virtualization.info Editors

For years Google has been pretty adamant that it doesn’t need hardware virtualization.
Everything started in 2007 when a Google engineer, Luiz André Barroso, said at the Usenix conference:

I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.

In April 2009 Google even (indirectly) responded to VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz about the idea that virtualization is the only viable way to do cloud computing.

But now, apparently, something changed at the search giant.

The KVM Forum 2010 just ended and the speakers slide decks are now available online. They are full of extremely interesting details about the KVM project and its roadmap.
And one of them is especially interesting: Ganeti as a KVM cluster management interface.

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Despite its position in the VDI market is not exactly comfortable at the moment, VMware is taking interesting steps. The company just signed agreements with a couple of VDI vendors, Liquidware Labs and Lakeside Software, to use their capacity planning products in assessments conducted by its Professional Services Organization (PSO).

The two vendors announced their agreements pretty much at the same time:

• Liquidware Labs signs Desktop Assessment Agreement with VMware Consulting
• Lakeside Software to Accelerate VMware Desktop Virtualization Assessments

So basically, VMware will use both Stratusphere and SysTrack in its VDI assessments. But why using two different tools to achieve the same task?

Update: Another good question, raised by VMware’s competitor in the capacity planning space Lanamark, is: why VMware needs 3rd party products when it has its hosted Capacity Planner solution which is completely free for the PSO and partners?

If it’s true that Capacity Planner is not good enough for VDI assessment, as Lanamark suggests, then this means that VMware may want to acquire one of the two companies above to fill the gap. And maybe this deal is just a testbed to see what solution performs better on the field before the acquisition.

HP has recently published a reference architecture for VDI environments based on Citrix XenDesktop 4, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

The 24-pages report describes a platform powered by BladeSystems c7000 blade servers, ProLiant BL460c G6 blades, StorageWorks P4800 G2 SANs and HP Thin Clients.

The document includes the bill of materials (BOM) and a performance analysis. Quite interestingly HP used the tool Virtual Sessions Indexer (VSI), developed by the Dutch solution provider Login Consultants and used in the popular independent benchmark Virtual Reality Check (VRC) Project.  
The VRC Project has been already validated by Citrix and somehow recognized by VMware too.

According to the benchmark, this system can serve approximately 800 concurrent users using Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer applications.

In May Microsoft finally unveiled an upcoming, revamped version of its patch management solution for virtual infrastructures: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) 3.0

VMST is not a patching tool per se, but rather a connector that allows seamless integration between Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Hyper-V.

The first beta introduced much wanted features like the ability to patch offline VMs and templates in the SCVMM library, or the support for Live Migration.
The second beta, appeared less than a month after, just fixed an issue with the template VHD update feature.
The third beta, which was announced last week, seems just for additional bug fixing.

VMware continues to release new technical papers about vSphere 4.1. 
After Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX 4.1, Enhanced VMware ESX 4.1 CPU Scheduler and Host Profiles: Technical Overview, today virtualization.info recommends VMware vCenter Server 4.1 Performance and Best Practices.

The 46-pages document describes the performance improvements introduced with vSphere 4.1, provides capacity planning guidelines for vCenter Server and best practices for performance monitoring and tuning of advanced features like HA, FT and DRS.

VMware’s VMworld 2010 is just two weeks away and, like always, virtualization.info will publish a live report from the keynote stage. 
From his Twitter account, Steve Herrod, CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, hinted that this year there will be more announcements than ever, so there will be a lot to cover.

But the keynotes are not the only must-see presentations to watch this year. The VMworld’s agenda offers a higher than ever number of interesting break out sessions, and, surprisingly, many of them are about the VMware’s products roadmaps. 
In mid July virtualization.info published an early recommendation list but a number of key sessions were published only after the article. So here’s the updated, definitive list of 22 sessions (23 if you are a partner) that readers are encouraged to attend (roadmap sessions have an asterisk):

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As every virtualization professional on the planet knows, Citrix develops a commercial version of the Xen open source hypervisor called XenServer. On top of that, the company also offers management and VDI solutions for Microsoft competing hypervisor: Hyper-V.

While Citrix reiterated for years now that it’s fully committed to continue XenServer development, and its newest releases definitively confirm this trend, a number of people believes that at a point in the future the company will drop its own platform to support only Hyper-V.

Maybe Citrix contemplated the idea in the past, but at this point it’s less likely than ever: Amazon EC2, currently powered by the Red Hat implementation of Xen, is leading the public cloud computing adoption effort, while the new OpenStack orchestration framework launched by Rackspace, which supports Xen out of the box, has good changes to become a key platform in the race for private cloud computing.

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In a recent interview with Datamation, Chris Wright, Linux Kernel Developer at Red Hat, provided an interesting metric about KVM:

…KVM can now achieve 85 percent of bare-metal performance for its virtual guest operating systems, while adding that high-performance I/O is not coming at the expense of additional CPU overhead…

About the platform roadmap he adds:

…KVM is set to get support for what’s called “transparent huge pages,” enabling multi-megabyte memory pages that can be dynamically allocated from 4 kilobyte memory chunks. The addition, he said, will help improve the performance of virtual machines with memory-intensive workloads.

At the end of last week VMware updated its desktop virtualization platform Workstation and Player, as well as its platform wrapper ACE.

Workstation 7.1.1 (build 282343) only introduce support for ESX 4.1 as guest operating system. VMware introduced the capability to run its bare-metal hypervisor as a guest OS inside its hosted virtualization platform in Workstation 7.0, after the community requested the capability for a long, long time.

Player 3.1.1 and ACE 2.7.1 (build 282343) are for bug fixing only.

In October 2009 VMware released a fully featured capacity management solution called CapacityIQ.
Before this launch, VMware used to offer a hosted capacity planning solution called Capacity Planner (acquired from AOG in October 2005) and a scaled down version of the service available as part of VI 3.5, Guided Consolidation (formerly Server Consolidation Advisor).
While Capacity Planner is still available for free to VMware partners, the Guided Consolidation module is going to disappear from vSphere in the next release.

After almost one year VMware updated CapacityIQ last week.
The new 1.0.4 version (build 276824) only introduces support for vSphere 4.1.

The release notes document also clarifies that this version doesn’t enforce yet the new pay-per-VM licensing model that should take place starting September 1st. VMware already said that this product will be the last one to have this pricing, some time in Q4.