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Virtualization start-ups hit reset button

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Two start-ups hoping to profit from virtualization are giving details of new strategies this week. It’s a sign that the technology, while a hot item, doesn’t mean easy profits.

Stephen Shankland wrote on news.com

Virtual Iron and XenSource both have altered course with their virtualization products, which is software that lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Virtual Iron has scrapped its own virtualization software in favor of the open-source Xen project. Meanwhile, the leader of that project, XenSource, is steering away from management tools and aiming squarely for virtualization leader VMware.

The two companies are describing their new strategies at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston this week. And with more news in the area from VMware, Microsoft’s Virtual Server group and SWsoft, the show might well be called VirtualizationWorld.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, VMware executives might blush at the strikingly similar rhetoric from Virtual Iron and XenSource.

“The market really wants a competitor to VMware,” said Simon Crosby, XenSource’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

“It’s time for a company to step up and be a viable commercial competitor to VMware,” said Virtual Iron Chief Executive John Thibault.

It’s no surprise why competitors are angling for advantage. A February Forrester survey of 1,221 customers with at least 1,000 employees found that 41 percent of North American customers are using virtualization already or are planning pilot tests. And 60 percent plan to spend more money on the technology in the next 12 months.

VMware leads the market, the study found, with 43 percent of customers considering it most often for x86 server virtualization, compared with 24 percent for Windows Virtual Server. Xen “is not yet on the radar for customers,” the report said.

Virtualization, in the form most widely discussed these days, lets a computer run many operating systems simultaneously and therefore lets administrators replace several largely idle servers with one efficiently used machine. The technology works by fooling programs into thinking that they’re running on real hardware, when they actually are running on a virtual layer called a hypervisor.

That sleight-of-hand means that operating systems can share the same hardware, or be moved while running from one computer to another to cope with hardware failure or new processing demands.

Virtualization is an established feature in higher-end servers. Now, since it’s arriving in mainstream models with x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, companies like Virtual Iron and XenSource are trying to commercialize it as a stand-alone technology.

A big change coming with virtualization support from AMD and Intel means that virtualization companies today can sidestep some of clever engineering techniques VMware employs. AMD Virtualization, set to debut in months, and Intel’s corresponding VT, which started arriving in 2005, permit Xen to run an unmodified operating system. In practice, that means Xen can run Microsoft Windows as well as Linux.

The side effect is that VMware will be getting more direct competition from XenSource and Virtual Iron. But that’s not all: Another start-up called Parallels also hopes to give VMware a run for its money.

Its $50 hypervisor-based Parallels Workstation 2.1 product runs on Windows and Linux desktop machines right now, and the company plans to launch a midrange server product in mid-2006 and a high-end server product in late 2006, Marketing Manager Benjamin Rudolph said.

Lining up at LinuxWorld
VMware is looking to sustain its leadership in part by opening up interfaces to control virtual machines and making its basic virtual machine software free. And Monday at LinuxWorld, it plans to announce a related move: The EMC subsidiary is offering its virtual machine disk format specification to all comers for royalty-free use. The format competes with Microsoft’s VHD specification and Xen’s XVM.

Several announcements on virtualization moves are expected at LinuxWorld, which has morphed substantially since it began in the 1990s, following the growing impact of open-source software. The conference’s annual East Coast edition runs Monday through Thursday in Boston.

In addition to exhibitors touting operating system-related technologies, representatives from open-source databases and middleware companies are also scheduled to attend. Sessions and keynotes will also cover the impact of open-source business models on the software industry overall, including one entitled “The Death of the Enterprise Software Business Model.”

At LinuxWorld, IBM plans to announce services to help customers design, install and configure virtual machines as a way to consolidate Linux servers. It’s a sign that Big Blue, a virtualization pioneer with its mainframe servers, is also trying to profit from the technology as it becomes mainstream.

