Year: 2008

It was just a matter of time before one Linux distribution, for consumer or enterprise use, would switch its virtualization engine from Xen to KVM.

The inclusion of KVM in the Linux kernel, along with the controversy influence that Microsoft first and Citrix then appy to the Xen project, led to this.

The suspects that Citrix is not fully commited to the open source project after acquiring XenSouce may be a further factor.

Canonical’s decision to drop Xen in favor of KVM may remain an isolated case, but anyway Ubuntu is one of the most popular distro among consumers (DistroWatch reports that it’s the most downloaded of 2007).

The influential example may be followed by other distributions like Fedora, which already implements KVM side by side with Xen.
It’s worth to remember in fact that Fedora is controlled by Red Hat, which is in hasty competition with Novell. But while Xen is implemented by both companies, only Novell has a tight partnership with Microsoft, which has a tight partnership with Citrix, which is now able to influece the Xen development.

It’s easy to imagine how likely is a Red Hat departure from the Xen bandwagon.

Citrix officially announce that the release date for XenServer 4.1, the first update of XenServer after the XenSource acquisition, is set for March 2008.

Along with all notable enhancements unveiled at open beta launch, Citrix is including a new major one: the integration with NetApp Data ONTAP.

Right after the XenServer 4.1 Standard Edition release, Citrix will also introduces a new Platinum Edition.

This new commercial offering will be available on Q2 2008 as well, and may consist in a bundle with Citrix Provisioning Server, to allow provisioning of XenServer instances on bare-metal.

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

Web Performance Inc. just released a performance analysis of VMware ESX Server 3.0.2 running a virtual machine with CentOS 5 Linux distribution and SugarCRM 4.5.1e application. The entire environment was set up on a HP BL460C blade system featuring Intel Xeon 5130 (dual core) CPUs.

The benchmark reports that the same configuration serves 14% more users on the physical server.

While the analysis is interesting, it’s worth to note that nor VMware VMmark neither Intel vConsolidate benchmarks systems were used to perform it.

Read it here.

With VI 3.5 VMware introduced a new feature called Storage VMotion, which allows to migrate virtual machines from one storage array to another without downtime.

Unfortunately the only way to manage the new feature is throught the VMware Remote CLI, and so several users are creating custom panels for it.

Among the others, Alexander Gaiswinkler created a simple GUI for Windows:

Download it here.

So far virtualization.info extensively covered some of the contents that VMware will offer at upcoming VMworld Europe 2008. But a conference is not just for business right? VMware is preparing some fun as well.

For the night event attendees should expect a big party shaped around the four elements: Fire, Earth, Air and Water.

These elements will influence the whole show, including a bunch of videogames: flight simulator for Air, motorbike and F1 simulators for Earth, surf simulator for Water, etc.

Another part of the show that will be influenced by the four elements will be the music with several bands performing on stage (the main one is MADHEN). Disco Inferno anyone?

virtualization.info will be in Cannes and while we cannot promise a coverage of the night even, we’ll certainly cover the keynotes and all new announcements. Check previous coverage of TSX 2007 in Nice (part 1 and part 2) and VMworld 2007 in San Francisco.

All the product manager and and staff engineers coming from US are expected to attend the party as well, so attendees have additional opportunities to interact

This month virtualization.info started presenting Eddie Dinel, Product Manager for Stage Manager. Today we feature Devaki Kulkarni (the first girl ever on virtualization.info), Senior MTS, and Jeffrey Buell, Senior Staff Engineer:

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Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

XenSource committment in the Xen project has been questioned since the day a partnership with Microsoft was signed. The acquistion from Citrix in August 2006 raised even more concerns about the Xen destiny and the Citrix effort in the open source community that developed its new hypervisor.

Now ZDNet argues that Citrix move to rename Presentation Server in XenApp Server is a clear confirmation that those concerns were well founded.

Update: Citrix (through Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division and former XenSource CTO) fires back immediately:

• The Xen project is in great shape, superbly funded by Citrix and the community, and is operated independently from Citrix, by the Xen project Advisory Board. Citrix has more than doubled XenSource’s open source team size already, and is continuing to develop new initiatives for Xen. At the most recent Xen developer summit in December, we had over 200 attendees, and there was fantastic participation from across the industry. Our own open source team operates independently from the product groups and has a blank check for headcount and resource.
• Citrix XenServer is a core foundational product to Citrix. Specifically, XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) and XenDesktop (formerly Desktop Server, addressing the VDI use case) will both include XenServer in all future releases. Why? Because XenServer is being optimized to run the XenApp and XenDesktop workloads, and provides a fantastic set of manageability, availability, scalability, and flexibility options to the XenApp/XenDesktop administrator, with incredible performance (very significantly better than VMware’s). Citrix customers don’t like using VMware for virtualizing Presentation Server, because of the very serious performance penalty, but they need to virtualize it for various reasons: test & dev flexibility, consistency of image management, DR, ease of provisioning etc. XenServer offers them all they need, at much better price/performance than VMware. XenServer 4.1 specifically contains optimizations for Presentation Server as a workload.
• XenServer itself continues to go from strength to strength. The new release 4.1 boasts over 50 new features and performance optimizations, and a profound and strategic tight coupling between the virtual infrastructure platform and smart virtualization aware storage, such as the NetApp devices. Expect a range of exciting announcements as we move down this path.

