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What is SR-IOV?

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

I/O virtualization is a topic that has received a fair amount of attention recently, due in no small part to the attention given to Xsigo Systems after their participation in the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day. While Xsigo uses InfiniBand as their I/O virtualization mechanism, there are other I/O virtualization technologies out there as well. One of these technologies is Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV).

So what is SR-IOV? The short answer is that SR-IOV is a specification that allows a PCIe device to appear to be multiple separate physical PCIe devices. The SR-IOV specification was created and is maintained by the PCI SIG, with the idea that a standard specification will help promote interoperability.

SR-IOV works by introducing the idea of physical functions (PFs) and virtual functions (VFs). Physical functions (PFs) are full-featured PCIe functions; virtual functions (VFs) are “lightweight” functions that lack configuration resources. (I’ll explain why VFs lack these configuration resources shortly.)

SR-IOV requires support in the BIOS as well as in the operating system instance or hypervisor that is running on the hardware. Until very recently, I had been under the impression that SR-IOV was handled solely in hardware and did not require any software support; unfortunately, I was mistaken. Software support in the operating system instance or hypervisor is definitely required. To understand why, I must talk a bit more about PFs and VFs.

I mentioned earlier that PFs are full-featured PCIe functions; they are discovered, managed, and manipulated like any other PCIe device. PFs have full configuration resources, meaning that it’s possible to configure or control the PCIe device via the PF, and (of course) the PF has full ability to move data in and out of the device. VFs are similar to PFs but lack configuration resources; basically, they only have the ability to move data in and out. VFs can’t be configured, because that would change the underlying PF and thus all other VFs; configuration can only be done against the PF. Because VFs can’t be treated like a full PCIe device, then the OS or hypervisor instance must be aware that they are not full PCIe devices. Hence, OS or hypervisor support is required for SR-IOV so that the OS instance or hypervisor can properly detect and initialize PFs and VFs correctly and appropriately. At this time, SR-IOV support is only found in some of the open source Linux kernels; this means it will find its way into KVM and Xen first. I do not have a timeframe for SR-IOV support in VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V.

So, putting this all together: what do you get when you have an SR-IOV-enabled PCIe device in a system with the appropriate BIOS and hardware support and you’re running an OS instance or hypervisor with SR-IOV support? Basically, you get the ability for that PCIe device to present multiple instances of itself up to the OS instance or hypervisor. The number of virtual instances that can be presented depends upon the device.

The PCI SIG SR-IOV specification indicates that each device can have up to 256 VFs. Depending on the SR-IOV device in question and how it is made, it might present itself in a variety of ways. Consider these exampes:

  • A quad-port SR-IOV network interface card (NIC) presents itself as four devices, each with a single port. Each of these devices could have up to 256 VFs (single port NICs) for a theoretical total of 1,024 VFs. In this case, each VF would essentially represent a single NIC port.
  • A dual-port SR-IOV host bus adapter (HBA) presents itself as one device with two ports. With 256 VFs, this would result in 512 HBA ports spread across 256 dual-port virtual HBAs.

These are, of course, theoretical maximums. Because each VF requires actual hardware resources, practical limits are much lower. Currently, 64 VFs seems to be the upper limit for most devices.

In situations where VFs represent additional NIC ports or HBA ports, other technologies must also come into play. For example, suppose that you had an SR-IOV-enabled Fibre Channel HBA in a system; that HBA could present itself as multiple, separate HBAs. Of course, because these logical HBAs would still share a single physical HBA port, you’d need NPIV (more information here) to support running multiple WWNs and N_Port_IDs on a single physical HBA port.

Similarly, you might have a Gigabit Ethernet NIC with SR-IOV support. That NIC could theoretically (according to the PCI SIG SR-IOV specification) present itself as up to 256 virtual NICs. Each of these NICs would be discrete and separate to the OS instance or hypervisor, but the physical Ethernet switch wouldn’t be aware of the VFs. Switches wouldn’t, by default, reflect some types of traffic arriving inbound on a port (from one VF) back out on the same port (to another VF). This could create some unexpected results.

