by Greg Shields

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The hypervisor was is (almost) over, and the winner is a draw. Today’s battlefront in this ongoing virtualization vendor saga appears to have shifted from the features in the hypervisor itself to a new focus on the tools that effectively manage it once installed.

Considering this approach, we in IT are only now seeing some very dramatic changes in the third-party virtualization management products that are available. Previously locked into only a single vendor for their add-on products, third-party add-ons these days are beginning to express support for every hypervisor…all at once.

This migration from dogmatic vendor lock-in to a more egalitarian approach can only be a benefit for the IT organization looking to save on costs. To explain my point, think about the different hypervisor platforms available today: One is an exceptionally well-designed solution for your highest-value workloads with a fantastic feature set that matches its fantastic price point. Another arrives as a more general-purpose solution for servers that don’t require Tier-1 capabilities or Tier-1 costs. A third appears to be focusing on desktops, leveraging a long history in application delivery to create exceptional VDI or hosted virtual desktop environments. Lesser players exist, but with substantially more limited market share.

Each of these platforms has its strengths and weaknesses, with some having greater capabilities while others cost less. The same holds true for the individual servers in your data center today. Not every server in your data center is of Tier-1 criticality. Your email servers, yes. Your databases, yes. But your WSUS servers, management servers, clustered DNS or DHCP, or really any other server that isn’t mission critical for your business? These servers don’t need top-level virtualization features, but they do need to be virtualized.

But, What About Efficiencies?

The obvious question you should be asking at this point is, “Well, this sounds great on paper, but what about the efficiencies I get by maintaining a single-vendor approach?” The question is an excellent one because in most situations standardizing on a single platform provides huge efficiencies through its single point of administration.

That’s where the previously mentioned concept of hypervisor egalitarianism comes into play. Today’s third-party vendors have seen the advantages of creating administrative toolsets that support multiple hypervisors at once. Such solutions create what amounts to another “layer of abstraction” over the top of your multiple virtualization platforms. As a result, you get a single toolset that does all the nice things you’re used to seeing in your first-party tools. The difference is that those actions can be accomplished against VMware vSphere environments, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Citrix XenServer.

In a fully-realized multi-hypervisor environment, you might not even have to know which platform your virtual machines are running atop. The management layer handles that work for you.

Think for a minute about the architectures that quickly become affordable and realizable: We already have online P2V and V2V capabilities today. Systems that fall out of Tier-1 requirements can be seamlessly migrated to a no-added-cost Tier-2 hypervisor. Other systems that change state from pre-deployment to ready-for-deployment can be migrated off Tier 2 and onto Tier 1.

Today’s overarching guidance is that almost every workload can be virtualized. Yet not all workloads can be virtualized together on the same host . As a result, some organizations see benefits in virtualizing without consolidation as a goal. In plain English, this means “hosting one virtual server atop one physical server.” As a result, the workload gets all the great benefits of virtualization—better backups, snapshot capabilities, disaster recovery, and so on—by only playing a slight performance overhead.

This configuration only works when it’s cost effective. Thus, no-added-cost hypervisors might provide a better ROI for 1:1 consolidation than those that require cost-per-processor.

So, in short, today’s business climate means that IT professionals have to take a business-oriented approach to technology selection. For some, that means settling on “all of them” as your hypervisor of choice. To manage that heterogeneous infrastructure, look to multi-hypervisor management solutions from Quest ( www.quest.com ), Vizioncore ( www.vizioncore.com ), and even Microsoft with its System Center Virtual Machine Manager ( www.microsoft.com/scvmm ).

About the Author

Greg Shields is an independent author, speaker, and IT consultant, as well as a Partner and Principal Technologist with Concentrated Technology. With 15 years in information technology, Greg has developed extensive experience in systems administration, engineering, and architecture specializing in Microsoft OS, remote application, systems management, and virtualization technologies. He is a Contributing Editor and columnist for TechNet Magazine and Redmond Magazine, and serves as the Series Editor for Realtime Publishers, the world’s leading provider of high-quality content for the IT market. Greg is a highly sought-after and top-ranked speaker for both live and recorded events, and is seen regularly at conferences like TechMentor Events, Microsoft Tech Ed, VMworld, and more. He is a multiple recipient of Microsoft “Most Valuable Professional” award.