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

Kris Buytaert

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.

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.

Floss Virtualization Doesn’t Care About Marketing …

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It cares about Quality and Frequent code releases. The Open Source community doesn’t
wait till the week before VMWorld to announe big news, they just code along happily and when the coding is done.. they release their software.

And there was plenty of it last couple of weeks. Here’s an overview ..

  • The New Virt Manager 0.70 is out , it s featuring a Redesigned New Virtual Machine Wizard, a file browser for storage pools and volumes, there are now features to add physical device assignment (PCI,USB) for existing virtual machines.
  • Qemu, the open source processor emulator, has now a 0.10.0 Stable Branch which will be used to receive bug fixes until at least the next major release .
  • The qemu-0.10.0 changelog liss better KVM acceleration support, Bluetooth emulation and host passthrough support , Nokia N-series tablet emulation multiple vnc clients, and much more platform and hardware support. Eventually this might lead to qemu making current kvm-userspace obsolete, but that’s not for tomorrow yet.
  • Reuven announced Enomaly ECP 2.2.3, a maintenance release fixing some bugs .
  • And Matt announced openQRM 4.4 with SOAP Webservices for it’s Cloud , openQRM 4.4 now also implements “persistent appliances” which means that users can now “pause”, “unpause” and “restart” their Cloud appliances via the User-Portal. The internal billing mechanism will only charge active Cloud appliances and now fully provides the “pay-on-demand” Cloud Computing model. Also better integration for Puppet and Sshterm were added. More about it’s new features can be read on the openQRM site ..
  • And last but not least is the new ConVirt project that has just announced it’s 1.0 release .
    ConVirt is a centralized management solution that lets you provision, monitor and manage the complete lifecycle of your Xen deployment.

So that’s it’s for this week’s Open Source Virtualization updates 🙂
Be expecting more updates around the next VMWorld, or when the code is done 🙂

Oracle To Buy Virtual Iron?

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The rumour is spreading , but so far no official feedback from Oracle.

Local Techwire reports that there are talks between Oracle and Virtual Iron ongoing and that Oracle is aiming at Virtual Iron to expand its server virtualization management platform.

According to Local Techwire Katherine Egbert, a Jefferies & Company analyst who closely follows Red Hat, say that

It’s likely Oracle would buy Virtual Iron to improve its prospects in the rapidly growing server virtualization management market and to keep Virtual Iron technology out of competitive hands,

and note that Virtual Iron is the “fifth-largest server virtualization vendor.”

She also noted that Virtual Iron’s technology is “complementary to Oracle Virtual Machine” while also cheaper than market leader VMware.

Virtual Iron, according to TechVibes founded in 2003 , already has a questionable Virtualization History, as I wrote earlier in Open Source Virtualization Today , Virtual Iron initially had a Single Server Image implementation they sold under the Virtual Iron VFe productname , but somewhere in 2005 they changed gears and became the supplier of a server virtualization & virtual infrastructure management solution , a Virtualization Solution based on Open Source Technologies, or back then a Xen Management Solution.

Fact is that when RedHat moves towards KVM , it leaves a gap to fill for Oracle which with OracleVM today is putting it’s eggs in the Xen basket. Oracle just hosted the Xen Summit and has Wim Coekaerts on the Xen Advisory Board. So adding a company like Virtual Iron to it’s portofolio to manage those Xen based VM’s absolutely makes sense.

If or when that will happen is still the question 🙂

But we’ll keep you posted..

Karma Koala

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With all the fuzz around Cannes.. oh wait .. nothing happened there.. that was the most boring event ever wasn’t it … we forgot to focus on where the real action is happening …

When the 9.10 Ubuntu Release, Karmic Koala, hits the wire it will be Cloud Ready or Virtualization ready or whatever you want to call it. Ubuntu wants to keep Open Source and Free software where it belongs, the key components of Cloud Computing. We have to agree that it are the Open Source Hypervisors that are the being used in the fundaments of Cloud Computing.

Ubuntu will be embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2 and will make it easier for every body to build their own Private Clouds using Open Source tools. Ubuntu-vmbuilder allows you to create a custom AMI , however they also provide a set of standard images to be used. Apart from deploying Ubuntu instances on the existing clouds, Karma Koala will live very happy in his favourite Eucalyptus trees

In Plain English, Ubuntu has recently welcomed the Eucalyptus framework in it’s software repositories, and it will be part of the upcoming release 9.4 already. (Eucalyptus being the open-source infrastructure for implementing Elastic Cloud computing using computing clusters which has an interface-compatible that is with Amazon.com’s EC2 which we covered earlier)

Now if you remember Ubuntu was one of the first Linux distributions to go for KVM rather than Xen, given its desktop-oriented nature. Amazon build it’s infrastructure on Xen. So Originally Eucalyptus was a mostly Xen supporting Framework, but lots of things have changed and today Eucalyptus supports both Xen, KVM and VMWare mostly using LibVirt, making it hypervisor-agnostic.