May 9th, 2008
Avanade TCO model for virtualized environments
Steve Fink, Solutions Architect for Avanade, and I enjoyed a long chat about a TCO/ROI model that Avanade is using to help their clients project what their datacenter virtualization projects are likely to cost and what type of return could be expected at the end of that project. As a well known model jockey from my years at IDC, I’m always somewhat suspicious of models of this nature. So, I did my best to be polite while I grilled the good Mr. Fink.
May 8th, 2008
KVM and Xen cofounders engage in war of words
Xen cofounder and project lead Ian Pratt said predictions about his virtualization hypervisor’s demise to the newer kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) technology are unfounded, a by-product of his competitors’ imaginations. 
“There’s no evidence for it. The Xen community is alive and well. Xen is a true hypervisor architecture that’s better for scalability, security and availability,” said Pratt, chairman of Xen.org, a leading open source virtualization hypervisor project that is backed by IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Intel, Sun, Oracle, HP and Dell. Citrix’s Xen-based XenServer began shipping factory integrated on Dell PowerEdge servers today.
“KVM is not a true hypervisor. It tries to add virtualization capabilities to the Linux kernel but it’s not a true hypervisor approach. It’s good for something like desktop Linux and a convenient way of doing simple virtualization but it’s not really a high end hypervisor,” Pratt said in an interview with this blogger. “Having true hypervisor architecture is clearly important on the server side.”
Them’s fightin’ words?
Maybe, but Pratt was responding to his KVM’s competitors’ claims that Xen’s days are numbered because of KVM’s tight integration with the Linux kernel.
The war is heating up as KVM-based products begin hitting the market. The recently released Ubuntu 8.04 Linux distribution incorporates KVM and Qumranet – a KVM supporter that has been in development with its desktop product for more than a year – recently made available its SolidICE product and SPICE remote display protocol. Xen.org sponsor Citrix ships XenServer now and will begin shipping SolidICE rival XenDesktop later this month.
“If Xen will die or not die, I don’t know. But KVM will take over and be the virtualization selection of choice,” said Benny Schnaider, CEO and co-founder of Qumranet, whose first KVM-based virtualized desktop solution called SolidICE was recently released. 
In an interview with Qumranet recently, Schnaider acknowledged that KVM is at its first stage of development but is being enhanced and will eventually be ideal for server, desktop, embedded and real time virtualization scenarios. The advantage KVM has over Xen is that it is integrated with the Linux kernel’s scheduler, which allows for sub 15 second switchover between guests and performance metrics that Xen cannot match, Schnaider claims.
“XenSource can’t do it because the scheduler they’re using is different and is independent of the Linux kernel,” said Schnaider, a former Cisco exec. “In the case of desktop virtualization, user response time is very important. And when you’re running and loading a server with 50 virtual machines, interactivity is very important.”
Linux kernel developer and Linux Foundation Fellow Ted Ts’o claimed it’s inevitable that Red Hat and Novell will standardize on KVM because of its inclusion in the kernel. He said the Xen project was working to integrate with the kernel but enever finished the effort.
The Xen organization attempted to integrate its code with the Linux kernel but ran into some technical problems that would have compromised the performance of the hypervisor, Pratt said. He said integrating it with the kernel would have meant sacrificing key features of its platform. “You need to hold to your principles,” Pratt said.
He also said predictions about Xen’s demise by Linux kernel developers are inherently biased. “They have work going on with KVM and many folks see it as competitive to Xen and are more prone to be outspoken against Xen.”
Pratt also rejected out of hand Qumranet’s suggestions that open source developers who have worked on the Xen project for some time are not too thrilled with Citrix’s purchase of XenSource – the offspring of the Xen.org project – or the way Citrix is treating outsiders these days.
“I certainly haven’t been hearing grumblings from the community,” said Pratt, noting that open source projects routinely get complaints from developers whose patches don’t make it into the code but that’s business as usual.
