Year: 2010

Second day here in Prague for the Catalyst Conference 2010. Yesterday virtualization.info reported about a subset of the agenda, providing live coverage of three sessions about Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing.
Today the focus will shift on server and desktop virtualization, including a promising session about client hypervisors.

The first session we are going to cover is titled Server Virtualisation, Mobility, and Shared Physical Infrastructure: New Beginnings, performed by Chris Wolf, Research Director at Gartner.

Wolf is on stage.

He starts describing the state of the union for the virtualization market: many companies now consider virtual infrastructures as the default platform for all x86 applications, and this platform is the foundation of emerging standard architecture models designed by vendors like VMware, Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft and HP, featuring a deeper integration between servers, storage, networks, security and management.

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This week virtualization.info is in Prague, Czech Republic, to follow and report about the Burton Group (a Gartner independent subsidiary) Catalyst Conference 2010 Europe.

The event features a specific  track about virtualization and IaaS cloud computing and virtualization.info will cover some of the sessions that are part of this track.

This morning the first one is titled Building a Viable Cloud Adoption Strategy, performed by Drue Reeves, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner.

Reeves is on stage: we know that cloud computing has a lot of issues (security, vendor viability, ROI, liability, etc.).

He says that we passed the definitional phase in cloud computing and this is the year of planning, building and maintaining.
Customers are primarily divided in two groups: the ones that are ready to happily jump on the cloud computing bandwagon and the ones that want to know nothing about it.

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BlueLock is one of the four hosting providers that joined the VMware vCloud program and that currently offer a vSphere-based cloud infrastructure powered by vCloud Express.
The company planned to declare its offering out of beta at the end of March, but at the very last minute it changed its mind and postponed the launch.

Of course the company is spending a lot of effort to promote the VMware cloud, mostly now that the vCloud Service Director (vCSD) is about to hit the market, and convince customers that it can work better than Amazon EC2.

Part of this effort turned into an interesting 10 minutes video, where the company compares the two Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing offerings:

Now that the TechEd 2010 conference is ended, Microsoft is publishing its breakout session video on TechEd Online.

Just last week virtualization.info mentioned a must-see session about the Hyper-V Dynamic Memory feature, part of the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

Today we’d like mention another interesting session titled Hyper-V Backup Deep Dive: A Look Under the Hood.

The 53-minutes presentation is available for on-demand streaming (you’ll need Silverlight) and for download (both WMV and MP4 formats). Microsoft also published the slide deck.

The Microsoft Research labs seem extremely busy on virtualization these days. Just one week ago virtualization.info reported about a new, interesting project codenamed Bunker-V, which aims at reducing the Hyper-V trusted computing base (TCB) with a new boot and optimization methodology.

Today we report about another research called LiteGreen, which leverages hardware virtualization to reduce power consumption of unused physical desktop machines in a new way:

To reduce energy wastage by idle desktop computers in enterprise environments, the typical approach is to put a computer to sleep during long idle periods (e.g., overnight), with a proxy employed to reduce user disruption by maintaining the computer’s network presence at some minimal level. However, the Achilles’ heel of the proxy-based approach is the inherent trade-off between the functionality of maintaining network presence and the complexity of application-specific customization.
We present LiteGreen, a system to save desktop energy by virtualizing the user’s desktop computing environment as a virtual machine (VM) and then migrating it between the user’s physical desktop machine and a VM server, depending on whether the desktop computing environment is being actively used or is idle.

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In April VMware appointed a new Vice President and Federal Chief Cloud Executive: Doug Bourgeois.

Bourgeois has been the Director of National Business Center in US for more than four years, responsible for more than $400M inside the government administration. 
Before that he was the CIO of the US Patent and Trademark Office.

At VMware Bourgeois he’s in charge of the strategy and business development of the cloud computing effort for the Federal market.
Interviewed by CRN, he offered an interesting comment on the confusion in the public sector about cloud computing:

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Could the week end without a new marketing skirmish between Microsoft and VMware? Of course not, or at least not when a long time Microsoft partner is involved.

Just last week VMware announced a new, rather surprising OEM deal with Novell, which allows the virtualization vendor to distribute SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as part of the upcoming vSphere 4.1.
Additionally, VMware announced a plan to adopt SLES as the guest operating system of choice for all its virtual appliances.

Microsoft didn’t react too well (you can say it by the way they misspelled the name of the competitor, something that didn’t happen in a long time), and published its own interpretation of the deal, suggesting that customers may be locked into an inflexible offering:

…looks like VMWare finally determined that virtualization is a server OS feature. I’m sure we’ve said that once or twice over the years ;-). The vFolks now plan to ship a full version of a server OS with vSphere, and support it, to fulfill their application development and application deployment plans.

Fourth, this is a bad deal for customers as they’re getting locked into an inflexible offer. Check out the terms and conditions.

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virtualization.info has stressed about the importance of capacity planning for years now, but the number of vendors that are actively working to educate the market is extremely low, as low is the number of products available in this space.

Even VMware, despite its leadership position and remarkable product portfolio, didn’t spent too much effort in evangelizing capacity planning (and management).
The company has a hosted solution, Capacity Planner, available since October 2005 for its solution providers, a scaled down version of the service available as part of VI 3.5, Server Consolidation Advisor, since December 2007, and a brand new product called CapacityIQ, that was launched in October 2009.

Things seem changing finally as the company has begun publishing insightful articles on the topic on its recently launched Virtualization Management Blog.

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VMware just published a video demonstrating how the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) feature, part of the upcoming vSphere 4.1, works.

SIOC provides the capability to define quality of service prioritization for the I/O activity on a single host or a cluster of hosts.
The prioritization, which can be enable or disable on specific datastores, is enforced through shares and limits.
The ESX/ESXi hosts monitors the latency in communication with the datastore of choice. As soon such latency exceeds a defined threshold the datastore is considered congested.
At that point all VMs accessing that datastore are prioritized according to their defined shares.
The administrator can even define the amount of I/O operations per second (IOPS) that each virtual machine can reach.

The video shows SIOC in action and it’s really worth watching:

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At virtualization.info we usually don’t pay much attention to the various sales promotion that vendors launch to win the hyper-competitive virtualization market. Sometimes we make exceptions. And today is one of those days.

Stratus Technologies is a well-known company for its 99.999% fault-tolerant hardware, ftServer, which is made by a couple of identical machines that act as one, providing out-of-the-box HA capability.

ftServer is certified by Citrix and VMware virtual infrastructures but Stratus doesn’t seem happy enough to tell its customers that its platform is guaranteed to work.

The company has just launched a new promotion called Zero Downtime Guarantee:

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