Virtualization & Cloud Computing News [09.04.09] April 9, 2009
Posted by Roel Gydé in Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization.Tags: BlueCat, Cisco, Citrix, Devon IT, ESX, StorMagic, Tidal Software, Veeam, Vimware View, XenDesktop
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- Thin clients from Devon IT Europe have been VMware View certified
- BlueCat launches its Proteus and Adonis products as virtual appliances for VMware ESX
- VMware View 3.0 has been arwarded a 7,5/10 by Infoworld Test Center (report), the last test of XenDesktop (version 2.0) resulted in 8.3 (report)
- Veeam introduces version 4.5 of nWorks Management Pack for integration in vCenter and SCCM (more)
- Cisco to buy Tidal Software, who have a focus on intelligent application management and automation solutions, which will be integrated into Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 view.
- StorMagic , who specializes iSCSI SAN management software for virtualized environments, launched an extensive channel program (more
Virtualization & Cloud Industry News [02.04.09 - Update] April 2, 2009
Posted by Roel Gydé in Application virtualization, Cloud Computing, Data Center Management, File Virtualization, I/O Virtualization, Memory Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & Storage, datacenter, desktop virtualization.Tags: brokers, Cloud Computing, Cloud Security Alliance, ESX, ESXi, IBM, LotusLIve Engage, SaaS, VMware
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- IBM announced yesterday their first move to cloud computing with a SaaS offering for contact management, instant messaging and file sharing program in their own data centers. The fee per user per month will be between 10 USD and 45 USD, general availability of the suite is foreseen for April 7th and it will be marketed under the brand LotusLive Engage (more)
- VMware changes the number of supported virtual CPUs to 20 virtual CPUs per core across a board. The maximum number of vCPU remains unchanges: 192 (ESX) and 170 (ESXi Update 3) (more)
- Cloud Security Alliance formed to promote security best practices a cloud computing environment. Founding members include eBay and ING, furthermore PGP, Qualys and vScaler are also member (more)
- VDI Connection Brokers have been analyzed (more)
Virtualization & Cloud Industry News [02.04.09] April 2, 2009
Posted by Yves Peeters in Data Center Management, Server Virtualization, datacenter.Tags: ESX, Hyper-V, Intel, VKernel, VMware
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DMTF Releases OVF 1.0 Standard (more).
Intel releases new CPUs and NICs with nested page tables and I/O virtualization (more).
5nine Software today announced 5nine P2V Planner for Microsoft Hyper-V (more).
VKernel Ships Virtual Data Center Modeling Tool for VMware ESX Environments (more).
Virtutech Defines Full Systems Virtualized Development With Simics 4.2 (more).
Virtualization Olympics: Vendor bitchslapping event February 3, 2009
Posted by Roel Gydé in Application virtualization, Server Virtualization.Tags: ESX, Hyper-V, XenApp, XenServer
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Following our post on December 19th last year on virtualizing XenApp on XenServer, VMware and Citrix are at it again. VMware recently posted an article on the performance of XenApp on ESX and XenApp on XenServer.
It may not be a suprise that the VMware findings were boldly in favor of ESX and not in favor XenServer. It would be one step to far in this world that vendors confirm that their product might not be a good a fit to virtualize a specific application. Following the VMware post, Simon Crobsy (CTO Citrix) took his pen and opened the virtualizing-olympics with the following statement and challenge:
So I’ve decided to issue an open challenge to VMware CTO Stephen Herrod: Steve, it’s time to rein in the monkeys behind the keyboard, end VMware’s indefensible EULA restrictions and allow independent performance comparisons of your products with others, by third parties with a vested interest in accuracy and independence.
Both posts resulted in a flood of responses of the virtualization-community, but there are some general correct remarks in all these responses from the community:
- Why virtualizing XenApp? It obviously performs better natively (even proven by the VMware tests)
- Benchmarking should be done by independent companies/organization like http://www.virtualrealitycheck.net (2 experience system engineers working with Citrix and VMware)
- Selecting a virtualization platform for your XenApp, if you decide to do so it is not only abou performance, decissions will aslo be influenced by investement in the virtualization layer, automation, management, …
One thing however keeps me wondering … why virtualizing everything? Todays server come (in most cases) with 2x 4 cores, offering 8 cores which enables you to provide XenApp to more than a decent number of users. When adding virtualization to the stack for sure you will lose some performance (wether it is hyper-v, xenserver or esx).
I strongly believe that for those users that haven chosen to work with XenApp as a strategy a minimum number of XenApp servers should be physically, use a virtualized XenApp as escape-mode when something goes wrong. Furthermore keep in mind that when it comes to automation you might require an automatic launch system to rollout new servers in second.
