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Virtual Iron releases today a new minor release which introduces interesting new features:
Download a trial here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.
Guest star authors: Ronald Oglesby, Director of Architecture-Virtualization Services, and Dan Pianfetti, Principal Consultant, at GlassHouse Technologies.
Patch Tuesday for VMware, sounds kind of silly doesn’t it? At least it did to us prior to doing some research on the patches coming out of VMware for ESX Server. This all started a few days ago when we started looking at a network issue some VMs were having. We then (after sorting through the available downloads/patches, and talking to support) found there was a patch for this issue.
Nice. Great. Why wasn’t this installed? Too many patches? Admins don’t think they need them?
Whatever the reason it is starting to become a trend in some ESX environments; not all patches are installed by the admins. The reason for this is pretty simple; we already have patch Tuesday for Microsoft Servers we are dealing with, patches for applications that app owners install, SQL, Exchange, etc patches and of course desktops patching. Sorting through ESX patches is often a secondary job for Windows administrators tasked with maintain ESX, and if ESX is working, patching it, falls to the bottom of the pile. I mean this is VMware’s ESX server! The product that we used to tell people didn’t need patching that often since there wasn’t much code to have to patch. But recently we have started to notice a change, and have had to stop telling people that patches for ESX were few and far between.
To be rational about our assertion we started by looking at the available data on patches for ESX. We couldn’t get data all the way back to ESX 1.5 since VMware’s site has been revamped several times and those patches are not available, and quite honestly who saves patches all the way back to 2003/4 anyway. But, what we found in the data was pretty telling. The first item we noticed was sheer number of patches for ESX 3.0.1: 68! Sixty-Eight patches in the course of about a year. Of course they were released in about 11 groups, at an average of about 7 patches per release date (per the VMware website).
Of those 68 patches; 17 were considered Critical patches (an average of 1.4 per release), 21 were security related (average of 1.75 per release) and 30 General patches averaging 2.5 patches per release date. The other thing we noticed (besides the number of patches) was the frequency at which patches were released. Essentially the time between patches / release dates continues to shrink.
The chart above shows the average number of calendar days between patches by version of ESX Server. If you are an ESX expert, you will note some minor versions of ESX that were not widely adopted or had a small number of fixes, have been filtered from this list. The other thing to notice is the red normalized line. This normalized line is used ONLY for 3.0.0 and 3.0.1. After 3.0.0 was released there wasn’t a patch available for about 100 days. We believe this is due to the slow adoption of 3.0.0 at first release and the normalized line only takes into account time between patches after the release of the first patch for that OS.
So why make this chart and look at the time between patches? Let’s take a hypothetical server built on July 2nd of 2007, 5 months ago almost exactly. Since being built on that day and put into production that server would have been put into maintenance mode and patched/updated eight times. That’s right eight (8) times in 5 months. How did this happen? Let’s look at the following timeline:
Wow huh? This server has been put into maintenance mode on an average of every 19 calendar days (less than three weeks) over 5 months… Now expand that to an environment with a couple of 10 node clusters?
At this point, some readers may point out that the general patches may not be needed by all implementations. This may be one reason VMware has separated the patches instead of releasing one big patch/update on each release date containing all the fixes. While it is true that not ALL general patches are needed, most are. If you look at some of the general patches for 3.0.1 or 3.0.2 you will see that they affect some of the basic components of ESX that everyone uses or contain fixes for common use components like iSCSI updates, updates to the e1000 driver, a fix for time gains in Windows etc. So these general patches cannot be ignored in most environments, and if you have failed to install one (like the Windows Time issue fix let’s say) and then experience the problem, it is your head on the chopping block for not patching and keeping up to date.
