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Some Projects for 2012

Monday, January 2, 2012 in General, Networking, Virtualization by slowe | 13 comments

Rather than posting some sort of “2011 in review” article where I talk about how many visitors the site had or how many RSS subscribers there are, I thought I’d instead focus on the upcoming year and some of the projects in which I’ll be involved. By describing some of the projects that I’m undertaking this year in 2012, that gives you—the readers—a rough idea of some of the types of content that will likely appear in the coming year.

Here are some of my 2012 projects (some of these I’ve already tweeted about):

  1. I’m going to learn to script in Perl. Many people have asked why Perl and why not Python or Ruby or something else. Honestly, I don’t have a really good answer for you. I tried (unsuccessfully) to teach myself Perl a couple of years ago, so I still have the O’Reilly Learning Perl book. Rather than spending money to learn some other scripting language, it seemed reasonable to revisit Perl again and just leverage the resources I already have. You might see a few Perl-related posts here and there as I work through Learning Perl, but I’ll try not to bore you with elementary stuff.

  2. I’m going to learn German. Same scenario here—many people have asked why German and why not Spanish or French. I do have an answer this time: I seem to be spending a fair amount of time in Vienna, so German seemed to make sense. I also have a series of customer meetings planned in Germany in the first quarter of this year. Plus, German is completely new and different than anything I’ve learned before, and I wanted to challenge myself to learn and think in new ways. It’s unlikely that this will find its way into any blog posts, but you never know…

  3. I’m going to become much more familiar with the Xen hypervisor. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll focus strictly on the open source version of Xen or Citrix XenServer; I’m open to suggestions there. No, this doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning VMware or anything like that; I just want to expand my knowledge. You can’t simply discount Xen; after all, Amazon EC2 is built on Xen. Along with this dive into Xen, I’ll also be looking very closely at Open vSwitch and OpenStack. I’d expect that a great deal of this education will eventually end up in various blog posts here.

  4. I’m going to pursue my CCNP. I “re-achieved” CCNA last year, and this year I’m pursuing my CCNP. As with Xen, I’m confident that the learning curve required to move closer to (or even achieve) CCNP will result in a number of related blog posts on various networking technologies or concepts.

I do have a few other projects planned for this upcoming year, but I’m not quite ready to discuss those publicly yet. At least one of these other projects will be something new that I haven’t done before. Stretching myself and my skills/experience in new directions is a bit of a theme this year.

If you have any tips/tricks/advice to share on any of these upcoming projects, or if there are specific things related to these projects that you’d like to see blogged about here, please let me know in the comments. Thanks, and I hope that 2012 is going to be as exciting for you as it will be for me!

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Technology Short Take #17

Monday, November 28, 2011 in Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft, Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

Welcome to Technology Short Take #17, another of my irregularly-scheduled collections of various data center technology-related links, thoughts, and comments. Here’s hoping you find something useful!

Networking

  • I think it was J Metz of Cisco that posted this to Twitter, but this is a good reference to the various 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules.
  • I’ve spoken quite a bit about stretched clusters and their potential benefits. For an opposing view—especially regarding the use of stretched clusters as a disaster avoidance solution—check out this article. It’s a nice counterpoint, especially from the perspective of the network.
  • Anyone know anything about sFlow?
  • Here’s a good post on VXLAN that has some useful information. I’d just like to point out that VXLAN is really only intended to address Layer 2 communications “within” a vApp or a collection of VMs (perhaps a single organization’s VMs), and doesn’t do anything to address Layer 3 routing/accessibility for clients (or “consumers”) attempting to connect to those systems. For that, you’ll still need—at least today—technologies like OTV, LISP, and others.
  • A quick thought that I’m still exploring: what’s the impact of OpenFlow on technologies like VXLAN, NVGRE, and others? Does SDN eliminate the need for these technologies? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

Servers/Operating Systems

  • If you’ve adopted Mac OS X Lion 10.7, you might have noticed some problems connecting to older servers/NAS devices running AFP (AppleTalk Filing Protocol). This Apple KB article describes a fix. Although I’m running Snow Leopard now, I was running Lion on a new MacBook Pro and I can attest that this fix does work.
  • This Microsoft KB article describes how to extend the Windows Server 2008 evaluation period. I’ve found this useful for Windows Server 2008 instances in the lab that I need for longer 60 days but that I don’t necessarily want to activate (because they are transient).

Storage

  • Jason Boche blogged about a way to remove stubborn hosts from Unisphere. I’ve personally never seen this problem, but it’s nice to know how to address it should it occur.
  • Who would’ve thought that an HDD could serve as a cache for an SSD? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Normally, that would probably be the case, but as described here there are certain instances and ways in which using an HDD as a cache for an SSD can improve performance.
  • Scott Drummonds wraps up his 3 part series on flash storage in part 3, which contains information on sizing flash storage. If you haven’t been reading this series, I’d recommend giving it a look.
  • Scott also weighs in on the flash as SSD vs. flash on PCIe discussion. I’d have to agree that interfaces are important, and the ability of the industry to successfully leverage flash on the PCIe bus is (today) fairly limited.
  • Henri updated his VNXe blog series with a new post on EFD and RR performance. No real surprises here, although I do have one question for Henri: is that your car in the blog header?

