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AMD / Red Hat Pull Off A Live Migration of VMs Across Vendor Platforms

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AMD, in collaboration with Red Hat, today demonstrated for the first time “live migration” of a virtual machine across vendor platforms. Live migration enables the movement of running virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another without disrupting service to the end user, something that, till now, has only been demonstrated across systems based on one vendor’s platforms. Today’s live migration demonstration moves a live VM from an dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to a system based on the forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, utilizing Red Hat’s high-performance open source virtualization software. See the demonstration on the AMD Unprocessed YouTube Channel or here.

Update: also, read the blog post from Margaret Lewis (Product Marketing Director at AMD) on the announcement.

Industry interest in live migration has grown as virtualization technology has become more widely adopted. Live Migration of VMs across physical servers is a vital component of data center management that enables IT managers to move VMs as necessary in order to perform tasks such as upgrading or conducting maintenance of a server, balancing the server load and proactively managing the server availability to avoid downtime or lost data. The demonstration illustrates AMD’s approach to an open and collaborative relationship with its partners to meet customer demands.

Update On ESX 3.5 Issue: A Letter from Paul Maritz

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New VMware CEO Paul Maritz has issued an official statement about the major bug plaguing customers who had updated to ESX / ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and experienced a serious problem yesterday due to a mistake in the licensing code.

The letter in full:

“Last night, we became aware of a code issue with the recently released update to ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2).

When the time clock in a server running ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2 hits 12:00AM on August 12th, 2008, the released code causes the product license to expire.  The problem has also occurred with a recent patch to ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.  When an ESX or ESXi 3.5 server thinks its license has expired, the following can happen:

  • Virtual machines that are powered off cannot be turned on;
  • Virtual machines that have been suspended fail to leave suspend mode; and,
  • Virtual machines cannot be migrated using VMotion.

The issue was caused by a piece of code that was mistakenly left enabled for the final release of Update 2.  This piece of code was left over from the pre-release versions of Update 2 and was designed to ensure that customers are running on the supported generally available version of Update 2.

In remedying the situation, we’ve already released an express patch for those customers that have installed/upgraded to ESX or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.  Within the next 24 hours, we also expect to issue a full replacement for Update 2, which should be used by customers who want to perform fresh installs of ESX or ESXi.

I am sure you’re wondering how this could happen.  We failed in two areas:

  • Not disabling the code in the final release of Update 2; and
  • Not catching it in our quality assurance process.

We are doing everything in our power to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  VMware prides itself on the quality and reliability of our products, and this incident has prompted a thorough self-examination of how we create and deliver products to our customers.  We have kicked off a comprehensive, in-depth review of our QA and release processes, and will quickly make the needed changes.

I want to apologize for the disruption and difficulty this issue may have caused to our customers and our partners.  Your confidence in VMware is extremely important to us, and we are committed to restoring that confidence fully and quickly.

Thank You,

Paul Maritz
President and CEO
VMware”

Major Bug Kills VMware Powered Virtual Servers

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Today’s a black day for VMware, and also (and maybe especially) VMware customers who upgraded their virtual servers with the new Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2. As of this morning, many could not power on VMotion or any of their Virtual Machines. The VI Client threw the error “A general system error occurred: Internal Error”.

This was first reported by a customer in a thread on VMware Communities. You can find the Knowledge Base article on this problem here.

The problem apparently exists within the software licensing code, rather than the functional part of ESX software.The license code falsely identifies many implementations as being out of license, prevents new virtual machines from launching, or existing VMs from migrating to new hosts.

Big oops indeed.

“An issue has been uncovered with ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi 3.5 that causes the product license to expire on August 12,” says a statement from VMware’s public relations company in response to press inquiries. “VMware is alerting customers and partners of this issue. Updated product bits with correct licensing will be made available for download as soon as possible. VMware regrets any inconvenience to customers. VMware is working on an immediate patch for customers in production. VMware expects to fix the issue in code in the next 36 hours once QA testing has been completed,” the statement concludes.

A work-around has been offered whereby customers should manually set the date of all ESX 3.5u2 hosts back to 10 August as a temporary fix. Brian Madden has more on the actual glitch and the workaround, as does Matthew Marlowe.

It looks like ESXi 3.5 and even some versions of Infrastructure 3.5 Update 1 with some patches have been affected. New downloads of all affected products has been disabled, and according to VMware patched products will be made available starting tomorrow.

This will hurt VMware in any event, even if we don’t really know how many customers have already downloaded Update 2, and how many of those were using it in a live environment.

