virtualization.info Editors

But one new start-up looking to advance the notion of using software to consolidate infrastructure in data centers has arrived this week, promising to do virtualization on a much broader level, starting with Intel machines running Linux.

Virtual Iron Software has created software that can assume the processing and performance of several connected hardware servers, which is a distinction from VMware right out of the gate.

Virtualization software allows customers to consolidate resources and move them around where necessary, a key component of utility or on-demand computing systems.

Virtual Distinctions and Contradictions

While virtualization software from VMware is designed to carve up a single, x86 (define) box into small partitions, Virtual Iron’s VFe 1.0 software allows users to take multiple computers in a data center and use them as “Lego-like” building blocks, or virtual computers.

Virtual Iron CTO and co-founder Scott Davis said this gives his company a broader applicability. But Raghu Raghuram, senior director of strategy and market development at VMware, is quick to disagree. He questioned Virtual Iron’s ability to gain traction based on demand for such technology on Intel-based systems.

“The proposition that you can combine two or more boxes with Virtual Iron’s software to replace a larger box starts to become cost effective when you are talking about applications running on large SMP servers, such as 8-ways or 16-ways or 32-ways,” Raghuram said. “Of the five-plus million Intel servers sold every year, only a few thousands fall into this category. We therefore think that this is a small market opportunity.”

VMware, Raghuram said, is focused on the millions of servers running applications that run on one-, two- and four-way servers. As multi-core processors from Intel and AMD become the norm, tomorrow’s two-way or four-way will itself have eight or 16 CPUs, which should boost VMware’s opportunity and diminish Virtual Iron’s chances in the space.

But Davis argued that VMware’s market for targeting x86 machines has gotten as good as it’s going to get despite the fact that VMware announced that its fourth-quarter revenues for 2004 were $71 million, a 159 percent increase year-over-year.

Davis believes the market for virtualization on multi-processor servers will grow, citing IDC estimates that almost 65 percent of all business processing applications or workloads continue to run on SMP-based servers.

Moreover, he said “we expect x86 server partitioning to rapidly be commoditized by advances in Intel and AMD processors.”

While this may be speculative, there are signs that Intel and AMD are doing more with virtualization for their chips. AMD this week announced it will port XenSource’s Xen open-source virtualization software to its AMD64 technology. Like VMware products, the Xen hypervisor is an x86 virtual machine that lets a single machine run multiple operating systems.

In fact, Pund-IT analyst Charles King said Xen is likely to be a greater threat to VMware than Virtual Iron, which he said sports an approach so different from VMware’s that Virtual Iron will more likely compete with grid computing vendors like Platform Computing or United Devices.

Despite the opposing opinions about the market’s direction, there is a lot of money to be made in virtualization software. IDC said the market garnered $19.3 billion from 2003 to 2004, with about $1.5 billion coming in the virtual processing space where Virtual Iron plays.

Virtual Iron Tech Garners Praise

At least one analyst was duly impressed with Virtual Iron’s novel approach to complexity issues in virtualization technology that go back 30 years.

IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky said people are usually trying to find a way to bring the application to the resources they have. Virtual Iron has dragged the resources of a system — storage, processors and memory — to the application.

“They saw the same problem everyone else did, which is ‘we want to somehow aggregate the resources from a lot of inexpensive machines and in the end produce the work that used to require a supercomputer'” Kusnetzky said. “It’s a simple conceptual difference. But it is truly rocket science underneath — I am absolutely certain of it.”

But Kusnetzky acknowledged that while the technology might be impressive, the Acton, Mass.-based company of 35 employees has a ways to go to prove itself in a market dominated by VMware.

“Their little voice is likely to be drowned out by the big voices of other vendors,” he said. “I think that means this company is going to have to work very rapidly to develop alliances and partnerships with these companies so when they are presenting their message, Virtual Iron is part of their message.”