Virtualizing at the operating system is one approach, but SWsoft is taking a higher-level approach that divides a single operating system into multiple virtual environments, each with its own independent applications. At the show, SWsoft plans to announce its Datacenter Automation Suite, a Web-based management tool for tasks such as launching new environments or filling them with software templates.

Xen is catching on in the Linux realm. Indeed, it’s being built into premium Linux products from Novell and Red Hat due by the end of the year, undermining the technology somewhat as a standalone product.

XenSource ‘parks’ XenOptimizer
That fact was part of why XenSource changed direction. “What we found out over last six months, talking to a lot with customers…is that the way they want to consume Xen is through Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or) Suse Linux,” Crosby said.

Those two Linux sellers now are XenSource business partners. That arrangement is one facet of XenSource’s business strategy, while selling a stand-alone product called XenEnterprise to compete with VMware is the other, Crosby said.

XenSource no longer plans to sell its Xen management tool software, XenOptimizer. “We’re parking that for now,” Crosby said. There already are several management tool companies with which customers are comfortable, and those customers “don’t want to see XenSource going head-to-head with those guys,” he said.

…

Virtual Iron plans management tools
Virtual Iron doesn’t share XenSource’s reticence for management software. With the upcoming version 3 of its software, it will let Xen customers manage Xen virtual machines. For example, it can move virtual machines from one physical computer to another and restart virtual machines when a computer fails.

The Lowell, Mass.-based company plans three versions of its product. The Community Edition will be available freely under the same General Public License (GPL) as Xen itself, includes basic Virtual Iron extensions.

The Professional Edition will be free and supports management of a single server. The Enterprise Edition will let customers manage virtual machines running on multiple computers, with prices starting at $1,500.

Beta testing for Virtual Iron 3 on Linux will begin in July and on Windows in September. Both versions should be generally available before the end of the year, Thibault said.

The strategy marks a dramatic departure for Virtual Iron. Previously, the company had billed its software as providing a way to use InfiniBand high-speed links to join several low-end servers into what amounted to single multiprocessor system.

“Trying to sell InfiniBand into enterprise datacenters was, to say the least, a real challenge. We were spending more time selling InfiniBand than our own product,” Thibault said. “What got lost in translation was we had built a very full-featured management platform.”

Read full story at news.com

Is Virtualization the miracle cure for software set-up?

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Stephen Shankland at News.Com reports:

Most talk about virtualization these days centers on using server hardware more efficiently. But the technology also has the potential to ease another headache: software installation woes.

 

Today, administrators installing software typically must ensure beforehand that it’s certified to run with their particular hardware and operating systems, then configure and optimize it afterward. The hidden benefit from virtualization is that users can unpack a ready-to-run collection of software components–operating system and all–and drop it onto a fresh, empty partition of the computer called a virtual machine. No muss, no fuss, no driver updates, no configuration file tweaking, no conflicts with other software.Virtualization essentially lets the companies selling the software handle the tricky part also provides a clean slate for installation.There’s one problem, however: Some software licensing plans aren’t designed to accommodate such schemes, though that could eventually change.One convert to the approach is Open Xchange, a server software company that lets customers download its software packaged into a virtual machine so they can quickly get to the evaluation stage. Within the next six months, the company plans to release software for production use, not just testing, said Dan Kusnetzky, executive vice president of marketing strategy. “We send an image that (has) a complete stack of software preinstalled, set up and ready to go,” Kusnetzky said. “We felt it would be an advantage in the competitive marketplace,” he said, because without the virtual machine approach, “it took a level of expertise to install it.” Representatives from three powers in the virtualization realm–EMC subsidiary VMware, its XenSource with the open-source Xen software and Microsoft with the proprietary Virtual Server software–all believe at a minimum that the idea has potential. But it’s VMware, which leads the virtualization market, that’s working hardest to make virtual machine-based installation a reality–and to make its underlying virtual machine technology the foundation of choice. It has a Web site where people can download sample virtual-machine-based packages from Oracle, IBM and others. “The reasons it’s going to become mainstream is you can now package your application with the operating system it really wants. You get the exact patch level and everything in the OS that you want,” said VMware President Diane Greene. And it’s particularly useful for small software companies that don’t have engineers to support a wide variety of systems. “They don’t have to necessarily port their software to every possible operating system and every possible version of the operating system.” In recent months, VMware started offering two free ways that customers can try out virtual-machine-based software packages, which it calls virtual appliances. First came VMware Player in 2005, good for desktop applications, such as an isolated partition for safely surfing the Internet. In February came part two: VMware Server for server tasks. Xen programmers are currently stabilizing their core virtual machine software, but virtual-machine-based installation will happen with Xen, too, predicted Simon Crosby, XenSource co-founder and chief technology officer. “That’s equally possible in Xen…I definitely think it’s going to happen,” Crosby said, though he acknowledged Xen doesn’t yet have VMware’s mature virtual machine management software or established presence at many customer sites.

