November 2nd, 2009

Client virtualization will help you create your next generation desktop

Posted by Natalie Lambert @ 6:27 am

Categories: Virtualization

Tags: Virtualization, Environment, Client Virtualization, Desktops, Hardware, Phil LeClare

2012. That is the year in which our clients are predicting that their next-generation desktop will be up and running. However, no one company defines this new desktop the same way. Some believe that this desktop will be fully virtualized in a data center and accessible from any device, others see this desktop as only a set of applications delivered to a user when required, and others just look at this desktop as a more manageable, supportable, and lower cost environment than today.

Regardless of how you define your next generation desktop, there is one thing in common factor that will make this all possible – client virtualization. Client virtualization will be the underpinning of all of these new ways of approaching the desktop as it will decouple the desktop and applications from the underlying hardware. Applications will be delivered to users using application virtualization, and users will interact with their desktop using desktop virtualization. In the end, these virtualization technologies are allowing IT to scale their desktop environments to new heights, while at the same time providing greater flexibility, security, manageability, and support than has ever been possible.

When Forrester thinks about client virtualization, it splits into four categories:

• Hosted desktop virtualization: the technology that allows a desktop environment to be run in a data center and gives users the ability to connect to that “desktop” from any internet-enabled device in the world.
• Hosted application virtualization: the technology that allows an application to be run in a data center and gives users the ability to connect to that application from any internet-enabled device in the world.
• Local desktop virtualization: the technology that allows a desktop environment to be run on a user’s device (either directly on bare metal or as a guest on top of the host/native OS).
• Local application virtualization: the technology that isolates applications from other applications and the underlying OS to insure a conflict-free application environment.

According to “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch” report by my colleague Alex Cullen, companies’ infrastructure strategy and associated architecture will shift over the next three years to provide “greater scalability and flexibility while reducing support costs.” Client virtualization will be a key technology in the IT service platform. Just think: in 2012, IT organizations will only focus on delivering the capabilities that truly enable the business – the applications and the productivity environment (AKA the “desktop”) – while dropping the tasks that bring no competitive advantage to the business. On the flip side, users will be thrilled by the opportunity to work from the device of their choosing (including a home PC, thin client, netbook, or even the latest and greatest Mac) in a secure fashion. The way I see it, win-win!

August 24th, 2009

Will advances in the Mac OS tip the scales for BYOPC?

Posted by Natalie Lambert @ 12:11 pm

Categories: Virtualization

Tags: Apple Mac OS, Apple Macintosh, Operating System, E-mail, Desktops, Online Communications, Hardware, Phil LeClare

 CNET recently reported that Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard OS will support Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Why is this important for BYOPC? Because until this release, BYOPC presumed some amount of virtualization (in most cases desktop virtualization) to support the killer app — email. According to the CNET article, “Improved Exchange support will be integrated into Mail, iCal and Address Book in Snow Leopard, which means email, calendar appointments, to-do lists and contacts from Outlook will be viewable on your personal calendar, mail and address books. It also allows things like dragging and dropping contacts into iCal to schedule meetings, and your Mac will be able to discover time conflicts between personal and work calendars and change the meeting time and location.”

So, with virtualization no longer needed to support the killer app on a Mac, organizations will need to rethink how they will support users that want to use Macs in their native state for corporate activities. However, this is a huge step forward for employees wanting to use Mac’s in the corporate environment…IT can no longer hang their hat on email not being supported. This opens a few questions for me:

• will IT shops have the proficiency to support the Mac?
• will email work well on a Mac and live up to expectations?
• will this follow a similar trajectory as the iPhone with execs just demanding it?
• what is the fate of VMware Fusion and Parallels?

Regardless, my advice is this: Walk down to your local Apple store and offer the Genius behind the counter a job!

May 20th, 2009

Are big boxes better for server virtualization?

Posted by Galen Schreck @ 9:47 am

Categories: Virtualization

Tags: Memory, CPU, Intel Xeon, Server Virtualization, Virtualization, Servers, Processors, Hardware, Semiconductors, Components

From time to time, someone will ask me if it makes sense to purchase a large (32+ CPU) server as a big virtualization host running a VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix hypervisor.