Virtualization

  • Interested in setting up host-only networking on VMware Fusion 4? Here’s a quick guide.
  • Kenneth Bell offers up some quick guidelines on when to deploy MCS versus PVS in a XenDesktop environment. MCS vs. PVS is a topic of some discussion on the vSpecialist mailing list as they have very different IOPs requirements and I/O profiles.
  • Speaking of VDI, Andre Leibovici has two articles that I wanted to point out. First, Andre does a deep dive on Video RAM in VMware View 5 with 3D; this has tons of good information that is useful for a VDI architect. (The note about the extra .VSWP overhead, for example, is priceless.) Andre also has a good piece on VDI and Microsoft Outlook that’s worth reading, laying out the various options for Outlook-related storage. If you want to be good at VDI, Andre is definitely a great resource to follow.
  • Running Linux in your VMware vSphere environment? If you haven’t already, check out Bob Plankers’ Linux Virtual Machine Tuning Guide for some useful tips on tuning Linux in a VM.
  • Seen this page?
  • You’ve probably already heard about Nick Weaver’s new “Uber” tool, a new VM alignment tool called UBERAlign. This tool is designed to address VM alignment, a problem with how guest file systems are formatted within a VMDK. For more information, see Nick’s announcement here.
  • Don’t disable DRS when you’re using vCloud Director. It’s as simple as that. (If you want to know why, read Chris Colotti’s post.)
  • Here’s a couple of great diagrams by Hany Michael on vCloud Director management pods (both public cloud and private cloud management).
  • People automatically assume that “virtualization” means consolidating multiple workloads onto a single physical server. However, virtualization is really just a layer of abstraction, and that layer of abstraction can be used in a variety of ways. I spoke about this in early 2010. This article (written back in March of 2011) by Brad Hedlund picks up on that theme to show another way that virtualization—or, as he calls it, “inverse virtualization”—can be applied to today’s data centers and today’s applications.
  • My discussion on the end of the infrastructure engineer generated some conversations, which is good. One of the responses was by Aaron Sweemer in which he discusses the new (but not new) “data layer” and expresses a need for infrastructure engineers to be aware of this data layer. I’d agree with a general need for all infrastructure engineers to be aware of the layers above them in the stack; I’m just not convinced that we all need to become application developers.
  • Here’s a great post by William Lam on the missing piece to creating your own vSEL cloud. I’ll tell you, William blogs some of the coolest stuff…I wish I could dig in as deep as he does in some of this stuff.
  • Here’s a nice look at the use of PowerCLI to help with the automation of DRS rules.
  • One of my projects for the upcoming year is becoming more knowledgeable and conversant with the open source Xen hypervisor and Citrix XenServer. I think that the XenServer Design Handbook is going to be a useful resource for that project.
  • Interested in more information on deploying Oracle databases on vSphere? Michael Webster, aka @vcdxnz001 on Twitter, has a lengthy article with lots of information regarding Oracle on vSphere.
  • This VMware KB article describes how to enable centralized logging for vCloud Director cells. This is particularly important for HA environments, where VMware’s recommended HA strategy involves the use of multiple vCD cells.

I guess I should wrap it up here, before this post gets any longer. Thanks for reading this far, and feel free to speak up in the comments!

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Virtualization Short Take #41

Tuesday, May 25, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | 3 comments

It has been a busy week since I last posted, and the blogging/micro-blogging world has been quite busy. I’ve gathered quite the collection of links and posts over the last week or so; here are a few that caught my eye. Welcome to Virtualization Short Take #41!

