Year: 2007

Besides the good Infrastructure Planning and Design for Application and Server Virtualization, Microsoft just published another, smaller guide to introduce designing and deployment issues of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007.

Table of Contents includes:

• About VMM Components
• Goals and Objectives
• Features of VMM
• Planning for VMM Deployment
• Supported Configurations
• Network Considerations
• Storage Considerations
• Security Considerations
• General Security Considerations
• Required User Privileges
• About Assigning Ports in VMM
• Planning for VMM Components and Features
• Planning for the VMM Library
• Planning for Hosts
• Planning for Host Groups
• Planning for Monitoring and Reporting
• Planning for Self-Service

While it’s very brief (39 pages) it will be useful for all SCVMM newcomers.

Download the whole paper at the source.

It’s well-known that virtualization platforms hosted on Windows (like VMware Server, Microsoft Virtual Server, etc.) may use the Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) to perform a hot backup of running virtul machines.

There are several obstacles in doing so:

• Some virtualization platforms are not VSS-aware (like VMware Server)
• Some backup solutions are VSS-aware but cannot perform the hot backup (like Microsoft NTBackup)
• At today no application is officially supported by its ISV in such scenario

Despite that customers find this approach so much better than turning off each virtual machine, performing the backup and powering it on again, that several solutions are evaluted today.

The most popular (and expensive) one requires the use of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and the new System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2007. But Redmond magazine published today a new article which promises to accomplish the task with a simple, free script:

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Backup software that supports VS Writer can back up running virtual server VMs by creating a volume shadow copy that contains each of the VMs’ open files and then backing up the VM files associated with the shadow copy.

If your backup software does not support VSS and VS Writer, then you can still reliably back up Virtual Server VMs from the physical host using a vbscript. To back up running virtual machines, the script needs to perform the following tasks:

1. Create a snapshot of server’s volume that stores the virtual machines.
2. Mount the snapshot to a temporary drive letter.
3. Copy the virtual machine files to your preferred backup location — either a locally mounted drive or a UNC path.

With that in mind, let’s look at implementing a scripted solution. Steps 1 and 2 are the toughest, and rely on vshadow.exe to create and manage the shadow copy. Vshadow.exe is included in the VSS Software Development Kit (SDK). So, to script a live backup solution, you will first need to download the VSS SDK…

Read the whole article at the source.

VMware just published a very interesting whitepaper describing benchmarks of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition SP2 on a four-way HP ProLiant DL 585 with ESX Server 3.0:

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This paper describes transaction processing workload performance in virtual machines using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and VMware Infrastructure 3. This performance study was conducted at the HP Strategic Alliances Engineering (SAE) lab in Cupertino. The primary goal is to prove that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can successfully handle enterprise-level transaction-processing workloads when running inside VMware virtual machines. To facilitate planning for server consolidation, this study presents sizing data and data on system resource utilization at various load levels for uniprocessor (UP) virtual machines, two-way SMP virtual machines, and four-way SMP virtual machines. This study also compares the performance of UP, two-way, and four-way SMP virtual machines across 32-bit and 64-bit virtual environments…

Read the whole paper at the source.

It’s worth to note that Microsoft supports SQL Server inside third party virtual machines, while Oracle is not: the company preferred to develop its own hypervisor to control how customers embrace virtualization rather than officially supporting VMware environments.

Is it just a case today VMware publishes a paper about SQL Server?

Following a great technical paper published in August 2006, VMware releases today a softer version describing differences between three approaches used today in hardware virtualization.

It’s an interest reading for virtualization newcomers which also compares performances between VMware, Microsoft, Parallels and all the Xen-based implementations.

Read the whole paper at the source (reading the 2006 technical version is highly recommended).

The US startup Thinsy Corporation joins today the growing crowd of virtualization vendors which are offering commercial products based on Xen hypervisor. Thinsy is the 7th commercial implementaion, immediately after the just announced Oracle VM.

Their EnSpeed VMM has yet to reach version 1.0, but already introduces a different approach in how virtual machines availability is granted: instead of relying on a NAS/SAN facility, this implementation uses a peer-to-peer disk synchronization technology called LiveSync, which allows virtual machines failover onto a secondary host if primary one fails.

Along with it Thinsy aslo provides a web based management solution called EnSpeed VM Orchestrator which provides basic operational capabilities.

Both products can be download here (it’s unknown which kind of restrictions are in place or which will be the final price).

In early August virtualization.info broke the news about Infiniband support in the upcoming ESX Server 3.5.

Now that the product is about to ship, Mellanox officially announces its involvement:

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, server and storage interconnect products, today announced that later this year VMware is expected to provide enablement for Mellanox InfiniBand-based adapters in the newest release of VMware Infrastructure, which includes VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VMware VirtualCenter 2.5. The InfiniBand LAN networking and block storage drivers are based on the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version 1.2.5 and were developed by Mellanox, VMware and other participants of the VMware Community Source program.