Licensing lumps

 

Not so fast, cautions Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. “This is a direction, but not a near-term mainstream change in the way that everyone installs their applications,” Haff said. “There are too many details to work through. Licensing is one issue.” The licensing hurdle stems chiefly from the fact that the installation method requires the inclusion of an operating system, and although software companies might delight in distributing them willy-nilly, operating system companies are more finicky. Microsoft, for example, permits only evaluation copies of Windows to be distributed, and then only within a company and only to test and evaluate software, said James Ni, group product manager for server virtualization at Microsoft. “Currently there is no redistribution of the Windows Server operating system,” Ni said. Right now, the virtual installation idea is about testing software rather than full-on production use, so the evaluation software approach is appropriate, Ni argued. He’s not alone in his assessment. “I would expect this to be primarily about experimentation,” said Forrester analyst Frank Gillett. Ni didn’t close the door to virtual-machine-based software sales. Market forces dictated major changes to Microsoft licensing policies before. For example, Microsoft in 2004 began charging the same price for a dual-core processor as for a single-core processor, and in 2005 started permitting customers with one license for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition to run as many as four copies on a single server partitioned with virtual machine software. But Microsoft’s policy is an impediment to VMware’s aspiration. Greene sees companies distributing virtual-machine-based software internally today and expects customers will eventually buy it that way, Greene said. “Microsoft is not letting their operating system be used in this model,” Greene said. And though it’s had a more permissive position in the past, it has backed off that stance: “Microsoft did not renew our license to (redistribute) Windows.” Open-source software, of course, has fewer restrictions. “Linux makes it easy,” Gillett said. …

Not just the operating system

Microsoft, Xen and VMware virtualize a computer’s hardware. But some companies tackling the problem at a higher level are offering a different revamp of software installation. SWsoft sells a product called Virtuozzo that essentially virtualizes the operating system rather than the underlying hardware. That lets several programs run at once in separate zones on one instance Linux or Windows. Sun Microsystems has taken the same approach with its “containers” technology in Solaris 10. “We have templates for close to 100 different solutions and applications for various configurations,” said SWsoft Chief Executive Serguei Beloussov. “When you apply a template to a certain virtual private server (a partition), this solution will immediately become available.” …Softricity is another company that tries to break the hard link between operating system and applications. Its software first captures all the modifications a software package makes to Windows, letting companies store employees’ configurations on a central server rather than directly modifying a PC and potentially causing conflicts among different programs. “The applications are no longer bound to the operating system,” said David Greschler, co-founder and vice president of corporate marketing. That lets administrators quickly set up new PCs or update existing ones, he said. It also means employees can move from one PC to another without disruption, because their software is automatically enabled when they log on to a new PC.

