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IBM

Looking Back At A Decade of Open Source Virtualization

March 10, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 3 Comments

Will 2008 become the “Virtual Year”?

That’s what some people would have us believe now that the virtualization hype is reaching never before seen heights, and large acquisitions & mergers are starting to become quite common (Citrix bought Xensource, Novell picked up PlateSpin, Sun acquired innotek, Quest Software snapped up Vizioncore while VMware treated itself to Thinstall, and so on).

But few people realize or fail to acknowledge that the large majority of virtualization techniques and developments were started as, or remain Open Source projects.

Where are we coming from ?

Even without looking back, we know that IBM was one of the pioneers in the virtualization area; they were talking about Virtual Machines before I was even born. But who remembers one of the first Open Source virtualization takeovers? Back in 1999, Mandrake Software bought Bochs . Yes, that’s nineteen ninety nine, even before the y2k hype. Kevin Lawton had been working on the Bochs project together with different other developers since 1994. In 1999, he also had started working on Plex86, also known as FreeMWare.

Kevin back then compared Plex86 to other tools such as VMWare, Wine, DOSEMU and Win4Lin. Plex86 in the meanwhile has been totally reinvented. While at first it was capable of running almost all operating systems, it is now a very light virtual machine designed only to run Linux.

Wine was also a frequently covered topic at different Linux Kongress venues. As its initiators claim themselves, Wine is not an emulator, but it most certainly used to be a key player in the virtualization area. Its attempts to run non-native applications in a different operating system, in this case mostly Windows applications on a Linux platform, didn’t exactly pass by unnoticed.

However, installing VMWare or Qemu became such an easier alternative than trying to run an application with Wine. And Win4Lin, its commercial brother, had similar adoption issues. Corporate adoption for neither Wine nor Win4Lin was successful, and Win4Lin recently reinvented itself as a Virtual Desktop Server product, where it is bound to face a lot of stiff competition.

People who claim desktop virtualization was ‘born in 2007’ obviously missed part of history. Although most Unix gurus claim desktop virtualization has been around for several decades via the X11 system, the Open Source alternatives to actually do the same on different platforms (or cross-platform) have also been around for a while.

Who has never heard of VNC, the most famous product that came out the Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL) in Cambridge, England? VNC was one of the first tools people began to use to remotely access Windows machines. System administrators who didn’t feel like running Windows applications on their Unix desktop just hid an old Windows desktop under their desk and connected to it using VNC. It was also quickly adopted by most desktop users as a tool to take over the desktop of a remote colleague. After the Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory closed different spin-offs of VNC such as RealVNC , TightVNC and UltraVNC popped up.. and it’s still a pretty actively used tool.

But VNC wasn’t the only contender in the field. Back in 2003, I ran into NX for the very first time , written by the Italian folks from NoMachine , with a FreeNX release co-existing alongside a commercial offering. It was first claimed to be yet another X reinvention, however NX slightly modified the concept and eliminated the annoying X roundtrips. The fact that NX used proxies on each side of the connection guaranteed that it could function even on extremely slow connections.

In the early days of this century, there was some confusion between UML and UMLinux. While Jeff Dike called his User-mode Linux the port of Linux to Linux, it was in essence a full blown Linux kernel running as a process on another Linux machine.

Apart from UML, there was UMLinux, also a User Mode Linux project, featuring a UML linux machine which booted using Lilo and from which an out-of-the-box Linux distribution could be installed. Two projects, one on each side of the Atlantic, with both a really similar goal and similar naming was simply asking for confusion. In 2003, the UMLinux folks decided to rebrand to FAUmachine. hence ending the confusion once and for all.

Research on virtualization wasn’t conducted exclusively in Germany; the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Washington was working on the lesser known Denali project. The focus of the Denali project is on lightweight protection domains; they are aiming at running 100s and 1000s VM’s concurrently on one single physical host.

And apparently, one project with a confusing name wasn’t enough. The Open Source community seemed desparate for more of that. Hence, the Linux-VServer project and Linux Virtual Server came around around the same time. The Linux Virtual Server actually hasn’t got that much to do with virtualization, at all. In essence, Linux Virtual Server is a load balancer that will balance TCP/IP connections to a bunch of other servers hence acting to the end user as one big High Performant and Highly Available Virtual Server. (The IPVS patch for Linux has been around since early 1999).

Linux VServer (released for the first time in late 2001) on the other hand provides us with different Virtual Private Servers that are running in different security contexts. Linux VServer will create different user space segments , so that each Virtual Private server looks like a real server and can only ‘see’ its own processes.

