Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Kris Buytaert

Virtual Machines in a Browser ?

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Yes we can …

When us mere mortals want to learn about a new computer language, or a new platform, we start out with the “Hello World”-variant and then try to dig in deeper…

Some people however when they want to study Javascript, raise the bar by writing optimized code for different Javascript Engines. Sharpening their skill set further by developing a JavaScript PC Emulator… That’s right, Fabrice Bellard of FFMpeg, tinycc, and Qemu fame has recently published a link to his JavaScript PC Emulator written in pure JavaScript and working in recent Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 browsers on different platforms.

Fabrice got his inspiration from the x86 dynamic translator code that is present in Qemu and he emulates a 32bit x86 cpu which is pretty close to a 486 without FPU.

More details on the actual emulator can be found on his web page.

Watch that space. For all you know, we’re going to be hooked on old school PC games in our browsers in the very near future…

Virtualbox 3.1 Beginner’s Guide

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Packt asked us a couple of months ago if they could send us their VirtualBox 3.1 Beginner’s Guide for reviewing.

It took me a while to actually get started reading the book, but once I got started I finished it extremely fast.

The book is really down to basics, it gives a good explanation of what VirtualBox is capable of doing , and how it works, it explains in depth how to install VirtualBox on different platforms and how to install different platforms in VirtualBox

In 8 different chapters the author covers Installing VirtualBox on both Windows and Linux , how to use the Guest Additions for these platforms that allow you to make better of your graphical hardware and provide you with seamless integration of the different window managers.

It also explains you about different disk formats and how to use them , about copying cloning and other interesting
topics .. and it shows you how to get Virtual Appliances from the Internet and use them for testing purposes.

The last chapter of the book explains you how you can use alternative front ends for VirtualBox and how to build a headless server with them.

I must say the most surprising chapter was the 6th which covered all different aspects of Networking with virtualization explaining five different methods of connecting a virtual box to your network, something most other books on virtualization often neglect to tackle.

As the title says it’s the Beginner’s Guide, so don’t expect any fancy in depth topics in the book, as an advanced user you’ll speed to trough this book in no time. But for the reader new to Virtualization this is the ultimate guide to start with …

Eucalyptus Announces Support For Windows

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Eucalyptus just announced the launch of Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition 2.0 which adds New Features to Create and Manage Private and Hybrid Clouds in Enterprise Environments

Eucalyptus today launched Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EE) 2.0, a major upgrade to the commercial edition of the open source Eucalyptus software for private and hybrid cloud computing. Eucalyptus EE 2.0 includes new support for Windows virtual machines (VMs), enabling users to integrate any application or workload running on the Windows operating system into a Eucalyptus private cloud.

“Eucalyptus EE 2.0 is built on the core Eucalyptus open source platform, with additional functionality designed to optimize building and deploying massively scalable, high performance private clouds in the enterprise,” said Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus Systems CEO.

Cloud.com, a new Open Source Cloud management platform..

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With a domain like Cloud.com you are doomed to deliver something Virtualization related,

And today that plan became visible for the rest of the world, the company formerly known as VMOps , today emerges from stealth mode and announces that it will be rebranding to Cloud.com

We had a chat earlier this week with Peder Ulander who joined Cloud.com as chief marketing officer bringing more than 15 years of experience. Previously, Peter could be found at companies such as Sun Microsystems responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform. but also at other Open Source companies icluding MontaVista Software, the largest distributor of Linux for embedded devices, and Cobalt Networks, one of the early open source for networking companies, Cisco and Symantec.

Next to Peter the company also announced two other new additions to it’s management team

Kevin KLuge joins as vice president of engineering and previously served as vice president of engineering at Zimbra, an open source server software provider for email and collaboration, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and sold to VMware in 2009. Prior to Zimbra, Kluge was vice president of engineering at Corvigo, a leading anti-spam provider. Additionally, Kluge has held leadership positions at Openwave Systems, where he led engineering for multiple innovative products including instant messaging, voicemail and multi-media messaging services (MMS), Sun Microsystems and Portola Communications.

and Kyle MacDonald joins as chief evangelist having most recently served as vice president of corporate development and strategy for Hosting.com / Wachovia Capital Partners. Prior to this position, MacDonald held executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet and next generation service providers sector at Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2009. MacDonald also held the position of corporate technologist for software and strategic technology at AMD where he helped developed AMD’s software strategy and key strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, BEA, Adobe, EMC and Symantec.