Under Citrix’s umbrella, the Xen.org project now has a full time project manager and board that manages contributions to the Xen project. Pratt also said the organization conducts weekly or “fortnightly” (bi weekly) calls with major distributors and the Xen community is now “stronger” than ever. Pratt, who is also a lecturer at Cambridge University in England, where Xen was conceived, maintains there’s plenty of room for two open source virtualization choices.
May 8th, 2008
Virtualization discussion with Oracle
I recently had a chance to chat with Oracle’s vice president of Linux engineering, Wim Coekaerts, and senior director of product marketing, Monica Kumar, about Oracles virtualization efforts and a bit about the philosophy behind the company’s efforts. In summary, Oracle sees virtualization technology as just another tool organizations can use to increase the performance, reliability, scalability, agility and/or manageability of their IT infrastructure. Oracle would suggest that an organization’s focus should be on efficiently and effectively getting their work accomplished rather than an intense focus on the tools that do that work.
May 7th, 2008
Dell and Virtualization
Dell issued a press release today saying “Dell is driving the next wave of virtualization solutions beyond hypervisors and hardware consolidation with end-to-end solutions tuned to the speed of businesses of all sizes.” While there are sufficient catch phrases, buzz words and industry jargon in that statement to statisfy most marketing folks, what does this really mean?
May 6th, 2008
Oracle developing grid management, chargeback features for Oracle VM
Oracle is integrating virtualization management into its grid control product, the company’s chief corporate architect said.
Oracle VM, a server virtualization product based on the Xen open source virtualization hypervisor, made its debut last November. The VM software supports Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Oracle’s databases, middleware and applications are certified for Oracle VM. Oracle Grid Control will have a virtualization management features this year, an Oracle executive said.
“The first challenge is to make sure that you’ve got a management level that understands both the virtualization layer, you know, and the application layer, and of course let’s not forget the OS in between,” said Oracle’s Edward Screven, in an interview conducted with the Linux Foundation. ” We’ve done that with Oracle Grid Control. So this year we’ll release a version of Oracle Grid Control that integrates virtualization management.”
He noted that Oracle’s VM has a separate management module for customers not using Oracle Grid Control that manages virtualiuation but it does not support the software running on top of the VM. Because of the level of integration required among virtualization and clustering technologies for proper resource allocation, an additional management layer is needed and will be delivered sometime in 2008, Screven told Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin as part of the foundation’s Open Voices series. A transcript of the interview was released to the media. The webcast will air today from the Linux Foundation web site.
Screven also acknowledged that customers who have used virtualization technology for years, first on the mainframe, and now on commodity servers, want a utility pricing model that works. “I think in a way you could look at grids as the new mainframe. Yes, we called our virtualization product Oracle VM for a reason,” Screven said. “A lot of our customers, you know, that’s one of the first things they’ve asked for—Oracle VM—’Is [there] some way to help me account?’ And it’s just like it was in the mainframe base, right; charging back. ”
“Now, I have to say—admit—we didn’t actually predict the chargeback feature request from customers, and so that’s something we’ll be adding over time,” Screven said.
May 6th, 2008
ClearCube Spins off VDIworks
ClearCube has long offered an interesting desktop virtualization environment that is based upon its VMware-enabled ClearCube PC blades with its Sentral™ management software. When combined, the two create a very usable virtual desktop environment. Each PC blade can be used as a computing resource for multiple users. My post ClearCube Cross Platform Application Access offers some comments on the company’s basic approach. Today the company spun off it’s software unit and named it VDIworks. Now this powerful software can be utilized to support PC blades from other hardware suppliers as well as those being offered by ClearCube.
May 5th, 2008
Quick note from MyCareTeam
I just got a note from an old friend, Greg Pettit, and thought I’d pass it on to you. Here’s a snippet from his message.
I wanted to give you a quick update on MyCareTeam, Inc. and let you know about a special offer that will be available until Friday, May 9th to anyone you may know who has diabetes.
