Toon Vanagt

VMware Rolls Second FUD Wave Over Citrix Xenserver

June 1, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

Is marketing inherently manipulative, superficial, annoying and therefore evil? Do software marketing departments communicate the opportunities and advantages of their products in a honest way? Does it help to engage in FUD tactics against competitors?

At Virtualization.com we honestly don’t know… but we do think that when you are the market leader (hello, VMWare!), it doesn’t really strengthen your case when you point so much attention towards your once-great-partner Citrix. So why did Jeff Jennings at VMware mail the two messages below to his sales partners? This only seems to create the unwanted impression Citrix/XenServer is a real threat to VMware…

Let’s bear in mind these arguments were ‘only’ intended as marketing speak towards VMware sales partners.

Dear <name>,

Yesterday, Citrix announced the immediate availability of XenDesktop, a collection of technologies intended to provide a virtualized desktop experience. This competitive flash summarizes what was announced, explores specific claims that may cause confusion, and provides guidance for VMware sales professionals and partners.

Executive Summary

XenDesktop: What Can it Really Do, and How Much Does it Really Cost?

Citrix has widely promoted the concept of application streaming, and the idea that XenDesktop offers a “new PC at each log on”. This message has created confusion, because to achieve a “new PC at each log on”, multiple products must be integrated. Evidence of this confusion is also in the press. The Register recently published Citrix’s XenDesktop can fly you to the moon, an article about misleading product claims by Citrix. Brian Madden also examines Citrix XenDesktop pricing and competition with Citrix’s own XenApp (Presentation Server) products in his blog entry Citrix XenDesktop pricing is out-of-whack. One of the main value propositions of a virtual desktop is that all your applications work in a VDI environment. By bundling XenApp (Presentation Server) into their desktop solution, Citrix is making customers use XenApp (Presentation Server) for application deployment which doesn’t work for many applications. In addition, customers will have to pay the additional CAPEX and management costs for XenApp (Presentation Server). At a minimum, this includes server and storage hardware, and a Windows Server license for each XenApp server. Furthermore, customers may need to buy a Terminal Services CAL for each user.

XenDesktop: Complex, Poorly Integrated, Built on a Platform That Has an Uncertain Future

Citrix XenDesktop software is complex, consisting of different disparate components bundled together. The underlying XenServer virtualization platform is also unproven in enterprise environments. Both Citrix and Microsoft have stated that Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor will replace XenServer. Customers who deploy XenDesktop will use a virtualization platform that has an uncertain future. Several customers who have evaluated XenDesktop failed to deploy the complicated solution. Citrix’s XenDesktop keynote demonstration at their user conference, Synergy, didn’t even work.

VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is Built on a Proven Platform and is Easy to Deploy
In contrast to Citrix XenDesktop, customers that deploy VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) gain all the robustness and proven enterprise capabilities of the industry leading VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI3) platform. VMware VDI is mature and much simpler to deploy than XenDesktop. XenDesktop deployments have up to eight different wizards, applications, and management consoles; VMware VDI uses two. Partners can have VMware VDI installed and working on their first customer visit, while XenDesktop can take days to get even a simple system deployed.

Bottom Line

We encourage VMware partners to clearly articulate how the virtualization platform is a strategic technology underlying virtual desktop deployments. Citrix’s claims about product features, such as whether XenDesktop includes application streaming or virtualization capabilities, and claims of disk storage savings without noting significant restrictions, should not go unchallenged.

Read more

Best regards,
Jeff Jennings
Vice President, Desktop Products and Solutions VMware

(As reported on May 27, 2008 by Brian Madden)

In Febrary 2008, Jeff Jennings alreay gave a list of reasons that tried to clarify the competitive advantage of VMware. Among them there’s a very interesting point about partnership between Microsoft and Citrix.

“The new items are a collection of loosely connected pieces thrown together to look like a coherent virtualization plan. Microsoft is still talking vision….