Ironically, Kusnetzky said this is how VMware started. It aligned itself with major server vendors and deepened or broadened those partnerships. VMware recently extended its pact with IBM to offer VMware’s VirtualCenter, VMotion, ESX Server and Virtual SMP software on IBM eServer xSeries and BladeCenter systems.

At the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo here, numerous companies voiced Xen support in the form of endorsements, programming help and software contributions. Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Red Hat, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Voltaire all are involved, but one of the more interesting allies is IBM, which has decades of experience in the area.

“Two or three months ago, it wasn’t on anybody’s radar. Now it’s going to make a big change in how everyone uses Linux,” said Chris Schlaeger, vice president of research and development for Novell’s SuSE Linux.

The change illustrates what can go right in the world of open-source software: a project can trigger a cascade of cooperation by multiple interested parties. When it works well, as in the case of Linux, that cooperation can lead to a unified, fast-developing project rather than proprietary, mutually incompatible competitors.

“The open-source community has finally decided to smooth over its differences and get behind one virtualization project, which means it’s actually going to happen rather than having 12 warring fiefdoms, each with about two soldiers,” said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff.

Xen began three years ago at the University of Cambridge in England, said Ian Pratt, project leader and a founder of XenSource, a start-up that develops and supports the software and is trying to make it a standard computer feature. “Being ubiquitous on Linux is the first step to that,” he said.

Xen and other approaches to dividing a computer into separate partitions rely on a concept called virtualization, which lets programs run on a software simulation of actual hardware. In the case of VMware, this foundation is called a virtual machine.

One difference between VMware and Xen: The former completely simulates a machine, which theoretically allows any operating system to run unmodified on a virtual machine. Xen, on the other hand, uses “paravirtualization,” which doesn’t go as far. That means faster performance but also requires an operating system to be modified to run, Pratt said.

Higher-level software, however, doesn’t need to be modified, he said.

The requirement for a modified operating system will loosen with Intel’s coming Vanderpool Technology, or VT, due in 2005, Pratt said. It will mean unmodified operating systems will run on Xen, though not as fast as modified ones. That means Windows will run on Xen even though open-source programmers don’t have access to change Windows itself.

Falling by the wayside
Xen competitors that haven’t caught on include Plex86 and User-mode Linux. While the latter made it into the most recent version of SuSE Linux from Novell, it likely won’t last.

“User-mode Linux is most likely dead,” Schlaeger said. The management tools Novell developed to administer that software will be re-used to control Xen instead, added Markus Rex, general manager of SuSE Linux.

Xen will likely be incorporated into Novell’s upcoming SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 and later into the next version of its premium product SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, Rex said.

Linux seller Red Hat also has Xen plans. The virtualization package is being added to Red Hat’s experimental Fedora Core 4 product and will probably be in version 5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering. Like Novell, Red Hat plans to add management tools to control aspects such as the creation or removal of Xen virtual machines.

Hewlett-Packard strongly endorsed Xen this week, saying it will contribute software to the effort. “Our expectation is that Xen will provide a viable, open-source alternative in virtualization platforms,” said Martin Fink, vice president of Linux, in a keynote address at the Linux show. HP, too, hopes to profit from software to manage virtual machines.

Intel began contributing software to the Xen project in January so it could use VT extensions, said Phil Brace, director of marketing for Intel’s digital enterprise group.

Expanding into new areas
Currently Xen works with Linux on computers using x86 processors such as Intel’s Pentium, but efforts are under way to extend it into other domains. This week, AMD announced it’s helping to bring Xen to 64-bit x86 chips such as its Opteron, future generations of which, employing “Pacifica” technology, will have new virtualization support.

There’s experimental support for Intel’s Itanium family now in Xen, Pratt said. And IBM has expressed interest in moving it to the Power chip, Schlaeger said.

Among operating systems, the NetBSD variant of Unix works on Xen–and the version was done so quickly, Pratt said, that XenSource hired the NetBSD programmer who did the work, Christian Limpach.

