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Research and Markets Releases “All About Implementing Virtualization” Report

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Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “All About Implementing Virtualization” report to their offering.

Featuring:
Assessing Candidate Servers for Virtualization
This assessment tool provides a high-level view of the current infrastructure in the context of technical, business, and operational readiness. Use this tool to decide which servers are ideal candidates for virtualization as well as which servers should await further planning and development.
All About Implementing Virtualization goes a step further by pairing the assessment tool with tactical and practical research notes so you know what to do next and how to do it.
Also Included:
— Five Pitfalls of Virtualization and How to Avoid Them – The road to server virtualization and consolidation is not without its potholes. Examined are five common virtualization implementation challenges and how they can be mitigated. Very few virtualization challenges are purely technical, but rather stem from shortfalls in planning. Do not take an ad hoc approach to virtualization. Avoid the pitfalls by focusing on application provisioning and capacity planning.
— Virtual Servers Planning Goals: Take a Baby Bear Approach – In a typical scenario, a modest 100-server shop will not be moved to server virtualization by a strategic imperative. Rather, the trigger will be the acquisition of partitionable x86 servers as part of a regular hardware refresh. Planning can make the difference between this implementation being a one-off effort with limited return on investment or the beginning of a new way of managing infrastructure that has significant cost and service benefits.
— Virtualization Scope Analysis Worksheet (Tool) – The most often cited challenges to virtualization are related to people and processes, not technology. Take some time to think about all the people and processes that would be impacted by virtualization. Use this downloadable worksheet to identify goals, dependencies, opportunities, and potential barriers to virtual machine adoption.
— Virtualization Project Definition Template (Tool) – Info-Tech sees the best approach to large scale virtual server implementation as one that combines planning for a foundational virtual infrastructure with careful and incremental adoption. Having employed the ITA Premium “Virtualization Scope Analysis” worksheet to consider who and what will be impacted by virtualization, use this template to develop a long-term project definition for virtualization.
— Business and Operational Assessment for Virtual Server Implementation – Business and operational assessments are as critical for virtual server implementation as is the technical assessment that identifies virtualization candidates. People and process issues are more likely to be an impediment to implementation than technical limitations. Identify and resolve these issues through assessments that establish baselines business and operational measures for virtualization success.
— Technical Assessment of Candidates for Virtual Server Implementation – Technical assessment of current server infrastructure is one of three critical assessments necessary for an effective virtual server implementation. The other important assessments are a business assessment and an IT operational assessment. The important results of the technical assessment will be a list of virtualization candidate servers, and baseline utilization data for capacity planning of the virtual machine infrastructure.
— Just Do It: Server Virtualization without Planning? – The best approach to virtual server implementation combines planning for a foundational virtual infrastructure with careful, incremental adoption. While planning is critical, don’t let external involvement bog down or stall initial implementation efforts. Use a business and operational assessment to define the trigger point for the larger planning effort.

Zenoss 2.3 Adds Native VMware Monitoring

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Zenoss, a provider of commercial open source systems and network management software, last week rolled out a new version of its product suite.  The new release adds native VMware monitoring across the full virtualization infrastructure lifecycle.  This latest version, Zenoss 2.3, now enables enterprise IT staff and cloud services providers to monitor their virtual and physical IT infrastructures with a single, integrated product that costs significantly less than traditional offerings.

“Two of the biggest issues currently facing IT are virtualization and shrinking budgets,” said Erik Dahl, CTO of Zenoss. “Zenoss 2.3 addresses both of these head on with a powerful monitoring solution for both physical and virtual environments that not only costs less to acquire, but also saves time and manpower through quick installation, auto-discovery of infrastructure assets, and drop-in performance templates.”

Zenoss Enterprise delivers functionality across the major IT management lifecycle disciplines (such as inventory discovery, configuration detection, network mapping, availability and performance monitoring, and event management) and across the full physical and virtual infrastructure. Integration of Inventory data in a central Configuration Database allows Zenoss Enterprise users to view all performance, availability, and event data with a single web console. The product also includes remediation, allowing Zenoss to take corrective actions automatically when problems occur.

Guest Post: VMware’s Biggest Threat Isn’t Microsoft

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This is a cross-post of a blog article written by Gregory Ness, former VP of Marketing for Blue Lane Technologies who is currently working for InfoBlox.

