UCS and VCE vBlock Type 1 Challenge Top VMmark

[caption id="attachment_1306" align="alignright" width="105" caption="VMmark "Tile" Loads "][/caption]

Last November we reported on the Fujitsu RX300 S5 rack server taking the top VMmark spot for 8-core systems. Yesterday (January 11, 2010) Cisco's UCS B200-M1 using VMware ESX 4.0 (build 164009) came within 0.5% of the top spot with a score of 25.06@17 tiles. While falling only slightly short of the mark set by the brute force RX300/DX80 combo, the UCS system did so with a very different solution, unsurprisingly similar to the vBlock Type 1 architecture described by Chad Sakacc in his blog post about the VMware, Cisco and EMC alliance.

Given that VMmark is a single node test harness, the difference between rack server and blade server architectures is a non-issue. However, more than just rack vs. blade is going on in this comparison. The Cisco UCS system is being fed by a pair of 10GE converged network adapters - used both for host network access and Fiber Channel bus access - and a monolithic storage array in the guise of a CLARiiON CX4-240 complete with a complement of 20, 73GB STEC SSD's - just to sweeten the pot.

[caption id="attachment_1385" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="VMmark Network Configuration for the UCS B200-M1"][/caption]

While it is clear from past VMmark posts that the network speed (beyond 1Gbps) has little to do with the results, it is nice to see the confidence Cisco has in the CNA approach (Cisco UCS M71KR-Q) to go with the "eggs in a basket" solution. Given the storage demands on the CNA, the VMmark result should remove any doubt about the viability (performance) of high-capacity tandems (we'll leave the physical link security concerns for another day.)

However, where the "rubber meets the road" in this contest is storage I/O and this solution - in our opinion is just plain showing off. With just 41 disks to build from, the CX4-240 has been configured to deliver 37 LUNs - nearly one LUN per unit disk. Before any awards are given out for storage of the year, we need to consider that 36 of those LUNs are RAID0 - yielding a testing platform with no real-world analog (hence "showing off".)

[caption id="attachment_1388" align="aligncenter" width="449" caption="CLARiiON CX4-240 Storage Build-out for UCS B200-M1 VMmark"][/caption]

Given the ease at which RAID0 can be replaced by RAID1+0, it may be safe to assume that the same results could have been obtained by using 77 disks instead of 41 - at which point the CX4-240 would still be less than half the size of the top VMmark's 172-disk solution. The reason is clear: SSD's accelerate I/O loads incredibly well in architectures that support them. If anything, this "runner-up" proves that SSD adoption is on the verge of becoming mainstream.

But what does this test show about UCS? Firstly, it shows that Cisco's platform can compete with the best solutions out there on CPU and I/O performance (what's a half a percentage point across 102 virtual machines?) It's not really a surprise given that the UCS platform was designed to do just that - and within a neatly managed framework. Secondly, it shows that the choice of EMC as a partner was an excellent one. As Martin Glassborow commented on his Storagebod's Blog, EMC's involvement in VMware has energized the storage vendor to take bold and innovative steps towards Cloud Computing solutions that it might not have done otherwise (like the RAID0 SSD array). Thirdly and most importantly, it underscores the importance of predictable performance in a virtualization solution. Given the UCS/vBlock approach to systems organization, it can be very difficult not to draw solid parallels between the benchmarks and expectations for net new builds based on the criterion.

Quick Take: Red Hat and Microsoft Virtual Inter-Op

This week Red Hat and Microsoft announced support of certain of their OSes as guests in their respective hypervisor implementations: Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) and Hyper-V, respectively. This comes on the heels of Red Hat's Enterprise Server 5.4 announcement last month.

KVM is Red Hat's new hypervisor that leverages the Linux kernel to accelerate support for hardware and capabilities. It was Red Hat and AMD that first demonstrated live migration between AMD and Intel-based hypervisors using KVM late last year - then somewhat of a "Holy Grail" of hypervisor feats. With nearly a year of improvements and integration into their Red Hat Enterprise Server and Fedora "free and open source" offerings, Red Hat is almost ready to strike-out in a commercially viable way.

