Planet Virtualization

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Surgient's CTO, Dave Malcolm, to talk about virtualization and the cloud. Surgient has been working... Read more at VMblog.com.

Last Friday Microsoft announced the acquisition of Opalis Software, a run-book automation company founded in 1998 in Canada with 70 employees (according to LinkedIn) and over 300 customers (according to Opalis).

Data center orchestration is one of the most important areas where virtualization will expand in the coming years, as soon as customers will realize that their virtual infrastructures are reaching such a scale and complexity to become inefficient.

VMware and Citrix already invested in this area.
VMware acquired the Swiss startup Dunes Technologies in September 2007, and it’s now offering their solution for free, as part of vSphere 4.0 platform, under the name of Orchestrator.
Citrix offers an orchestration framework called Workflow Studio since January 2009.

Microsoft isn’t shy to say that the Opalis Software technology will be integrated in its System Center portfolio and that it will serve as the automation layer for Hyper-V virtualization and Azure cloud computing.

With this acquisition Microsoft doesn’t need much more to compete end-to-end against VMware on virtualization. Yes, the company still doesn’t have a client hypervisor, and didn’t clarify if it plans to become a major VDI player on its own or not, but the technology to deliver both missing pieces is there.
The Microsoft problem is that its vision about virtualization is nowhere near the VMware’s one. They have a lot of products which could be integrated to form an impressive end-to-end offering, but the today’s reality is completely different. And of course the customers’ trust in the Microsoft capability to compete with VMware reflects this.

Update: In October, The 451 Group analysis firm reported that this acquisition is around $60M.
Opalis raised $25M in venture capital funding and scored over $10M in revenue.

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced independent... Read more at VMblog.com.

Virtualization has quickly evolved into a strategic enabling technology now widely deployed at all levels of the IT stack – from servers and desktops Read more at VMblog.com.

Quest Software, Inc. today announced the availability of the newest version of Quest vWorkspace , an award-winning desktop virtualization solution... Read more at VMblog.com.

Elastra Corporation, the leading provider of application infrastructure automation software, today released its top predictions for the cloud... Read more at VMblog.com.

What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2010? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive. Article Contributed By Jeff Treuhaft,... Read more at VMblog.com.

What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2010? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive. Contributed Article by Simon Crosby,... Read more at VMblog.com.

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The OpenNebula team announced that they have reached a stable state for the new 1.4 series of the OpenNebula Toolkit. Downloads are available as... Read more at VMblog.com.

Novell today announced advancements in the joint development agreement between Novell and SAP AG. As part of the ongoing initiative, SAP has... Read more at VMblog.com.

What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2010? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive. Contributed Article by Lori Wizdo, VP of... Read more at VMblog.com.

What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2010? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive. Article Contributed By Tyler Jewell, VP,... Read more at VMblog.com.

VMware, Inc ., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter to the cloud, today announced the results of a... Read more at VMblog.com.

Citrix Systems, Inc., today announced registration for Citrix Synergy™ 2010 is now open. Citrix Synergy – where virtualization, networking and cloud... Read more at VMblog.com.

Teradici Corporation, the industry leader in delivering a true PC experience over standard IP networks, today released PCoIP Firmware 3.0, which... Read more at VMblog.com.

The Remote Desktop team just did an interesting post here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2009/12/15/remoteapp-for-hyper-v.aspx

About the RemoteApp for Hyper-V functionality that is available with Windows Server 2008 R2. 

The concept here is that you would have a setup similar to Windows Virtual PC, where you run a legacy application in a Windows XP / Vista virtual machine, and access it seamlessly from your desktop.  Only in this case the virtual machine is not running on your desktop – but on a Hyper-V server.

This looks really neat  - and I am hoping to get the time to try it out in the next week or two.

Cheers,
Ben

Yesterday Veeam released version 4.1 of its disaster recovery solution Backup & Replication.

The major new feature is that the product can now replicate the paid/licensed version of VMware ESXi leveraging the VMware vStorage APIs (so far it could only backup it).
The replication of free version of ESXi is not available, according to what VMware required in June.

Backup & Replication 4.1 also introduces SNMP notifications (reporting the status per-job and per-VM) and a brand new, stand-alone utility, available for Windows and Linux, called Extract that customers can store on tapes with saved data, to accelerate the restore process.

