• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Virtualization.com

Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

  • News
  • Featured
  • Partnerships
  • People
  • Acquisitions
  • Guest Posts
  • Interviews
  • Videos
  • Funding

VM

Guest Post: “Fault tolerance a new key feature for virtualization”

August 6, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Below is a an article originally published on the guest author’s blog. Who’s the author, you ask?

Kevin Lawton! Bio: pioneer in x86 virtualization, serial entrepreneur, business and technology visionary, prolific idea creator, news and business book junkie. Founding team member in a microprocessor startup, the author and lead for two Open Source projects, a public speaker, and at the forefront of what is now a multi-billion dollar x86 virtualization industry. I have a degree in computer science and started my career at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

–

Fault tolerance a new key feature for virtualization

VM migration has been a key feature and enabling technology which has differentiated VMware from Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Though as you may know, Windows Server 2008 R2 is slated for broad availability on or before October 22, 2009 (also the Windows 7 GA date), and Hyper-V will then support VM migration. So you may be wondering, what key new high-tech features will constitute the next battleground for differentiation amongst the virtualization players?

Five-Nines (99.999%) Meets Commodity Hardware

One such key feature is very likely to be fault tolerance (FT) — the ability for a running VM to suffer hardware failure on one machine, and to be restarted on another machine without losing any state. This is not just HA (High Availability), it’s CA (Continuous Availability)! And I believe it’ll be part of the cover-charge that virtualization vendors (VMware, Citrix/XenSource, Microsoft, et al) and providers such as Amazon will have to offer to stay competitive. When I talk about fault tolerance, I don’t mean using special/exotic hardware solutions — I’m talking about software-only solutions which handle fault tolerance in the hypervisor and/or other parts of the software stack.

Here’s a quick summary of where the various key vendors are w.r.t. fault tolerance. Keep watch of this space, because the VM migration battle is nearly over now.

VMware’s product line now offers Fault Tolerance, which they conceptually introduced at VMworld 2008. This was perhaps the biggest wow-factor feature VMware talked about at that VMworld. FT is not supported in VMware Essentials, Essentials Plus or vSphere Standard editions. It’s supported in more advanced(/expensive) versions.

In the Xen camp, there are two distinct FT efforts, Kemari and Remus. Integration/porting to Xen 4.0 are on theroadmap. If/when that occurs, the Xen ecosystem will benefit. After battle-testing, it’s easy to conceive of Amazon offering FT as a premium service. It does after all chew through more network capacity, and will necessitate extra high level logic on their part. There’s also a commercial FT solution for XenServer from Marathon, called everRun VM.

Microsoft appears to be leveraging a partnership with Marathon for their initial virtualization FT solution. This is probably smart given it allows Microsoft a way to quickly compete on fault tolerance, with a partner that’s been doing FT for a living. One would imagine this option will come at a premium though, perhaps a revenue opportunity for Microsoft for big-money customers, with an associated disadvantage vis-à-vis similar features based on free Xen technology and massive scale virtualization (clouds). That may make Marathon a strategic M&A target.

Licensing Issues, Part II

Just when you thought software-in-a-VM issues were mostly resolved, the same questions may be raised again for FT, given there is effectively a shadow copy of any given FT-protected VM. It’s not hard to imagine Microsoft aggressively taking advantage of this situation, given they live at both virtualization/OS and application layers of the stack.

Networking is Key

Fault tolerance of VMs is yet another consumer and driver of high bandwidth, low latency networking. The value in the data center is trending from the compute hardware to the networking. FT is another way-point in the evolution of that trend, allowing continuous availability on commodity hardware. You probably won’t run it on all your workloads (they will run with a performance penalty), but you might start out with the most critical stateful workloads. If you want to do this on any scale, or with flexibility, architect with lots of networking capabilities. For zero-sum IT budgets, this would mean cheaper hardware and better networking, something that might be a little bitter-sweet for Cisco, given its entrance into the server market.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Posts Tagged With: fault tolerance, hardware failure, Hyper-V, Kevin Lawton, microsoft, Microsoft Hyper-V, virtualisation, virtualization, VM, vmware

Parallels, HP, NVIDIA virtualize GPUs with Workstation Extreme

March 30, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren Leave a Comment

Parallels is launching “Parallels Workstation Extreme”, a desktop workstation virtualization offering developed jointly with HP and NVIDIA.

