February 2009

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Hyper9 Apparently in Good Shape

Friday, February 27, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

With the recent downturn in the economy, it seems like companies on all sides are running into lots of problems. This seems to be particularly true; I’ve heard rumors—nothing confirmed, mind you—that more than one virtualization-related startup is down to a skeleton crew in the hopes they can survive the economic storm.

That does not appear to be the case with Hyper9, who recently announced two pieces of good news. First, the company has just closed an $8 million Series B round of funding. Second, they’ve announced that Mike Maples Sr. has joined the Board of Directors. Apparently this second announcement is quite significant, although I must admit the significance is mostly lost on me (I’m not really familiar with Mr. Maples’ business history). David Marshall, who works for Hyper9, also covered this news on his blog as well.

In any case, it’s nice to see that at least a few companies are doing well. To David Marshall and crew at Hyper9, here’s a good luck wish to you! If you keep up the good work on the Hyper9 products, I’m confident you’ll do well.

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Open Source VMFS Driver

Thursday, February 26, 2009 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

It looks like my post discussing a universal cluster file system may have been prescient. Shared with me first via Twitter, it appears that a company has already started building an open source VMFS driver. It was also covered here and here.

As we discussed in the post about cross-hypervisor cluster file systems, the implications of hypervisors potentially being able to share clustered storage are quite significant. Of course, there are many hurdles to yet overcome, but what if this project develops and matures and becomes a valid tool? What will happen if open source Xen adopts VMFS as their cluster file system of choice? And although it’s quite unlikely—potentially even impossible—that GPL licensing would allow it, what would happen if Microsoft were to use this open source VMFS driver with Hyper-V? Everything has to start somewhere…and that includes universal cluster file systems. This could be the beginning.

Of course, there are numerous other implications as well. As was mentioned on Twitter, this opens the possibility of an open source VCB equivalent and it sets a precedent for a potential de facto standard in cluster file systems for virtualization. The creation of standards through broad adoption by the vendors is something that I mentioned in my coverage of Citrix’s open sourcing their VHD implementation, and I mentioned at that time that I believed the move to open source the VHD implementation put Citrix in a good spot to be the leader in the creation of a de facto virtual hard disk standard. If this open source VMFS driver takes off, that puts VMware in a good position to have their cluster file system established as a de facto standard.

Does this mean we’ll be running our virtual machines in VHD files stored on a VMFS partition? It’s possible…let me know what you think.

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VMware vExpert Awards

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

Today, VMware awarded their vExpert Awards, an award intended to highlight those IT professionals who have supported the VMware community through user groups, blogs, forums, tools, and other means. Quoting from John Troyer’s official announcement on the VMTN Blog:

Email went out tonight informing around 300 hard-working bloggers, user group leaders, and virtualization evangelists of all types that they had received a VMware vExpert Award. VMware vExperts were chosen on the basis of the contributions they had made to the community of VMware and virtualization users in 2008.

I am honored to announce that I was one of the recipients of a 2008 VMware vExpert award for my community contributions during 2008. I thank everyone in the community for their nominations and their support, and I hope to be able to continue to support the community moving forward in the future as well. Thanks to everyone!

More information about the VMware vExperts can be found on the vExpert landing page.

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It’s Official: XenServer Available for Free

Monday, February 23, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 7 comments

Although word of this announcement was leaked last week, today Citrix made the announcement official: Citrix XenServer will be available to customers free of charge. Although I was briefed by Citrix on this news the day before word broke, I assured Citrix that I would honor my word and not discuss the news until the embargo expired.

As I understand it, there are actually three parts to the announcement:

  1. XenServer 5 will be available free. According to the information shared with me by Citrix, this won’t be a stripped down version of XenServer, either: this is supposedly the equivalent of XenServer 5 Enterprise Edition, so functionality like live migration, Active Directory integration, and a centralized management console are all included.
  2. Citrix will be unveiling a new product line called Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V. This is a management product that provides automated lab management, dynamic provisioning, StorageLinkTM technology to leverage advanced storage functionality, and advanced high availability (but only when used with XenServer). Citrix Essentials will manage both Hyper-V and XenServer, and is intended to integrate with Microsoft System Center and other high-level management frameworks.
  3. Finally, Citrix is extending their relationship with Microsoft around virtualization. Microsoft will be recommending Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V as the management platform, and Microsoft will be adding support for XenServer in System Center.