Microsoft now officially supports the following Red Hat guest operating systems in Hyper-V:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4

Red Hat likewise officially supports the following Microsoft quest operating systems in KVM:

Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2

The goal of the announcement and associated agreements between Red Hat and Microsoft was to enable a fully supported virtualization infrastructure for enterprises with Red Hat and Microsoft assets. As such, Microsoft and Red Hat are committed to supporting their respective products whether the hypervisor environment is all Red Hat, all Hyper-V or totally heterogeneous - mixing Red Hat KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V as necessary.

"With this announcement, Red Hat and Microsoft are ensuring their customers can resolve any issues related to Microsoft Windows on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating on Microsoft Hyper-V, regardless of whether the problem is related to the operating system or the virtualization implementation."

- Red Hat press release, October 7, 2009

Many in the industry cite Red Hat's adoption of KVM as a step backwards [from Xen] requiring the re-development of significant amount of support code. However, Red Hat's use of libvirt as a common management API has allowed the change to happen much more rapidly that critics assumptions had allowed. At Red Hat Summit 2009, key Red Hat officials were keen to point out just how tasty their "dog food" is:

Tim Burke, Red Hat's vice president of engineering, said that Red Hat already runs much of its own infrastructure, including mail servers and file servers, on KVM, and is working hard to promote KVM with key original equipment manufacturer partners and vendors.

And Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens pointed out in his Summit keynote that with KVM inside the Linux kernel, Red Hat customers will no longer have to choose which applications to virtualize; virtualization will be everywhere and the tools to manage applications will be the same as those used to manage virtualized guests.

- Xen vs. KVM, by Pam Derringer, SearchDataCenter.com

For system integrators and virtual infrastructure practices, Red Hat's play is creating opportunities for differentiation. With a focus on light-weight, high-performance, I/O-driven virtualization applications and no need to support years-old established processes that are dragging on Xen and VMware, KVM stands to leap-frog the competition in the short term.

SOLORI's Take: This news is good for all Red Hat and Microsoft customers alike. Indeed, it shows that Microsoft realizes that its licenses are being sold into the enterprise whether or not they run on physical hardware. With 20+:1 consolidation ratios now common, that represents a 5:1 license to hardware sale for Microsoft, regardless of the hypervisor. With KVM's demonstrated CPU agnostic migration capabilities, this opens the door to an even more diverse virtualization infrastructure than ever before.

On the Red Hat side, it demonstrates how rapidly Red Hat has matured its offering following the shift to KVM earlier this year. While KVM is new to Red Hat, it is not new to Linux or aggressive early adopters since being added to the Linux kernel as of 2.6.20 back in September of 2007. With support already in active projects like ConVirt (VM life cycle management), OpenNebula (cloud administration tools), Ganeti, and Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform, the game of catch-up for Red Hat and KVM is very likely to be a short one.

Quick-Take: VMworld 2009 Wrap-Up

VMworld 2009 in San Franciso started off with a crash and a fist fight, but ended without further incident. If you're looking for what happened, it would be hard to beat Duncan Epping's link-summary of the San Francisco VMworld 2009 at Yellow-Bricks, so we won't even try. Likewise, Chad Sakacc has some great EMC view point on his Virtualgeek blog, and - fresh from his new book release - Scott Lowe has some great detail about the VMworld keynotes, events and sessions he attended.

There is a great no-spin commentary on VMworld's "softer underbelly" on Jon William Toigo's Drunken Data blog - especially the post about Xsigo's participation in VMworld 2009. Also, Brian Madden has a great wrap-up video of of interviews from the VMworld floor including VMware's Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) and the software implementation of Teradici's PC-over-IP.

AMD's IOMMU was on display using a test mule with two 12-core 6100 processors and a SR5690 chipset. The targets were a FirePro graphics card and a Solarflare 10GE NIC. For IOMMU-based virtualization to have broad appeal, hardware device segmentation must be supported in a manner compatible with vMotion (live migration.) No segmentation was hinted at in AMD's demo (for FirePro), but the fact that vSphere+IOMMU+Magny-Cours equated to enough stability to be openly demonstrating the technology says a lot about the maturity of AMD's upcoming chips and chipsets. On the other hand, Solarflare's demonstration previewed - in 10GE - what could be possible in a future version of IOV for GPU's:

"The flexible vNIC demonstration will highlight the Solarstorm server adapter’s scalable, virtualized architecture, supporting 100s of virtual machines and 1000s of vNICs. The Solarstorm vNIC architecture provides flexible mapping of vNICs, so that each guest OS can have its own vNIC, as well as traffic management, enabling prioritization and isolation of IP flows between vNICs."