VMware

Sanbolic Bridges Hyper-V And Shared Storage Networks

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Sanbolic today announced (PDF) that Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines can now be stored on a single shared storage area network (SAN) storage volume using Sanbolic Kayo File System. The virtual machines can then be moved independently between physical host servers using Quick Migration because all host servers have shared access to the virtual machines.

“Kayo FS is a new product that provides file-level shared access to a SAN volume from multiple physical host servers and is designed specifically to provide a cost-effective shared LUN solution for Hyper-V virtual machines,” said Momchil Michailov, Sanbolic’s founder. “Sanbolic is already shipping Melio FS, which is an advanced clustered file system with byte-range locking that can also provide concurrent read/write access to application data on SAN storage from multiple Windows physical or virtual servers. Kayo FS is aimed at a much broader group of customers who we expect will adopt server virtualization now that it is component of the Windows Server 2008 platform.”

Sanbolic’s product portfolio also includes Melio clustered file system and LaScala volume manager, which are designed to support Windows applications which benefit from central administration of a large virtual storage pool simultaneously accessed by multiple physical or virtual servers. Melio FS uses 64 bit architecture, allowing very large volume and file system sizes.

These products can utilize any fibre channel or iSCSI storage hardware. Windows directory, reporting, and clustering features are supported. The file system also incorporates quality of service assignment to allow prioritization of defined workloads in storage bandwidth-constrained environments.

Kayo FS will be priced at $299 per host server and sold in a 5 license bundle.

[Source: Scott Lowe]

Sanbolic

Microsoft Introduces Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool

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Microsoft has announced the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool which aims to help organizations maintain virtual machines that are stored offline in a Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager library. While stored, virtual machines do not receive operating system updates. The tool provides a way to keep offline virtual machines up-to-date so that bringing a virtual machine online does not introduce vulnerabilities into the organization’s IT infrastructure.

The tool combines the Windows Workflow programming model with the Windows PowerShell interface to bring groups of virtual machines online just long enough for them to receive updates from either System Center Configuration Manager 2007 or Windows Server Update Services. As soon as the virtual machines are up-to-date, the tool returns them to the offline state in the Virtual Machine Manager library.

This Solution Accelerator includes the following components:

  • Executive Overview. Available online only on Microsoft Technet. Summary for business and technical managers that briefly explains how this Solution Accelerator can fit into an organization’s IT infrastructure management strategy.
  • OfflineVMServicing_x64 and OfflineVMServicing_x86. Setup files for the tool, for 64 bit and 32 bit versions of Windows Server® 2003.
  • OfflineVirtualMachineServicingToolGettingStartedGuide. Getting Started Guide, in docx and doc formats. Provides information about how the tool works, explains prerequisites for the tool, and describes how to install and configure the tool.
  • Offline_VM_Servicing_Tool_Release_Notes.rtf. Notes provide information about this release, describe known issues in the tool, and include feedback instructions.
  • Offline_Virtual_Machine_Servicing_Tool_Help. Help file for the tool. Provides instructions for using the tool.

If you would like to download the tool, or get some more information, click here.

ProxMox, The Open Source Virtual Environment You Didn’t Know

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Jason Perlow over at ZDNet Blogs today wrote an interesting article about ProxMox, a Vienna, Austria-based Open Source turnkey virtualization server provider we weren’t aware of until this day. Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is basically an easy to use Open Source virtualization platform for running Virtual Appliances and Virtual Machines.

ProxMox

ProxMox VE, which is is licensed under GPLv2, boasts:

  • Pre-built Virtual Appliances
  • Install and manage with a view clicks
  • Selection of products for the use in the enterprise

Proxmox VE is optimized for performance and usability. For maximum flexibility, the following virtualization technologies are installed by the bare metal ISO-installer. It leverages two virtualization platforms, OpenVZ and KVM.

As Jason writes:

In a nutshell, ProxMox VE is a bare-metal install CD that contains a highly-tweaked version of Debian Etch that is optimized for use as a virtualization server, using a modified Linux kernel which includes all the support needed for KVM and OpenVZ. The system runs completely headless and in a light configuration — the entire install CD is only 250MB. To take advantage of ProxMox VE, you’ll want a 64-bit CPU that supports the Intel VT or AMD-V instruction sets, such as recent Core Duo, Xeon, AMD64 Athlon X2 or Opteron chips. You’ll also want at least 2GB of RAM to run a few virtual machines/virtual environments comfortably.

Read the rest of the article here.