We just re-launched our diabetes monitoring software this week after receiving FDA clearance from the US Food & Drug Administration. As you may know, our software makes it easier for people with diabetes to manage their diabetes and communicate with their physician and caregivers electronically. MyCareTeam, Inc. is pleased to offer our diabetes management software, MCT-Diabetes, for free for a limited time.
my affiliation with MyCareTeam, Inc., you, or anyone you may know that has diabetes, are eligible to receive a FREE one year subscription along with a free cable ($123.88 value) to connect the glucose meter to the computer.
To enroll, simply have your friends visit www.mycareteam.com and click on the Enroll Now button at the top of the page. Fill out the registration information. When asked for a group code, enter: MCTFAF0501. Please note, you or your friends will not get the special offer if they do not enter the group code.
Remember, everyone must enroll before Friday, May 9th in order to take advantage of this free offer.
Feel free to pass this offer along to anyone you know that has diabetes.
If you’re interested, please check in on that website.
May 5th, 2008
BLADE Networks and Network Virtualization
I don’t often get the opportunity to speak with companies offering a different take on network virtualization, a blade networking approach. A week ago, I had a chance to speak with Dan Tuchler, VP of Strategy and Product Management, for BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE) about network virtualization for blade servers. Until my conversation with Dan, I had never come across the term “rackonomics” before.
May 2nd, 2008
Enomaly’s open source virtual platform moves VMs in the cloud
Enomaly is a software developer in Toronto whose open source cloud computing platform is getting a lot of attention these days.
The platform, Enomalism, is a virtual infrastructure tool that allows customers create their own cloud capacity and move virtual machines from one’s data center or from anywhere on the cloud to virtually any location. It is similar in some respects to VMware’s VirtualCenter VM management platform but is designed for larger capacity computing and managing applications in the cloud.
It is self funded but investors are taking notice. “We’re getting a lot of interest from VCs and private equity firms, “ said chief technologist and founder Reuven Cohen. “Our competitors are doing that so we might have to go down that road.”
The 16-employee company – which also built its own elastic compute cloud engine and remote storage product– has been working closely with service providers including Amazon and its Elastic Computing 2 (EC2) platform and another unnamed internal telecommunications provider that boasts 175 million customers worldwide. Roughly 60 percent of the interest comes from hosting providers and 40 percent from Fortune 500 companies that are strained for capacity.
Cohen, who founded Enomaly as a consulting firm four years ago, said he prefers Linux’s built in kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) technology but emphasizes that his platform (which was initially built using the Xen API) supports Xen, KVM, OpenVZ and Sun’s VirtualBox with plans to support VMware and Microsoft’s forthcoming HyperV. “We’re trying to be agnostic,” he said.
Enomaly’s next generation 2.0 platform, in beta testing, is based on a new Python framework and middleware that intelligently orchestrates how large scale applications are deployed in the cloud. Version 2.0 is a complete rebuild and its final release is expected in June, Cohen said.
Enomalism is a cloud enabler, whose virtual infrastructure layer is used by cloud providers.
Enomaly is sponsored (but not financially supported) by Intel. It is released under the AGPL license, sort of a GPL3 implementation for hosted solutions, Cohen said.
In some ways, Enomaly competes against VMware and 3terra but Cohen contends that the economics of proprietary solutions won’t fare well in the cloud computing arena. “It’s not cost effective with large scale capacity,” he said. “For them to compete against Amazon at 10 cents per hour is impossible. Open source makes it more attractive.”
May 2nd, 2008
Off Topic: Desktop evaluation - Linux, Mac OS and Windows
I’ve been asked by a KG client to run through a specific set of functions on a specific set of desktop environments and report back to them on my experiences. I’m to include such things as how long it took to set things up, how quickly it would take their staff to become productive in their new world, compatibility with data/files they’ve already created, and an evaluation of what it would cost per staff member if the entire environment was made up of that one desktop environment. The client chose a short list of operating environments and hardware platforms that included Apple Mac OS X, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), and Windows XP. I thought you’d be interested in a few random thoughts that have come out of this project. Read the rest of this entry »
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