SR-IOV does have its limitations. The VFs have to be the same type of device as the PF; you couldn’t, for example, have VFs that presented themselves as one type of device when the PF presented itself as a different type of device. Also, recall from earlier that VFs generally can’t be used to configure the actual physical device, although the extent to which this is true depends upon the implementation. The SR-IOV specification allows some leeway in the actual implementation; this leeway means that some SR-IOV-enabled NICs may also have VF switching functionality present (where the NIC could switch traffic between VFs without the assistance of a physical switch) while other NICs may not have VF switching functionality present (in which case VFs would not be able to communicate with each other without the presence of a physical switch).

I do want to point out that SR-IOV is related to, but not the same as, hypervisor bypass (think VMDirectPath in VMware vSphere). SR-IOV enables hypervisor bypass by providing the ability for VMs to attach to a VF and share a single physical NIC. However, the use of SR-IOV does not automatically indicate the hypervisor bypass will also be involved. Hypervisor bypass is a topic that I’m sure I will discuss in more detail in the near future.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the PCI SIG is also working on a separate IOV specification that allows multiple systems to share PCIe devices. This specification, known as Multi-Root IOV (MR-IOV), would enable multiple systems to share PCIe VFs. I hope to have more information on MR-IOV in the near future as well.

You now should have a basic understanding of SR-IOV, what it does, what is necessary to support it, and some of the benefits and drawbacks that SR-IOV creates. Feel free to post any questions you have about SR-IOV in the comments and I’ll do my best to get answers for you.

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Virtualization Short Take #31

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 12 comments

Welcome back to yet another Virtualization Short Take! Here is a collection of virtualization-related items—some recent, some not, but hopefully all interesting and/or useful.

  • Matt Hensley posted a link to this VIOPS document on how to setup VMware SRM 4.0 with an EMC Celerra storage array. I haven’t had the chance to read through it yet.
  • Jason Boche informs us that both Lab Manager 3 and Lab Manager 4 have problems with the VMXNET3 virtual NIC. In this blog post, Jason describes how his attempts to install Lab Manager server into a VM with the VMXNET3 NIC was failing. Fortunately, Jason provides a workaround as well, but you’ll have to read his article to get that information.
  • Bruce Hoard over at Virtualization Review (disclaimer: I write a regular column for the print edition of Virtualization Review) stirred up a bit of controversy with his post about Hyper-V’s three problems. The first problem is indeed a problem, but not an architectural or technological problem; VMware is indeed the market leader and has a quite solid user base. The second two “problems” stem from Microsoft’s architectural decision to embed the hypervisor into Windows Server. Like any other technology decision, this decisions has its advantages and disadvantages (these technology decisions are a real double-edged sword). Based on historical data, it would seem that the need to patch Windows Server will impact the uptime of the Windows virtualization solution; however, this is not to say that VMware ESX/ESXi are not without their patches and associated downtime as well. I guess the key takeaway here is that VMware seems to be doing a much better job of lessening (or even removing) the impact of the downtime through things like VMotion, DRS, HA, maintenance mode, and the like.
  • Apparently there is a problem with the GA release of the Host Update utility that is installed along with the vSphere Client, as outlined here by Barry Coombs. Downloading the latest version and reinstalling seems to fix the issue.
  • And while we are on the subject of ESX upgrades, here’s another one: if the /boot partition is too small, the upgrade to ESX 4.0.0 will fail. This isn’t really anything too new and, as Joep points out, is documented in the vSphere Upgrade Guide. I prefer clean installations of VMware ESX/ESXi anyway.
  • Dave Mishchenko details his adventures (part 1, part 2, and part 3) in managing ESXi without the VI Client or the vCLI. While it’s interesting and contains some useful information, I’m not so sure that the exercise is useful in any way other than academically. First of all, Dave enables SSH access to ESXi, which is unsupported. Second, while he shows that it’s possible to manage ESXi without the VI Client or the vCLI, it don’t seem to be very efficient. Still, there is some useful information to be gleaned for those who want to know more about ESXi and its inner workings.
  • I think Simon Seagrave and Jason Boche were collaborating in secret, since they both wrote posts about using vSphere’s power savings/frequency scaling functionality. Simon’s post is dated October 27; Jason’s post is dated November 11. Coincidence? I don’t think so. C’mon, guys, go ahead and admit it.
  • Thinking of using the Shared Recovery Site feature in VMware SRM 4.0? This VMware KB article might come in handy.
  • I’m of the opinion that every blogger has a few “masterpiece” posts. These are posts that are just so good, so relevant, so useful, that they almost transcend the other content on the blogger’s site. Based on traffic patterns, one of my “masterpiece” posts is the one on ESX Server, NIC teaming, and VLAN trunking. It’s not the most well-written post I’ve ever published, but it seems to have a lasting impact. Why do I mention this? Because I believe that Chad Sakac’s post on VMware I/O queues, microbursting, and multipathing is one of his “masterpiece” posts. Like Scott Drummonds, I’ve read that post multiple times, and every time I read it I get something else out of it, and I’m reminded of just how much I have yet to learn. Time to get back out of that comfort zone!
  • Oh, and speaking of Chad’s blog…this post is handy, too.