In addition to these moves, it is my understanding that Citrix will be more aggressively moving more of their XenServer-related code into the open source community. The first of these moves has already been announced, and I am assured by Simon Crosby that more code is slated to be open sourced in the coming weeks and months.

So what’s my take on this announcement? I’ve already stated that I’m glad to see Citrix giving back to the Xen open source community, from which they’ve benefited so greatly, and I’m looking forward to the continued movement of XenServer-related code into the open source community. The StorageLinkTM stuff looks pretty cool, and if Citrix can actually deliver on it then they’ll be back on par with what’s slated to be in the vStorage APIs from VMware. (Wonder who will deliver first?) Citrix Essentials looks interesting, but it’s really too early to tell just yet. The cross-platform approach is nice, and a welcome acknowledgement of the heterogeneous nature of the data center, but as a new product it will take some time to establish itself in the market.

That leaves only free XenServer. There’s no question that XenServer receives far less attention than Hyper-V, despite the fact that it’s been around far longer than its Microsoft cousin. Now that XenServer is available at no charge, this will open the door of many more customers who may not have previously considered the Citrix product. That will likely increase uptake of the product in the SMB market, but I doubt that it will make a significant impact in the large enterprise market, where VMware’s flagship products still rule. The other effect of the announcement will be on other Xen-based virtualization solutions, like Virtual Iron, who now have to compete with Citrix on a completely different playing field. I would not be surprised to see a number of these smaller players exit the game, either by acquisition or bankruptcy.

The real question here is this: what will VMware do? VMware continues to pour R&D dollars into the development of its hypervisor and surrounding applications, and only makes limited versions of its bare metal product available for free (ESXi). Will this push VMware to make “full” ESXi available for free? Or will VMware continue to believe, as they have in the past, that the hypervisor is still not a commodity, and therefore continue to charge for it? I suspect that their path will be the latter and not the former, and it will be justified by the presence of features like Storage VMotion and VMware FT that have yet to be replicated by any other vendor. While I have my concerns about that approach, only time will tell if my concerns are justified.

UPDATE: The Citrix press release is available here.

UPDATE 2: As shared by David Marshall, it turns out that the automated lab management functionality of Citrix Essentials is being OEM’ed from VMLogix.

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Is Unified Fabric an Inevitability?

Friday, February 20, 2009 in Gestalt, Storage by slowe | 11 comments

So here’s another “thinking out loud” post. This time, I’m thinking about Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and unified fabric.

I was going back through a list of blog posts and articles that I wanted to read and think on, and I came across a link to Dave Graham’s article titled Moving a Fabric forward: FCoE Adoption and other Questions. His blog entry was partially in response to my FCoE discussion post. His post got me thinking again.

It seems like anytime someone talks about FCoE, they end up also talking about unified fabric. After having read a number of different articles and posts regarding FCoE, I can see where FCoE would be attractive to shops with significant FCP installations. In my mind, though, this doesn’t necessarily mean unified fabric. Given the political differences in organizations—think the “storage team” and the “networking team”—how likely is it that an organization may adopt FCoE, but not unified fabric? Or how likely is it that an organization may adopt FCoE, intending it to be a transitional technology leading to unified fabric, but never actually make it all the way?

So here’s my question: is unified fabric an inevitability?

(Oh, and here’s a related question: Most people cite VoIP as proof that the unified fabric is inevitable. More so than anything else, I believe VoIP’s success was more a reflection of the rising importance of TCP/IP networking. If so, does that give iSCSI an edge over FCoE? Is iSCSI the “VoIP of the storage world”?)

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Citrix Open Sources Their VHD Implementation

Thursday, February 19, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 3 comments

One sticking point I’ve had with Citrix since the XenSource acquisition has been the perception of a failure to give back to the open source Xen community. Note that I said perception. It appeared, following the XenSource acquisition, that Citrix was all about using open source Xen as a base but failing to return any of enhancements they made to the code base. No, I don’t have any concrete examples; again, this was the perception.