Perhaps both CTOs need to read a report released by Aberdeen today on the advantages of virtualization and what about business critical applications, a quote from a researcher: (full report)
“Even though organizations could experience significant cost savings from conducting virtualization projects, these benefits could diminish if they don’t have capabilities in place for effective management of application performance. One of the key challenges for these organizations is that the effective management of application performance in virtualized environments requires a set of capabilities and functionalities that were not required when these organizations were looking to achieve same performance goals in physical environments. Understanding what these capabilities are is making the difference between success and failure of virtualization projects as measured from business prospective,” said Bojan Simic, research analyst, Aberdeen.
Xen-based hypervisors push performance limits – Citrix XenServer 5.0 Top Finisher January 21, 2009
Posted by Yves Peeters in I/O Virtualization, Server Virtualization.Tags: Citrix, ESX, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Novell XEN, Virtual Iron, virtualization, VMware, Xen, XenServer
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Tom Henderson and Brendan Allen of Network World Lab Alliance conducted an extensive performance testing of Citrix XenServer 5.0, Novell’s Xen 3.2 and Virtual Iron 4.4. Two other vendors — Sun and Red Hat — were invited to participate but because of varying timing problems, declined to participate.
The testing confirmed that open source Xen is a formidable challenger to the closed code VMware and Microsoft hypervisors. When the performance of business transactions running on top of the hypervisors was measured, Citrix’s XenServer 5.0 was the top finisher in nine out of 12 test runs.
Citrix VMs are tops in transaction processing, Novell’s in I/O speed.
Read the full article here.
Cost effective daily IT management in 9 seconds !!! November 14, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Data Center Management.Tags: ESX, RES Software, Run Book, Wisdom
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The day to day management of an IT environment in a virtualized environment does not differ much from a physical environment. Yet IT departments tend to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money at executing day-to-day tasks or repetitive tasks when it comes to users and systems.
With the release of RES Wisdom 2009 the time spent can be reduced, the effort can reduced to a minimum and the budget for an IT department can be better allocated to more important tasks than day to day management.
A typical example of a day-to-day job within an IT department is setting up a new user in the Active Directory, creating a homedrive, creating the same user in the Exchange environment and set a number of AD parameters. With RES Wisdom 2009 this can be done in 9 seconds !!!
RES Wisdom 2009 is your ‘Santa’s little helper’, offering you the breathing-space for other more critical tasks when it comes to day to day management of a small, medium or enterprise-sized IT infrastructure.
Wisdom 2009 is not the first release of RES SOFTWARE form the Netherlands, it is the sucessor of WISDOM 2007 with a lot of new features such as provisioning, run books and snapshot intelligence.
Microsoft SVVP … Cisco, VMware October 6, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, SVVP, WAAS, Xen, XenServer
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For those who do not know what Microsoft SVVP means, it stands for Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program.
Mcirosoft SVVP and Cisco Systems
Wednesday last week, Microsoft and Cisco announced the Microsoft Server on Cisco WAAS. This solution enables branch offices to be equiped with one device offering networking services and basic Microsoft services such as DHCP, DNS, Printing, AD. The appliance will be available at 10.000 USD.
Immediately a lot of comments, postings saw the light within the blogging community. The big question that remains at present is which virtualization solution Cisco will use. When reading the press release it states
“ … Cisco will embed a virtualization component within its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliance family that will help customers to host Windows Server 2008 …”
This sparked the discussion wether it would be Xen, KVM, XenServer, Hyper-V or VMware. When looking at the announcement we strongly believe that VMware will not be onboard this device seen the recent ‘well understanding’ between Microsoft and VMware.
This leaves KVM, XenServer, Xen or Hyper-V. Seen the good relationship between Microsoft and the open source community, we strongly believe that KVM or Xen will not be included, altough that Cisco has indicated its ‘fondness’ of KVM. This leaves Hyper-V or XenServer.
The Citrix Branch Repeater (also a combined development between Microsoft and Citrix) offers (currently) more features than the Microsoft Server on Cisco WAAS and is almost a head-to-head competing product. Based on this simple mathematics we strongly believe that the device will run Hyper-V.
Yet the device will host a W2K8 server to offer the necessary services to the branch. So this device will be the point of entry and exit to the branch or to the WAN. What would be the need to offer the capcity to rollout multiple VMs on an appliance, that has one goal, reducing the number of servers at the branch while reducing maintenance on the branch?
Story to be continued.
Addition 7.10.8 – On a slidedeck used by Cisco when proposing the solution, it shows that it will be a Linux kernel, so there goes Hyper-V, remains: Xen and KVM
Microsoft SVVP and VMware:
A few weeks ago Microsoft announced that VMware ESX had passed the SVVP (so Microsoft Server will run fluently on ESX), however it seems to be that VMware ESX is only certified on AMD processors and not on Intel processors.
XenServer 5 has been certified with a maximum of 8 CPUs, 30GB RAM and both on AMD and Intel processors
Virtualization Management with VKernel September 8, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: ESX, VKernel
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Looking for monitoring, chargeback and searching tools for your Virtual VMware Envinronment take a look at VKernel Virtual Appliance Suite. Full article and analysis here.
