Kris Buytaert

When Red Hat acquired Qumranet about 15 months ago lots of people realized that RedHat’s good practice of Open Sourcing everything they do might be a difficult task for the Qumranet software. And indeed, RedHat has been critised a lot for having a Windows only management framework for their Qumranet based technologies and for not opening up Spice yet.

But it came trough on their promise, as of now you can go to the fresh Spice Space page, part of the RedHat emerging Technology Projects at et.redhat.com

“The Spice project aims to provide a complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktop devices.The Spice project deals with both the virtualized devices and the front-end. Interaction between front-end and back-end is done using VD-Interfaces. The VD-Interfaces (VDI) enable both ends of the solution to be easily utilized by a third-party component. ”
The 3 goals of spice are :

a). To deliver a high-quality user experience, similar to local machine, in LAN environments
b). To maintain low CPU consumption in order to have high VM density on the host
c). To provide high-quality video streaming and 3D

A bit later than the main page also the Wiki and the GiT repository became public

The 0.4.0 Spice version is the first Public release is currently available in source or as packages for Fedora 12

Currently, the project main focus is to provide high-quality remote access to QEMU virtual machines. Seeking to help break down the barriers to virtualization adoption by overcoming traditional desktop virtualization challenges, emphasizing user experience. For this purpose, Red Hat introduced the SPICE remote computing protocol that is used for Spice client-server communication. Other components developed include QXL display device and driver, etc.

If you want to know more, there is a 12 page document titled Spice For Newbies that should teach you a lot !

The folks over at Gluster dropped in the news that they are releasing their Gluster Storage platform:

“By integrating the GlusterFS file system with an operating system layer and improved management user interface, Gluster provides a complete storage software platform that simplifies the task of deploying petabyte-scale storage to two installation steps and a few mouse clicks. The new platform addresses the complexity of managing ‘big data,’ the demanding scalability requirements of modern applications”

Now what has this got to do with Virtualization you might ask,
the accelerating growth of Virtual Machine deployments requires people to rething their storage strategy, the demand for a unified storage space that contains high available copies of the running virtual machines is growing.

The Gluster Storage platform comes as a Clustered Storage on s stick version, the complete platform image fits on a USB memory stick that can configure a bare server to a clustered storage node in 15 minutes or less

As mentionned it provides the user with a Unified global namespace, according to them you can add hundreds of petabytes in a single volume across multiple commodity storage nodes.

It has Web-based installation and management providing you with rapid installation of first storage node with disk formatting performed post-install; integrated management of volumes, data resources and servers plus centralized logging and reporting.

And off course it is High availability – data can be replicated (mirrored) for high availability; real time self-healing performs error detection and correction within files while they are running and during recovery from hardware failures

“Gluster Storage Platform is the natural evolution of GlusterFS, combining the power and scalability of clustered storage with unparalleled simplicity,” said Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “Gluster is the only commercial scale-out storage platform that eliminates metadata server issues and allows non-experts to deploy petabyte-scale storage with the ease of an install wizard.”
With regard to virtualization ,
Gluster Storage Platform ensures continuous operation of virtual machines (VMs). Replicated virtual machines can continuously operate in the event of hardware failure and recovery is performed in the background without requiring a restart or blocking I/O to the live VM. Gluster Storage Platform uses checksum based healing which detects and corrects errors within the VM rather than for the entire VM image.

Gluster argues that as the Gluster Storage Platform aggregates disk and memory resources into a single pool of capacity under a global namespace it provides a true virtual storage environment to complement server virtualization. VM images and application data can be stored in the same system in a single volume, eliminating silos of data and centralizing management. Multiple storage building blocks are clustered together in parallel, eliminating I/O bottlenecks and hotspots that often negatively impact VM performance. With Gluster, storage administrators no longer need to manually manage multiple volumes and individual storage connections.

According to them it is now common for mission critical applications to be deployed on VMs. The VM images not only need to be stored, they also need to continue operating in the event of hardware failures and not allow faults to interrupt applications and services. Gluster Storage Platform employs file replication to ensure multiple copies of a VM are available in the event of hardware failure and provides both high availability and sophisticated real time self-healing to ensure continuous VM operation.

We quickly looked into the GlusterFS platform and set it up on different nodes,
the setup speed and ease of confiugration was a welcome suprise as opposed to different other clustering setups.

