virtualization.info Editors

As announced, virtualization.info is here at VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes to live blog during the opening keynotes for the first two days.

Diane Greene, VMware Founder and CEO, is on stage.

She starts introducing the virtualization phenomenon, the VMware historm, results and technology evolution, along with some major customers case studies (today the company has more than 100,000 customers worldwide).

To further validate the customers portfolio, Greene calls on stage one of the biggest case study: British Telecom.
BT deployed VMware technology over 11 datacenters (+900 platforms) worldwide and it’s using it to re-provision workloads across the globe, to delivery virtual desktops to travelling users, to achieve automated disaster recovery.

The approach taken so far seems to assume that the European audience is pretty new to virtualization and still needs basic evangelization.

Greene is back on stage.

She reveal a reliability record achieved by one customer: no reboot for ESX Server since 1461 days.

She now moves to the green hype, describing how Europe has a chance to go greener with VMware.

And finally she (briefly) mentions the four products announced and re-announced yesterday: Lab Manager, Stage Manager, Lifecycle Manager and Site Recovery Manager.

No details or demos are provided about them. Diane Greene prefers to move on and call IBM on stage, describing a performance record achieved with ESX Server 3.5, IBM System x3850 M2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Two things are very ironic about this part of the presentation: the first is that Exchange Server 2007 is not yet officially supported on any virtualization platform by Microsoft (and nobody is mentioning this), the second one is that VMware and IBM are talking about virtualizing a Microsoft product and there’s no sign of Microsoft involvement anywhere.

IBM also announces that the new VMware ESX Server 3i is supported and embedded in the BladeCenter HS21.

Greene is back but just to call HP on stage.

HP describes the synergy between VMware VirtualCenter and HP Insight Control management solution (like IBM also HP pushes blads on screen). A DL 380 G5 with ESX Server 3i, managed by the two products, is demoed.

Could VMware invite IBM and HP on stage without also calling Dell (which is also one of the earliest VMware investors)? Obviously not, so Dell comes on stage as well.

(at this point the keynote turned into a major showroom for the biggest OEMs)

Dell announces full support for ESX Server on every server that VMware HCL currently supports (including blade systems). But the biggest point is that Dell now allows customers to download and buy ESX Server directly online (the VMware Sales Channel will not answer well on this).

Diane Greene is back on stage for the last part of the keynote.

She now pushes for the VDI initiative and introduces a new feature: the Scalale Virtual Image technology.

A demo is provided: VirtualCenter GUI now includes a Scalable Image Management console which is able to creates tents of virtual machines in seconds using the well-known linked clones technology that VMware already offers in Workstation 6.0.

Specifically, Greene shows how patching the master image implies that each single linked clone copy inherits the last patches without any additional effort.

Greene closes talking about the just acquired Thinstall technology. This is the very first time that VMware pushes on stage the application virtualization technology they just adopted.

A final demo showing a virtualized version of Microsoft Visio running from a USB key ends her keynote.

That’s all for today. Tomorrow’s keynote will be delivered by Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Chief Scientist, and will likely cover some new technology enhancements coming from the company.

Update: VMware published the recorded videos for this keynote. Watch it here.

virtualization.info has just learned that PlateSpin, leader in the P2V migration market, has been acquired by Novell.

The canadian firm acquisition further boosts Novell visibility in the virtualization space.

Novell already has a major involvement in the market since the early days of Xen development in 2004, when the company was announcing the inclusion of the open source hypervisor in its SUSE Enterprise Linux.

After that first step another acceleration was provided by the interoperability agreement signed with Microsoft in 2006.

PlateSpin is a valuble acquisition target for Novell not just because of its flexible migration tool, PowerConvert, but also because of the other products in its offering: a capacity planning tool, PowerRecon, and most of all a new disaster recover solution called Forge.

These technologies will probably go integrated with the Novell management solution ZENworks, adjusted to handle virtual machines since end of 2006.

At the moment nor Novell neither PlateSpin officially announced the acquisition. This will probably happen tomorrow, when VMware VMworld Europe 2008 will open in Cannes, France.

virtualization.info will publish a live coverage of the morning keynotes and all the other virtualization vendors announcements. So stay tuned!

Update: Novell announced the acquisition, which is worth $205 million and will complete in Q2 2008.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

This year virtualization.info plans to announce a series of major projects. The first one is the opening of a Japanese edition of the site.