In a word, I think the answer is “no”.

Here are a few reasons why:

• First, very few virtualization users that I’m aware of have selected anything larger than 4-socket systems. Massive servers with 32 processors simply cost too much on a per-VM basis, and since you end up dividing them up into smaller virtual machines, there’s not much benefit to go with a massive system. Most hypervisors don’t support more than four virtual processors per virtual machine (including VMware — you have to purchase the top-of-the-line Enterprise Plus to get 8-way virtual SMP).
• Second, many of the HA features in large SMP systems can be provided by clustering or live migration capabilities in software.
• Third, having all that capacity in one box used to make it easier to reallocate resources between partitions — but live migration across physical boxes makes that unnecessary as well.
• Lastly, some vendors have claimed that virtual environments built on big servers are easier to manage, since there are fewer physical endpoints to worry about. I think this is an older argument that dates back to when people purchased a Sun E10K to run a large number of websites. Ultimately, more automated management tools made it possible to run large numbers of scale-out servers at a similar cost.

Even among modular servers, there is some debate as to how big of a box you need. The recent release of the Intel Xeon 5500 allows you to manage a lot more memory with fewer physical CPUs. In order to provide the maximum amount of memory to their VMs, many companies purchased more processors than they needed — simply so they could get enough RAM. Systems were still mostly memory bound, so with the release of the new Xeon 5500 that can address more DIMMS, we think that some firms will temporarily swing back towards systems with fewer CPUs. Plus, the CPUs have gotten much faster — recent demonstrations by Intel are showing the new Xeon 5500-based servers running twice the workload of their prior models.

May 13th, 2009

Oracle enhances VM management with Virtual Iron acquisition

Posted by James Staten @ 5:24 pm

Categories: Data center, Virtualization

Tags:

The rumors are true. Oracle has finally announced that its intent to acquire Virtual Iron for its virtual server management capabilities.

It’s a nice fit for Oracle, which has its own Xen-based virtualization platform called Oracle VM. Up until now, Virtual Iron has been selling its management tools on its own Xen-derived hypervisor. The net result is that Oracle gets dynamic resource management, power management, and better virtual server capabilities. And since Virtual Iron was built to manage Xen-based systems, the integration should be done by lunchtime on the day of the acquisition.

The acquisition brings up some larger questions, however, such as how Oracle will integrate Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Virtual Iron Sun’s xVM Server and xVM Ops Center. Now that it will supply hardware and virtualization platforms, Oracle will need to build out a stronger system management and automation portfolio.

Today Oracle’s virtualization tools don’t have much traction in the market when compared with VMware or Microsoft. Prior to the acquisition of Sun, I would have said it was unlikely Oracle would become a general purpose virtualization platform, with a few die-hard Oracle customers using it for their Oracle apps. Combining three Xen contenders may position Oracle as the strongest Xen player, to the detriment of Citrix. Now, it seems more likely that Oracle can become a true platform vendor — especially if it uses virtual appliances to distribute its products. We think virtual appliances make it easier to consume operating environments that you aren’t accustomed to managing. You don’t have to be a Linux expert to boot a VM with a preconfigured Linux OS and Oracle running on it. If done properly with automatic updates and a web interface, you would never even have to know what was running underneath.

April 22nd, 2009

VMware wants to be your network operating system of choice

Posted by James Staten @ 10:25 am

Categories: Data center, Virtualization

Tags:

Whenever a company changes the name of their major product you often have to wonder what level of change they are trying to signal. In the case of VMware which changed ESX to vSphere yesterday, the signal is one of intent. They could have called it vWorldDomination but that might have been a bit too caustic. So instead they chose a global metaphor. Despite the subtlety, make no mistake, this version is a direct affront to how we have traditionally run our data centers with traditional operating systems and element-centric system management tools.

