www.nickhodge.com

Microsoft is on the cusp of ship­ping a whole forest of new products. Vista, .Net 3.0, Office 2007 and *.live.com stuff than you can poke a branch/stick at. All of which presents Microsoft with some tall chal­lenges. How does a single tree get noticed? How does the world find the sap­lings that are going to be the next Sequoi­aden­dron giganteum? Does the forest work together as a cohes­ive eco-system?

Today, thanks to Microsoft Australia’s, Frank Arrigo, I atten­ded the Blogger’s Brunch. Great of Microsoft to reach out to a sec­tion of the local tech­no­logy blog­ging com­munity. None of the attendees (except Angus Kid­man and Nic) are fam­ous in the blo­go­sphere, but on the inter­nets — noone knows you are an Australian.

Whilst hav­ing been a Microsoft cus­tomer since 1984 (Microsoft Basic 1.0 on a Macin­tosh 128K — and the box is in stor­age some­where), I am a rel­at­ive noob to “mar­ketec­tural” Microsoft. The speak is strangely famil­iar to my ears.

The fol­low­ing are some ran­dom thoughts and un-expressed ques­tions from this morning’s session:

• To the Microsoft PR people. Sorry it par­alleled Microsoft-Groove/Ray Ozzie his­tory with Apple-NeXT/Steve Jobs. To Frank Arrigo. Sorry I stated that the *.live.com people are hav­ing fun being com­pat­ible with all the ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer rather than imple­ment Fire­fox sup­port. Both of these were inten­ded as jokes, not memes.
• Today’s Aus­tralian Fin­an­cial Review’s IT sec­tion has quotes from vari­ous large Aus­tralian fin­an­cial organ­isa­tions stat­ing that they are tak­ing a wait-and-see approach to Win­dows Vista. Some are only now installing Win­dows XP. These organ­isa­tions state they will install Vista in 2–3 years. I find this quite inter­est­ing as it has taken them 4–5 years to install Win­dows XP. Per­son­ally, I am con­cerned if a large fin­an­cial organ­isa­tion is not run­ning a recent, up to date, tested and secure OS on all their desktop com­puters. I’d love to know what fea­tures in upcom­ing products are dir­ect feed­back from Aus­tralian cus­tom­ers. This would show that the soft­ware devel­op­ment pro­cess is a two-way street.
• Share­point should evolve into *.live.com server for the Enter­prise. If Vista has all the hooks, and the connected/disconnected world and new applic­a­tions are going to be mashed (lashed?) together with live stuff, this seems like a logical move. How­ever, large organ­iz­a­tions will be reluct­ant to put all their data into the world’s cloud for all to stumble upon. I am no expert on Share­point and all the pos­i­tion­ing stuff, but it seems there might be a little “ten­sion” (not a bad thing, mind you) between these two environments.*.live.com is gar­ner­ing the mind­share as it is new-ish; many of the APIs and licens­ing mod­els are to be determ­ined. Come to think about it, these are prob­ably the two reas­ons why they are still sep­ar­ate. Rev­enue and developer penetration.
• After hear­ing about the IT pro­fes­sion­als fawned over the cool­ness of Vista infra­struc­ture deploy­ment … I left the ses­sion (both men­tally and phys­ic­ally) ask­ing “what are Microsoft’s cus­tom­ers going to do with all these fine trees?“Customers doing mean­ing­ful stuff with Microsoft’s soft­ware so that they can impress their cus­tom­ers is where it is at. Mar­ket­ing people might call it Unlock­ing the value of the plat­form.
• Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion on the desktop has been one of my “things” for a while, so it’s inter­est­ing to hear that Vir­tu­alPC is to be included in the Enter­prise ver­sion of Vista. Whilst listen­ing to the intric­a­cies of Vista vs XP deploy­ment, my mind was racing think­ing about the future of oper­at­ing systems.So here goes: why is the Enter­prise desktop so fat? Why not have a Singularity-based OS with .Net 3.0 Frame­work as the API. Win32 + other leg­acy apps could be vir­tu­al­ized to the desktop. As the world and work becomes more con­nec­ted, the smart cli­ent at the edge of the net­work will have a dif­fer­ent face.

