Year: 2005

VMware Workstation 5, which features memory sharing technology borrowed from the company’s ESX Server, has a Teams feature that allows users to connect multiple virtual machines together with configurable network segments in order to simulate and test higher-end applications on a programmer’s desktop system, company officials said.

The new version also allows desktop users to take multiple point-in-time “snapshots” of running virtual machines, and then revert back to a previous snapshot with a single mouse click. Version 5 makes it possible for users to mark any virtual machine as a template, allowing multiple users to share its base installation. Any changes made to the virtual machine are saved in a new virtual machine that is connected as a way to reduce disk space and better empower team collaboration, company officials said.

“There are a lot more people building visor-based applications today, but building them is expensive because developers can’t afford to buy machines for each and every developer. But with feature like Teams, for instance, allows developers to create multitier configurations on a single physical machine,” said Srinivas Krishnamurti, a senior product manager at VMware.

One developer said the new product’s virtual capabilities have served to reduce their hardware costs.

“We cut our costs by buying fewer PCs, and we can do more on one computer than we could with separate boxes. With language testing, for example, we can boot up four virtual machines in different languages at once, and then run and compare our products against different languages and configurations at the same time. We can also isolate issues without having to worry about degradation of hardware or needing to rebuild systems,” said Cliff Thornton, manager of Solution and Interoperability Quality Control at Cognos.

In Version 5 VMware has also added support for 64-bit operating systems and processors including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. Support for chips with 64-bit extensions, such as AMD’s Opteron and Athlon 64 and Intel’s EM64T, are also supported.

The company has also added new 32-bit operating system support to the product for host and/or guest operating systems including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 3, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, SuSE Linux Pro 9.2, Mandrake Linux 10, Sun’s Java Desktop System, and Novell’s Linux Desktop 9.

The primary N1 vision was a network-centric philosophy that views the network as a resource that make computing more flexible, adaptive and easily connected; managing the datacenter as if it were a single system using virtualization and data automation; managing policy; as well as provide load balancing and other autonomic technologies.

N1 was also designed to manage and coordinate the provisioning of new hardware and software.

However, making this entire vision a reality would have required Sun to support a wide breadth of hardware and platforms. Sun will now shift its focus to making N1 work with its own products.

As first reported by eWeek, John Loiacono, Sun’s executive vice president for software has confirmed suspicions that Sun will drastically alter its plans for N1 implementation in the coming months when a new version of the framework is publicly released.

According to the report, Sun will take a different approach to how N1 provisions multi platform services that is both simplified and more realistic. Sun says that its work in utility computing and with grid computing technologies is the basis of its changed vision.

Loiacono said Sun will begin to push a project known as the Customer Network Systems group (CNS) that will make each component of Sun’s product portfolio from servers, to the operating system to its Java Virtual Machine (JVM) able to “connect back to Sun.”

Sun will then be able to provision and patch products and share service information if the customer opts in.

“This combination can lower total cost of ownership through server virtualization that scales and utilizes each server to its fullest potential,” Kurt Daniel, SWsoft’s marketing director, said in a statement.

Q: How many people are staying with a single box per application, rather than consolidate? You must have some idea if you bothered to build it into the CPU. After all, it’s not free, it uses some of your transistor budget.
A: I don’t know what the mix will be. We have a generous transistor budget at the moment, it doesn’t significantly impact that.

There are still people out there today deploying thousands of DP servers as opposed to scaling up and going on to four or eight-way servers, and there will always be different theories or rationalisations about what processing model to deploy. Is it a big SMP box, is it a Superdome or at the other extreme, thousands of DP servers like Google? There’ll always be things in between. And we wanted to build a platform that’s general purpose that’s not specific to one segment, so VT [Virtual Technology] is there if you want it.

But there’s a lot of people who want to virtualise. They’re using VMware and Virtual Server and so on, Intel’s VT increases the reliability of virtualisation, an increased robustness, it doesn’t remove the need for software like VMware.

Q: How does it work?
A: OSes that have been virtualised run as if they owned the whole system. We have to change the protection model. Right now, they think they’re running at ring zero [which gives the OS total access to and control over the hardware] but they’re actually running at ring 1. The OS executes instructions that are ring zero instructions and then you’ve got to trap them. So there’s a risk in terms of doing it and it limits some IT departments’ desire to use virtualisation, because it’s only in software, not like the old mainframe days when it was hard-wired.