- Solarflare Press Release

SOLORI's Take: The controversy surrounding VMware's "focus" on the VMware "sphere" of products was a non-starter. The name VMworld does not stand for "Virtualization World" - it stands for "VMware World" and denying competitor's "marketing access" to that venue seems like a reasonable restriction. While it may seem like a strong-arm tactic to some, insisting that vendors/partners are there "for VMworld only" - and hence restricting cross-marketing efforts in and around the venue - makes it more difficult for direct competitors to play the "NASCAR-style marketing" (as Toigo calls it) game.

VMworld is a showcase for technologies driving the virtualization eco-system as seen from VMware's perspective. While there are a growing number of competitors for virtualization mind-share, VMware's pace and vision - to date - has been driven by careful observation of use-case more so than innovation for innovation's sake. It is this attention to business need that has made VMware successful and what defines VMworld's focus - and it is in that light that VMworld 2009 looks like a great success.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/090309-vmworld-vmware-roundup.html

Quick Take: AristaNetworks Announces vEOS for vNDS

Arista Networks - the Menlo Park, CA "cloud networking solutions" company - has announced the first competitor to Cisco's Nexus 1000V virtual, distributed switch for VMware's vSphere. Called simply vEOS (aka Virtualized Extensible Operating System) the virtual machine application integrates into the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch (vNDS) framework to accomplish its task.

The current advantages posed by the vNDS architecture are preservation of a VM's network state across vMotion events and port configuration simplicity. Enhancements for the vEOS virtual machine will include QoS (with TX/RX limiting), ACL enforcement (when used with Arista's 7000 series switch family), CLI configuration and management, distributed port profiles, port profile inheritance, VMware port mirroring, SNMP v3 RW, syslog exports, active standby control plane, SSH/telnet access to CLI, "hitless" control plane upgrades, non-disruptive installation and integrated vSwitch upgrade workflow.

Another advantage of vEOS for adopters of Arista's 7000-series 10Gbase-T switches is its derrivation from the switch's own EOS code base. The EOS image is monolithic with respect to feature set, so there are no "trains to catch" for compatibility, et al. Michael Morris from NetworkWorld has an article about the vEOS announcement along with some additional information about Arista's plans and how to get your hands on a beta version of vEOS... See Arista's official press release about vEOS.

SOLORI's Take: While CNA's are great, 10Gbase-T provides a less "process disruptive" access to greater network bandwidth. Arista's move with vEOS is challenging both Cisco's presence in the VMware market and its vision for network convergence. Just like Ethernet won-out over "superior" technologies based on its simplicity, we're looking at 10Gbase-T's drop-in simplicity (CAT5e support, 100/1G/10G auto-negotiate, etc.) to drive obvious market share for related products. With the 2010 battle lines drawn in the virtualization platform market, the all-important network segment will be as much a scalability factor as it is a budgetary one.

When using the coming "massive" virtualization potential of 2P/4P hardware being released in 2010 (see our Quick Take on 48-core virtualization) the obvious conduit for network traffic into 180+ VM consolidations is 10GE. The question: will 10Gbase-T deliver order-of-magnitude economies of scale needed to displace the technical advantages of DCE/CNA-based networking?

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Strategy

Red Hat's recently updated virtualization strategy has resulted in an "oversubscribed" beta program. The world leader in open source solutions swings a big stick with its kernel-based virtualization products. Some believe one of the keys to successful large scale cloud initiatives is an open source hypervisor, and with Xen going commercial, turning to the open source veteran Red Hat seems a logical move. You may recall that Red Hat - using KVM - was the first to demonstrate live migration between AMD and Intel hosts.

"We are very pleased by the welcome we have received from enterprise companies all over the world who are looking to adopt virtualization pervasively and value the benefits of our open source solutions. Our Beta program is oversubscribed. We are excited to be in a position to deliver a flexible, comprehensive and cost-effective virtualization portfolio in which products will share a consistent hardware and software certification portfolio. We are in a unique position to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of virtualization solutions, ranging from a standalone hypervisor to a virtualized operating system to a comprehensive virtualization management product suite."

- Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat

Red Hat sees itself as an "agent of change" in the virtualization landscape and wants to deliver a cost effective "boxed" approach to virtualization and virtualization management. All of this is hinged on Red Hat's new KVM-based approach - enabled through their acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008 - which delivers the virtualization and management layers to Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and its kernel.

Along with Qumranet came Solid ICE and SPICE. Solid ICE is the VDI component running on KVM consisting of a virtual desktop server and controller front end. Solid ICE allows Red Hat to rapidly enter the VDI space without disrupting its Eco-System. Additionally, the SPICE protocol (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) enables an standardized connection protocol alternative to RDP with enhancements for the VDI user experience.

Red Hat's SPICE claims to offer the following features in the enterprise:

• Superior graphics performance (e.g. flash)


• video quality (30+ frames per second)


• bi-directional audio (for soft-phones/IP phones)


• bi-directional video (for video telephony/ video conferencing)


• No specialized hardware. Software only client that can be automatically installed via Active-X and a browser on the client machine

Red Hat's virtualization strategy reveals more of it's capabilities and depth in accompanying blogs and white papers. Adding to the vendor agnostic migration capabilities, Red Hat's KVM is slated to support VM hosts to 96 cores and 1TB of memory with guests scaling to 16 vCPUs and 64GB of memory. Additional features include high availabitily, live migration, global system scheduler, global power saving (through migration and power down), memory page sharing, thin storage provisioning and SELinux security.

Quick Take: Oracle to Buy Virtual Iron

Oracle extended its spring buying spree by announcing the purchase of Virtual Iron Software, Inc (Virtual Iron) on May 13, 2009. Citing Virtual Iron's "dynamic resource and capacity management" capabilities as the reason in their press release, Oracle intends to fill gaps in its Xen-based Oracle VM product (available as a free download).

Ironically, Virtual Iron's product focus is SMB. According to a Butler Group technology audit, Virtual Iron "has one limitation that [they] believe will impact potential customers: the management console currently can only manage 120 nodes." However, Virtual Iron's "VI-Center" - the management piece cited as the main value proposition by Butler and Oracle - is based on a client-server Java application, making it a "good fit" with the recent Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Oracle has not announced plans for Virtual Iron, pending the conclusion of the deal. Oracle's leading comment:

“Industry trends are driving demand for virtualization as a way to reduce operating expenses and support green IT strategies without sacrificing quality of service,” said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering. “With the addition of Virtual Iron, Oracle expects to enable customers to more dynamically manage their server capacity and optimize their power consumption. The acquisition is consistent with Oracle’s strategy to provide comprehensive enterprise software management and will facilitate more efficient management of application service levels.”

SOLORI's take: If the deal goes through, Oracle has found an immediate job for its newly acquired Sun Java engineers - getting VI-Cener ready for enterprise computing. Currently, Oracle VM is a "barebones" product with very little value beyond its intrinsic functionality. With the acquisition of Virtual Iron and its management piece, Oracle/Sun could produce a self-sufficient virtualization eco-system with OracleVM augmented by Virtual Iron, Sun Storage, choice of Oracle or MySQL databases, and commodity (or Sun) hardware - all vetted for Oracle's application stack.

Virtual Iron was supposedly working on Hyper-V and KVM (RedHat's choice of virtualization) management features. Though we doubt that Oracle VM will evolve into a truly "virtualization agnostic" product, the promise of such a capability is the stuff of "cloud computing." Sun's VDI and xVM server group will have a lot of work to do this summer...

Your Own, Personal Cloud

RightScale, the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbar and Ubuntu are launching a tag-team assault on the cloud paradigm. Based on Xen infrastructures and Amazon EC2 control syntax (Amazon Web Services, AWS), the Eucalyptus platform is designed to be a work-alike, elastic cloud building block to promote private cloud confederations.

Starting with Ubuntu 9.04, RightScale will support private cloud management from their web management platform to your Eucalyptus cloud with registration built-into the Eucalyptus install. Why Ubuntu 9.04? Because it is the first distribution to ship with the Eucalyptus technology preview.

