Year: 2006

Ben Armstrong published another script in his endless serie, this time aimed to gather informations about Virtual Server 2005 virtual networks:

Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)

For Each vn in vs.VirtualNetworks
Wscript.Echo
Wscript.Echo “Virtual Network: ” & vn.name
Wscript.Echo “Packets sent: ” & vn.packetsSent
Wscript.Echo “Packets received: ” & vn.packetsReceived
Wscript.Echo
Next

Be sure to read the original post for updates and comments.

Update: Ben posted a little modification of the above script to collect historical statistics.

This script below will go through each virtual network on a physical computer and enumerate the amount of traffic seen each second for the last 60 seconds:

Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)

For Each vn in vs.VirtualNetworks
Wscript.Echo
Wscript.Echo “Virtual Network: ” & vn.name

Wscript.Echo
Wscript.Echo “Packets sent history: ”
For Each stat in vn.PacketsSentHistory
Wscript.StdOut.Write stat
Wscript.StdOut.Write “,”
Next

Wscript.Echo
Wscript.Echo “Packets received history: ”
For Each stat in vn.PacketsReceivedHistory
Wscript.StdOut.Write stat
Wscript.StdOut.Write “,”
Next
Wscript.Echo
Next

Also in this case be sure to read the original post for updates and comments.

Dennis Zimmer, owner of german blog VMachine.de, wrote a book in german language about VMware ESX, GSX servers and Microsoft Virtual Server.

VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server Release Date: September, 2005 ISBN: 3898427013 Edition: 1 Pages: 612

You can read a sample chapter here.

Note: this book will not appear on the Virtualization Bookshelf cause is not in English language.

On February 27th 2006 VMware launched one of the coolest challenge IT communities ever saw in modern times: creating the slimmest, fastest, most useful and open source virtual machine ever. Something which can be used by anyone worldwide for free, simply downloading powering on the VMware Player, and which the company calls Virtual Appliance.

The challenge, originally called VMware Ultimate Challenge, is so cool surely for the high objective but most of all for final prize: $200,000 for winners (half of them only for the first place).

The first phase of the challenge, the virtual machine submission, is going to close (the final day is set for May 26th) and, even if it propagated in the IT world like an earthquake, until now there are no news at all.

It’s quite understandable every competitor is afraid of disclosing his idea too early and permit others to get in at last minute and, with enough manpower, clone it, but at this point quite everybody is asking how many registrations VMware recorded and how many submissions they received…

A partial answer has been given by Michael Blonsky, Senior Manager of Virtual Appliances and ISV Solutions at VMware, which revealed on a VMTN forum, at the end of April, his company recorded almost 1,200 registrations but not even a single submission.

This means that VMware will have to face a massive upload near the deadline, and have to work hard to publish all submissions on the Virtual Appliances Directory.

If really all 1,200 (maybe more since another 15 days have passed) registrants will submit one virtual machine (but I heard some of them wanting to submit more than one) VMTN Community readers and official judging panel will have a huge work to recognize top virtual appliances.

The winners will be announced on August 14th: will 2,5 months be enough to choose?

CMPnet Asia published an interesting interview with David Wagner, Director of Solution Marketing for Capacity Management and Provisioning at BMC.

In the interview Wagner points out there are many challenges to front in virtualization and not every company is aware of all of them:

…
There are IT organizations that are very aware of the challenges of the management and there are those at the other end of the spectrum that think of virtualization as just another platform to manage. I think the ones that think of that way are doing themselves a disservice because there are some unique risks associated with virtualized environments that don’t exist in the physical environment or are at least not as significant.

I would classify these risks in really two main categories. One is all the risks associated with change. The whole reason there are risks associated with change is because when you make changes you need to know, what the current state is, so that if and when problems do occur, you can revert back to the point before the change is made or you can inform the right people so that they can use tools to diagnose the problem based on the knowledge of what the current configuration is. The unique thing about virtualized environments is the environment’s configuration itself is changing over time. So in virtual environments, you have applications that might be running on one physical machine one day and another one another day — or one virtual machine (VM) here or VMs are brought in and out service.

This is a whole new paradigm and it creates a whole new set of availability risks and downstream management challenges.

The other major bucket associated with virtualization challenges is one that simply does not exist in isolated physical environments — capacity risk. If you previously had an environment where you had two different applications running on two different physical servers you could be pretty well certain they weren’t going to cause problems for each other from a performance standpoint because they had their own resources. If one application required 30 percent of CPU at 9:30 in the morning to meet response time guarantees, it could because it had its own dedicated physical box. And if the other one needed 40 percent at 9:30 in the morning, that was fine. But if you combine them both and they are both running on a shared hardware platform in two separate virtual machines, if they both need access to the same physical resource at the same time, by definition one of them is going to have to wait so that is a new risk that didn’t exist previously.