The tech industry loves great battles between rivals, and it is often tempting to frame challenges within the context of specific competitive battles. Many see the entrance of Microsoft or even Citrix into virtualization as VMware’s biggest threat. I beg to differ.

VMware’s biggest threat is virtualization-lite, or the confinement of the virtualization business case to within hypervisor VLANS. VMware needs to get enterprises to the bigger picture, the full realization of the benefits of virtualization in the data center, including VMotion. If it cannot, then its sheer share of the data center market will be many times smaller than otherwise, with or without Microsoft or Citrix.

Getting beyond virtualization-lite should be VMware’s number one goal. That would involve unprecedented work with related IT eco-system elements. VMsafe was a great step forward, but it didn’t deliver dynamic security solutions capable of protecting moving VMs.

Another area directly impacted and often overlooked is the network itself. That is, can a static network infrastructure manage, protect, maintain and/or deliver dynamic systems and endpoints? If it cannot, then that is a problem for VMware and an opportunity for the network solutions players.

That is why I think the biggest VMware requirement for success is dynamic infrastructure, or Infrastructure 2.0.

There are substantial virtualization and cloud computing initiatives that will also depend upon dynamic infrastructure. We’ve talked about this issue at Archimedius from both the standpoint of virtualization security and cloud computing. Yet I’m discovering that the issue is much bigger than that. Some enterprises get this and are moving to more dynamic infrastructure; yet others are trying to figure it out.

I think this issue is bigger for IT and networking than a weak global economy. It promises to produce an explosion of breakthroughs in network, endpoint and application intelligence.

The End of Neverland, What Neverland ?

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Stop the presses, RedHat and AMD just announced the end of Neverland.

The big News seems to be that RedHat and AMD managed to do Live migration of a virtual machine between 2 different CPU Vendors.

Now given my age and my starting alzheimer, LinuxKongress 2005 in Hamburg seems like ages ago,
As a speaker giving my Automating Xen Deployments talk early on the first conference day , I flew in the day before the conference and I needed some network connectivity so I sneeked into Ian Pratt’s tutorial about Xen. I remember sitting between Heinz Mauelshagen and my colegue Peter Leemans, Heinz was playing with SMP guests on a non SMP host and tried to figure out the limits.

If I recall correctly at the end of his session Ian was explaining Live Migration and demoing it by migrating a small virtual machine around between laptops of people in the front rows of the audience , Laptops from different architectures and from there started a discussion about CPU feature checking.

I asked around and some people actually remember parts of the discussion and the demo.

So for me , when RedHat and AMD claim today they have achieved in something new that was Never going to be implement they are either focusing on nitty details, like migrating from 2 brand new CPU’s to each other and forgetting the fundaments already existed for ages or just trying to get some positive news out of the door. In which they succeeded.

But I`m looking out for the next step in virtualization , not just mashups of things we’ve all been doing before, or things that are really similar to existing things.

Video: Interview Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource – Citrix (VMworld 2008) part 2/2

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In this second part of our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, the Citrix XenSource CTO denies that there is more than a ‘fabulous partnership’ between Microsoft and Citrix. In his typical outspoken style, Simon Crosby does not see his competitor VMware take of into the clouds with vaporware. He remains an advocate for open standards and shines his light on Virtualization security issues (aka VirtSec by the insiders).

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A full transcript of the interview is below and the  first part of our interview can be viewed here.

(00:00) Simon, in the blogosphere there are these ever mounting rumors about Microsoft and Citrix. What can you comment on that relationship. Add Cisco, VMware and you’ve got a complicated puzzle.

It is.

(00:10) It’s intriguing though.  Many people see a lot of interesting things going on there, what can you say about that?

So our partnership with Microsoft is great.  I mean fabulous.  Microsoft makes a ton out of everything of what Citrix does and they give us scale and we basically take the platform, extend its features set. We’ve done this for years.  It turned out to what XenSource was doing in Virtualization with Microsoft, very similar to the traditional Citrix model of working closely with Microsoft to extend the platform and deliver a bunch of features.  So we do that today and so we’re partner in Virtualization for XenDesktop and runs great on Hyper-V, runs great on XenServer and you know, that’s a terrific partnership.  We’ve partnered also in the area of Virtualization generally and interoperability is key. But XenServer in the platinum edition, not generally known, has the ability to run VMs on VMware or Hyper-V or Xen or even bare metal. Okay, so once you’ve taken your VMs and centralized them into a central repository, we can boot them and run them on anything, right?  Which allows us to extend the concept of Virtualization beyond just Xen, to other hypervisors and even bare metal.