That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for the next installation, where I’ll once again share a collection of links about virtualization. Until then, feel free to share your own links in the comments.

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Thinking Out Loud: Is VMware Legitimizing the Competition?

Monday, November 16, 2009 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 14 comments

I was reading a completely unrelated post on Alessandro’s site this morning about how VKernel is reacting to VMware’s release of CapacityIQ when a thought occurred to me: is VMware legitimizing the competition?

Here’s the excerpt from Alessandro’s post that started me thinking:

And of course VKernel now is also in hurry to clarify that support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer is coming.

Now, let me ask you this question: what is one of the largest complaints about products like Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer? It’s the size of the partner ecosystem. Customers are a bit more hesitant to deploy these other solutions in part because there aren’t as many partner solutions out there to complement the virtualization solutions.

So, as VMware expands into new markets like capacity management and monitoring, backups, etc., former VMware-only partners are forced to adapt their products to work with Hyper-V and XenServer in order to protect themselves. This causes the size of the partner ecosystem for VMware’s competitors to grow, eliminating that complaint and removing one of VMware’s competitive advantages. In effect, VMware’s own actions are building out the partner ecosystem for their competitors and thus legitimizing the competition.

Am I crazy? Am I wrong? What is a company like VMware to do, if anything? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

UPDATE: Some readers have pointed out, rightfully so, that “legitimizing” isn’t really the best word to use here. Perhaps “assisting” or “helping” is a better word?

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Hyper9 VMM Released

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 3 comments

In case you hadn’t already heard elsewhere, our good friends at Hyper9 have released the final version of Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM). VMM works with VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware vSphere 4, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer 5. Users can use VMM with just about any mobile device, including the Apple iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android, and Windows Mobile devices.

VMM is available for users to manage up to five virtual machines for free. Hyper9 is also offering special introductory pricing of only $199 to manage up to 1,000 virtual machines.

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VMware, This is Wrong

Thursday, May 28, 2009 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 11 comments

UPDATE: VMware has clarified their position; they will allow competitors to exhibit at VMworld. The text in the exhibitors agreement was legalese—supposedly consistent with other major vendor-sponsored conferences—meant to give them an out in the event an exhibitor behaves inappropriately.

I sincerely hope that Brian Madden is wrong about the recent change to vendor policies for VMworld.

This is exactly the wrong thing to do in this sort of competitive landscape. You know, earlier this week on the Virtual Thoughts podcast, I was defending VMworld’s move into the territory of their former ISVs with products like vCenter Data Recovery, vCenter Chargeback, and vCenter ConfigControl. After all, VMware is a publicly owned company, and they have to show value to their shareholders. But this? This doesn’t have anything to do with showing value to the shareholders. This is like a spoiled little kid saying, “This is my sandbox, and you can’t play in it.”

