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Interviews

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst On The Linux Vendor’s Virtualization Initiatives

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A half-year after becoming president and CEO of Linux vendor Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst was in Boston this week for the annual Red Hat Summit, where a lot of announcements were made about Red Hat’s forray into virtualization. Whitehurst sat down with Network World’s Jon Brodkin to discuss open source, a new patent settlement, and Red Hat’s moves in virtualization, reports PC World.

This is the excerpt of the interview where they talk about virtualization:

The virtualization market is dominated by VMware, but you guys expanded your virtualization portfolio with a Linux-based hypervisor this week. What are your goals in virtualization?

Virtualization is half the operating system. Paul [Cormier, Red Hat president of products and technologies] would actually say virtualization is the operating system in a lot of ways. We feel pretty strongly virtualization needs to be pretty tightly integrated with the operating system.

VMware’s the dominant player in an industry that’s what, like 5 or 10% penetrated? And it’s primarily in development and test scenarios, and primarily to reduce server sprawl.

We come from a different heritage. Our systems usually aren’t running at 10%. Linux workloads are a lot higher. The value from our perspective is less around server consolidation and more about what new functionality or architectures can be enabled by virtualization.

You talk about grid computing, cloud computing, whatever that is. The necessary enabler of that is Linux with integrated virtualization. Because otherwise what are you going to run on a cloud?

Read the rest of the interview on PC World.

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

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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.

A Conversation About Virtualization Security, The Quotes

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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!

Jeff Woolsey and Scott Lowe Discuss Hyper-V

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IT pro and virtualization expert Scott Lowe had an interesting discussion with Jeff Woolsey, Senior Program Manager for Hyper-V at Microsoft. Scott posted a summary of their conversation on his blog, here’s an excerpt:

What are the key architectural advantages of Hyper-V as compared to Xen or ESX?

Jeff indicated that Hyper-V and Xen are architecturally very similar. Both use a privileged VM; Microsoft calls it the parent partition, Xen calls it dom0. In both cases, I/O is routed through this privileged partition and only the privileged partition has access to the physical hardware. Microsoft believes the hypervisor should be as thin as possible; Hyper-V is only about 600K worth of code. The networking stack and the storage stack are pushed up into the parent partition to keep drivers out of the hypervisor. Jeff referred me back to his session earlier in the day, where he discussed the need for the parent partition (my summary of that session is here). ESX puts all the drivers in the hypervisor, which means that they have a harder time providing support for new hardware (the example given was 4Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs vs. 8Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs). In talking about the placement of device drivers, our discussion naturally led us to the next question.

How would you respond to the concerns about the quality of the device drivers in the parent partition affecting the stability of the hypervisor?

Jeff doesn’t buy into this argument. Unlike desktops or workstations, administrators don’t typically go willy-nilly with drivers on production servers. Drivers are generally provided by the hardware vendors. In addition, because Hyper-V requires the x64 edition of Windows Server 2008, this is even less of an issue; it’s impossible to use unsigned drivers with x64 Windows. This means that any driver that can be used with Hyper-V will be WHQL-tested. Supposedly, this will keep out potentially faulty device drivers. Jeff pointed to the exclusive use of Hyper-V to power the MSDN and TechNet web sites at Microsoft as proof. I can see his point, but I still have to wonder if another level of qualification and validation shouldn’t have been established to ensure that everything works as expected with Hyper-V. It still seems possible to me that organizations stepping outside the “Big 3? server vendors—Dell, HP, and IBM—could run into issues.

Read the rest (3 more questions) here.

Video: Vinod Khosla On His Green Tech Investment Strategy

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The video below features the legendary entrepreneur turned venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, interviewed briefly by Om Malik at the recent D6 Conference. Khosla shares some insight in his investing strategy, as well as some info on his recent data center plays. Xsigo Systems, a startup we mentioned on Virtualization.com before, is lucky enough to have him not only as an investor, but also as one of their board members. Khosla explains why he decided to back the company, which makes both hardware and software to create and manage virtual servers.

[Source: Earth2Tech]

“Benchmarking” The Citrix / XenServer Combo with Ian Pratt (Video Interview – Part 3)

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During the Fosdem 2008 conference, we had a chance to sit down (on a bench) with Xen Guru Ian Pratt. Below is the third part (see part 1 and part 2) of our exclusive interview, where Ian shines his XenServer light on the Xen page tables algorithms, open source community involvement, management frameworks, the Citrix take-over, virtualization marketing with OS-enlightment, FUD-tactics by VMWare, …

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

This video is also available on Vimeo and Streamocracy.

(0:02) As you are one of the core members of the Xen project, you know that one of the hardest issues to address are the shadow page tables, which are a head ache when you build a hypervisor. I believe you are in the 6th rewrite of the Xen page tables algorithms. At the same time we see that the hardware vendors try to address this in a different way, by supporting it from the hardware up. What is the best way to go?

“It is one of those areas where having some hardware support certainly helps, but it is not a panacea, certainly with the hardware implementations that exist today. There are plenty of benchmarks (probably most benchmarks) that prove that the software approach of Xen wins out. Because there has been a lot of investment into that software approach and there is some really clever code in there right now, written by some super smart people. It is an interesting arms race between the two. One of the things that we are looking at is depending on the workload -dynamically chosen- whether you use the hardware approach or the purely software approach. You kind of hope that for that particular one –at least for the basic functionality- the hardware wins out over time. But there will always be parts of virtualizing the MMU (Memory Management Unit) which are best done by software. That is where OS-enlightment (aka) Para-virtualization comes in. That is a huge win for virtualizing the MMU.”