(01:23) If we go back to the cloud concept, because that has been buzzing this industry for a few months now.  What I find quite intriguing is that there’s no standards.  Every cloud has its own APIs and with VMware launching its newest product line (vCloud).  It’s not very clear what those APIs are going to look like, nor when we’re going to have them.  Xen is also moving in that direction with CCC or C3 (Citrix Cloud Center).

Yeah, though not from an API perspective. I agree with you that the APIs are an important one and the ABI.  That is compatibility between the enterprises that counts a big deal. The VMware announcement yesterday, the demonstration around the clouds, the big bullet point on Paul Maritz slide was compatibility, okay? Which basically says that every cloud is going to have to buy by VMware.  You know what?  It’s just not going to happen, okay?  So compatibility is an important concern.  It’s really important that enterprise that  adopt Virtualization know that their VMs will run great in their enterprise but also in the cloud and if the only way we can achieve that is if everybody buys VMware, I can tell you the industry is sunk.  That’s not going to happen.  So compatibility is an important consideration.  OVF is a great component of that and I think it gives us a good way of migrating that whole process.

(02:43)  Do you think that the DMTF is a good standards body to also look into APIs that the vendors agree upon from Amazon to Citrix?

(02:50) Simon Crosby:  I’m not so sure about the Amazon guys. You should go out and speak to Werner on that. But in general, you know Amazon is very open to moving towards standard based APIs, kind of an innovator out there. But VMware, to give them credit, is doing a great job in the DMTF.  They really are.  So, I got to tell you that I’m not a fan of LibVirt you know in the Linux world, it doesn’t have strong semantics.  It doesn’t have like a well-defined API or ABI but the DMTF world is moving forward terrifically, yeah very good.

(03:24) Virtualization was a way of abstracting. Now clouds are another way of abstracting?

They are just another hypervisor platform for me.

(03:34) What about an OS.  What would be your definition, VMware is calling it an OS? 

Oh, the data center OS?

(03:42) Interviewer:  How do you define such an OS?  Do you consider it an OS, a framework or an API set?

You know what?  I think it’s vaporware, right?  So let’s be real for a bit, there are several key things that people want to achieve.  They want to achieve greater agility, greater dynamism, and greater security. There are a lot of ways to get there. But defining a data center OS based on a product which has got a single point of failure, isn’t the way to get there.  There are very interesting technologies that one can bring to solve that problem. In general, I don’t think they (VMware) have them.  Now, it differs between enterprises and clouds on how you want to do this. Enterprise IT runs in a very different way than the cloud.  So we know today that NetScalers drives automatically very large files, that is we can use NetScalers sitting in the application hard drive to dynamically move traffic between machines whenever machine fails, between data center whenever data center fails and on the fly bring up new VMs and servers on the basis of need. Because we can watch the application response times and drive the data center in that way.  That is in particular like a kind of cloud architecture. There are some enterprise adopting it. But at data center OS which is built in the management domain out of a bunch of stuff which is really just managing software.  I don’t buy the concept.  It’s an important concept that people start to think about, that is agility and dynamism and data center reintroduce a whole bunch of complexities but it isn’t here yet.

(05:14) Maybe to finish off, you mentioned security?

Yeah.

(05:18) How do you see that involve, it’s one of the major concern of these people.  How do you secure Virtual issues?  How do you make absolutely sure that they can’t break out?

There are three things here, one of them is how do you secure the guests?  How do you secure the hypervisor?  And how do you virtualize the security function generally, okay?  So let’s start. How do you secure the guest?  You know, the basic capabilities of inspecting the traffic, block an I/O, everybody can do that.  That’s straightforward.  VMware took a one step further with VMsafe which allows their plug-in security appliances to inspect the memory of running guests.  The black hat folks just don’t like this approach, okay?  We have an equivalent thing in open source that the big scary moment is if you compromise that interface, you can get hold of any memory of any guest.  It’s really, really scary.  So you have to do better than that, you know. 

