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Archives for April 2009

Oracle Gets Sun xVM, Solaris Zones and Virtualbox

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When Oracle announced that it will be acquiring Sun it didn’t just impact the database market. It’s not just the question of what will happen with MySQL, OpenOffice and Java. The impact on the virtualization market is big as well.

At the moment Sun has a very confusing virtualization offering: they have different flavours, different tools and, depending on which Sun representative you talk to, another technology is their next big thing. They indeed cover the 3 big areas: with Solaris Zones they have a nice OS virtualization alternative, with xVM they have a powerful Xen-based Bare metal virtualization technology based on paravirtualization, and with VirtualBox they have a Type II hypervisor ready to tackle the deskop market. A nice set of features indeed.

Oracle on the other hand was really focussing on Xen, and probably will continue to do so, so what will the future hold for Solaris Zones and VirtualBox hold.
Some people already mentioned that VirtualBox could merge up with Hosted Xen .

Now what was Oracle’s Cloud offering again? Sun already has a strategy here, and with the acquisition of Qlayer earlier this year they also have got a solid product line.

Xen just got another really strong vendor backing it’s technology, with both Citrix and Oracle behind it now. We’ll probaly find out soon.

Economy And Failure To Sell Likely To Murder Cassatt, Says CEO Bill Coleman (See Our Earlier Video Interview With The Man)

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Data center management software firm Cassatt is “close to the end,” stated founder and CEO Bill Coleman in a Forbes article. Coleman is well-known in Silicon Valley, having served as a senior exec in the early days of Sun Microsystems and as one of the co-founders of middleware company BEA systems. The ambitions with Cassatt were huge, but now (after raising $100 million in capital) the company is apparently having trouble even selling itself to one of the majors it aimed to compete with.

From the article:

“The big guys copied my story,” says Coleman. Cassatt, he adds, was upended by a slowing economy and by customers skittish about closing big orders or changing existing ways.

“What frustrates me is my own naivete,” he says. “I thought I could give companies something radical that had a proven return on investment, and they would be willing to change all their companies’ computer policies and procedures to get that. Right now it’s hard to get people to get beyond proof of concept tests or a data center energy analysis.”

And it concludes:

For his own part, though, Coleman says, “I have to think about my people. Then I’m going to a beach for a month to think about what to do next.”

We wish Coleman all the best.

Here’s a video interview we conducted with the man in the Summer of 2008:

PART 1

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PART 2

Eucalyptus Set To Launch With $5.5 Million In Series A Funding

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Eucalyptus Systems, creators of an open source private cloud platform, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating.

The funding marks the launch of Eucalyptus Systems as a private company that will build and service enterprise-grade products based on the Eucalyptus open source privatecloud software. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus cloud platform and to deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a “cloud” that is controlled and customized by local IT. Moreover, a local cloud based on Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.

Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each. To assist customers with setup, deployment, training, and support, Eucalyptus Systems has created the QuickStart program, the ideal first step for organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives.

The Eucalyptus management team includes Co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins, Co-founder and CTO Dr. Rich Wolski, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Reid, and the team of Ph.D. computer science engineers from the Eucalyptus project at UCSB. In addition, Andreas Von Blottnitz, former CEO of AOL Europe and Citrix Online, is chairman of the board, and Dr. Klaus Schauser, founder of AppFolio and founder and CTO of Citrix Online, is serving as an advisor.

To date, Eucalyptus has been downloaded over 14,000 times in 72 countries. In addition, Eucalyptus software is the cloud computing engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (powered by Eucalyptus), which was recently announced as part of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Eucalyptus will ship with every copy of Ubuntu, starting with the Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, made available on April 23.

Apologies For The Radio Silence

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We would like to apologize to our readers, and particularly those who subscribe to our RSS feed and/or e-mail newsletter, for not posting any news for the past couple of days. We moved offices and it took us a while to get our internet access back. But we’re back now, and here’s an overview of what happened while we were sitting on a tropical island in no-internet-hell.

Veeam has a new CFO (William H. Largent)

BlueStripe Software raised Series B funding to the tune of $8 million from Valhalla Partners and Trinity Ventures.