They made their case initially at VMWorld EMEA when they declared that a new “operating system” is needed in the virtualized data center and that the old model no longer applies. They called it Cloud OS but didn’t deliver on this vision. vSphere is the first step towards this new model in that it significantly shifts the focus from simply virtualizing workloads to managing and automating pools of VMs and shows how management at the virtual infrastructure layer can address data center efficiency in ways other layers can’t. It also moves the VM world closer to being able to manage business services that span VMs (although other tools like HP Operations Orchestrator and BMC BladeLogic still do this better) and track and diagnose their performance with AppSpeed, previously BeeHive, (although not as well as Hyperic).

Probably the biggest improvement in vSphere is its performance and scalability. There are a number of improvements to the maximum supported RAM and CPU configurations, as well as far better I/O throughput, and overall efficiency. In short, VMware can now claim that they can virtualize any application, no matter how performance hungry it is. Plus, VMware partners like Intel and Cisco have announced complimentary enhancements to address a variety of performance and ease of configuration issues.

Some of the key capabilities that enterprise customers should strongly consider include:

• vCenter Host Profiles — Capture all the configuration details of a deployed virtual machine or collection of VMs and create a golden master that will enforce these configuration parameters when a service is reinstantiated, moved or duplicated.
• Thin provisioning with vStore — Quick, what’s your storage to VM ratio today? What if you could cut this down by 90%? How many of your VMs share the same OS and middleware stack (or same applications). And your storing how many copies of that exact same software? ‘Nuff said. While many enterprises take advantage of array-based thin provisioning to get some of these same benefits, vStore provides these vendors with an API to optimize thin provisioning for a vSphere environment.
• vShield Zones — Distributed Resource Scheduling is a key technology for creating pools of resources and allowing VMs to automatically optimize their use of these resources. But managing a big homogeneous pool lets you set policies per app but not across groups of apps. Zones lets you create sub-pools for implementing these types of policies.
• vCloud — while this is still mostly a future, VMware now has named a collection of hosting companies who plan to deploy VMware-based cloud computing in their data centers which will allow you to more easily take advantage of Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing. The big gain they bring: Your vSphere and theirs are compatible and your existing vCenter-centric tools allow aggregation of your virtual pool and their clouds.
• Fault tolerance — for applications that require zero downtime, VMware now offers a fault tolerant capability that can eliminate the need for specialized hardware or additional clustering technologies. The fault tolerance feature replicates your VM’s state to a shadow VM on separate hardware in the same data center. If the primary machine should fail, the shadow VM picks up with no disruption to users.

But before you can really take advantage of these enhancements, enterprise infrastructure and operations professionals need to adopt more general best practices with their VMware environments such as booting VMs from network storage, activating DRS and getting comfortable with basic policies, taking greater advantage of VM templates and virtual appliances, leveraging VMware HA for recovery, and backing up with tools that leverage VMware’s backup APIs. You can’t move to a more efficiency future without preparing your environment for it.

February 23rd, 2009

Red Hat and Citrix ratchet up open source virtualization relevancy

Posted by James Staten @ 11:24 am

Categories: Data center, Virtualization

Tags: Hypervisor, Red Hat Inc., Open Source, Citrix Systems Inc., Xen, KVM, Virtualization, Hardware, James Staten

The open source hypervisor landscape got a lot more interesting today after the latest announcements from Red Hat and Citrix. Both were shots across the bow of VMware’s juggernaut, but Red Hat’s volley may have overshot and struck Xen.org in the stern.

Citrix, the flag bearer for Xen.org, recently announced that two significant hypervisor features would be made available in the free version of its Xen distribution, XenServer – live migration and multi-node management. Neither of these capabilities are provided in the free version of VMware ESX and live migration won’t be available in Microsoft Hyper-V until Windows Server 2008 R2. Citrix is also busily placing calls to the major Linux distributors hoping to sign them up to commitments to replace the free Xen.org hypervisor with the free XenServer.