And Sun’s Solaris–which the company has begun aggressively pushing for x86 servers–is another likely candidate, said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun’s network systems group. “We think the open-source virtual hypervisor is the way to go,” he said. (Hypervisor is a term IBM is trying to trademark referring to a layer of software that lets hardware be divided up so multiple operating systems can run on it.)

The IBM connection
Sources familiar with IBM’s plans expect Big Blue to play a significant part in Xen. The company has decades of experience in the field with mainframes, Unix servers and Intel-based servers.

Although IBM has a sales and development partnership with VMware, it also has an in-house hypervisor project for x86 chips–a project that came to light in a January posting to the Xen mailing list. Researchers in IBM’s labs were using it as a foundation for a project called sHype, or Secure Hypervisor, to make virtual machines less susceptible to attack. The software uses rules that govern administrative privileges and the flow of information between virtual machines.

“We now plan to contribute this to Xen by integrating our security architecture into it,” IBM researcher Reiner Sailer said in the posting. Pratt responded favorably in his posting: “It’ll be great to have IBM contributing to Xen security.”

That’s not all. One source familiar with IBM’s plans said the company expects to contribute software for two key computing technologies–input-output services for communicating with devices such as network cards and virtual memory for extending physical memory using hard drives.

Despite the Xen support, IBM reaffirmed its VMware ties Thursday. “IBM has a strong and vital business relationship with VMware. That relationship is stronger than it’s ever been,” said spokesman Jim Larkin.

VMware, for its part, labels Xen a “nascent” virtualization project that’s hampered by its requirement that the operating system be modified. “Xen will not be very useful for the overwhelming majority of customers that have deployed standard Linux operating systems today,” VMware said in a statement.

But VMware–combined with Intel’s VT technology and Microsoft’s competing Virtual Server–faces a definite threat, Haff said.

Red Hat and Novell will not add server virtualisation tools to the current versions of their enterprise Linux server products, but are working to include them in the next versions, due in about 12 months.

Server virtualisation tools enable a single server to run multiple operating systems. They also improve server management – for example, by enabling systems to be backed up or moved to new hardware without shutting them down or interrupting services. Experts predict that within five years 95 percent of Wintel server deployments will use virtualised hardware. With at least three open-source server virtualisation projects under way, the developer community already seems convinced about the usefulness of such tools. And Open-source giant Novell has promised “significant announcements” about open-source server virtualisation.

Also, Red Hat’s Fedora Linux distribution already supports Cambridge University’s Xen open-source virtual machine monitor (VMM) tool; and Microsoft launched its Virtual Server 2005 late last year. Red Hat spokesman Nick Carr said, “It’s an area of great excitement and buzz in the open-source community. We have customers looking forward to this technology. It will allow them to increase the utilisation of the very powerful dual-core and HyperThreaded servers that will be coming to market later this year.” Both AMD and Intel are expected to launch dual-core versions of their respective Opteron and Xeon processors later this year.

Carr said that Red Hat supports its enterprise server software for seven years after release, so its focus is on software stability good management infrastructure.

Unfortunately for proponents of purely open-source systems, it seems the Xen project supports fewer operating systems than the commercial alternatives like those from virtualisation specialist VMware or Microsoft. Xen can only be used to host virtual machines running a few specially honed versions of Linux.

Both IBM want to harden Xen so it can be used in commercial environments where security and stability are a given. IBM Research is contributing a security architecture called sHype and some code that it created for a home-grown X86 virtualization engine. HP is offering some code based loosely on ideas from its vPar virtual partitions for its HP-UX platform to help Xen better manage and secure Xeon partitions.

Novell’s contributions to the project are unclear, but the company definitely wants to use Xen as a differentiator for its SUSE Linux distributions. Patrick said yesterday that Novell was putting software engineers on the Xen project and would be integrating it into the future SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 desktop. Patrick said that Novel tends to ship a new release of SUSE Linux Professional every six months or so, since it is the version of its Linux distribution that has all the latest-greatest features.

SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 started shipping at the end of 2004, which means the 9.3 release is probably due mid-year or so. Patrick said that Novell is demonstrating Xen running on the LinuxWorld expo floor on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, the current Linux 2.6 kernel version, and that Xen would be integrated fully into the future SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

AMD also announced that it would be porting Xen to work with its Opteron processors and said further that it would have a commercialized version of the product available in the first half of 2005. Because of the direct memory architecture of the Opteron design, AMD believes that it will be able to do a better implementation of Xen.

Moreover, AMD is counting on the “Pacifica” hardware virtualization features in future single-core and dual-core Opterons to help Xen run even better on the chips. Intel is creating a version of its “Vanderpool” virtualization hardware features for Pentium 4 processors, called “Silvervale,” which will provide hardware-assist for virtual machine partitioning like that offered by Xen

VMware ACE lets IT managers create what the company calls an “assured computing environment” on Windows-based desktop systems in isolated or remote settings, and it controls these systems using predefined policies.

VMware ACE, released in December, leverages VM (virtual machine) technology to create a secure Windows PC environment. Using VMware ACE Manager (the management interface in VMware ACE), IT managers can apply custom policies to VMs preinstalled with guest operating systems, applications and data, and then easily deploy them via network shares, CD or DVD.

VMware ACE Manager is priced at $795 per license. The end-user VMware ACE license is priced at $99 per PC. A $995 VMware ACE Starter Kit includes a single VMware ACE Manager license and four VMware ACE end-user PC licenses.

VMware ACE is not designed to replace corporate desktops. However, our tests show the product would be a good fit in extended enterprise desktop infrastructures such as remote access sites and guest PC systems.

We’ve seen no other VM software that provides such a high level of policy management in the desktop environment. Competitors such as Leostream Corp. and PlateSpin Ltd. offer products for converting standard operating systems into VMs, as well as a centralized management platform. However, these systems mostly target server farms and data centers. Further, Microsoft Corp. has yet to include policy management in Virtual Server 2005, its stand-alone server virtualization software.

VMware ACE supports a wide range of guest operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Solaris, but the host operating system is Windows-only. We tested VMware ACE using Windows Server 2003 as the host and Windows XP Professional as the guest client.

VMware ACE Manager provides comprehensive and granular rule sets for governing VM usage. Its version-based network access policies let administrators restrict network access and limit guest systems to only assigned resources.

VMware ACE Manager’s user interface provides intuitive wizards for configuration settings. The end-user client’s new VM UI behaves like a normal Windows application; for example, we could resize or minimize the UI window. The VMware ACE application, which runs on a separate virtualization layer independent of the host operating system, is governed by predefined policies.

The VMware ACE client can suspend the VM application by default upon exit. This is a useful feature that enables users to save their work by suspending the VMware ACE application and logging back on at a later time.

We used VMware ACE Manager’s Virtual Rights Management capabilities to apply different policies to govern VM usage for test clients. After we set up an IIS (Internet Information Services) Web server to host the network policy, the VMware ACE client connected to the policy server during startup to download the configuration settings. We also used the policy server to update configurations.

We could restrict the VM client’s access to the network based on IP addresses or subnets; we could also restrict users’ Internet access.

We encrypted data and configuration files on VMs when they were installed. This capability is useful because it prevents users from tampering with the VM’s files.

Of the two, Vanderpool promises the biggest shift in the way desktop computers are operated, but it could turn out to be a nightmare for IT managers.

On the plus side, Vanderpool could enable more secure home working, allowing staff to access corporate applications through a locked-down virtual machine that connects to the office via a virtual private network (VPN). On the other hand, administrators will need some way of managing all those virtual machines.