CohesiveFT added both Fedora Core 10 and Internal Eucalyptus Cloud Deployment Option to its Elastic Server platform

Tranxition has announced general availability of LiveManage for Virtual Migrations 7.0

VMware has announced vSphere, its infamous cloud operating system (and then some)

rPath has announced rBuilder 5

Pano Logic has appointed Parmeet S. Chaddha as executive vice president of engineering

VMware put out their financial numbers for the first quarter of 2009

Leostream released Connection Broker 6.0

Citrix today announced that the beta release of XenServer 5.5 (code-named “Project George”) is available

On the dangers of OVF

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Usually I`m all in favour of Open Standards that are supported by different parties, and the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) pretty much matches these requirements.
The last Virtualbox has support for it, Simon is telling about it being part of the new XenConvert v2 Tech Preview .
However, Reuven wonders why it hasn’t gained widespread adoption yet.

Here’s my take, .. I`m not in favour of a standard as OVF that provides an easy way to transfer packaged virtual machine instance between different platforms.

Why ? Because I don’t think transferring full images of Virtual machines around is a good idea, not on 1 platform, not on different platforms.
And I`m not the only one with that opinion.

A Virtual Machine image is the perfect vehicle for malware in your network … some prepares an image for you , you run it on your network, and you set loose the devil, who knows it does a networkscan in the background and sends the info

OVF is a good breeding area for VM Image Sprawl,the effect you get when the number of images you have grows beyond what you can easily maintain, and this time it can grow beyond the people only using proprietary software , where as Image Sprawl used to be a disease mostly diagnosed within the VMWare usergroups and sysdamins with no clue on large scale deployments OVF

Sure OVF will assist smooth migration between different platforms so vendors want to keep it as far away from their users as possible, but people that already have a platform agnostic deployment framework in place don’t really need to worry about deploying on different platforms.

Updates on Xen

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When you have been in this industry for a couple of years, you might think that the Virtualization industry has stopped innovating, that there are no new awesome features coming out anymore.

Obviously they aren’t coming at the same pace as 5-10 years ago anymore, we aren’t surprised anymore when people add Virtualization support for yet another CPU or publish yet another new and fresh management framework, with a cloud sauce .. But hidden far in the back corner innovation still happens, be it with much smaller and less intrusive steps than before.

So lets have a look at these small changes

First of all a project I’ve been following for a while now .. XenFS , XenFS builds on the idea that you often want to share filesystems between virtual machines on the same physical machine and that you don’t want to use NFS, Cifs or even the regular network stack to achieve this goal.

According to Mark Williamson who’s working on the project :

The major differences from a traditional network filesystem are in the implementation. XenFS is implemented as a XenLinux “split driver”, with kernel modules implementing the client and server portions. Instead of exchanging protocol messages over a network socket, XenFS exchanges requests and responses using shared memory, similar to the “device channels” used by the block and network split drivers. Beyond that, instead of copying data from the server to the client (and back) XenFS also shares the memory containing the actual file data.

XenFS has been around for a while, but KXen is actually brand new. Argumenting over the advantages and disadvantages of a TypeI vs TypeII hypervisor is now over as Xen “supports” both.

Stephen Spector announced the availability of the first public release of Hosted Xen (KXen)

According to Stephen

Xen is the leading open source Type-1 VMM, providing a fast, robust and secure virtualization platform. KXen leverages the Xen technology, extending the range of environments in which the same core engine can be used to existing desktops, laptops and allowing scenarios like run from usb stick.
Work is underway to support MacOSX as the host, as well as 64-bit versions of Windows. The windows 32-bit host code is designed such that it is easy to port to other host operating systems.

The Remus project which we covered earlier , has also released it’s initial Request for Comment code. Remus allows systems to transparently move to another physical machine in the event of a failure on the primary machine , with only seconds of downtime, while preserving the original host state such as active network connections , memory and disk state.
Being an RFC release means that it is meant to start a discussion on how it might be merged with Xen and Kemari. According to the announcement it is not by any means in shape for application to the Xen tree
But it is a giant step forward towards a better high availability solution using Virtualization.