virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from Investors:

When EMC (EMC) capped a 2003 acquisition spree by buying VMware for $635 million, it almost seemed like an afterthought.
…
But as EMC is learning, big things sometimes come in small packages. VMware has enjoyed a commanding lead in “virtual machine” technology. And while it generates a small fraction of EMC’s total sales, it’s emerged as one of the firm’s fastest-growing businesses.

Now the big question is: Can VMware stay on that growth path? It faces a raft of competitors, including a vastly improved version of Microsoft’s (MSFT) rival virtualization software and open-source alternatives.
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According to IDC, the company had more than half of the virtual machine market in 2004. It overtook longtime leader IBM, (IBM) which in addition to its own virtualization technology uses VMware for its Intel-compatible servers.

But VMware faces mounting competition from Microsoft, which is close to launching an upgrade to its Virtual Server software.

“VMware has already dropped prices because of Microsoft,” said Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman. And new chip technology from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) could make virtualization software easier to produce. That could intensify competition.
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Eventually, Microsoft plans to make virtualization part of its basic Windows operating system – rather than a software add-on….

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from Virtual PC Guy blog:

Virtual PC emulates an S3 Trio 64 Video card with 8mb of video ram (VRAM). From time to time I get people asking me why we do not increase the amount of VRAM – and there are a couple of reasons why:

• VRAM is a fixed overhead. Each virtual machine that you launch uses 8mb of your computers memory to store our VRAM information. If we increase this – it will increase the amount of memory used for each virtual machine – whether the virtual machine is using this extra memory or not.
• On video cards with hardware 3D acceleration support VRAM is used for storage of textures, and other performance improving measures. However with a 2D video card VRAM is only used to store a single frame buffer of the contents on screen. This means that with a 2D video card (such as we emulate) adding more VRAM just allows you to support higher resolutions – but it does not provide better performance. At 8mb we are able to display at up to 1600×1200 resolutions.

Even on a 2 GB RAM workstation (as mine) VMware virtual machines can run slowly. Too slowly sometimes.

This can depend on a large amount of factors but we can reduce the number to 4 critical issues:

1. Antivirus real-time protection
   You probably run VMware Workstation on your everyday working computer, and you probably want to stay secure running an antivirus software.

   The most useful feature of any AV is the real-time protection, catching and monitoring I/O accesses of every process for suspicious activities.
   This feature can greatly impact on your VMs performances and should be fine-tuned for virtualization.

   So be sure to create an exclusion filter on your real-time protection settings for .vmdk (VMware virtual disk) and .vmem (VMware virtual memory) files. In this way countinous I/O operations on your virtual machines will not be hit by antivirus checking.

   Note: if you plan to run liveCD operating systems (like Knoppix) inside your VMs or simply often use CD images for installing new software, I highly recommend to exclude .iso files too from AV checking.

2. HostOS disk fragmentation
   A really performance hitter for virtual machines is a fragmented host OS disk.

   VMs virtual disks are very large (4 GBs at minimum on the average) and are created by default as non preallocated. In other words your virtual disk grow as you install more software on the guest OS till reaching your defined disk limit.
   If you use only one physical disk for everyday work and VMs storing, you probably will use space around a growing virtual disk, obliging your host OS to fragment virtual machines more and more.

   So be sure to:

   • Create a dedicated partition for virtual machines only
   • Create guest OSes virtual disks with Allocate all disk space now option
   • Schedule a daily defragmentation for your virtual machines directories (maybe at launch time or during the night)
3. Memory trimming
   Workstation checks which part of the guest OS virtual memory is not used and allocates it back to the host OS. This permits to have more concurrent virtual machines running but everytime the guest OS asks back for its memory it suffers a performance degradation.

   So, if you have enough free RAM for all planned concurrent VMs, be sure to disable memory trimming for guest OSes adding the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:

   MemTrimRate=0

   Note: Memory trimming can be disabled through GUI since Workstation 6.0.

4. Page sharing (quoted from VMware documentation)
   VMware uses a page sharing technique to allow guest memory pages with identical contents to be stored as a single copy-on-write page. Page sharing decreases host memory usage, but consumes system resources, potentially including I/O bandwidth.

   You may want to avoid this overhead for guests for which host memory is plentiful and I/O latency is important. To disable page sharing, add the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:

   sched.mem.pshare.enable=FALSE option

These suggestions will work well for every VMware Workstation 5.x and Player 1.x since both share same engine.