At the last Microsoft PDC conference, the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said that customers will be able to upload their (Hyper-V) virtual machines inside the soon-to-be-launched cloud computing platform Windows Azure.

More clearly, Ozzie said that Microsoft will support the hosting mode offered by Xen-based (like Amazon EC2) and VMware-based cloud architectures, but, besides that, the company didn’t provide any detail about the availability of this IaaS component or the way it works.

The only thing we know for sure is that Microsoft is preparing a toolkit to guide its customers to extend their virtual data center into the Azure cloud.
Now we also know that this toolkit is going to be available in March 2010.

The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) component of Azure will be launched January 1, 2010. Maybe Microsoft plans to announce an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) part too, and that one will arrive in March.

Herco van Brug, Senior Consultant at PQR, last week released an interesting paper about the storage implications in VDI environments.

The 14-pages paper, titled VDI & Storage: Deep Impact, covers an area of virtual desktop infrastructures that is not investigated enough most time:

…when implementing a VDI infrastructure certain points need to be addressed. First of all, the TCO/ROI calculation may not be as rosy as some people suggest. Secondly, the performance impact on applications, specifically multimedia and 3D applications, needs to be investigated. And finally, don’t forget to check licensing aspects, as this can be a very significant factor in VDI infrastructure.
While centralized desktop computing provides important advantages, all resources come together in the data centre. That means that the CPU resources, memory resources, networking and disk resources all need to be facilitated from a single point - the virtual infrastructure.
The advantage of a central infrastructure is that, when sized properly, it is more flexible in terms of resource consumption than decentralized computing. It is also more capable of handling a certain amount of peak loads, as these only occur once in a while on a small number of systems in an average data centre.
But what if the peak loads are sustained and the averages are so high that the cost of facilitating them is disproportionate to that of decentralized computing?
As it turns out, there is a hidden danger to VDI. There’s a killer named “IOPS”…

RSA, the EMC security division acquired in June 2006, just published a recommended reading for any VMware customer interested in VDI: A Guide for Deploying and Administering the RSA Solution for VMware View.

This is a massive 110-pages paper that describes the architecture and step-by-step implementation of a VMware View 4.0 environment secured by RSA products and managed by the EMC Ionix Server Configuration Manager.

Interestingly, RSA recommends Windows Server 2003 for the entire stack.
From a security standpoint it makes sense to not suggest the latest version of the Microsoft operating system (Windows Server 2008 R2), but RSA seems to have no problems in suggesting to deploy View 4.0, which is pretty new too, and which introduces a brand new remote desktop protocol, the software-only version of Teradici PCoIP, which probably didn’t pass much security scrutiny so far.

Maybe the reason to recommend Window Server 2003 rather than 2008 is another one and somebody from RSA will reach out to clarify this point.

Thanks to Virtual Geek for the news.

After a couple of months in beta, Citrix releases Essentials 5.5 for Hyper-V just before the holidays.

This version of the management platform for the Microsoft hypervisor includes a new technology called StorageLink Site Recovery.

This feature allows the Hyper-V administrators to control the replication features that their SAN arrays without using multiple consoles. From the Essentials console they can test the recovery process with what-if analysis, and restore the protected VMs in isolated, test networks.

The notable thing is that StorageLink Site Recovery is available for every version of Essentials, including the Express one which is free of charge (but it won’t appear there before Dec. 23).
HP announced its support for this technology a long time ago and now confirms integration with StorageWorks SANs.

Citrix published a bunch of videos to show how it works here.

At the moment there are not many (virtualization-aware) solutions for disaster recovery of Hyper-V virtual machines and it’s not clear if Microsoft is going to release its own or not. So Citrix has a good chance here to be considered in most comparisons.

Since the release in May, Cisco updated its virtual switch for VMware virtual infrastructure, the Nexus 1000V, a couple of times.

The second update arrived last week, introducing a number of key features. Most of them are security-oriented and very welcome.

