Year: 2006

Canadian Business Online published the PROFIT HOT 50, a list of top 50 emerging companies in Canada.

Among them, at the 4th position, there is PlateSpin with a stunning growth of 4,781% (no, it’s not a typo).

Check the whole list here.

Dell published a very short but interesting paper about performances of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in a VMware ESX Server 2.5.2 infrastructure:

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To investigate the performance of SQL Server 2005 in a server consolidation environment, in May 2006 the Scalable Enterprise Technology Center compared the performance of 15 VMs running SQL Server 2000 with 15 VMs running SQL Server 2005 on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 server with two dual-core Intel Xeon processors at 2.8 GHz and 8 GB of RAM. Each VM had the same configuration except for the version of SQL Server, with 512 MB of RAM, a 10 GB hard disk, and a vmxnet virtual Gigabit Ethernet4 NIC.

ESX Server 2.5.2 was installed on the PowerEdge 2850 server, and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with SP1 was the guest OS on all the VMs. The number of VMs running on the server was set at 15, which was based on findings in the Dell white paper VMware ESX Server Performance Gains on Dell PowerEdge 2850 Dual Core Servers…

One of the most critical service to move in a virtual environment is database depending on its high I/O workloads, and at today I still see so many customers refusing to migrate.
Benchmarks like this one should help clarifying when is sensible use a virtual database and when not.

Unfortunately this study just compared performances between virtualized SQL Server 2000 and 2005, and not performances between a physical SQL Server 2005 and a virtual one.

Read the whole paper at source.

Thanks to VMTN Blog for the news.

Summary
This book covers the native tools that VMware provides with ESX Server. It then discusses in detail the different scripting API’s and how they can be leveraged to provide some very useful, practical and time saving tools to manage a virtual infrastructure. From virtual server provisioning to backups and everything in between, all are covered in detail with real world examples that have been tested and will work either copied directly from the book or with slight modifications for the reader’s specific environments.
This book is a one stop shop for virtual tools. VMware provides the most robust virtualization platform in the market and it has very cool management tools like VirtualCenter and the MUI. Yet more often then not, the most overlooked and most powerful management tools are either not considered ort unknown. These are the native command line tools and scripting possibilities the ESX Server has built right in it. From simple shell scripts to COM and Perl and new in ESX Server 2.5 Common Information Model (CIM) VMware provides API’s to access your virtual infrastructure and leverage 100% of its functionality.

Additionally, VMware has included outstanding command line tools the provide powerful possibilities for those willing to use them. The scripts found in this book have been used in real world engagements and deployments of ESX Server. The reader will be able to copy almost directly with very little customization if any. By combining the graphical tools such like those found in the MUI and VirtualCenter with the power you’ll find with the scripts detailed within the following chapters, you will be able to get under the hood of your virtual infrastructure, tune it up and make it purr.

Abouth the Author
Al Muller is a VMware Certified Professional as well as a MCSE and CCNA. He has planned, designed, and implemented a number of server consolidation and virtualization projects and currently works as a Senior Consultant for Callisma. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from San Diego State University.

IBM Redbooks department published this time a special Redbook about the IBM Virtualization Engine:

This IBM Redbook is a student workbook for IBM Virtualization Engine V2.1 on Linux for IBM System z9. It is based on classes given to IBM students in a classroom. The book guides you in installing, configuring, and using the suite of products available for the IBM System z mainframe. IBM Director 5.10, IBM Director z/VM Center extensions, Enterprise Workload Manager V2.1 (EWLM), Virtualization Engine Console, Resource Dependency Service V2.1, the Director and EWLM bridges to the Virtualization Engine Console are all installed on four separate Linux images (z/VM guests). This book also provides exercises for exploring the IBM Director system management functions, such as monitoring and event action planning.

In this book, you go through a lab on step-by-step provisioning of new Linux images under z/VM using the Director z/VM Center extensions. The EWLM exercises explores Application Response Measurement (ARM) enabling a Web-based application to trace and analyze the performance of a Web transaction from a Web page to a Web server to IBM WebSphere and its return. You have Resource Dependency Service exercises executed to develop and explore cross-system topologies. The book explores Virtualization Engine console interface with the above products, along with IBM Tivoli Directory Server and IBM DB2.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Overview of the products
• Chapter 2 – Virtualization Engine V2.1: Class infrastructure and tools
• Chapter 3 – Installing Virtualization Engine V2.1
• Chapter 4 – Configuring Virtualization Engine V2.1

Download it here.

Virtualization key players have been busy during the whole 2006 summer arguing about value of para-virtualization as well as the best approach to integrate a standard hypervisor interface in the Linux kernel.

On this last point VMware hoped since last year its standardization implementation, Virtual Machine Interface or VMI, could be widely accepted in the community and find its way in the Linux kernel.
But XenSource, providing a large part of the development team behind Xen, the open source para-virtualization platform, and others are pushing for adoption of other interfaces.