I guess the point of this article is to wonder what is behind the increase in the number and frequency of patches for ESX. As we stated earlier, we used to tell clients that this (ESX) was a piece of infrastructure, with very few moving parts and therefore very few patches when compared to Windows, and can generally be treated like an appliance. The issue we now see is that in VMware’s quest to support more hardware, add more features, and keep MS at bay with their advanced technology, they seem to be focusing more on “which whiz-bang can we put in today”, rather than “how can we make this the most stable enterprise platform available?” I mean at what point did we get rid of the idea of a “small” hypervisor and not something stuffed so full of components that need to be patched every 18.75 days (in the case of the example server).
We are not here to beat VMware over the head for patching/updating their product. Obviously if something is broken it needs to be fixed. Instead we are wondering where their focus is and point out a larger problem in the virtualization world. Companies are moving unbelievably fast in an attempt to create new features, stay ahead of the game and basically be the leader in whatever virtualization niche they are in. But at what cost? And is it worth it to the client? If a client is buying into the idea of server virtualization as a piece of infrastructure (like a SAN or a switch) only to see the types of patching we see in Windows, they are going to get smacked in the face with the reality that these are SERVERS. The reality that the vendors are sticking so much into the OS that patches are going to happen just as often as with Windows Servers… Or, if the client believes the stability/rock solidness and skips a majority of general patches, they wind up with goofy time issues or other problems with iSCSI, until they catch up.
VMware, the largest player in the game, seems to be moving at such a fast pace that they are soon going to need a Patch Tuesday (kind of like MS). Patch Tuesday wasn’t invented because people hate Mondays and needed a reason to hate Tuesdays. Patch Tuesday was needed because patches just came out randomly from different groups and different times, requiring numerous resources to constantly review patches and implement them. Instead they release the patches all at once, and Windows admins can simply slam them all down at simultaneously. Sooner or later (if the trend continues) we may need to do the same thing for ESX and I’ll bet VMware is seeing the same thing. Notice how patching tools are in the works for ESX (and some pieces are already available in the OS)? And third party tools are already available to attempt to make it easier for Windows Admins trying to keep up with their ESX environment.
Maybe it’s time to slow down and look at this as a QA issue? Maybe it’s time to stop thinking about these platforms as rock solid, few moving parts systems? Maybe it’s better for us not to draw attention to it, and instead let it play out and the markets decide whether all this patching is a good thing or not. Obviously patching is a necessary evil, and maybe because we are so used to it in the Windows world, we have ignored this so far. But a patch every 18.75 days for our “hypothetical” server is a bit much, don’t you think?
About the authors
Ron Oglesby is the Director of Architecture-Virtualization Services at GlassHouse Technologies and the co-author of ESX Server – Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3- Advanced Technical Design Guide.
Dan Pianfetti is a Principal Consultant at GlassHouse Technologies and specializes in VMware implementations in enterprise environments.
Update: VMware answered this post on its own corporate blog.
A great help in virtualization projects comes from return on investment (ROI) calculators that vendors sometimes publish online for free. While they are always fine tuned to justify the new technology adoption, they still remain a great starting point.
In April VMware released one of the best tool in this category, despite it only covered server consolidation scenarios.
But the new version released today is also able to calculate ROI in virtual lab automation and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.
The fact the calculator can now export in Excel format along with PDF, makes it the tool of choice for any virtualization plan.
Access it here.
After appointing a new CEO and ending all lawsuits, Endeavors Technology (formerly doing business as Tadpole Technology and Stream Theory) is doing notable progresses in gaining back a relevant position in the market.
The company first launched a website, Stream 24-7, which distributes for free pre-virtualized popular applications, then it announced a new solution, Application Jukebox, which will provide an out-of-the-box experience to develop, distribute and consume virtualized and streamed applications.
Now Endeavors goes even further, launching a free edition of its product flagship product, AppExpress, which includes both the streaming server and the application virtualization client: AppExpress Lite.
Download it here.
After securing a tight partnership with VMware, mostly because of upcoming Site Recovery Manager, NetApp now looks for its competitors.
