virtualization.info Editors

Veeam just published an interesting paper describing how its product, Veeam Backup, uses the Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) feature to perform a live backup and restore of Windows guest operating systems.

The paper also compare the Veeam implementation of VSS with the ones from Vizioncore and VMware (both the new VSS-friendly snapshot and the Consolidated Backup approach).

Of course this is not an independent comparison so it should be carefully verified before accepting the matrix above, but it’s an interesting aspect to evaluate and discuss with your pre-sales representatives.

Update: Veeam promptly answered forwarding the video testimonial that supports this paper. It’s available at their corporate blog here.

One of the oldest startup in the virtual lab automation segment, Surgient, is now profitable as reported by the Austin Business Journal.

The key for this revenue boost was the decision to change the go-to-market strategy.
Surgient used to host the lab infrastructures of its customers and this approach may raise security and availability concerns.

Last year the company started to sell software licenses for in-site installations and won big customers like SAP and Siemens.

The story is interesting as other just-born startups in this and other segments are trying the hosting model right now: Skytap (virtual lab automation) and Lanamark (capacity planning) are two good examples.

This morning the VMware’s customers that upgraded their virtual data centers with the new Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2 (build 103908) had an awful surprise: any virtual machine that is turned off cannot be powered on again, and any attempt to execute a VMotion (the live migration of a VM from one host to another) fails.

The reason behind this huge and unprecedented issue is an error in the license expiration time.

The only way to workaround the problem at the moment is to disable the Network Time Protocol (NTP) client and set the date back to August 10, as promptly suggested by a customer here.

Of course this countermeasure has an impact on the log consistency and on any tool that analyzes the VirtualCenter events for different purposes (performance monitoring, trend analysis, capacity planning calculation, etc.).

More than that obviously, this issue has an impact on the availability of those infrastructures where the IT administrators are in vacation (and there are many on August 12) and cannot operate any recovery.

The users from all around the world are reporting failures of part of their systems and in some case even the complete knock-down.

VMware has over 200,000 enterprise customers (100% of Fortune 100 and 95% of Fortune 500), and it claimed that 59% of them use VMotion in production.
The company didn’t provide any statistics about how many already deployed the Update 2, but the license fault could have impacted thousands of them.

VMware is aware of the issue but couldn’t provide any immediate solution.
At the moment it seems that the entire VMware Knowledge Base collapsed.
Calling the support line customers can just receive a brief message saying that the problem will be solved within 36 hours.
Additionally, VMware removed the capability to download any affected product.

The existence of such issue is more than enough to undermine the credibility of the company (which already made some mistakes in the past) in a complex moment of its successful history.
A 36 hours timeframe to provide a solution is just an unacceptable answer for all those enterprises that deploy virtualization in production.

The whole thing may severely damage the stock performance of today.

Update: The license of VMware ESXi 3.5 U2 (build 103909) is reported as affected by the same problem.

Second update: To further aggravate the situation, today is the so called Microsoft Patch Tuesday, so a number of guest operating systems are being automatically (or manually for those unaware of the issue) rebooted.

As this is not enough, any customer running a VDI environment certainly allows its end-users to reboot their virtual desktops any time they want.

Third update: as the VMware Knowledge Base is still unavailable probably due to overload, virtualization.info publishes the original KB article about this issue.

Fourth update: The issue also impacts ESX 3.5 Update 1 with certain patches. 
The full details are available in the comment section of this post, thanks to the effort of a virtualization.info reader.

Suddenly the problem is no more a matter of early adoption.

Fifth update: As promptly reported in the comments section, the VMware’s new CEO, Paul Maritz, published on the official blog an apology, informing that a patch has been released:

…I am sure you’re wondering how this could happen.  We failed in two areas:

• Not disabling the code in the final release of Update 2
• Not catching it in our quality assurance process 

We are doing everything in our power to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  VMware prides itself on the quality and reliability of our products, and this incident has prompted a thorough self-examination of how we create and deliver products to our customers.  We have kicked off a comprehensive, in-depth review of our QA and release processes, and will quickly make the needed changes…

Maritz couldn’t desire a worst start for its new role in the company. Nonetheless this is a great opportunity: the co-founder and former VMware CEO, Diane Greene, was often accused of being unable to grow her company as a big enterprise, capable of competing against Microsoft.

Handling this incident Maritz has the first chance to demonstrate that he’s the right person to do better than Greene.

Sixth update: VMware is still unable to republish the ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 images for fresh installations.
Their availability is expected by August 13, 2008 at 6pm PST.

Seventh update: VMware just informed its customers that it cannot deliver a new, patched image of the product for the planned deadline.

The images are now planned for release August 14, between 2am and 8am PDT.

Eighth update: A number of enterprise customers may be unable to apply the first patch released (see Fifth update above) for a number of reasons:

• Unable to schedule a maintenance window
• Internal change control procedures
• No available server to VMotion running VM’s onto

VMware is aware of these constrain and informed its customers that is developing a second procedure, called U2 Alternative Install Process (U2 AIP), to apply the patch, available on demand calling the Support.
At the moment (August 15, 2008) there is no release date for this new patch installation procedure.

Meanwhile the full patched images are finally available online and all the download links have been reactivated.
The new build numbers are:

• ESX 3.5 Update 2 – 110268
• ESXi 3.5 Installable Update 2 – 110271

ComputerWorld just published an interview with the Executive Vice President of Product and Technologies at Red Hat, Paul Cormier, where some interesting details about the company strategy emerge.