Different positions of two main contenders slowed down progress for hypervisor standardization and received complains from big names like Oracle.

At the last USENIX both companies finally agreed to work on a joint project, coordinated by Rusty Russell, Linux kernel hacker working for IBM Linux Technology Center, and called paravirt-ops.

But while paravirt-ops specifications are in the work, VMware today released by surprise a working version of its Player able to run para-virtualized Linux distributions over a VMI compliant engine.

The Technology Preview build is available for free on the VMware site and the company invites Linux community to verify some performance improvement on high CPU workload scenarios, downloading para-virtualized Fedora Core 5 and SUSE OpenLinux 10.1 distributions as well.

At this point any other hypervisor deveveloped with VMI specifications would be already able to run same Linux distributions without further intervention.
So with this move VMware wants to demonstrate that, despite its support to the paravirt-ops effort, a standard hypervisor is already available and benefits are already quantifiable.

Download the new VMware Player for Linux with para-virtualization support and para-virtualized Linux distributions here.

Quoting from the Affentranger Associates official announcement:

Dunes Technologies SA, the market leader in process automation and system management software for virtual environments, announced today that it has raised new equity capital led by Affentranger Associates along with private investors and employees.

The company will use the funds raised to ramp-up its sales activity and expand its operations in the US under the leadership of Dr. Robert Laurie, the newly appointed CEO of Dunes.
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As result of this investment, Nicolas Fulpius from Affentranger Associates will be joining the Board of the company as Chairman. Ernst Messmer will remain actively involved with the company as a technology advisor to the Board.

Former CEO and Co-Funder, Stephane Broquere, stepped down and is now covering the role of Vice President of Business Development.

Quoting from the Opsware official announcement:

Opsware Inc., the leading provider of Data Center Automation software, today announced the company’s strategy for managing complex virtual server environments at the company’s annual user conference, OPSWorld, held this week in San Jose, CA.
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Horowitz’s keynote discussed and demonstrated the value that automation can deliver for environments virtualized with technologies such as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Sun Solaris 10, XenSource and others, both in terms of setting up these environments as well as in the ongoing management of them.
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Opsware has developed a comprehensive solution available in the near future and today unveiled the longer-term roadmap for automating the management of virtualized IT environments.
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Opsware will automate the process of creating virtual servers through a simple point-and-click interface that enables rapid creation of virtual machines for all virtual server platforms, including VMware, Sun Solaris, Microsoft Virtual Server and XenSource. Without this level of automation, IT organizations would have to use separate, disparate point tools, each requiring administrators to have specialized knowledge and expertise.
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Opsware enables IT to manage across all virtualization platforms from a single solution, minimizing platform specific training and saving significant time and resources.
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Opsware’s solution allows enterprises to automate the full lifecycle of virtual servers including provisioning, patching, and compliance, providing the deepest level of visibility and control across the IT environment from a single console…

No informations are given about the availability timeframe of these features.

Ben Armstrong posted a new VBscript to verify real consumption of memory for every Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 virtual machine:

When you create a virtual machine under Virtual Server, you configure the amount of memory that you want that virtual machine to believe that it has (say 512mb of RAM).
However, Virtual Server needs to use more than that amount of memory to actually run the virtual machine. Virtual Server also needs memory for itself to run emulated devices and store various information about the virtual machine in.

Unfortunately, because Virtual Server uses a driver (VMM.SYS) to allocate the memory this information is not easily to determine (i.e. it does not show up in task manager)…

Read the whole article at source.

Altiris arranged a live panel for September 20th, to answer questions about application virtualization and its Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) in particular.

Some of the point being addressed:

• How software virtualization is different from what is being seen in the server realm
• How IT organizations can get value from software virtualization
• Why companies have selected SVS and how SVS has been implemented in these organizations
• Altiris’ future vision for SVS and upcoming features

It’s a good opportunity to receive clarifications about this new virtualization approach.

Register for it here.

VMware continues its introductory campaign for the benchmarking tool they are going to launch at VMware 2006: VMmark.

This time a long essay appeared on the company management blog, The Console, detailing challenges of performance measurements in virtual environments:

Plenty of benchmarks exist to measure the performance of physical systems, but they fail to capture essential aspects of virtual infrastructure performance. We need a common workload and methodology for virtualized systems so that benchmark results can be compared across different platforms.

There are a number of unique challenges in creating sound and meaningful benchmarks for virtualized systems:

• Capture the key performance characteristics of virtual systems
• Ensure that the benchmark is representative of end user environments
• Make the benchmark specification platform neutral
• Define a single, easy to understand metric
• Provide a methodical way to measure scalability so that the same benchmark can be used for small servers as well as larger servers

Let’s take a look at these in turn…

Read the whole post at source.