By then, Plex86 had a big competitor coming from France, where Fabrice Bellard was working Qemu. At first, Qemu was really a Machine Emulator. Much like Bochs (anyone still running AmigaOS?), you could create different virtual machines from totally different architectures. Evidently froml X86, but also from ARM, Sparc, PowerPC, Mips, m68k and even development versions for Alpha and alternative 64bit architectures. Qemu however was perceived by a lot of people as slow compared to other alternatives. There was an Accelerator module available providing an enormous performance boost, however that didn’t have such an open license as the rest of Qemu, which held back its adoption significantly. It was only about a year ago (early 2007) that the Accelerator module also became completely open source.

The importance of Qemu however should not be underestimated, as most of the current hot virtualization projects are borrowing Qemu knowledge or technology left and right. KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is the most prominent user of Qemu, but even VirtualBox, Xen (in HVM mode) and the earlier mentioned Win4Lin are using parts of Qemu.

As this is an overview of the recent Open Source Virtualisation history the focus has been on running virtual machines on Linux, or connecting to a remote platform from a Linux or Unix desktop, where most of the early developments have taken place. We shouldn’t fail to mention CoLinux in this regard, however. CoLinux allows you to run Linux as a Windows process, giving people on locked down desktops an alternative for VMWare to run Linux on their desktop.

Xen is with no doubt the most famous open source virtualization solution around, certainly after its acquisition by Citrix. Xen was conceived at the XenoServer project from the University of Cambridge, an initiative aiming to build an infrastructure for distributed computing and to create a place where one can safely execute potentially dangerous code in a distributed environment. Xen was first described in a paper presented at SOSP in 2003 but work on it began somewhere in 2001.

Next week, we’ll talk more about virtualization and open source with a detailed look at today’s landscape.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Posts Tagged With: 64bit, Accelerator, acquisitions, Alpha, ARM, bochs, citrix, CoLinux, denali, DOSEMU, faumachine, FreeMWare, freenx, IBM, Jeff Dike, Kevin Lawton, kvm, linux, linux kernel, Linux Kongress, Linux Virtual Server, Linux-VServer, m68k, Mandrake, Mips, nomachine, nx, Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory, open source, ORL, OS, Plex86, PowerPC, qemu, RealVNC, SOSP, sparc, TightVNC, UltraVNC, UML, UMLinux, Unix, User Mode Linux, virtual desktop, virtual machines, Virtual Private Server, VirtualBox, virtualisation, virtualization, vnc, Win4Lin, windows, wine, X11, X86, Xen, xenoserver, xensource

Preinstalled Hypervisors And The Future of Operating Systems

March 5, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Posts, People Tagged With: 451 Group, amd, Dell, fosdem, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, Hypervisor, Ian Pratt, IBM, jay lyman, John Abbott, Novell, operating systems, OS, red hat, The 451 Group, vmware, Xen, xensource

VMWare To Embed VMware ESX 3i Hypervisor Across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM Servers

February 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Today at VMWorld Europe 2008 (watch our video reports), VMware announced agreements to embed the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor in servers from Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP and IBM. System providers are expected to begin shipping servers embedded with the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor within the next 60 days.

vmware1.jpg

From the release:

“We are very excited to be partnering with Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM to proliferate virtualization and fast-track customers on the path to running a self-managing virtual datacenter,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “Customers can now get VMware pre-integrated and pre-configured for the hardware platform of their choice for immediate standalone server consolidation. As customers want to expand their adoption and get more value from virtualization, they can upgrade from the ESX 3i hypervisor to VMware’s complete datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3).”

“VI3 provides automatic load balancing, business continuity, power management and the ability to move a virtual machine across physical machines with no service interruption. In addition, customers who are already using VI3 can plug-and-play virtualization-enabled servers into their datacenters to dynamically and automatically expand the pool of resources (CPU, memory, and networking) available to meet their changing business requirements.”

Greene and other VMware executives highlighted the new VMware ESX 3i agreements with representatives from Dell, HP and IBM during today’s VMworld Europe general session keynote presentations. The presentations will be available via a recorded web cast (http://www.vmware.com/go/europe-webcast ) by 3:00 p.m. Central European Time and 9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today.

Filed Under: Featured, News, Partnerships Tagged With: Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, hardware, HP, IBM, server, servers, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMware ESX, VMware ESX 3i, VMware ESX 3i Hypervisor, VMWare ESX Server

Gartner: Server Market Doing Fine Until Further Notice

February 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

A new report from Gartner shows the server market did great during all of 2007, including the fourth quarter. Server shipments rose 11 % during the fourth quarter, while revenue rose almost 3 %. The world’s server vendors combined to ship 2.4 million boxes during the fourth quarter and brought in $ 15.5 billion for their efforts. In all of 2007, shipments rose 7 %, while revenue jumped 4 %. For the entire year, vendors moved more than 8.8 million units and generated $ 54.8 billion in revenue, according to Gartner.

virtualization-servers-datacenter.jpg

The rise of virtualization and the general economic slowdown, combined with trimmed budgets at the financial services companies, has left a lot of analysists proclaiming a big slowdown and even downfall in hardware sales. But so far, the sky seems blue.

