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Red Hat, HP Achieve Top Virtualization Performance Spec.org Benchmark

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Red Hat, today announced that it has achieved a new record-setting SPECvirt_sc2010 virtualization performance benchmark in collaboration with partner HP based on the powerful Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor and HP ProLiant systems.

The SPECvirt virtualization benchmark measures the ability of a system to host virtual machines that are running a set of typical server applications and is modeled to look like a customer’s real environment.

The SPECvirt_sc2010 metric is derived from a combination of the performance of the virtualized applications, noting the number of virtual machines used in the test, and a Quality of Service (QoS) requirement.

The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 and its integrated KVM hypervisor and the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 has established new leading results – 7,424@456VMs and 76 tiles – setting the best virtual performance mark and highest number of tiles, or set of six virtual machines running an application, of any published SPECvirt result.

Including today’s record-setting result, 11 of the 18 published SPECvirt 2010 benchmark results published at Spec.org were achieved using KVM technology.

Red Hat Gains Gluster To Better Manage Explosion Of Big Data

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Red Hat, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster, Inc., a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for standardizing the management of unstructured data. With this $136 million cash acquisition, Red Hat tries to define a new baseline for how enterprise IT can better manages the explosion of big data, whether deployed on-premise or spanning into the public cloud. This helps Red Hat expanding into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, enabling it to deliver open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing.

“The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90’s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.”. Feel free to dive into the full take from Brian Steven on Gluster.

Founded in 2005, Gluster’s goal was to simplify storage using open source software and commodity hardware. The heart of Gluster is GlusterFS, a software-only, scale-out storage system. It allows enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performance, centrally-managed and globally-accessible storage pool. By combining commodity economics with a scale-out approach, customers can deploy abundant storage without compromising on cost, performance and manageability. Gluster has emerged as an innovative open source leader, relied upon by companies such as Pandora, Box.net and Samsung to efficiently manage large volumes of data.

“We are extremely pleased to be joining Red Hat,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “We believe this is a perfect combination of technologies, strategies and cultures and is a great development for our customers, employees, investors and community.  Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat.”
“Enterprises and service providers have struggled to manage their rapidly expanding unstructured data stores with conventional storage systems,” said Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of The 451 Group. “The scale out storage technology and expertise Red Hat is gaining from the acquisition of Gluster will serve as a powerful foundation for future public, private and hybrid storage clouds.”

In September 2008, Red Hat already acquired Qumranet, Inc. including its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) platform and SolidICE offering, a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which together presented a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers. With the addition of Gluster to KVM Red Hat now seems to aim at offering a cloud platform too. Interesting times ahead in the crowded cloud market.

Red Hat has agreed to acquire Gluster, a privately-held company, for approximately $136 million in cash. As part of the transaction, Red Hat will also assume unvested Gluster equity outstanding on the closing date and issue certain equity retention incentives.  The transaction is expected to close in October, subject to customary closing conditions.

Vyatta Network OS Now Available In Amazon AWS Cloud And For Red Hat KVM Environments

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Vyatta, which specializes in software-based networking for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, announced that its latest product release, Vyatta Network OS 6.3, is now available as an Amazon Machine Images (AMI), and that it will include compatibility with Red Hat Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisors.

With new AMI custom support packages, Vyatta Network OS 6.3 offers comprehensive network security for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Using Vyatta Network OS AMI, Amazon cloud customers can now build out secure multi-tier, multi-location architectures within Amazon VPC environments that include the same connectivity, network security and threat protection available from hardware devices in their enterprise datacenters.

Vyatta Network OS 6.3, the latest release of Vyatta’s on-demand networking software, provides IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers a way to secure and connect Red Hat KVM-based datacenters and clouds. The Vyatta Network OS for KVM adds a full virtual network security stack with enterprise-grade router, firewall, VPN, IPS, web filtering, QoS and more.

HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat And Others Form Open Virtualization Alliance

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BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE yesterday announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

The consortium will promote examples of customer successes, encourage interoperability and accelerate the expansion of the ecosystem of third party solutions around KVM, providing businesses improved choice, performance and price for virtualization.

The Open Virtualization Alliance will also provide education, best practices and technical advice to help businesses understand and evaluate their virtualization options.

The consortium complements the existing open source communities managing the development of the KVM hypervisor and associated management capabilities, which are driving technology innovations for customers virtualizing both Linux and Windows applications.

Members of the Open Virtualization Alliance have a common interest in supporting open virtualization, and are involved in the development, distribution, support, use, or other business interest in KVM or offerings which use it. By providing an open virtualization alternative, they are offering their clients choice and enabling them to select the ideal virtualization products for their business needs.

Cloud.com, a new Open Source Cloud management platform..

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With a domain like Cloud.com you are doomed to deliver something Virtualization related,

And today that plan became visible for the rest of the world, the company formerly known as VMOps , today emerges from stealth mode and announces that it will be rebranding to Cloud.com

We had a chat earlier this week with Peder Ulander who joined Cloud.com as chief marketing officer bringing more than 15 years of experience. Previously, Peter could be found at companies such as Sun Microsystems responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform. but also at other Open Source companies icluding MontaVista Software, the largest distributor of Linux for embedded devices, and Cobalt Networks, one of the early open source for networking companies, Cisco and Symantec.

