Virtualization.com

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

Robin Wauters

Will Increasing Memory Costs Slow Down Virtualization Growth?

by 1 Comment

Memory vendor Kingston Technology (check out the short interview we did at their VMWorld Europe 2008 booth) says memory in industry standard servers is causing virtualization projects to become unnecessarily expensive and that fears over warranties are holding back users from upgrading.

virtualization-memory-kingston-technology.jpg

“Not having enough memory restricts the number of virtual machines, and also restricts the overall performance. Not having enough memory is either down to improper planning, or in most cases, the inability to purchase enough memory due to the higher cost of OEM memory,” the company said.

Hewlett-Packard does not seem to share their vision:

Rhys Austin, who runs the virtualization practice for industry standard servers at HP agreed that too little memory will affect virtualiszation performance but strongly rejected Kingston’s assertion that users were worried about price or warranties.

[Source: PC Advisor]

Microsoft Opened Up Virtualization For Vista Under Court Pressure

by 1 Comment

Earlier this year, Microsoft surprisingly flip-flopped its earlier decision not to allow users to run Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium as guest operating systems on a virtual machine. According to Computerworld, court documents now prove MS did this because of a complaint filed with antitrust regulators.

According to a status report filed with U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, Microsoft changed the end-user licensing agreements (EULA) of Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium under pressure from Phoenix Technologies Ltd. Phoenix, best known for the BIOS, or firmware, that it sells to PC makers, had filed a complaint with regulators sometime after early November 2007, arguing that Microsoft should open the less-expensive versions of Vista to virtualization.

virtualization-vista-windows-microsoft.JPG

Although the report didn’t name the Phoenix virtualization product, it was referring to HyperSpace, technology that the company unveiled in November 2007. HyperSpace embeds a Linux-based hypervisor in the computer’s BIOS that allows the computer to run open-source software without booting Windows. A little more than two months after Phoenix filed its complaint, Microsoft gave in. “After discussion with the Plaintiff States and the three-person technical committee that assists in monitoring Microsoft’s compliance, Microsoft agreed to remove the EULA restrictions, and has done so,” the status report said.

Unfortunately, Phoenix Technologies and Microsoft declined to comment about the complaint and the changes to virtualization in Vista.

On Virtualization and Server Consolidation

by Leave a Comment

Insightful post by Arthur Cole over at ITBusinessEdge about server consolidation and virtualization. Cole argues that server consolidation done the right way remains the primary driver for most data centers.

But as those who have already taken the virtual plunge have no doubt realized, consolidating servers is not just a simple matter of powering up the virtualization layer and then pulling equipment out of racks. There is a long list of factors to consider with any centralization project and a wide range of land mines that need to be avoided to prevent service failures.

Cole refers to four interesting articles about server consolidation:

Read the whole article here.

Virtutech Looking To Advance Standards for Virtualized Software Development

by Leave a Comment

Virtutech, a San-Jose based Virtualized Software Development (VSD) provider, today announced an initiative to accelerate the creation of standards for the VSD industry and to drive mainstream acceptance of VSD throughout the electronic systems business. While continuing its long-standing involvement with Power.org at both the Technical Sub Committees and Marketing Programs level, Virtutech has also joined organizations in its domain-Eclipse.org, OSCI and Spirit Consortium-with the aim of fostering standards and best practices. Virtutech further announced collaboration with GreenSocs to promote Open Standards and community development.

virtualization-virtutech.gif

Virtutech intends to leverage its expertise with more than 1,000 successful users accumulated over the course of deploying its Simics platform since 2001 to propose, promote and support best practices, conventions and standards for VSD.

“Virtualized Software Development has the potential to make the same dramatic impact on software development that virtualization has already brought to the data center and business applications. However, the industry needs to stand up and define, promote and drive adoption of virtualization throughout the development community,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing at Virtutech. “Virtutech intends to be an agent of change and to actively precipitate the next big virtualization wave.”

[Source: press release]

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie On Cloud & Utility Computing

by Leave a Comment

Interesting interview up on GigaOM today, featuring Microsoft‘s Chief Software Architect and industry luminary Ray Ozzie talking about MS’s strategy, the economics of cloud computing and the relevance of desktop and infrastructure challenges.

virtualization-ray-ozzie.jpg

The most interesting bits:

OM: The costs of computing, hardware and bandwidth are dropping quickly. Do you believe that the cost will come down fast enough to make cloud computing actually a profitable business?

RAY OZZIE: Well, it’s unlikely that we would get into it if we didn’t think it was going to be a profitable business. So we’ll just manage it to be profitable. It’s going to have different margins than classic software, or the ad (-supported) business. But, we have every reason to believe that it will be a profitable business. It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom.

…

OM: When do you think utility computing can be a profitable business; are we’re looking at like maybe two years, four years out before it actually starts to become a profitable entity?

RAY OZZIE: (Let’s) take (one company) who is in the market today: Amazon. They chose a price point. There are either customers at that price point or not. They may have priced themselves at expected costs as opposed to actual today costs, but it doesn’t really matter. They could have brought it out at twice the existing price and there still would have been a customer base, and they’d be making money at birth.

I think all of these utility-computing services, as they’re born will either be breaking even or profitable. At the scale that we’re talking about, nobody can afford, (even Microsoft) can’t afford to do it at a loss. We could subsidize it, I suppose. Google could subsidize it by profits in other parts of their business, we could subsidize it, but I don’t think there’s any reason that any of us in this world would bring out that infrastructure like this without charging for what we’re paying, and then trying to make some profit over it. The cost base is so high in terms of building these data centers you do want to kind of make it up.

Read the rest of the (edited) interview here.

Podcast Tip: Andrea Arcangeli on KVM and hypervisor virtualization

by Leave a Comment

Let us join Michael Dolan in pointing you to a great podcast on LinuxCast (LinuxWorld), featuring Don Marti interviewing Andrea Arcangeli on the topic of KVM and the benefits of the kernel taking on the hypervisor role (rather than separating the hypervisor and rewriting all the supporting structures as Xen does).

Listen to the podcast here!