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Video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Virtualization Director at HP (Part 1/4)

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In this first part of our lengthy video interview (4 parts) with Nick Van Der Zweep, Director for Virtualization at HP, we get introduced to how HP defines virtualization as flowing computing resources around and how this drops your costs and increases agility from desktop virtualization to data center virtualization and storage.

The interview was recorded at the HP headquarters in Cupertino, where Nick is often asked by financial analysts: ‘Is virtualization bad for your business?”. His clear answer is “NO”, as it unlocks the potential for businesses to do more and enables HP to sell a lot more robust configurations with a larger amount of condensed CPUs, much more memory, more I/O capability, etc.

Nick also shines a light on the future of virtualization, which will have (mostly free) hypervisors as a commodity. What really unlocks virtualization however is the management software and related automation capabilities. This is why HP bought and integrated a company like Opsware.

Apart from its top-range Integrity platform, with the HP-UX operating system, (deeply virtualized since 1999), HP is absolutely not entering the X86-market with a proprietary hypervisor. With products like Inside Dynamics, HP reaches into third party hypervisor software and manipulates those virtualization layers agnostically for multiple vendors. Nick is very happy with the excellent responsiveness from the X86 virtualization leaders and claims HP is the number one partner for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

Read the full transcript below.

0:12 Nick Van Der Zweep, welcome on Virtualization.com. You are the director for virtualizationat HP. We are at your Cupertino headquartersand you’ve got the longest job title I’ve come across in a while. I think that illustrates how disruptive this virtualization technology is to the industry. Could you tell us something more about that?

Van Der Zweep:  So virtualization for HP is all about pooling and sharing of resources so that the supply of resources can meet the demand from a business demand.  The idea is to move away from silos of resources, servers, networking, software, and storage, that is dedicated on an application by application basis, more to a pooled set of resources that can flow and ebb and flow to the application on demand.  You want to be able to do that automatically so that automatically when one application needs more resources, they automatically flow to it, although that’s scary for a large amount of IT organizations out there to have automatic reallocation of resources.  So at a minimum, you want to have the ability to just type in a command to reroute resources very, very quickly, instantaneously even, from one place to another.  So virtualization  to us is everything from desktop virtualization, to data center virtualization, storage, etc.  But ultimately, it’s all about flowing those resources around, dropping your costs, increasing your agility.

1:43 What types of virtualization does HP support?

Van Der Zweep:  Well, we’re investing heavily in all aspects of virtualization.  Like I said, desktop to data center, desktop virtualization, thin clients, storage virtualization, that started years ago and it’s back into a renaissance again with some of the capabilities that are out there.  Server raid virtualization absolutely top of mind, to folks as well, the software, software virtualization, management software around it.  So, all the technology aspects for sure and then services because this is new to a large amount of companies.  So services, plan for it, plan consolidation, data center transformations, implement the technologies, help people through cultural changes as they move to a shared environment as well. Because that’s another probably one of the biggest sticky factor as well is you’ve got to move to a mode where you’re sharing with your co-workers, your infrastructure instead of having dedicated and that’s a bit of a wall sometimes.

02:51 I’m interested to know if virtualization was expected to lower hardware sales because people are finally going to be better utilizing their hardware.  But it turns out that it’s actually quite good for hardware sales and HP is one of the ones that has benefited of this movement. Which elements does one need to get better performing hardware to do  virtualization the right way?

Van Der Zweep:  Yeah, classic question that we hear all the time. Usually the question is not from technical people, but from the financial analysts and goes “is this bad for your business”?  But it absolutely is good and this even goes back to ’98 when I was doing the consolidation program.  People would ask, is this bad for you business?  It isn’t.  It’s good, because it unlocks the potential for businesses to do more and because they are frustrated because they have a hundred projects to do but they can only afford a certain amount of infrastructure and a certain amount of projects so this really allows them to do a lot more.  And then from a net-net to HP we see a lot more robust configurations going out the door, so a larger amount of CPUs within it, much, much more memory within the systems, more I/O capability so there are very much richer systems that they can run many applications on top.

4:11 It’s more condensed, more cores.

Van Der Zweep:  More cores and more memory.  Memory is a big one; more I/O is a big one.  And then because virtualization causes a lot of sprawl as well—virtualization sprawl.  While you might have had a hundred servers before you install virtualization, you go to twenty servers but, pretty quickly, you’ve got 200 images of OSes running, so you need better management software to manage that ecosystem, where as you might have done it manually before.  You’ve got to put in management software, virtualization management and then automation comes into play.  Hence, things like our investment in automation, in buying companies like Opsware as well.