Thierry Koehrlen pinged us with the news that Ulteo is introducing its open source virtual desktop OVD 2.0. This new release delivers both Linux and/or Windows applications as complete virtual desktops and also via a web portal.

Thierry Koehrlen CEO & co-founder of Ulteo says . “Users can now log into their corporate portal and simply click a link to launch a remote Windows and/or Linux application, or they can click an icon to open a document with an associated remote application.”

Ulteo OVD 2.0 provides more implementation choices to IT departments
“OVD 2.0 is about providing more choices from an architecture perspective as well” adds Gaël Duval, Ulteo CTO and co-founder.

Users now can have shared directories, more supported databaes, single sign on, support for different Windows Server versions, etc. OVD also offers the choice on where to deploy their Virtual Desktop infrastructure For example, OVD can now run on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing environment. This ability was made possible with the help of the Open Source community which allows us to deliver an impressive list of features much faster than on our own.”

Ulteo OVD: a flexible Open Source Virtual Desktop solution for public and private organizations of all sizes, and also for telco and cloud companies

Their full press release can be found here , and Ulteo, Open Virtual Desktop 2.0 can be downloaded from their main page

From blog.xen.org:

The Xen community is pleased to announce the addition of Fujitsu and VA Linux Systems Japan K.K. to the Xen Advisory Board. Fujitsu and VA Linux Systems joins other leading enterprise vendors to offer expertise and leadership to promote the Xen hypervisor as the industry standard in open source virtualization. The addition of these two influential vendors based in Japan provides Xen with an enhanced customer prospective in the server, client and cloud virtualization markets.

Over the last two years, Fujitsu has significantly increased their contribution to the Xen.org community. Fujitsu hosted the inaugural Xen Summit Asia event in 2008 at their Makuhari Lab, submitted a substantial number of accepted patches for the Itanium (IA64) Xen hypervisor and the following Xen features: PV SCSI driver, PV USB driver, VTd SAN boot support, and guest dump. The company has also been a leader in defining and contributing to the newly launched Xen Client Initiative (XCI) and Xen Cloud Platform. Finally, Fujitsu has recently released a benchmark tool for virtualization, AutoVMbench.

VA Linux Japan has also been a great Xen evangelist with presentations at Linux.con.au 2007, Japan Linux Symposium 2009, Xen Summit Boston 2008, Xen Summit Asia 2008, and Xen Summit Fall 2006. They have also sponsored 2 Xen Conferences in Japan in 2007 and 2008 with sizeable audiences. On the development side of Xen, VA Linux Japan is the current Xen/IA 64 maintainer and has contributed large amounts of code for PCI passthrough, I/O schedulers and bandwidth control, domU core-dump, and Linux upstream of domU pv_ops/ia64.

“Having Fujitsu and VA Linux Japan join the Xen Advisory Board is another milestone for the Xen community, demonstrating the broad reach of the project,” said Ian Pratt, founder of the xen project and Chairman of Xen.org. “With Fujitsu’s and VA Linux Japan’s industry leadership and strong presence in the Asian marketplace, the Xen.org community is further strengthened, ensuring a continued leadership position as the open source hypervisor of choice.”

“Fujitsu is committed to contribute to the open source with Xen community, and we are excited to join the Xen Advisory Board,” said Chiseki Sagawa, president of the SOP Strategy and Development Office at Fujitsu. “With the openness and enterprise-class features of the Xen Cloud Platform, customers can freely choose best of enterprise ready cloud platform from various vendors.”

“VA Linux Japan has been contributing to the Xen community since its inception, offering high-quality consulting services for the Xen virtualization technology in Japan. Today’s announcement of joining the Xen advisory board gives us a confidence that our efforts toward the Xen open source projects have been widely recognized.” said Iehisa “Ike” Nakamura, president and CEO, VA Linux Japan. “We are proud to be a member of the Xen advisory board. VA Linux is committed to support the adoption of the Xen technology and XCP in Japan and continue to contribute to Xen.org.”

The Xen Advisory Board provides oversight and guidance to the Xen project for all community activities, technology development, and management of the Xen® trademark. The Xen Advisory Board includes membership from the top eight contributors to the Xen project, as well as the key vendors delivering the Xen hypervisor. Current advisory board members are Citrix, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and VA Linux Japan

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