Quoting from CRN:

…

In order to start making its various virtualization applications work better together, Citrix also expects to introduce Citrix Workflow Studio, a software package that composes the workflows of XenApp, XenServer, XenDesktop, and NetScaler, the latter of which accelerates the delivery of Web-based applications, Hartwick said.

Citrix Workflow Studio also makes it easier to integrate Citrix products with third-party technologies, he said.

…

The company could use Citrix Workflow Studio to design a workflow to automatically provision the employee’s desktop and applications. Scripts could be set up so that a manager could handle the provisioning without intervention from the IT department, he said.

Read the whole article at the source.

…

Citrix is also planning to unveil XenServer Platinum Edition, which features automatic provisioning of application workloads, Dhawan said. It is expected to be available shortly after the release of XenServer 4.1, and have a list price of about $5,000, which allows application workloads to be provisioned on an unlimited number of virtual servers on one physical server, as well as on three other physical servers, he said…

While waiting for the official launch of the newest Sun hypervisor based on Xen, early adopters have the very first chance to see it in action.

The new hypervisor in fact appears in the first 2008 build of Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE), labeled 1/08, (which correspond to the Solaris Express Community Edition Build 79b).

Note that while xVM Server is present since a while inside the Solaris Express Community Edition, the SXDE is tested more scrupulously and comes with official support.

Sun also exposed some initial documentation for xVM Server, including details on how to boot the SXDE build to run in xVM mode, how to configure ZFS to expose storage for the virtual machines, how to remotely control guest OSes through the embedded VNC server (Xvnc).

The SXDE 1/08 build is available here free of charge.

The ones which prefer to wait for the official release may want to read the virtualization.info Q&A with Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, about the Sun virtualization strategy and roadmap for 2008.

Thanks to Phoronix for the news.

From his corporate blog Jose Barreto, System Architect at Microsoft, details all the storage options that will be available with upcoming Hyper-V: DAS (SAS, SATA), Fibre Channel and iSCSI. Unfortunately:

…Hyper-V’s virtual BIOS does not support booting to iSCSI directly, so you will still need to have at least one disk available to the guest as an IDE disk so you can boot to it…

Barreto’s post includes some valuable matrix to compare virtual machines limitations for each scenario and it’s a recommended reading.

All the storage options should be already available in the current beta 1, included in the just released Windows Server 2008 RTM.

Update: Ben Armstrong, Program Manager on Core Virtualization at Microsoft, provides additional details about the Hyper-V iSCSI capabilities and reveals that the goal can be accomplished in a way:

…

Hyper-V virtual machines do not emulate an iSCSI HBA or allow you to pass a physical iSCSI HBA through to the virtual machine. However, as Hyper-V supports booting virtual machines directly off of physical hard disks, you can attach an iSCSI LUN to the parent partition and then boot the virtual machine off of it.

In order to do this you would need to:

• Attach the iSCSI LUN to the parent partition.
• Create a new virtual machine and opt to configure the hard disk later.
• Open the settings for the new virtual machine and select the first IDE controller.
• Select to add a disk drive.
• On the disk drive configuration page select to use a physical hard disk, and select the iSCSI LUN.
• Apply changes and close the virtual machine settings.

Now you can boot the virtual machine directly off the iSCSI LUN by just starting it up…

Quoting from the ZANTAZ official announcement:

Autonomy ZANTAZ, a leader in the archiving, eDiscovery and policy management markets, today announced its unique ability to discover electronically stored information (ESI) in all virtual environments, including those powered by VMWare, further extending its lead in eDiscovery. In order for companies to be compliant with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), eDiscovery software must be able to find and hold all information relevant to litigation, including more complex file types such as virtual images, multimedia attachments, voice, video, IM and blackberry messages.

…

Autonomy ZANTAZ’s Introspect software enables customers to quickly and accurately survey, assess and discover all information in virtual environments, without the manual and complicated process of logging into each virtual server environment to search the contents. Introspect’s Collector module can simultaneously search multiple virtual file servers running multiple operating systems, enabling native file ingestion of content relevant to litigation. This provides substantial savings in time and effort to organizations’ eDiscovery initiatives and increases their ability to be FRCP compliant…

While the fact that forensic suites starts to be virtualization-aware, it’s worth to note that this ZANTAZ announcement is misleading: both VMware and Microsoft (along with all the others virtualization vendors supporting the Microsoft VHD format) allow customers to mount any virtual machine image at host level, without the need to start the virtual machine and logging inside the guest OS.

This allows a manual or automatic inventory of the guest OS exactly like the host one. For free.