Quoting from the official announcement:
Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class software solutions for server virtualization, today announced that storage solutions from NetApp are now certified for Virtual Iron’s server virtualization software…
The way vendors sold (and customers adopted) virtualization over the years evolved in an interesting way.
At the early beginning of VMware era, few years ago, vendors use to push the technology as an efficient way to support legacy operating systems and applications, or how we say today to achieve maximum application availability.
Unfortunately this approach gets traction only around operating systems replacement cycles (and this is why Windows Vista and imminent Windows Server 2008 are going to represent a rare opportunity to sell more virtualization).
So over time was clear that server consolidation could be a much better selling point, producing a faster and more concrete return on investment, using the unique excuse of saving the environment (under the green computing flag).
But there is an application for virtualization which is even more easier to sell, more interesting for customers because it addresses a fundamental challenge in every infrastructure and provides the highest ROI: disaster recovery.
Some vendors before others realized that virtualization can revolution the security world providing a more effective way to achieve business continuity.
PlateSpin is one of the first to see the opportunity and starts to sell its popular P2V migration solution as a convenient way to do live backup of expensive physical server into cheap virtual machines. But while its a good solution, any P2V migration tool still requires a virtualization infrastructure and a solid understanding of the technology. Something which is not appealing for companies just looking for a disaster recovery solution.
So today PlateSpin announces an out-of-the-box solution to achieve disaster recovery through virtualization, Forge, which is still based on its P2V migration technology but doesn’t require additional products or skills to be used.
Forge is a hardware appliance, based on Dell PowerEdge with a robust configuration (2-way Intel Quad Core at 2.6GHz, 16GB RAM, 6 x 1Gbit Ethernet cards and 2.5TB SATA drives in RAID5), with VMware ESX Server 3.0 and PlateSpin PowerConvert pre-installed aboard, and a brand new management interface.
Once plugged and configured the system performs live backup of up to 25 physical or virtual servers on continuous basis (incremental backup).
If something bad happens the administrator is informed through the web console or Blackberry email and the latest image of the protected machine gets recovered.
The recovery can happen on any chosen system, thanks to a PlateSpin technology, Workload Portability, which allows a virtual or physical machine to be restored on physical or virtual hardware.
Since testing DR plans is an expensive and time consuming task which few companies really do in the proper way, PlateSpin also introduced the capability to test the disaster recovery: Forge can restore all protected systems into an isolated environment so the entire plan can be verified without impacting on the normal business operations.
But the most interesting feature probably is the so called Failover Preparation: if, for any reasons, the IT manager feels that his infrastructure could suffer a fault, he can ask Forge to boot and prepare stand-by servers to have the shortest downtime possible.
PlateSpin will start distributing Forge in US starting from Jan 15, while rest of the world will have it no earlier than April 2008, at an unknown price.
virtualization.info has learned new tentative dates for all upcoming VMware products everybody hoped to have yesterday:
Massimo Re Ferrè, IT Architect at IBM, published on his personal blog another good article.
This time he compares features available for each virtualization platform available on the market, including VMware ESX Server, Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron, other Xen implementations from Novell and Red Hat, and even OS virtualization solutions SWsoft Virtuozzo and Sun Solaris Containers.
Read the comparison here.
Quoting from Network World:
…
The Forrester report — “x86 virtualization adopters hit the tipping point” — was released Friday and is based on a survey of 275 enterprise server decision-makers.
Previous Forrester research actually showed higher adoption of server virtualization, with 50% of IT shops using the technology in production and pilots in 2006.
…
The latest report finds that 37% of IT departments have virtualized servers already, and another 13% plan to do so by July 2008. An additional 15% think they will virtualize x86 servers by 2009…
Read the whole article at the source.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.
After ending the lawsuit with Endeavors Technologies in June, appointing a new CEO, AppStream is free to focus on product development, which started with 5.5.2 version in August.
Now the company introduces a Service Pack to enable two new features:
Download a trial here.