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The Virtual Infrastructure Evolves Into The Virtual Datacenter OS

September 16, 2008 by Lode Vermeiren 3 Comments

More and more details on what VMware calls the “Virtual Datacenter OS” are starting to come out of VMworld. The new CEO, Paul Maritz, is expected to elaborate on this new strategy in today’s keynote. (update: check our live blog coverage)

(Update 2: also check the coverage on Between The Lines and Virtually Speaking, both ZDNet blogs)

The VDC-OS is not a new product per se, but an umbrella name for a set of products and features, much like VMware Virtual Infrastructure is composed of ESX server, VirtualCenter and features like DRS, HA and VMotion.

VDC-OS is a natural evolution from the “virtual infrastructure” approach, which no longer only includes the virtualization servers and their shared storage and networking, but also the “next layer” in the virtualization stack, both upwards and downwards: VDC-OS no longer stops at the guest OS level, but provides application services as well, and in the other direction goes beyond the local network and is aware of the bigger picture.

The building blocks that make up VDC-OS will sound very familiar to beta testers of ESX 4.0 and technology partners. They include some new features, recent acquisitions and better integrated versions of the current product line-up, as well as third-party add-ons bearing the VMware Ready logo. All of these are called “vServices”.

The three big areas of vServices VMware identifies are:

  • Application vServices – Availability, Security, Scalability
  • Infrastructure vServices – vCompute, vStorage, vNetwork and vCloud
  • Management vServices – vCenter (the new name for VirtualCenter)

The new and current features in depth:

Application Services
Availability:

  • HA, VMotion, Storage VMotion, NIC/HBA teaming
  • VMware Fault tolerance, formerly known as “Continuous availability” – which allows a VM to run on two hosts simultaneously, using lock-stepping of CPU instructions. (new)
  • vCenter Data Recovery – built-in disk-based backup and recovery of VMs and the files within them, including data deduplication. (new)

Security

  • ESXi, a stripped-down hypervisor in only 32 MB of code, to reduce the attack surface
  • VMware vSafe (first announced at VMworld Europe), with third party support add-ons from IBM, Checkpoint, Radware and McAfee, who will announce their first products today (new)

Scalability

  • DRS
  • Hot add of virtual CPU, memory and PCIe devices like network adapters (new)
  • Very large VMs with 8 virtual CPUs and 256 GB of RAM (new)

Infrastructure Services

vCompute

  • CPU/Memory optimization with hardware assists, page sharing and memory ballooning
  • DRS
  • VMDirectPath – enabling wirespeed network access to VMs (new)
  • Paravirtualized SCSI – providing more iops per second at lower latency (new)

vStorage

  • VMFS
  • Linked clones (first demonstrated at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco) – allows multiple VMs to run from the same base disk (new)
  • Storage VMotion
  • Thin Provisioning (new)
  • APIs to closer work together with storage arrays (new)

vNetwork

  • more offload technologies to reduce virtualization overhead
  • Distributed vNetwork virtual switches (new)
  • Third-party virtual switches – the first one to be announced today by Cisco (new)

Cloud Services (vCloud)

  • VMotion and Storage VMotion (within the “internal cloud”)
  • VMware vCloud (new)
  • Network vMotion – preserving network and security policies when a virtual machine is being migrated (new)
  • vApp – an encapsulation of a VM and its policies and service levels, based on OVF (new)

Management

vCenter replaces VirtualCenter, and integrates the add-on products today known as Stage Manger, Lab Manager and the likes. It integrates withing other management frameworks from the likes of IBM and CA.

  • vCenter AppSpeed – performance monitoring and remediation to guarantee service levels. (new)
  • vCenter Orchestrator – to automate repetitive workflows
  • vCenter CapacityIQ – proactive capacity planning for entire VI environments
  • vCenter Chargeback – to allow IT departments or cloud service providers to charge based on VM usage
  • vCenter ConfigControl – called “update manager on steroids” by VMware, a central way to configure and update the virtual data center
  • Host Profiles – to standardize the setup of ESX hosts using templates

Watch out for more announcements by VMware and its partners in the coming hours and days.

