kvm

The End of Neverland, What Neverland ?

November 14, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

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.

The Future of Xen At Red Hat

October 28, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

As you might know, most of the development for the upcoming Red Hat releases is happening in the Fedora project, so if you want to keep an eye on what’s going to happen in future RedHat releases Fedora is a good place to look.

Reuven pointed out that the next Fedora release (Fedora 10) won’t have Dom0 support.

This however is not yet the strategic decision from Redhat after buying Qumranet and thus KVM. But merely a lack of time before the release has to ship.

Xen typically is being developed with an older 2.6.18 Linux kernel release and forward porting of these features is a time consuming effort. The typical kernel-xen package in Fedora has always been a bit behind on the kernel package
So the slow introduction of paravirt_ops, is keeping Dom0 support out of Fedora 10.

The idea behind paravirt_ops is to build a kernel structure that gives an interface to a virtualization layer, any virtualization layer, it allows the kernel to run on both a hypervisor and the actual hardware. Initial support for Xen, VMware and KVM is available.

Today running Fedora 10 as a host for your virtual machines will give you KVM as your only option. However Fedora 11 should solve that problem again. But then again, you probably don’t want to be running Fedora in a production environment, RedHat Enterprise or CentOS 5 are a much more viable alternative

RedHat Picks Up Qumranet

September 4, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 5 Comments

According to Globes, RedHat has acquired Qumranet (confirmed via press release)

“Redhat announced its acquisition of Israeli virtualization start-up Qumranet Inc. for about $100 million, ending a long period of rumors. This is Red Hat’s first acquisition in Israel, and it will turn the Linux software company into a market leader in virtualization. Qumranet will become Red Hat’s R&D center in Israel.”

Best known Qumranet co-founders are Benny Schnaider, Moshe Bar, Both are well known, with track records ath Cisco ,PentaCom and P-Cube, and more interesting Qlusters and XenSource (now Citrix)

“Benny Schaider, and Moshe Bar are expected to head Red Hat’s Israeli R&D after the acquisition. Qumranet has 65 employees worldwide, mostly R&D staff in Israel. The company has raised $20 million in two financing rounds from its founders, Sequoia Capital, Northwest Venture Partners, and Cisco. The company still has cash from its latest financing round, which was held in January. ”

This shines a totally different light on the irrational discussion if RedHat should be Acquired by VMWare .

RedHat now owns one of the fastest growing Virtualization technologies around : KVM
RedHat had already chosen for stronger support of KVM, but with todays evolution one has to start thinking about the future of Xen in the leading Linux distribution. In one day RedHat stepped from being just an integrator of different virtualization technologies to one of the leading Virtualization Vendors.

IBM launches the open-ovf project

August 14, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Scott Moser from IBM’s Systems Technology Group has released the first version of the open-ovf project. OVF is a standard packaging format for virtual machines and software appliances. The open-ovf project is seeking contributors and users to help establish OVF as a transparent and platform-neutral method for packaging virtual machine images.

The goal of open-ovf is to be able to deploy a single OVF package to either Xen or KVM.
Eventually expanding that list to include VMware, Hyper-V, and other platforms. For that goal they are looking at community contributions. A good start might be the qemu-img tool that already knows how to convert between different formats.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has defined a vendor-neutral standard for packaging virtual appliances enabling automated installation, configuration and activation of any virtualization platform. The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for packaging

For a summary of OVF and the open source project, see the presentation from the recent Xen summit
The open-ovf project is hosted on sourceforge and the source code is available from it’s git repository

Qumranet Announces Craig Bauman as Vice President of Sales and Channel Chief

August 7, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Qumranet, with its hosted desktop virtualization product, Solid ICE, announced that Craig Bauman has joined the company as the vice president of sales and channels. Bauman will be responsible for launching the Qumranet Partner Program and leading the sales organization through its recent grow th stage.

Buaman joins Qumranet from TriActive. Prior to joining TriActive, Bauman was an enterprise sales director at Microsoft responsible for sales of the Windows enterprise management products in the U.S. and Canada driving sales growth. Bauman was also a key stakeholder in driving Microsoft’s acquisitions of AssetMetrix and Softricity.

Additionally, he has held sales leadership roles at Altiris (now Symantec) assisting
in the successful IPO and helping to grow the company from $10 million to $200 million revenues, along with a 300 percent increase in partner-led sales.

“Since launching Solid ICE several months ago, and with interest in desktop virtuali
zation soaring, it’s vital to get the right people in place to take advantage of these opportunities,” said Rami Tamir, president and co-founder, Qumranet. “Craig has been a major contributor to the virtualization and systems management industry and we
are honored to have him join our team.”

Qumranet is also the maintainer of the open source virtualization project KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)