Out of the top vendors, Hewlett-Packard enjoyed the strongest fourth quarter in terms of shipments. It grew 12 % year-over-year, while Dell grew at 9 %, IBM grew at 7 % and Sun declined by 6 %. Fujitsu-Siemens also enjoyed a super quarter with 18 % growth.

Vendor Q4 Shipments Gain/Loss
1) HP 702,100 12%
2) Dell 499,687 8.8%
3)IBM 372,701 7.4%
4)Sun 84,778 -6.3%
5)Fujitsu/Siemens 75,882 17.9%

Almost all of the vendors saw their revenue rise during the fourth quarter. IBM stood out as the lone laggard, despite it talking an awful lot lately about how strong its server business is.

Vendor Revenue Gain/Loss
1) IBM $5.3bn -0.8%
2)HP $4.4bn 7.6%
3)Dell $1.6bn 4.1%
4)Sun $1.49bn 1.0%
5)Fujitsu/Siemens $616k 2.1%

For the full year, HP stood out with 17 % growth in shipments, leading the herd. Sun was the biggest loser, dropping 8.3 %. In revenue, Dell was the main gainer, showing sales growth of 13.2 %. HP notched 9 % growth as well, while the rest of the vendors were in the low single digits.

Everyone moved a ton of x86 boxes and benefited from double-digit growth in terms of shipments. HP, Fujistu-Siemens and Sun had double-digit revenue growth as well, while Dell came in at 4 % and IBM hit 7 % growth.”Blade servers continue to be a high-growth segment with a revenue increase of 44.5 % and a shipment increase of 19.9 % for the year,” Gartner said. “HP was the 2007 leader with blades at a 41.7 % shipment share, with IBM being in second place at 30.9 %. These two vendors continued to dominate this form factor and totaled almost 78 % of the worldwide blade revenue share for 2007.”

[Source and tables: The Register]

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, gartner, growth, hardware, Hewlett Packard, HP, IBM, research, server, server market, server sales, server shipments, sun, sun microsystems, virtualisation, virtualization

IBM Takes Virtual Servers Into Virtual Worlds

February 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IBM has long been fascinated with the potential of 3-D virtual worlds and has now taken the next step and created actual 3-D virtual worlds that enterprise companies can use to manage their existing data centers or design new ones, as announced today by the company.

virtualization-ibm.gif

IBM’s new 3-D Data Center software can create a 3-D replica of servers, racks, networking, power and cooling equipment that communicates with real-world equipment to provide managers with a centralized view of IT operations. The environment is based on the OpenSimulator project and IBM middleware known as the Holographic Enterprise Interface (HEI), which can communicate with building automation systems to replicate physical data center operations in the virtual world.

Is this another novelty experiment in virtual worlds by corporate America, or has IBM found a killer business application for 3D gaming technology? IBM notes that the 3-D Data Center (PDF) can recreate two or more remote data centers, but is a multi-user virtual world, complete with in-world 3D messaging.

“Viewing information about your data center in 2-D text – even in real time – only tells a data center manager part of the story, because our brains are wired for sight and sound,” said IBM Researcher Michael Osias, who architected the 3-D data center service. “By actually seeing the operations of your data center in 3-D, even down to flames showing hotspots and visualizations of the utilization of servers allows for a clearer understanding of the enterprise resources, better informed decision-making and a higher level of interaction and collaboration.”

IBM has given data center managers the ability to replicate their data center assets in an environment much like World of Warcraft, and then work together to manage the environment – kind of like conducting a raid on a heating and cooling challenge. The technology has arrived. Do data center managers want this?

IBM is ready to find out (although it’s not announcing pricing). It will be interesting to track the progress of the 3-D Virtual Data Center and see if new client announcements follow.

[Source: DatacenterKnowledge]

Filed Under: Featured, News, People Tagged With: 3-d, 3-D Data Center, 3-D Virtual Data Center, 3d, Holographic Enterprise Interface, IBM, Michael Osias, OpenSimulator, virtual worlds, virtualisation, virtualization

IBM announces virtualization management tool

November 3, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtualization Manager

Stephen Shankland at CNET  reported on IBM announcing a new management software to govern many types of virtual machines. IBM’s Virtualization Manager is a dashboard that lets administrators take actions such as allocating computing resources to virtual machines. The software can control IBM’s own System p and System i servers as well as x86 servers running VMware, Xen and Microsoft virtualization foundations.It’s part of the Tivoli Systems Director package. One customer is Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, a German engineering and science research group, which is using the software to manage 2,000 servers, some using Xen and VMware.

Read more at source CNET 

Filed Under: News Tagged With: IBM, Tivoli Systems Director, virtualisation, virtualization, virtualization management, Virtualization Manager, vmware, Xen

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