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VMWorld 2008

Video: Interview Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource – Citrix (VMworld 2008) part 2/2

November 13, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

In this second part of our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, the Citrix XenSource CTO denies that there is more than a ‘fabulous partnership’ between Microsoft and Citrix. In his typical outspoken style, Simon Crosby does not see his competitor VMware take of into the clouds with vaporware. He remains an advocate for open standards and shines his light on Virtualization security issues (aka VirtSec by the insiders).

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A full transcript of the interview is below and the  first part of our interview can be viewed here.

(00:00) Simon, in the blogosphere there are these ever mounting rumors about Microsoft and Citrix. What can you comment on that relationship. Add Cisco, VMware and you’ve got a complicated puzzle.

It is.

(00:10) It’s intriguing though.  Many people see a lot of interesting things going on there, what can you say about that?

So our partnership with Microsoft is great.  I mean fabulous.  Microsoft makes a ton out of everything of what Citrix does and they give us scale and we basically take the platform, extend its features set. We’ve done this for years.  It turned out to what XenSource was doing in Virtualization with Microsoft, very similar to the traditional Citrix model of working closely with Microsoft to extend the platform and deliver a bunch of features.  So we do that today and so we’re partner in Virtualization for XenDesktop and runs great on Hyper-V, runs great on XenServer and you know, that’s a terrific partnership.  We’ve partnered also in the area of Virtualization generally and interoperability is key. But XenServer in the platinum edition, not generally known, has the ability to run VMs on VMware or Hyper-V or Xen or even bare metal. Okay, so once you’ve taken your VMs and centralized them into a central repository, we can boot them and run them on anything, right?  Which allows us to extend the concept of Virtualization beyond just Xen, to other hypervisors and even bare metal.

(01:23) If we go back to the cloud concept, because that has been buzzing this industry for a few months now.  What I find quite intriguing is that there’s no standards.  Every cloud has its own APIs and with VMware launching its newest product line (vCloud).  It’s not very clear what those APIs are going to look like, nor when we’re going to have them.  Xen is also moving in that direction with CCC or C3 (Citrix Cloud Center).

Yeah, though not from an API perspective. I agree with you that the APIs are an important one and the ABI.  That is compatibility between the enterprises that counts a big deal. The VMware announcement yesterday, the demonstration around the clouds, the big bullet point on Paul Maritz slide was compatibility, okay? Which basically says that every cloud is going to have to buy by VMware.  You know what?  It’s just not going to happen, okay?  So compatibility is an important concern.  It’s really important that enterprise that  adopt Virtualization know that their VMs will run great in their enterprise but also in the cloud and if the only way we can achieve that is if everybody buys VMware, I can tell you the industry is sunk.  That’s not going to happen.  So compatibility is an important consideration.  OVF is a great component of that and I think it gives us a good way of migrating that whole process.

(02:43)  Do you think that the DMTF is a good standards body to also look into APIs that the vendors agree upon from Amazon to Citrix?

(02:50) Simon Crosby:  I’m not so sure about the Amazon guys. You should go out and speak to Werner on that. But in general, you know Amazon is very open to moving towards standard based APIs, kind of an innovator out there. But VMware, to give them credit, is doing a great job in the DMTF.  They really are.  So, I got to tell you that I’m not a fan of LibVirt you know in the Linux world, it doesn’t have strong semantics.  It doesn’t have like a well-defined API or ABI but the DMTF world is moving forward terrifically, yeah very good.

(03:24) Virtualization was a way of abstracting. Now clouds are another way of abstracting?

They are just another hypervisor platform for me.

(03:34) What about an OS.  What would be your definition, VMware is calling it an OS? 

Oh, the data center OS?

(03:42) Interviewer:  How do you define such an OS?  Do you consider it an OS, a framework or an API set?

