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Eucalyptus Set To Launch With $5.5 Million In Series A Funding

April 29, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Eucalyptus Systems, creators of an open source private cloud platform, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating.

The funding marks the launch of Eucalyptus Systems as a private company that will build and service enterprise-grade products based on the Eucalyptus open source privatecloud software. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus cloud platform and to deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a “cloud” that is controlled and customized by local IT. Moreover, a local cloud based on Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.

Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each. To assist customers with setup, deployment, training, and support, Eucalyptus Systems has created the QuickStart program, the ideal first step for organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives.

The Eucalyptus management team includes Co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins, Co-founder and CTO Dr. Rich Wolski, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Reid, and the team of Ph.D. computer science engineers from the Eucalyptus project at UCSB. In addition, Andreas Von Blottnitz, former CEO of AOL Europe and Citrix Online, is chairman of the board, and Dr. Klaus Schauser, founder of AppFolio and founder and CTO of Citrix Online, is serving as an advisor.

To date, Eucalyptus has been downloaded over 14,000 times in 72 countries. In addition, Eucalyptus software is the cloud computing engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (powered by Eucalyptus), which was recently announced as part of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Eucalyptus will ship with every copy of Ubuntu, starting with the Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, made available on April 23.

Filed Under: Funding Tagged With: Benchmark Capital, BV Capital, cloud computing, eucalyptus, Eucalyptus cloud platform, eucalyptus systems, open source private cloud platform, private cloud, private cloud platform, Rich Wolski, ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, ubuntu enterprise cloud, Ubuntu Linux, virtualisaiton, virtualization, woody rollins

Karma Koala

March 8, 2009 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

With all the fuzz around Cannes.. oh wait .. nothing happened there.. that was the most boring event ever wasn’t it … we forgot to focus on where the real action is happening …

When the 9.10 Ubuntu Release, Karmic Koala, hits the wire it will be Cloud Ready or Virtualization ready or whatever you want to call it. Ubuntu wants to keep Open Source and Free software where it belongs, the key components of Cloud Computing. We have to agree that it are the Open Source Hypervisors that are the being used in the fundaments of Cloud Computing.

Ubuntu will be embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2 and will make it easier for every body to build their own Private Clouds using Open Source tools. Ubuntu-vmbuilder allows you to create a custom AMI , however they also provide a set of standard images to be used. Apart from deploying Ubuntu instances on the existing clouds, Karma Koala will live very happy in his favourite Eucalyptus trees

In Plain English, Ubuntu has recently welcomed the Eucalyptus framework in it’s software repositories, and it will be part of the upcoming release 9.4 already. (Eucalyptus being the open-source infrastructure for implementing Elastic Cloud computing using computing clusters which has an interface-compatible that is with Amazon.com’s EC2 which we covered earlier)

Now if you remember Ubuntu was one of the first Linux distributions to go for KVM rather than Xen, given its desktop-oriented nature. Amazon build it’s infrastructure on Xen. So Originally Eucalyptus was a mostly Xen supporting Framework, but lots of things have changed and today Eucalyptus supports both Xen, KVM and VMWare mostly using LibVirt, making it hypervisor-agnostic.

Filed Under: Guest Posts, News Tagged With: cloud, eucalyptus, Koala, kvm, libvirt, ubuntu, vmware, Xen

Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition Focuses On Virtualization

October 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

On Thursday, Ubuntu Linux distribution organization Canonical flipped the switch on free public downloads of Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition, both of which will be supported for 18 months.

Improvements to Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition focus on virtualization, Java development, system management, and email security. It includes a Virtual Machine builder with which developers can construct customized virtual images, which is based on the most recent version of the Just Enough Operating System (JeOS).

Java developers now have the option of using Apache Tomcat 6.0 and OpenJDK, and ClamAV and SpamAssassin have been added to the main repository to handle anti-spam and anti-virus tasks.

