Year: 2010

VKernel has announced the general availability of Chargeback version 2.5. This version is the follow up of version 2.0 which was released in July this year. Chargeback, which is part of the VKernel Capacity Management Suite and supplied as a virtual appliance provides chargeback capabilities for VMware and Hyper-V environments.

This new version was developed in collaberation with Microsoft to support the private IaaS cloud environment Hyper-V Cloud which Microsoft announced beginning this month. The product integrates with Microsofts monitoring tool System Center Operations Manager and with the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal which was released earlier this month.

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Last week Citrix made available the paper: XenDesktop 4.0 Planning Guide – Hosted VM-Based Resource Allocation. The paper which contains 5 pages covers resource allocation recommendations for users running Windows 7 or Windows XP virtual desktops.

First the paper recommends to classify between Light, Normal, Power and Heavy Users, and based on this classification and OS used provide guidelines for vCPU and Memory allocation per Virtual Desktop. Also estimated IOPS for each Virtual Desktop during steady state (which doesn’t include boot, logon and logoff) are provided. The paper makes this estimates based on peak usage and not average users, so that maximum performance for end-users is guaranteed.

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The Canadian startup CiRBA has released version 6.0 of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software. This version is the follow up of version 5.3 which was released in May this year.

DCI is a capacity planning tool which supports VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, IBM pSeries and zSeries and Oracle/Sun Zones and LDOMs. The products provides pre-defined analysis templates tailored for the mentioned platforms, in order simplify use of the product.

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With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware made available the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). The VAAI can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware, which results in less CPU, memory and storage fabric bandwidth consumption, for which the technical details ware covered by virtualization.info before.

NetApp has released a paper titled: Understanding and Using vStorage APIs for Array Integration and NetApp Storage. The paper which contains 22 pages covers the following topics:

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At the end of September this year, Robert Passmore working for Gartner published an article with the title: Storage Best Practices for Hosted Virtual Desktops. The article discusses how features provided by some storage arrays can enhance Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) implementations.

The paper tries to answer the following questions:

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Besides its cloud computing strategy, Microsoft unveiled a lot about System Center at its TechEd Europe 2010 conference a couple of weeks ago. For example, the audience has been informed that Opalis, the orchestration framework acquired in December 2009, will hit version 3.6 in one week or so, while its integration in System Center won’t happen before 12-15 months.

Even more interesting is what Microsoft said about System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012. Marcel van den Berg provided a lot of details about the upcoming feature set, developed to manage private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds:

• Support for Citrix XenServer (5.6? 6.0?) and VMware ESX 4.1
• Hyper-V remote deployment on bare-metal
  A new server will boot from PXE, download a WinPE image, download a VHD, join a domain and install the Hyper-V role all automated and orchestrated from SCVMM 2012.
• Dynamic Optimization (DO)
  Automatic/Manual workloads balancing across Hyper-V hosts in a cluster, without System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).
  It will compete with VMware Distribute Resource Scheduler (DRS)

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In November 2008 VMware announced the acquisition of Trango Virtual Processors, a startup focused on hardware virtualization for embedded devices.
At that time the company also announced its plan to deliver a mobile hypervisor called Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).

VMware remained mum and under the radar about MVP, also because its initial plan to deliver by the second half of 2010 doesn’t seem feasible anymore. The cellphone industry radically changed in the last two years, with new forces and platforms dominating the market. These changes may have obliged VMware to completely reconsider its go-to-market strategy and the timing to execute it.

The company also made significant changes in the MVP architecture as reported by virtualization.info in mid September:

…the MVP architecture has been radically changed compared to the original plans: in its early demos VMware suggested that the mobile hypervisor (a type-1 VMM) would run side by side two VMs with real-time operating systems (RTOS).

The new architecture instead adopts a hosted virtualization platform (a type-2 VMM) that runs on top of the native RTOS installed on the phone. This one is considered the “personal environment” while the VM running on top of it contains the “business environment”…

Now, additional detalis are coming from the VMware’s major competitor in the mobile virtualization arena: Open Kernel Labs (OKLabs), which is coincidentally funded by Citrix.

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VMware posted on its website a paper titled: Interpreting esxtop 4.1 Statistics. esxtop is an utility provided by VMware which can be used to perform monitoring and collection of data for CPU, memory, disk and network. This document provides in depth and extensive information on how the statistics of esxtop can be interpreted and used.

The output of esxtop can be viewed in different types of screens one each for CPU statistics, memory statistics, network statistics, disk adapter statistics, disk device statistics, disk VM statistics and interrupt statistics. esxtop also provides a batch mode, where data can be redirected to a file for offline uses, or to use by other utilities.

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November 17 (in Milan) and November 24 (in Bologna) I’ll be at the VirtualDays 2010 conference, performing the opening keynote about the state of the virtualization industry and the emerging trends.

In20 already hosted a VirtualDays event in Florence, which has been pretty successful considering it was at the end of July.
Compared to that event, the one in Milan tomorrow will have a different format, with the presentations taking place in the late afternoon, with an evening cocktail at the end to do some networking.

During the afternoon the three major virtualization players will introduce their vision: looking at the agenda for tomorrow, it seems that VMware will have a primary focus on private cloud computing, that Citrix will be all about desktop virtualization, while Microsoft may have a broader vision about IT management in general to communicate.

If you plan to attend feel free to stop by after the lecture.

Alessandro

Veaam has released a white paper titled: VMware Data Protection Report 2010, The Survey of 500 Enterprises. The report, which was written by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research organization and contains 19 pages. The paper contains key findings from a worldwide survey held with 500 CIOs from organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France with more than 1,000 employees.

This document gives great insight in the current challenges companies face when adopting virtualization, overall conclusion is that virtualization requires a change of mindset compared to traditional non-virtualized environments.

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