Billed as the "Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud" platform, the Ubuntu+Eucalyptus+RightScale triumvirate will allow emulate the EC2 environment and control the hardware build-out as well. Future updates will allow ServerTemplates and automation from RightScale, but this is a "preview" after all.

Some strong points about the Eucalyptus cloud:

• 2-4 times better TCP throughput than EC2


• AppScale (Google AppEngine) can deploy to it


• Runs on Xen and open source

Currently, there is no planned support for non-Linux operating systems, so Windows users will need to look to other technologies. However, if this project delivers, the air between public and private clouds could be getting a lot thinner.

AMD's New Opteron

AMD's announcement yesterday came with some interesting technical tidbits about its new server platform strategy that will affect its competitiveness in the virtualization marketplace. I want to take a look at the two new server platforms and contrast them with what is available today and see what that means for our AMD-based eco-systems in the months to come.

Initially, the introduction of more cores to the mix is good for virtualization allowing us to scale more gracefully and confidently as compared to hyper-threading. While hyper-threading is reported to increase scheduling efficiency in vSphere, it is not effectively a core. Until Nehalem-EX is widely available and we can evaluate 4P performance of hyper-threading in loaded virtual environments I'm comfortable awarding hyper-threading a 5% performance bonus - all things being equal.

[caption id="attachment_435" align="alignright" width="300" caption="AMD's Value Shift"][/caption]

What's Coming?

That said, where is AMD going with Opteron in the near future and how will that affect Opteron-based eco-systems? At least one thing is clear: compatibility is assured and performance - at the same thermal footprint - will go up. So let's look at the ramifications of the new models/sockets and compare them to our well-known 2000/8000 series to glimpse the future.

A fundamental shift away from DDR2 and towards DDR3 for the new sockets is a major difference. Like the Phenom II, Core i7 and Nehalem processors, the new Opteron will be a DDR3 specimen. Assuming DDR3 pricing continues to trend down and the promise of increased memory bandwidth is realized in the HT3/DCA2 and Opteron, DDR3 will deliver solid performance in 4000 and 6000 configurations.

Opteron 6000: Socket G34

From the announcement, G34 is analogous to the familiar 8000-series line with one glaring exception: no 8P on the road-map. In the 2010-2011 time frame, we'll see 8-core, 12-core and 16-core variants with a new platform being introduced in 2012. Meanwhile, the 6000-series will support 4-channels of "unbuffered" or "registered" DDR3 across up to 12DIMMs per socket (3 banks by 4 channels). Assuming 6000 will support DDR3-1600, the theoretical bandwidth of a 4 channel design would yield memory bandwidths in the 40-50GB/sec range per link (about twice Istanbul's).

[caption id="attachment_433" align="alignright" width="300" caption="AMD 2010-2013 Road-map"][/caption]

With a maximum module density of 16GB, a 12-DIMM by 4-socket system could theoretically contain 768GB of DDR3 memory. In 2011, that equates to 12GB/core in a 4-way, 64-core server. At 4:1 consolidation ratios for typical workloads, that's 256 VM/host at 3GB/VM (4GB/VM with page sharing) and an average of 780MB/sec of memory bandwidth per VM. I think the math holds-up pretty well against today's computing norms and trends.

Opteron Turns 6: Plus Istanbul and a New Road-map

AMD released an updated technology road-map for it's Opteron processor family, beginning with the early availability of Istanbul - its Socket-F compatible 6-core processor - shipping for revenue in May and available from OEM's in June. This information was delivered in a webcast today.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="214" caption="AMD Istanbul 6-core Processor"][/caption]

"...up to 30 percent more performance within the same power envelope and on the same platform as current Quad-Core AMD Opteron..."

Additionally, AMD updated the availability of its Direct Connect Architecture 2.0 to be available only in the Opteron 4000 and 6000 series (socket C32 and G34, respectively). Companies waiting for the 12-core "Magny-Cours" processor will have to switch to the G34 platform in 2010. AMD announced that it is already shipping this 45nm part to sampling partners, and some customers will receive parts in 2H/2009. Magny-Cours is expected to be available from OEM's and system vendors in 1H/2010.