You know what?  I think it’s vaporware, right?  So let’s be real for a bit, there are several key things that people want to achieve.  They want to achieve greater agility, greater dynamism, and greater security. There are a lot of ways to get there. But defining a data center OS based on a product which has got a single point of failure, isn’t the way to get there.  There are very interesting technologies that one can bring to solve that problem. In general, I don’t think they (VMware) have them.  Now, it differs between enterprises and clouds on how you want to do this. Enterprise IT runs in a very different way than the cloud.  So we know today that NetScalers drives automatically very large files, that is we can use NetScalers sitting in the application hard drive to dynamically move traffic between machines whenever machine fails, between data center whenever data center fails and on the fly bring up new VMs and servers on the basis of need. Because we can watch the application response times and drive the data center in that way.  That is in particular like a kind of cloud architecture. There are some enterprise adopting it. But at data center OS which is built in the management domain out of a bunch of stuff which is really just managing software.  I don’t buy the concept.  It’s an important concept that people start to think about, that is agility and dynamism and data center reintroduce a whole bunch of complexities but it isn’t here yet.

(05:14) Maybe to finish off, you mentioned security?

Yeah.

(05:18) How do you see that involve, it’s one of the major concern of these people.  How do you secure Virtual issues?  How do you make absolutely sure that they can’t break out?

There are three things here, one of them is how do you secure the guests?  How do you secure the hypervisor?  And how do you virtualize the security function generally, okay?  So let’s start. How do you secure the guest?  You know, the basic capabilities of inspecting the traffic, block an I/O, everybody can do that.  That’s straightforward.  VMware took a one step further with VMsafe which allows their plug-in security appliances to inspect the memory of running guests.  The black hat folks just don’t like this approach, okay?  We have an equivalent thing in open source that the big scary moment is if you compromise that interface, you can get hold of any memory of any guest.  It’s really, really scary.  So you have to do better than that, you know. 

But in general, virtualizing the security function is thought very open area and Chris Hoff has a perfect take on this, you know it’s very, very early days and has a ton of work to do.  Moreover is I/O starts to go back into hardware so we just get IOV devices coming.  None of those security appliance gets to look at the traffic anymore, so it’s going to be very interesting.  So all has to get down again.  Securing a hypervisor, we’re absolutely concerned about that.  That is one of our key focuses, I guess VMware is concerned about it.  They have a big code base.  I think one of their big things that they do is they went from you know ESX to ESXi was to ditch the console OS which is a major headache for them.  You know we’re down onto tens of megabytes in software now, generally written onto read-only flash and we focus manically on securing our box, right?  That’s absolutely what we have to do.  Now can we make guest more secured?  Absolutely we can do that and that’s the next big one which is how you can use the Virtualization platform itself and Virtualization to provide greater security for the workload while it’s running and through its life cycle.  So once you separated the software from the server, can I take a guest to walk out of the building without a memory stick?  That’s an interesting question.

(07:31) Simon, I’d like to thank you for the time you’ve given us and for the straight talk and your views on Virtualization and everything around it.  See you.

Filed Under: Featured, Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: citrix, Citrix XenSource, CitrixXenServer, CTO, interview, Las Vegas, Simon Crosby, video, virtualisation, virtualization, VMWorld, VMWorld 2008, XenEnterprise, xenserver, xensource

Video: Interview Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource – Citrix (VMworld 2008) part 1/2

November 11, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 3 Comments

Below is the first part of our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, where Citrix XenSource CTO Simon Crosby tells us where he sees Virtualization going in general and shares his view on the future of security, networking and I/O virtualization in particular.

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Feel free to check on the I/O Virtualization vendors we covered in the past, such as 3Leaf, Neterion, NextIO, VertenSys with Neterion or Xsigo.

A full transcript of the interview is below. you might want to check on our previous chat with Simon at VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes to see if what he claims is consistent on both sides of the atlantic.

(00:11) Simon Crosby, you’re the CTO, Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.  What are the next challenges you see coming up in Virtualization?