In sum­mary, I groked that Microsoft groks (sorry, Hein­lein) the world as it exists today. Ensur­ing that no trees are felled in the rush to mar­ket is going to be an inter­est­ing challenge.

An excel­lent art­icle from the New York Times: Weigh­ing a Switch to a Mac. Inter­est­ing, as it goes through the two options: Boot­Camp or Parallels.

You don’t need to leave your Windows-mind behind when switch­ing. Now that I am dis­con­nec­ted from the Adobe-mind, I rarely use Win­dows applic­a­tions. But then again, I’ve not really done much in the last two weeks apart from fill this blog up with stuff!

Mac­World reports from the WWDC and an inter­view with Ben Rudolph of Par­al­lels:

…“What’s more, Par­al­lels Desktop for Mac will see “fast 3D graph­ics support,” pre­sum­ably to help cater to gamers who want to run Win­dows games without hav­ing to reboot their machine”…

I’ve just updated to the latest Par­al­lels beta; it was smooth and you can notice the graph­ics improve­ment. Being able to tweak the vir­tual environment/MacOS X is cool. Not ACPI BIOS yet, so no Vista install. Yet.

Now that Microsoft has left the MacOS X sphere, Par­al­lels seems to be pos­i­tion­ing itself at the con­sumer end of the mar­ket: games and ease of use. And increas­ing its dis­tri­bu­tion was a smart and cal­cu­lated move.

This leaves VMware to the high end. As pre­dicted here, two of the three pre­dic­tions have come true; and accord­ing to a Macin­touch inter­view with Dave Schroeder of VMware, the third is going to need cus­tom­ers to voice their needs to Apple. So it is not off the table, how­ever we have Apple’s mantra/dogma of “MacOS X will never run on non-Apple hard­ware” to surmount.

It is within the realms of pos­sib­lity that Apple could cre­ate a ver­sion of MacOS X Server that had a dis­tinct, non-desktop per­son­al­ity (desktop APIs removed), and checked for either Apple or VMWare “vir­tual hard­ware” — cre­at­ing a stable, enter­prise level Unix. This leaves cus­tom­ers to choose either XServe hard­ware with MacOS X Server, or VMware vir­tual hard­ware with MacOS X Server. The res­ult is a live mar­ket test and ROI of being in the highly com­pet­it­ive and fast mov­ing blade server marketplace.

Leave the desktop MacOS X to run on Apple hard­ware only.

There must be a gaggle Product Man­agers and Finance-types deep inside of Cuper­tino run­ning their pivot tables in Excel to argue both sides of the equa­tion. The sales of the these new XServes in the next 2–3 quar­ters will pre­dict the future of MacOS X Server on a vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion platform.

ars­tech­nica reports that Microsoft is out of the Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion space on the Mac.

Con­sid­er­ing the MacOS X mar­ket­share, espe­cially on the server; there are no suprises here. The battle on the desktop is a flank­ing skir­mish in the big­ger war for the server.

Pre-register your interest for the VMWare Player for MacOS X 10.4. No com­ments on require­ments, etc — but at least we are head­ing in the cor­rect dir­ec­tion. Now Mac users can run those self-contained appli­ances, easily.

Update: 11:25am 8^th August: “Work­ing in the labs…” Srinivas Krish­namurti of VMWare talks about the forth­com­ing MacOS X ver­sion of their vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion soft­ware. Of note is the quote “This product will allow you to cre­ate and run vir­tual machines on OS X” and “vir­tual machines cre­ated with this product are fully com­pat­ible with the latest release of other VMware products”.

Sil­icon Val­ley Sleuth writes a short art­icle on the appear­ance of VMware at WWDC. It’s about more than just the desktop OS.

Here is another pie-in-the-sky, non-desktop scenario:

• Apple releases new ver­sions of both their Xserver and the MacOS X Server.
• Xserve becomes a tested and sup­por­ted plat­form for VMWare Server and more import­antly VMware’s ESX Server. This will per­mit new Intel-based XServes to be installed into Data­cen­ters with their heads held high. VMware endorse­ment is cred Apple needs to go to the next rev­enue level with their servers.
• An imple­ment­a­tion of Leo­pard­ized MacOS X Server will run on non-Apple hard­ware on VMware. This is a counter-punch to the recent Xen/Microsoft/VMware wrangling. Now MacOS X Server can run on a stable and sup­por­ted plat­form (VMware ESX) rather than the mul­ti­tude of hard­ware con­fig­ur­a­tions found in the Intel world.

