SMEs Spend More Than 50% of the World's IT Budget

“Over half of the world's IT budget is spent by SMEs”, said VMware CEO Paul Maritz in his keynote at the company's mega annual conference, VMworld 2011 last month. That's not something to be taken lightly, and clearly. VMware has outlined their products and technologies to cater specifically to this segment. VMware has two key product lines in its portfolio that are targeted at SMEs-vSphere Essentials and VMware Go.

Data Center in a Box with

vSphere Essentials & Virtual Storage

Appliance

The vSphere Essentials range of products aim to create a data center in a box. The product takes 2-4 servers, and puts all the software on them to convert them into a fully reliable, redundant, and fault tolerant system. An essential element to make this happen is a common SAN-like storage in the system. “Many of the advanced features that provide the resiliency require a common storage between the compute elements”, said Maritz. So if you're doing vMotion, high-availability, fault-tolerance, etc, you must have a SAN in the picture. Since SAN requires significant investment, most SMEs tend to back off from it. To make life easy, the company introduced a new Virtual Storage Appliance at VMWorld.

The software takes three standard servers, and uses their DAS (direct attached storage) to convert them into a virtual SAN. According to VMware, the software is dead simple to use.

According to Raghu Raghuram, Senior VP and GM, Cloud Infrastructure and Management at VMware, the vSphere product line was introduced two years ago. However, one key challenge that SMEs still faced was that they didn't have inhouse expertise for running their own network storage. Due to which, VMware introduced the Virtual Storage Appliance, or VSA this year. The product takes local storage that's present in each of the servers and networks them together to make it look like a network storage. Most important aspect of this product is that it's completely integrated into the virtualization platform, said Raghu. From a management perspective, you don't have to understand how to manage storage. If you can setup a server, then you know how to setup, servers, virtualization, storage all put together. “I'm very bullish on the prospects of that product, and we'll definitely introduce it in India. We have a small, but growing collection of savvy partners, and I'm sure they'll be very excited to see this”, said Raghu.

Performance bottlenecks in VSA?

Considering that VSA uses local DAS to build a virtual SAN, are there likely to be performance bottlenecks? “Yes, if you don't build it well, said Raghu”. The product is explicitly meant for 50 virtual machines or less. Moreover, VMware is also certifying common apps that people are likely to put on this, like small to medium databases, MS Exchange, SharePoint, all those usual apps that people have. This is done so that the company can provide prescriptive guidance on how to deploy them quickly and easily. “We feel this should avoid some of the performance problems”, he added.

Upgrade path to VSA

Considering that VSA is meant to handle 50 VMs or less, what happens as the number of VMs grows beyond that? To this, Raghu responded that the vSphere product will see this as one storage layer, but you can always add external storage layers, and start putting new VMs onto that. We've got a tech called vMotion that will allow you to migrate VMs from one storage array to another in a non-disruptive fashion, without having to stop the application. You can put your NAS or SAN box in and as the VM disks grow, you can locate the disks onto the network storage, and as existing VM disks grow, and you're short on capacity, you can use Storage vMotion to move it off. It's a very compelling and powerful solution that will lead to an increase in adoption of virtualization and lead to people getting more comfortable with network storage.

Managed ESXi Services with VMware Go

VMware has a free hypervisor product called ESXi server, and according to Paul Maritz, about 400,000 people download it every year to add virtualization capabilities in their data center. The VMware Go product line is actually a SaaS based service aimed at adding more value to ESXi. “We decided to find a way of adding value to what those people want to achieve”, said Maritz. The service VMware Go (free and a paid, Pro version) is a SaaS service that offers assistance to people for this.

The VMware Go service provides everything from a guide to the installation and configuration of VMware vSphere Hypervisor to software license management for compliance, and even asset and patch management services. The service helps SMEs create virtual machines with a P2V (physical to virtual) tool from physical servers, and even manage vSphere Hypervisor hosts and virtual machines for basic performance and resource utilization. Plus of course, it scans physical and virtual machines for missing patches for Microsoft OS, and the list of software titles in all the physical and virtual machines.

Just because there are two products meant for Indian SMEs, it doesn't mean that other VMware products are out of bound for Indian SMEs. According to VMware's CTO, Steve Herrod, these are only two examples, and they're meant to help SMEs adopt vSphere, due to their simplicity. Even if you don't have IT staff, these products can be implemented by SMEs because they're so easy to use. Apart from these two, there are other products like VMware View for desktop virtualization, which according to Herrod, is cheaper than buying physical hardware, and managing traditional desktops. There's a set of DR and BCP solutions introduced by VMware as well, which make the technology more accessible to SMEs.

The author was hosted by VMware in Las Vegas