Simon Crosby: So Virtualization today is server only, right?  So in fact the question to me is “where does Virtualization go generally”?  The technology works superbly for clients.  It applies in terms of virtualizing the client device and it works great in PDAs and various other mobile internet devices and so on.  So Virtualization is going down that path.  Xen already runs on all machines of that category and does so with great performance.  So now we can expose real devices, models, straight up to Windows and so on and we can get terrific performance.  So Virtualization technology will go much more broadly into the execution environments.  Virtualization adoption by enterprise It’s a big, big change, right?  Because everything changes.  So just to get beyond 10% or 12 or whatever adoption percentage we are at right now, the whole of the enterprise IT process has to be rethought.

(01:13) Where do you see the real challenges when it comes to security and virtualization and how can you organize those?

Today, I think you know we do a pretty good job of pulling in the storage and the compute side of it, that is we dynamically drive storage for virtualization.  Networking is still way out there.  I mean because the security folks want to know exactly where the bump in the wire is. Arguably as you move the virtual machines around in the data center because of those network security policies you got to follow them.  That doesn’t happen yet.  So, all of that has  to change but as you start to do this, people who got a very rational concern for knowing where things are, that they are secured, that they die when they should and all that sort of stuff, right?  And so, the general complexity that virtual machines bring is that our appetite for computers have not gone down.  There are more VMs than there are physical servers.  They live some place you don’t generally know where.  At any point in time, you need to find the darn thing.  Check if it’s secured.  Check if it’s updated.  Manage it through its life cycle and then throw it away securely.  So it actually complicates things.  So the great thing by Virtualization is we now get as a bunch of IT vendors, to go and redo it all and do it right and do it better and that’s the opportunity.

(02:34) Now Simon, one of the major announcements here at VMworld was that, VMware together with Cisco, they’ve launched VN-link which is a new standard for networks to become virtual machine aware.  What’s your point of view on that, on this merging of virtual network solutions and standards in that field?

The fundamental driver here is Moore’s law., So we get more and more and more VMs per server.  That means that the switch technology that we use in the virtualized platform in general, has to become more and more like a network based switch.
So that’s a good observation.  Therefore, all of the separation and other policies that you want to have in a network have got to follow your VMs, right?  So there is an interesting question of what you do there?  Now the VMware virtual switch (indeed there is one in XenServer too) are based on the bridge code that came out of Linux. We modified  so it can support VLANs and everything else, but that’s where it came from.  So there’s a very rational question as to how this evolves over the time?  Now, the technology that’s coming down the wire is essentially IOV. If you do SRIOV..

03:35 Could you quickly explain what IOV and SRIOV stand for?
SRIOV stands for single root I/O virtualization.  It’s the I/O Virtualization standard coming out of the PCI SIG and with that, essentially you introduce the ability for a NIC-card to have a full layer 2 switch on it.  So what’s going to happen is that it’ll all move to hardware. And those layer 2 switches will look like existing real physical switches in your Ethernet, okay?  And so, in general, you know we have to have the same ability to control those and manage them as we do with our physical network infrastructure today.

Filed Under: Featured, Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: citrix, Citrix XenSource, CitrixXenServer, CTO, interview, Las Vegas, Simon Crosby, video, virtualisation, virtualization, VMWorld, VMWorld 2008, XenEnterprise, xenserver, xensource

Microsoft Bashes VMware With A New Website; “Get The Facts” Revisited?

September 23, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 3 Comments

Thanks for reading us. We are bundling all our VMworld 2008 coverage in one handy page, go check it out now for more reports and videos!Hyper-V flyer team at the VMworld entrance The Venetian

Microsoft had people dressed up like medieval Venetian models at the hotel entrance of last week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They distributed dollar chips and flyers to anybody wearing a VMworld bag, with on it the website address VmwareCostsWayTooMuch.com, which led VMware customers and partners to a landing page, on which the headlines all redirect to the Microsoft Hyper-V portal.