So, what’s the net-net of this? Apple has VMware sup­por­ted as an applic­a­tion on MacOS X desktop; endorse­ment of their blade server envir­on­ment and more sales of MacOS X Server without the sup­port hassles.

VMware gets unique and in-demand server OS with excel­lent cor­por­ate sup­port. Rather than IS man­agers adopt­ing the Linux/Intel “build it your­self” approach; a sup­por­ted plat­form is important.

It is not so much about the desktop, but the server.

The next few days will be very interesting!

WWDC 2006 is going to be fun:

• Par­al­lels
• VMWare
• Is Microsoft going to show any­thing? Vir­tu­alPC for Intel Mac has been prom­ised … I ima­gine there is a couple of engin­eers some­where locked up for the weekend…

Just over the digital hori­zon, your Apple Mac­Book will boot mul­tiple MacOS X 10.x, Win­dows Vista and Linux/Ubuntu oper­at­ing sys­tems at launch. You don’t see all of their friendly faces, but they are there ready-to-go. Get-info on Fire­fox, and you inform the primary OS which of these oper­at­ing sys­tem envir­on­ments you would like the applic­a­tion to launch into. Need to run Out­look 2007 for your large organ­isa­tion? No stress: its there, behind the scenes as you run­ning Pho­toshop on the MacOS side. If your Win­dows instance crashes as you are test­ing a new applic­a­tion; it is shut­down and relaunched sim­ul­tan­eously. Far fetched? With Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion and mul­tiple Core CPUs, no. On the desktop, usable vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion is rel­at­ively new; what can we do with mod­ern pro­cessors and soft­ware. There are cycles to burn.

Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion is noth­ing new in the IT world. Main­frames, the Cro­codilian sur­viv­ors of last cen­tury have long used Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion as a method of per­form­ance man­age­ment and isol­a­tion. If you are login as user on a main­frame in, your ses­sion is a vir­tu­al­ized instance of the whole oper­at­ing sys­tem. This isol­ates you from other users, pro­tects the whole sys­tem from strange things you may do: like run­away quer­ies. SELECT * FROM INVOICES;

Micro-processors since the Intel 4004 have sur­vived with a single Cent­ral Pro­cessing Unit (CPU) that stepped through the com­mands in strict mil­it­ary time as soun­ded by the clock. We star­ted with Hertz, then x1000 to Mega­hertz and now x1000 again to Giga­hertz. A big leap has been the mul­tiple “cores”, or sep­ar­ate CPUs added to the Intel pro­cessor line, with the VT-x,With multi-core pro­cessors being the cur­rent “thing”, and with Intel talk­ing about their pro­cessors hav­ing upto 32 cores in 2010 — per­form­ance is going hori­zontal (more CPU cores) and ver­tical (Ghz Clock speeds). The drum­mer in that mil­it­ary band must be get­ting sore arms beat­ing that fast!

PowerPC and other RISC-like pro­cessors star­ted to split their pro­cessing com­mands to internal co-processors. This is like del­eg­at­ing the “dif­fi­cult” jobs to the spe­cial­ized under­lings. For instance, Maths to Float­ing Point Units (FPUs). To gain per­form­ance dur­ing the lat­ter days of the PowerPC, Apple star­ted adding mul­tiple pro­cessors to split the work­load. Smart soft­ware could take advant­age of these to speed up heavy pro­cessing tasks.

Mul­tiple Cores in the same pro­cessor is bring­ing this same philo­sophy to every­one — includ­ing low-end Mac­Book laptops. Few applic­a­tions scale well into multi-cores: one that does is Virtualization.

