History

Enterprise Open Source Magazine published a comparison between Win4Lin 2.7 and VMware Workstation 5.5.1 for Linux.

There are a lot of funny parts with an even funnier conclusion:

While both products behaved as advertised, I had a better feeling about Win4Lin at the end of test. The lukewarm reception I got from VMware left me feeling that if I ever needed support, I might be left hanging.

Despite the fact that VMware performed faster, Win4Lin certainly performed fast enough for me. Also, through no fault of its own, VMware is probably overkill for your average desktop GNU/Linux user. If we desktop users need to use Windows at all, likely a single instance will do.

Lastly, money talks. Since it’s likely that a single Windows instance will do, the $89 Win4Lin Pro price tag is a lot easier to swallow than the $189 tag on VMware.

Read the whole comparison at source.

Summary

With User Mode Linux you can create virtual Linux machines within a Linux computer and use them to safely test and debug applications, network services, and even kernels. You can try out new distributions, experiment with buggy software, and even test security. Now, for the first time, the creator and maintainer of User Mode Linux shows how to put it to work hands-on. Jeff Dike covers everything from getting started through running enterprise-class User Mode Linux servers. You’ll find authoritative advice on bootup, compilation, administration, specialized configurations, and much more.

Contents

• What User Mode Linux is, how it works, and its uses in Linux networks
• Key applications, including server consolidation, development, and disaster recovery
• Booting and exploration: logins, consoles, swap space, partitioned disks, and more
• Copy-On-Write (COW): UML’s efficient approach to storing filesystem changes
• In-depth discussion of User Mode Linux networking and security
• Centrally managing User Mode Linux instances, and controlling their hardware resources
• Implementing clusters and other specialized configurations
• Setting up User Mode Linux servers, step-by-step: small-scale and large-scale examples
• The future of virtualization and User Mode Linux

About the Author

Jeff Dike, an engineer at Intel, is author and maintainer of User Mode Linux. Well known throughout the Linux technical community, he has been active in Linux kernel development for more than five years. He holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.

Quoting from the Emulex official announcement:

Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), the most trusted name in storage networking connectivity, today announced that its LightPulse® Fibre Channel HBAs used within VMware ESX Server are qualified and supported by HP for storage area network (SAN) connectivity to HP StorageWorks XP, EVA and MSA arrays, and HP ProLiant server solutions.

This qualification enables customers implementing VMware virtual infrastructure software – for partitioning, consolidating and managing servers in mission-critical environments – to deploy HP-branded HBAs from Emulex for high performance SAN connectivity to the HP StorageWorks and HP ProLiant server solutions.
…
The Emulex HBAs supported by HP include the LP1050-based models of single- and dual-channel HBAs.
…
In addition to today’s announcement, Emulex is working closely with VMware on a number of initiatives, including the forthcoming release of Emulex’s LightPulse Virtual HBA technology to the broader market.
As more IT managers are looking to virtual infrastructure for consolidation, increased resource utilization and management flexibility, the Emulex LightPulse Virtual HBA technology in conjunction with VMware VMotion technology and VMware ESX Server, enables each virtual machine or guest operating system to own and access a dedicated World Wide Port Name (WWPN), even when several virtual machines are sharing the same physical host bus adapter.
This new capability enables each guest to be managed independently, using SAN best practices for security and configuration management, such as fabric-based zoning and storage Logical Unit (LUN) mapping…

The famous IT Spending Survey from Goldman Sachs research group tracks, among others, which IT vendors are most requested at spending time among top 1000 worldwide companies.

The 2006 survey, conducted in mid-April on a 100 IT executives sample (half of them CIOs) and published on 5th May, still reconfirms VMware as the most purchased technology in US, after being at first position on 4 surveys of 6:

Server Watch published a nice article about needs of server consolidation:

Listen closely to the vendor community,and it sounds like everybody is ditching their small servers and either consolidating onto a few larger machines or buying a bank of blades that can be more tightly controlled.

We wondered how rampant this consolidation really is. Turns out, here, too, it depends on whom you ask.
…
“Server consolidation does not appear to be that rampant,” says Chip Nickolett, president of Comprehensive Solutions, a systems integrator and consulting firm with experience in server consolidation based in Brookfield, Wisc. “It is mainly performed by larger companies with a complex and robust infrastructure that have been looking at this as a way to reduce cost and provide more flexibility and ease of management.”
…
There are times, however, when it may be prudent not to engage in server consolidation. IDC analyst Kelly Quinn points out that it takes careful preparation to conduct such a project, and that a vital part of that step is defining what – if any – value will actually be derived from it.

“Don’t engage in a server consolidation project until you’ve proven you can derive benefits from it and have thoroughly prepared both your personnel and resources for the process,” says Quinn. “It’s like the old adage goes, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Microsoft just updated his recently released Virtual Server 2005 R2 Management Pack to include support for SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

The new version maintains same build version 05.0.4000.0000.

Download it here.

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

Thanks to Virtualserver.tv for the news.