Next to Peter the company also announced two other new additions to it’s management team

Kevin KLuge joins as vice president of engineering and previously served as vice president of engineering at Zimbra, an open source server software provider for email and collaboration, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and sold to VMware in 2009. Prior to Zimbra, Kluge was vice president of engineering at Corvigo, a leading anti-spam provider. Additionally, Kluge has held leadership positions at Openwave Systems, where he led engineering for multiple innovative products including instant messaging, voicemail and multi-media messaging services (MMS), Sun Microsystems and Portola Communications.

and Kyle MacDonald joins as chief evangelist having most recently served as vice president of corporate development and strategy for Hosting.com / Wachovia Capital Partners. Prior to this position, MacDonald held executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet and next generation service providers sector at Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2009. MacDonald also held the position of corporate technologist for software and strategic technology at AMD where he helped developed AMD’s software strategy and key strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, BEA, Adobe, EMC and Symantec.

The new team members join the team of CEO Sheng Liang, who founded the company in 2008. Liang has extensive experience in the technology industry and has served in a number of both technical and executive leadership roles. Prior to Cloud.com, Liang co-founded and served as CTO of Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Sheng also was a member of the senior management teams at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, and was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

Cloud.com also lets the Virtual world know that it closed a $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million

Apart from its new name, management and funding Cloud.com today also announced their product : CloudStack,
an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of private and public cloud services. They provide an integrated software solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which comes in three distinct versions: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition and CloudStack Community Edition.

CloudStack is the result of work started by VMops in 2008 and is already being used in productions by some key customers.

Next to the expected features such as definition, deployment and management of cloud devices, CloudStack also adds metering to the feature list, so billing can be done based on actual usage of the public , private or hybrid deployments.

About the Open Source release availabel on Cloud.com tells us :
The CloudStack Community Edition is distributed under the General Public License 3 (GPL3). The Community Edition offers a leading open source software stack integrated with the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors, and can be deployed with Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. With its simple to install software package, Cloud.com is a fully integrated binary that enables developers to quickly and easily build, manage and deploy IaaS clouds.

There is a lot of competition in the Open Source Cloud and Virtualization management area, Corporate OpenQRM just being relaunched by Matt Rechenburg, Eucalyptus these days being managed by Marten Mickos and Abiquo just having opened a new office in the US, … and this all seems just like the start

So I`m keen to follow this one … and I’ll be having a closer look at the Cloud.com platform in our lab soon.

Does Shift happen ?

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Last week’s announcement of RHEL 6 Beta not including Xen anymore probably is the start of a new era in open source virtualization. While the signs were on the wall since RedHat acquired Qumranet it has never been more visible.

The tone has been set …in the same week RedHat announces RHEL6 Beta with only KVM support, Canonical announces 12000 UEC Deployments. UEC is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud , it’s their Eucalyptus implementation, or should we say integration ?
12000 deployments of UEC sounds like a lot, maybe a bit too much to believe today … ,

It’s probably too early to say that there are more KVM than Xen deployments today (certainly taking into account Amazon’s giant Xen deployments ) , but when talking to different ISP’s and Cloud Vendors you feel that there is a trend towards preferring KVM over Xen.

The biggest argument for KVM today is the fact that you can turn any recent Linux box into a Virtual Machine container with a couple of comands. The fact that KVM is part of the Linux Kernel and doesn’t require you to add extra components to your distibution makes it a lot easier to deploy and validate as opposed to a Xen setup that still needs extra changes and isn’t in the main kernel.

Today main reason why people are still considering Xen in some projects is legacy hardware not having a VT chipset yet … lots of older hardware can be put to good use with the performance that Xen’s paravirtualization brings .

When given choice of KVM / Xen or VirtualBox for their future Open Source virtualization deploymetns, Almost 50% of the people questioned plan on using KVM for their next deployment, as opposed to only about 30% planning to use Xen.

So at first KVM was being ignored, then being laughed at for not being a dedicated hypervisor but being part fo the Operating System .. and now apparently it’s time for the fight … and what a fight .

With much sadness we read Simon Crosby’s FUDitorial about RedHat’s KVM adoption.

When people start calling OEL a “superior enterprise version of RHEL” a red light starts flashing for me , so is Oracle planning to acquire Citrix any time soon ? As the only way to explain Simon talking about RHEL not being available for download and no sources being availble at all, I can think off is that he is already thinking about how to please his next employer.. Simon’s reaction tries to make the RedHat move look insignificant for some, for others it might be the drop that makes them really switch to KVM as it clearly is full of FUD regarding to RedHat

Oracle was betting heavily on Xen, Sun was also putting a lot of effort into xVM, however the Sun xVM effort seems to wander off towards more VirtualBox efforts. Obviously Citrix won’t head towards KVM anyh time soon .. but the big question is .. what will the masses do ?