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Novell Offers Solution For Workload Management In The “Mixed IT Data Center”

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Novell today announced significant enhancements to its PlateSpin Workload Management solution. The new PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Orchestrate enable customers to profile, migrate, protect and manage server workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures in heterogeneous IT environments. Through these new enhancements, PlateSpin Workload Management is the only solution on the market today to support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all leading hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual Server, VMware ESX and ESXi and Xen integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

As data centers increasingly deploy diverse hardware platforms, operating systems and virtualization technologies in heterogeneous environments, the artificial boundaries between physical and virtual machines are being erased by portable workloads – the combination of an operating system, application and data software independent from the underlying physical or virtual platform. PlateSpin Workload Management enables data center administrators to optimize the distribution of workloads to provide the best performance for users and applications across both physical and virtual machines. As a result, customers can transform their IT environment into a more efficient and resilient next-generation data center.

PlateSpin Workload Management has added key functionality that makes PlateSpin a critical component of the day-to-day operation of the next-generation data center. PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect are available now. PlateSpin Orchestrate will be available in the first quarter of 2009.

The End of Neverland, What Neverland ?

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Stop the presses, RedHat and AMD just announced the end of Neverland.

The big News seems to be that RedHat and AMD managed to do Live migration of a virtual machine between 2 different CPU Vendors.

Now given my age and my starting alzheimer, LinuxKongress 2005 in Hamburg seems like ages ago,
As a speaker giving my Automating Xen Deployments talk early on the first conference day , I flew in the day before the conference and I needed some network connectivity so I sneeked into Ian Pratt’s tutorial about Xen. I remember sitting between Heinz Mauelshagen and my colegue Peter Leemans, Heinz was playing with SMP guests on a non SMP host and tried to figure out the limits.

If I recall correctly at the end of his session Ian was explaining Live Migration and demoing it by migrating a small virtual machine around between laptops of people in the front rows of the audience , Laptops from different architectures and from there started a discussion about CPU feature checking.

I asked around and some people actually remember parts of the discussion and the demo.

So for me , when RedHat and AMD claim today they have achieved in something new that was Never going to be implement they are either focusing on nitty details, like migrating from 2 brand new CPU’s to each other and forgetting the fundaments already existed for ages or just trying to get some positive news out of the door. In which they succeeded.

But I`m looking out for the next step in virtualization , not just mashups of things we’ve all been doing before, or things that are really similar to existing things.

Can We Stop Hyping The Cloud Yet ?

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The past six to nine months we’ve seen the rapid invasion of the Cloud, Cloud Computing or a variant including Cloud. We’ve had different Barcamp style Cloudcamps, there are bloggers rebranding their virtualization blog to a cloudblog and there are new aggregators popping that gather all cloudy news.

Now let’s face it, there is absolutely nothing new on the horizon.
The cloud terminology has been coined by the marketing people, you know the weird folks in suits that are a bit uncomfortable at campstyle events, yep those guys. Oh well.. not all of them are like that 🙂

When Amazon had an overstock of machines in the summer of 2002 they launched Amazon Web Services and for a lot of people that was the start of what today they call Cloud Computing. Their Server as a Service , the Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as “EC2”, The idea that you can launch a Virtual Machine somewhere remotely, manage it via an API and Pay As You Use .

So in came the abbreviations, SAAS, Software as a Service, the new business model for a lot of software vendors, PAAS , Platform As A Service, the new service for the ISP’s. And SOSAAS, Same Old Software as a Service

But the strange thing is that the idea wasn’t Amazon’s in the first place.

If you would read the following project description :
“The project is building a public infrastructure for wide-area distributed computing. We envisage a world in which execution platforms will be scattered across the globe and available for any member of the public to submit code for execution. The sponsor of the code will be billed for all the resources used or reserved during the course of execution. This will serve to encourage load balancing, limit congestion, and hopefully even make the platform self-financing.”

You’d think Amazon wouldn’t you ? Wrong bet, The above text is coming straight from the Xenoservers project at the University of Cambridge yes, the project that eventually lead to the development of the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor, on which coincidentally Amazon EC2 is based.

But was this the first form of distributed deployment of user resources. ?
Reuven, Mr Cloud, thinks not ,

Even way back then the criminal syndicates had developed “service oriented architectures” and federated id systems including advanced encryption. It has taken more then 10 years before we actually started to see this type of sophisticated decentralization to start being adopted by traditional enterprises.

So the script kiddies had a whole cloud of dynamically on demand deployable instances of hosts where they could deploy their malware. No Pay As You Go, and certainly no fuzz about which licenses needed to be bought.