4:56  Where do you think virtualization is headed?

Van Der Zweep:  You know that’s an interesting one.  I think it’s going to move fast.  It’s been moving fast.  I don’t think it’s going to slow down.  To a large extent the hypervisors are going to commoditize.  People are seeing a lot of that moving on.

5:13 Prices are dropping or even free.

Van Der Zweep:  Prices are dropping, free open source, a lot of activity in that space.  Management software virtualization or management software automation is what really unlocks virtualization.  Those core hypervisors give some basic functionality but that software really unlocks the power to deliver, reduce cost, better agility, and high availability—those types of things.  That is where the value is showing up.  So we’re going to see a lot more of that.To be honest I don’t think there’s anybody in the industry that can really predict what it’s going to look like in five or six years because this thing is moving so fast that if anybody says, “I can tell you exactly where virtualization is going,” I just walk away, because it’s going to change dramatically again over the next number of years as well.

6:10  HP hasn’t built its own hypervisor.  You chose to offer your clients the choice between VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V.  You ship them with the hardware?

Van Der Zweep:  It’s actually a combination. We do have our own hypervisor for our Integrity platform, so on that platform we have an HP-UX operating system, the partitioning, hypervisor, management software, and we deeply virtualized back since 1999-2000.  In the X86 space, we absolutely are not entering the market with the hypervisor.  VMware is out there and Microsoft is out there with virtual server but Hyper-V is if it’s not today it’s soon to be generally available.Citrix, acquiring XenSource and the other Xen open source environments and Linux with KVM.  There is plenty of work going on in the hypervisor space.  We are trying to enable on top of that, add management to be on top that.  Our products like HP Insight Dynamics-VSE reach into and manipulate and use VMware’s software and manipulate that virtualization layer.

7:23:  How happy are you with the support of these partners?  VMware and Xen service or technology partners?

Van Der Zweep:  So they’re very responsive us and we’ve got a very good relationship with them.  We’re the number one partner of VMware in the industry, the number one partner of Microsoft in the industry, and the number one partner of Citrix in the industry.  So they tend to jump when we give them a call saying, “Hey we’re looking at integrated hypervisors or building management software around it.”  They know they get a huge addressable market by working very, very close with us.  So they’ve been very responsive.

HP

Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview – 2/2)

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In this second part of our video interview with Rich Wolski (see the first part here), recorded at the O’Reilly Velocity conference, we learn how Eucalyptus came around the Amazon subscription method, where credit cards are the key to authentication. Offering ‘free and open’ clouds in university environments was achieved by introducing a system administrator in between the user account request and the issuing of certificates. Upon user request, the Eucalyptus user subscription interface generates an e-mail to an administrator, who will then perform a ‘manual’ verification. This can be a phone call or a physical meeting.


Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski on open source cloud computing, Xen and Amazon’s EC2 (part 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Users did not like Rocks (leading open source cloud management tool), but the community (in smaller community/ deployment supports) preferred to do this manually. So Eucalyptus 1.1 provides Guidance, a script to build from scratch by hand.

A ‘build with one button’ remains the goal for future versions.

The full Eucalyptus image is only 55 Mb (without Linux image) and includes the necessary packages in order to make sure all of the revision-levels are fully compatible. Eucalyptus comes as Free BSD Open-Source license with a small disclaimer that the University of Santa Barbara explicitly wants to avoid any intellectual property infringements and will take necessary steps if needed.

Virtualization is supported by Xen 3.1 for security sake (3.0 works too, but is discouraged).

Lessons learned in building clouds from open source are quite rare. Here are a few from Rich:

Unlike commercial environments (where one controls the configuration, hardware purchase and networking), the architectural decisions are very different in open source environment, where one does not know the installation. One of the current challenges is to build a system depending on the control you have over your specific installation, you could successfully remove more of the portability from the system as you needs fit.

A second lesson is that people do things by hand and this is an opportunity for automation. Nobody is deploying Linux manually, instead sys admin use distributions. Shouldn’t there be a similar cloud distribution product out there? The people at Puppet were eager to help on providing such scripts for cloud deployments. According to Rich, this illustrates how O’Reilly should be credited for creating a good atmosphere at the Velocity 08 conference where a lot of cross-fertilization happened.

Rich ends the interview by throwing a fundamental question at the cloud community. He classifies current cloud initiatives on a scale based on the ‘closeness’ of the application layer to the cloud API. At the one end of this spectrum, he puts Google Apps (with Python oriented function calls) and at the other end Amazon EC2 (a set of very simple web service interfaces to the underlying virtualization technology) and all other cloud offerings float in between. This impacts what you can do with virtualization. Google AppEngine becomes your compiler on their end of the scale.