What are you going to do, VMware? Let’s see, you’re expanding into the territory formerly handled by many of your ISVs, and now you’re blocking access to competing products at VMworld. So who will be at VMworld? Let’s see…

  • Vizioncore can’t come, because vRanger Pro overlaps functionality VMware will provide in vCenter Data Recovery. And vFoglight overlaps with CapacityIQ.
  • VKernel can’t come; again, they overlap with CapacityIQ.
  • As Brian Madden mentioned, Quest won’t be there due to a conflict with VMware View.
  • Microsoft won’t be there, because they won’t be able to talk about Hyper-V. True, they could come and not talk about Hyper-V, but I suspect they’ll also act like a spoiled child by saying, “If we can’t play by our rules, we won’t play at all.” Hmm…considering 90-95% of all the workloads running on VMware are Microsoft Windows, that’s an interesting situation to create. Oh, and VMware: are you prepared to be excluded from Tech-Ed too?
  • Ditto for Citrix. And probably ditto for being allowed to exhibit at Synergy. So much for VMware vSphere being the best platform on which to run XenApp—you won’t get the chance to make that claim!
  • Leostream? Nope—conflicts/overlaps with VMware View.
  • What about Hyper9? Not sure, vCenter Server 4.0 does provide a Search feature now, so that could potentially preclude Hyper9 from coming, too.
  • Surely Veeam could come, but they can’t talk about Veeam Backup (conflicts with vCenter Data Recovery).
  • esXpress? Nope.
  • Hardware vendors—IBM, HP, Dell—will be there.
  • Storage vendors—EMC, NetApp, HP, Compellent, Dell—will be there.
  • Networking vendors like Cisco and HP will be there. Unless VMware thinks that HP’s networking functionality isn’t complementary enough to its own virtual networking functionality…

I’m sure that I’ve overlooked some companies, but it sounds to me like the vast majority of the third-party ISVs now find themselves precluded from exhibiting at VMworld, in addition to finding themselves competing head-to-head with VMware in their own markets. Looks like the exhibit hall is going to be a lot less crowded this year!

Is VMware the new Microsoft? I’ll let you answer that one on your own.

Disclaimer: Before anyone jumps the gun and says otherwise, note that these opinions are mine, and are not endorsed by my employer or any vendor or other organization.

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Hyper9 Virtualization Mobile Manager Beta Invitations

Thursday, May 14, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 14 comments

The fine folks over at Hyper9 recently offered me a very limited number of special beta invitations for Hyper9’s new Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM) product. As you may already know, VMM is the brainchild of Andrew Kutz, who recently joined Hyper9 and has already released a few snippets of code via H9Labs.

Here are some highlights of VMM:

  • Supports all major hypervisors: VMware Server 2, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VMware ESX and VMware ESXi 3.5, VirtualCenter 2.5), Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer 5
  • Runs as an Apache Tomcat web application, supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X
  • Accessible from just about any mobile device: Apple iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android-based phones, and Windows Mobile devices
  • “Gracefully degrades” into Lite Mode if the mobile device doesn’t support all the web UI features

While the VMM beta is open to the general public, I have 15 special invitations that will grant additional benefits (extra perks, if you will). Specifically, these beta invitations will come with:

  • A 50% discount on the already low pricing for VMM once it is released
  • Automatic entry into a contest, starting in June, to win a mobile device
  • A limited edition Hyper9 T-shirt (assuming you provide a little feedback to the team at Hyper9)

Interested in one of these special invitations? Well, you’re going to have to work for it. Post a comment to this article telling me why you should be one of the lucky 15 readers who gets a special invitation. Telling me you’ll help promote my upcoming vSphere book might improve your chances…or it might not! I’ll leave comments open until Friday, May 22, or until I get 30 comments on the article, whichever comes first. From the comments on the article I’ll select the top 15 to receive the special invitation to the VMM beta.