Current virtualisation technologies such as VMware run on top of a host operating system. With Windows XP, for example, VMware can be used to create one or more virtual PCs running Linux or an older version of Windows, but the host Windows XP still has ultimate control over the physical system resources.

Intel’s Vanderpool technology introduces a software layer, the virtual machine monitor (VMM), and this has control over the system hardware, according to the firm. While details of the architecture are still vague, it looks from Intel’s preliminary documentation that the VMM takes the place of the host operating system, relegating Windows, Linux, and every other operating system on the PC to the position of “guests” running inside virtual machines.

However, Intel may find that Vanderpool creates as many problems as it solves for IT departments. For one thing, it has the potential to render many of the most widely used management tools almost useless. Imagine trying to do a network audit of the systems in your company with the management agent on each system running inside a virtual Windows PC. The agent will only report the virtual hardware that Windows thinks it is running on, which might not be the same as the real hardware.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that Intel is working on another technology to let administrators remotely manage PC systems, even if the operating system on the box in question isn’t working. Intel’s Active Management Technology (IAMT) promises out-of-band (read “outside of Windows”) diagnostic and recovery capabilities to remotely patch and restore systems. Whether this will also enable the deployment and control of virtual machines is not clear at the moment.

If the deployment issue can be addressed, virtualisation has the potential to revolutionise desktop support. It could enable administrators to apply the latest Windows service pack update just once to one virtual machine, for example, and then deploy copies of that across the LAN, rather than patch every system individually.

Xen is an open source server virtualization architecture that allows users to run multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) simultaneously on the same physical server. Each VM gets a portion of the server CPU, memory and I/O from Xen, which dynamically assigns resources to virtual machines or migrates virtual machines to other servers, if needed. Through integration with Voltaire InfiniBand interconnect, Xen benefits from multi-channel hardware and OS bypass to enable full isolation between virtual machines, greater performance and scalability.

The combined solution, which includes Voltaire network and storage virtualization technology, will improve the efficiency of enterprise data centers by providing the full flexibility to choose any application to run on any virtual server, and dynamically allocate compute, network, and storage resources. In addition, financial institutions required to comply with recent SEC regulations for data protection will have better flexibility to reassign applications geographically.

Voltaire is collaborating with Cambridge, U.K.-based XenSource and the open source Linux community to deliver the solution. InfiniBand and Xen drivers were recently added to the Linux kernel. Both drivers are in Kernel.org 2.6.11rc.

“Voltaire’s InfiniBand solutions are well-positioned to serve as the underlying infrastructure for Xen-based virtualized data centers,” said Moshe Bar, CTO of XenSource, a company founded by the creators of Xen to deliver enterprise class virtualization solutions. “The combination of RDMA transport standard protocols such as iSER and SDP and Voltaire’s multiprotocol switches fits well with the Xen virtualization architecture.”

“The combination of 10 Gbps InfiniBand architecture, Voltaire’s unique high-speed network and storage virtualization capabilities, and Xen server virtualization technology provides the most comprehensive, scalable and high-performance virtualization solution in the market,” said Yaron Haviv, CTO, Voltaire. “We look forward to delivering a powerful solution that makes true grid computing a reality in enterprise data centers.”

Voltaire interconnect solutions consist of layer 2-7 multiprotocol switches with integrated InfiniBand, GbE and Fibre Channel connectivity, grid management and virtualization software, adapters and software that enable high performance applications to run on commodity server and storage resources that can be virtualized into supercomputers. Voltaire switches are the fastest in the industry and are deployed successfully in the world’s largest production supercomputer and many other large grids.

Voltaire switches are centrally controlled and virtualized through embedded VoltaireVision Grid Interconnect Management software. VoltaireVision uses industry-standard interfaces to enterprise management platforms and can be provisioned by automation and policy platforms such as IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator and others. The integration of provisioning management tools, server virtualization software and intelligent grid interconnect solutions is the foundation of the next generation data center.