VMware to Acquire B-hive

VMware announced today that they are buying B-hive, an Israeli based company that has an application mapping, application performance management, and end user experience management solution for virtualized applications systems. The B-hive product is interesting in that it is delivered as a virtual appliance that sits on a virtual mirror or spanned port on the virtual switch inside of the VMware host. This allows the product to see all of the application level flows between the layers of the applications systems, no matter how they are distributed between guests on one host, or multiple hosts.

This announcement changes the dynamics of the virtualization market in two very important and fundamental ways:

1. It is, at least for the VMware platform, a "game over" for many of the monitoring startups that were focused upon being "the" monitoring vendor for VMware as their business plan. Unless the remaining monitoring vendors have a really strong story as to why an enterprise customer should buy their product in addition to B-Hive, the startup monitoring vendors will now be selling against, and not with the VMware Sales organization. These vendors will now have to focus very hard on whatever their value add is with respect to B-Hive, and turn their attention to the Microsoft and Citrix virtualization platforms. Of course this also means waiting for Microsoft and Citrix to get to an installed base large enough to constitute a market, which certainly has not happened yet.
2. Taking ownership of applications performance is an extremely effective and strategic move on the part of VMware. This move is effective, because it says to customers that VMware understands that customers must be able to measure and ensure acceptable performance of virtualized applications in order to push virtualization beyond the "low hanging fruit" stage that currently exists. This move is strategic, because it says to Microsoft, "It does not matter if you make virtualization free. What matters is who can take virtualization the furthest and the fastest and thereby deliver the customer more ROI and flexibility". So, VMware is shifting the debate from "who has the best product", to "whose product can deliver the enterprise customer more ROI, more quickly". This is an extremely good move on the part of VMware because it will serve to accelerate deployments, and in turn drive more VMware license revenue.

This move on the part of VMware also significantly raises the "parity bar" on Citrix and just as they are respectively entering, or about to enter the market. VMware already has a signifant lead in the tools and products that surround the virtualization platform itself. HA, DRS, VMotion, the application mapping possible with the new release of SMARTS, and now application performance management and end user experience management with B-Hive consitute a significant difference in both manageability and functionality in VMware's favor.

Needless to way, Microsoft and Citrix are unlikely to stand idly by, and let VMware raise the bar in this manner with no responses. Since VMware has transformed the virtualization platform, into a virtualization suite, Microsoft and Citrix must to a significant degree follow suit. This means that remaining vendors that have significant pure play monitoring functionality for virtualized systems (see my Solutions Guide for the list), must now focus much more of their energies upon building a partnership with Microsoft and Citrix, and position themselves as candidates for acqusition. This also means that there is little likelihood of a long term independent market for application performance management and end user experience management for virtualized systems, as this will likely turn into war fought on the basis of who is building out their portfolio most effectively via acquisition.

Bernd Harzog
CEO
APM Experts
bernd.harzog@apmexperts.com

The 5 "D's" of Managing Virtualized Environments

I suppose that it should not be surprising, given the speed with which VMware has made major inroads into enterprise IT infrastructures, but it is astonishing nonetheless that the tools have just started to arrive. Why is this so hard. Because VMware inserted some new variables into the management of production systems. I refer to these new variables as the five "D's" of Managing Virtualized Systems:

1. Dynamic
2. Dense
3. Difficult to Measure
4. Destructive Politically
5. Disruptive

Let me explain each of these in some more detail.

Dynamic

A traditional systems architecture has one operating system per server, and generally one or one key set of applications for the operating system. Instances of operating systems do not move from one server to another. In a virtualized application system one Guest containing one OS and one key application can move from one physical server to another. The move can occur automatically based upon a resource allocation decision by the VMware Host, or it can be done manually by an administrator.

Moving a Guest creates two problems the first problem is that an application management product now needs to re-discover the relationship between the layers of an N-tier application system This means the application management products that rely upon fixed definitions of the hardware that their agents run upon are too brittle to be used to manage virtualized applications. The second problem is that if a application management product calculated baselines based upon its previous hardware environment, it now needs to be smart enough to know that it has been relocated, to to update those baselines based upon what is the normal behavior of the Guest in its new environment.

Dense

The applications that used to run on 10 servers now run together on one. While the issue of lack of compatibility between applications is addressed by the virtualization of the entire OS upon which the application is running, a new issue of how those applications and operating systems now have to share resources get created. Virtualized systems put unparalleled load onto the CPU, memory and I/O subsystems in a server, and since so many things are going on in each server, things like disk I/O over the SAN are now concentrated into fewer and more heavily utilized links.


Difficult to Measure

The traditional way of measuring applications performance - through their utilization of resources is broken. Any metric that is collected within a Guest OS that relies upon the system clock in the Guest is randomly wrong by the degree to which the Guest OS has been scheduled out of execution cycles of the CPU's during the measurement interval by the Host OS. CPU utilization, page faults per second, network I/O rates per second, and disk I/O rates per second are all invalidated by how the clock inside of the Guest OS is rendered meaningless by virtualization. Even the holy grail of applications performance - response time is wrong if it is measured from within the Guest.

Destructive Politically

With traditional servers, business units often purchased the servers for "their" applications. Of course, whenever the slightest performance problem arose, more hardware was thrown at the problem. This lead to massive over investment in capacity, and set the stage for the massive ROI's associated with server consolidation through virtualization.

With virtualized servers, however, the business units no longer "own" the servers. Server resources are a shared pool of capacity owned and managed by IT. So, IT is responsible for buying enough server capacity to meet the needs of all of the business units collectively. It is also responsible for not wasting the money saved through consolidation. This pits IT against the instincts of the business unit which is to buy more servers whenever a user complains about applications response time.

However, since it is really hard for IT to know when the current capacity of a virtualized production system has been exceeded, IT is now in a very tenuous political situation. IT has an incentive not to overbuy, so as to not let the ROI of the virtualization project erode. But IT does not have the tools that create credible data that can be used to say "no" to the business units.

Disruptive

For all of the reasons listed above, virtualization is disruptive to the existing applications and systems management tool vendors and industries. This is the first time that a change in the industry has brought created a new platform, and broken all of the incumbent tools at the same time. When the Internet happened, you could still measure the CPU used by an application on a web server. That might not have been as useful as knowing the response time that the application was delivering to its users, but the number was at least still correct. This is not the case with virtualization. A new platform exists, and the incumbent tools have been made less valuable. This sets the stage for the entry of a new set of nimble and focused vendors to address this opportunity.

Bernd Harzog
CEO
APM Experts
bernd.harzog@apmexperts.com