In the event you aren’t interested in one of the special invitations, or if you read this article after the invitations have already been given out, you can also register for the beta from the Hyper9 community site.

So post your comment now!

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iForum 218: What the Other Virtualization Guys Don’t Want You to Know

Wednesday, May 6, 2009 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 3 comments

This is iForum 218, titled “XenServer 5: What the Other Virtualization Guys Don’t Want You to Know”. The presenters are Roger Klorese and Jill Skok.

Klorese starts out the presentation with XenCenter, the centralized multi-node management tool that ships with XenServer. As I’ve noted here on this site before, XenCenter’s real-time replication and multi-node behavior is, I believe, superior to the highly-centralized model that VMware uses with vCenter Server. He then goes through some of the features available in XenServer (which Klorese tells us really means “XenServer + Citrix Essentials for XenServer”) like XenMotion, High Availability, Dynamic Provisioning Services (which I believe refers to Citrix Provisioning Server aka Ardence), and Lab Management (OEM’d from VMlogix).

XenServer 5.5 is in beta currently. What are the features introduced in XenServer 5.5?

  • Active Directory authentication: This eliminates the need to login as root to manage XenServers via XenCenter. The granularity is a bit limited at the moment, but it is a big step forward.
  • Workload balancing: This feature, similar to VMware DRS, includes both live workload balancing as well as optimized (or intelligent) placement. Workload balancing is policy-driven, allowing users to select maximum performance or maximum density. Workload balancing can make decisions not only on CPU and memory, but also on network and disk statistics. Workload balancing does require a separate, Windows-based server (is this server in addition to the server running Essentials?).
  • Enhancements to the Xen hypervisor to add support for Intel EPT and AMD RVI virtualization extensions.
  • Worklow automation and orchestration: Workflow Studio gets incorporated into some editions of Citrix Essentials. I’m not sure how this is a new feature of XenServer 5.5.
  • XenCenter now adds organization view, to provide a different view of objects within XenCenter. This lays the foundation for more role-based administration and role-based views.

Klorese then moves into a discussion of XenServer’s storage integration technologies. This is StorageLink. Underneath it, XenServer underwent some changes. This enables snapshots on all types of storage repositories. A new feature, called LVHD, brings VHD layout to existing LVM storage repositories. This is a fast and simple upgrade to add new features.

Another new storage-related feature is backup enablement with Symantec NetBackup. From Klorese’s description, this essentially sounds like VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)—in other words, it’s not a backup solution but a framework for enabling backups with other products. When XenServer 5.5 is finally released, there will be documentation and best practices available to configure this backup enablement with NetBackup.

Delving back into StorageLink, Klorese describes some of the functionality of StorageLink. StorageLink requires a separate server (this may share hardware with the Workload Balancing server mentioned earlier) in order to function; this is called the StorageLink Gateway Server. StorageLink Manager is where you can manage and configure StorageLink. Most of what is done in StorageLink is handled inside XenCenter (you do have to use StorageLink Manager when using Essentials with Hyper-V). Use of the command-line interface (CLI) is required for initial setup of StorageLink with the storage array.

StorageLink is evolving into Citrix Ready Open Storage, which opens up StorageLink to work with many more different storage vendors and their functionality with XenServer 5.5. Products that participate in Citrix Ready Open Storage will work with Essentials for XenServer as well as Essentials for Hyper-V.

What about VM portability? Klorese indicates that multi-hypervisor interoperability is made possible by StorageLink and Citrix Essentials. This allows a VM to be moved between XenServer and Hyper-V. Klorese also mentions XenConvert 2.0, which provides extensive P2V and V2V functionality.

The next portion of Klorese’s discussion focuses on total cost of ownership (TCO) of XenServer versus other virtualization solutions. Naturally, VMware is in his targets here (as fully expected). Klorese feels that free XenServer with a support contract meets the needs of the majority of the users. For all the other users, Citrix Essentials provides workload balancing, high availability, StorageLink, etc. It would be interesting to me to see the pricing of XenServer plus Citrix Essentials versus VMware Infrastructure 3 (or VMware vSphere 4).