Microsoft’s announcement introduces new conflicts into the Microsoft-Citrix business partnership and begs the question “When will Microsoft dump Citrix and take all of the business for itself?” Is this just a partnership of convenience for Microsoft until it ships its own product?…Tell your prospects that are considering Citrix, that MSFT will soon cut Citrix out of the loop…and Citrix is allowing it to happen…

…New Conflict #1: Microsoft System Center or Citrix XenServer for Management…This declaration hits at the heart of Citrix’s stated business model for virtualization – to generate revenue from the management of Windows VMs with Citrix XenCenter. System Center and XenCenter are clearly competitors…

…New Conflict #2: Calista acquisition creates more direct competition with Citrix SpeedScreen (ICA)..This acquisition strikes at Citrix’s core business since ICA is Citrix’s key differentiator and competes with RDP..”

“Benchmarking” The Citrix / XenServer Combo with Ian Pratt (Video Interview – Part 2)

May 28, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 3 Comments

During the Fosdem 2008 conference, we had a chance to sit down (on a bench) with Xen Guru Ian Pratt. Below is the second part (watch the first part here) of our exclusive interview, where Ian shines his light on the Xen GPL license, OracleVM, xVM (Sun), the future of virtualization and XenServer.

We cut the interview into 4 digestable pieces, which we publish one at a time. As said, this is the second part (you can also find a written transcript below for your convenience):

This video is also available on Vimeo and Streamocracy.

(0:02) Could Virtualization also help the infrastructure to become more self-healing or self-provisioning?

“Sure. It is already the case that you can have a pool of physical hardware. Something that Xen calls a resource pool and than a pool of VMs running on top. You can configure things as the referrer to give “down notices”, so you can fail over those virtual machines. There are plenty of people who do that today on Xen.”

(0:31) When I look at the Xen GPL-license. I find it interesting that Xen is being renamed as xVM by Sun, OracleVM by Oracle. When Oracle first announced OracleVM it quickly had to admit it was actually a tweaked Xen version. I heard they initially did not publish the tweaked code.

“Oh no, they have. The fact is that there are lots of different vendors, shipping Xen products as they pick up the Xen hypervisor core engine and incorporate it into their own products. The Linux vendors: like Novell and Redhat, there is Sun, there is obviously XenSource / Citrix and Virtual Iron. Lots of different companies are doing that. Actually the GPL license means that any changes they make will go back into the main project. In reality, pretty much all those company just pick it up as is. They take the latest stable release, which is maintained, they might add the odd little patch to it, but it really is all very clear, there is a lot of uniformity in the Xen versions out there.”

(1:40) As many of these projects like Sun’s xVM and Oracle’s VM are using the Xen project. At what level are they tweaking their own software to be more integrated with Xen or to be more stable or faster?

“Most of those companies are very close to mainline Xen. They post a couple of patches. In some cases they maybe not. What they will be doing, is taking Xen and it’s really on top of Xen , in the rest of their Virtualization stack (that runs in user space) that’s where they’ll be probably doing their own things. They might have their own management tool. They will have their own way of wanting to present virtualization to the user. So if you think about what the operating system vendors are typically doing, is they want to expose virtualization using the same tools and user interfaces as they use for exposing other facilities inside that operating system. Which is quite different from what a company like XenSource was trying to do, which tried and effectively build a virtual machine hosting appliance. You just put the CD in the server, install it and just manage it from a windows GUI or web interface. Every company is bringing Xen to market in a different way for a different kind of user. And that is where the differentiation happens. The core engine is the same throughout.”

(03:31) You think that is what the future will bring us? You buy a piece of hardware and just initiate it, to install an operating system.

“I think it will go way further than that. We have always envisioned getting Xen embedded in the firmware as we think that the hypervisor is a core part of the platform. We think it should come with servers when they role of the production line and they should all have Xen installed on them. And the really cool thing is that this is happening. Dell is already announcing that in their new servers shipping later this year, Xen will be a factory installed option in flash memory. Other hardware vendors are to follow soon. People will have ubiquitous virtualization, every server will have Xen installed on it. You will be able to install multiple operating systems and virtual appliances, etc. on top of the hardware.”

(04:33) So now the x86-type of servers are becoming very similar to what mainframes are used to for decades?