How does this related to Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion? Now we have mul­tiple cores, one poten­tial use is to run sep­ar­ate oper­at­ing sys­tems on these mul­tiple core CPUs; and each oper­at­ing sys­tem run­ning at full speed. Vet­er­ans in the Mac world would remem­ber the first ver­sions of non-Microsoft Vir­tu­alPC. This soft­ware emu­lated (and dynam­ic­ally recom­piled!) the Intel pro­cessor com­mands on PowerPC like a human lan­guage trans­lator. Trans­lat­ing takes time, and there­fore the oper­at­ing sys­tem just didn’t feel snappy. Now on we have Intel mul­tiple cores, the OS world is a user’s oyster as the trans­la­tion is no longer required.

As Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion is in the hard­ware, the soft­ware that has been unique can be com­mod­it­ised. This has drawn WMWare and Microsoft into a war for the “Vir­tual Server Plat­form”, and the first battle on the desktop to grab the hearts-and-minds. The dol­lar returns for these organ­iz­a­tions lies with the “own­er­ship” of the server platform.

Microsoft has released Vir­tu­alPC 2004 as now a free product, with Vir­tu­alPC 2007 also fol­low­ing for free. This is a parry to the VMWare thrust of WMWare Player. Vir­tu­alPC comes from a product star­ted by Con­nectix. Announce­ment made at a recent Mac­World that Vir­tual PC Mac would sup­port Intel based Macs in the future. The Channel9 Team at Microsoft have an inter­view with the engin­eers of Vir­tu­alPC. This provides an excel­lent back­grounder on the his­tory, and tech­no­logy of virtualization.

EMC, and spe­cific­ally their VMWare divi­sion, has free ver­sions of VMWare Server and VMWare Player avail­able for free. Con­veni­ently, VMWare have links to pre-created VMWare images, or “appli­ances” as they name them.

Server Appli­ances: one of the VMWare images avail­able is a Fire­fox Browser appli­ance.. A self-contained oper­at­ing sys­tem with user inter­face (Ubuntu) and Fire­fox — pre-installed, ready to go. We are all wait­ing for VMWare for the Intel-based Macs.

The recent scrabble over the Xen envir­on­ment for vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion between Microsoft and VMWare, and recent com­ments by Nov­ell are an indic­ator of the import­ance of server vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion. Many large server hard­ware com­pan­ies must con­cerned about the impact on their busi­ness as server hard­ware is consolidated.

Server, large sys­tems, IT shops with many phys­ical serv­ers and the need to sup­port leg­acy server applic­a­tions bene­fit from Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion today. How about desktop environments?

One of the first applic­a­tions I installed on my Mac­Book Pro was Par­al­lels Desktop for the Mac. There are a few Windows-only applic­a­tions I need to use; and within 30 minutes I was sold (and yes, I pur­chased a copy). I use Win­dows XP daily, Par­al­lels has been use­ful in see­ing what this com­mo­tion about Ubuntu has been about, and doing a test install of Debian prior to pro­duc­tion install as our home server.

10 Ways Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion Will Change Our Digital Lives:

1. Crit­ical Applic­a­tion isol­a­tion In our daily computer-lives, there are applic­a­tions that are more miss­ing crit­ical. Ima­gine you have a soft-phone run­ning via VoIP. You really want that applic­a­tion run­ning, rain hail or crash. With Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion, you could put that applic­a­tion in an envir­on­ment that is isol­ated from your World-of-Warcraft envir­on­ment. In fact, you have a “play”, “work” envir­on­ment to sep­ar­ate your digital life.
2. Hol­istic Backups Backup your VM, and there­fore your whole envir­on­ment. I remem­ber the first time I lost a hard drive (an amaz­ing 100Mb external SCSI drive on a Mac II) and lost all the data. Bour­bon and Coke soothed the loss; now I have a laptop with 100Gb. Learn­ing from the ori­ginal loss of data, there are a myriad of backups lying around: burnt CDs, DVDs, Debian server with 450Gb, some data inside GMail. How­ever, the invest­ment in the setup of my machine is worth 4–5 work­ing days to become “online” if I lost the hard drive. With an image of the think invest­ment in the setup, let alone the data.
3. Pre-setup Server Plat­forms:A pro­ject like Ruby on Rails. To install this beastie, you have to install Ruby, Apache, MySQL (or Post­gres), the Ruby Gem remote installation/dependency sys­tem, Rails plus a few Ruby hooks to con­nect all this together. For the faint of heart, or non-OS tweaker — its a major and poten­tially impossible chore. Deploy­ing this in a development/test/production cycle increases the com­plex­ity by an order of mag­nitude. Serv­ers, and server soft­ware is just too darn com­plex for the aver­age developer.

