Virtualization.com
News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
“Deploying Virtualization in the Enterprise” is the conference theme of SYS-CON‘s 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo Europe to be held in London, England, January 26-27, 2009. The organization has now opened a Call for Papers. Virtualization experts can submit a speaking proposal here.
The Ottawa Linux Symposium today announced its Mini Summits that will be taking place on the Tuesday before the actual Symposium. One of these summits is the “Virtualization Technology & Management” Mini Summit which has just issued a Call for Presentations.
There will be two types of presentations
Full Presentations: These presentations will consume an entire 40 minute time slot. It is suggested that the presentation be planned for 25-30 minutes which will allow for a 10-15 minute period of dicussions with the audience. Lightning talks: These talks will be scheduled for 5 minutes.
And the suggested topics are :
Virtualization Technology: Review and/or provide deep insight into the fundamentals of specific virtualization technologies. Exploration of project development opportunities. Discussion of ideas to improve the technologies.
Layered Tools and New Opportunities: How can virtualized environments be made manageable? What’s worked and not worked in the past? What new ideas are cropping up?
Virtualization Deployment Experiences: What’s the “Good, the Bad and the Ugly”? What has gone right? What has gone wrong? What are end users’ thoughts about the whole experience? Are folks meeting goals and saving money overall? What are the unexpected benefits?
Meet us there!
VMware has shown a great deal of commitment by publishing an official (yet experimental) guide to creating VI Client plugins.
“With the release of VirtualCenter 2.5, VMware offers third-party developers and partners the ability to extend the VMware Infrastructure Client (VI Client) with their own product-specific menu selections or toolbar icons that provide access to external, Web-based functionality. These extensions, or VI Client Plug-ins, comprise the set of configuration files, URLs, icons, and Web-server-hosted resources that work together to display extended menu items, icons, and other user interface (UI) items in the VI Client and provide access to the external functionality.”
In related news, Andrew Kutz (who also posted his thoughts about the guide and how it relates his own unofficial guide) is publishing a book with O’Reilly on “Programming and Managing VMware Infrastructure“.
Selena Frye over at TechRepublic talks about an interesting technology from Cisco called APX (Application eXtension Platform), made up of a hardware card, modified Linux software that runs on the card and a program for software developers.
The AXP is a card that goes into your Cisco router and that card runs a hardened version of Linux, customized by Cisco. So, you aren’t running Linux on your current Cisco router CPU, RAM, and Flash or in the IOS. You are running Linux on a card that is inserted into the router.
Once you have this card and the Linux OS, you can then run third-party applications on that platform. Think about that for a minute. What if you could run a protocol analyzer like Ethereal or an IPS like SNORT “in your router?” What if you could run WAN Compression, performance monitoring, and network management software ‘in your router?” Wow — that would be amazing!
The AXP card, a standard network module (NME) or AIM card, goes in the Cisco ISR Routers (1841, 2800, and 3800 series) and has its own memory, CPU, and Flash HD (and GB Ethernet in the case of the NME). As for the specs:
AXP has its own Linux CLI, error messages, debugging, and virtualization capabilities. It can run applications in various languages — C, Python, Perl, Java. You can even read and write router configuration through APIs and receive info about the status of the router. An application running in the AXP could know if the router was taking errors on the serial interface.
Cost reduction is always mentioned as one of the benefits of virtualization, but there are little case studies featuring actual numbers available to prove it. That’s why this post on Server Virtualization Blog by Eric Siebert was a refreshing read. Eric writes:
In today’s world the cost of just about everything has been on the rise. Fuel costs in particular have a ripple effect on just about everything we buy which also affects computers. That’s why virtualization is a great way to offset those increased costs. Providing power and cooling to a data center can be a very big expense, virtualizing servers can dramatically reduce this cost. PlateSpin provides a nice power savings calculator on their website. If we plug in the following numbers:
- 200 physical servers
- average usage of 750 watts per server
- average processor utilization of 10% before virtualization
- target processor utilization of 60% after virtualization
The average power and cooling savings a year comes out to $219,000 with a consolidation ratio of 5:1 based on a cost per kilowatt hour of 10 cents. As the cost of power increases the savings become even greater, at 12 cents the cost savings become $262,800 per year and at 15 cents the cost savings become $328,500 per year.
Of course savings will vary based on a number of factors including how well utilized your physical servers are before virtualization, your consolidation ratio which can sometimes be as high as 15:1 and also your location. Different parts of the country average different costs per kilowatt hour, California and New York tend to be the highest at 12 – 15 cents per kilowatt hour where Idaho and Wyoming are the cheapest at about 5 cents per kilowatt hour. Power costs tend to rise a lot more then they go down so the argument for virtualization from a cost perspective becomes much easier when you factor in the potential savings.
The great tech blog Ars Technica announced about two weeks ago that it would host a brand new community program in collaboration with Intel, dubbed ‘Directions: a Web Symposium’.
This week’s topic of the Directions Symposium is centered around virtualization and server consolidation. Intel has rounded up ten of their top virtualization experts, including a few Intel Principal Engineers, for participation in the new round of conversations.
Jump in if you’re interested!