“Exactly, it will be a similar model. The difference will be that you can start using these x86-servers, connecting them into resource pools and than running pools of VMs on top of these pools of servers. That is when things start becoming really interesting.”

(04:58 ) You think people will need to rethink their whole infrastructure even more drastically than they do today?

“Yes, today virtualization is typically used for sort of server consolidation. Often used for taking legacy applications or old versions of operating systems and consolidating them onto a single machine…
I think that the way that things are going to be tomorrow and start happening today (and for which Xen is brilliantly prepared) is actually for running production workloads, where all of your machines and partners are running hypervisors and that enables you to run any virtual machine image on any physical machine to take advantage of being able to move workloads around by using live relocation. Also balancing of VMs to servers and even features like fault tolerance and the stuff we talked about, which you want for production workloads.”

(05:59) If you ask people to name a virtualization vendor, VMware will probably come up first. They definitely have a track record to have built this market. But if you look at really big IT-datacenter applications like Amazon, Google or MySpace, they actually deployed Xen as their core engine. It appears all of the Fortune top 100 companies in the United States are VMware clients. So why do banks go for VMware and these major datacenters for Xen?

“I think you will see plenty of banks switching to Xen and plenty of them already have, as it is obviously a lot cheaper to deploy Xen. The reason that companies such as Amazon go with Xen, is that when you do these large virtualization deployments, you want to be using something to secure great performance and some of the high-end second-generation virtualization features. Xen certainly has all that and also has the advantage that it is open source. So there is not going to be vendor lock-in, with a number of different Xen-vendors to procure from and the price is right. For a sophisticated company like Amazon, they will just download the open source version and they will have 20 engineers deploying it across machines. There are plenty of other companies that will rather tank one of the pre-packaged versions from one of the Xen-vendors. I think that many of the large virtualization deployments -such as Amazon- are on Xen because it works better.”

Go back to part 1 of this interview

Citrix Raises the Bar on Integrated Server Virtualization with HP Select Edition

March 20, 2008 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

This morning Citrix and HP jointly announced a long awaited strategic development and distribution agreement that will integrate an enhanced version of Citrix XenServer™ into 64-bit HP ProLiant servers, which they ‘simply’ named the Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition.

The subtitle of the press-release proudly claims “Jointly Developed Solution Offers Unparalleled User Experience and Out-of-the-Box Integration with HP Insight Control Management Software”. We are not sure if Citrix tries to hint at Virtualization vendor Parallels with this interesting choice of wording…

This new solution supposedly features an easy-to-use graphical management console and is seamlessly integrated with the same HP Insight Control management software that customers already use to physically administer their HP ProLiant servers. With this new solution, new and existing HP and Citrix customers will be able to deploy and manage a virtualized environment faster and easier than before. This virtualization bundle follows the VMware partnership with HP, which was announced a few weeks ago during the VMworld Europe Event in Cannes.

Seems like there are interesting times ahead, when you purchase servers at the major hardware vendors… Upon ordering, you will be able to select which virtualization vendor (VMware or XenServer) you want to bundle you new hardware with. Dell already opened a Virtualization price war, as it announced to cover the full cost of certain VMware ESX server 3i licenses and bundles it for free with its newest servers.

The Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition is part of the HP ProLiant iVirtualization offering and according to the press release below, it provides extensive advantages over alternative solutions.

