Year: 2009

Guest star author: Kevin Lawton, Lead developer of Bochs.

VMs live migration, VMotion in VMware parlance, is a key technology underlying a number of useful features. For example, VMware’s DRS and DPM features use migration to perform load balancing and power management respectively.  These are in essence high level forms of scheduling, though with much coarser granularity of time at which an operating system schedules.

Given a migration within the same storage and networking domains, there is still a considerable amount of VM memory which has to be transferred between source and destination servers, through a finite amount of networking bandwidth. On a 1GbE network for example, a VM with 2GB of RAM might have a best-case migration time on the order of 20 seconds. Or on a 10GbE network, the same VM might have a best-case migration time on the order of 2 seconds. In some cases, live migration takes minutes to complete.

Using relatively slow VM migration as a mechanism for scheduling, has a number of risks and short-comings, which leave its full potential untapped. 
This is necessarily true, because the time within which workloads can ebb and flow (and spike) is much quicker than the response time available to the scheduler to re-schedule VMs on other servers. As a result, the scheduler has to be ultra-conservative, otherwise it may break SLAs and/or create troublesome load-based hot-spots.  By contrast, if the scheduler could expect near instantaneous VM migrations, it could perform much higher fidelity load-balancing or much more efficient power management (packing VMs onto absolutely the fewest number of powered-on servers).  Thus, as live VM migration times decrease, the less conservatism is needed, and the greater the amount of potential performance and power savings can be wrung out of existing resources.

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The release of the much awaited vSphere platform (formerly VMware Infrastructure) is very near now.
VMware is supposed to announce its availability or at least its RTM status next week, in an online and live event scheduled for April 21.

The community is already divided between the early adopters that look forward to implement the new product as soon as possible, and the cautious customers that want to extensively test vSphere to verify its reliability and compatibility.

On this last point there may be some early issues. The blog VMGuru.nl (not associated with the Scott Herold’s VMGuru.com) published an interesting insight:

Yesterday we had a meeting with VMware and they revealed that the next version of VMware ESX, vSphere, has very limited support for the VMware management and automation suite.

vSphere will of course be available with vCenter for basic management and automation tasks but the rest of VMware’s great product suite is not supported in the initial release of vSphere.

So there won’t be support for:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vCenter Lab Manager
• VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
• VMware vCenter Stage Manager
• VMware View

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After the sack of Diane Greene, the VMware co-founder and CEO, in July 2008 many suspected a mass departure of loyal engineers and executives.

As far as we know such exodus never happened but for sure the company lost some key people in the leadership team:

• August 2008 – Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development (on sabbatical)
• September 2008 – Richard Sarwal, Executive Vice President of R&D (back to Oracle)
• September 2008 – Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder and Chief Scientist (back to Stanford University)
• November 2008 – Nand Mulchandani, Senior Director of Security Products (now at OpenDNS)

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At the beginning of March, virtualization.info published an article about the new strategy of Vizioncore, which is about to enter new markets and start new partnerships now that VMware has become an uncomfortable buddy.

One of the two new solutions that will lead the change is the Virtualization EcoShell, a virtualization extension for the Quest PowerGUI tool that has caught the interest of the community.

EcoShell will enter in public beta tomorrow (you’ll be able to download it here).

Meanwhile the Vizioncore marketing was smart enough to release some teasing videos, showing the features and the potentiality of this toolkit:

• Establishing Connections to your VMware Infrastructure using the PowerGUI Console
• Navigate your VMware Infrastructure using the PowerGUI Console
• Execute Links and Actions in the PowerGUI Console
• Create and Save Filters using the PowerGUI Console
• Using the PowerGUI Script Editor

It’s not clear yet how much this free initiative will impact one of the youngest startups in the virtualization market, icomasoft, which decided to develop its first product around PowerShell.

After a long period of silence, in February some new information about the Symantec strategy in the virtualization space emerged.

The company is working on a new platform, called Endpoint Virtualization Suite, which will include the AppStream (Symantec Workspace Streaming), Altiris (Symantec Workspace Virtualization), nSuite (Symantec Workspace Corporate / Remote) and RTO Software (Symantec Workspace Profiles) technologies and which will be released somewhere this spring.

Today we learn that the suite is now in Release Candidate status. The news has been published on a corporate blog along with some screenshots.
The article unveils other interesting details:

• Symantec changed again the name of this platform: from Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite (EVS) to Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV).
  The arbitrary version number set to 6.1 is still there.
• The free version of SVS may still exist
• The platform will have a SDK

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Last week the Canadian startup Lanamark launched a new module for its hosted capacity planning service.

The new component, dubbed Desktop Analysis Pack, is specifically tailored to perform a capacity planning of VDI environment.

It does some very interesting things like recognizing if a target computer is a laptop or a workstation (this way it recognizes the mobile users), recognizing which applications are really used and which ones are just installed, recognizing if there are hardware constrains like monitors, printers, scanners.

The Lanamark competitors (like VMware, PlateSpin and CiRBA) are completely focused on servers, so this may be a first in the industry.

It’s hard to tell if the hosted model that Lanamark is using will pay off but for sure this company has some numbers.

After the precious article about how Microsoft IT department internally uses Hyper-V, the TechNet library exposes another key resource: a list of all possible errors returned by Hyper-V.

The troubleshooting guide, called Hyper-V Health Model by Microsoft, is still a draft (last update was on April 7) but it’s already very detailed.
It divides the events and errors in five categories:

• Services
• Virtual Machines
• Virtual Network Switch
• Hypervisor
• Authorization manager (AzMan) Store

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Just a few months after its strategy change, Reflex Systems (formerly Reflex Security) was able to secure its first round of funding.
RFA Management Company, an Atlanta-based private investment firm, provided $8.5 million.

Maybe the previous effort to lead the market as a virtualization security company consumed all the money and now Reflex needs more cash for its second attempt.
Maybe Reflex tried to raise some money in the early days but VCs didn’t want to bet on a virtsec startup.
Maybe the OEM agreement that Reflex signed with Dell last month increased the confidence in their new solution.

Anyway the company now has the help it needs to compete against the crowd in the virtualization management space.

Just last week virtualization.info covered the new product that FastScale is launching and that seems to bring the company away from its original strategy.

The CEO, Lynn LeBlanc, answered on this point in the comments section, but there was at least another interesting comment (unfortunately anonymous and so not verifiable):

I had heard that they were shopping themselves (SUN, HP/Bladelogic, VMware) with tepid interest because venture money has dried up. Must be even tougher to raise funds in this market with no customers.

As an answer to this assertion, today FastScale announces its second round of funding.
ATA Ventures provided them $5.5 million to continue to virtualize the connection between the application and the operating systems components (no, its a different approach from the application virtualization that we are used to).

Citrix has just opened the beta program for the next version of XenServer, which is and will be free as everybody knows by now.

The new product is codenamed Project George (but the final name will be XenServer 5.1 according to our sources),  and features some interesting capabilities:

• Active Directory integration. Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
• Workload balancing. Guest and host performance metrics are used to create star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance.
• LVHD. Fast cloning and snapshots are now supported on all SR types through integration of our software VHD stack and LVM-based Storage Repositories (SRs).
• StorageLink integration. CLI-only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR that adds native standards-based support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion, and NetApp storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel with automated initiator/fabric/array management.
• Expanded guest OS support. RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.

Citrix says that the RTM code beta will be open for the end of April. It’s clear that the company is anxious to have it ready for the Synergy 2009, to be held in Las Vegas in early May.