VMware launched an upgrade to its core software platform on Tuesday with the message that virtualization is ready to run any class of enterprise application, no matter how large.
"Virtualization is the mainframe for the 21st century," said Stephen Herrod, VMware's CTO, at an event to launch the company's new vSphere 4 software, an update to Virtual Infrastructure 3, at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
[ InfoWorld's Eric Knorr believes that VMware's vSphere falls short of the cloud. | Read InfoWorld's full coverage of the VMware vSphere announcement. | Dave Marshall brings you non-stop coverage of virtualization in Virtualization Report. ]
VMware says the software will allow companies to transform their datacenters into a "virtual compute cloud," where applications can be moved fluidly across compute, network, and storage resources to wherever capacity is available. It's due for release by the end of the quarter.
VMware's goal Tuesday was to convince customers that virtualization, widely used for server consolidation and to set up test and development environments, is now reliable and scalable enough to run large databases and other critical applications.
The message was hammered home by a lineup of industry bigwigs that included Michael Dell, Cisco's John Chambers, Intel senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger, and Joe Tucci, chairman of EMC, which owns a stake in VMware.
"We can see from the demonstrations and the testimonials today that there are no applications -- no applications -- that can't be run in a virtualized environment," Tucci said.
At the heart of VMware's claim are new performance capabilities in vSphere. The software can now manage a cluster of computers with up to 32 physical servers, 2,048 processor cores, and 32TB of RAM, according to VMware. Perhaps more importantly for database applications, VMware says it has doubled the maximum I/O operations its software can perform, to more than 200,000 per second.
In a jab at the big systems vendors, VMware assembled a group of servers by the stage, including a Sun Sparc machine, to show how much capacity can now run in a vSphere cluster. A handwritten sign on the Sun machine had the word IBM crossed out and replaced with Oracle, which just beat IBM in a deal to acquire Sun.
VMware CEO Paul Maritz took another jab at IBM, sometimes called a pioneer of virtualization because of its use of the technology in its mainframes.
"Even IBM, which likes to claim to be the inventor of virtualization, didn't fully realize and anticipate what could have been done with this technology," Maritz said. "It's not about individual machines, but about how groups of servers relate to each other."
Beyond the hype and the bluster, some analysts and customers at the event said there is some validity to VMware's claims. Thanks to enhancements in Intel's new Nehalem processors, as well as the improvements in vSphere, virtualized servers can now run much more demanding applications, said Chris Wolf, a senior analyst with Burton Group.
"All companies should be asking, not why should I virtualize this application, but why shouldn't I virtualize it?" he said.
But VMware still doesn't provide all the management capabilities needed to treat a cluster of industry-standard servers as if it were a mainframe or large Unix system, he said.
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