As if Klorese read my mind, the next slide is exactly that. Although he doesn’t mention VMware by name, it’s clear that’s who they are talking about. Some points Klorese mentions are absolutely valid—using more RAM in the servers instead of worrying about memory overcommitment may make a lot of sense in some cases—other points aren’t quite so clear. For example, Klorese lists almost 10x the “advanced virtualization management” costs for the opponent, but not for Citrix XenServer. The basis for that is that High Availability and other advanced features are needed by all the servers in the farm, therefore there’s no need to license them and you can save money by not buying those licenses. In my mind, that’s a weighted comparison.

At this point, Jill Skok of Accenture takes the podium. Her discussion is about building a virtualization practice on XenServer. I was most interested in the technical aspects of the XenServer discussion, so at this point I wrapped up my coverage.

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Citrix Synergy Day 2 Keynote

Wednesday, May 6, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

The Citrix Synergy Day 2 keynote starts about 8:40 AM with Pat Gelsinger of Intel, a figure becoming increasingly visible at events such as this conference. He starts his talk with a review of IDC statistics on the pressures and forces that are shaping IT, which is much a review of what John Gantz said yesterday.

At least the keynote is a bit more technology focused than yesterday’s keynote.

Gelsinger shares that Intel’s vision is 100% virtualized, and Intel’s engineers and technologists are driven toward eliminating all of the overhead involved in virtualization. That lead into a discussion on the Xeon 5500 processor. Gelsinger then moves into an on-stage demo of a Xeon 5500-based server versus an older server to demonstrate the vast performance improvement that the Xeon 5500 CPUs provide.

Next, Gelsinger moves into a discussion of how Intel is addressing client-side concerns. As with servers, Intel’s vision is that every client have some sort of virtualization built-in; this will fulfill what Intel calls the “Dynamic Virtual Client”. This is a lead-in to Intel’s vPro technology. Continuing Intel’s development, they will in 2010 introduce a 32-nm platform that builds upon the technologies found in vPro and enables the Dynamic Virtual Client. What is the Dynamic Virtual Client? It looks surprisingly similar to Citrix’s description of how user profiles, applications, operating systems, and hardware are decoupled. The Dynamic Virtual Client falls in the middle between thin clients and “managed rich clients”. The Dynamic Virtual Client is a set of hardware that enables any form of end-user experience: application streaming environments, client-side virtual environments, OS image streaming environments, or completely server-hosted environments.

Early customer examples of the Dynamic Virtual Client is Providence Health and a large financial firm (Gelsinger would not disclose the identity of the customer, but the picture said “Stock Exchange”). I’m not so sure that these customer “success stories” have as much to do with Intel and Intel technologies as it is based on technologies like application streaming, OS streaming, and the use of VDI and thin clients.

Gelsinger then introduces Ian Pratt, VP of Advanced Products at Xen.org. Pratt and Gelsinger start discussing the Intel and Citrix collaboration on XenClient, the new name for Project Independence (as announced yesterday). Pratt, of course, would like to see Xen slimmed down far enough to be embedded on the motherboard of every system that comes out of the factory. Pratt moves into a demonstration of a client hypervisor, where the hardware is running two virtual machines: a personal desktop and a professional desktop. In the demonstration, Pratt shows off Windows Vista with the full Aero experience running inside a virtual machine. Pratt then switches to the professional desktop, which is completely isolated and separated from the personal desktop.

This is a very different vision of client virtualization than VMware has shared. In what I’ve seen of VMware’s idea of client virtualization, it’s really only about virtualizing a single OS instance—not multiple OS instances. This demonstration—which I assume is a demonstration of XenClient—is, in my opinion, a more powerful, albeit more complex, view of client virtualization.

