Year: 2005

A huge news today: SWsoft choosed to start and sponsor an open source project about its flagship products, Virtuozzo.
The project is called Open Virtuozzo and its a subset of Virtuozzo product:

Open Virtuozzo is an Operating System-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. Open Virtuozzo creates isolated, secure virtual private servers (VPSs) or virtual environments on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VPS performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VPSs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.

The Open Virtuozzo project is an open source community project supported by SWsoft and is intended to provide access to the code and ultimately for the open source community to test, develop and further the OS virtualization effort. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may evolve into the regular Virtuozzo product offering. We encourage the community to access, use, develop and comment on the software and references on this site.
Open Virtuozzo is a subset of Virtuozzo — a commercial virtualization solution offered by SWsoft.

Since Virtuozzo (and Open Virtuozzo) approaches virtualization in a different way from VMware, Microsoft and Xen, I strongly recommend you to read SWsoft virtualization introduction before proceed.

You should also read how Open Virtuozzo differs from Virtuozzo in this comparison.

Then you can go further and try to download it at this location: http://openvirtuozzo.org/download

Expect to see a review of this product on virtualization.info in the near future.

Please help donating money for New Orleans and other cities victims.
You can see what’s happening in many places. This, this and this are reliable sources.

You can donate at American Red Cross or Convoy of Hope.

You can pay in many ways. I found simple donating American Red Cross through Amazon.

(informations online claim that donating $100 will feed a 4-members family for 2 days)

I already talked about the new VMTN subscription for developers. VMware is now offering a way of upgrading your standard Workstation 5.0 license to this new subscription.
Quoting from the VMware Newsletter:

Offer Expires September 15th.
For a limited time, VMware is offering Workstation 5 customers the opportunity to upgrade to VMTN Subscription and receive a full rebate for their Workstation 5 upgrade or license.

VMTN Subscription includes VMware Workstation, GSX Server, ESX Server Developer Edition and P2V Assistant for development and testing purposes. The subscription gives developers and testers an enterprise-proven virtualization platformcombined with product
updates, upgrades and supportfor only $299 per year.

This upgrade offer expires on September 15th, 2005, so act now.

Learn more about VMTN Subscription:
http://vmware.rsc02.net/servlet/cc5?NuOpQTBDQAVHtLkkHgKjhQiLjpttpxnuHptQJhuV2VW

Learn more about this rebate offer:
http://vmware.rsc02.net/servlet/cc5?NuOpQTBDQAVHtLkkHgKjhQiLjpttpxnuHptQJhuV2VY

This could be a good moment to do the upgrade since Workstation 5.5 is coming and it would be included in the Workstation / VMTN license.

PlateSpin guys just started a corporate blog: the Spinblog.
This could be a good way to learn more technical details about Platespin products and how the company foresees the server consolidation market.

The Linux Journal published a good technical introduction to Xen VMM architecture. This is the kind of article I’d like to see more often: virtualization and paravirtualization are changing the way we work and more companies everyday want to understand technical details before adopting the technology.

Quoting from the article introduction:

This article is intended mainly for developers who are new to Xen and who want to know more about it. The first two sections, however, are general and do not deal with code.

The Xen VMM (virtual machine monitor) is an open-source project that is being developed in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge, UK. It enables us to create many virtual machines, each of which runs an instance of an operating system.

These guest operating systems can be a patched Linux kernel, version 2.4 or 2.6, or a patched NetBSD/FreeBSD kernel. User applications can run on guest OSes as they are, without any change in code. Sun also is working on a Solaris-on-Xen port.

I have been following the Xen project closely for more than a year. My interest in Xen began after I read about it in the OLS (Ottawa Linux Symposium) 2004 proceedings. It increased after hearing an interesting lecture on the subject at a local UNIX group meeting.

Full virtualization has been done with some hardware emulators; one of the popular open-source projects is the Bochs IA-32 Emulator. Another known project is qemu. The disadvantage of hardware emulators is their performance.