"Opteron 4000 series is also planned for introduction in 2010 for 1P and 2P servers and designed to address virtualized Web and cloud computing environments. The 4000 series will launch with 4- and 6-core processors..."

AMD believes, with core counts on the rise, dense computing (HPC and data center virtualization or cloud) will rely on the 4000 series and its more "green friendly" low power parts called "EE" offering comparable performance at 40W average power. This will create a differential in the server space between 4000 and 6000 (much like 2000 and 8000 today) but with overlap in the 2P market (unlike 2000/8000). The 6000 series is envisioned as a "high performance computing" part where power sensitivity is not the major concern.

VMware: vSphere Pricing/Features Announced

VMware released more information to the public about its next-generation virtualization product today with the announcement of vSphere. The target is cloud computing and 100% virtualization will become the new mantra.

vSphere introduces much requested support for new operating systems as well. Starting with the release version of vSphere 4.0, the following OSes will be fully supported on VMware's platform:

Asianux, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, SCO OpenServer, SCO Unixware.

These come in addition to the already supported array of Windows, RedHat, Suse, DOS and Netware operating systems. This broadening of supported OSes extends the gulf between VMware and Xen/Hyper-V even further. As Cloud-OS is a tenant of VMware's future plans, the ability to support an extended array of operating systems is a requirement as customers export/import between private and public clouds.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="250" caption="vSphere Essentials Editions"][/caption]

For the long-neglected SMB space, VMware now offers a vSphere Essentials to spur the growth of enterprise virtualization in that space. The new package comes in two editions: Essentials and Essentials Plus retailing at $995 and $2,995 respectively. Both packages come with vCenter Server and associated management licenses. The real value here for SMB's is the included licensing of three physical servers with up-to two processors and 12-cores each.

vSphere Essentials

Why is the Essentials offering so important to the SMB market? With the exception of vMotion technology, the Essentials editions offer small businesses the ability to consolidate up to 85 virtual machines for as little as $35/VM including server hardware (based on 2P, quad-core Opteron systems with 32GB RAM and 4:1 VM:core consolidation ratios).

Feature Essentials Essentials Plus ESXi or ESX (64-bit hardware) X X vStorage VMFS X X vStorage Thin Provisioning X X Four-way vSMP X X vCenter Server Agent X X vStorage API X X VMware Consolidated Backup X X vCenter Update Manager X X VMware HA X VMware Data Recovery X vCenter Server Essentials X X Suggested Retail Price $995 $2,995

We believe most SMBs will prove to have more aggressive utilizations than large enterprise averages. As a result, we expect fairly conservative consolidation ratios of 2:1 to 3:1 (per core) in vSphere Essentials integrations with only 3 servers.

Even so, Essentials delivers its solution for under $70/VM (30-40 VMs), and Essentials Plus comes in at $115/VM in a fully HA environment (no single host with more than 66% of design capacity). Likewise, one must consider the value of Update Manager, vCenter, vSMP, Thin Provisioning and VMware Consolidated Backup to SMB's moving forward.

The additional "IT muscle" leveraged with these options could create may "virtualization as a service" propositions for small integrators wishing to covert CAPEX into recurring revenues. We expect to see many offerings of this ilk cropping-up in the SMB space as wallets tighten and virtualization in-sourcing becomes more popular. In any case, either option presents an attractive value proposition for SMB's and the integrators/solution providers that serve them and vSphere is the leading platform to make it all happen.

VMware Partner 2009 Update: License Changes Coming

The old VMware licensing system was "difficult to understand" for many end-users. The policy of purchase-registration-activation and subsequent assignment to either license server or host license file/code will be changed to accommodate simple key codes. Those familiar with Microsoft's license key structure will feel right at home with the new licensing structure.

Once purchased, the new license key - with full enablement encoded into it - will be e-mailed to the purchaser and applied to the host/vCenter Server for feature activation. License keys can be split on-line (i.e. 20-CPU key turned into two, 10-CPU keys, etc.) and managed through the portal as usual. VMware also promises to enhance the end-user's ability to track license keys better.

Current license holders should be looking for more information from VMware in their in-boxes following the general availability announcement before the end of Q2'09.