Quoting from RedmondMag.com:

Several third-party vendors announced management packs and other products that support Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 at Microsoft’s IT Forum event this week in Barcelona, Spain.
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AppMind version 3.8 now officially supports Sun Solaris on x86 and VMware ESX along with HP-UX, Solaris SPARC, Linux and OpenVMS. Version 3.8 also lets administrators perform central configuration, management and deployment to non-Windows systems from the MOM 2005 server.
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Vendor nworks announced its VMware Management Pack for MOM 2005, which provides automated VMware ESX Server monitoring from MOM 2005. The product provides agent-less management and monitoring of more than 100 ESX Server and virtual machine metrics, as well as of root and virtual file system free space.
…

Read the whole article at source.

Ben Armstrong reports a wonderful online tool for capacity planning on HP Proliant servers:

The HP ProLiant server sizer for Microsoft Virtual Server is an automated tool that assists the user in selecting the server environment necessary to support Microsoft Virtual Server. The sizing information and algorithms have been developed using testing and performance data on HP ProLiant servers.

The HP ProLiant server sizer for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is an automated tool that assists the user in selecting appropriate HP ProLiant servers. This tool provides a quick and consistent methodology to determine a “best-fit” server for your individual needs.

The sizing information and algorithms have been developed using testing and performance data on HP ProLiant servers running the Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition.

You can use it here.

I just discovered a developement project parallel to Xen called XenFS.

Developed by Mark Williamson this aims to be an underlying reliable architecture for file sharing among Xen domains.
The planned features are:

• Super fast coherent filesytem sharing between Xen domains.
• Shared buffer cache functionality for improved sharing performance and reduced memory footprint.
• Application level interdomain memory sharing using standard mmap API.
• Copy-on-write filesystem functionality enabling multiple domains to share a common base filesystem. This will be supported by CoW mechanisms at the memory level.

Mark was kindly enough to give virtualization.info some more details about it:

I’m hoping to get XenFS working fully over the next couple of years, all (with luck) the next few months will see some reasonably usable functionality.

The basic usage model for XenFS is “NFS but better”. Running in a tightly-coupled virtualisation environments gives us loads of opportunities for optimisation that NFS just doesn’t allow. We want to enable things like efficiently sharing data between VMs, running from a XenFS root filesystem, etc. The interdomain memory sharing is a neat party trick that falls out “for free” as a result of my implementation.

Other stuff that’s interesting includes how to handle live-migration: it’ll require a certain amount of cunningness but I think a correctly configured XenFS domain should actually show better migration performance.

Right now I’m working on some other stuff and thinking about a new control plane to fit in the the XenBus. Once that’s done, I’ll get working on the core FS and things should really start moving again.

On a CNet article about new effort of Sun to support PostgreSQL in the near future, Martin LaMonica writes about Sun plans to integrate Xen in Solaris 10 (and obviously OpenSolaris) for September of next year.

If so Solaris 10 is going to become a very powerful platform for virtualization counting at the same time on Sun partition technology, Solaris Zones, and XenSource paravirtualization.
I also need to underline that Solaris 10 is supported on every x86 CPU and will surely support AMD and Intel virtualization extensions, eventually permitting to run Windows virtual machines inside Xen.

At no cost even for commercial use, and with this bright future, Solaris 10 could become the MUST platform for virtualization in the enterprise.

VMTN Blog, the official VMware blog, reports an interesting TechRepublic 4-parts article on how to set up a VMware lab environment to achieve videoconferencing with OpenBSD firewalls and Windows XP calling clients.

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Creating the OpenBSD virtual machines
• Part 3: Configuring the gateways
• Part 4: Setting it all up with teams

InVirtus VM Optimizer essentially is a virtual machines resizer, able to reduce VMs dimension up to 80%.
The version 2.0 works on every VM created with any VMware or Microsoft virtualization product.

Lorenzo Barbieri published a full review on his blog.

Xen 3.0 is expected to be released this month (and as far as I can see from my top queries statistics people are hammering for downloading).
If you are interested in being documented as fast as possibile you can take a look at the actual Xen 3.0 User’s Manual.

This is an ongoing work so you always should check the Chapters Status to know what’s missing.

Remember you can also test the technical preview simply installing SuSE Linux 10.0.