Naturally, the demonstration wouldn’t be complete if they didn’t also show off some of the other products and technologies announced here, so Pratt shows off Citrix Dazzle.

With regard to security, Gelsinger and Pratt discuss and explain how XenClient leverages Intel Trusted Execution to guarantee the integrity of the hypervisor and the client OS images, and how it uses Intel VT-d to improve performance. Pratt then demos how XenClient can “punch” applications from one VM into another VM to provide greater security and protection. The demo showed Pratt running an application from the professional desktop seamlessly inside the personal desktop—denoted by a green border around the window—and how that application is protected against potential malware running in the personal desktop. The technology looks a great deal like the Kidaro demonstrations that Microsoft provided last year at Tech-Ed 2008.

XenClient will be available before the end of the year.

With that, Gelsinger ends his portion of the keynote, and Mark Templeton takes the stage again.

Then Pratt comes back on the stage to show off how XenClient running on a MacBook Pro, and then shows Microsoft Outlook running in a seamless window under Mac OS X. This is quite similar to Parallels’ Coherence or VMware’s Unity mode, but is clearly quite new to the Citrix virtualization crowd. However, it makes me wonder how Apple feels about Citrix virtualizing Mac OS X with a bare metal Type 1 hypervisor. As far as I know, the Mac OS X EULA only permits the virtualization of Mac OS X Server, not the client version.

Templeton then takes center stage again to discuss data centers and clouds. To be effective in providing SaaS—a form of cloud computing according to Templeton—providers must have flexibility, economics, automation, and pay-as-you-go. Templeton compares the economics of “the cloud” by comparing the costs of resources for organizations such as Amazon, Google, YouTube, and Salesforce.com against those same costs for enterprise organizations. (I’m not so sure this is a valid comparison, but that’s OK.)

Templeton sees data centers evolving in four steps: consolidated data center, dynamic data center, self-service data center, and cloud-extended data center. The industry is currently in the first step of that evolution. To share some of the announcements around the cloud-extended data center, Templeton introduces Wes Wasson, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix.

Wasson jumps right in with some announcements:

  • Citrix is announcing a sister product to the NetScaler MPX, the NetScaler VPX product. The NetScaler VPX is a virtual appliance that runs on standard x86 hardware on top of XenServer. This gives organizations the power of the NetScaler MPX as a virtual appliance. To help drive innovation around the NetScaler VPX, Citrix is offering the opportunity to win $10,000 to show the world what’s innovative and possible with NetScaler VPX.
  • Citrix re-affirms that XenServer 5.5 will continue to be free. The new version adds new guest support, new support for backups, and other key features.
  • Citrix is also announcing Citrix Essentials 5.5 for XenServer or Hyper-V. New features include dynamic workload balancing, which sounds like the equivalent of VMware DRS; expanded storage integration via StorageLink and a new “Citrix Ready Open Storage” program; and automated stage management.

Wasson introduces Peter Blum, who performs a demonstration of the new automated stage management functionality found in Citrix Essentials 5.5. Some of this functionality, if I recall correctly, is OEM from another organization (VMlogix, I think?). Blum starts out with a demonstration of the Lab Manager functionality within Citrix Essentials. One nice piece showed off was integration between Dazzle and Lab Manager to provide greater self-service functionality for end-users.

Wasson moves into a couple of cloud computing announcements:

  • Citrix Cloud Center (C3) was announced last year (I covered it here). This week, Citrix is announcing the addition of NetScaler VPX to Citrix C3 to provide flexibility and multi-tenancy.
  • Citrix is also announcing the addition of virtual switching technology to XenServer. (Citrix is notoriously quiet about this announcement…odd. No details?)
  • Citrix is enabling virutal applications and desktops as a service, and enabling pay-as-you-go functionality in Citrix C3.
  • Citrix and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are announcing a partnership and a Citrix C3 Lab that combines Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Citrix C3, and a series of blueprints that provide deployment guides, configuration notes, architectural overviews, best practices, etc.