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: ESX 4.0, ESX Server, Paul Maritz, VDC-OS, Virtual Datacenter OS, virtualcenter, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMware ESX 4.0, VMWare ESX Server, VMware Virtual Datacenter OS, vmware virtualcenter, VMware vServices, vServices

DataSynapse Extends Dynamic Service Management Tools for VMware Infrastructure Support

July 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

DataSynapse, maker of dynamic application service management software, today announced that it is working with VMWare to provide customers with simplified deployment and operational management of application platforms and services to facilitate always-on, always-responsive virtualized applications.

As a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program, DataSynapse plans to integrate its FabricServer dynamic application service management software specifically with VMware VirtualCenter. This integration will allow IT organizations to automate deployment and provisioning and optimize service levels of server applications in a virtualized infrastructure, helping them to reduce capital and operating costs while delivering order of magnitude improvement in time to market for critical business applications.
DataSynapse FabricServer software is an enabling platform for standardizing and automating the configuration, activation, scaling and aligning application service levels with planned business policies, which minimizes downtime, automates service level management and improves enterprise application performance. Combined with VMware VMotion technology, VMware’s live migration capability, FabricServer provides responsive horizontal scalability.
DataSynapse

Filed Under: News, Partnerships Tagged With: DataSynapse, DataSynapse FabricServer, Dynamic Service Management, FabricServer, virtualcenter, virtualisation, virtualization, VMotion, vmware, VMware Infrastructure, VMware Technology Alliance Partner, vmware virtualcenter, VMware VMotion

VMware Releases Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2, ESX and VirtualCenter Get Upgrades, ESXi Now 100% Free

July 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

VMware has released Update 2 for Infrastructure 3.5, listing a whole set of updates and features. At the same time, the company has made the license for ESXi completely free, as announced last week during the earnings call.

These are the highlights of some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware Infrastructure 3 (free evaluation here):

  • Windows Server 2008 support – Windows Server 2008 (Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions) is supported as a guest operating system. With VMware’s memory overcommit technology and the reliability of ESX, virtual machine density can be maximized with this new guest operating system to achieve the highest degree of ROI. Guest operating system customizations and Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) are not supported with Windows Server 2008.
  • Enhanced VMotion Compatibility – Enhanced VMotion compatibility (EVC) simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations by automatically configuring server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. Once EVC is enabled for a cluster in the VirtualCenter inventory, all hosts in that cluster are configured to ensure CPU compatibility for VMotion. VirtualCenter will not permit the addition of hosts which cannot be automatically configured to be compatible with those already in the EVC cluster.
  • Storage VMotion – Storage VMotion from a FC/iSCSI datastore to another FC/iSCSI datastore is supported. This support is extended on ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 1 as well.
  • VSS quiescing support – When creating quiesced snapshot of Windows Server 2003 guests, both filesystem and application quiescing are supported. With Windows Server 2008 guests, only filesystem quiescing is supported. For more information, see the Virtual Machine Backup Guide and the VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5 Release Notes.
  • Hot Virtual Extend Support – The ability to extend a virtual disk while virtual machines are running is provided. Hot extend is supported for vmfs flat virtual disks without snapshots opened in persistent mode.
  • 192 vCPUs per host – VMware now supports increasing the maximum number of vCPUs per host 192 given that the maximum number of Virtual Machines per host is 170 and that no more than 3 virtual floppy devices or virtual CDROM devices are configured on the host at any given time. This support is extended on ESX 3.5 Update 1 as well.

As for the hardware enablement and management:

  • 8Gb Fiber Channel HBAs – Support is available for 8Gb fiber channel HBAs. See the I/O Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i for details.
  • SAS arrays – more configurations are supported. See the Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i for details.
  • 10 GbE iSCSI initiator – iSCSI over a 10GbE interface is supported. This support is extended on ESX Server 3.5 Update 1, ESX Server version 3.5 Update 1 Embedded and ESX Server version 3.5 Update 1 Installable as well.
  • 10 GbE NFS support – NFS over a 10GbE interface is supported.
  • IBM System x3950 M2 – x3950 M2 in a 4-chassis configuration is supported, complete with hardware management capabilities through multi-node Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) driver and provider. Systems with up to 32 cores are fully supported. Systems with more than 32 cores are supported experimentally.
  • PMI OEM extension support – Execution of IPMI OEM extension commands is supported.
  • System health monitoring through CIM providers – More Common Information Model (CIM) providers are added for enhanced hardware monitoring, including storage management providers provided by QLogic and Emulex. LSI MegaRAID providers are also included and are supported experimentally.
  • CIM SMASH/Server Management API – The VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API provides an interface for developers building CIM-compliant applications to monitor and manage the health of systems. CIM SMASH is now a fully supported interface on ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
  • Display of system health information – More system health information is displayed in VI Client for both ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
  • Remote CLI – Remote Command Line Interface (CLI) is now supported on ESX Server 3.5 as well as ESX Server 3i. See the Remote Command-Line Interface Installation and Reference Guide for more information.