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When InfiniBand I/O adapters are used with VMware ESX Server 3.5, a single adapter can replace multiple gigabit Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs while maintaining or enhancing I/O throughput from virtual machines. For example, SAN throughput from a virtual machine can reach up to 1500 Megabytes per second (MB/s) or it can be shared linearly across multiple virtual machines, e.g., about 400 MB/s per virtual machine across four virtual machines on the same VMware ESX Server host. This is equivalent to using four 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs, one dedicated to each of the four virtual machines. This I/O consolidation and scale out, which results in significant cost and power savings, is achieved transparently as operating systems and applications running in the virtual machines continue to run over traditional virtual NIC and HBA interfaces available in VMware virtual machines. Network and storage I/O provisioning for virtual machines and features like VMware VMotion are also configured transparently using VMware VirtualCenter 2.5, which exposes only the familiar virtual NIC and virtual HBA interfaces available over the unified InfiniBand I/O adapter. Similarly, features such as high availability and migration of virtual machines are preserved as if they were operating on Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs…

Massimo Re Ferrè, IT Architect at IBM, published on his personal blog an article comparing InfiniBand with 10Gbit Ethernet which is a worth reading.

Quoting from the RingCube official announcement:

RingCube Technologies Inc., the leading provider of the secure, managed digital workspace, today announced the appointment of a seasoned enterprise technology executive, Pete Foley, to serve as the company’s chief executive officer and president. Foley most recently was president and CEO of Port Authority Technologies, an information leak prevention company that was acquired by WebSense in early 2007.

An experienced business leader with extensive knowledge of the enterprise and security software industries, Foley previously served as chairman and founding CEO of InfoBlox, a successful network security company. He also co-founded two other companies, Sysix Technologies, a Chicago-based systems integrator, and Faber Consulting, a business intelligence consulting firm. Foley holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Political Science from Yale University…

Despite official appreciation statements, Oracle announcement of its own hypervisor has probably been a bad hit for VMware.

Just the same day Oracle VM is made available in fact, VMware decides to publish a long and comprehensive post on the corporate blog about why ESX Server is the preferred choice to run Oracle database.

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One of the best kept secrets is just how well Oracle performs on VMware ESX. This didn’t happen by accident – there are a number of features and performance optimizations in the VMware ESX server architecture, specifically for databases.

In this blog, I’ll walk through the top ten most important features for getting the best database performance. Here are a few of the performance highlights:

• Near Native Performance: Oracle databases run at performance similar to that of a physical system
• Extreme Database I/O Scalability: VMware ESX Server’s thin hypervisor layer can drive over 63,000 database I/Os per second (fifty times the requirement of a typical database)
• Multi-core Scaling: Scale up using SMP virtual machines and multiple database instances
• Large Memory : Scalable memory – 64GB per database, 256GB per host

We’ve continued to invest a great deal of work towards optimizing Oracle performance on VMware, because it’s already one of the most commonly virtualized applications. The imminent ESX 3.5 release is our best database platform to date, with several new advanced optimizations.

In this blog article we’d like to explain the unique and demanding nature of database applications such as Oracle produces and show the performance capabilities of ESX Server on this type of workload…

It’s highly relevant that VMware dedicates one my-solution-is-better-than-yours post on the corporate blog to Oracle rather than Microsoft, which announced final name, SKUs and (pretty aggressive) price, $28, for its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-V.

It’s also highly relevant that VMware details every single aspect of why ESX Server is the best solution for Oracle customers, but forget to face the support issue, the only real point of the story. Oracle VM FAQs report:

Will Oracle support customers who are using Oracle products on other x86 server virtualization environments?
Oracle VM is the only x86-based server virtualization environment on which Oracle products are supported.

Update: VMware is so serious in its answer that built up at light speed an entire portal about Oracle on ESX Server scenarios.

It’s clear that while the company has to preserve its customer base, it also sees a new opportunity to pitch its products to all those customers who refused so far to migrate databases into virtual machines. Oracle VM existence validates this scenario and VMware hopes to take advantage of it.

It’s well known Sun is working to port Xen open source hypervisor on Solaris since November 2005.

The name, xVM, and the release timeframe, Q2 2008, were disclosed during these last months, but only today, at Oracle OpenWorld conference, Sun decided to officially announce its upcoming virtualization platform:

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Customers tell us the last thing they want is a proprietary vendor at the core of their next generation datacenter architectures, which is why Sun is pleased to commit nearly $2 billion in R&D to the success of its xVM program, a free and open software platform and comprehensive management offering to virtualize and manage mixed environments running platform software from the Java, OpenSolaris and Linux software communities, along with Microsoft Windows, across HP, Dell, IBM and Sun hardware.