First of all Red Hat predicts that within 2 years 90% of the existing servers will run a virtualization platform.

Second, the company sees virtualization as the first step towards a cloud computing world, following VMware which started to spread the idea earlier this year (virtualization.info wrote about this at the beginning of 2006).

Third and most important, Red Hat sees the VDI as the next big thing.

Why this point is specially interesting? Red Hat is only the last of a long series of vendors that demonstrated interest for hosted desktops. But compared to the others the Red Hat vision deserves a little more attention because this is the only company that so far is dropping Xen in favor of KVM.

While open source, KVM is maintained and supported by Qumranet, a US startup (see the virtualization.info coverage here) that offers a commercial VDI solution.

Now let’s consider the equation:

• KVM is now embedded into the Linux kernel
• Red Hat will offer KVM as the virtualization platform of choice
• Red Hat sees VDI as the next big thing
• Qumranet offers the only VDI solution based on KVM
• Qumranet maintains KVM

The question is: how important will become Qumranet for Red Hat in the near future?

Last month Citrix announced its commitment to adhere the almost ready new standard for virtual machines: the Open Virtual Machine Format or OVF.

Citrix is working on a set of tools (project Kensho) to grant the OVF interoperability and said that a technical preview of its toolbox will be available in Q3 2008 (probably September).

Last week at the LinuxWorld conference the company CTO Simon Crosby added another key information: the core of those tools will be available free of charge as open source technology.

This implies that other Xen-based products (like the ones from Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat and Oracle) will be able to implement the OVF support much faster.

Crosby also said that the project Kensho will support a number of virtual disk formats including the one that Amazon is using in its Xen-based cloud computing infrastructure EC2: the AMI (Amazon Machine Image).

Maybe, by the end of next year customers will not have to worry about virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations anymore (with much disappointment from companies like PlateSpin).

By the end of this month Virtual Iron will be ready to roll out the version 4.4 of its platform.

Despite the numbering this update comes a major new feature called LivePower:

LivePower optimizes data center power consumption by monitoring resource utilization in the virtual data center. When there is excess CPU capacity, LivePower consolidates virtual machines onto fewer physical servers and shuts down the remaining devices based on pre-defined policies. When the virtual machine load increases beyond pre-defined thresholds, LivePower turns physical servers back on and live migrates virtual machines to rebalance the virtual data center and ensure that resource requirements and service levels are met.

LivePower sounds pretty similar to the Distributed Power Management (DPM) that VMware introduced in version 2.5 of its VirtualCenter.
And exactly like the VMware feature, also LivePower currently has an experimental support.

With LivePower, Virtual Iron announced the upcoming support for a new feature that Intel Core i7 (formerly codename Nehalem) will introduce: the Dynamic Power Node Manager.

Node Manager is an out-of-band (OOB) power management policy engine that is embedded in Intel server chipset. It works with BIOS and OS power management (OSPM) to dynamically adjust platform power to achieve maximum performance/power at node (server) level. Node Manager has the following features:

• Dynamic Power Monitoring: Measures actual power consumption of a server platform within acceptable error margin of +/- 10%. Node Manager gathers information from PSMI instrumented power supply, provides real-time power consumption data (point in time, or average over an interval), and reports through IPMI interface.
• Platform Power Capping: Sets platform power to a targeted power budget while maintaining maximum performance for the given power level. Node Manager receives power policy from an external management console through IPMI interface and maintains power at targeted level by dynamically adjusting CPU p-states.
• Power Threshold Alerting: Node Manager monitors platform power against targeted power budget. When the target power budget cannot be maintained, Node Manager sends out alerts to the management console

Sun published a minor update for its free desktop virtualization solution VirtualBox (acquired by innotek in February).

The 1.6.4 release introduces a number of bug fixes and enhancements but no new features.

Download it here.

In just four months the Israeli startup InstallFree, which launched with $1.7 million, raised a second round of funding surpassing $10 million.

The new infusion of cash comes from Ignition Partners and Trilogy Equity Partners.
As result Richard Fade and John Connors of Ignition Partners and Peter van Oppen and Chuck Stonecipher of Trilogy Equity Partners will join the company’s Board of Directors.

The company raised remarkable interest because of its application virtualization solution for the enterprise, Bridge, and for a new dynamic environment, simply called Desktop, that will be launched later this year.

The application virtualization startup Ceedo last week announced the support for the Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) ICA client.

The news is interesting because so far the preferred solution to virtualize the ICA client was offered by Thinstall. But Thinstall was acquired by VMware (which now sells its products under the name ThinApp) so Citrix is more than welcome to switch its partner.

While the Ceedo platform is flexible enough to virtualize most applications, the company markets this specific application with a dedicated package, priced $89 per seat (perpetual license).

Download a trial here.

Veeam is preparing to roll out the third generation of its products.
Last week the startup launched the beta program of Reporter 3.0 and now it does the same with Monitor 3.0.

The new version will introduce some really interesting features, including:

• Data aggregation from multiple VMware VirtualCenters
• Alarm simulation (test the effect of your new alarm filter against the events history)
• Trend analyzer (forecast the virtual center growth and the most-consumed resources per host to simplify the capacity planning)
• Data correlation between registered events and virtual machines performance
• Analysis of the historical data available inside VirtualCenter

Some of these features are killer independently of the current level of implementation.
For example the data correlation is critical to finally see the virtual infrastructure as a complex, tightly connected entity rather than as a bunch of isolated guest operating systems.

Enroll for the beta program here.