Rich wonders if this tighter link to the Google AppEngine will become a liability or an asset in the future when it comes to virtualization capabilities?

We invite you to provide your answers in the comments below!

Exclusive Video: VMware In A Nutshell, By Product Marketing Manager John Gilmartin

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So what’s VMware all about now on a technology level, now that their stock went tumbling and their CEO has been replaced? John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing at VMware answered our questions on virtualization in general and their strategy and product portfolio in particular.

After defining virtualization and virtual machines, John dives deeper into what drives prospective virtualization customers (infrastructure consolidation, high availability, business continuity, disaster recovery?). He also shares more on their recently announced VMsafe initiative, which allows trusted partners to ‘peak’ into a Virtual Machine and identify threats from the outside of the operating systems and the applications they try to protect.

John underlines that VMware is offering features far beyond the basic data center consolidation needs; such as life cycle management, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), automated provisioning, fail over, disaster recovery and optimize the management tasks for a virtual infrastructure.

All this is part of VMware’s from-desktop-to-datacenter portfolio and makes VMware feel confident and well positioned to compete with Hyper-V from Microsoft.

Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview – 1/2)

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A month ago we reported on how you can build your own open source cloud on clusters to make your personal cloud dreams come true!  Simply put your datacenter to use by ordering Xen virtualization on the Rocks and then carefully roll it in fresh Eucalyptus leaves.

In order to learn what makes these clouds tick, we have sent our enthusiastic cloud computing koala Toon Vanagt to San Francisco to interview Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski at the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Below, you can find the first part of this exclusive video interview (we’ll post the second part tomorrow).

Rich’s students came up with EUCALYPTUS, which stands for ‘Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems’ as an open-source tool for doing “cloud computing”. Their tool is designed to stimulate the development, interest, experiments and research into the nascent concept and industry of cloud computing.

Eucalyptus was build in a modular fashion, so it can “mimic” the interface of popular commercial clouds, like the one they started off with, Amazon EC2. The team plans support for several cloud interfaces as long as they are public and well documented.

Rich underlined that Eucalyptus is designed to experiment and not to compete with industrial strength clouds as Amazon EC2. Although with some engineering, one could take parts of Eucalyptus, mature those and scale to specific needs.

When asked about the underlying virtualization experience, Xen is seen as a very useful technology in ‘cloud’ regards. Rich complements Xen on being well documented and conceptually easy to understand and he looks back at the Xen selection as a good first hypervisor choice. Due to the nature of their specific use, parts of Xen would ‘break’ under load and were modified to meet certain stability needs.

As LibVert is used, Eucalyptus should in theory be relatively easy be able to support other hypervisors such as VMware and KVM. If no major wrinkles appear on the development surface, Eucalyptus therefore expects to support VMware and KVM with its 2.0 release, scheduled for early September 2008.

Rich supportively points to the Enomalism elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure. as an alternative open source virtualization system.

Security remains an issue but in some respects, accountability and authentication are an even bigger problem to the open source community than within commercial projects. “In an academic space, where you are not paying for usage, it is not a credit card that you are accounting to, but a user”. So Eucalyptus had to devise a user accounting system that is based on certificates. On top of that components should not be ‘spoofable’, as there is no message encryption in Eucalyptus (yet). Because these messages can be spoofed, Rich’s team had to take care of an open source implementation of Web Services Security to make sure the cloud controllers cannot be ‘fooled’ by malicious messages of doubtful origin.

The shortage of public IP addresses in university environments was solved by using the open source technology VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet). [VDE is an ethernet compliant virtual network that can be spawned over a set of physical computer over the Internet. You can see VDE as the software incarnation of a hardware network switch plus attached cables. Using the vde_switch and vde_plug programs you are able to create quite complex virtual analogies of a network that can span several hosts, even across the Internet.

By creating a virtual Ethernet for every cluster allocation and make that a set of user space processes can tunnel through NATs (Network Address Translation). As a downside to this VDE implementation comes a performance penalty. So Eucaluptus is offered with 2 flavors, linked to the SLA-nature in cloud computing. The first option uses the described very flexible ‘Virtual VLAN’ independent of IP-addresses. The second option bypasses VDE and is faster but less scalable as limits user requests to the confines of a single cluster.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish the second part of this exclusive interview. Stay tuned!