The idea behind the Xen Project (para-virtualization) is not new. The performance metrics and the high efficiency it achieves, however, can be seen as a breakthrough. The overhead of running Xen is very small indeed, about 3%.

As was said in the beginning, currently Xen patches the kernel. But, future processors will support virtualization so that the kernel can run on it unpatched. For example, both Intel VT and AMD Pacifica processors will include such support.

In August 2005, XenSource, a commercial company that develops virtualization solutions based on Xen, announced in Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that it has used Intel VT-Enabled Platforms with Xen to virtualize both Linux and Microsoft Windows XP SP2.

Xen with Intel VT or Xen with AMD Pacifica would be competitive with if not superior to other virtualization methods, as well as to native operation.

In the same arena, VMware is a commercial company that develops the ESX server, a virtualization solution not based on Xen. VMware announced in early August 2005 that it will be providing its partners with access to VMware ESX Server source code and interfaces under a new program called VMware Community Source.

A clear advantage of VMware is that it does not require a patch on the guest OS. The VMware solution also enables the guest OS to be Windows. VMware solution is probably slower than Xen, though, because it uses shadow page tables whereas Xen uses both direct and shadow page tables.

Xen already is bundled in some distributions, including Fedora Core 4, Debian and SuSE Professional 9.3, and it will be included in RHEL5. The Fedora Project has RPMs for installing Xen, and other Linux distros have prepared installation packages for Xen as well.

In addition, there is a port of Xen to IA-64. Plus, an interesting Master’s Thesis already has been written on the topic, “HPC Virtualization with Xen on Itanium”.

Support for other processors is in progress. The Xen team is working on an x86_64 port, while IBM is working on Power5 support.

The Xen Web site has some versions available for download, both the 2.0.* version and the xen-unstable version, also termed xen-3.0-devel. You also can use the Mercurial source code management system to download the latest version.

I installed the xen-3.0-devel, because at the time, the 2.0.* version did not have the AGP support I had needed. This may have changed since my installation. I found the installation process to be quite simple. You should run make world and make install, update the bootloader conf file and that’s it–you’re ready to boot into Xen. You should follow the instructions in the user manual for best results.

The article is too long to be full quoted so proceed to http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8540

Microsoft released a couple of very interesting papers about Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 only available for Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCP).

Article 1: Build a virtual laboratory with Virtual Server 2005

As a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), you’re constantly faced with the need to have access to running technologies such as Active Directory, DNS, or Exchange, for all sorts of reasons. Whether it is for training, testing or development, it’s really handy to have a readily available working environment you can jump into within minutes. That’s why you need a Virtual Laboratory. Since Virtual Laboratories provide this kind of support to your everyday work, they need to be treated as official systems that have their own places in the production network. This is why you need a structured and standard approach for their creation.

That’s what this article series is all about: How to build a Virtual Laboratory, set it up, use and reuse it, and manage it for long term operation. The strategies outlined in these articles stem from real-world projects that cover all sorts of usage scenarios. These strategies will help you obtain value from your laboratory and ensure that you get a solid return on investment (ROI) for your efforts. One customer was able to build an entire collaboration testing environment in less than 32 hours. Think of it: less than four days to build three physical hosts with more than ten virtual machines playing roles as varied as Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint Portal Server, Content Management Server, SQL Server, Live Communications Server, and more. In addition, they are able to reuse this environment for other testing purposes. There is no doubt that this level of ROI is simply not available with physical laboratory environments.

When you’re building a laboratory you need to focus on four different areas:

• Laboratory Description-Here you will outline the strategy you will use to create and implement the environment.
• Laboratory Deliverables-In this area you identify how the deliverables from the laboratory can be used to support other testing or development scenarios. With virtual laboratories in particular it’s really easy to include pre-constructed machines as deliverables to other projects. This is because virtual machines (VM) are really only constructed of a few files on a disk-large files admittedly, but files that can be transported, copied, or downloaded from remote locations.
• Laboratory Management Practices-The third area focuses on the practices you’re going to use for the management and operation of the laboratory. Once again, file management will be a big part of this activity.
• Future Plans and Projected Growth-The fourth area looks beyond the immediate, and covers both best practices and recommendations for future lab usage as well as the creation and management of a distributed virtual laboratory structure as more members of the organization require access to running technologies.