Earlier this week in a conference call with reporters, Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu distribution organization Canonical, said the company has yet to turn a profit, but he plans to continue funding it for an additional three to five years.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Canonical, Canonical Ubuntu, linux, ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition, Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition, Ubuntu Linux, virtualisation, virtualization

Virtualization Workloads, a comparative study in Open Source environments

August 7, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

At the Ottawa Linux Symposium, Benoit de Lingeris and his team from Revolution Linux presented their paper “Virtualization of Linux Server, a comparative study“, mostly the work of Fernando L. Camargos in pursuit of his Masters degree in Computer Science.

They looked at VirtualBox, Xen, KVM, OpenVZ, LinuxVServer and KQemu in an 64bit mode for all tests where possible (hence not for VirtualBox). Their Host OS was Ubuntu 7.10 and the VM’s were Ubuntu 6.06.

It’s pretty obvious that virtualization creates a little overhead, the bigger question however is how much overhead? What’s the penalty when virtualizing an environment? They focused on several aspects, the first one was just trying to figure out what impact the addition of a hypervisor had on an environment.
The second one how many virtual machines one could run in a virtualized environment.

They ran their tests multiple times and the results presented where averages of these tests.

In the first set of tests, impact of the hypervisor compared to the real native machine, they started of with a Linux Kernel compilation workload.

Here Linux Vserver lost almost no performance closely followed by Xen and then OpenVZ. Compared to native machine speed Both VirtualBox and (K)Qemu scored below 50%.
Their second test was file compressions. Here most of the environments scored around 85-95% native speed except from KQemu and OpenVZ.

The Samba team brought us dbench, “dbench is a filesystem benchmark that generates load patterns similar to those of the commercial Netbench benchmark, but without requiring a lab of Windows load generators to run. It is now considered a de-facto standard for generating load on the Linux VFS.”
Here LinuxVserver outscales the rest , Linux VServer scores good here as they use directly the IO drivers of the system where as others don’t. Xen is second best in this test but the other frameworks really need some work done here.

If you want to do low level data copy on UNIX obviously dd is your favorite tool. For the same reasons as above Linux-Vserver scores good here. The strange thing however is that it scores better than Native speed. When copying an existing file Xen and KVM are a good second but OpenVZ seemed to need some work. Another interesting fact is that KQemu and VirtualBox failed the test. When copying data from /dev/zero KVM scores better.

During the test the block devices were backed by different technologies , for Vserver it was a native disk , for Xen a file. Off course this doesn’t give equally good results. Different options for tuning are available here. Still a good advise, do not virtualize your fileserver.

When looking at network IO performance the team opted to use netperf for the test. VirtualBox, Linux-Vserver, Xen and OpenVZ all score good here. The performance of KQemu and KVM were a disaster.
When testing an Rsync with different filesizes OpenVZ scored best and most of the other tools performed around 80% native machine speed , except for KVM that seemed to have more problems with 1 big file than with different small ones. The good scores of VirtualBox are because of their modified IP stack and their efforts there obviously were worth the time…

So they covered, compiling, disk IO, network IO, obviously we want to know a bit about Database performance too. Revolution Linux chose Sysbench for this test. Again good scores for Linux-Vserver and xen , less for the rest

With strange Looks from the OpenVZ people in the audience they concluded that Linux-Vserver has excellent performance and has presented minimal overhead , off course Linux-VServer and OpenVZ are still chroots on steroids, not full virtualization solution. According to Revolution Linux Xen achieved great performance in most of the tests. KVM was fairly good for full virtualization but didn’t perform well for applications relying on I/0

As mentioned earlier apart from the overhead tests Revolution Linux also set to test the scalability , Only 2 tests here kernel compilation and Sysbench performed with n ( n = 1 , 2, 4,8 ,16 and 32) instances .

If they looked at the Number of Transactions globally per host , so spread over the different Virtual Machines) Xen is the best perform it actually reached a higher total throughout with 32 virtual machines than wit 1 vm, peaking at 4-8 VM’s.