It appears that Citrix is now taking steps to remedy that perception. In a blog entry posted last night, Simon Crosby announced that Citrix has open sourced their optimized VHD support. This means that XenServer’s robust VHD implementation is now available to any developer under the BSD license. In case you don’t already know, VHD is the same virtual disk technology Microsoft uses in Hyper-V, and which Microsoft is using even more extensively in future versions of Windows.

In my opinion, this is an excellent move. It addresses the perception of failing to give back to the open source community, and it puts what appears to be a valuable piece of technology into the open source world. Making XenServer’s VHD implementation available for other open source developers to use in their projects puts VHD on the fast track to being the de facto virtual disk standard. Assuming that other virtualization platforms adopt VHD support—and I’m not sure why many of them wouldn’t adopt VHD support, except for VMware—we’ve now removed a huge barrier to interoperability. That’s a good thing.

Not being a lawyer, I’m a bit worried about the compatibility of the BSD license—which is generally regarded as quite generous—and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, but I’ll leave that for others to hash out.

It will be interesting to see if Citrix also open sources some of their other XenServer-related technologies. Time will tell…

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Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Four, HP Traditional Expansion Options

Monday, February 16, 2009 in Virtualization by adelp | 20 comments

By Aaron Delp

Welcome to Part 4 in our series on blades and virtualization. Please note that I will be covering the HP virtualized I/O offerings in a near future post. I plan to cover Virtual Connect, Flex-10, and the BL495 blade at that time.

As always, let’s start by reviewing the hardware specification we will be using to compare the rack servers against the blade servers. Here are the portions of the spec that concern us:

  • A minimum of 32 GB memory – As many have commented and my own studies have shown, memory is usually the first limiting factor. The more memory you can install in the system, the better.
  • 2 on-board NICs + some combination of expansion cards (FC, iSCSI, NIC, 10Gb)

As we did for the IBM side, let’s start with memory. The maximum amount of memory available on the DL360 is currently 64GB when using 8GB DIMMS in each of the eight slots. The BL460c has the same memory configuration (8 slots), but has a few caveats depending on the processor power consumption. According to the HP Product Bulletin Tool, if the processor is 80W or below, then the max amount of memory is 64GB (8x8GB). If you would like to use processors above 80W, then the maximum amount of memory is 48GB in a 6x8GB configuration. Which processors take above 80W you ask? As of this writing, there are only 2 processors in this category, the 3.0GHz Quad Core (Intel X5450 chip, not the E5450 chip!) and the 3.16GHz Quad Core (Intel X5460).

As with the IBM solution, I will explore four possible transport technologies for virtualization: 10Gb, iSCSI, FC, and NFS. I will also fill any remaining expansion slots with 1Gb Ethernet ports. Just like the IBM Chassis, we have a maximum of eight expansion ports.

HP expansion is a little more straightforward than IBM. Bays 1 & 2 connect to the blade on-board NICs and must be populated with an Ethernet compatible switch. An HP BL460c blade has two expansion slots, labeled Mezzanine 1 & 2. Bays 3 & 4 on the chassis connect to the adapter in Mezzanine Slot 1 on the BL460c Blade. Bays 5-8 connect to Mezzanine bay 2 on the blade. If a dual port card is placed in Mezzanine 2, only Bays 5 & 6 will be active. A four port card is required (Ethernet is the only 4 port card currently) to access all four switch bays.

The only exception to the above port mappings is 10Gb. Like the IBM 10Gb switch, the HP 10Gb switch is a “double wide” switch. For dual 10Gb in the HP chassis, one switch must be placed in Bays 5/6, the other in Bays 7/8.