The new team members join the team of CEO Sheng Liang, who founded the company in 2008. Liang has extensive experience in the technology industry and has served in a number of both technical and executive leadership roles. Prior to Cloud.com, Liang co-founded and served as CTO of Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Sheng also was a member of the senior management teams at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, and was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

Cloud.com also lets the Virtual world know that it closed a $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million

Apart from its new name, management and funding Cloud.com today also announced their product : CloudStack,
an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of private and public cloud services. They provide an integrated software solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which comes in three distinct versions: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition and CloudStack Community Edition.

CloudStack is the result of work started by VMops in 2008 and is already being used in productions by some key customers.

Next to the expected features such as definition, deployment and management of cloud devices, CloudStack also adds metering to the feature list, so billing can be done based on actual usage of the public , private or hybrid deployments.

About the Open Source release availabel on Cloud.com tells us :
The CloudStack Community Edition is distributed under the General Public License 3 (GPL3). The Community Edition offers a leading open source software stack integrated with the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors, and can be deployed with Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. With its simple to install software package, Cloud.com is a fully integrated binary that enables developers to quickly and easily build, manage and deploy IaaS clouds.

There is a lot of competition in the Open Source Cloud and Virtualization management area, Corporate OpenQRM just being relaunched by Matt Rechenburg, Eucalyptus these days being managed by Marten Mickos and Abiquo just having opened a new office in the US, … and this all seems just like the start

So I`m keen to follow this one … and I’ll be having a closer look at the Cloud.com platform in our lab soon.

Does Shift happen ?

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Last week’s announcement of RHEL 6 Beta not including Xen anymore probably is the start of a new era in open source virtualization. While the signs were on the wall since RedHat acquired Qumranet it has never been more visible.

The tone has been set …in the same week RedHat announces RHEL6 Beta with only KVM support, Canonical announces 12000 UEC Deployments. UEC is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud , it’s their Eucalyptus implementation, or should we say integration ?
12000 deployments of UEC sounds like a lot, maybe a bit too much to believe today … ,

It’s probably too early to say that there are more KVM than Xen deployments today (certainly taking into account Amazon’s giant Xen deployments ) , but when talking to different ISP’s and Cloud Vendors you feel that there is a trend towards preferring KVM over Xen.

The biggest argument for KVM today is the fact that you can turn any recent Linux box into a Virtual Machine container with a couple of comands. The fact that KVM is part of the Linux Kernel and doesn’t require you to add extra components to your distibution makes it a lot easier to deploy and validate as opposed to a Xen setup that still needs extra changes and isn’t in the main kernel.

Today main reason why people are still considering Xen in some projects is legacy hardware not having a VT chipset yet … lots of older hardware can be put to good use with the performance that Xen’s paravirtualization brings .

When given choice of KVM / Xen or VirtualBox for their future Open Source virtualization deploymetns, Almost 50% of the people questioned plan on using KVM for their next deployment, as opposed to only about 30% planning to use Xen.

So at first KVM was being ignored, then being laughed at for not being a dedicated hypervisor but being part fo the Operating System .. and now apparently it’s time for the fight … and what a fight .

With much sadness we read Simon Crosby’s FUDitorial about RedHat’s KVM adoption.

When people start calling OEL a “superior enterprise version of RHEL” a red light starts flashing for me , so is Oracle planning to acquire Citrix any time soon ? As the only way to explain Simon talking about RHEL not being available for download and no sources being availble at all, I can think off is that he is already thinking about how to please his next employer.. Simon’s reaction tries to make the RedHat move look insignificant for some, for others it might be the drop that makes them really switch to KVM as it clearly is full of FUD regarding to RedHat

Oracle was betting heavily on Xen, Sun was also putting a lot of effort into xVM, however the Sun xVM effort seems to wander off towards more VirtualBox efforts. Obviously Citrix won’t head towards KVM anyh time soon .. but the big question is .. what will the masses do ?

Marten Mickos, ex MySQL CEO, joins Eucalyptus as CEO

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Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creators of the leading open source private cloud software Eucalyptus , let us know that Marten Mickos joined the company as chief executive officer.

Marten Mickos, born November 6, 1962 in Espoo, Finland) was chief executive officer (CEO) of MySQL AB. He served as chief executive officer from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun bought MySQL AB. He served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems until February 2009

An interresting fact is that Marten also serves on the board of RightScale , Former Eucalyptus CEO Woody Rollins will take up the role as Eucalyptus Systems’ chief financial officer.
Marten knows how to run an open source company and generate business for it. It’s no secret that while Eucalyptus has a good technical background they were suffering in getting stuff done on the business level. Marten might be the right person to guide Eucalyptus systems to the next level .