Year: 2008

Microsoft published a new 18-pages guide to setup virtual machines fail-over between two Hyper-V (now in Release Candidate 1) virtualization hosts.

Download it here.

In October, while ESXi (at that time called ESX Server 3i) was still in beta, Richard Garsthagen, Senior Evangelist at VMware, published an hack to get the command prompt and perform some tasks on the BusyBox shell used by the new lightweight hypervisor that are not mapped on the VirtualCenter GUI.

It seems that something changed in the RTM code, so Richard published another article with the new hack.

Just hit ALT-F1 during ESXi boot and type the word unsupported even if you don’t get a prompt do to that.

The keyword to enter this console mode tells everything: anything happening inside the shell is totally unsupported by VMware at today.

June 2nd I’ll be at the Nordic Virtualization Forum 2008 in Stockholm, giving a lecture about how the virtualization market is evolving.

My session will try to highlight which new virtualization technologies are emerging, how today’s and tomorrow’s virtualization approaches will combine and where they will be implemented.
And, as usual in my speeches, I’ll put a major emphasis on who are the old and new players.

I’ll be honored to speak along with some top performers: Kirk B. Skaugen (GM of Server Platform at Intel), Mike Neil (GM of Virtualization at Microsoft), Simon Crosby (CTO at Citrix), Reza Malekzadeh (Senior Director of Products at VMware), Avi Kuvity, (Lead Developer of KVM) and Brian Madden.

If you plan to attend the event please stop by and say hello: it’s always a great pleasure to meet virtualization.info readers in person!

Alessandro

(just in case you are interested but cannot attend, I’ll speak at other events this year. My full schedule is here)

A storage capacity management software company called MonoSphere recently introduced the interesting concept called dark storage: the storage space wasted by inefficient capacity allocation.

MonoSphere states that customers waste on average 30% of storage despite the yearly spending raises of 10% to 15% every year.

The raw storage becomes configured storage, then it’s mapped to a host server (allocated storage), then it’s recognized by the hardware (claimed storage), then it’s presented as volumes (assigned storage), and finally is used by the applications (used storage).
At each step MonoSphere recognizes inefficiency which prevent the optimal allocation of 90-95% of the available space.

Since virtualization introduces an additional abstraction level, it should aggravate the issue, so it’s not surprising that MonoSphere joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program and just announced support for ESX in their Storage Horizon 3.7.

The product recognizes and reports the dark storage, providing a cost analysis and a forecast of the storage usage and waste over time.
When used with VMware it highlights the relationship between the hosts, the VMs and the storage space.

Thanks to Jon William Toigo for the news.

Long Zheng just spotted a Microsoft job announcement which reveals how the company is building native support for virtual hard drives (VHDs) into its next operating system: codename Windows 7.

Do you want to join the team that is bringing virtualization into the mainstream? In Windows 7, our team will be responsible for creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs (virtual hard disks) natively. Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it.
…
Virtualization technology has been a great success with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. With native OS support on the horizon it will become an even greater hit. Our team is making this a reality in Windows 7. Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file. These are a few reasons why this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7–come help us achieve this goal…

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.

The recent round of funding may have had serious implications for Leostream which seems working to start from scratch.

For the second time in its history the company dropped a product from its portfolio.

The first one, once flagship product, was called Virtual Machine Controller (VMC): a cross-platform management supporting VMware and Microsoft virtualization platforms, shipped as virtual appliance.
Leostream dropped VMC somewhere at the end of 2006, after more than five years of development.

The second casualty is P > V Direct, a physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration tool that Leostream develops since more than four years and just disappeared from the company website these days.

The download page of the official website hints at an even worse scenario for customers, implying a possible drop of the last surviving product:

Note: We are currently re-evaluating our product line. Connection Broker trials are still available, but P2V trials have been withdrawn. We thank you for your patience during this transition.

The Leostream connection broker had a strange evolution so far, jumping from version 1.0 (released in August 2006) to version 5.0 in just one year and without interim version. 
Additionally, the VDI space is the most crowded at today, with at least ten different players, including the big ones VMware and Citrix.

A new change of focus for the company wouldn’t surprise too much in these conditions.

For a prospect customer there’s nothing better than a real-world implementation to realize the potential or a certain technology. And this is very true in an almost unexplored technology like virtualization.

Microsoft, which eats its own dog food since the Virtual Server 2005 era, just announced the complete migration of both MSDN and TechNet, two of the most popular web sites in the world, on virtual machines.