Here are the possible configurations given the port mappings above:

BL460c blade with 10Gb & 4 NICs:

Dual On board NICs Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)
Mezz 1 – Dual Port NIC Bays 3 & 4 (Ethernet Switches)
Mezz 2 – Dual Port 10Gb Card 5/6 – 10Gb switch & 7/8 10Gb switch

 

BL460c blade with 10Gb, 2 NICs, and 2 FC:

Dual On board NICs Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)
Mezz 1 – Dual Port FC Card Bays 3 & 4 (FC Switches)
Mezz 2 – Dual Port 10Gb Card 5/6 – 10Gb switch & 7/8 10Gb switch

 

BL460c blade with FC & 6 NICs:

Dual On board NICs Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)
Mezz 1 – Dual Port FC Card Bays 3 & 4 (FC Switches)
Mezz 2 – Quad Port 1Gb Card Bays 5-8 Ethernet switches

 

BL460c blade with iSCSI & 6 NICs:

Dual On board NICs Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)
Mezz 1 – Dual Port iSCSI Card Bays 3 & 4 (Ethernet Switches)
Mezz 2 – Quad Port 1Gb Card Bays 5-8 Ethernet switches

 

BL460c blade 8 NICs:

Dual On board NICs Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)
Mezz 1 – Dual Port 1Gb Card Bays 3 & 4 (Ethernet Switches)
Mezz 2 – Quad Port 1Gb Card Bays 5-8 Ethernet switches

 

As you can see from the tables above, HP has a nice round portfolio without any holes. In the next section we will be covering the IBM virtualized I/O solutions.

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Hyperspaces Updated

Saturday, February 14, 2009 in Macintosh by slowe | 1 comment

Hyperspaces, the application designed to extend and build upon the built-in functionality of Spaces, has been updated again. My first coverage of Hyperspaces was back in October 2008, and at that time the application still had a few rough edges. I’m happy to report that Hyperspaces seems much more polished this time around—it’s clear that Tony Arnold, the developer, has been paying attention to the details.

For example, the latest build of Hyperspaces provides an animation transition for desktop backgrounds, a feature that was lacking previously. In earlier builds, there was a jarring delay between switching desktops and the background switching as well; now, there is a nice transition from one background to the next. Much better!

Based on Tony’s comments from the first article I know that he has a number of features still in the works. I’d like to cast my vote for a pager that isn’t attached to the menu bar as the next major feature to be implemented. (I’d really love to see desktop transitions, aka the “Cube effect,” return, but something tells me that will be a lot harder than detaching the pager from the menu bar. I could be wrong, though.)

Either way, Tony, keep up the great work. Hyperspaces is looking good!

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Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Part Three, IBM Traditional Expansion Options

Friday, February 13, 2009 in Virtualization by adelp | 15 comments

By Aaron Delp

UPDATE:  I have made some corrections to the 10GB and iSCSI sections based on feedback.  Thank you!

Welcome to part 3 of my series on blades and virtualization. I will be breaking the expansion articles into four parts: traditional IBM options, traditional HP options, virtualized IBM options, and virtualized HP options. By “virtualized options” I mean the IBM and HP blade I/O virtualization solutions (like IBM Blade Open Fabric Manager and HP VirtualConnect), not a server configuration that will run virtualization. Today, we will be covering IBM traditional options.

Let’s take a second to revisit a portion of our hardware standard we have been using for the power series and make a few additional notes. Here is the spec again:

  • A minimum of 32 GB memory – As many have commented and my own studies have shown; memory is usually the first limiting factor. The more memory you can install in the system, the better.
  • 2 on-board NICs + some combination of expansion cards (FC, iSCSI, NIC, 10Gb)
  • 2 x 146GB, 10k SAS drives (except the IBM HS21XM blades which only support one HD)

I will get into the expansion options in a second, but let me start with the memory since this is the area most people are concerned about. With the recent addition of 8GB DIMMS to the HS21XM product line, the HS21XM now supports 64GB of memory. The IBM 3550 supports a max of 32GB and even the IBM 3650 only supports 48GB. If memory is your concern, the IBM blade is actually the BEST fit for virtualization.

Another area of concern is the fact that the HS21XM only supports one hard disk. If you would like to boot the OS from a local disk, this can be an issue. IBM also offers the dual solid state drive in a RAID-1 configuration but both platters are mounted in the same enclosure so if you lose one, you need to replace them both. We know because it happened to one of our customers. In the end that doesn’t make sense either. I don’t see the actual ESX build as critical in a VirtualCenter environment so I usually don’t worry about it excessively.

The expansion cards can get a little tricky depending on the configuration. For virtualization I see four possible options to fill out the blades to meet our needs. They are FC, 10Gb, iSCSI, and NFS. We will fill any remaining expansion with Ethernet 1GB ports to provide as much connectivity as possible.