VirtualCenter 2.5 update 2 adds full support for monitoring individual virtual machine failures based on VMware tools heartbeats. This release also extends support for clusters containing mixed combinations of ESX and ESXi hosts, and minimizes previous configuration dependencies on DNS. It also extends support for alarms on the overall health of the server by considering the health of each of the individual system components such as memory and power supplies. Alarms can now be configured to trigger when host health degrades.

VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 provides the ability of creating a clone of a powered-on virtual machine without any downtime to the running virtual machine. Therefore, administrators are no longer required to power off a virtual machine in order to create a clone of it. Also, you can now automatically authenticate to VirtualCenter using your current Windows domain login credentials on the local workstation, as long as the credentials are valid on the VirtualCenter server.

This capability also supports logging in to Windows using Certificates and Smartcards. It can be used with the VI Client or the VI Remote CLI to ensure that scripts written using the VI Toolkits can take advantage of the Windows credentials of your current session to automatically connect to VirtualCenter.

VMware

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: ESX, ESXi, VI, VI 3, virtualcenter, VirtualCenter 2.5, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMware ESX, VMware ESXi, VMware Infrastructure, VMware Infrastructure 3, VMWare Infrastructure 3.5, VMWare Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2, VMware VI, VMware VI 3.5, VMware VI 3.5 Update 2, vmware virtualcenter, VMware VirtualCenter 2.5

Microsoft To Release System Center VMM 2008 Soon

July 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Diane Prescott, Product Manager, System Center at Microsoft posted an article on the official SC blog today sharing that the launch of the next version of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is imminent, specifically in Q4 2008. The beta was formally introduced by the company end of April 2008.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 will be available as a stand-alone product, while the current version only comes bundled with Server Management Suite Enterprise. Prescott also said something about the pricing structure:

“[SCVMM 2008] will follow the licensing model set forward by the SMSE. It will be sold as a per-device enterprise server management license (ML) and will include rights to the management server. Because we’ll be selling the VMM 2008 enterprise server ML on a per-device basis, which makes sense in the context of virtualization, we’ll be targeting a price which will be approximately 10-15% less than the SMSE at that time it’s generally available. Additionally, because of the new value and functionality being added to the various System Center offerings over the next year, including VMM, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager, we will be implementing a price increase to the SMSE of approximately 10-15% in the same time frame. We’re still working on the specifics regarding the pricing and licensing of VMM 2008 and the SMSE and we’ll have further details to share in early August.”

Next to support for Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008 will also offer management capabilities for VMware ESX environments, allbeit through VirtualCenter.

Microsoft

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Diane Prescott, microsoft, Microsoft System Center, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, SCVMM, SCVMM 2007, SCVMM 2008, System Center, System center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, System Center VMM 2008, Virtual Machine Manager, virtualcenter, virtualisation, virtualization, VMM, VMM 2007, VMM 2008, vmware, VMware ESX

Webcast: Demonstration of the VMware VirtualCenter SDK

March 19, 2006 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Richard Garsthagen produced a video (13.4 Mb WMV-file) to demonstrate how VMware VirtualCenter API can be programmed to develop usefull applications for managing virtual infrastructures. Richard focuses on his Virtual Machine Order HOTLINE application.

Could somebody please inform Richard that a shaved head in front of a blue screen results in a egg-shaped performance, that seem to come straight from Star Trek 🙂

Have a look at his otherwise clarifying performance here.

Filed Under: News, Videos Tagged With: richard garsthagen, Videos, virtualcenter, virtualcenter api, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, vmware virtualcenter

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