Microsoft kept the back-end database on physical boxes, but moved 100% of its IIS7 frond-ends on Hyper-V RC0 VMs with 4 virtual CPUs and 10GB RAM.
The virtualization hosts (no mention of the brand obviously) are powered by 2 Intel quad-core CPUs and 32GB RAM (2GB are reserved for the Windows Server 2008 parent partition).

The performance report after this migration is very interesting:

• Hyper-V CPU overhead (as measured by the parent partition utilization) was 5% to 6% with linear progression as the number of requests increased.
• CPU oversubscription (three four-processor VMs on an eight-processor physical server) resulted in 3% lower overall performance per physical server based on overall requests per second per 1 percent CPU.
• Requests per second per 1% CPU performance of MSDN over the previous physical server platform improved. This demonstrates to us the viability of efficient consolidation from dedicated older physical servers to shared virtualized platforms.
• Physical MSDN handled 21% more requests per second per 1% CPU than virtualized MSDN.

Since this data would be much more meaningful knowing some details about the guest OS workloads (which are not published), virtualization.info reached Microsoft and received the following numbers:

• the MSDN front-end serves more than 3 million page views per day
• the TechNet front-end serves more than 1 million page views per day

Read the whole report here.

It would be interesting reading something similar from VMware, which so far never disclosed anything about how its own technology is used inside the company.

This seems a transition period for marketing executives working in the virtualization industry.

Earlier this month Virtual Iron lost its Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Grandinetti, and just last week Surgient lost its Vice President of Marketing, Erik Josowitz.
Now it’s the Parallels turn which lose its Director of Corporate Communications, one the men behind the company’s success in the Apple market, Benjamin Rudolph.

Rudolph will move to Microsoft, heading up the enterprise public relations for Windows Vista/Windows 7.

VMware is known for being a little aggressive with competitors (namely Microsoft and Citrix) when they release new products.
Sometimes the company hits with public statements (like the ones against the Microsoft partnership with XenSource, against the Microsoft licensing policy for virtualization or against the Citrix acquisition of XenSource), other times they hit with private emails to the Sales partners (like the one against the Microsoft partnership with Citrix).

This time the target is the-once-great-partner Citrix and its just released XenDesktop.

The same day the product was finally released, VMware sent a letter to its partners completely destroying the value of the Citrix solution.
Among the other claims, VMware states that the product marketing message is misleading and confused the press, that the software is complex, poorly integrated and most of all built on a platform that has an uncertain future.

This last part obviously is the most interesting one.

In one of the previous attacks mentioned above, VMware already instilled the doubt that the Citrix hypervisor may be dumped by Microsoft as soon as Hyper-V becomes available, but now the company says something more:

Both Citrix and Microsoft have stated that Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor will replace XenServer. Customers who deploy XenDesktop will use a virtualization platform that has an uncertain future.

At virtualization.info we agree that at today is not clear yet how Microsoft and Citrix will share out the market, but so far we didn’t track any news reporting that the two companies plan to drop XenServer for Hyper-V. Quite the opposite.

It will be interesting to see how Citrix (and Microsoft) will answer this new attack. This post will be updated accordingly.

Update: Obviously Citrix refuted the statement about a possible drop of XenServer, publishing a long summary of how its hypervisor and Microsoft virtualization products will be integrated and not replaced by each other.

In February 2008, the independent company Principled Technologies published an analysis committed by IBM to compare VMware ESX 3.5 performance on IBM and HP quad-core servers: an IBM System x3850 M2 and a HP ProLiant DL580 G5.

As always happens in these cases, the winner is the client:

• The IBM machine produced 27% better performance per Watt than a similarly configured HP machine with redundant power supplies active at five CSUs
• The IBM machine delivered 8% more performance running vConsolidate with the optimum number of CSUs (five) than the HP machine
• With the redundant power supplies active at five CSUs, the IBM machine used 15.1% less power than the HP machine.

The results are anyway interesting because Principled Technologies used the Intel vConsolidate benchmark framework to run its tests.
Somebody may want to try some comparisons with the results provided by VMmark, the VMware benchmark framework, for the same machines but it’s worth to note a couple of major differences:

• the hardware configuration tested with vConsolidate is not necessarily equal to the one tested with VMmark
• in the case of HP ProLiant DL580 G5, the VMmark benchmark was performed with VMware ESX 3.0.2 instead of 3.5.0