Year: 2010

The application virtualization startup Endeavors Technologies (formerly Steam Theory) certainly had one of the most complex and painful evolutions in the virtualization market.

From May 2006 to October 2007 the company was involved in patent lawsuits with Microsoft (after the Softricity acquisition), Citrix, AppStream and Exent.
In May 2008, it mistakenly announced the advent of a new Microsoft licensing (SPLA) which allows 3rd parties to stream Office.
In July 2008 the company suspended its share from the London Stock Exchange detailing a difficult financial situation.
And finally, in August 2008, it entered into controlled administration.

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Now that Citrix is about to release of XenClient, and the product seems to get serious attention, other companies offering client hypervisors have a problem.

This includes, for example, Virtual Computer and Neocleus which both offer a Xen-based bare metal virtual machine monitor (VMM) for consumer laptops since a few months.

While Citrix will not offer all the capabilities of these competitors in the first version of XenClient, it’s still true that its product will be available for free.
Competitors have two choices: try to compete with XenClient or drop their own Xen implementations and build on top of it (which is what Citrix probably wants).

The first choice implies a major effort since the startups above don’t have as much resources as Citrix for R&D and marketing. And more than that, they don’t have a powerful ally like Microsoft, that may step-in at some point in the near future and further help the adoption of XenClient.
On the other side, remaining independent allows these companies to potentially deliver innovation faster than Citrix, gaining enough brand value and market share for a successful, future acquisition.

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At virtualization.info we usually don’t cover case studies. But a virtualization vendor that describes its own virtual infrastructure is well worth an exception.

In the past Microsoft already provided a few details about its internal implementation of Hyper-V, but it has now expose much more through a 23-pages whitepaper titled How Microsoft Moved to a Virtualized Infrastructure:

Microsoft.com Operations (MSCOM Ops), a team within the Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) division that manages the Microsoft.com Web site, faced the same budgetary pressures that affect many businesses today: It needed to constrain capital spending, optimize the use of existing hardware, and reduce operational costs. Using the traditional IT model of “Decommission the old and buy newer, more-powerful servers” continued to result in a lot of unused storage, network, and compute capacity. The number of physical servers provisioned to support business needs was growing at a rate of approximately 20 percent per year during a time when budget continued to shrink. In spite of earlier and significant investments in physical server hardware, Microsoft.com was using less than 10 percent of the available processing power and 30 percent of the storage space.

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At the past Synergy 2010 conference, in mid May, Citrix and McAfee announced a partnership to deliver new security products for XenDesktop, XenServer and XenClient.

Part of this partnership involves the launch of a new, optimized version of the McAfee antivirus that reduces the security endpoints’ footprint and schedules its scanning and signature update activities in a way that the hypervisor is not overloaded by too many concurrent I/O activities.

Just last week Trend Micro announced an upcoming release of its own antivirus, OfficeScan 10.5, that should offer similar optimizations.

OfficeScan 10.5 will support Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View VDI platforms and will be available in July, at the price of $20 per user and $8 per user for VDI-aware capability (for 1,000 seats).

As expected, VMware has launched a new classroom course about the automation of the vSphere virtual infrastructure through the Microsoft PowerShell implementation called PowerCLI.

The course objectives are:

• Automate VMware ESX configuration
• Automate the provisioning of virtual machines
• Automate changes to virtual machine configuration
• Automate cluster operations
• Automate reporting

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In mid March Microsoft finally announced its plan to integrate the Calista technology, acquired in January 2008, in the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2.

The technology, dubbed RemoteFX, extends the Remote Desktop capabilities and leverages the presence of supported GPUs on the physical servers that are used for VDI.

So far the company didn’t share much details about all the capabilities of RemoteFX 1.0, but a couple of weeks ago, during its TechEd 2010 conference, the company unveiled at least one thing: the support for generic USB redirection.

Bink.nu reports about the details:

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Now that it’s near the release of its vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly project Redwood) VMware is working to focus the attention on its programming interfaces and ignite an ecosystem of new developers that can build on top of the vCloud platform.

Part of this effort consists in the launch of a new SDK support program.

Where VMware can help?

• Design Advice
  Guidance in the choice of approach and selection of supported methods that best meet the goals of your use case.
• Performance tuning advice
  Guidance in the best practices around using supported APIs to achieve better performance.
• Code snippet review and advice
  Guidance based on review of standalone code snippets for the purpose of insuring proper use of supported APIs.
• Problem diagnosis
  Assistance with isolating a reported problem for the purposes of determining if the issue is with customer code or the supported API.
• Bugs report
  Interacting with Engineering to find resolution for a problem discovered with a supported API.

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To further facilitate the evaluation of its new client hypervisor, Citrix has recently published a Proof of Concept Implementation Guide which guides customers step-by-step in the setup of a VDI infrastructure that include XenClient, Receiver and Synchronizer.

The 53-pages documentation includes guidance to test the experimental feature called Secure Application Sharing, already available as part of the XenClient Express 1.0 Release Candidate, which is used to share data between virtual machines.

The upcoming release 4.1 of vSphere will introduce a new memory over-commitment technique called Memory Compression which VMware claims to greatly improve virtual machines performance under heavy load.

There may be further innovation in this area coming in the near future: in January 2010 a number of Chinese researchers presented a new technique called Dynamic Memory Paravirtualization (DMP) for virtual infrastructures:

In dynamic paravirtualization, VMM (virtual machine monitor) dynamically monitors and replaces the hot instructions, which cause most VM exits. It is transparent to the guest OS such that the legacy OSes can benefit from this optimization. Our study focuses on reducing the overhead of memory virtualization—dynamic memory paravirtualization (DMP). We implant a new memory management mechanism in VMM such that all user-mode page faults can be handled by the guest OS directly without VM exits. We implement a prototype of dynamic memory paravirtulization based on a version of KVM using Intel VT. Our experimental results show that our technique essentially eliminates the overhead of VM exits caused by page faults. Dynamic memory paravirtualization can achieve the effectiveness of paravirtualization without changing the source code of guest OS.

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A few days ago IBM published a very interesting study about the support model used by Amazon for its Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud platform: EC2.

The 7-pages research summarizes the analysis of the Amazon support forums between August 2006 and December 2009, and highlights how the cloud provider is having issues in dealing with a lot of troubleshooting:

…We found that, with the exception of problems related to application-level issues, the observed problems are roughly evenly divided among the remaining problem classes (e.g., connectivity, virtual image management, performance, etc.). In studying the evolution of problems over time, we find that some classes of problems are closely related to the introduction of new cloud features as users incorporate them into their deployments. Other problems, such as those related to connectivity, are persistent and are relatively less affected by new functionality. We see evidence that some problem classes (e.g., related to image management) diminish significantly as cloud providers introduce new interfaces and tooling to simplify certain operations. The level of involvement from the cloud operator in solving problems also is dependent on the problem class, and changes over time. Some classes, such as those problems related to virtual infrastructure components, require operator involvement 50% of the time. While operator involvement in solving problems does generally decrease over time, some problems consistently require help from the cloud operator…

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