These four pillars will help you build and prepare a Virtual Laboratory that can be used to support any number of scenarios. The following are some examples:

• Enterprise Development Environment-Developers need to have a certain amount of freedom on the machines they work with, but since these machines are enterprise systems, they must be controlled. Within a virtual environment, they can be granted the level of privilege they need without compromising production security.
• Test Environment-New technologies, new products, new patches, and new hotfixes all need to be tested before they are introduced into the production environment. A Virtual Laboratory can be used to create a low-cost reproduction of the production environment in support of these tests. This is especially useful when you need to test applications which affect the structure of your Active Directory.
• Support Environment-Help desk operators supporting levels 1, 2, or 3 can use the virtual environment to reproduce any problem. This avoids having to give them multiple systems, and lets them test out multiple scenarios without impacting the production environment.
• Training Environment-A Virtual Laboratory is the ideal environment for MCP preparation. You can install any technology and simulate any situation, allowing you to gain practical experience in the technologies in which you want to be certified. The virtual lab will let you test out scenarios that you are unable to reproduce in your production network.

You might be already using technologies such as Virtual PC or Virtual Server (if you’re an MCT, you’re definitely using Virtual PC),but the practices outlined here will help you move from ad hoc usage of virtual machines to an officially supported implementation from which multiple members of your organization can profit.

Article 2: Working with a virtual laboratory

The first part of this series focused on the preparation of a permanent virtual laboratory. It also outlined the particular deliverables you can expect when building a production virtual laboratory, one that is controlled and can provide permanent services to your testing community. Now that your virtual laboratory is up and running, you’ll need to focus on maintenance and operation. In fact, you’ll need to make sure that you have developed processes for the following activities:

• Reuse of the deliverables – these procedures will let you reuse the four deliverables created during the preparation of your laboratory.
• Laboratory management – these procedures will ensure the continuing good health of the machines making up the virtual laboratory.
• Best practices – as in all situations, you’ll want to derive best practices from your laboratory effort to ensure even better implementations in the future.

This is the gist of this article: to provide you with additional information on how you, as an MCP, can make the best of your virtual laboratory, letting you learn key features of the products you need to be certified on.

Both can be downloaded at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=3550069 (you need to login in Passport network and you need to have MCP credentials).

Server virtualization changed the way we develop, test and deploy software.
Actually it could even change they way we sell and buy hardware.

Few weeks ago VMware revamped its web community launching what is called VMware Technology Network (VMTN), and opened a new Virtual Machine Center: a place where users can download preconfigured virtual machines with various preinstalled operating systems, servers and applications.

VMware partners like Novell, Red Hat, Bea, Oracle, MySQL, SpikeSource and others to come are providing virtual machines with their flagship products aboard, from SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to Oracle Database 10g, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to Bea Weblogic 8.1. And any of them will be able to run on any VMware product from Workstation to ESX Server.

This move could start a new trend on selling hardware and someone is already trying to take the most of it.
The site VMdrive.com for example offers preconfigured virtual machines with various operating systems and softwares, making them available for Microsoft and VMware virtualization products.
Customers buy online the DVD image and get a brand new machine with any committed application, working out-of-the-box. It’s just virtual instead of physical.

If this seems a good idea the site Run-Virtual.com is producing something even better: the Virtual Machine Order HOTLINE is an on-demand bulding web script that let customers choose virtual machine configuration details before buying.
This approach drops down many configuration steps hardware vendors usually need to take, greatly reducing costs already cut by virtualization adoption.

Is this the beginning of a virtual-OEMs era?