Microsoft TechED 2008: Hyper-V versus ESX June 19, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: ESX, Hyper-V, Management, solution, XenServer
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For one or another bizar reason the comparisions Hyper-V vs. ESX went public. A nice article on this discussion was posted by Peter Bruzesse on inforworld. The article was completely non biased and it was kept to the facts. Unfortunately once again some MS-addicts and VMW-addicts managed to get into a competing conversation on which technology was the best.
Personally I can understand that you prefer one brand over another, but that you start comparing a brand on features, that is way beyond my understanding. It is not the brand that counts, it is a solution that counts. This virtualization solution should fit the current and future requirements of the business, must be easy to manage, … clearly this decission can not be taken on feature-level. Below is an overview of our short reply to all the posts that Peter got on his article:
As a channel manager for a distributor in Europe we often get confronted with channelplayers that do not see which solution/brand to propose. Comparing the products on feature-level is not the best way. It all depends if you require an engine or a car like Simon Crosby often states.
Seen the fact that VMware has been in this market much longer than other brands, it is normal that they are leader. When new technology comes out, it is normal that everybody gets on this wagon and chooses that brand as there is no alternative.
If a company needs to take a decision regarding a brand/solution, expressions like “we’ve swapped 7000 VMs from datacenter 1 to datacenter 2 over a super high speed link 100km away” are totally irrelevant.
Decisions for a solution or a brand should be based on the current and future requirements of the business, the TCO, ROI manageability, ecosystem of the solution, …
There are three major players running around in the ballpark right now: Citrix, Microsoft and VMware and others following . But in the long term it will not be the hypervisor that will be the winner, it will be the business that once again gets in the driverseat and IT needs to align to this driverseat.
VKernel releases Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer 1.2 for VMware June 19, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer, ESX, Management, VKernel
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Imagine being able to instantly identify capacity bottlenecks on hosts, clusters and resources pools. Capacity bottlenecks, when not resolved, cause performance problems or even downtime. VKernel´s Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance immediately builds a list of current RAM, CPU, storage and network bottlenecks in a VMware infrastructure. It also predicts future capacity bottlenecks and alerts you when trends exceed customizable thresholds.
Free trial here, at present is unclear if the solution will also be available for XenServer or Hyper-V
Novell prepares SUSE for ESX June 18, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: ESX, SUSE
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Novell announced it is collaborating with VMware to improve Linux performance in VMware environments by incorporating support for the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) into the SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise kernel. Demonstrating their commitment to provide open interoperability and optimization for virtualized environments, the companies have worked together to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for the VMware platform.
VMware prepares for Hyper-V June 13, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: ESX, Hyper-V
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Eric Horschman knows that the once-cozy relationship that VMware and Microsoft once enjoyed is about to change in the next few weeks.
“We’re clearly about to go into direct competition with Microsoft with its Hyper-V technology,” Horschman, director of product marketing for VMware, said in an interview at the Microsoft TechEd 2008 Professionals event.
…
The key difference, Horschman said, is that Hyper-V is part of Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 operating system. Conversely, VMware is moving its hypervisor technology away from the operating system. The latest example is ESXi, released late last year, which is an operating system-independent hypervisor that can be integrated into the server or used as a stand-alone hard drive install.
At this point, Woolsey said, the only key advantage VMware holds over Microsoft is the ability to migrate live virtual machines, something VMware offers in its VMotion technology. Woolsey said the live migration capabilities will be available in the next version of Hyper-V. He declined to say when that will be released.
“We feel good about the performance and management” of Hyper-V, Woolsey said, pointing out that Microsoft testing showed Hyper-V outperforming ESX.
Full article here.
Lost in VMware acronyms? June 3, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: ESX, ESXi
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Let us be honest VMware has a number of differnt utilities/applications/… that are all marketed under different acronyms: VMFS, VSMP, VMHA, VCB, VMUM, DRS, SRM, … relax and read this post.
VMware certifies … June 3, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: ESX, Gigabyte, IESC, Supermicro, Tyan
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VMware just announced a number of new partnerships with
- ASUS
- Gigabyte
- IESC
- Supermicro
- Tyan Computer Corporation
is it possible that the hardware-vendors are feeling the pressure of virtualization on their sales? Is that also the reason why many of these hardware-vendors are also certifying for multiple platforms. For example Supermicro is available with XenServer and ESX? Full article here.
eG Innovation VM Monitor soon for XenServer June 1, 2008
Posted by Roel Gydé in Uncategorized.Tags: ESX, Sun Solaris Containers, XenServer
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eG Innovation VM Monitor, able to merge and correlate performance data collected inside the virtual machines (on the guest OSes) and inside their virtualization host. This approach greatly helps to have the big picture of the virtual infrastructure and pinpoint bottlenecks accordingly. The product will be soon available on XenServer, it is already available for VMware and Sun Solaris Containers.