This last move is part of a larger overall strategy to move the Xen community forward and redefine compatibility and interoperability. At present, Xen community members can distribute compatible Xen derivatives that leverage a common hypervisor engine, the guts of what makes a hypervisor capable of hosting virtual machines. But most of the higher level functions, like storage and security integration and management and automation infrastructure are not part of this standard engine. Thus, incompatibilities reign among the Xen distributions. Try migrating an Amazon Machine Image over to Sun xVM and then to Oracle VM to see what I mean. Or try discovering and managing VMs running atop Citrix XenServer with your Virtual Iron tools.
 
A higher level of compatibility is needed across Xen distributions for this hypervisor to gain market momentum and legitimately challenge VMware and Hyper-V. Citrix is hoping to cement the free XenServer as this higher level implementation. Or, in other words, as the “de facto standard distribution.”

Which brings me to our friends in North Carolina. Red Hat angered the Xen community last year when it announced that KVM would be its go-forward hypervisor. While the company said it would continue to distribute Xen, it clearly was orienting its engineering resources to empower the newcomer. And today we received first word about those efforts.

While the market wasn’t awaiting news of a new hypervisor with bated breath, there is reason to turn an ear in Red Hat’s direction. It’s not because the hypervisor will debut with functionality arguably matching VMware ESX and XenServer, or because it is claiming greater scalability than these peers, but mainly because of the foundation upon which KVM is based.

You see, Xen has the notion of two elements: a very thin hypervisor that looks at the scheduling of CPU and memory, and Domain 0, which is responsible for management, networking and resource utilization.

Complexity (and the incompatibilities mentioned above) comes from the implementation of the two layers, how you innovate, and where you place new features. As a result, when new features are needed in the Xen hypervisor layer, they have to be created anew, even if that capability existed in the base OS running in Domain 0.

KVM comes from the point of view that all hypervisor-specific capabilities should be in this layer. All the things you need that already exist in an OS or should naturally be in an OS, should be in Domain 0.

Domain 0 for KVM is the official Linux kernel and thus it inherits all the hooks, capabilities and partner ecosystem built around the kernel. Security? Inherited. Scalability? Inherited. Compatibility with 1000s of third party applications? You get the idea. So this presumably will help KVM out-innovate its competition — Red Hat certainly hopes this will vault them into the position of leading open source alternative. Sound familiar?

However, as is usually the case, the devil will be found in the details. Red Hat will first release an embedded hypervisor which will have a stripped down Domain 0 of RHEL 5. It’s currently not known how much of that rich Linux partner ecosystem will find the hooks they need in that 64MB domain. Will what KVM inherits be what the embedded footprint takes away? We’ll find out in May.

November 17th, 2008

Addressing virtualization's achilles heel

Posted by James Staten @ 7:30 am

Categories: Data center, Virtualization

Tags: Bandwidth, Virtualization, Network Interface Card, Blade, Achilles Heel, VM, Networking, Servers, Hardware, James Staten

The benefits of virtualization are quite obvious but when you start to really increase the density of virtual machines in order to maximize utilization suddenly it ain’t such a simple proposition. The latest CPUs from AMD and Intel are more than up to the task of running 10-20 or more applications at a time. Most servers run out of memory and I/O bandwidth well before processing power. Recent announcements from the leading server vendors have been made to address the memory side by packing more DIMMs onto a single motherboard (including blade server boards), but you can only add so many Ethernet cards and Fibre Channel HBAs. Oh yeah, and then there’s the switch ports to go with them (blade systems help a lot here).If you are part of the elite group of infrastructure and operations managers who are pushing the VM density envelope, then 10GbE may be your better option. Most VMs individually don’t consume the full bandwidth of a single GbE NIC but we are quickly seeing that the standard network configuration of ESX is 6 NICs and 2 FC ports per VM. The NICs are for console, vm kernel, and vm network and you need two of each, for redundancy, for a total of 6.  And each of these NIC connections requires a separate data center uplink cable. On top of this, the more VMs you add the more bandwidth is consumed which requires…more ports and that means a lot of connections. And even if each connection only consumes 10% of that 1 GbE of bandwidth each, you’re running out of I/O very quickly. Plus every VM is sharing a limited set of physical NICs - heaven forbid you might actually want to do quality of service or give any of these VMs their own physical NIC, as is often the case.

