Year: 2004

VMM is not a stand alone tool, it requires an existing IBM Director environment.

– Product overview
Virtual Machine Manager enables the use of the following
virtualization applications in an IBM Director environment:

o VMware ESX Server in a VMware VirtualCenter environment

o Microsoft(R) Virtual Server

When Virtual Machine Manager and these virtualization
applications are installed, you can perform the following tasks
from IBM Director Console:

o Discover and report status about virtualization components

o Log in to the management interface of the virtualization
application

o Perform migration and power operations on virtual machines

Tony Fernandes, vice president of technology infrastructure at Inventure Solutions Inc., the internal IT arm of Vancouver City Savings Credit Union in British Columbia, plans to begin testing Microsoft Corp.’s Virtual Server software next year.

Fernandes said he expects to have to train his staff to perform some application troubleshooting tasks, and he views the testing process as an opportunity to find out if his vendors’ use of the word partner rings hollow. “Partner is this great word, but how many spell it correctly?” Fernandes said. He added that he plans to give the application vendors he works with this message: “You say that I’m an important customer, so show it.”

Fernandes and other users said they have two strategies for dealing with vendor resistance to testing. One approach involves training internal IT staffers to do the necessary work on virtualized servers. The other might be called the blunt-force method: threatening to take their business elsewhere. Fernandes said he thinks that in 95% of the cases at his company, he could find an alternative application vendor if necessary.

Conference attendees said troubleshooting software is most likely to come from point-solution vendors that develop specialized applications, often for specific vertical industries.

Many of those vendors are relatively small and don’t have the funding or expertise to test their software in virtualized environments, said William Miller, manager of computing services at Roche Diagnostics Corp., an Indianapolis-based maker of medical diagnostics equipment.

Miller plans to conduct his own tests of third-party software on virtualized servers and then seek help from vendors if there are problems. He said he will deliver a message similar to the one that Fernandes has in mind: “Support me, or I’ll go find another point solution.”

Application support by third-party software vendors is “the main issue” in adopting virtualization technology, said Luis Franco, vice president of technology at Banesco Bank in Venezuela. Some vendors “don’t want to assure the quality of their applications” on virtualized servers, Franco said, adding that the bank needs to increase the skills of its own personnel as a result.

In the long run, though, application vendors may have little choice other than to make the adoption of server virtualization software as easy as possible for users.

Gartner analyst Tom Bittman predicted that the average CPU utilization rate on two-way Wintel servers will increase to 40% by 2008, up from about 25% now. The rise will be partly driven by an increase in virtualization offerings, including Microsoft’s Virtual Server, he said.

Some users believe that x86-based servers are so inexpensive, there’s no point in buying virtualization software for them, Bittman said. But he argued that users may be spending more on x86-based servers as a whole than they do on mainframes or Unix systems.

The low-end servers also generate a lot of heat because of their increasing CPU power and density, contributing to cooling problems in many data centers, Bittman said.

There are now three 64-bit implementations in the “Intel® compatible processor” marketplace:

Intel IA64, as implemented on the Itanium 2 processor
Intel EM64T, as implemented on the Xeon DP “Nocona” and future Xeon MP processors
AMD AMD64, as implemented on the Opteron processor

There have been a certain amount of discussions lately regarding optimal and efficient implementations of ESX Server, VMware’s flagship product in terms of x86 hardware virtualization. This document is a guide or a basis for a discussion related to the best practices in terms of the scalability of an ESX Server implementation on IBM xSeries and BladeCenter servers.

In this document, we focus the discussion around two major scenarios: the so-called scale-up implementation and the scale-out implementation. These are terms that are used often today that basically describe the usage of an architecture, either based on one or few big x86 server systems, or based on many smaller x86 server systems. The former being defined as a scale-up solution (that is, you have to add components and resources to the big system in order to achieve scalability) and the latter being defined as a scale-out solution (that is, you have to add new server systems to your “server farm” in order to scale it accordingly to your needs).

The objective of this document is to create the basis for a wide understanding of what the advantages and disadvantages are for both approaches without having to compromise our analysis and match it with a limited set of products. This should ensure the readers that our analysis will be as agnostic as possible.

Security contexts are functionally similar to a collection of independent physical firewalls but are much easier to manage. Because they are virtual devices, it is easy to add or delete security contexts based on subscriber growth. This reduces management costs, because organizations do not need to deploy multiple devices, yet they can achieve the same capabilities and maintain complete control over the firewall infrastructure from one consolidated platform.

