Year: 2008

The US startup FastScale officially launched last year with two products: an innovative product to build slim virtual machines, Composer (April 2007), and a management solution, Virtual Manager (August 2007).

Today the company releases version 2.0 of this suite, introducing support for VMware ESX Server 3.5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The original marketing message from FastScale was focusing on the capability of Composer to track down how an application works and tailor around it an essential operating system (aka cutting away all unnecessaries libraries and OS components). But with this second release the company seems to have slightly changed the tune, focusing much more on how Composer approach can be used in the so called VM Lifecycle Management market:

…streamlining configuration settings for improved ease of use; fine grained configuration control throughout the software lifecycle; expanded options and control over patch policies; flexible rules-based management of external file systems and storage; enhanced control and management of networking interfaces; and, the ability for users to view the impact of rules-based configuration settings before servers are deployed or anytime during the software lifecycle…

If so FastScale will have to compete against other startups like Embotics, FortiSphere and ManageIQ.

Even VMware is entering the space with the still-in-beta Stage Manager, but its unlikely it will be a competitor for FastScale. It’s well known in fact that VMware internally adopts FastScale products since much before the startup left the stealth mode.

Additionally, it’s worth to remember that FastScale is still on track for a Q1 2008 release able to support Windows environments. It will be interesting to see how FastScale will be able to squeeze the Microsoft operating system without breaking any license agreement.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Sun just released the first version of its new management solution called Ops Center (despite customers don’t seem able to download it right now).

While this first edition is not virtualization-aware, the next one expected for Q2 2008, will be able to extend its current capabilities to the upcoming Sun hypervisor xVM Server.

That version will include a notable list of features like:

• Full virtual guest lifecycle management
• Management of the domain 0 instance
• Monitoring, management and provisioning of Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
• Migration capabilities (Live, Regular and Cold)
• Simple single host management through direct browser access, as well as large scale multi-node management via xVM Ops Center
• Expansive resource monitoring and analysis
• Guest image storage library management
• Virtual and resource pooling
• Network virtualization and bandwidth management

At the moment there are no prices are available for the three editions: Starter, Standard and Enterprise.

More details about the Sun virtualization strategy are available in this exclusive virtualization.info Q&A with Steve Wilson, VicePresident of xVM.

The VMware Performance Team just published an interesting ESX Server 3.5 benchmark about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64bit guest running as a web server on top of HP ProLiant DL 385 G1 servers.

To complete the analysis VMware didnt’ use its own benchmarking framework, VMmark, but rather relied on the industry standard SPECweb2005.

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There are different dimensions to performance. For real-world applications the most significant of these are usually overall latency (execution time) and system throughput (maximum operations per second). We are also concerned with the physical resource utilization per request/response.

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The part of the curve marked “Performance plateau” represents the behavior of the system under moderate stress, with CPU utilizations typically well below 50%. Interestingly, we observed lower latency in the virtual environment than in the native environment. This may be because ESX Server intelligently offloads some functionality to the available idle cores, and thus in certain cases users may experience slightly better latency in a virtual environment.

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From this graph we can draw the following conclusions:

1. When the CPU resources in the system are not saturated, you may not notice any difference in the application latency between the virtual and physical environments.
2. The behavior of the system in both the virtual and physical environments is nearly identical, albeit the knee of the curve in the virtual environment occurs slightly earlier (due to moderately more CPU resources being used by the virtualized system).

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VMware also published a 35-pages whitepaper about the topic, detailing the approach used for system tuning and measurement with SPECweb2005.

Download it here.

Quoting from the NoMachine official announcement:

NoMachine, leading and award-winning provider of NX desktop virtualization software, announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program. This brings all the benefits of NoMachine NX software to the virtual suite of VMware, ensuring customers successful remote access to their virtual environments.

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As a VMware technology partner, NoMachine will continue to enhance the ability of NX to work securely and successfully with VMware products. Beginning today, all NoMachine products are fully supported running in VMware virtual environments…

The fact that NoMachine joined the VMware TAPP is particularly interesting: the company provides remote desktop enhancements to Linux X Window System and already requalified itself as a desktop virtualization vendor (despite terminal services related technologies are usually referred as presentation virtualization).

It’s not hard to imagine the company releasing a VDI connection broker in the near timeframe.

Quoting from the MonoSphere official announcement:

MonoSphere Inc., the creator of award-winning storage capacity management software, today announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program. As a member of the program, MonoSphere will leverage VMware resources and expertise in its efforts to deliver storage capacity management solutions to optimize storage for VMware environments.

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The Storage Horizon software from MonoSphere provides an in-depth view into the current and projected storage usage of heterogeneous environments, helping organizations manage hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of storage. The Storage Horizon solution does not require installation of software agents on application servers, and the system deploys in only a few hours, beginning immediately to collect storage usage data…

The battle for bright minds between virtualization vendors is not just at R&D and Sales levels. Obviously the most critical positions to change the political influence over the market is at the executive level and VMware is doing all the best to gain some strategic advantages.