10GbE can address the NIC sharing scenario and Ethernet storage solutions such as iSCSI and the forthcoming Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE) - yes, I know Cisco says it’s ready today - can save you tremendously on HBA costs. The need for more true physical connections is more of an issue.

The NIC vendors are addressing this scenario with SR-IOV (single-root I/O virtualization) technology that splits 10GbE NICs granulary and dynamically so you can set quality of service parameters for the virtual NICs that share these pipes. But it’s a virtual solution; if you still need physical NICs you’re out of luck.

To address this, HP has released Flex-10 Virtual Connect modules for its c-Class blade systems. These 10GbE switch modules (and this technology in implemented on its 10GbE NICs in the BL495c blade too) can physically split a single 10GbE connection into 4 physically discrete connections with tunable bandwidth (100Mbps increments up to 10Gbps per connection). With Flex-10 modules and BL495c blades each physical server gets 8 “physical” NICs (up to 24 with an expansion cards), which fan out to 384 “physical” connections coming out of a full bank of switch modules. You of course can blow out this number with virtual NICs per VM as not every VM will need its own physical NICs. And each of these connections can replace a FC port in an Ethernet storage configuration. If you want to pack a ton of VMs into a tiny package without sacrificing I/O performance this is an intriguing way to go. Even if you don’t use Flex-10 for storage, the density benefits here are worth considering.

As we stated in our report on 10GbE futures, earlier this year, the move to 10 is a pricey upgrade today but more easily justified in IT infrastructure consolidation moves since so much more consolidation can be achieved. Blade servers and even VMware constantly face similar price justification challenges but are winning more and more customers through this same cost analysis. You’ll have to include the switch upgrades in your analysis but if you can achieve 2x or greater consolidation in doing so, the investment may be well worth it.

October 2nd, 2008

HP Acquires LeftHand Networks, Virtualized iSCSI Storage Vendor

Posted by Andrew Reichman @ 7:28 am

Categories: Acquisitions, Data center, Storage, Virtualization

Tags: LeftHand Networks, iSCSI, Hewlett-Packard Co., Storage Company, Storage, Storage Area Networks (SAN), Hardware, Andrew Reichman

Today, HP announced the intention to acquire iSCSI storage vendor LeftHand Networks for $360 Million in cash. LeftHand makes virtualized storage array software that can turn just about any server, PC or subset of disks on a device into a full featured IP based SAN array with features like space efficient snapshots, distance replication support and thin provisioning. LeftHand has a tight partnership with VMware, and does both standard virtual server attach to SAN, as well as some innovative virtual appliance models that turn the physical disks on board a VMware server into an array. The LeftHand software can span across multiple physical devices, allowing for combinations of virtual appliances and dedicated servers.

It’s no surprise to see LeftHand get snapped up by a major storage vendor as they are one of the few remaining independent storage vendors in a market where it’s hard to be small and go it alone. It’s a particularly good fit for HP though for a number of reasons. For one, about half of LeftHand’s 3000+ installs use HP servers as a back end. HP states that they are committed to supporting existing customers regardless of what platform they are on, but they are eager to take advantage of their strength in delivering industry standard servers as the go forward back end for LeftHand. This is also a good thing for customers who will benefit from the simplicity of a well integrated packaged solution including hardware and software. The acquisition also gives an immediate boost to HP’s story around advantages for VMware attach, which is currently one of the hottest battlegrounds for all storage vendors.

What’s more, like PolyServ, the clustered NAS firm bough by HP, LeftHand is at its core a software company. This means that HP can continue selling the current LeftHand product family, and eventually take advantage of the capabilities throughout the rest of the HP StorageWorks family. Existing HP storage products can use the help as the iSCSI offerings are weak, they have no true thin provisioning, snapshot count and manageability can use a boost and the overall EVA architecture would benefit from more virtualization and flexibility. The LeftHand technology stack should help to accelerate HPs roadmap in these key areas, helping them improve current offerings and at the same time build towards the virtualized, scale-out storage that is likely to be the architecture of choice in most datacenters in the near future.