Workstation Extreme is aimed at graphic workstations such as those used on stock trading floors (think: massive multimonitor support) and in 3D animation studios (where several power hungry applications usually don’t like to share resources).

Parallels Workstation Extreme offers desktop virtualization with near-native performance (backed by impressive SPECviewperf numbers) and support for very large VMs (Up to 12 virtual CPUs and 64 GB of RAM per VM). It is built around the latest technology from Intel and NVIDIA. It uses the Intel Xeon 5500 series of CPUs, better known as the “Nehalem” line, which increases the amount of physical RAM that’s supported per machine, and VT-d to allow direct I/O paths to be passed through a hypervisor.

This technology used by the NVIDIA SLI Multi-OS technology incorporated in the latest NVIDIA Quatro cards, also announced today. Using SLI Multi-OS the multiple GPUs available on the system can be virtualized just like traditional CPUs. This allows high-end graphics programs like CAD, CAE and 3D rendering applications to be virtualized and still use the raw geometric number crunching chips provided by the machine. (In traditional desktop virtualization products, the video adapter is emulated, dramatically reducing 3D graphics power.)

Parallels blends this all together with its FastLane architecture, and offers this as a bundled solution on HP Z800 workstations.

Target audiences for this product are digital content creators, design engineers, software developers and testers, sales and training professionals and those working with data modeling in a range of vertical sectors, including finance, government, science, engineering, manufacturing, and oil and gas.

Parallels Workstation Extreme runs on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, Windows XP or Vista (all 64-bit). Supported Guest Operating Systems at the time of release are RHEL 4.7 & 5.3 64-bit, Fedora 10 64-bit and the same 64 bit Windows flavors.

More info can be found on the Parallels website.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: desktop virtualisation, desktop virtualization, nehalem, Parallels, Parallels Workstation Extreme, specviewperf, virtual desktop, virtual machine, virtualisation, virtualization, VM, Workstation, workstation extreme

VKernel Releases Another Free Tool, SnapshotMyVM

March 20, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VKernel has released another free tool, SnapshotMyVM, a utility that makes it extremely easy to quickly document and inventory all of your VMs.

SnapshotMyVM automates the time-consuming documentation process, collects dozens of important VM attributes, and creates detailed reports.  You can export your documentation to XML, so that you can save it, edit it, archive it, and share it with others.

Here’s a sampling of the information you can get with SnapshotMyVM:

  • VM name
  • Guest operating system
  • Host hardware type, manufacturer, and version
  • VM resource (CPU, memory, storage, network) configuration
  • VM resource utilization statistics (saves a week of historical data)
Video:

    Filed Under: News Tagged With: free tool, snapshotmyvm, virtual machine, virtualisation, virtualization, VKernel, VM

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

    November 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

    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.

    Filed Under: Featured, Partnerships Tagged With: amd, live migrating, live migration, red hat, vendor platforms, virtual machine, virtual machines, virtualisation, virtualization, VM, VMs

    Primary Sidebar

    Tags

    acquisition application virtualization Cisco citrix Citrix Systems citrix xenserver cloud computing Dell desktop virtualization EMC financing Funding Hewlett Packard HP Hyper-V IBM industry moves intel interview kvm linux microsoft Microsoft Hyper-V Novell oracle Parallels red hat research server virtualization sun sun microsystems VDI video virtual desktop Virtual Iron virtualisation virtualization vmware VMware ESX VMWorld VMWorld 2008 VMWorld Europe 2008 Xen xenserver xensource

    Recent Comments

    • C program on Red Hat Launches Virtual Storage Appliance For Amazon Web Services
    • Hamzaoui on $500 Million For XenSource, Where Did All The Money Go?
    • vijay kumar on NComputing Debuts X350
    • Samar on VMware / SpringSource Acquires GemStone Systems
    • Meo on Cisco, Citrix Join Forces To Deliver Rich Media-Enabled Virtual Desktops

    Copyright © 2023 · Genesis Sample on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

    • Newsletter
    • Advertise
    • Contact
    • About