So previously, the capacity risk of industry standard architectures was really a cost issue. You just threw more hardware at it and knew that risk was solved. But throwing more hardware at it here doesn’t solve the problem because now you are making things share resources that didn’t used to, so now you need to plan for that…

Read the whole interview at source.

If you already saw my 2005 last day’s post you know that virtualization.info is a witness of virtualization huge grow we are seeing in these last few years.

But even covering all available news about Egenera, IBM, Leostream, Microsoft, Parallels, PlateSpin, SWsoft, Sun, Virtual Iron, vizioncore, VMware, Xen and all others players of this exciting market, virtualization.info is not yet the biggest observer of how it is changing.
The biggest one is obviously the most used search engine of these last years: Google.

Google just launched a new service, Google Trends, which I found simply amazing to track and understand how the news buzz around virtualization raised during time, underlying most hot announcement for one or more requested keywords.

I started checking the word virtualization:

then tried with VMware:

and finally tried with Xen:

Looking at them together shows even more interesting details:

Note that I preferred focus bottom tabs on Languages, cause I find this information absolutely new and interesting, spreading light, maybe, on totally unsuspectable markets.

I would like to also add Microsoft, but there is no way to include them reducing focus just on virtualization (if I specify a keyword like Virtual Server 2005, I have to use same criteria even with VMware, which would provide unreliable results).

IT Week published a very brief review of vizioncore flagship product: esxRanger Pro, rating it 5/5 stars and reporting this verdict:

EsxRanger Pro is an excellent application to make backups of virtual machines hosted by VMware’s ESX Server system.

It benefits from a low price and the ability to make hot-backups. However, it requires a Windows host and cannot back up direct to tape.

Read it at source.

Next time IT Week should check better products names it reviews: Vizioncore is vizioncore and EsxRanger is esxRanger. I know: I pretend precision with names.

To support its launch of virtualization outsourcing services INS published a survey conducted among 100 IT professionals about top issues arising with server virtualization adoption.

Reported issues are classified in this rank:

• Lack of staff expertise
• Identifying application that are unaffected by virtualization
• Demonstrating ROI
• Ongoing growth management
• Managing the virtualized infrastructure
• Security concerns

Read the whole survey here.

IBM Redbooks departement released another very cool book, this time about IBM research and development on grid computing:

This IBM WhitepaperRedpaper redbook discusses the IBM Global Account Worldwide Grid (IGA WW Grid), an infrastructure for Grid computing deployed on the IBM intranet. The IGA WW Grid is a global network of heterogenous rsources to enable internal business applications for Grid computing. Using virtualization, the IGA WW Grid is composed of IBM zSeries and pSeries servers distributed across the globe.

In this book, we discuss:

• Benefits provided by the IGA WW Grid
• Components of the IGA WW Grid
• Scheduling workloads on the Grid
• Enabling applications to run on the Grid

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Overview
• Chapter 2 – Grid management center
• Chapter 3 – Virtual file system
• Chapter 4 – Grid resource controller
• Chapter 5 – Grid services
• Chapter 6 – Installing to virtual file system
• Chapter 7 – Application deployment on the Grid

Download it here.

On June 16, at the Enteprise Hotel in Milan, I will present for the first time Akimbi Slingshot to italian press, in an event sponsored by italian distributor Systematika.

The event is titled: Automazione e Ottimizzazione di una Infrastruttura Virtuale
(Virtual Infrastructure Automation and Optimization)

The event is open just for press journalists.

For details about how to register contact them.

Quoting from the Sun official annoucement:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the Sun N1 Advanced Architecture for SAP Solutions to provide end-to-end provisioning and management of SAP applications across virtualized heterogeneous environments, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS).

Sun and SAP have collaborated to create this product that can streamline customers’ IT processes and help reduce overall management complexity and operating costs, while improving resource utilization and enhancing application availability.
…
The new offering gives customers a total Sun solution for SAP Adaptive Computing landscapes. The N1 Advanced Architecture for SAP Solutions is certified for compliance with SAP Adaptive Computing for managing SAP NetWeaver applications, which helps customers to further simplify their hardware and software infrastructure and drive down overall complexity to new lows. SAP customers can take advantage of the N1 Advanced Architecture for SAP Solutions to virtualize and manage their heterogeneous data center applications. This includes backup, archiving or other E-Business Solutions, while using SAP Adaptive Computing Controller.