Our mission is to provide high-quality coverage of the market evolution and to evangelize the technology anywhere possible.
We strongly believe that the APAC region has huge growth potentials and that virtualization will profoundly change the IT industry like it’s happening in North America and EMEA since a while, and so we are delighted to welcome Japanese readers.

Starting since Feb 22, 2008, virtualization.info is available in Japanese language at this address: https://virtualization.info/jp (also linked from this site in the menu bar).

The daily news we publish on the English edition of the website are translated with a delay of just one day.
This will include the VMworld Europe 2008 live coverage that we’ll start publishing since tomorrow morning (9am CET).

Additionally, some of the virtualization.info unique tools like the Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been translated as well. More will come over time.

This project couldn’t be possible without the help of NetWorld, our first sponsor for the Japanese edition.

We are working hard to provide more translations in the coming months. Meanwhile stay tuned for another, huge announcement coming next week…

A new report published this February by the Yankee Group details an evidence: VMware currently has a technology lead over other virtualization players which then will compete on prices.

The analysis recognizes Microsoft, Citrix, Novell, Red Hat and the newcomer Oracle as main challengers, but fail to mention both Virtual Iron and the upcoming Sun, which is heavily investing in virtualization as well.

The Yankee Group expects a harsh bidding war mainly because VMware Infrastructure 3.5 offers less management capabilities than, for example Microsoft System Center Suite, at a higher price.

This depends on the fact that the former only covers virtual machines management, while the latter can spread over virtual and physical servers and desktops.

While this is absolutely true, just a very small portion of the prospects looking for virtualization also wants to replace their existing enterprise managemet solutions.

In most cases a company wants to return on its previous investments and integrate new virtualization consoles with what’s already available. This makes less meaningful a comparison between VMware VI 3.5 and Microsoft System Center Suite.

Obviously, those customers already implementing Microsoft management solutions will look forward to the Hyper-V + System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) offering for the reasons mentioned above, but all the others using CA, IBM, HP, etc. will not see the same option as the preferred one.

Another major flaw of the Yankee Group report is related to the security level that VMware products offer compared to the competitors’ ones.

A fundamental lesson that the security industry can teach is that the number of security bulletins doens’t measure the inherent security of a product. Not until it’s directly related with the product’s diffusion on the market at least.

Considering that VMware has about 70% of the market share while Microsoft has above 20% (the analysis reports 30% which is uncorrect), it’s more than expected that the number of discovered security flaws follows this proportion accordingly.

All software in every IT industry is expected to have security flaws, but a straight comparison can be done only when two solutions have the same distribution. In all other cases many factors have to be included in the equation.

Nonetheless VMware will face a more harsh price war in the coming months as the Yankee Group states. But this will not depeding on the thesis above. This will rather depend on the fact that virtualization is slowing reaching the SMB market, where the price point counts much more than the enterprise management features.

Update: The improper comparison between VI 3.5 and SCVMM 2007 was so evident that VMware obtained to put it offline, as The Inquirer reports.

Some time may pass before the Yankee Group publish another analysis about virtualization technologies.

VMware published an interesting 12-pages paper comparing the performance achieved in a SAN environment with ESX Server 3.5 virtual machines stored in a VMFS volume and in a raw disk volume (mentioned as Raw Device Mapping or RDM):

…

For random workloads, VMFS and RDM produce similar I/O throughput. For sequential workloads with small I/O block sizes, RDM provides a small increase in throughput compared to VMFS. However, the performance gap decreases as the I/O block size increases. For all workloads, RDM has slightly better CPU cost.

The test results described in this study show that VMFS and RDM provide similar I/O throughput for most of the workloads we tested. The small differences in I/O performance we observed were with the virtual machine running CPU-saturated. The differences seen in these studies would therefore be minimized in real life workloads because most applications do not usually drive virtual machines to their full capacity. Most enterprise applications can, therefore, use either VMFS or RDM for configuring virtual disks when run in a virtual machine.

However, there are a few cases that require use of raw disks. Backup applications that use such inherent SAN features as snapshots or clustering applications (for both data and quorum disks) require raw disks. RDM is recommended for these cases. We recommend use of RDM for these cases not for performance reasons but because these applications require lowe-level disk control…

Read the whole paper at the source.

Ironically enough, the author of the first 3rd party plug-ins for the new VirtualCenter 2.5, Andrew Kutz, is also the one that has to warn about the security risks implied in using any non-VMware plug-in:

…

During the development of the Console plugin I had to register a message filter on the primary message loop to capture input for the SSH “terminal.” I was not sure if the VI client would allow me to do this, as the ability to so has nasty implications. Well, it does, and it does.