But in general, virtualizing the security function is thought very open area and Chris Hoff has a perfect take on this, you know it’s very, very early days and has a ton of work to do.  Moreover is I/O starts to go back into hardware so we just get IOV devices coming.  None of those security appliance gets to look at the traffic anymore, so it’s going to be very interesting.  So all has to get down again.  Securing a hypervisor, we’re absolutely concerned about that.  That is one of our key focuses, I guess VMware is concerned about it.  They have a big code base.  I think one of their big things that they do is they went from you know ESX to ESXi was to ditch the console OS which is a major headache for them.  You know we’re down onto tens of megabytes in software now, generally written onto read-only flash and we focus manically on securing our box, right?  That’s absolutely what we have to do.  Now can we make guest more secured?  Absolutely we can do that and that’s the next big one which is how you can use the Virtualization platform itself and Virtualization to provide greater security for the workload while it’s running and through its life cycle.  So once you separated the software from the server, can I take a guest to walk out of the building without a memory stick?  That’s an interesting question.

(07:31) Simon, I’d like to thank you for the time you’ve given us and for the straight talk and your views on Virtualization and everything around it.  See you.

Hyperic Releases HQ 4.0, Hires Former Salesforce Exec

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Hyperic today announced HQ 4.0, the next evolution of its systems monitoring and management application. The new release addresses the growing needs of businesses embracing Amazon cloud services to create affordable and scalable IT deployment strategies.

With today’s release, Hyperic HQ is the first software that enables the modern enterprise to monitor its Amazon Web Services securely alongside internal infrastructure. It is also the first enterprise-class monitoring and management software offered for deployment and payment directly though Amazon Web Services.

Datacenters have a fixed capacity for handling application traffic at any given time and distribute resources to match average peak capacity. Businesses deploying in Amazon’s cloud now have access to unlimited number of resources, and pay only for the services they need at any given time. To remain cost-effective, operations teams need to frequently tune web and application server capacity to match fluctuations in demand.

Hyperic HQ 4.0 addresses this need for a new generation of monitoring and management tool that will help enterprises adopt cloud computing strategies with confidence, by better equipping operations teams to perform repetitive management tasks more efficiently. Traditionally, installing a new server and deploying it into production was a lengthy process that took place over days or weeks. Now, with cloud providers like Amazon offering the ability to rapidly deploy servers in minutes and pay by the hour, companies need a way to ensure consistent monitoring oversight of their web operations that is just as fast and flexible.

In developing the new release, Hyperic has drawn upon its extensive experience in providing the automation and visibility needed to maintain application performance in datacenters using virtualization software. Hyperic HQ currently manages over 3,500 VMware and XenServer virtualization deployments. Also referred to as “private clouds,” these environments consist of both physical and virtual servers, and typically support high rates of change as virtual servers are easily added, subtracted or moved to improve server utilization and maintain service levels.

The new Hyperic HQ 4.0 release starts by streamlining the process of adding new software resources into management. After auto-discovery registers the new resources into inventory, a new process of server cloning allows all configuration profiles for log data collection, security and services checks to be immediately applied. Coupled with global alert templates for resource types, the entire system of monitoring and rules for warning of performance problems can be incorporated in under a minute.

In addition, the release also addresses additional areas of concern for virtualized and cloud-based deployment including security, application management and capacity planning. A new server communication protocol allows agents monitoring external resources to always initiate communication with the HQ Server in order to meet to security protocols and operate across firewalls. Despite the uni-directional communication, the agent still maintains a full range of capabilities including the ability to update and run diagnostics remotely, and issue corrective control actions such as a service restart or running garbage collection to free memory.

Additionally, a new capacity planning function automatically analyzes historical performance and projects the future resource trends of any given management metric. This function allows users to quickly assess and predict future trends, and proactively manage capacity needs to anticipate demand or conserve costs.

Also part of the 4.0 release, Hyperic HQ Enterprise 4.0 will be available as a fully configured system on Amazon’s Web Services. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) preconfigured for Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is expected to be available later this month. The new distribution will be available directly on Amazon’s DevPay service for a low initiation fee and a monthly charge based on the amount of management data being collected to the HQ Server. A familiar arrangement to businesses looking to embrace the cloud, there will be no contract term and users will simply pay for how much value they are deriving from the Hyperic HQ Enterprise application.

Hyperic also announced the appointment of Matthew Stodolnic to the newly created company position of vice president of marketing. Stodolnic, who joins the Hyperic executive team after seven years with Salesforce.com, will be responsible for the company’s overall marketing strategy and further expansion into cloud computing.