Despite no press announcements were released, an uncommon fact for such big tech companies, between December 2007 and now VMware hired two top executives away from two top competitors. In details:

• Former Senior Vice President of System Management at Oracle, Richard Sarwal, left the company (after almost 19 years) to become the VMware Executive Vice President of Research & Development
• Former Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix, Kate Hutchinson, left the company to cover the same role at VMware

It doesn’t seem a case that both Oracle and Citrix are threatening VMware from different angles.

Mike DiPetrillo, Specialist System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis department at VMware, describes on his personal blog some of the technical issues when virtual machines are live migrated between Intel and AMD CPUs:

…Basically you’re running an OS on an Intel box and let’s say the processor supports the SSE3 instruction set and your app happens to use that instruction. Now you migrate that to an AMD box that doesn’t support SSE3 but the app is still using it and trying to use it. BAM! Your app and your OS will crash. This can happen with VMotion and Microsoft Quick Migration. Actually anyone that does live migration will get impacted by this. There are several “user mode” instructions like this that we can’t mask out at the virtualization layer…

But DiPetrillo goes further and states that the Microsoft and Citrix implementations of this technology, included in upcoming Hyper-V and the current XenServer, may be a serious risk for virtual machines:

…With the Xen based live migration and Microsoft Quick Migration they do not perform the check and so you can actually do the migration but your app and your OS may die as a result.

…that’s why we say you can’t migrate from Intel to AMD just yet and this is why anyone that says they can do it is lying to you or just don’t understand the technology. The later happens to be true with most of VMware’s competitors – especially the field sales…

Update: As easy to imagine both Microsoft and Citrix promptly answered DiPetrillo statements.

Answer from Ben Armstrong, Program Manager on Core Virtualization at Microsoft:

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Here [In planned fail-over] the virtual machines are placed into a saved state on the source physical computer and are then restored on the target physical computer. Since there is state transferred here there are issues with processor compatibility. For this reason we state here that you should have compatible processors for all computers involved in a virtualization cluster.

So what happens if you try to configure a cluster with Intel / AMD processors?
Unfortunately we are the only server product / role that cares about the processor type beyond “x86 or x64” so Windows Server Fail-over Clustering will happily let you create such a configuration.
When you then try to perform a planned fail-over of a virtual machine it will be placed in saved state on the source physical computer, but when we try to restore it on the target physical computer we will detect that the processor is not compatible and will fail the request. The virtual machine can then be safely restored on a compatible system.

Answer from Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix:

…Both in XenServer and in open source Xen, we require a match on CPU processor vendor, family and stepping before a migration can be performed.

In both cases Mike DiPetrillo verified the statements and corrected his original post accordingly:

…I’m not sure why my original setup did not check for CPU compatibility. I’m also not sure why the guts of Quick Migration and failover – HAVM.vbs found at the end of the instructions for setup – does not clearly show anywhere that a check occurs. Never-the-less, if you happen to try migrating between incompatible processor types then you get the following warning in the interface followed by a VM left in a suspended state and awaiting instructions on where to go and run…

…I was using an older version of XenSource and relying on some experience with open source implementations in RHEL5 and SLES10. The RHEL5 and SLES10 implementations still do not perform CPU checks or if they do they certainly don’t tell you about it or warn you when you do a migration. Thankfully my test VM was a simple RHEL5 guest and just migrated between the Intel and AMD systems I had without worries. No warning. No caution. Just migrate. My XenSource 4.1 install did produce a warning when adding the AMD host to the Intel cluster…

Last week CMP Channel revealed results of a virtualization survey conducted in November 2007 among North American VARs.

It exposes interesting informations like:

• Less than 23% of VARs currently resells virtualization technologies (769 interviewed)
• Only 11% of VARs plan to sell OS virtualization in the next 12 months (116 interviewed)
• Customers turn to virtualization mostly for server consolidation (72.4%) and disaster recovery (71.6%) (116 interviewed)
• Virtualization generated over 20% of VARs revenue in the last 12 months (41 interviewed)
• Lack of experience is the very first challenge (32.8%) in selling virtualization (116 interviewed)

After publishing the first ever 3rd party plug-in for VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 last week, a Storage VMotion control panel, Andrew Kutz is ready to unveil the second one: a control panel to create vSwith port groups on multiple ESX Servers at the same time.

The plug-in is still far away from being complete (and it’s completely unsupported by VMware) but it’s definitively worth to experiment with.

Download it here.

Quoting from the Veeam official announcement:

Veeam Software, innovative provider of systems management tools for VMware ESX Server environments, today announced the Veeam Management Suite for VMware, a comprehensive suite designed to address many of the common challenges faced by ESX administrators.

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Capabilities offered by the Veeam suite include:

• Veeam Reporter automatically discovers and collects information about the VMware Infrastructure 3 environment, its components and configuration settings, including virtual machines, network, storage and VMotion…
• Veeam Monitor is an agentless solution that supports the monitoring of multiple ESX Servers and multiple VirtualCenters…
• Veeam Configurator allows administrators to manage advanced settings and subsystems of multiple VMware ESX Servers easily without accessing the command line, writing scripts or manually editing configuration files…

The price for this new bundle is set to $270 per socket.