(1:30) That is a term I hear more often now. Where does the marketing term: “OS-enlightment” come from?

“We had been using the term para-virtualization. I think it was Microsoft that came up with the term “enlightment”, which we have been told is very much a nod to the Xen-heritage. Microsoft probably has rather more budget to spend on marketing than open source projects.”

We all know Microsoft understands a few things about marketing.

“I am not at all upset with that term. I am quite happy to use it and adopt it.”

(2:09) So Ian, it is quite interesting you just mentioned Citrix and the sun joined us. Do you think the contributions from the open source community have slowed down since the Citrix takeover?

“We certainly have not seen that! If you think about the life of the Xen project, there have been a number of significant changes.
When we left the university to setup XenSource, people were worried we might go off and take Xen in closed source or something, which we did not do. It is still the same group of guys, basically myself, Keir Fraser, Steve Hand, Christian Limpach…all off the same guys working on the project, with now many more off course.

Then Citrix acquired XenSource and we obviously had to explain to people what was happening. I think our community has seen that nothing has changed. One of the things that we did do was just to provide greater transparency. We have setup Xen.org, the Xen advisory board and all of the web site and everything where we run Xen.org. The advisory board now has focus from companies like Intel , AMD, HP, IBM. All big companies that are now contributing to Xen and have that oversight from the advisory board. So I think the community is pretty happy and it’s going from strength to strength.”

(3:33) How do you see the shift XenSource (now XenServer) made from building a para-virtualized platform, that served the open-source community and mainly targeted unix/linux-environments, to a company which has another main audience with Bill, the average Windows admin.

“We were never focused just on running only open source operating systems. That was never the aim. We wanted to build a platform that would be OS-agnostic and to be able to run any OS and do a great job at it. We have always put an awful lot of effort into supporting Windows, because there are a lot of windows OS instances out there, we can’t deny that. It is something that always has been important to us. What is different is the way that XenSource and now Citrix look at packaging Xen. Lots of different companies are bringing Xen to market. Obviously the Linux vendors are mainly concerned about running Linux. Solaris and Sun are mainly concerned about running Solaris. One of the things Citrix / Xenserver are trying to do is making sure it is OS agnostic and we did a great job at running Windows and a great job at running Linux as well.
Xen is awesome running Linux and completely blows any other virtualization solution out of the water and at running Windows it is extremely good too. Let’s put it this way: I am unaware of any benchmarks we lose. “

(05:02) When you look at the fight going on between the companies building the management frameworks for Xen and projects like Enomaly, OpenQrm, Redhat & Novell. Was the acquisition of Xensource by Citrix your easy way out of that fight?

“I think we are still very much in the fight. Xensource and all of these other companies are building management frameworks on top of Xen. I think that all of these companies are coming at it from a different point of view. Linux vendors are trying to provide that same look & feel they have within Linux and expose Virtualization through those same GUIs and tools. The difference is that companies like XenSource and Citrix are interested in making it very easy to use and are building a Virtual Machine hosting appliance, hiding all that complexity and expose it via a web GUI or a Windows user interface.

There are always going to be lots of companies building tools on top of Xen. Even if you look at XenServer, there are all of these other companies building products on top of XenServer, like Egenera, Platform, Marathon. There is a very healthy eco-system of building stuff on top of other people’s stuf. I guess people are happy, because everybody is making money.”

06:27 Some analysts say Microsoft acquired Xensource by proxy, hinting at a future take-over of Citrix by Microsoft. What is your opinion on that topic?

“I truly do not know anything about that. I think if Microsoft was going to buy Citrix, it would have done so a long time ago. I think that Microsoft is a very close Citrix partner and that XenSource has worked with Microsoft as well. There are a number of projects on which we have worked together, such as defining some of the para-virtualization or OS-enlightment extensions to enable Xen-guests to run on Microsoft’s hypervisor when that ships and also vice-versa. We have always found Microsoft quite easy to deal with to be honest.”

(07:16) You get good support from Microsoft?

“Certainly all the people that we deal with are perfectly nice guys.”

(7:23) So let’s talk about the less perfectly nice guys & women. When I read articles on blogs and in the press, I feel that VMware is recently throwing some mud at Citrix and Xensource and especially the marketing department. They try to cast some doubt on your products and projects. What do you think about these marketing techniques?

“Well there has been a certain use of FUD-tactics and things like that. That is sort of a natural reaction. That is what marketing departments will go and do. We have good working relationships with some of the technical folks at VMware and we work together on the OVF virtual appliance format. I know that some of their engineers get pretty embarrassed about some of the stuff their marketing department does. VMware tries to position things which are Xen features or architectural implementations as ‘weaknesses’ against their product. Whereas they know they have teams working flat out to get and implement those same ‘weaknesses’ into their own product. That is just the way it is. Marketing departments go off and do that, but at the end of the day customers will hopefully get the right message and buy the right product.”

(08:45) At least it shows they take you seriously.

“I guess we should be flattered.”

View part 1 or part 2 of this interview.