Xen, an open-source project with growing ties to Red Hat, Novell and Hewlett-Packard, is emerging as the leading contender for providing open-source virtualization for the Linux environment.
Ian Pratt, the founder of the Xen project that originated from the University of Cambridge in England, confirmed that developers from Red Hat and Suse are preparing “testing packages” of Xen that will be released in the near future.
Additionally, Xen has joined forces with leading Linux distributors, chip vendors and platform vendors to create a consortium that will more broadly enable open-source virtualization development and deployment.
Xen backers are hopeful that support from heavy hitters in the Linux industry will make Xen a household name in the open-source community. The open-source project completed the first major update of Xen version 2.0 in November.
Steven Hand, another computer scientist at the University of Cambridge’s computer lab, said he expects the Red Hat drop will be available in the same time frame as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, which is due in the first quarter of 2005.

“Red Hat’s packaging Xen in the near future as part of Fedora. We’ve talked to Suse,” said Hand. “We have a lot of momentum in the open-source community. Now we’re pushing into mainstream Linux so when Xen goes into the latest versions of Linux, users can compile a Xen kernel out of the box.”
Red Hat will release test builds for Red Hat Fedora Core 3, and Novell will soon release test builds for Novell Suse Linux, Pratt said. The Xen components will be dropped into experimental Linux packages, but they won’t be commercially supported.

Xen does not support Windows today because it uses a technique called para-virtualization to achieve high performance that involves modifying the operating system kernel, Pratt said. However, the debut of virtualization features in next-generation CPUs from Intel and AMD will make it easier to support unmodified operating systems, Pratt said.
“At that time we will reconsider Windows support,” he said.

Neither Red Hat nor Novell would comment on their plans with Xen. A Novell spokesman said the company is “excited about what Xen is doing. But it’s premature at this point for us to talk publicly about our strategy and potential partnerships around virtualization.”
Xen will be available under the General Public License; some components may be available under a NetBSD-style license, Hand said.

Consultants and solution providers in the open-source market said they would welcome an alternative to VMware and Virtual Server, but Xen needs to add support for Windows. VMware supports Linux but is often an expensive add-on to an open-source stack, other observers said.
“Xen is very, very good, but it does not yet support Windows,” said Chris Maresca, senior partner at Olliance Group, Palo Alto, Calif. “A lot of people use VMware to support WinX on Linux.”
Ironically, Microsoft Research provided funding for the Xen group when it was founded two years ago, but has since back out, Xen officials said.

Xen is only one of several open-source projects devoted to offering virtualization software for the open-source and Linux environment.
Bochs, an open-source project founded in 1994 that evolved into Plex86, focused on Linux virtual machines. Observers said Plex86’s approach is more like VMware’s. Founder and developer Kevin Lawton said he talked with IBM, Red Hat and Novell about getting backing for the Linux VM project in 2003, but those discussions didn’t pan out.
The existing code, he said, is very experimental in nature and needs additional development before it could be classified as a “version 1.0” commercially ready server. The last update of Plex86 posted in December 2003. The project is now stalled, said Lawton, who is consulting for a startup company.
Top Linux vendors have also explored another open-source project, called user-mode Linux, or UML, said Lawton. UML is said to be slower than Xen but runs on more established technology and is often used for testing and debugging applications, observers said.

HP Labs and Intel Labs are other backers of Xen. HP is using Xen in its utility computing efforts, Hand said.
While HP would not comment on its plans for Xen, one HP executive said the company is working with several source projects and commercial companies as well as HP’s own virtualization technology to help enable utility computing.
“We’re primarily working with VMware and Microsoft in the virtualization space,” said Nick van der Zweep, director of virtual and utility computing at HP, noting that HP is not bundling Xen at this point but is investing in “various OS initiatives.”
Dave McCrory, founder of Surgient, an ISV and ASP whose platform uses virtualization technology, said there is a market for an open-source spin-off of VMware, but there are limitations to Xen that could stymie its acceptance.
“Xen is semi-virtualization. Right now, you can’t run Windows except a modified XP version and modified Linux. If someone could come up with an enterprise virtualization solution that was open source, it would be fantastic,” said McCrory, also chief scientist at the Austin, Texas, firm.
“Another problem that would face open-source solutions is that a lot of the real virtualization ground is consumed by patents created by VMware and Connectix and now owned by EMC and Microsoft,” he said. (EMC owns VMware while Microsoft now own Connectix’s virtualization software and is marketing it under the Virtual Server brand.) “This would pose another problem if corporations were considering adopting these types of solutions. I do believe there would be a market for it, however.”