virtualization.info Editors

At the end of January Citrix and Intel announced a major partnership to jointly develop a client hypervisor based on Xen (codename Project Independence).
The news definitively had an impact on competitors as VMware felt the need to remark that its partnership with Intel is stronger.

The two companies plan to release the new product somewhere in H2 2009 (likely immediately before or during VMworld 2009) so nobody really expected any additional information going public for a while (at least nothing before the upcoming Synergy conference in May).

Unexpectedly, last week Gabrie van Zanten, a well-known virtualization blogger, published an early preview of the Citrix client hypervisor, highlighting interesting features:

…After the primary partition is loaded, the other partitions (virtual machines) can be managed through a web interface in the primary partition. This interface integrates with XenDesktop (VDI) and XenApp (Presentation Server), which gives the user great control over what technique to use, depending on the device he or she is or the location. The user will also be given the option to check out a VM to take it on the road…

as well as some concerning design approaches:

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Microsoft and Citrix agreed on who’s the guru in town when managing Hyper-V and XenServer hosts (tip: it’s Citrix) but this doesn’t seem to slow down the development of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Just two months after opening the public beta of Hyper-V 2.0, Microsoft is now launching the public beta of SCVMM 2008 R2.
This first beta build introduces the following features:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Hyper-V host management
• Enhanced support for Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) and SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts (including support for multiple virtual machines per LUN by using CSV)
• Support for multiple LUNs per iSCSI target
• Support for host’s “Maintenance Mode”
• Support of disjoint domains
• Use of defined port groups with VMware vCenter 

Enroll for the beta program here.

For the release of its vSphere 4.0 platform (formerly VMware Infrastructure), VMware will drop the label “experimental” from one of the most interesting features released with VI3.5: Distributed Power Management (DPM).

It’s not yet clear how much DPM will impact the data center operations today, but CPU power management certainly is a feature that is influencing the roadmaps of several vendors:

• Intel will release a Dynamic Power Node Manager with its upcoming Nehalem CPU
• Microsoft will release Core Parking and CPU power consumption controls as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 which Hyper-V 2.0 will leverage

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Microsoft just opened a new beta program for the Hyper-v Management Pack for System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2.

The management pack is incomplete for now as it only allows to  monitor the health of Hyper-V hosts that are part of Windows Server 2008 full (Standard / Enterprise / Datacenter).

No support at the moment for Windows Server 2008 Core Server versions or for the stand-alone Hyper-V Server 2008.

The program is not directly available on the Connect website. To access it you have to email Microsoft.

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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