Just as in today’s Clouds, on of the reasons why the cloud is getting so popular is that people using it don’t have to think about how many extra software licenses, the biggest part of it’s underlying technology is Open Source, not a non scalable, proprietary platform

The cloud to me is the mix of Virtualization, Scalability, Automation , Open Source, Large Scale Deployment , playing the puppetmaster, and High Availability .. and let it be the Virtualization part and the Management of Virtual environments which I cover for Virtualization.com

So yes you’ll be reading more cloud news here, as after all part of it is just plain old Virtualization, or SAAS, or Thin Client

Thin Cloud Computing

The Future of Xen At Red Hat

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As you might know, most of the development for the upcoming Red Hat releases is happening in the Fedora project, so if you want to keep an eye on what’s going to happen in future RedHat releases Fedora is a good place to look.

Reuven pointed out that the next Fedora release (Fedora 10) won’t have Dom0 support.

This however is not yet the strategic decision from Redhat after buying Qumranet and thus KVM. But merely a lack of time before the release has to ship.

Xen typically is being developed with an older 2.6.18 Linux kernel release and forward porting of these features is a time consuming effort. The typical kernel-xen package in Fedora has always been a bit behind on the kernel package
So the slow introduction of paravirt_ops, is keeping Dom0 support out of Fedora 10.

The idea behind paravirt_ops is to build a kernel structure that gives an interface to a virtualization layer, any virtualization layer, it allows the kernel to run on both a hypervisor and the actual hardware. Initial support for Xen, VMware and KVM is available.

Today running Fedora 10 as a host for your virtual machines will give you KVM as your only option. However Fedora 11 should solve that problem again. But then again, you probably don’t want to be running Fedora in a production environment, RedHat Enterprise or CentOS 5 are a much more viable alternative

Rackspace Acquires Cloud Providers Slicehost And Jungle Disk

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Rackspace Hosting today announced it has acquired privately owned VPS provider Slicehost, and storage provider Jungle Disk. (hat tip to TechCrunch)

The purchase price of the combined acquisitions is approximately $11.5 million payable in cash and stock, with the potential for up to $16.5 million in additional payouts of cash and stock based on certain performance criteria.

Rackspace is one of the largest providers of dedicated servers. Recently it has also moved into the virtualization world through partnerships with VMware and its own “cloud” division Mosso. Today’s announcement further shows that traditional hosting companies anticipate a growing importance of virtualization-based solutions.

Slicehost is one of the leading providers of Xen-based virtual servers. They cater mostly to developer crowds. In two years they have managed to build a customer base that runs more than 15.000 virtual servers.

Jungle Disk is a provider of storage software that works in conjunction with Amazon’s S3 storage platform. Rackspace announced that it will gradually move over new customers to its own storage systems, but will continue to support Amazon S3 as well.

Rackspace owns 8 datacenters in the United States, Hong Kong and the UK, and further has sales offices througout Europe and South Africa.

Scalent Brings Combined Virtual and Bare Metal Management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

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Scalent Systems, provider of real-time Management & Automation software for large data centers, and Red Hat today announced Scalent’s support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Xen. The combined solution extends virtualization and data center automation beyond hypervisors, to bare metal servers, network and storage connectivity.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 provides IT managers unprecedented levels of operational flexibility, via a comprehensive suite of open source server applications and virtualization capabilities . Scalent V/OE enables IT managers to rapidly provision entire virtual or bare metal servers and associated storage and network topologies, yielding higher asset utilization and dramatically lower costs.

Scalent’s software provides real time data center management, automation, and virtualization across physical and virtual servers, networks, and storage. Highly complementary to Red Hat’s Linux Automation efforts, the Scalent V/OE software enables data centers to react in real-time to changing business needs by shifting workloads and connectivity.

The result: data centers can transition between different configurations – or from bare metal to live, connected servers – in five minutes or less, without physical intervention.

Scalent’s software complements Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Linux Automation capabilities by delivering fully transparent management & automation of software workloads and connectivity across bare metal and virtual environments, including:

  • Simple, transparent deployment, automation, and management of both virtual and physical servers, network connectivity and storage access
  • Cost-effective high availability and server failover solutions, through Scalent’s N+1 technology leveraging existing IT assets
  • Fully-automated disaster recovery across data centers, through Scalent’s disaster recovery technology;
  • Creation of server pools that enable server rightsizing and scalability through dynamic repurposing; and
  • Effective chargeback capabilities, logical, secure partitioning, and named pools of resources for rapid change of operational lab or production environments.