Wasson leaves the stage and Templeton returns. Templeton returns to yesterday’s vision: transforming data centers into delivery centers, and delivering desktops and applications as a service.

Templeton shows the videos from the Citrix Innovation award finalists—Emory Healthcare, HDFC, and Tesco. After watching the videos, Templeton announces that the winner of the Citrix Innovation award for 2009 is Emory Healthcare.

At this point, the keynote transitions into a customer panel moderated by John Gallant of Network World. I’m wrapping up coverage of the keynote.

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Double-Take Software’s Workload Optimization Suite

Monday, April 6, 2009 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Today Double-Take Software announces their new Workload Optimization Suite. All of Double-Take’s flagship software products are now organized and unified within the idea of workload optimization, and new products are being announced to help provide a more complete set of solutions.

The products in the Workload Optimization Suite include:

  • Double-Take Move
  • Double-Take Flex
  • Double-Take Backup
  • Double-Take Availability

Of these four products, two of them—Move and Flex—are new products also being announced today. These new products are available today. Double-Take Backup and Double-Take Availability are available under existing Double-Take, Livewire, TimeData, and GeoCluster brands. For example, Double-Take for Windows will fold into the Double-Take Availability and Double-Take Backup products later this year with an update.

Double-Take Move is one of the new products that was announced today. Double-Take Move leverages Double-Take’s existing replication technologies to provide a platform-independent X2X migration engine. X2X means any-to-any: physical-to-virtual (P2V), physical-to-physical (P2P), virtual-to-physical (V2P), and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) are all supported. In addition, Double-Take Move will automatically create a VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machine when the destination is a virtual machine. Pricing is available per-use or for an entire site. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of tools that are licensed on a per-use basis, but with a product like this there are only so many ways to license it. For larger projects, I hope Double-Take’s site licensing won’t be too unattractive.

The second new product, Double-Take Flex, allows organizations to boot systems via an iSCSI SAN without the need for expensive iSCSI hardware initiators. Any ordinary Ethernet NIC within a server or desktop can be used to iSCSI boot and enable diskless operation. In addition, Double-Take Flex contains an iSCSI target for Windows Server, allowing smaller organizations to build their own iSCSI SANs. When using the Double-Take Flex iSCSI target, organizations also gain the ability to share base images, so that the storage requirements are greatly reduced and management of the OS image is simplified. I would love to have seen this sort of support with enterprise iSCSI targets like those provided by NetApp, EMC, HP, and others, but for now the shared image support is limited to Double-Take’s own iSCSI target implementation. Double-Take assured me that APIs are available to allow other vendors to add this support to their systems; only time will tell if anyone actually takes advantage of those APIs.

Both Double-Take Move and Double-Take Flex provide management consoles for ease of administration.

More information on Double-Take Move, Double-Take Flex, and the rest of the Workload Optimization Suite is available from Double-Take’s web site.

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Storage Alignment Document

Tuesday, March 31, 2009 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 16 comments

NetApp has recently released TR-3747, Best Practices for File System Alignment in Virtual Environments. This document addresses the situations in which file system alignment is necessary in environments running VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer. The authors are Abhinav Joshi (he delivered the Hyper-V deep dive at Insight last year), Eric Forgette (wrote the Rapid Cloning Utility, I believe), and Peter Learmonth (a well-recognized name from the Toasters mailing list), so you know there’s quite a bit of knowledge and experience baked into this document.

There are a couple of nice tidbits of information in here. For example, I liked the information on using fdisk to set the alignment of a guest VMDK from the ESX Service Console; that’s a pretty handy trick! I also thought the tables which described the different levels at which misalignment could occur were quite useful. (To be honest, though, it took me a couple of times reading through that section to understand what information the authors were trying to deliver.)

Anyway, if you’re looking for more information on storage alignment, the different levels at which it may occur, and the methods used to fix it at each of these levels, this is an excellent resource that I strongly recommend reading. Does anyone have any pointers to similar documents from other storage vendors?

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