Year: 2009

In 2006 the ConVirt team started an ambitious project: develop an open source, multi-host management console for Xen.
Initially called XenMan, the tool was then renamed ConVirt and its roadmap was enriched with several highly desirable features.

Three years later the ConVirt team morphs in a company called Convirture, and ConVirt, still an open source product, finally reached version 1.0 with a notable number of features:

• Support for Xen and KVM
• Support for multi-host virtual infrastructures
• Support for virtual machines snapshot, live migration, backup and decommission
• Support for VMs templates and virtual appliances
• Support for storage usage

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Tim Mangan, a well-respected application virtualization expert, just released an interesting tool to monitor the system performance of a Hyper-V infrastructure.

Rather than relying on the Task Manager inside each Windows virtual machine, HyperV_Mon connects to Hyper-V through its WMI interface and retrieves the physical and virtual CPUs consumption data from hosts and guests.

The tool is able to recognize when a vCPU is descheduled and thus provides more precise information compared to the guest OS Task Manager.

HyperV_Mon is available for free here.

It doesn’t matter how hard you look, it’s almost impossible that you are going to find a performance comparison that involves Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.
The VMware End User License Agreement (EULA) specifically says that the company won’t recognize any 3rd party performance testing before it has the chance to review and approve the adopted methodology.

(before June 2006 the situation was even worse as VMware simply didn’t allow the publishing of any benchmark comparison)

At these conditions, the chances that you’ll see an independent benchmark where VMware is outperformed by its competitors are zero.

Despite that, last week a group of brave reporters at Virtualization Review challenged VMware and published an independent analysis without asking any permission.

To ensure the validity of our test results and testing environment, Virtualization Review enlisted the help of Stuart Yarost to formulate and validate the test plan. Yarost is an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer and Certified Quality Engineer with more than 22 years’ experience in the software and quality fields. Yarost currently holds the position of Vice Chair of Programs for the ASQ Software Division.

The results are more than interesting:

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While VMware is working hard to recruit the hosting providers of tomorrow, tempting them to jump on the the cloud computing bandwagon with its upcoming vCloud APIs, Microsoft continues to focus on the hosting providers of today.

As highlighted several times, Microsoft is focusing its Hyper-V adoption strategy on this market segment, where VMware is not particularly strong.
It’s not a case that MyHosting, HostBasket, MaximumASP, Layered Technologies and others were the first to testify the adoption of the new hypervisor.
And it’s not a case that Microsoft recently released a specific licensing guide for hosting providers.

Last week, at the Microsoft Hosting Summit 2009, the company released yet another resource for them: the Dynamic Data Center Tool Kit.

The resource will contain guidance, sample code, best practices and additional collateral to build and launch managed services with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Everything should appear online at this address (almost empty right now):
http://dynamicdatacentertoolkit.com/Default.aspx

For the ones that missed the opportunity to attend the second edition of VMworld Europe, virtualization.info published a live coverage of the opening keynotes (Day 1 – Paul Maritz / Day 2 – Dr. Stephen Herrod) and a final wrap-up.

Of course this is definitively not enough. Luckily VMware is filling the gap: two weeks ago it published an impressive number of videos (including the recordings of the keynotes above and a precious, unannounced Q&A session with the company executives).

This week it’s the turn of the breakout sessions, available in slides and videos here after a free registration after paying a $699 yearly subscription.

Among the others virtualization.info recommends to watch the following:

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Two weeks ago Citrix announced the unthinkable: XenServer, one of the technologies that acquired from XenSource for $500 million almost two years ago, becomes a free product.

The move raised an unprecedented level of attention, from customers, partners and competitors.
It’s not a speculation: the virtualization.info statistics reveal how serious the echo of this action has been and still is.

To make profit Citrix counts on support agreements (which is exactly the same model Sun is using for its Solaris operating system and what it plans to adopt for the upcoming xVM virtualization portfolio) and on the sales of premium management features, packed in a new Essentials product, available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Citrix wants to obtain a lot of things with this strategy:

• with XenServer for free it wants to build a serious brand awareness in the virtualization industry and, at the same time, disturb the VMware activity in the enterprise market
• with Essentials for XenServer it wants to demonstrate its enterprise prospects that it has something serious to pit against VMware vCenter
• with Essentials for Hyper-V it wants to reproduce the successful combination of Microsoft Terminal Server plus Citrix Metaframe that made its early fortune

Of course the key part of the strategy is the synergy with Microsoft and not the free hypervisor.

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By now every virtualization.info reader should know that Cisco is about to enter the x86 server market with a brand new blade system codenamed California.
We broke the news in early December 2008, unveiling that the product will feature a massive hardware set and an unprecedented (for the company) unification of server, networking and storage resources.

Anyway so far nor virtualization.info neither the mainstream press that confirmed the news really clarified how this unification is implemented and why Cisco should be especially relevant in the virtualization industry.
Bundling the new blade system with the upcoming VMware vSphere 4.0 and the upcoming virtual switch Nexus 1000V is notable but not something the company could call Unified Computing like it’s doing since months now.

There’s a good chance we’ll know next Monday, when Cisco is expected to announce its new strategy. But for now we can speculate on what codename California will really be.

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Normally virtualization.info doesn’t cover customers case histories but in this case we’ll make an exception.

SAP as a software is one of the most important mission-critical applications in the world.
SAP as a company is one of the savviest companies in the industry about virtualization: during 2007, the company fully embraced hardware virtualization, supporting VMware, Xen (both Novell and Red Hat implementations) and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.
They even have a 3-days conference called Virtualization Week.
But most of all SAP is one of the key partner of VMware as the company demonstrated at the recent VMworld Europe 2009, when Paul Maritz granted SAP no less than 30 minutes of his opening keynote.

The fact that SAP is virtualizing around 500 servers with XenServer is remarkable.
It really validates the Citrix hypervisor.

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In the last two years Virtual Iron has been frequently mentioned as an acquisition target in rumors about Novell, Symantec and other big IT vendors.
The last one comes from Jeffried & Co. analyst Catherine Egbert who suggested that Virtual Iron is being acquired by Oracle.

The rumor was picked up by several news sites, including LocalTechWire, ITBusinessEdge and The Register.
virtualization.info reached out both companies but, as expected, Oracle answered that the company doesn’t comment on press stories while Virtual Iron didn’t answer at all.

Does Oracle need Virtual Iron? If we listen to Larry Ellison the answer is no.
But it’s not because Oracle is not interested in becoming a global virtualization player. Quite the opposite.

The Oracle CEO once said that his cat could write the VMware hypervisor and to prove it in November 2007 his company released its own virtualization platform: Oracle VM.

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Last week virtualization.info published an article titled VMware is becoming an infrastructure management company, suggesting that the virtualization vendor is morphing into something much bigger, getting ready to compete, over the long term, with the big four infrastructure management companies: BMC, CA, IBM and HP.

Peter Spielvogel, Product Marketing Manager of Operations Center at HP, believes that this scenario is worth at least some discussion and mentions the article on the corporate blog.

He’s quick and subtle in remarking that HP current leadership in the infrastructure management depends on the strategy to support physical and virtual servers in the same way, no matter what the vendor is.
But how hard would be for vCenter to manage 3rd party hypervisors and physical servers?

Isn’t true that VMware already offer some interesting and innovative management capabilities for physical servers like Distributed Power Management?
Isn’t true that VMware already offer some basic hardware monitoring capabilities for ESXi hosts through the new Common Information Model (CIM)?