  • About a month ago Rick Vanover posted a quick note about the use of Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding as a potential performance tweak. As Rick mentions at the end of his article, it’s important to “test before and after with an intensive workload”; otherwise, you could find yourself actually hurting performance. Like so many performance tweaks, it really depends upon your specific environment and your specific workloads. Definitely refer to some of the linked resources at the end of Rick’s article (Duncan’s stuff is always helpful) for more details.
  • Speaking of Duncan, his post on vCPU limits is a great read and helps dispel a common misconception about vCPU limits. Remember the definition of a hertz folks—300 million cycles per second (300MHz) means 300 million cycles per second. It doesn’t mean 500 million cycles per second, or 700 million cycles per second.
  • Frank Denneman’s article on memory reservations and resource pools is also a really good read.
  • Kenneth van Ditmarsch has a good post on using datastore permissions to help ensure that VMs are properly placed based on SLAs. This is the kind of operational advice that I think many organizations still need.
  • Continuing our theme of resource allocation, here’s a good post on the effect of shares.
  • If you’re interested in an early look at some of the features targeted for inclusion in VMware View 4.5, have a look at Matthijs Haverink’s post on View 4.5 expected features. If Matthijs’ information is accurate, it looks like VMware has some good stuff planned.
  • I had a URL in my Yojimbo collection for part 5 of the series on Hyper-V dynamic memory, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore. I think the blog post was pulled. If anyone has a working link (yes, I’ve already checked Google), feel free to post it in the comments.
  • Jeremy Waldrop of Varrow brings to light a potential issue with the Cisco “Palo” adapter (now called the Virtual Interface Controller, or VIC) and PowerPath/VE. There is a workaround that fixes the problem. It’s important to note that the Cisco VIC isn’t fully vetted or validated for Vblock yet; that’s still in progress.
  • As a follow up from my mention of this issue in VST #40, I have more information on the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) issue. This post from VMware has more information on the specific conditions needed to produce the problem. I have to say, it looks like a pretty specific set of circumstances. I’m curious to know your thoughts: is this a corner case, or a really significant problem? Personally, I’m leaning toward the former.
  • EMC virtual appliances are really taking off; Chad unwrapped the FMA virtual appliance and fellow vSpecialist team member Nick Weaver unveiled v2 of the “Uber” Celerra VSA as well. I haven’t had the chance to play with the FMA virtual appliance yet, but I’m traveling tonight so maybe I’ll mess around with it on my laptop tonight from the hotel. (Yes, I’m a geek. What can I say?)
  • Following Citrix’s announcement of XenClient, their bare metal client hypervisor, and VMware’s response that perhaps the bare metal client hypervisor’s use cases are more limited than many might think, Citrix has responded by explaining XenClient to VMware. Bare metal hypervisors, unmanaged type 2 hypervisors, and policy-managed type 2 hypervisors all have value in the desktop virtualization space. Perhaps VMware should write a response to Citrix explaining the idea behind check-out/check-in of policy-controlled VMs? While I’m sure that I won’t be very popular with VMware for saying this, I do have to agree with Citrix here: discounting the value of bare metal client hypervisors on the basis of a single use case is a bit disingenuous, especially when you’ve been promoting client hypervisors for a while.
  • Looking to stay sharp and stay relevant in today’s changing IT landscape? Mike DiPetrillo offers some suggestions for skills that IT folks should embrace.
  • Kevin Goodman shared some information here on consolidation ratios with his Cisco UCS environment. He admits he is constrained by RAM, which is common in many data centers today. There are two answers to that problem today: full-width UCS blades with support for massive amounts of RAM; or expensive, high-capacity RAM modules to drive memory capacity higher. It also looks like the Nehalem EX chipset is going to help address that problem with support for more memory buses and more memory slots. Once again I find it interesting that virtualization is helping to drive hardware development.
  • Forbes Guthrie has published v5 of his connections and ports diagram for VMware ESX/ESXi. Definitely a useful resource!
  • This VMware KB article helps clarify the behavior of TPS with Intel Xeon 5500 (Nehalem)-based systems. This isn’t new information (I believe Duncan might have pointed it out first?), but it’s nice to see clarification of the behavior.
  • OK, I’m probably showing my ignorance here (I haven’t had the opportunity to spend as much time with View Manager as I would like), but who knew View Manager had a command-line tool?

I guess that will wrap things up for this issue of Virtualization Short Takes. I hope you’ve found something useful!

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A Bit Harsh, Don’t You Think?

Wednesday, December 23, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 11 comments

Yesterday, Alex Barrett of TechTarget posted a tweet about her predictions for 2010:

No wishy washy 2010 predictions from me: VMware will cut prices, and Citrix will give up on XenServer: http://bit.ly/75vDxc

The link in the tweet corresponds to this TechTarget article in which Alex predicts that VMware will cut prices and Citrix will dump XenServer and focus instead on its management products like Citrix Essentials. Citrix Essentials, as you probably know, already supports Microsoft Hyper-V. Alex’s prediction is not an unusual one; others have made this prediction before. Quite honestly, based on the progress we are seeing on XenServer’s development, I can see the logic behind Alex’s prediction.

Then along comes Simon Crosby and posts a rebuttal to Alex’s prediction, citing XenServer’s growth, industry partnerships, and projected development goals. OK, that’s fine and all; I would certainly expect Simon to be an ardent supporter of Xen and XenServer. I don’t take issue with his rebuttal; what I take issue with is this statement:

I think I’ve concluded that there are a few people whose predictions about the future I will never believe. They are precisely those who are compensated based on clicks and not insight, and who seldom take the time to check for data or accuracy.

To prevent any question of the individual about whom he was speaking, Simon added a hyperlink (recreated in the quote above) to point to Alex Barrett’s author page at TechTarget.

Ouch—that’s a bit harsh, don’t you think? It’s just bad form to say something like that about someone. First of all, a prediction isn’t exactly something you can “check for data or accuracy”; it’s a prediction. No one, including me, begrudges any vendor from defending itself. But there are ways of defending yourself without personally attacking others. There are ways to disagree respectfully and courteously. There are those out there that might want to try this approach.

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What is SR-IOV?

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 15 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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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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