The most prominent anyway is a JAVA-based GUI installer for the Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM).
The GUI allows to perform several actions like create the VMware port groups, VLANs, enable the SSH service, register the Nexus plug-in inside vCenter Server and restart the VSM.
Cisco published  a video to show it in action:

Nexus 1000V 1.2 also includes:

• Layer 3 control
  a VSM can be Layer 3 accessible and control hosts that reside in a separate Layer 2 network
• Virtual Service Domain (VSD)
  Virtual service domains (VSDs) allow you to classify and separate traffic for network services.
  Interfaces within a VSD are shielded by a service VM (SVM) that provides a specialized service like a firewall, deep packet inspection (application aware networking), or monitoring.
• iSCSI Multipath
  The iSCSI multipath feature sets up multiple routes between a server and its storage devices for maintaining a constant connection and balancing the traffic load.
• DHCP Snooping
  DHCP snooping acts like a firewall between untrusted hosts and trusted DHCP server.
• Dynamic ARP Inspection
  Dynamic ARP Inspection (DAI) validates ARP requests and response.
• MAC Pinning
  If one or more upstream switches do not support port channels, you can use MAC pinning to assign each Ethernet port member to a particular port channel subgroup.
• Static Pinning
  You can use vPC-HM to configure a port channel subgroup so that traffic is forwarded only through its member ports by assigning (or pinning) one of the following to the subgroup: vEthernet interface, the Control VLAN e Packet VLAN.

Today VMware released version 1.2 (build 41671) of its application performance analyzer AppSpeed, announced in January and released for the first time in July.

AppSpeed, acquired from B-Hive in May 2008, is a performance analyzer tool that sniffs the network traffic and learn how the applications inside virtual machines usually perform, so it can help to understand the reason of performance issues.

Version 1.2 introduces some interesting features:

• A single user interface can now manage different AppSpeed instances
• The UI can now edit the mapped application topology
• Administrators can exclude servers that don’t need to be monitored
• Users authenticate against the vCenter user database
• The product includes a new latency-focused analysis which offers two views: a view that compares a single application or transaction latency between servers, and a view that compares transaction or server latency with their latency baselines, pointing to latency anomalies

HP always offered a basic capacity planning tool to its customers that want to use ProLiant servers for virtualization.
In November 2005 it released one for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. In March 2007 it released one for VMware VI 3.0.

Yesterday the company released also one for Microsoft Hyper-V R2. This one is not a web tool like the previous versions, but a 50MB Windows application that customers can download and use without restrictions.

To collect data from physical servers, the Sizer tool interacts with the Microsoft Assessment & Planning (MAP) Toolkit (both 3.x and 4.x are supported) or the Windows Performance Monitor, but it can also import information from other tools.
Once data is available, this tool produces a detailed Bill of Materials (BoM) that includes servers and storage equipment, with pricing specified for the customer’s country.

It also includes an update engine which automatically downloads new inventory parts and refreshes prices.
A check of this engine shows that the capacity planning engine is marked as version 4.0:

A few Microsoft customers know that the company is offering a patch management solution for offline virtual machines since July 2008.
The tool is called Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (OVMST) and uses PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).

Despite the importance of this product, which is released for free, so far Microsoft spent minimal effort in developing and promoting it.
Version 2.0 was released exactly one year ago. And today OVMST only reaches version 2.1, introducing support for the R2 wave of products.
This includes Hyper-V R2 (released in July for partners, in October for public), SCVMM 2008 R2 (released in August), SCCM 2007 SP2, WSUS 3.0 SP2, and Windows 7/2008 R2 guest OSes.

It’s very concerning to see that Microsoft doesn’t recognize the security of virtual data centers as a top priority.
The company should do much better that this to build confidence in its upcoming Azure-based private cloud offering.

Last week VMware announced the availability of Fusion 3.0.1 (build 215242). 
While it seems just a minor update, it introduces a couple of key improvements.

First of all, the Windows virtual machines gain now from 20% to 80% better performance on Mac OS X 10.6 (codename Snow Leopard) for 3D and video tasks.
It seems that part of the slowdown experienced with Fusion 3.0 on Mac OS X depends on the VMware Tools which are now improved.

Additionally, Fusion 3.0.1 introduces a brand new 64bit networking stack, which was not available when VMware launched the Fusion 3.0 64bit engine.

Finally, the new product supports Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (codename Karmic Koala) as guest OS and Parallels Desktop 5.0 virtual machines for importing.