virtualization

Internal Memo From VMWare Staff Criticizes Microsoft And Questions Its Partnership With Citrix

January 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

When Microsoft issued a long press release last week on its ‘Vision and Strategy to Accelerate Virtualization Adoption ‘, the internal sales channel at VMWare apparently got a memo downplaying MSFT’s announcements and instructing their commercial team to further question the Microsoft-Citrix partnership and its ability to survive Redmond’s plans with virtualization in front of their clients.

Here are some of the quotes a blogger reposted from an obtained copy of the memo (emphasis ours)

…Microsoft announced a hodge-podge of items related to virtualization in a desperate attempt to make it look like it had a new, coherent vision and strategy for virtualization…

…MSFT includes many recycled items in the announcement to make it look substantive. In actuality, they are just rehashes of old items. Microsoft is not delivering anything new, substituting marketing in place of real substance…

…The new items are a collection of loosely connected pieces thrown together to look like a coherent virtualization plan. Microsoft is still talking vision…

…Microsoft’s announcement introduces new conflicts into the Microsoft-Citrix business partnership and begs the question “When will Microsoft dump Citrix and take all of the business for itself?” Is this just a partnership of convenience for Microsoft until it ships its own product?…

…Tell your prospects that are considering Citrix, that MSFT will soon cut Citrix out of the loop…and Citrix is allowing it to happen…

…New Conflict #1: Microsoft System Center or Citrix XenServer for Management…This declaration hits at the heart of Citrix’s stated business model for virtualization – to generate revenue from the management of Windows VMs with Citrix XenCenter. System Center and XenCenter are clearly competitors…

…New Conflict #2: Calista acquisition creates more direct competition with Citrix SpeedScreen (ICA)..This acquisition strikes at Citrix’s core business since ICA is Citrix’s key differentiator and competes with RDP…

Microsoft and Citrix are longtime virtualization partners, but VMware is using Microsoft’s own advances in the market to argue that the two companies are also becoming bigger competitors with each other — despite their recently announced plan to develop interoperability between Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008. As Microsoft prepares to launch Windows Server 2008 — featuring the Hyper-V hypervisor — next month, the battle for VMware’s server virtualization market share lead should grow even more intense. Which makes it all more interesting for us, of course 🙂

Call for Papers on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster

January 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

The 3rd Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing (VHPC’08) is calling for papers. This prestigious workshop will be held as part of Euro-Par 2008, at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on the Canary Island in Spain from August 26 to 29, 2008

Focus on Virtual machine monitors (VMMs)

VMMs are reaching wide-spread adoption in a variety of operating systems as well as scientific educational and operational usage areas. With their low overhead, hypervisors allow for concurrently running large numbers of virtual machines, providing each encapsulation, isolation and in the case of Xen, network-wide CPU migratability. VMMs offer a network-wide abstraction layer of individual machine resources to OS environments, thereby opening whole new cluster-and grid high-performance computing (HPC) architectures and HPC services options. With VMMs finding applications in HPC environments, these workshops aim to bring together researchers and practitioners active on virtualization in distributed and high-performance cluster and grid computing environments. The workshops will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each followed by 10 min discussion sections. Presentations may be accompanied with interactive demonstrations and the accepted papers will be published in the Springer LNCS series. The workshop will be chaired by Michael Alexander (WU in Vienna) and Stephen Childs (co-chair), Trinity College in Dublin and will end with a 30 minute panel discussion by the presenters.

Topics include the following subject matters:

Virtualization in cluster and grid environments

Workload characterizations for VM-based clusters

Virtualization in cluster and grid environments
Workload characterizations for VM-based clusters
VM cluster and grid architectures
Cluster reliability, fault-tolerance, and security
Compute job entry and scheduling
Compute workload load leveling
Cluster and grid filesystems for VMs
VMMs, VMs and QoS guarantees
Research and education use cases
VM cluster distribution algorithms
MPI, PVM on virtual machines
System sizing
Hardware support for virtualization
High-speed interconnects in hypervisors
Hypervisor extensions and utilities for cluster and grid computing
Network architectures for VM-based clusters
VMMs/Hypervisors on large SMP machines
Performance models
Performance management and tuning hosts and guest VMs
Power considerations
VMM performance tuning on various load types
Xen/other VMM cluster/grid tools
High-speed Device access from VMs
Management, deployment of clusters and grid environments with VMs
Information systems for virtualized clusters
Management of system images for virtual machines
Integration with relevant standards e.g. CIM, GLUE, OGF, etc.

Saugatuck Technologies on ‘The Many Faces of Virtualization’

January 24, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Consulting and research firm Saugatuck Technologies published a report last December dubbed ‘The Many Faces of Virtualization – Understanding a New IT Reality ‘, proclaiming that virtualization will have the single largest effect on IT budgets for hardware and support over the next three years and that by 2010, the 3 main vendors (VMWare, Cisco & Citrix / XenSource) will dominate the IT virtualization industry.

Another important finding of the study is that all facets of IT virtualization will see substantial enhancements in functionality and performance, with the most significant enhancements being in microprocessors, hypervisors and operating systems.

The report notes that the general concept of virtualization is usually equated with the specifics of server virtualization, since server and mainframe virtualization have been used in the IT world for decades. But it’s important to note that virtualization can be applied to all IT resources, including servers, storage, networks, and desktops.

“This study is the first attempt that we’ve seen to use real-world expertise and practicality to classify and explain the types and effects of IT virtualisation, in terms that both user and vendor executives can understand, and can profit from,” said Saugatuck founder and CEO Bill McNee. “This is a solid foundation from which executives can educate themselves, and begin planning more effective management of virtualisation.”

To Be Followed: ivi, A Java Virtual Interface

January 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

From the lostcreations team comes:

ivi, which stands for Java Virtual Interface. ivi is currently the beginnings of a single GUI application that allows an IT administrator to manage a VMware virtual infrastructure, Xen servers, KVM boxes, and even OpenVZ systems all from one interface. ivi is currently very alpha and can only connect to VMware VI3 and Xen systems. The l o s t c r e a t i o n s blog will chart the progress of ivi.

[Source: Server Virtualization Blog ]

Rackspace Adding Virtualized Service Offering

January 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

As of yesterday, San Antonio-based hosting provider Rackspace is adding a virtualized service offering. Citing increased flexibility, market demand, and a desire to better address customer needs, Rackspace will be offering customers their own, non-shared ESX environments to complement traditional 1×1 server platforms.

Rackspace’s virtualization platform was built on VMware ’s third-generation virtualization software suite, and according to the company “pushes virtualization to the next level in order to support mission-critical, production systems.” The fast-growing hosting provider employs five VMWare Certified Engineers with ten more in training for certification.

“Our product development approach focuses first and foremost on Fanatical Support® readiness,” said John Engates, chief technology officer, Rackspace. “We also ask ‘Is the technology ready to use in a production environment?’ We believe that our new virtualization offering now meets these requirements and pushes the envelope, giving customers a virtualized environment ready for mission-critical applications, supported by our wealth of experience, expertise and Fanatical Support.”

Rackspace’s new virtualization platform will be based on dedicated physical hardware for each customer and will include the option of hybrid virtual and physical hosted environments.

[Source: press release ]

To Virtualize or not to Virtualize (Windows Vista),That’s The Question

January 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Just in case you haven’t heard, Microsoft flip-flopped its earlier decision not to allow users to run Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium as guest operating systems on a virtual machine. Mac users, and virtualization software vendors such as Parallels can rejoice over the news, which has been extensively covered all over the web , with the best commentary coming from:

CNET News , ZDNet blogs, Ars Technica and The Register .