Different standards

Yet another complication comes from the fact that VMware, Xen and Microsoft use a different file format for their virtual machines. In August, VMware began trying to standardize its format. That was shortly after Microsoft began offering royalty-free licenses to use its format, called Virtual Hard Disk. And Xen uses a third format, XVM. Barriers between these formats are not insurmountable. For example, XenSource licensed Microsoft’s VHD and will offer the ability to import virtual machines created with Microsoft Virtual Server, Crosby said, and VMware shared its format as well. At the same time, VMware offers support for that feature with its Virtual Machine Importer software. Insurmountable, yes, but barriers nonetheless. “It will tend to retard the movement toward a standard hypervisor level that just sits on top of x86 hardware,” Haff said, adding that low barriers would mean customers could more easily substitute one virtualization company’s product for another. “It is not in VMware’s (or Microsoft’s) business interest to be able to have someone’s free, native hypervisor just slip in to replace ESX Server.” Another hitch stems from cultural obstacles to virtualization in general, Red Hat Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said. “The customers I’ve talked to over the last six months are challenged by the human issues: How will they deal with the sharing of physical resources across the enterprise? We’ve all gotten conditioned to having our own server environments,” he said. Virtual installation will happen, but XenSource’s Crosby understands the change won’t happen overnight, “I think it’s going to be a fairly profound change for the industry to get there.”

 

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Virtualization all the way to Kyoto?

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Blade servers

Although blade servers are not directly related to virtualization, they are often considered since the Blade-concept also involves  around several kinds of consolidation (physical, logical, partitioning, etc…). Any one who ever stood behind an open rack filled with running blades can certainly testify about the generated heating. If you happen to pay the electricity bill, you certainly now about the extravagant energy cost! Also bear in mind that all this heat needs to be cooled down again requiring even more energy for your datacenter.  I wonder how long it will take before chipmakers will manage to include energy consumption in their equation of “moore’s law”. Now the technology sector is only starting to become a little more environmentally concerned, thus making the Kyoto goals more reachable. Intel recently announced Conroe, a desktop processor that is 40% faster than the current generation while using 40% less power and unveiled a server processor, Woodcrest, which boasts 80% more power and 35% less power consumption.

Energy consumption

Joan Goodchild at SearchWinIT.com & SearchDataCenter.com reports on the high energy consumption of blades.

“Blade servers, which are deemed the next big thing in hardware, are also a big energy drain in an enterprise, according to a recent study that looks at the latest advances in server technology. The results of the study by TheInfoPro (TIP) Inc., a New York research firm, reveal that these new server technologies have not provided heating and cooling advantages. TIP recently released the second half of a server study it conducted in 2005. The research examined the concerns of 133 server professionals.
…
Despite their intense heat production, the slim servers are indeed a priority for IT managers. According to TIP’s survey, 62% of the respondents said they will spend more money on blade servers in the next year.
Bob Gill (TIP’s chief research officer) said blade vendors are realizing that excess power is a problem in terms of energy efficiency, and there is an initiative among them to create blades that are more energy-efficient. A number of groups have suggested that vendors should develop a standard for measuring energy efficiency and then develop technology accordingly. He also noted that virtualization technology would alleviate some problems with power efficiency and consolidation.Overall, the research found that power and energy pose the biggest challenges for server administrators. Thirty-eight percent of users said power requirements are the greatest challenge to the data center. Thirty-one percent cited cooling requirements, and just over 20% cited heat output.”It’s a vicious cycle,” said Gill. “While systems become denser, their energy efficiency has decreased. Devices are getting smaller and smaller, but they are getting hotter.”

Read the whole SearchDataCenter.com article at source.

Next Microsoft Virtual Server slips to 2007

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Microsoft has delayed an update for Microsoft Virtual Server until early 2007.

Reported by Stephen Shankland at Cnet News.Com in an interview with James Ni, group product manager for server virtualization at Microsoft.

” The Service Pack 1 update to Virtual Server 2005 R2 will include support for two chip features, Intel’s Virtualization and Advanced Micro Devices’ Virtualization, that ease the task. Previously it had been scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter, but a Microsoft representative confirmed the slip on Tuesday.