Ben Armstrong published another script in his endless serie, this time aimed to gather informations about Virtual Server 2005 virtual networks:

Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)

For Each vn in vs.VirtualNetworks
Wscript.Echo
Wscript.Echo “Virtual Network: ” & vn.name
Wscript.Echo “Packets sent: ” & vn.packetsSent
Wscript.Echo “Packets received: ” & vn.packetsReceived
Wscript.Echo
Next

Be sure to read the original post for updates and comments.

Update: Ben posted a little modification of the above script to collect historical statistics.

This script below will go through each virtual network on a physical computer and enumerate the amount of traffic seen each second for the last 60 seconds:

Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)

For Each vn in vs.VirtualNetworks
Wscript.Echo
Wscript.Echo “Virtual Network: ” & vn.name

Wscript.Echo
Wscript.Echo “Packets sent history: ”
For Each stat in vn.PacketsSentHistory
Wscript.StdOut.Write stat
Wscript.StdOut.Write “,”
Next

Wscript.Echo
Wscript.Echo “Packets received history: ”
For Each stat in vn.PacketsReceivedHistory
Wscript.StdOut.Write stat
Wscript.StdOut.Write “,”
Next
Wscript.Echo
Next

Also in this case be sure to read the original post for updates and comments.

Dennis Zimmer, owner of german blog VMachine.de, wrote a book in german language about VMware ESX, GSX servers and Microsoft Virtual Server.

VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server Release Date: September, 2005 ISBN: 3898427013 Edition: 1 Pages: 612

You can read a sample chapter here.

Note: this book will not appear on the Virtualization Bookshelf cause is not in English language.

On February 27th 2006 VMware launched one of the coolest challenge IT communities ever saw in modern times: creating the slimmest, fastest, most useful and open source virtual machine ever. Something which can be used by anyone worldwide for free, simply downloading powering on the VMware Player, and which the company calls Virtual Appliance.

The challenge, originally called VMware Ultimate Challenge, is so cool surely for the high objective but most of all for final prize: $200,000 for winners (half of them only for the first place).

The first phase of the challenge, the virtual machine submission, is going to close (the final day is set for May 26th) and, even if it propagated in the IT world like an earthquake, until now there are no news at all.

It’s quite understandable every competitor is afraid of disclosing his idea too early and permit others to get in at last minute and, with enough manpower, clone it, but at this point quite everybody is asking how many registrations VMware recorded and how many submissions they received…

A partial answer has been given by Michael Blonsky, Senior Manager of Virtual Appliances and ISV Solutions at VMware, which revealed on a VMTN forum, at the end of April, his company recorded almost 1,200 registrations but not even a single submission.

This means that VMware will have to face a massive upload near the deadline, and have to work hard to publish all submissions on the Virtual Appliances Directory.

If really all 1,200 (maybe more since another 15 days have passed) registrants will submit one virtual machine (but I heard some of them wanting to submit more than one) VMTN Community readers and official judging panel will have a huge work to recognize top virtual appliances.

The winners will be announced on August 14th: will 2,5 months be enough to choose?

CMPnet Asia published an interesting interview with David Wagner, Director of Solution Marketing for Capacity Management and Provisioning at BMC.

In the interview Wagner points out there are many challenges to front in virtualization and not every company is aware of all of them:

…
There are IT organizations that are very aware of the challenges of the management and there are those at the other end of the spectrum that think of virtualization as just another platform to manage. I think the ones that think of that way are doing themselves a disservice because there are some unique risks associated with virtualized environments that don’t exist in the physical environment or are at least not as significant.

I would classify these risks in really two main categories. One is all the risks associated with change. The whole reason there are risks associated with change is because when you make changes you need to know, what the current state is, so that if and when problems do occur, you can revert back to the point before the change is made or you can inform the right people so that they can use tools to diagnose the problem based on the knowledge of what the current configuration is. The unique thing about virtualized environments is the environment’s configuration itself is changing over time. So in virtual environments, you have applications that might be running on one physical machine one day and another one another day — or one virtual machine (VM) here or VMs are brought in and out service.

This is a whole new paradigm and it creates a whole new set of availability risks and downstream management challenges.

The other major bucket associated with virtualization challenges is one that simply does not exist in isolated physical environments — capacity risk. If you previously had an environment where you had two different applications running on two different physical servers you could be pretty well certain they weren’t going to cause problems for each other from a performance standpoint because they had their own resources. If one application required 30 percent of CPU at 9:30 in the morning to meet response time guarantees, it could because it had its own dedicated physical box. And if the other one needed 40 percent at 9:30 in the morning, that was fine. But if you combine them both and they are both running on a shared hardware platform in two separate virtual machines, if they both need access to the same physical resource at the same time, by definition one of them is going to have to wait so that is a new risk that didn’t exist previously.

So previously, the capacity risk of industry standard architectures was really a cost issue. You just threw more hardware at it and knew that risk was solved. But throwing more hardware at it here doesn’t solve the problem because now you are making things share resources that didn’t used to, so now you need to plan for that…

Read the whole interview at source.