Video: Interview with Matt Rechenburg, Project Manager at OpenQRM on Virtualization

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This interview is part of our Virtualization Video Series, a recurring theme we want to implement on Virtualization.com featuring interviews with key players from the industry, event reports, etc. Our first interview was recorded at the Profoss 2008 event on Virtualisation and features Matt Rechenburg, Project Manager at openQRM, interviewed by Toon Vanagt about what he’s doing and how he looks at the future of virtualization.

You can find a written transcript of the interview below.

WRITTEN TRANSCRIPT

Welcome Matthias Rechenburg.
You are the Project Manager at OpenQRM. Could you tell us something more about the datacenter management platform you are building?

With OpenQRM, we are trying to give the system administrators a complete solution for managing their datacenter. What we often found out is that there are critical, loosely connected tools being used to manage modern data centers today. Some of these tools can not be missed by the sysadmins. With OpenQRM, we offer the option to integrate these utilities as an additional plug-in. We are a well-defined plug-in API. So the system admin benefits from his once loosely connected tools in a single management console. The benefit is that integrated tools cooperate with each other and OpenQRM and its deployment and provisioning framework. This way OpenQRM can handle and act on specific situations automatically. A good example is Nagios, we have an integrated monitor plug-in, which feeds errors into OpenQRM as events and OpenQRM then reacts automatically by for example restarting or redeploying a machine.

So Matt, what problem is openQRM trying to solve?

OpenQRM tries to make it very easy for its users to make their first steps into Virtualization. For example OPenQRM provides tools to migrate Physical Machines into Virtual Machines (aka P2V) from any type. With its partitioning layer it conforms Virtualization Tehcnology, so that a sys admin may decide at any time to move a Physical machine to Xen VM, or from a XEN VM to a Linux Vserver partition, and form a LinuxVserver partition to Quemo And later even back to the Physical machine if needed, without needing to change anything on the server itself or hassling with the configuration

When you look at your competition, what are the Virtualization features on your wishlist?

We are not a single virtualization technology. we are a platform which tries to conform Virtualization technology. What we learned today at this Profoss event, is that there is no single hypervisor technology which is the best or single option for a users. For each service or application, there is always a virtualization solution that fits best for that particular situation. So the user should always select the virtualization technology upon the needs of the services and applications, which they want to virtualize. With OpenQRM, we try to close the gap of the current problem of migrating from one technology to another or for the first step of moving from physical to virtual systems.

What do you think about the standardization discussions by vendors on open formats such as OVF?

What I currently understand from the virtualization vendors, is that there is great motivation and cooperation to build a standard. On the other hand they also want to keep their own customers. The option to move from one virtualization format to another, may not be beneficial for every company.

Matt, what evolution do you see in the virtualization mindset and capabilities of the datacenter engineers and decision makers you work with?

I see a strong movement to “appliance-based deployment”. This means automatic provisioning plus configuration anagement of server-images to either physical- or virtual-machines. Since there are different virtualization technologies available datacenter engineers have to manage migration from physical-to-virtual (p2v), virtual-to-physical (v2p) and also migration from one virtualization type to another depending on the application needs. The goal is it to create an vendor independent data-center management platform which supports all mainstream virtualization technologies and provides lots of automatism.

Do you think we need to educate the business user about the array of possibility virtualization could offer them?

Of course, getting detailed informations and facts from independent professionals helps decision makers to create their own, objective knowledge of how to go on with virtualization.

What about licensing issues? What did you foresee in the Open QRM platform to correlate between the software and the virtual environments they run in?

Since the licensing issues of running operation-systems in virtual machines are not yet fully solved by the operation-system vendors. Therefore openQRM for now “just” provides the technical environment for rapid, appliance-based deployment. Of course we are looking forward to implement licensing-verification add-ons as additional plugin for openQRM as soon as those issues are solved.

Everybody is still struggling in this field?

Yep, we are still waiting for a kind of standard for virtual-machine licensing.

What do you expect the commercial vendors to do?

Asap, they should come up with a transparent and fair licensing model for operation systems running in virtual-machines. This would also help companies to move on in virtualization.

What do you consider a fair model and measurement unit for the users?

Eh, Power-consumption?

You think electricity consumption could be such an underlying unit and a way to educate the users?

Yes.

Storage seems to become quite a virtualization bottleneck? What systems should users be able to support?

Yes, bringing up a new virtual machines basically just requires some space on a storage-server. To my mind we should directly interface modern storage-server solutions with a generic deployment system which is being able to manage both, physical and virtual systems.

Matt, thanks a lot for your time and all the best with OpenQRM!