…

VMware has been informed of this flaw, and provided with a solution.

…

Try using the CheckForMsgFiler.exe application that comes with the KeySniffer client plugin. This application checks a given assembly and notifies the user if said assembly has any contains types that implement the IMessageFiler interface…

To proof the concept Andrew developed a malicious plug-in, KeySniffer, able to record any keystroke typed in the VirtualCenter GUI. Try it here.

Andrew Kutz seems unstoppable and continues to release useful plug-ins for the new VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 architecture.

After one to manage Storage VMotion migrations and one to manage mass configuration of port groups, the last creation allows to embed a SSH client in the VirtualCenter GUI.

To realize this plug-in Andrew used SharpSSH, a SSH2 library for Microsoft .NET Framework, and ackterm for VT-100 emulation, but he has yet to implement the Public Key authentication.

Just like the others, this tool is totally unsupported by VMware and should not be deployed in production environments.

Download it here.

During the entire January and February virtualization.info published an exclusive series of videos showing several VMware product managers and staff engineers introducing their sessions at upcoming VMware Europe 2008:

• Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for End-User Enablement
• Ashwin Kotian, Product Manager for Physical Virtualization
• Bing Tsai, Staff Engineer
• Kit Colbert, Staff Engineer
• Eddie Dinel, Product Manager for Stage Manager
• Devaki Kulkarni, Senior MTS, and Jeffrey Buell, Senior Staff Engineer
• Mostafa Khalil, Staff Product Support Engineer

At the same time we detailed a list of new products and initiatives that VMware is going to announce (or it’s supposed to) on stage:

• Site Recovery Manager
• Operational Framework
• Lifecycle Manager
• Stage Manager
• Server 2.0
• VMsafe

Next week virtualization.info will be in Cannes covering the keynotes and all the product announcements above. Before that anyway we’d like to close this video series with our last guest: Jay Judkowitz, Senior Product Manager for the new Site Recovery Manager.

QT_OnloadWriteOBJECT_XHTML(‘http://www.vi3demo.com/vmworld/Jay1_2.mov’, ‘400’, ‘240’, ”,
‘autoplay’, ‘false’,
’emb#bgcolor’, ‘black’,
‘align’, ‘middle’);

If you still did not, register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

Four months after releasing the first version, Veeam is ready to jump to Monitor 2.1.

The new build introduces support for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and improves the metrics query timing.

Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

VMware spent great efforts over the last years affirming that its virtualization technology, the binary translation, was more performant and flexible than para-virtualization (used by the Xen hypervisor and its commercial derivates since ever) in most scenarios. But at the same time the company worked to use para-virtualization and increase the guest OS performance as much as possible.

One major step in this progression was the introduction of a para-virtualization standardized interface, the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), which the company hoped to integrate in the Linux kernel.

Because of the long dispute with XenSource (now Citrix), VMI made its way in the Linux kernel only one year later in version 2.6.21. (Oracle was so sick and tired of the delays that proceeded building its own hypervisor).

Meanwhile VMware announced its plan to support VMI-para-virtualized guest OSes in its entire product line.
Today VMI is supported inside Workstation 6.0 and ESX Server 3.5. The upcoming Server 2.0 will support the interface as well.
The Linux distributions that support VMI out of the box are Novell SUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora.

Now, to further validate all its para-virtualization effort, VMware is publishing a benchmark analysis, comparing the performance of two Linux distributions (32bit only) with and without VMI flag on ESX Server 3.5:

…

This paper shows that VMI-style paravirtualization offers performance improvements for a wide variety of workloads. However the performance gains depend heavily on the nature of those workloads. Workloads that spend the majority of their time in user mode provide only a modest gain when run in a VMI virtual machine.
Workloads that spend a significant portion of their time in kernel mode, or that are memory management unit intensive, see the largest benefit from running in a VMI virtual machine.

Non-VMI-enabled guests continue to perform quite well with binary translation, and remain an appropriate choice for many situations. VMware is also working with hardware vendors to improve hardware virtualization. With support for binary translation, hardware virtualization, and VMI-style paravirtualization, ESX Server 3.5 allows the choice of the best virtualization technique for each virtual machine based on its workload and guest operating system.

Read the whole 17-pages paper at the source.