Putting VT in gives us increased robustness because we move the virtual machine monitor (VMM) down another layer, or ring. It means the OS runs where it should do and the VMM sits underneath it. So that gives a benefit in terms of stability, which will probably increase the uptake on it.

We’ve published the programming instructions for ISVs and it’s basically a set of instructions that allows you to switch context. Once you’re in the privileged ring, you use that set of instructions. Ring zero is where the OS sits normally and it’s allowed to access the hardware directly. Today the place where the VMM sits is at ring -1, under ring zero.

Q: What’s the significance of ring -1?
A: Today when you run VMware, it has to push the OS up so it runs at ring 1 so it can run at ring zero and have total control. The problem then is that the OS doesn’t realise that it’s at ring 1 and you have to trap and emulate those ring zero instructions. This has performance costs and stability risks. By putting the VMM underneath, we’re letting the OS have total control but then when we want to switch context, given that you’re in a multi-tasking environment, that VMM can cut in.

It has instructions that saves the context state because one of the things that impacts performance is saving the complete machine state so you can make that switch to the other instance, and that’s now hardware assisted. So we’ve got new instructions that enable you to get into that state and manage the virtual machine.

Q: Is there a set of virtual stacks that you save the machine state to?
A: The stack’s not saved in hardware, you have to flush the stack. It’s a bit like when you enter the system management mode. You flush out a set of registers — the processor context — and the chances are that there’s more context in the processor than the normal instruction set can save because of some of the state of the machines.

But it doesn’t save it into the processor — it’s not like the Itanium register stack engine where you’ve got these 228 registers which set up as general purpose registers and flip between them. It has to maintain the programming model that we have and know. You’ve got be able to run NT3, virtualised.

Some businesses have even gone a step further. Purdue Pharma LP last year started buying Stratus Technologies’ fault-tolerant servers, similar to those used by financial services companies and emergency call centres, to run Microsoft’s Active Directory and other applications in a virtual environment.

That was the drug maker’s first foray into fault-tolerant servers, and it came after the company decided to use VMware’s virtual server technology, said Stephen Rayda, director of architecture at Purdue.

Rayda said last week that he didn’t want Purdue’s IT administrators to have to answer the following question if the virtualised system failed: “When they lose 30 servers on a single box, they’re going to get asked, ‘What could we have done to avoid this?’ ”

CIO at Austin Energy Andres Carvallo said he’s buying fewer servers now and focusing his budget for Intel-based machines on systems “with higher capacity and more fault-tolerant-type features.” He embarked on an 18-month project last year to reduce his server count from about 250 systems to 80, largely through virtualisation.

CIO at Education Management Christopher Kowalsky, a company that operates a variety of academic institutions with a total of about 66,000 students, is evaluating VMware’s software and Microsoft’s rival Virtual Server offering. “We’re the same as most organisations,” he said. “We have a lot of servers and a lot of processors, and we’re continuing to try to figure out how to best utilise them.”

But Kowalsky added that if his company does adopt virtualisation technology, he will run the software on fault-tolerant, highly resilient systems that are capable of failing over to another box. Having servers with high-availability features is “going to be a big part” of any move to virtualisation, he said.

Impact on server sales?

Although virtualisation and grid computing technologies can increase server utilisation and reduce the need for new boxes, worldwide revenue from server sales grew 5.5 per cent last year, according to IDC. Analyst Stephen Josselyn said he doesn’t think virtualisation will hurt server revenues.

Virtualisation is more about better utilisation of resources, Josselyn said, adding that he expects users to continue to scale out their system installations more than they scale up single systems.

But Gartner has a different take. In a report presented at its data centre conference in December, Gartner said higher processor utilisation rates could “dramatically reduce server hardware and administrative spending.”

Users typically cite ease of management, reduced support needs and associated staffing savings as the top benefits that virtualisation can provide, not server cost reductions. But even if some of the hardware that users are buying for virtualised environments is more expensive than what they used to purchase, the fact remains that they’re buying fewer servers than before.