The postponement comes on the heels of Microsoft’s delays of Windows Vista and Office 2007. “Quality always takes priority over timeline,” the Microsoft representative said.

Microsoft’s top competitors have suffered similar setbacks. Market leader VMware had planned to release its next top-end ESX Server product, version 3.0, by the end of March but gave itself three more months. The other major competitor, the open-source Xen project, had planned to release its version 3.0 by August 2005 but in fact didn’t release it until December. ”

….

“The beta version of SP1 still is scheduled to arrive in the second quarter, said James Ni, group product manager for server virtualization at Microsoft.

The new version also will include Volume Shadow Services, which lets all a computer’s virtual machines be backed up simultaneously, Ni said. The feature also permits the graceful restart of all those virtual machines, letting customers rely on the software without having to worry as much about the consequences of server failure.

“Basically, it allows us to do a snapshot of all the virtual machines running on a host. Then you can use something like Virtual Server with Data Protection Manager to create good backup and recovery,” Ni said. “You can recover the entire host and all the virtual machines running in a very orchestrated fashion.”

Microsoft faces major competition in the market from EMC subsidiary VMware and increasingly the Xen project that’s being built into forthcoming versions of Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Microsoft is working hard for a piece of the action, however. In December, it cut prices of Virtual Server 2005 R2 from $999 to $199 for the Enterprise Edition and $499 to $99 for the Standard Edition. The Standard Edition runs on servers with up to four processors, while Enterprise is for larger machines.

At the same time, though, market leader VMware is making its own moves. It released its Player software for free, which lets people download and try out virtual machines preconfigured with software, and made its GSX Server product into the free VMware Server. That product competes directly with Microsoft Virtual Server; VMware still charges for its higher-end ESX Server.

Much of Microsoft’s attention is directed toward the future with a successor, the Microsoft hypervisor, code-named Viridian. Virtual Server requires Windows as a foundation, but hypervisors are lower-level software. ESX Server and Xen both employ the hypervisor approach.

One major change coming with Viridian will be support for 64-bit virtual machines, Ni said. That will catch Microsoft up with Xen and VMware, which support 64-bit virtual machines today.

Viridian isn’t likely to debut until 2008 at the earliest, however. It’s designed to work with the upcoming Longhorn Server, a server-oriented version of Windows Vista that’s scheduled to arrive in 2007, but it’s more likely to arrive with a service pack sometime 18 to 24 months afterward, Ni said.

“We’re not committing to whether the hypervisor is part of the initial release or not. Right now, from a scheduling perspective, it doesn’t look like it,” Ni said.

Read the full article at source.

Virtual Server RDP Administration Annoyance

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Quoting from a Q&A column from Chris Wolf at MCPmag.com

Question to Chris:

I’m having a strange problem with the Virtual Server 2005 Administration Web Site. I’m accessing the server remotely using remote desktop and can connect fine. However, when I try and open the virtual server administration web site from within the RDP session, I get a “Page Cannot be Found” error. Other users on the local LAN don’t have any problem accessing the site using IE. Is this one of those strange Terminal Services problems?
— Steve

Anwer to Steve:

Your prediction is right on the money. Remote Desktop and Terminal Services can do some strange things. Many of us at one time or another have found ourselves scratching our heads over a particular program or installation sequence that would not work when launched from within a Remote Desktop connection.

With your particular problem, connecting to the Virtual Server host using IE directly or through a VPN connection would be your best bet. If this isn’t possible, you can get the Virtual Server Administration Web site to run inside an RDP session by running the RDP session as a remote IE console. In other words, you’ll need to configure Remote Desktop to launch IE at the time the RDP connection is made. While this will prevent you from accessing the actual desktop of the remote Virtual Server host, it will allow you to access the Administration website through the RDP connection. You can always set up a second RDP connection for complete access to the Virtual Server host’s desktop.