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Red Hat and Sun are collaborating to expand interoperability and customer choice. Customers seeking a free and open source virtualization platform that ensures interoperability and avoids proprietary vendor lock in, can look to Sun and Red Hat solutions. Sun supports Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy and Red Hat supports Sun’s xVM strategy, both of which extend the reach and value of open source. Red Hat and Sun will ensure customers mutual certification and customer support across our virtualization offerings. In addition, Sun and Red Hat are committed to working together to foster libvirt (www.libvirt.org), an open source community for cross-platform virtualization management, to enable Sun, Red Hat and 3rd party management tools to seamlessly interoperate across each company’s virtualization platforms.

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As part of Sun’s commitment to interoperability, Sun xVM will run on multi-vendor x86/64 and SPARC processor-based systems from leading hardware vendors including Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Sun.

Sun xVM Ops Center and Sun xVM Server will be the first of the xVM family of products introduced to the market. Sun xVM Ops Center will deliver a unified management console that will help users to manage both the virtualized and physical components of their IT environment. Sun xVM Server, Sun’s virtualization server, will include code derived from work of the Xen open source community. Sun xVM Server will help extend the benefits of technologies like Predictive Self-Healing software and ZFS to Windows and Linux guest operating system instances, previously only available to Solaris OS users…

The complete Jonathan Schwartz keynote is available here.

Sun also launched an online portal for the community that will grow around xVM.

It’s worth to note that Sun clarified this is just the beginning: the company already launched its own connection broker, Sun VDI, it’s working on network virtualization, it has hardware which could size specifically for virtualization purposes, it has a partnership with Microsoft for Hyper-V interoperability, and it may merge existing OS virtualization technology, Solaris Containers, into a new powerful and flexible computing plaftorm (a goal that only Microsoft is able to achieve as well).

In short Sun is trying to do what IBM didn’t even try despite similar a position: using the Xen opportunity to builld a comprehensive virtualization infrastructure and return to be a prime player in the IT industry.

The recent announcement of Oracle own hypervisors rised new concerns among customers about an uncontrolled prolification of virtualization plaforms: Oracle VM is the 6th Xen-based commercial implementation (after Citrix, Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat and upcoming Sun xVM), and we still are waiting other virtualization platforms from Microsoft (Hyper-V), SWsoft (Parallels Server), innotek (hyperkernel) and even Phoenix Technologies (HyperCore).

Despite crowded space, it’s likely we’ll see even more hypervisors in the near future, thanks to market forecasts and lower cost to build the technology (thanks to AMD and Intel current and upcoming CPU enhancements).

In such scenario the need for management solutions able to support multiple virtualization vendors is becoming concrete. Along with the already concrete need to operate the virtual data center in a rational and more automated way.

So while companies like VMware are slowly building up their virtual machines lifecycle management solutions by acquisitions (Akimbi first, Dunes Technologies later), smaller startups are emerging fast just to address this challenge.

It’s the case of Fortisphere, a US company founded in 2006 and based in WA.

Fortisphere is still in stealth mode but virtualization.info has learned some exclusive informations about the company.

The startup is funded with $10 million by Fairhaven Capital and Globespan Capital Partners, while it’s managed by Michael Harper, the CEO with IBM experience, and John Suit, the founder and CTO coming from SilentRunner (acquired by CA).

It’s worth to note that Jim Melvin, Vice President of Marketing and Security Solutions at RSA (now part of EMC acquisition, which also controls VMware), has a place in the Board of Directors as well.

Fortisphere is about to enter the market with Virtual Essentials, a suite of tools to control the virtual machines lifecycle.

Besides expected features like multiple virtualization hosts management, virtual machines history tracking and control of its expiration time, guest OS profiling and automated customization on deployment, etc., the company also introduces ain interesting concept called Smart Growth.

Smart Growth is a set of best practices that shaped Virtual Essentials development so to limit virtual machines sprawl and lose of control.

To succeed the company strategy is to support VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors since early days, but there may be some interesting extensions, through a partnership with virtual machines online builder rPath.

Fortisphere may have to compete with VMware on the long run, but at launch date its direct opponents are other startups like Embotics, just launched at VMworld 2007, and ManageIQ, still in stealth mode.

In a short amount of time this market may see even more competitors, like companies which today offer virtual lab management solutions (namely Surgient and VMLogix), as soon as they decide to extend capabilities of their products.

Fortisphere will probably launch at Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, last week of this month, or at VMworld EMEA, last week of February 2008

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar, which already includes it, will be updated to reflect the status change.

Update: The company just unlocked the official website to the public.