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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

Roger Baskerville Leaves Citrix / XenSource

November 2, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Roger Baskerville has left Citrix, where he started out as the Sales Director of Xensource EMEA , after the Citrix merger to become Regional Director Northern Europe Server Virtualization .

During his years at Xensource Roger was one of the first commercial pushers of Xen and later XenEnterprise.

Roger has now joined Vizioncore as Vice President for EMEA and he will be responsible for EMEA operations. He leads the sales, marketing and systems engineering teams based across the region. Baskerville has held a variety of senior channel focused EMEA sales leadership positions with both mature high tech organizations as well as start-up operations. Previous companies include LightPointe, Palm, Compaq and NCR. A seasoned industry speaker who is both technically astute and sales focussed, Baskerville brings with him a wealth of experience in virtualization and international sales.

Earlier this year Quest fully acquired VizionCore as part of their journey into virtualization, after earlier
already owning a smaller part of the company. VizionCore then was described as the leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management.

Today their website reads
“VizionCore Inc. provides software that helps organizations safeguard and optimize their virtualized environments and allows them to extract the maximum return on their investment in the VMware platform. Vizioncore’s software products support essential IT strategies, including business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery.”

With this move Roger stays in the Virtualization world where he has worked for the past couple of years, however moving from a fully Open Source based technology to a back to a proprietary environment.

The bigger question however is .. who else will be leaving Citrix/ XenSource. and when ? XenSource has been with Citrix for about a year now .. maybe there are other people jumping ship.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Posts, People Tagged With: citrix, citrix xenserver, Citrix XenSource, industry moves, recruitment, Roger Baskerville, virtualisation, virtualization, Vizioncore, XenEnterprise, xensource

KVM Lives On At Red Hat, So Now What?

September 27, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Over a year after the first big Open Source Virtualization acquisition, Citrix Acquiring Xensource, the next industry shaking acquisition is a fact. Red Hat has reeled in Virtualization startup Qumranet, While RedHat had already announced that they were going to support both KVM and Xen in their product range , taking over Qumranet for some people sounds like a really strange thing to do , afterall apart from its work on KVM as the underlying opensource component of their product, Qumranet is a pretty proprietary software company.

Qumranet understood that the Bare Metal Low Layer virtualization layer was not going to bring them any money any day soon. There were going to be different Free and free alternative Virtualization layers out there anyhow so why keeping theirs secret rather than having it flourish as a community product and contribute back to the linux kernel community while at it.

On the other hand the products of Qumranet were closed, altough based on Linux their business was in selling a VDI solution to bigger customers. The question now becomes how this kind of product range will fit into RedHat’s tradidional Open Source offering. Red Hat has a long history of opensourcing everything they do. Obviously there is Redhat Linux, Jboss but also
the proprietary directory server they bought from Netscape which they opensourced . Sometimes it takes a while, like with their Satellite product, but they have a good track record here. So most parts of the SolidIce product line will be opensourced , but will they grow a community ?

Lots of people ask themselves if RedHat was interrested in the VDI infrastructure or did the just want to have the KVM Kernel developers on board. The fact is that they have a direct entry into managing Windows desktops , a market previously closed for themAnd that makes it an interresting move. As of now, managing a windows box is just managing a file on a Linux server, easy to copy, easy to replace.

With RedHat clearly preferring KVM over Xen in the future. What’s going to happen with Xen in the other distributions.
The 451 group reports that
“Novell insists Xen is its hypervisor of choice and it remains committed to the virtualization software and project.”,
but as we all know .. Novell will be working on other interoperability challenges too.

With Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux being a RedHat derivate the future of Virtualization in Unbreakable becomes an interresting topic.
Oracle clearly choose the Xen platform as their favourite virtualization technology earlier. And given the fact that it will be hosting the next
North American Xen summit , Oracle seems to plan on continuing to build their platform on Xen.