With their new benchmark Kernels Compiled per hour , they only have results for Vserver and Xen. With 1 VM both VServer build around 10-11 Kernels per hour , and as of 2/4 VM’s they go up to 20. Xen keeps pace up to 16 VM’s and then slows down.

So obviously there is a very strong correlation between the performance of a machine and the number of instances in that machine.
Also here Linux-Vserver scores better than average with Xen as a good alternative for bare metal Virtualization.

Their conclusions: It has to be said that Revolution Linux is a Linux-VServer shop , and that’s where their preference goes. If they have to be able to run different kernels they seem to prefer Xen.

Generally speaking it seems lots of optimization could be done for different setups. often other than the default setups could help a technology gain a significant boost in performance.

Different network setups ,using specific network stacks ,
or different disk backends (real disk vs file based backends) a lot can change with tuning and installation by experience people.
The tests also have been performed about 6 months ago .. which means that today the results might probably be a lot different.

Filed Under: Guest Posts, News Tagged With: kvm, linuxvserver, ols, openvz, Ottawa Linux Symposium, revolutionlinux, ubuntu, VirtualBox, virtualization, workload, Xen

How to … spend your weekend

August 1, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Virtualization is obviously becoming a better and better documented topic.

Over at UbuntuGeek.com is a fresh HOWTO on installing VirtualBox 1.6 in ad Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron setup, including USB Support.

Over at the other side of the Linux Distribution Spectrum, Falko Timme at How to Forge documents how to install and use OpenVZ on Centos 5.2.

So if you don’t feel like playing outside this weekend, you know what to do 🙂

Filed Under: Guest Posts Tagged With: CentOS, CentOS 5.2, falko timme, guide, Hardy Heron, How to Forge, howto, openvz, tutorial, ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, VirtualBox, VirtualBox 1.6, virtualisation, virtualization

Virtual Bridges Upgrades Win4Lin Desktop, Releases Win4Solaris Desktop 5

June 6, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtual Bridges announced today the release of a major upgrade to its Win4Lin Desktop product and a specially priced edition for Ubuntu users. Version 5 of its desktop virtualization system features performance increases that it claims beat the likes of VMware Workstation and other competitors in the growing desktop virtualization market.

VirtualBridges

Win4Lin Desktop 5 is based on code that has been re-engineered since 2005, when the assets of the former company NeTraverse were acquired to form Win4Lin, now renamed Virtual Bridges. The new verison includes support for 64-bit Linux and its architecture capable of interfacing with KVM.

Virtual Bridges has created a special Win4Lin Desktop 5 Ubuntu Edition, which they are offering for $29.99.

These are the major Features of Win4Lin Desktop Products, according to the news release:

  • Runs virtually all Windows applications from Microsoft, Intuit, Adobe, and most others, including in-house developed applications
  • Compatible with the latest Linux desktops (Ubuntu, Fedora, Open SuSE, Mandriva, and more)
  • A new Win4Lin Console for easy installation, backup, and management of Windows sessions
  • Share files and documents between Windows and Linux applications
  • Seamless printing from Windows
  • Easy access to files on flash drives, memory sticks, and digital photo cameras from Windows
  • Run Windows as a “desktop-in-a-box”, full-screen, or as “floating applications”
  • No need to understand complex virtual machine technology – Win4Lin does all the work for you

Win4Lin Desktop is being offered to users in two editions, Win4Lin Desktop 5 Ubuntu Edition and Win4Lin Desktop 5 Pro Edition. It is a no-cost update for Win4Lin Pro 4.5 users and is available here.

The company has also released Win4Solaris Desktop 5, also in two editions; Win4Solaris Desktop 5 Home Edition and Win4Solaris Desktop 5 Pro Edition.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: NeTraverse, ubuntu, Virtual Bridges, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMWare Workstation, Win4Lin, Win4Lin Desktop, Win4Lin Desktop 5, Win4Lin Desktop 5 Ubuntu Edition, Win4Lin Desktop Product, Win4Lin Ubuntu, Win4Solaris, Win4Solaris Desktop 5

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