Year: 2008

It’s not a secret that one of the most wanted innovations coming with VMware Infrastructure 4 is the new pluggable virtual network. Many customers are specially waiting for the first 3rd party virtual switch that Cisco will offer to leverage the new opportunity: the Nexus 1000V.

Tomorrow the company will host a public webcast where several new technologies related to virtualization are discussed and demoed. The Nexus 1000V is among them and will be shown in action while networking a bunch of VI 4 virtual machines:

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It may be just a coincidence but the just released Fedora 10 doesn’t include Xen. And this happens just a month after Red Hat unveiled its new virtualization strategy, adopting KVM and acquiring the startup that maintains it: Qumranet.

The reason behind this unexpected drop is explained in the official project newsletter:

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Yesterday VMware announced its Q3 2008 earnings, the first report presented by the new CEO Paul Maritz.

During the last quarter the company scored $472 million revenue equal to an increase of 32% from the previous year.
The aggregated revenue of these three quarters of 2008 is 50% more than the same period of 2007.

In details:

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Microsoft finally released the second version of its enterprise console for Hyper-V: System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.

This new version brings a wide range of improvements including a new user interface (both the console and the web self-service portal) but it’s specially interesting for three main new features:

1. it’s able to manage VMware ESX hosts through the VirtualCenter APIs (this includes performing even complex tasks like VMotion).
   
2. it includes a new capacity planning engine called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO), which continuously monitors the virtual infrastructure and suggests how virtual machines should be improved (upgrading the virtual hardware) or moved across the available virtualization host to achieve the best performance.
   The PRO engine is influenced by some pre-defined policies and SCVMM administrators can decide to approve/ignore each suggestion or automate the process.
   Additionally, PRO is extensible through 3rd party management packs, which can give further indications to SCVMM on how to move workload in the virtual data center.
3. it’s able to apply most of its features to all supported platforms. This means that the PRO engine and the Powershell scripting work with Hyper-V and ESX at the same time.

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Under the name of vCenter Administrator Portal (VCAP) VMware has silently release the technology preview of one of the most important products of its entire portfolio: a super-console able to centrally manage multiple, independent VMware Infrastructures.

When a product like VI 3.5 is deployed in a large-scale infrastructure there are high chances (because of different security domains for example) that each department will need full ownership of a VirtualCenter and its ESX hosts.
In other cases instead a big provider may want to offer to its customers independent installations.

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The Microsoft premiere conference about Windows internals, WinHEC, is approaching (this year is planned for Nov. 5-9) and the agenda is being populated with several sessions about Hyper-V.

Some of the abstracts unveil upcoming features like the capability to share the same LUN for Hyper-V virtual machines and the native Windows support for the VHD format:

Windows Virtualization and Cluster Shared Volumes – ENT-T588

Presenter(s): Jeff Mastro, Bryon Surace

Windows Server 2008 R2 will introduce a new feature for Failover Clustering called Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). CSV is an enhancement that allows multiple virtual hard disk (VHD) images to be mounted on a single logical volume. It allows the migration of virtual machines from one physical host server to another with minimal downtime. This session discusses the architecture and implementation details of CSV and illustrates its utility in Windows virtualization deployments.

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Recently Dell published a very interesting benchmark measuring the Microsoft Hyper-V performance on its new R900 server (with Intel Quad-Core and Six-Core Xeon) against HP ProLiant DL585 G2 (with Intel Quad-Core).

The top R900 system features 4 x E7450 Xeon @ 2.4Ghz and 128GB RAM.

Such system handled 40 Hyper-V virtual machines (1 vCPU and 2GB vRAM), each running a Windows Server 2008 64bit guest OS with SQL Server 2005 64bit.
The overall CPU utilization with such configuration hits 80%, serving 74,084 orders per minute.

Compared with the other two systems this R900 performed 27% better than the HP machine (which can serve no more than 26 virtual machines) and 8% better than the other Dell machine with Quad-Core CPUs (serving no more than 30 virtual machines).

This is one of the first performance study for Hyper-V and it’s worth of a full read.

Today Veeam releases the new Enterprise edition of its Reporter 3.0.

As the name suggests this edition has features specifically designed for large-scale deployments management.

The new capability to report about configuration change is specially interesting: Veeam is slowly entering the Change Management segment by tracking what happens to virtual machines settings over time, who’s their owner and when they were added to the infrastructure (useful to keep track of the VM sprawl).

The new edition is available as trial here.

Last week Gartner published a great interview with Ian Pratt, CTO of Xen, Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix (formerly co-founder of XenSource) and Chairman of Xen.org.

During the interview Pratt answers several questions about cloud computing and next steps for virtualization. Some answers are specially interesting:

Q: How real is the vision of cloud computing for the average organization today? Are we set to see a mass migration of IT functions toward external suppliers?

A: These things never happen as the people who are selling them propose, but I think there will be a movement over time. There are already plenty of startups whose entire IT infrastructure is cloud hosted and so they don’t have any physical infrastructures. Clearly, companies such as Amazon are providing a service that is useful.
But it’s a far bigger deal to take things that are working and running well in a data center and then try to push them out into the cloud. There are obviously going to be a lot of concerns around security, and you have to do a good job of convincing people that you’re going to look after their data in a secure fashion. I think the clouds that we have today are capable of evolving to do that. We have hypervisors. We know how to do a lot of these things, and I think that kind of strong isolation will evolve and be built into these cloud computing farms over time so they can provide those kind of guarantees: You can really create virtual data centers within a cloud and have confidence your data is being looked after, both when it’s on disk and flying across the network, as well as when it’s actually sitting in memory.

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One of the most exciting news announced at the VMworld 2008 last month in Las Vegas is the new pluggable virtual network that VMware Infrastructure 4 will introduce in 2009.

The first 3rd party virtual switch available for ESX 4 will be the Cisco Nexus 1000v.
The product is not yet in public beta but Cisco is already showing it to selected customers.

We are delighted to announce that virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab, our on-demand data center for virtualization professionals, has been selected as the demo facility for the Cisco Bootcamp about Nexus technologies in Switzerland.

The event will take place Oct. 21-23 and will show for the first time in the country a Nexus 5000 / Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) on a unified fabric (UF) in conjunction with VMware ESX environments.

Unified fabric (UF) is the overall name of the brand-new technologies that consists of: Datacenter Ethernet, Fibre-channel over Ethernet and high-speed 10G Networking for Datacenter LAN, SAN and cluster interconnect.

Unfortunately the Nexus will not be available for rent after this bootcamp, but stay tuned as we’ll fill this hole very soon. Also, look for other exciting announcements coming about Rent-A-Lab before the end of the year.