To close of there’s also the question of people at Qumranet, Qumranet was cofounded by serial virtualization enterpreneur Moshe Bar who previously had also cofouned Qlusters and Xensource What’s he going to do , will he stay around at RedHat or will he refocus to his other startup Sullego.

In a couple of weeks Xensource will celebrate it’s first anniversary at Citrix , let’s see what happens then …

Filed Under: Acquisitions, Guest Posts, People, Rumors Tagged With: citrix, Oracle VM, qumranet, RedHat, SolidICE, xensource

vMAN Over At DMTF Is Immune To Kryptonite And Now Powered by OVF Version 1.0

September 16, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

Like superheroes with a weak spot (remember Superman and green Kryptonite), large providers of green data center technologies and virtualization software had an Achilles’ heel with their vendor lock-in, which scared away quite a few prospects. Today the major players have all agreed to drop their distinct proprietary formats and aim to adopt the Open Virtualization Format 1.0 as soon as possible (most are already compliant upon release). We first learned about OVF during our interview with Ian Pratt and the release of this open standard is a great step forward. The short lead time of ‘only’ one year proves the industry has understood that open standards are the way to go.

Above is our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld in Las Vegas, where DMTF president Winston Bumpus revealed the release of OVF 1.0 and their larger Virtualization Management Initiative (vMAN). vMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. This Initiative delivers much-needed open industry standards to the management of virtualized environments. Ultimately, the group’s goal is to eliminate the need for IT managers to separately install, configure and manage interdependencies between virtualized operating systems and applications, by enabling automated management of the virtual machine lifecycle.

This new specification created by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource is about to become an industry standard and aspires to help ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. We did not have the time to transcribe the interview yet, but already took a few of Winston Bumpus’ quotes from the DMTF press release.

“With the increasing demand for virtualization in enterprise management, the new spec developed through this industry-wide collaboration dove-tails nicely into existing virtualization management standardization activity within the DMTF…
OVF extends the work we have underway to offer IT managers automation of critical, error-prone activities in the deployment of a virtualized infrastructure.”

By collaborating on the development of the OVF specification, the DMTF group aims to make it easier for IT organizations to pre-package and certify software packaged as virtual machine templates for deployment in their virtualized infrastructure and to facilitate the secure distribution of pre-packaged virtual appliances by ISVs and virtual appliance vendors.

Filed Under: Featured, Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: 1.0, Bumpus, DMTF, ESX, HP, Hyper-V, IBM, interview, microsoft, Open Virtual Machine Format, ovf, OVF 1.0, OVF releaseDell, release, video, video interview, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMWorld, Winston Bumpus, Xen, xensource

“Benchmarking” The Citrix / XenServer Combo with Ian Pratt (Video Interview – Part 4)

June 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

During the Fosdem 2008 conference, we had a chance to sit down (on a bench) with Xen Guru Ian Pratt. Below is the fourth and last part (see part 1, part 2 and part 3) of our exclusive interview, where Ian shines his light on Citrix Xenserver, relocating virtual machines (VM), VM-mirroring, OVF, page tables algorithms, open source community involvement, management frameworks, the Citrix take-over, Virtualization marketing with OS-enlightment, FUD-tactics by VMWare, self-healing servers, Xen embedded in firmware, why Amazon goes with Xen, the Xen GPL license, OracleVM, xVM (Sun), Parallels and the future of virtualization…

We cut the interview into 4 digestable pieces, which we publish one at a time (see part 1, part 2 and part 3). As said, this is the final part (soon, you’ll also find a written transcript below for your convenience):

The video is also up on YouTube and Steamocracy.

Filed Under: Featured, Interviews, People, Videos Tagged With: citrix, Citrix Ian Pratt, citrix xenserver, Ian Pratt, interview, Sun xVM, University of Cambridge, video, virtualisation, virtualization, Xen, Xen Ian Pratt, xen.org, XenDesktop, xenserver, xensource, XVM

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