Ron Oglesby, Scott Herold and Brian Madden book about VMware ESX Server is now available on Amazon.

Summary
This book is not an administrator’s guide. Rather, it’s written for IT consultants, system engineers, and architects who must plan, design, implement, and optimize VMware ESX systems. It’s filled with real-world, proven strategies created specifically for ESX Server. See how some of the world’s largest companies are using ESX Server in their production environments.

Are you thinking about using VMware ESX Server in your environment?
Do you want to use it to consolidate a few servers, or do you want to use it on a larger scale?
Are you wondering wheter the ESX technology is “real” enough for production use?

If you’re wondering whether ESX Server will work for you, spend 50 bucks on this book before spending thousands of dollars on licenses.

Why Less than 500 pages? It’s amazing what you can fit into a small space by taking out pointless screenshots and unrelated filler material. Buy this book now and start learning how ESX Server really works.

What’s Covered in This Book…

• Virtualization Overview
• How Virtualization Works
• The real differences between VMware Workstation, GSX, and ESX
• Hardware Allocation
• Getting devices to work
• Real-world server sizing
• SAN vs. local storage
• The inner workings of ESX networking: virtual switches, physical
• switches, and using ESX server for firewalls
• Managing the server
• Security
• Server Monitoring
• Automated installations and server provisioning
• High availability
• Backup and disaster recovery strategies

About the Authors

Ron Oglesby is the Director of Technical Architecture for RapidApp.
He’s helped companies of all sizes develop their virtualization strategies, ESX
Server farm designs, and virtualization roadmaps. Ron is a VMware
Authorized Consultant (VAC) and VMware Certified Professional (VCP) and has 9
years of experience in the industry with the last 2 years almost completely
dedicated to virtualization. Ron co-authored the best-selling books
Windows 2003 Terminal Servers, the Citrix MetaFrame XP CCA Study Guide, and
numerous articles and white papers on server and application virtualization.

Scott Herold is a Senior Network Engineer for RapidApp. He is a
VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC), VMware Certified Professional (VCP), and the
owner of www.vmguru.com. Scott has engineered and implemented some of the
largest ESX solutions in the world, including those for several financial
services and insurance companies. The solutions he has designed range from
2-3 physical server implementations to the enterprise sized environments of 50+
8-way hosts. He is one of the most active participants in the VMware
Technology Network Forums.

Table of Contents and some sample chapters are available here to download.

As I reported few weeks ago a special VMware image is circulating on the Net: is the experimental Apple MacOS x86, hacked to bypass the hardware check Cupertino guys created to avoid installations on unauthorized x86 machines.

The image really exists (actually called tiger-x86.tar.bz2) but there are alternatives to setup a MacOS 10.4.1 inside VMware: at the xplodenet.com site you’ll find 4 simple guides to achieve the task.

A blogger posted some screenshots (I’m assuming are not fake).

Quoting from VMTS:

The VMFS-2 metadata manager serializes operations performed on different hosts that require metadata updates. This is a standard file system practice that protects a shared resource (the metadata) from being modified simultaneously by multiple hosts. Here, normal data I/O is not affected—only operations that originate from different hosts and that require a metadata update are serialized. Typically, these operations occur infrequently and performance impact is not significant.
cp , however, can change this dynamic grow (in blocks of 10Kb) as data is appended to them. Growing a copied file is an operation that requires a lock on the VMFS-2 metadata.

When you have a cp in action you may experience a degradation in I/O performance due to increased VMFS-2 metadata contention. Other symptoms may include the inability to change power states or modify a virtual machine.

The extent of any performance degradation depends on several factors, including the number of ESX Server hosts with virtual machines that use the VMFS-2 volume, and the intensity and pattern of I/O activity in the virtual machines with REDO log files and the number of concurrent cp operation.

The only way to do a file copy inside a VMFS volume is to use the undocumented vmkfstools option:

vmkfstools -e /vmfs/vmfsname/target.vmdk -d vmfs /vmfs/vmfsname/source.vmdk