One of the big takeaways from VMworld Europe – management tools are needed

One of the big takeaways from my VMworld Europe trip was that VMware is definitely responding to the need for management tools. During the show, I couldn’t escape from the word “management”. VMware announced a number of management products just before the start of the show, and then each of these (Lifecycle Manager, Stage Manager and Site Recovery Manager) applications took center stage during the keynote, the exhibit floor, the break out sessions and the hands-on labs.

Don’t get me wrong here; I applaud them for this management bombardment. I think the application stack and the management of virtualization are of the utmost importance in today’s virtual datacenter. Some of the problems and concerns with managing the virtualization environment have been key deterrents to people fully implementing the technology into their datacenters.

However, at the same time, what we can’t afford is more confusion added into the virtualization mix. Specifically, I’m talking about VMware Lab Manager, Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager. I sat through numerous break-out sessions covering these tools and even attended their hands-on labs in hopes of getting a better understanding of them. Afterward, it was my understanding that these products were all designed to solve different use cases (specifically, VMware Lab Manager and Stage Manager) or handle different situations. And because of that, VMware thinks of them and treats them as separate products.

VMware Lifecycle Manager comes from the technology acquired in the Dunes acquisition. The product allows companies to implement a consistent and automated process for requesting, approving, deploying, updating, and retiring virtual machines.

VMware Lab Manager comes from the technology acquired in the Akimbi acquisition. It addresses the needs of development and QA engineers by providing them self-service provisioning of multi-tier virtual machines.

VMware Stage Manager is an extension of the Akimbi technology. It addresses the needs of the IT and application administrators responsible for rolling new and updated IT services into production. And it enables the streamlined and accelerated transition of complex, multi-tier IT services through the pre-production stages into production.

VMware Lab Manager is the only one of these applications currently available. The others are still in Beta with an expected Q2 release. Once the applications come out and people start to bang away at them, I would assume that some sort of VMware Management suite would then take shape and the applications would get wired together for a more powerful workflow experience.

According to Ravi Gururaj, founder and CTO of VMLogix, all of the customers that VMLogix has spoken with have expressed an interest in seeing a subset of the best features of Lab Manager + Stage Manager + Lifecycle Manager built into a single management framework/tool, and that this is the direction or view of the market that VMLogix is taking long term.

One of VMware’s partners and competitors, Surgient, is also taking a closer look at these new management tools – for obvious reasons.

Erik Josowitz, Surgient Vice President of Marketing, said the real issue is the notion of staging into production. And that to him, this requires 2 things: a real understanding of what is in production and the ability to model a change process on objects that maintain that context.

Josowitz said that VMware fails right now on both counts.

He stated, “VMware continues to build products that expect or require everything to be running in VMware. No customer environment we have ever seen looks like that. It rarely even looks like that for a single application.” Josowitz continued, “VMware’s model assumes that all production apps will ultimately be installed in VMware virtual machines and that’s just not workable. Until they have a software lifecycle management solution that doesn’t presume the endpoint is VMware it just won’t work in most enterprises. Add the strong support and growth we expect to see around Citrix XenServer and MS Hyper-V this year and the picture becomes worse for VMware’s management approach.”

When talking about the change process on objects, Josowitz said, “Stage Manager addresses many of the shortcomings of Lab Manager and gets a bit closer to what Surgient does (by adding support for multiple resource pools and a workflow model) but still doesn’t have any of the active resource management (scheduling, guaranteed reservations) or library management capabilities we provide. Our analysis of Stage Manager is that it’s just Lab Manager 2.0. They also haven’t addressed any of the issues around fencing, which is really what primarily prevents Lab Manager from working in real world scenarios. Fencing can’t span physical hosts, can’t model multi-tier networks, can’t address and manage more than 1 virtual NIC per VM – makes it really hard to even model a basic production MS Exchange configuration!”

Many people have been bringing up the fact that VMware is either acquiring or building out technology that directly competes with its partners – like Surgient and VMLogix.

However, if VMware wants to remain the virtualization leader, it has to keep developing and providing these types of management products as fast as possible. The differentiation between virtualization vendors will come down to add-on applications. And if the hypervisor does end up becoming a commodity as many people claim, then VMware would need to provide these types of applications to its customers in order to continue to post its impressive financial numbers.