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“Benchmarking” The Citrix / XenServer Combo with Ian Pratt (Video Interview – Part 4)

June 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

During the Fosdem 2008 conference, we had a chance to sit down (on a bench) with Xen Guru Ian Pratt. Below is the fourth and last part (see part 1, part 2 and part 3) of our exclusive interview, where Ian shines his light on Citrix Xenserver, relocating virtual machines (VM), VM-mirroring, OVF, page tables algorithms, open source community involvement, management frameworks, the Citrix take-over, Virtualization marketing with OS-enlightment, FUD-tactics by VMWare, self-healing servers, Xen embedded in firmware, why Amazon goes with Xen, the Xen GPL license, OracleVM, xVM (Sun), Parallels and the future of virtualization…

We cut the interview into 4 digestable pieces, which we publish one at a time (see part 1, part 2 and part 3). As said, this is the final part (soon, you’ll also find a written transcript below for your convenience):

The video is also up on YouTube and Steamocracy.

Large Majority of Applications Don’t Work In Virtual Environments

June 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

According to application compatibility tools developer Changebase AOK, a staggering 87% of applications may have issues when deploying in a virtualized environment. Evidently, the source implies that the results may have to be taken with a grain of salt, but still.

Changebase AOK says it has sponsored an independent study, which used a random sample of 100 key applications working with enterprise systems – and ran those through its AOK Virtualise-IT testing suite. It found that two thirds could be virtualized but half would need some remedial work or deployment with dependent components. At least we know that’s true as far as Brain Fitness goes.

“Of the issues and information revealed by AOK, the largest group was the identification of the need for Microsoft Office availability – meaning an application wants to use an Office application, and that if this is not loaded in the Virtual environment the application will experience problems,” explains Grant Ford.

“131 informational messages were raised across 16 of the applications that could be virtualised, showing that they had a dependency on Office components being available to them – which proved interesting, as the biggest concern that clients had voiced was the ability to be able to identify dependant middleware or missing dependencies,” he adds.

[Source: Manufacturing Computer Solutions]

A Conversation About Virtualization Security, The Quotes

June 11, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 2 Comments

Last week, an interesting conference call took place with several industry leaders in the virtualization security (virtsec) area, initiated by Virtualization.com. The panel included:

Joe Pendry, Director of Marketing – StackSafe,
Kris Buytaert – Infrastructure Architect; Open Source Expert; Principle Consultant Inuits; Blogger & editor at Virtualization.xom,
Tarry Singh – Sr. Consultant, Blogger, Industry/Market Analyst; Founder & CEO of Avastu & editor at Virtualization.xom
Andreas Antonopoulos, SVP & Founding Partner – Nemertes Research
Allwyn Sequeira ,SVP & CTO – Blue Lane, Michael Berman, CTO – Catbird
Chris Hoff, Chief Security Architect – Systems & Technology Division and Blogger – Unisys
Hezi Moore, President, Founder & CTO – Reflex Security

We’ll publish the highlights from our conversations shortly, but as a teaser, here are some of the most interesting quotes:

“I don’t see much point in really thinking too much about five steps ahead, worrying about VM Escape, worrying about hypervisor security, etc. when we’re running Windows on top of these systems and they’re sitting there naked.”

“We’re dealing with virtualized storage, while nobody will ever raise their hand saying they’re a security expert when it comes to that.”

“More than 75 percent of the people we asked, how are you securing virtualized environments? Their answer was VLANs. That’s where we stand today.”

“This was a network guy and his email went: WTF, you need 30 VLANS on one server? That’s the first time he became aware of virtualization. That team wasn’t even working with him. And the first inkling he had when he got a request that was just so out of the norm he just didn’t know what was going on.”

“To me, security is like bell bottoms, every 10-15 years or so, it comes back into style.”

Watch Virtualization.com for more!

Symantec Teams Up With Citrix, Enhances Veritas Virtual Infrastructure Suite

June 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Symantec has announced Veritas Virtual Infrastructure, which it claims to be the first solution to offer advanced storage capabilities for virtual server environments that effectively manage storage in large scale, x86 production environments.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure combines storage management capabilities from Veritas Storage Foundation with Citrix XenServer technology. Veritas Virtual Infrastructure aims to preserve all of the key storage management benefits enterprise customers rely on in their physical environments, but are not available in current file-system based virtualization approaches.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure uses a new distributed volume manager specifically designed to deliver advanced storage management capabilities for virtual servers. It uses a client/server architecture that establishes a unique, individual relationship between each virtual server and its underlying storage, just as if it were a physical server. Since it leverages Storage Foundation, Symantec claims its users can realize all of these benefits from their existing, heterogeneous SAN storage.

Veritas Virtual Infrastructure is expected to be available in the fall of 2008 with proposed pricing starting at $4,595 per 2 socket server.

VMware Stock Drops As Employee Grants Expire

June 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

On a generally down day for tech stocks, VMware slipped on news that a large number of employee share grants may begin trading this week. The stock was down $4.19, or 6.2 %, to $63.70 in recent trading, or 61 times 2008 earnings and 43 times 2009 earnings. The Nasdaq was off 0.8 %.

Some 51.2 million shares of VMware are currently traded. According to UBS analyst Heather Bellini, about 11 million shares, or 22 % of the float, will become eligible to trade this week, as one-year grants to employees begin to vest. Another 3.5 million shares will vest in each of the next two quarters.

VMware has clawed its way back from a March low of $41.41 since posting first-quarter earnings in April that reported a still healthy revenue growth of 69 %. But the stock is well below its October high of $125, when year-over-year revenue growth was nearly 90 %.

VMware issued 33 million shares at $29 a share in an IPO.

Also check our earlier post on VMware financials.

[Source: TheStreet]

Build Your Own Cloud!

June 6, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 2 Comments

Given enough hardware, you can now build your own Amazon Elastic Cloud or similar platform. And all in Open Source.

A group of developers from the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara has recently released a tool that can make your personal Cloud dreams come true!

EUCALYPTUS – Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems – is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces

Eucalyptus has been developed in the MAYHEM Lab within the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, primarily as a tool for cloud-computing research. It is distributed as open source with a FreeBSD-style license that does not restrict its usage much. Eucalyptus 1.0 targets Linux systems that use Xen (versions 3.*) for virtualization.

Eucalyptus is based on the Rocks cluster management platform. In the future, the EUCALYPTUS team will offer a source release along with other methods of deployment.

Being API compliant with Amazon EC2 means you can reuse the tools you already wrote for Amazon and effectively build your own while not having to change your applications. EUCALYPTUS also opens the door for other organizations with spare CPU cycles to offer Virtual Machines instances at a competitive price.

Eucalyptus 1.0 was just released last month and the ISO iso available for download.