Note: No changes to existing product licensing will be made as this new process applies to products released with (and in addition to) VMware's new hypervisor.

VMware Partner 2009 Update: vSphere is coming...

We're not the first to say it, but vSphere - VMware's 4.0 iteration of it's Virtual Infrastructure product - is coming and it will take the cloud by storm... Remember our "Christmas List" blog back in December? We essentially outlined the following "must haves" for our next generation vOS:

1. Agnostic live migration,


2. Infinite snapshot backup/restore,


3. Natively reads Xen, Virtualbox, KVM, VMWare and HyperV virtual disks and configs,


4. Can “clone on migrate” a running image to a “dmz” for analysis or a “remote cluster” for easy DR snapshots,


5. Supports I/O and processor limits per VM, and


6. Runs most workloads at least 95% bare metal.

Well, here's were we stand on that:

1. Not yet,


2. Close: new VCB solution will have API and lots of options,


3. Do I still want this feature?


4. Getting Fault Tolerance instead,


5. Got this one, and


6. Close: 90% bare metal.

On top of that, we're closer to private-public confederations that would allow vCustomer "A" to export/import to/from vCloud vender "B" if each are running vSphere.Also - and you've all seen this by now - we're getting a plugable vSwitch supervisor with many E-class switching capabilities...

Plus, we're getting application awareness in the networking back-end that will allow tweaking and performance tuning like never before... and much needed security tools to help with compliance and multi-tenant lockdown... And what about hot-add of vCPU, memory, devices, etc.? Wait and see what happens next...

Quick Take: Microsoft's Azure - Ctrl-Alt-Del

It is not surprising that Microsoft's cloud computing "technology preview" platform called Azure took a nose-dive. What's more, it's no surprise that a automated maintenance service caused the platform to crumble. As indicated by the Azure team, the failure was due to:

"During a routine operating system upgrade on Friday (March 13^th), the deployment service within Windows Azure began to slow down due to networking issues.  This caused a large number of servers to time out and fail..."

"...We have learned a lot from this experience.  We are addressing the network issues and we will be refining and tuning our recovery algorithm to ensure that it can handle malfunctions quickly and gracefully..."

"...For continued availability during upgrades, we recommend that application owners deploy their application with multiple instances of each role..."

Did they really think that "Friday the 13th" could buy them some sympathy? In any case, running two instances of the same image does not seem like a way to CONSERVE resources to me, and it seems to fly in the face of "green" practices. Given that graceful maintenance processes can be handled - on-line - by simple vMotion in VMware "clouds" - it makes me wonder if Azure is nothing but a bunch of Windows-on-Hyper-V servers managed by untested PowerShell scripts...

Oddly, the cure-all of running multiple instances is proven not to be 100% effective, as evidenced by their subsequent admission:

"Any application running only a single instance went down when its server went down.  Very few applications running multiple instances went down, although some were degraded due to one instance being down."

But rest assured, there will be no charge for the kludge, er, fix to the problem:

"We will not count the second instance against quota limits, so CTP participants can feel comfortable running two instances of each application role."

SOLORI's take: This reminds me of the early VoIP days, when everyone released a VoIP product and very few were ready-for-prime-time. That made the entire industry - good and bad alike - take a black eye and probably delayed broader adoption of VoIP by a solid 5-years. Could this really be Microsoft's strategy: to undermine the concept of cloud computing so that it is only fully-baked when they "proclaim" it to be?

SOLORI's 2nd take: I question the sanity of anyone trusting Microsoft with their cloud computing initiative. Microsoft proclaims their product delivers: choice, low risk and fewer distractions. What about Uptime? Performance? Cost? Management? Responsiveness? Isn't that the bread-and-butter of cloud computing? Too many questions - not enough answers...

Check-out TeckWorld's article for their perspective...

Quick Take: Cloud-ready Packaging

Robin Harris has a quick take on a cloud computing shortcut he calls "credit card and a cloud." He names an enabling service that pre-packages your OSS apps in a "ready to deploy" format for numerous on-line and in-house virtualization platforms.

SOLORI's take: As these services crop-up, differentiation between cloud vendors will tighten. In the mean time, use them to reduce your deployment time and cost.

Check-out the details and links at his storage blog.