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

On Virtualization and Server Consolidation

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Insightful post by Arthur Cole over at ITBusinessEdge about server consolidation and virtualization. Cole argues that server consolidation done the right way remains the primary driver for most data centers.

But as those who have already taken the virtual plunge have no doubt realized, consolidating servers is not just a simple matter of powering up the virtualization layer and then pulling equipment out of racks. There is a long list of factors to consider with any centralization project and a wide range of land mines that need to be avoided to prevent service failures.

Cole refers to four interesting articles about server consolidation:

Read the whole article here.

Virtutech Looking To Advance Standards for Virtualized Software Development

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Virtutech, a San-Jose based Virtualized Software Development (VSD) provider, today announced an initiative to accelerate the creation of standards for the VSD industry and to drive mainstream acceptance of VSD throughout the electronic systems business. While continuing its long-standing involvement with Power.org at both the Technical Sub Committees and Marketing Programs level, Virtutech has also joined organizations in its domain-Eclipse.org, OSCI and Spirit Consortium-with the aim of fostering standards and best practices. Virtutech further announced collaboration with GreenSocs to promote Open Standards and community development.

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Virtutech intends to leverage its expertise with more than 1,000 successful users accumulated over the course of deploying its Simics platform since 2001 to propose, promote and support best practices, conventions and standards for VSD.

“Virtualized Software Development has the potential to make the same dramatic impact on software development that virtualization has already brought to the data center and business applications. However, the industry needs to stand up and define, promote and drive adoption of virtualization throughout the development community,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing at Virtutech. “Virtutech intends to be an agent of change and to actively precipitate the next big virtualization wave.”

[Source: press release]

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie On Cloud & Utility Computing

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Interesting interview up on GigaOM today, featuring Microsoft‘s Chief Software Architect and industry luminary Ray Ozzie talking about MS’s strategy, the economics of cloud computing and the relevance of desktop and infrastructure challenges.

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The most interesting bits:

OM: The costs of computing, hardware and bandwidth are dropping quickly. Do you believe that the cost will come down fast enough to make cloud computing actually a profitable business?

RAY OZZIE: Well, it’s unlikely that we would get into it if we didn’t think it was going to be a profitable business. So we’ll just manage it to be profitable. It’s going to have different margins than classic software, or the ad (-supported) business. But, we have every reason to believe that it will be a profitable business. It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom.

…

OM: When do you think utility computing can be a profitable business; are we’re looking at like maybe two years, four years out before it actually starts to become a profitable entity?

RAY OZZIE: (Let’s) take (one company) who is in the market today: Amazon. They chose a price point. There are either customers at that price point or not. They may have priced themselves at expected costs as opposed to actual today costs, but it doesn’t really matter. They could have brought it out at twice the existing price and there still would have been a customer base, and they’d be making money at birth.

I think all of these utility-computing services, as they’re born will either be breaking even or profitable. At the scale that we’re talking about, nobody can afford, (even Microsoft) can’t afford to do it at a loss. We could subsidize it, I suppose. Google could subsidize it by profits in other parts of their business, we could subsidize it, but I don’t think there’s any reason that any of us in this world would bring out that infrastructure like this without charging for what we’re paying, and then trying to make some profit over it. The cost base is so high in terms of building these data centers you do want to kind of make it up.

Read the rest of the (edited) interview here.

Podcast Tip: Andrea Arcangeli on KVM and hypervisor virtualization

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Let us join Michael Dolan in pointing you to a great podcast on LinuxCast (LinuxWorld), featuring Don Marti interviewing Andrea Arcangeli on the topic of KVM and the benefits of the kernel taking on the hypervisor role (rather than separating the hypervisor and rewriting all the supporting structures as Xen does).

Listen to the podcast here!

Which Deals Will HP Be Announcing Soon?

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Reuters is reporting Hewlett-Packard is set to announce a series of deals this month expanding the server virtualization software it sells with its servers, quoting HP Vice President Mark Linesch.

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HP is already working with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft on customizing their software and Hewlett-Packard’s computer servers so they work together better out of the box, Linesch said, but declined to specify which companies the deal announcements would apply to.

We’re following Reuters’ perspective on this and think the most likely is Citrix Systems, which reportedly claimed earlier that close partnerships with HP and Dell would be announced in the course of 2008. Citrix has said it would get a payment for each HP server shipped with a basic package and a larger license fee for each upgrade sold.

What do you think the announcements will be?

Preinstalled Hypervisors And The Future of Operating Systems

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Jay Lyman from The 451 Group (also check out the interview we did with John Abbott, Chief Analyst & Research Director at The 451 Group) wonders about the future of Linux distributions in the virtualization arena.

Now that VMWare announced that it will embed its ESX 3i hypervisor in different server platforms from HP, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and IBM, the question pops up how Operating System Vendors will deal with this change of platform.

VMWare certainly isn’t the only one with those plans, since Ian Pratt from XenSource mentionned exactly the same during his Fosdem talk.

How do the OS vendors react to this new feature ? According to Lyman’s blog post, Red Hat claims

it is hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel that will create that standard virtualization layer and capability.

and

Novell indicates VMware may be taking somewhat of a risk, though, since OEMs like HP will look to upsell to their own software to create and manage VMs, which ESX 3i can’t do.

A hypervisor still needs management tools, so that the guest OS’s can be initiated, stopped and migrated. Applications aren’t running on hypervisors (yet); they need an operating system for IO, Memory Management and Network stacks at least for the foreseeable future.

On a longer term, we’ll have applications running natively on the hypervisor for sure. But today Operating System vendors are hoping for a uniform and better way to support different available and upcoming hypervisors and off course those lightweight systems will also benefit from these improvements.

If I were in the Operating System market I wouldn’t worry yet at this pointis , just as with all other features that hardware vendors are selling it is still ‘only’ a feature. When ordering a Dell you can choose between different CPU’s, different hard disks, different Operating Systems and most likely in the near future, different hypervisors as well.