keegan, a senior analyst with Enterprise containers for its authors. Strategy Group. O’Reilly looked at other container services, Containers have become a key part of that but the biggest draw to Carina was the sim- with developers who want to rapidly push out plicity of getting started, said Andrew Ode- applications. Still, there are concerns from an wahn, the California company’s CTO. The use operational standpoint about management, of the Docker API helps, as does the fact that security and isolation, Keegan said. The Rack- a lot of the and other features are space container-as-a-service offering attempts

10 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR CONTAINER SIMPLICITY to answer some of those issues by using some Berkholz, research director at 451 Research. of the existing tools already being used to “This keeps the barrier to entry low for new manage containers and by reducing the com- users, which is quite important to getting plexity around managing containers. developer traction,” Berkholz said. Rackspace’s use of bare metal is also inter- esting, Keegan said, as it reduces some of the HOME Rackspace says using bare metal through Carina allows overhead from a virtual wrapper that slows EDITOR’S NOTE down the speed to deploy and limits the num- users to create and deploy a ber of containers that can be run on a server. THE CHALLENGE cluster of containerized apps TO VMWARE AND Rackspace says using bare metal through MICROSOFT more than six times faster. Carina gives users the ability to create and

WITH CONTAINERS, deploy a cluster of containerized applica- MICROSOFT TRIES “Rackspace as a service provider is kind of tions more than six times faster than doing it MULTIPLE FLAVORS enabling this other area that is becoming a big- themselves. AN EARLY ADOPTER ger cloud use case, which is test and dev, while Running on bare metal isn’t new to contain- SEEKS CONTAINER SIMPLICITY also providing for the ability to use containers ers. A number of cloud providers offer bare- to build and launch apps quickly,” Keegan said. metal servers, including Joyent, CenturyLink, The strategy around Carina goes back to Internap and SoftLayer, but the use of bare Rackspace’s “fanatical support” philosophy by metal specifically in container-as-a-service putting the focus on the upstream open source offerings appears to be more limited. project at the product level rather than dif- Rackspace intends to eventually incorporate ferentiating on features or APIs, said Donnie a paid version of Carina. —Trevor Jones

11 VIRTUALIZATION WITHOUT THE HYPERVISOR ABOUT THE AUTHORS TREVOR JONES is a news writer for TechTarget’s and Virtualization Group. You can reach him at [email protected].

BRIEN POSEY is a seven-time Microsoft MVP with two decades of IT experience. He has published thousands of Virtualization Without the Hypervisor HOME articles and has written or contributed to dozens of IT is a SearchServerVirtualization.com e-publication. books. EDITOR’S NOTE Margie Semilof | Editorial Director

Phil Sweeney | Senior Managing Editor THE CHALLENGE ED SCANNELL is a senior executive editor in TechTarget’s TO VMWARE AND MICROSOFT Data Center and Virtualization Group, responsible for Patrick Hammond | Associate Features Editor overseeing the day-to-day operation of several Tech- WITH CONTAINERS, Target sites. He has decades of experience reporting on Linda Koury | Director of Online Design MICROSOFT TRIES MULTIPLE FLAVORS enterprise technology for TechTarget, Computerworld Neva Maniscalco | Graphic Designer and Infoworld. AN EARLY ADOPTER Rebecca Kitchens | Publisher SEEKS CONTAINER [email protected] SIMPLICITY TechTarget 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com

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