These advantages include faster implementation of Citrix XenServer virtualization technology on HP ProLiant servers, increased ease-of use for HP ProLiant customers utilizing Citrix XenServer, and leveraged investments in HP management tools such as HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) for remote server management.
“This integrated solution from Citrix and HP promises to have a significant impact on the industry by making the virtualization of servers as easy as managing physical servers,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “By enabling virtualization to be simple from the very beginning, it not only helps proliferate virtualization technology, but also enables enterprises to adopt it faster and easier.”
Integrated Virtualization Done Right
Citrix XenServer is a simple, efficient way to virtualize servers and help deliver a dynamic data center—a flexible, aggregated pool of computing and storage resources. Citrix XenServer supports 64-bit and extends the development and testing resources of the open source Xen virtualization engine, delivering easy-to-use dynamic virtualization solutions.
By tightly integrating Citrix XenServer into ProLiant platforms, Citrix and HP will provide a simpler deployment and management environment that speeds adoption of flexible, cost-saving server virtualization technology, making it the optimal choice for virtualization on HP systems. Highlights include:
• New HP ProLiant iVirtualization – This offering integrates virtualization capabilities into the ProLiant server platform, empowering customers to virtualize their server environments. It allows customers to quickly and easily boot up a Citrix XenServer environment, either on a single server or as part of an end-to-end Citrix solution for server, application and desktop virtualization (see today’s related announcement from HP).
• New HP ProLiant Virtual Console – The newly developed HP ProLiant Virtual Console (PVC), unique to Citrix and HP solutions, provides the same simple-to-use GUI interface to set up and manage virtual machines as HP customers already use to set up and manage individual physical servers. HP PVC further removes complexity from virtualization installations by offering single server virtual machine management using the server’s local keyboard, video, and mouse, or remotely using HP iLO that comes standard with every ProLiant server. This reduces the need for a dedicated management server or even a network connection, as it can be handled directly on the virtualized server.
• Pre-Integrated HP Management – Citrix XenServer HP products are the only integrated virtualization solutions to feature pre-integrated HP management agent technology. As a result, customers can use the same familiar management systems for virtualization that they have been using on their existing HP ProLiant servers, such as HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM). HP SIM provides a consolidated view of system hardware health, configuration, performance and status information for individual HP servers. In addition, HP Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) now supports Citrix XenServer and can be used to perform advanced management of virtual machines.
• Transparent Distribution of Virtualization Technology – The HP version of Citrix XenServer will be available on ten models of ProLiant servers, enabling customers to order systems with XenServer already integrated. The integrated solution will transparently power on as part of the system start-up, without any user intervention. This approach enables fast and straightforward virtual deployments with a consistent, reliable, and familiar ProLiant experience. Additionally, select models of existing HP ProLiant servers will be upgradeable with the XenServer technology.
• Seamless Upgrade – Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition provides a simple license-key upgrade to more powerful enterprise-class features included in Citrix XenServer Enterprise and Platinum editions, such as dynamic provisioning of both virtual and physical servers. – This makes it the only integrated virtualization solution to allow customers to upgrade and leverage enterprise features without having to shutdown and re-install new software or backend management systems.
• End-to-End Virtualization – After implementing Citrix XenServer, HP customers can also easily take advantage of Citrix’s application and desktop virtualization solutions to make the IT infrastructure more flexible and dynamic. Citrix XenApp™ for application virtualization stores all Windows applications in a single central store in the datacenter and then delivers them to end users on-demand via innovative application virtualization technology. Citrix XenDesktop™ is the industry’s first comprehensive, fully integrated desktop delivery system, moving beyond the limitations of existing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) point solutions to ensure the simple, secure, fast delivery of Windows desktops to any office worker over any network.
“HP is the largest x86 server vendor in the world, and by embedding Citrix XenServer into 64-bit HP ProLiant servers, HP and Citrix will make virtualization available to enterprises of any size and accelerate the adoption of server virtualization,” said Peter Levine, senior vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix. “Citrix and HP share the belief that virtualization should be a natural extension of the hardware platform, and the integration of XenServer with ProLiant uniquely combines the industry’s deepest integration with a seamless user experience.”
“We have made significant efforts to ensure our customers have the leading options for deploying and managing virtualization,” said Scott Farrand, vice president, Industry Standard Server Software, HP. “HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers with Insight Control management tools, combined with the unique architecture of Citrix XenServer, deliver a truly integrated user experience that makes virtualization feel like a seamless capability within the infrastructure.”
In addition to these comprehensive server virtualization capabilities, the two companies are also working to strengthen existing storage capabilities for customers. Citrix is a member of the HP Information Management and Storage Partner Program and is working closely with HP’s StorageWorks division on compatibility and certification testing across HP’s enterprise storage product portfolio.
Availability
Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition will be available and supported worldwide from HP on March 31, 2008. The Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition offers a low cost, all-in-one solution with integrated Citrix XenServer and HP ProLiant Virtual Console for single server management. HP Select Edition allows creation of an unlimited number of virtual machines per server, with up to 32 GB memory per virtual machine. For optimum enhanced data center flexibility, HP Enterprise Edition enables additional functionality such as resource pooling and live migration. This functionality leverages both ProLiant Virtual Console for single server management and XenCenter for virtual machine management across multiple servers. HP Enterprise Edition also includes HP technical support and services.
About Citrix XenServer
Citrix XenServer, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family, is an enterprise-class solution for virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing resources. With the new Platinum Edition, XenServer becomes the first and only solution on the market to address both virtual and physical servers, making the entire datacenter more dynamic.

Video: Interview with Werner Fischer, Developer at Thomas-Krenn.AG on OpenVZ and High Availibily in Virtualization

February 24, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

The interview below is part of our Virtualization Video Series, a recurring theme we want to implement on Virtualization.com featuring interviews with key players from the industry, event reports, etc.

This interview (written transcript below) was recorded at the Profoss 2008 event on Virtualisation and features Werner Fischer, Developer at Thomas-Krenn.AG being interviewed by Toon Vanagt on OpenVZ, high availability and virtualization in general.

WRITTEN TRANSCRIPT
———————

Welcome Werner Fischer, you are a developer at Thomas-Krenn.AG in Germany and you contributed to the free how-to guide on dealing with High Availability Clustering with regards to the OpenVZ project.

(Editorial note: the free guide can be consulted here)

Yes, in fact we came around OpenVZ and doing high availability clustering two years ago. The main idea behind it is that in the past doing high availability was a rather complex thing because you had to care of all the applications you have on the cluster itself. And so we were looking for a simpler way to do high availability.
There is a great benefit in using virtualization in such a setup, because with virtualization behind a cluster you can simply put all the applications you want to make highly available into a virtual environment and simply cluster the whole virtual environment. You don’t have to take care of all the applications. You simply cluster this virtual resource. You don’t have to think over all the problems you might have with clustering applications only.

Why is it so important to build high availability clusters in virtualized environments?

In fact when it comes down to virtualization you have a lot of benefits, but you also have new dangers behind it. In the past – when you had for example four servers in your setup – and one server went down, you still had three servers up and running. For example it was not that big problem when the database server was down for a few seconds, the mail server was still up and running, the file server was still up and running. But today, in a virtualized environment, when you loose a server, you don’t loose a single server, you loose in fact ten or twenty servers. And that’s also what is important about virtualization today: you have to think about what happens when the hardware fails.

I find it interesting that you documented this for your employer, who then choose to make your How-to guide publicly available. What is the motivation behind this uncommon knowledge sharing?

The reason behind is that we want to spread our knowledge. We at Thomas-Krenn.AG are working for our customers. And our customers want to know what they buy. So it is important for them to know how things work inside. And the good thing with Open Source is that you have the possibility to give the knowledge to the customer. And in fact with our solution we don’t have any drawbacks out of this decision. We have a high test-effort in our solution. We test the implementation on a specific hardware and go to customer and say: “You can use this system. You don’t have to do all the testing again, because we do all the testing in our lab.” And so there is no drawback when we document it and everybody can build it on his own. Because when somebody builds it on his own, he also has to do all the testing. And when it comes to a situation where he wants to use it in a commercial environment, he has to spend so much time and money on testing that it is cheaper to buy our box. So that’s a great deal for both – our company and for users who want to test this technology in their spare time or for a smaller project where they can’t afford to buy a solution.

So Werner, Thomas-Krenn.AG also makes it money in consulting or it just lives on the hardware margins on the boxed solutions?

In fact the solution is running out of the box. So you get a system, you plug it into your data center, go configure the IP addresses and you are up and running. The big benefit is that you can use it within 15 minutes or so. You don’t need a long time until the system is up and running. It is rather fast implemented.

What is your experience with the awareness on virtualization issues at your customers side. Is High availability a major concern or do they ask different questions?

I think today the big question for customers is: “Which virtualization technology should I use in my data center?”. That’s a very important question. In fact most of the customers don’t know yet what is the best solution to go today – because it’s a very fast growing market, and technologies are changing very fast. So there is a lot of time necessary to go to the customer, to communicate with him and to get know what’s the right technology to go for the customer. That’s a very big question today.
When customers don’t know what they should use we go to the customer, we spend time with him, but in the end the customer has to make his decision himself what technology to use. So he needs to spend time on focusing on the technologies which are available today and to make the decision afterwards. In fact there are a lot of benefits with all the different kinds of virtualization solutions that are available today but there is also a lot of time needed to get to know all these technologies and to make the decision afterwards.

What advice do you give your customers, who are selecting virtualization vendors and what existing applications are the typical first candidates for virtualization?

It mainly depends on the application, what is technology the best way to go. If the customer does mainly hosting things, like web hosting (Apache Web server, MySQL stuff) or something like this, often a virtualization technology like Virtozzo, OpenVZ or Linux-VServer is a way to go, because there you have a single kernel running. So you have a very small amount of overhead, and very fast solutions in this area. On the other side when you have different systems, like Linux systems, Windows systems, and stuff like that you have to take a technique which has a hypervisor like VMware or Xen, where you have to possibility to virtualize both – Windows and Linux systems – on a single box.

In which cases does it make sense to recommend the hypervisor approach?

The hypervisor is then necessary when you need to provide different operating systems in the guests. For example if you need to provide Windows, Linux, Solaris, or other operating systems on a single box, then it makes sense to use hypervisor-based solutions. On the other side when you can stick with a single operating system, for example you only need a Linux system providing web services, you don’t need a hypervisor because it adds an amount of overhead. When you simply don’t rely on those features it’s much easier to go with other solutions like operating-system-level virtualization like Virtuozzo or Linux-VServer. There you can put much more virtual environments on a single box than you could do with hypervisors.

Werner, what is the main characteristic and advantage of OpenVZ?

The main characteristic is that you have one single kernel image running on the box, but you have still different, secure virtual environments with their own users, their own distributions for example, their own file systems. So you still have secured environments there, but you have the great benefit that you have only a single kernel running. You are much faster than you could be with a hypervisor. For example when you want to up such a virtual environment you don’t have to initialize a virtual hardware or something like that. You only need to fork some processes and you have a new system up and running within four or five seconds. That’s really a great benefit. Also when it comes to highly available systems. When you have a fail over, you don’t need 30 or 60 seconds to boot up the virtual hardware. It takes only a few seconds and the system is up again.

Who are currently driving the growth in the virtualization market? Is it a true demand from customers or rather vendors trying to ‘sell’ their solutions and still raising awareness on the benefits of virtualization?

It’s really a demand. We have seen in the last months that more and more customers are asking for virtualization technologies. In the past our customers bought our servers to put directly operating systems on the servers. We now also see our customers asking for VMware, asking for Xen, or asking for Virtozzo. So they are aware of these different technologies. Sometimes they don’t know what technology they should use. But we see that virtualization or not just a hype, it’s getting into the data center. More and more customers are asking for it.

Thanks a lot for your time and hope to see you soon!

Thanks. Bye!

More info: HA cluster with DRBD and Heartbeat

Video: Interview with Frank Kohler, Virtualization Project Manager at Suse – Novell

February 24, 2008 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

This interview was recorded at the Profoss 2008 event on Virtualisation and features Frank Kohler, Virtualization Project Manager at Suse (Novell) being interviewed by Toon Vanagt on what he saw his clients do with virtualization technology and how you can avoid making those mistakes. Shortly after the interview, Frank was hired by XenSource (Citrix).

Video: Interview with Matt Rechenburg, Project Manager at OpenQRM on Virtualization

February 24, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

This interview is part of our Virtualization Video Series, a recurring theme we want to implement on Virtualization.com featuring interviews with key players from the industry, event reports, etc. Our first interview was recorded at the Profoss 2008 event on Virtualisation and features Matt Rechenburg, Project Manager at openQRM, interviewed by Toon Vanagt about what he’s doing and how he looks at the future of virtualization.

You can find a written transcript of the interview below.

WRITTEN TRANSCRIPT

Welcome Matthias Rechenburg.
You are the Project Manager at OpenQRM. Could you tell us something more about the datacenter management platform you are building?

With OpenQRM, we are trying to give the system administrators a complete solution for managing their datacenter. What we often found out is that there are critical, loosely connected tools being used to manage modern data centers today. Some of these tools can not be missed by the sysadmins. With OpenQRM, we offer the option to integrate these utilities as an additional plug-in. We are a well-defined plug-in API. So the system admin benefits from his once loosely connected tools in a single management console. The benefit is that integrated tools cooperate with each other and OpenQRM and its deployment and provisioning framework. This way OpenQRM can handle and act on specific situations automatically. A good example is Nagios, we have an integrated monitor plug-in, which feeds errors into OpenQRM as events and OpenQRM then reacts automatically by for example restarting or redeploying a machine.

So Matt, what problem is openQRM trying to solve?

OpenQRM tries to make it very easy for its users to make their first steps into Virtualization. For example OPenQRM provides tools to migrate Physical Machines into Virtual Machines (aka P2V) from any type. With its partitioning layer it conforms Virtualization Tehcnology, so that a sys admin may decide at any time to move a Physical machine to Xen VM, or from a XEN VM to a Linux Vserver partition, and form a LinuxVserver partition to Quemo And later even back to the Physical machine if needed, without needing to change anything on the server itself or hassling with the configuration

When you look at your competition, what are the Virtualization features on your wishlist?

We are not a single virtualization technology. we are a platform which tries to conform Virtualization technology. What we learned today at this Profoss event, is that there is no single hypervisor technology which is the best or single option for a users. For each service or application, there is always a virtualization solution that fits best for that particular situation. So the user should always select the virtualization technology upon the needs of the services and applications, which they want to virtualize. With OpenQRM, we try to close the gap of the current problem of migrating from one technology to another or for the first step of moving from physical to virtual systems.

What do you think about the standardization discussions by vendors on open formats such as OVF?

What I currently understand from the virtualization vendors, is that there is great motivation and cooperation to build a standard. On the other hand they also want to keep their own customers. The option to move from one virtualization format to another, may not be beneficial for every company.

Matt, what evolution do you see in the virtualization mindset and capabilities of the datacenter engineers and decision makers you work with?

I see a strong movement to “appliance-based deployment”. This means automatic provisioning plus configuration anagement of server-images to either physical- or virtual-machines. Since there are different virtualization technologies available datacenter engineers have to manage migration from physical-to-virtual (p2v), virtual-to-physical (v2p) and also migration from one virtualization type to another depending on the application needs. The goal is it to create an vendor independent data-center management platform which supports all mainstream virtualization technologies and provides lots of automatism.

Do you think we need to educate the business user about the array of possibility virtualization could offer them?

Of course, getting detailed informations and facts from independent professionals helps decision makers to create their own, objective knowledge of how to go on with virtualization.

What about licensing issues? What did you foresee in the Open QRM platform to correlate between the software and the virtual environments they run in?

Since the licensing issues of running operation-systems in virtual machines are not yet fully solved by the operation-system vendors. Therefore openQRM for now “just” provides the technical environment for rapid, appliance-based deployment. Of course we are looking forward to implement licensing-verification add-ons as additional plugin for openQRM as soon as those issues are solved.

Everybody is still struggling in this field?

Yep, we are still waiting for a kind of standard for virtual-machine licensing.

What do you expect the commercial vendors to do?

Asap, they should come up with a transparent and fair licensing model for operation systems running in virtual-machines. This would also help companies to move on in virtualization.

What do you consider a fair model and measurement unit for the users?

Eh, Power-consumption?

You think electricity consumption could be such an underlying unit and a way to educate the users?

Yes.

Storage seems to become quite a virtualization bottleneck? What systems should users be able to support?

Yes, bringing up a new virtual machines basically just requires some space on a storage-server. To my mind we should directly interface modern storage-server solutions with a generic deployment system which is being able to manage both, physical and virtual systems.

Matt, thanks a lot for your time and all the best with OpenQRM!