The guerilla marketing tactics actually worked, with coverage from publications like NetworkWorld, ZDNet Blogs, Channel Marker, Virtualization Information,  Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies blog, and others.

We ignore whether this smear marketing stunt was inspired by the US presidential campaign, but it was certainly not the first time Microsoft engages into heads-on advertising. Last time around it was targeted against Linux. However, we were never aware of Microsoft distributing any leaflets with GetTheFacts.com at the entrance of LinuxWorldExpo or LinuxTag. It is also quite funny to observe that Linux distributions (starting with SUSE) are now supported as Guest Operating Systems on Hyper-V and that Redmond advertises this feature extensively.

Microsoft even provides integration components and technical support for customers running select Linux distributions (limited to SUSE for the moment) as guest operating systems. IF history repeats itself, VMware can be reassured that in a few years this type of Microsoft campaign results in supporting a competing technology.

It took the VMware conference staff a little while to get notified about the leaflets and some more time before they got the hotel staff at The Venetion to stop the flyers from being handed out at the entrance of their annual user conference, attracting over 14.000 attendees to Las Vegas. It is estimated at least 4.000 flyers were distributed in the elapsed time.

Flyer front side and One Dollar Chip

The distributed 1 dollar chips were actually valid inside The Venetian Casino. This guerilla marketing initiative has cost at least 4.000 dollars in casino money, but the website and distribution must have cost a lot more.

It is hard to believe The Venetian did not make the connection between selling a few thousand ‘Dollar chips’ to Microsoft and concurrently renting their entire event facilities and rooms to VMware. Especially with those video cameras and security personell all over, it can be assumed Microsoft had obtained some sort of permission before handing out those free chips at the hotel entrance.

What do you think about this remarkable anti-VMware propaganda? Does it make MS look desperate as the new kid on the hypervisor block? Does it suit a multinational that runs entirely on ‘expensive‘ licenses to attack a ‘partner’ at its annual user conference over that very cost element? Do the facts that they present on their marketing website actually make sense? What boomerang effect can they expect? How would Microsoft react if Sun would hand out flyers at the gates of TechEd or DevDays with a catchy URL: GetOfficeForFreeAndStopPayingMicrosoft.Com. We look forward to seeing who will register that available domain. 🙂

As we all know, hypervisors are a commodity nowadays and just like Xen and Hyper-V, it must be said that ESX comes free of license cost too. At Virtualization.com, we like to think the value and related cost are no longer in that free naked hypervisor, but in the integrated management and extended tool sets that surround it.

If you were among those first 4.000 VMworld attendees, feel free to tell us how much you made with your Microsoft dollars on the gambling tables and if that was enough to cover/upgrade a VMware license?

Filed Under: News Tagged With: FUD, Get The Facts, guerilla marketing, licensing, marketing, microsoft, MS, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMwareCostsWayTooMuch, VMWorld, VMWorld 2008, VMworld conference

Sneak Preview on VMworld 2008 and its artwork (video).

September 15, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 1 Comment

VMworld 2008 under construction
Virtualization.com made it to Sin City. As of tomorrow and after a partner day, over 14.000 fellow Virtualization geeks will start gathering in The Venetian in Las Vegas for the latest vendor news and extensive networking activities. Virtualization.com is most interested in your stories from the datacenter trenches to the desktop victories. So feel free to share those lessons learnt when you see Toon Vanagt passing by with his camera.

We look forward to the real product innovations (is Cisco going to surprise us?). Judging from the amount of PR announcements we received, you can surely bet on a Virtualization product avalanche rolling over Las Vegas next week. VMWare is expected to release/announce ESX v4.0, with plenty of exiting features (continuous availability, alarms on physical hardware faults, 64bit kernel and COS and more). Information overdose guaranteed, especially with absent competitors, trying to spoil the VMware annual party, by hijacking some of that overal media focus on Virtualization.