Above is a picture of an IBM BladeCenter H Chassis from the rear, highlighting the expansion bays. Bays 1 and 2 connect to the onboard Ethernet so the switches must be Ethernet compatible. Bays 3 and 4 connect to the first expansion card on the IBM Blade, often called the CFFv form factor. The v in CFFv stands for “vertical” meaning this card will talk to the vertical expansion switches.

Bays 7-10 often cause much confusion.  They are positioned horizontally in the chassis and connect to any CFFh (h for horizontal, get it?) card on a blade. A number of different switches can be inserted into these bays. The first one is the easiest one, the 10Gb switch.  The first switch would go in bay 7.  The second would go in to bay 9.  Each switch would connect to a port on the dual port 10Gb card.

UPDATE: You can also do a 4x10GB configuration by adding 2 more 10GB switches in Bays 8 and 10.  You will then need the 4 port 10GB card instead of the 2 oprt 10GB card.  I have updated the charts below to reflect the MAXIMUM number of connections.  You can of course go with less.

The second option for Bays 7-10 involves something called the MSIM (Multi-Switch Interconnect Module). This option will allow the FC, iSCSI, and NFS configurations. The MSIM is an adapter that divides the High Speed Bays into Bays 7 to 10 shown above. To take advantage of all four bays, two MSIM’s divide both High Speed Bays and you will need a four port CFFh card to map to all four bays.

The above information yields the following switch and blade expansion card combinations:

Blade with 10Gb & 4 NICs (no MSIM’s – 4 NICs and 4 10Gb per blade):

Dual On board NICs

Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)

Dual Port Cffv NIC

Bays 3 & 4 (Ethernet Switches)

Dual Port 10Gb Card

Bays 7,8,9,10 (10Gb switches)

 

Blade with 10Gb, FC & Eth (no MSIM’s – 2 NICs, 2 FC and 4 10Gb per blade):

Dual On board NICs

Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)

Dual Port Cffv FC Card

Bays 3 & 4 (FC Switches)

Dual Port 10Gb Card

Bays 7,8,9,10 (10Gb switches)

 

Blade with FC Option #1 (requires 2 MSIM’s – 2 FC and 6 NICs per blade):

Dual On board NICs

Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)

Dual Port Cffv FC Card

Bays 3 & 4 (FC Switches)

Quad Port Cffh NIC

Bays 7,8,9,10 (Ethernet switches)

 

Blade with FC Option #2 (requires 2 MSIM’s – 2 FC and 6 NICs per blade):

Dual On board NICs

Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)

Dual Port Cffv NIC

Bays 3 & 4 (Ethernet Switches)
Dual NIC and Dual FC Cffh Card

Bays 7,9 (Ethernet) & 8,10 (FC)

 

Blade with NFS or software iSCSI (2 MSIM’s – 8 NICs per blade):

Dual On board NICs

Bays 1 & 2 (Ethernet switches)

Dual Port Cffv NIC

Bays 3 & 4 (Ethernet Switches)

Quad Port Cffh NIC

Bays 7,8,9,10 (Ethernet switches)

 

You will notice that only 3 of the 4 options are given. Hardware-based iSCSI is missing. That is because IBM has a hole in their portfolio. The IBM iSCSI card is the older form factor that if used on an HS21XM blade it doesn’t allow any other card. So, you end up with 2 NICs and 2 iSCSI. This isn’t acceptable and isn’t a valid option.

So what do you think? I believe that any of the above configurations will suit virtualization nicely given a proper design. I look forward to your thoughts as we continue on to the next article, HP traditional expansion.

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New Virtualization Wiki

Thursday, February 12, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Rynardt Spies of VirtualVCP hit me up via e-mail yesterday to let me know about a new virtualization wiki he’s launched. It’s called Vi-Pedia.

The idea behind Vi-Pedia is to gather information on virtualization technologies in one place for easier reference. Clearly, being a wiki it won’t succeed without lots of community participation, so I thought I’d put up a quick mention of the new site to help spread the word.

Free free to jump over to Vi-Pedia and help contribute!

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