Instructions

To set up Remote Desktop to start IE once a connection is made, follow these steps:

  1. 1. Click Start | All Programs | Accessories | Communications | Remote Desktop.
  2. 2. In the Remote Desktop Connection dialog box, click the Options button.
  3. 3. Now click the Programs tab in the Remote Desktop Connection dialog box.
  4. 4. Click the “Start the following program on connection” checkbox and enter the following information:

    Program Path and File Name:
    iexplore.exe https://localhost/virtualserver/vswebapp.exe

    Start in the Following Folder:
    C:Program FilesInternet Explorer
    5. Now click the General tab and enter the name or IP address of your virtual server in the Computer Name field.

  5. 6. Enter a user name and password (check the Save My Password box if desired), and then click the Save As button. In the Save As dialog box, browse to your desired save location such as the Desktop, enter a name for the connection such as RDPIE.rdp, and click Save.

At this point, you can double-click on the saved RDP connection to initiate an RDP connection to your virtual server host. I like to save RDP connection settings so that I don’t have to retype them over and over again, which could interfere with any personal tasks I’m trying to do while at work.

Note that I’m assuming an HTTPS connection here (shown in Step 4). The default method for connecting would be via HTTP; however, my Virtual Server Web site is configured to only allow SSL. If you’re looking for a simple way to set up SSL support for Virtual Server, take a look at the article, “Configure SSL for Virtual Server 2005 Using SelfSSL,” at thelazyadmin.com.

With Remote Desktop configured to launch IE and connect to the Virtual Server Administration Web site once you log on, you’ll see IE open up inside the Remote Desktop window once your login is authenticated. If you close IE, you’ll automatically be logged off from the RDP session.

With this approach, you’ll be able to access and work with the Virtual Server Administration Web site through a Remote Desktop connection. For some, seeing an application work correctly when run as a stand-alone program via RDP when it does not work in a normal RDP session, is considered nearly magical. Who knows? Maybe even David Blaine can show off a little RDP trickery as part of his street magic.

Chris Wolf, MCSE, MCT, CCNA, is an instructor with ECPI Technical College and a leading industry consultant and writer in the areas of enterprise storage, virtualization solutions and network infrastructure management…

Are Grid Computing & Virtualization Blending?

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The synergy between Grid computing and virtualization is becoming more and more apparent and is starting to find common ground in Linux.

At Novell’s Brainshare conference, virtualization is taking the spot light.  In fact, Dell made an announcement that it will offer Novell ZENworks for Linux servers.

Adam Fineberg’s (Levanta) view was reported by InfoWorld

Adam Fineberg (Vice President of Engineering at Levanta) sees specific technical reasons why Linux has become the most widely used OS for Grid environments:”Some of the key aspects of an operating system that you really need take advantage of in a Grid computing environment are the networking and file systems. The networking side is very important because of the large number of nodes, the need to quickly / easily add more nodes, exchange information between the nodes with low latency, as well as access shared storage systems and devices. Linux does very good ‘zero copy’ networking, meaning that once the data reaches the network stack, it doesn’t have to be copied again all the way through the rest of the operating system. That really keeps the networking efficient in Linux systems. With respect to file systems — because of the very strong interface that’s defined within Linux, there are a great number of file systems that are available for you. And that’s something that’s fairly unique to the Linux OS. Most of the operating systems don’t actually have a large number of file systems available for them, other than some standard ones like NFS. That makes it relatively easy to pick a file system that’s well-suited for your particular application. So having access to, for instance, XFS or JFS — which are two very high performance file systems that have good characteristics, but by the same token have very different implementations and therefore very different operating characteristics — you can optimize by choosing the file system that’s best suited for your application.”

The embracing of Linux by the Grid / Virtualization community boils down to being able to understand the boundary values of this set of complex use-case equations. Linux, being open source, lets you get at the raw OS kernel code. This gives you access to the “boundaries” of the OS, the way it interfaces to applications and the hardware. An intimate understanding of these boundary conditions are critical to Grid and Virtualization…

Read this full article at source.