VMware hired the prestigious design agency Cahan & Associates and they came up with edgy creations that underline customer ‘references/quotes’ and are supposed to make us all connect at a very human level. If you are into ‘minimalist cool’ and like the artwork too, you will be happy to learn that you can order your own illustration styled photo at YouAreArt. Simply sent your picture, receive a draft after 2 weeks, give the artist feedback and get an original canvas within another 2 weeks.
For the DIY die-hards or those with graphic insight, there is good news too, as they can easily assemble their own illustration styled avatar at FaceYourManga for free.

VMworld promises to be even bigger than last time (wear comfy shoes!) and all sorts of contractors and vendors are very busy gearing up The Venetian’s many meeting rooms: setting up banners, signs, booths, networks, registration desks, 38 Wifi hotspots, labs, etc…

Try not to spend all your money on the gambling floor, as over 200 exhibitors would like you to buy some of their latest products too 🙂

Here is to a great VMworld 2008 and a lot of fun!

Filed Under: News, Rumors, Videos Tagged With: Artwork, avatar, Face Your Manga, Las Vegas, Toon Vanagt, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMWorld, VMWorld 2008, You are art, YouAreArt

Egenera To Offer A Technology Preview Of Its New Capacity-on-Demand Solution at VMworld 2008

August 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Egenera today announced an upcoming technology preview of its capacity-on-demand solution developed jointly with VMware. Recently, Egenera had already picked VMware’s virtualization technology to power its BladeFrame Systems.

Set to be unveiled for the first time on the show floor at VMworld, the new joint capacity-on-demand solution will provide VMware VirtualCenter users access to PAN Manager by Egenera processing resources directly through VMware VirtualCenter. With capacity-on-demand, customers benefit from the automatic deployment of ESX hosts onto “bare metal” in response to overutilization that can adversely affect virtual machine performance.

With Egenera’s capacity-on-demand solution, new ESX hosts are automatically registered to VirtualCenter as part of the resource pool, while underutilized ESX hosts can be automatically powered off to reduce energy consumption. In addition, VMware features such as Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) and High Availability (HA) will rebalance virtual machine workloads within the changed environment.

Egenera

[Source: VMblog]

Filed Under: News, Partnerships Tagged With: capacity-on-demand, Egenera, Egenera BladeFrame, Egenera BladeFrame System, Egenera PAN Manager, PAN Manager, preview, technology preview, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMware Infrastructure 3, VMWorld, VMWorld 2008

INX’ Virtualization Book Release Scheduled For VMware VMworld 2008 (Las Vegas)

August 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

INX today announced the release of “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” at VMware VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

With the recent acquisition of AccessFlow in June, INX has made an aggressive move into the data center virtualization space by acquiring some of the most expert minds in the business. Those minds belong to Steve Kaplan and Gary Lamb, INX’s VP of Datacenter Virtualization and Senior Director of Data Center Virtualization Practice, respectively.
Steve and Gary have collaboratively written a book titled “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” and will be releasing the book at this year’s VMware World trade show, September 15 through the 18th in Las Vegas.
“Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” provides a starting point for understanding the VMware Infrastructure and deploying it for cost reduction, quicker deployments of systems, and better control of resource utilization, as well as datacenter management and high availability.
Kaplan and Lamb have started a national book tour to promote and discuss the book this month and will continue to tour until VMworld. Steve Kaplan is founder of AccessFlow and formerly ran an ROI consulting firm. He has helped organizations around the globe quantify their IT costs, written scores of published IT articles and white papers on virtualization, power savings and has spoken at many venues across the globe including delivering the keynote address at Thin Power 2006 in Norway.

Filed Under: People Tagged With: AccessFlow, book, book release, Deploying the VMware Infrastructure, Gary Lamb, INX, INX Inc, INXI, Steve Kaplan, virtualisation, virtualization, VM World, VM World 2008, vmware, VMware VMworld, VMware VMworld 2008, VMWorld, VMWorld 2008

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