   Instead, if there was a light­weight OS with these pre-configured, installed, secur­ity checked — a developer could simply down­load the VirtualPC/VMWare image and start.

   It would be cool if organ­iz­a­tions that sold/developed server tools provided a “pre-installed” image rather than an a myriad of inter-linked installers and required dependencies.

4. Light­weight Server oper­at­ing sys­tems, or based “frame­work” on which “vir­tu­al­ized” sys­tems can be cre­ated and eas­ily deployed. Guess what? there are these envir­on­ments for Linux and poten­tially for Win­dows.

   Rather than build­ing a large, com­plex OS with mul­tiple soft­ware sub-installs, com­mer­cial server applic­a­tions should move to a VMWare/VirtualPC image for double-click launch-and-go.

5. Deep debug­ging: ima­gine an instru­mented, or as Microsoft call it an enlightened OS. Run the VM, Record all the com­mands until crash. Rewind, Replay.
6. Vir­tu­al­iz­able OS for Test/Development; or Quick OS Undo: launch a VM and test an applic­a­tion and keep it sep­ar­ate from your work­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem. If some­thing “breaks”, throw away the VM image and restart. Keep­ing clean images of vari­ous oper­at­ing sys­tems in “cold stor­age” per­mits quick reset­ting back to a baseline.

   In a recent pod­cast Ruby on Rails inter­view with : “Its about breadth, not depth”; as pro­cessors are start­ing to go mul­tiple core, applic­a­tions need to scale hori­zont­ally, not expect more pro­cessor speed to magic­ally work. This has an impact on Dynamic/Scripted lan­guages being deployed as web applic­a­tions. Also SOA is about these applic­a­tions con­nect­ing to each other between dif­fer­ent servers.

7. Hos­ted Serv­ers from Vir­tu­al­ized Images: grab a “copy” of a vir­tual server from your new hos­itng pro­vider; loc­ally test/install & and then remotely deploy and start. After writ­ing this, I notived that TextDrive is offer­ing Sol­aris Con­tainer style serving.
8. Clone + Clone back: Take an image of your cur­rent VM OS con­fig­ur­a­tion. Make some change (install an applic­a­tion or OS upgrade), and bin­ary re-merge the now mod­i­fied clone back onto the ori­ginal. This is prob­ably more dif­fi­cult to do than think through, but a well archi­tec­ted OS could per­mit smal­ler diff style changes.
9. Why re-invent the wheel? Large applic­a­tions have large prob­lems; sav­ing files. found­a­tion: with IO/MM and low-level access to the hard­ware, could a large applic­a­tion run in its own oper­at­ing sys­tem? Sep­ar­at­ing the IO/MM out of the large frame­work into a well-tested OS res­ults in re-factored frame­works. Higher level applic­a­tions really don’t know they are in a vir­tual environment.
10. Net­work Vir­tual desktops. A twist on the Cit­rix envir­on­ment, but the CPU in use is on the desktop, file image on the server. VMware is a part of a gorup work­ing on desktop VDI. What we need is a small, eas­ily Vir­tu­al­iz­able (and pre-installed image) MacOS X and Win­dows XP/Vista.

Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion, as the pro­cessors go madly hori­zontal with mul­tiple CPU cores, is going to be a large part of our future: not only on the server, but also on the desktop.

Down­load Par­al­lels (if you on an Intel Mac) or VMWare Player / Microsoft Vir­tu­alPC and give it a whirl and exper­i­ence the begin­ning of our vir­tual future. Burn those Cycles!

Bed­time Reading

• An excel­lent roadmap of vendors and products in the mar­ket­place, and a roadmap for the future from selec­ted vendors.
• How to Install Win­dowsXP with Par­al­lels.
• Vir­tu­ally Vista.
• Peter Nor­vig on com­plex­ity of server setup We deal with mil­lions of Web mas­ters who can’t con­fig­ure a server, can’t write HTML. An indic­ator that “things” need to get simpler.
• Vir­tual – the new real­ity for developers
• Secur­ity Focus on Applic­a­tion level Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion