Virtualization.com

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

Featured

Intel Introduces New Family Of Xeon Processors

by Leave a Comment

Intel Corporation introduced 17 processors today, led by the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. They are Intel’s most revolutionary server processors since addressing the market with the Intel Pentium Pro processor almost 15 years ago.

The new enterprise-class chips can automatically adjust to specified energy usage levels, and speed data center transactions and customer database queries. They also will play a key role in scientific discoveries by researchers who use supercomputers as their foundation for research, all whilst delivering great energy efficiency for reduced electricity costs.

The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, previously codenamed “Nehalem-EP,” offers severaltechnologies that radically improve system speed and versatility. Technologies such as Intel Turbo Boost Technology, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology, integrated power gates, and Next-Generation Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) improved through extended page tables, allow the system to adapt to a broad range of workloads.

As use of the Internet expands toward Intel’s vision of 15 billion connected devices, the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series will also power an upcoming transformation for the Internet’s infrastructure. The high-tech industry has rallied around a goal to run applications from optimized processors and computing hardware that are available on-demand and scalable to the masses. Often called cloud computing, this vision could flourish helped by the adaptability, capability and intelligence of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.

With over 30 new world records the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series establishes new standards for two-socket performance while delivering gains of more than double the previous- generation Intel Xeon processor 5400 series.

Whether businesses are running high-capacity transactions or simulations, or researchers are striving to discover new energy resources or distant galaxies, computers based on the adaptable Intel Xeon processor 5500 series will play a big impact. Equipped with triple the memory bandwidth of previous server processors, Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based platforms effortlessly manage a variety of workloads and conditions. A new feature, Intel Turbo Boost Technology, increases system performance based on the user’s workload and environment, dynamically boosting the clock speed of one or more of the individual processing cores.

These and other more intelligent capabilities of the processors also maximize total cost of ownership for users interested in a smooth transition to the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series from their current systems. In this time of economic challenges, customers can replace older Intel Xeon servers with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and receive an estimated payback in as little as 8 months.

Intel is also announcing new server boards that offer a higher degree of integrated components. In addition, the company is announcing the Intel 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller, featuring advanced virtualization technology and unified networking support, which greatly improves network I/O performance in virtualized datacenters. It is optimized to support the increased bandwidth provided by platforms based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, which provides more than 250 percent the I/O throughput of previous-generation servers to best meet the needs of the most demanding virtualization applications.

Also available today is the Intel Data Center Manager software development kit that enables management console vendors to extend platform power control and set rack and datacenter level power policies dynamically, responding to changing server workloads to ensure that racks do not exceed those power levels.

For server applications, processor frequencies peak at 2.93 GHz with DDR3 memory speeds up to 1333 MHz and power levels of from 60 to 95 watts. Under certain conditions, Intel Turbo Boost Technology can provide operating frequencies up to 3.33 GHz, depending on the processor and system configuration. Workstation frequencies go up to 3.20 GHz with power levels of 130 watts, and up to 3.46GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology depending on the workload and environment. Each processor contains up to 8MB of level 3 cache.

Starting today, more than 230 unique systems based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series are expected to be announced by more than 70 system manufacturers around the world – including a new Intel customer, Cisco, along with Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems and others.

The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series ranges in price from $188 to $1,600 in quantities of 1,000. The single-socket Intel Xeon processor 3500 series ranges from $284 to $999 in quantities of 1,000. The L5518 and L5508 embedded processors for communications market segments are priced at $530 and $423, respectively, in quantities of 1,000.

Ex-Microsoft Exec Richard McAniff Appointed Chief Development Officer, Executive VP At VMware

by Leave a Comment

VMware today announced that Richard McAniff has been named Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer. McAniff will report directly to President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Maritz. In his new role, McAniff will be responsible for research and development across VMware’s Server and Desktop Business Units.

“I am pleased to welcome Richard to VMware at a time when the company is poised to expand its technology leadership even farther ahead with its upcoming VMware vSphere generation of products,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware. “As the new leader of our R&D organization, Richard brings deep experience in developing industry-leading software. He will play a crucial role in driving product engineering efforts that will help drive and grow our business.”

McAniff, 59, brings more than 28 years of software development leadership experience to VMware. Most recently, he spent 21 years at Microsoft. As corporate vice president for Microsoft Office, McAniff was responsible for several major software tools including Excel and Access. He also oversaw the Business Intelligence effort within Office and development of Web components for the SharePoint Portal Server. In addition, McAniff helped guide the development of Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007. Before serving as corporate vice president, McAniff served as general manager of the Visual Basic development system. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1987, McAniff was a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During his seven years there, he worked on numerous projects including probability analyses for alternative fuels.

McAniff holds a master’s degree in systems and industrial engineering from the University of Arizona, a master’s degree in resource economics from the University of Massachusetts, and a bachelor of science degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts.

Oh yeah, he also seems to be spending quite some time on Twitter.

Skytap Taps $7 Million In Series B Financing

by Leave a Comment

Skytap today announced it completed a $7 million Series B round of funding from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The funds will be used to bolster the company’s product development, sales and marketing efforts.

Skytap’s rapidly growing list of customers utilize its cloud-based virtual lab solution to augment or replace dynamic, high cost IT environments such as those used for application development and testing, IT prototyping, product demonstrations and technical training. By allowing users to scale resources on-demand and pay only for time and resources utilized, customers can immediately reduce costs, increase productivity and improve responsiveness to business demands.

Since emerging from stealth less than one year ago, Skytap has achieved strong customer traction and third-party recognition for its innovative virtual lab offering.

Exclusive – Cisco’s Unified Computing Platform: The Details

by 3 Comments

Today Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) will unveil its long-awaited server line, one of the building blocks that was still missing from their Unified Computing vision. This announcement is bound to shake up the IT industry in general, and the x86 server market in particular. Even though this market has several well established players like IBM, Dell, HP and to a lesser extent Sun, Cisco is determined to extend its already impressive datacenter footprint to this market as well.

What Cisco CEO John Chambers called “Datacenter 3.0” during his keynote at VMworld back in september 2007 has now been rebranded as “Unified Computing”. Different name, same concept.

Cisco emphasises that this is a big new concept, where the most important part is the (unified) network and the integrated management. We suppose the traditional server manufacturers beg to differ.

Without further ado, we’ve got the scoop on the juicy details:

  • Cisco California blade servers come in a new chassis (unlike for example Intel, whose now defunct Enterprise Blade Server line consisted of rebranded IBM kit).
  • The chassis has 8 slots, that can fit 8 half-width or 4 full-width blades. At the bottom of the chassis there are 4 power modules, on both sides there are two “FEX”es, or Fabric Extenders.
  • Each of the 8 slots has got a 10 Gb connection to one of the two Fabric Extenders.
  • The blades come in two models, both with two sockets, populated with Intel Xeon CPU’s based on the Core i7 (“Nehalem“) microarchitecture. The half-width blades have got 12 memory slots, the full-width have a whopping 48 memory banks. By leveraging the next generation Intel architecture, this allows for an unmatched memory density, which has traditionally been the bottleneck in virtualized environments. (Providing 384 Gb requires crazy expensive 8 Gb dimms. Using cheaper 4 Gb dimms still allows for an impressive 192 Gb of memory per blade.)
  • There are no dedicated management or switching modules in the chassis. The FEXes connect to the UCS 6100 (UCS = Unified Computing Switch), which is based on the Nexus 5020 switch. The UCS6100 is a “top of rack” switch that will carry the TCP/IP data, block level data (through FCoE) and the management of the system. By externalizing this management and switching, Cisco makes it easier to upgrade their chassis to new technologies later on, and it keeps as much of the environment as possible close to the network core, their traditional turf, treating the server as a commodity. The UCS communicates with a management chip on each blade to manage and monitor the server components. This management solution was co-developed with BMC.

Cisco will undoubtedly emphasise how this is a solution, based on a network architecture. As Christopher Hoff puts it at his Rational Security blog: It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but it’s a solution.

Now, how will the market react to this announcement is unknown. HP, IBM and the likes pretend to be unimpressed by their new competitor, but it’s worth noting Cisco might be on to something:

  • The more customers use virtualization, the more they need central management whereas the underlying servers become interchangeable building blocks. By integrating the management in the network switching, Cisco can reinforce their stronghold in the heart of the datacenter.
  • Cisco is a new player. They arent’ experienced in the server market, but they also could start designing their solution from the ground up, learning from mistakes made by their competitors. Expect them to try to silence potential criticts with a global service organisation (in partnership with Accenture and local partners), reference customers (Savvis is named to be a beta customer) and certifications by the likes of VMware, Oracle and SAP.
  • Fiber Channel and Ethernet are on a path to convergence. Storage vendors are preparing or shipping FCoE-capable arrays. (It’s likely EMC and/or NetApp will show up at the announcement later today.) Brocade, Cisco’s biggest competitor in the SAN market, knows this as well, but their aqcuisition of Foundry Networks was delayed by some shareholders. Their product lines will likely stay separate for several quarters to come, whilst Cisco is shipping a unified product line today.
  • Cisco is alienating their current partners like IBM and HP. This was inevitable however, as HP was already moving into Cisco’s market with their ProCurve switches, IBM has always courted multiple brides, and is now intensifying its relationship with Juniper. In a down economy, it’s everyone to himself. It is also the opportunity for challengers to enter new markets. Cisco has got a $30 billion piggy bank, a result of their average 65% margins. They can afford a fight, and we’re likely to see one, no matter how hard IBM, HP and even Cisco want to downplay the significance of this announcement.

It’s obvious VMware is involved in this play as well. They’ve been talking about the “software mainframe” for quite a while now, Chambers introduced “Datacenter 3.0” at VMworld in 2007, and Cisco is a minority shareholder in VMware.

Update: VMware has already put out its press release and a YouTube video in which CEO Paul Maritz talks about Unified computing.
Update: The Cisco press release is out as well.
Pictures are over at Flickr, and in the data sheet.

Cisco has published a full list of partners:

Stay tuned for the Cisco announcement later today. The webcast starts at 10:30 AM Pacific Time, 18:30 CET. You can tune in at Cisco.com.

Hyper9 Raises $8 Million Series B Round, Mike Maples Joins Its Board

by Leave a Comment

Hyper9 has raised $8 million in a series B funding round led by Venrock, a highly respected venture capital firm. Joining Venrock were current investors Matrix Partners, Silverton Partners and Maples Investments.

Hyper9’s new breed of virtualization management technology provides virtual infrastructure administrators with the visibility they need to effectively do their job as well as provide the control that is necessary to manage such a dynamic environment. The Hyper9 product will be generally available early March, 2009.

The company also announced that Mike Maples Sr., a private investor and tech industry veteran, joined its Board of Directors. Formerly Executive Vice President of the Worldwide Products Group for Microsoft, Maples has a proven track record in advising software companies as they expand product lines and enhance business operations such as sales and marketing. Prior to Microsoft, Maples held senior positions at other market leading companies such as IBM, Lexmark, NetIQ, and Sonic restaurants.

VMworld Europe Day 2 – Dr. Stephen Herrod Keynote liveblog

by Leave a Comment

Stay tuned for the liveblog of the keynote by Dr. Stephen Herrod, VMware CTO, live from VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, France.

Stephen Herrod was one of the original developers of ESX predecessor SimOS while at Stanford University (His homepage from the time is still online.). He worked at Transmeta, where he worked on their “code morphing” technology (somewhat related to the binary translation VMware is donig). He has been with VMware for a few years now, managing the ESX group.

Expectations for today’s talk are a bit unclear. Will the focus be on the desktop (VMware View, vClient, …), or will it be another “cloudy” day? Given the fact that there aren’t lots of sessions on vSphere (the next generation of the ESX product), expectations in this area are a bit low. This being said, vSphere 4.0 should still be released in the first half of 2009. (Although, given enough beers, some VMware employees are telling us august/september is a more realistic timeframe.)

Let’s find out…

8:44 The room is filling up for the keynote by Stephen Herrod. Keynote starts at 9.00 AM.

9:10 The introduction video (same as yesterday) is rolling.. Getting ready for the keynote. Dr. Steve Herrod seems fashionably late today.

9:11 Maurizio Carli, general manager EMEA is master of ceremonies again, welcoming the audience.

9:14 Small reminder by Carli that this afternoon there will be a session called “VMware Unplugged”, a Q&A session with CEO Paul Maritz, CTO Steve Herrod, Maurizio Carli and the COO Tod Nielsen.

9:14 Stephen Herrod takes the stage.

9:14 A reminder of the three initiatives – VDC-OS, vCloud and vClient. Today those concepts will be demoed in reality.

9:15 Lots of development done in EMEA. Several hundred engineers here.

9:15 The talk is called “The future of virtualization”. Subtitle: “Technical stuff”.

9:16 Herrod is walking through the different blocks of vSphere. First up: vCompute. ESX scales higher than ever before, to cope with today’s platforms and VM demands. Up to 8 vCPUs, 100K IOPS/sec.

9:18 Internal benchmark of Oracle 11g on RHEL running on next generation ESX on a development 8-core Xeon.
The numbers:
less than 15% overhead or 8vCPU VM, 24.000 total DB transactions per second. Near-perfect scalability from 1 to 8 vCPUs. 250 MB/sec disk I/O.

9:18 This is the performance of a 2002 Sun Fire 15k, then costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

9:19 Not every application scales as well as Oracle. A reminder that breaking up hardware platforms can give better-than-native performance. Exchange supports about 8K mailboxes natively on a platform, breaking this up with ESX gives 16K mailbox support on the same hardware.

9:21 Record SPECweb2005 performance, also with VMware ESX Server 3.5. 16 Gbit/second throughput. Would server 3 billion page views per day. (By comparison, eBay servers about 1 billion pages in a day).

9:21 Next block: vStorage: aggregating and optimizing disk usage. One example: Thin Provisioning (on VMFS/VMDK level).

9:22 VMware has a software implementation, but if the hardware array supports it natively (read: with higher performance), it plugs in to ESX and the thin provisioning is done by the hardware.

9:23 vNetwork: distributed virtual switches (which everybody’s heard of by now), enabling third party virtual switches. (Cisco Nexus 1000V)

9:25 Important because the ownership of the network can stay with the networking team (same management tools, IOS, …) and new functionalities can be added.

9:25 vCompute, vStorage and vNetwork are the “bottom layer” that make up the “giant computer” – the software mainframe.

9:25 DRS and related technologies take care of distributing the workloads across the physical building blocks.

9:26 Distributed Power Management, today an experimental feature in ESX 3.5, makes this giant computer power thrifty.

9:27 DPM can throttle CPU speed, and turn off hosts that aren’t needed. When bursting, hosts can be powered on as needed.

9:27 DPM is one of the built-in features that make the “giant computer” as self-managing as possible.

9:28 The “top layer” of vSphere is related to management, policies and SLAs.

9:28 One example: attach an SLA policies to vApps (containers of virtual appliances that make up tiered applications), vSphere will allocate the right resources (and chargeback for the usage).

9:30 Maximizing uptime stays important as well. There are features for planned and unplanned downtime: VMotion, Storage VMotion, Maintenance mode, HA, SRM and of course Fault Tolerance (nee Continuous Availability). Nothing new here.

9:31 A reminder of what FT is all about: for some VMs HA isn’t enough, a reboot introduces unacceptable downtime.

9:32 FT runs a “shadow VM” on a separate server, and cuts over to the machine in case the first one goes down. As this is done in software, it can be configured on a per-VM basis, and it uses “off the shelf” hardware. (as opposed to specialized cluster equipment)

9:33 FT works together with HA: if one of the two copies dies, a new shadow VM is booted up, keeping the protection intact.

9:34 Next topic: Security – VMsafe APIs help protect workloads without needing to install agents in VMs. VMware’s partners have been working with this APIs for a year now (VMsafe was announced last year at VMworld Europe 2008), a lot of products should ship together with vSphere.

9:35 The security settings are a part of the vApp policies, the follow the VM as it moves between clouds.

9:36 Another vSecurity-based feature are vShiled Zones. This technology came to VMware with the acquisition of Bluelane. vShield zones encapsulate and firewall VMs, regardless of where they are running.

9:37 To manage all this nice stuff we’re used to VirtualCenter. This will become vCenter, as a central management hub.

9:39 As vCenter becomes an increasingly important part of a virtual infrastructure, VMware introduces vCenter Server Heartbeat. A passive vCenter server can run in the background and take over in case the first one goes down.

9:39 This monitoring/heartbeat mechanism keeps logging, allowing rollback of misconfigurations.

9:42 VMware infrastructure environments become bigger and bigger. vCenter has several limits – 200 hosts and 2000 VMs today, 300 hosts and 3000 VMs tomorrow. Multiple vCenter servers can be linked together to overcome this boundaries. Up to 10 vCenter can be linked in linked mode.

To keep things manageable, the Virtual Infrastructure client now includes a search mode.

First demo on stage of the new VI/vCenter combo, focusing on the search interface.

Anyone who’s ever used a web browser will know how to use this.

9:42 Advanced search capabilities to refine search results.

9:43 Possible business model: ads in the vCenter search results.

9:44 Automation is not a new concept for VMware: Guided consolidation, Update manager, orchestrator have been around for some time now. vSphere takes this to a next level.

One of the major features of vSphere is Host Profiles.

9:45 Host Profiles attach configuration templates to ESX hosts. Hosts can be configured to a certain standard setting with a simple click, and can be monitored for changes. If a change on a single host breaks the template compliancy, Host Profiles can remediate this and fix it automatically.

9:47 vCenter will be shipped as a Windows binary like it is today, but also as a Linux Virtual Appliance.

9:47 Beta available today.

9:47 Applause from the audience. (Have I mentioned already there are less suits in the audience today?)

9:49 Shout-out to Twitter from Herrod.

9:49 Next major chapter: vCloud.

9:51 Standard APIs for VDC-OS management and federation. (Linking “clouds” across datacenters.)

vCloud manages security, network, storage and monitoring.

9:51 First example of federating clouds: Site Recovery Manager

9:51 Storage is replicated on array-base, vCenter is replicated via IP.

9:53 VMware tries to figure out “long distance VMotion” for live migration. Today this requires very exotic setups and the right network environments.

Challenges for long distance VMotion:
Moving the memory
Moving the disk images
maintaining the network connections.

This is an ecosystem challenge (storage replication, dedup, wan optimization, stretching VLANs, …). Lots of work being done by the partner community and VMware.
9:54 Some long distance VMotion applications: DRS accross DCs, datacenter maintenance/move, DC disaster avoidance (eg. when a hurricane is on its way) and “follow the sun” environments.

9:55 All the cloud providers are nowadays creating their own self-service portals. VMware will offer their own base portal, based on Lab Manager.

9:56 Next demo: vCenter vCloud plug-in to manage clouds.

9:58 Bruce adds credentials of external cloud provider (Telefonica in this case).
The capacity offered by the cloud provider becomes available in vCenter.
Applications can be dragged from internal clouds to the external provider, just like between internal esx clusters.

9:58 Personal note: wow!

10:00 VMware wants to open up the vCloud API, to enable a rich ecosystem of clouds.

10:00 I wonder what Amazon thinks about this…

10:00 Last chapter: vClient initiative.

10:01 Another recap of the “follow the user” model/vision.

10:01 Walking through some View features: View Composer (linked clones, central patching), pushing full VMs to “thick clients” to run on top of client-side hypervisor.

10:02 Patching is made easier by using shared base disks, and application virtualization (ThinApp, formerly known as Thinstall).

10:02 Centralized policy management, based on ACE.

10:03 Major focus is the best user experience for all environments. Wan/Lan: PCoIP (PC over IP), local: rich portable desktop.

10:04 Jerry Chen from the View team is going to demo this.

10:04 The WAN technology is based on a co-development with Teradici, supporting CAD/CAM and 3D over WAN through hardware-assisted optimization.

10:06 LAN use case: traditional VDI: Thin clients, high-bandwidth, true pc experience (HD video, multimonitor, …)

10:09 Demo: thin client connected to rack workstation (a standard workstation blade, in other words, no virtualization). Demo with Google Earth working fluidly over a LAN connection.

10:10 vClient summary: Best user experience, central management, partnership with Intel for client-side virtualization (offline VDI).

10:11 “One more thing”: evolution of the mobile phone

10:12 VMware acquired Trango Virtual Processors, maker of mobile phone hypervisor.

10:12 Mobile phones bring familiar challenges: security/manageability, home/work life convergence, persona management, third-party applications.

10:13 VMware’s Mobile Virtualizaton Platform is a hypervisor for ARM-based devices.

10:15 Live demo with a Nokia N800. (If I’m not mistaken this internet device doesn’t include a phone part, but let’s not bicker about that).

10:15 Demo: downloading Windows CE, running productivity apps (Solitaire).

10:16 Another VM is downloaded and running side by side: Android.

10:18 And with that, the keynote is finished.

10:18 Thanks for following!