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: Vyatta Takes Virtual Networking to Cloud

Earlier this month, Vyatta announced completion of its Series C round of financing resulting in US$10M in new capital led primarily by new partner Citrix. Vyatta provides an open source alternative to traditional networking vendors like Cisco - providing software and hardware solutions targeted at the same routing, firewall and VPN market otherwise served by Cisco's 2800, 7200 and ASA line of devices. Its software is certified to run in Xen and VMware environments.

In a related announcement, Citrix has certified Vyatta's products for use with its Citrix Cloud Center (C3) product family to "make it as easy as possible for service providers and enterprises to use Vyatta with Citrix products such as XenDesktop, XenApp, XenServer and NetScaler." With the addition of Citrix Delivery Systems Division GM Gordon Payne to the Vyatta board of directors, the now "closer coupling" of Citrix with Vyatta could accelerate the adoption of Vyatta in virtual infrastructures.

SOLORI's Take: We've been using Vyatta's software in lab and production applications for some time - primarily in HA routing applications where automatic routing protocols like OSPF or BGP are needed. Virtualizing Vyatta provides additional HA capabilities to cloud environments by extending infrastructure migration from the application layer all the way down to layer-3. In applications where it is a good fit, Vyatta provides an excellent solution component for the 100% virtualized environment.

Quick Take: PC Pro Recommends 4-node-in-2U Platform

Boston Limited UK has recently received a "recommended" rating from PC Pro UK for its 4-node-in-2U platform with AMD's Istanbul processor on-board. Dubbed the "Boston Quattro 6000GP" and following-up on the 2-node-in-1U "Boston 3000GP" platform, this systems allows for 4-nodes with 2x AMD Istanbul processors per node. This formula yields 8 processors (48 cores) in 2U resulting in a core density of over 1,000 cores per standard 42U rack.

Computational density like this is bound for virtualization and HPC clusters. Judging from the recent reports on Istanbul's virtualization potential and HPL performance, this combination offers a compelling platform alternative to blade computing. In its review, PC Pro UK touched on the platform's power consumption, saying:

"In idle we saw one, two, three and four nodes draw a total of 234W, 349W, 497W and 630W. Under pressure these figures rose to 345W, 541W, 802W and 1026W respectively. Even if you could find an application that pushed the cores this hard you'll find each server node draws a maximum of 256W - not bad for a 12-core system. Dell's PowerEdge R900, reviewed in our sister title IT Pro, has four 130W X7450 six-core processors and that consumes 778W under heavy load."

- PC Pro, UK

Advanced Clustering HPL Comparison: Instanbul vs Nehalem

Advanced Clustering Technologies, based in Kansas City, KS and specializing in HPC solutions, has just released a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) performance report comparing "equivalent" Xeon X5550 and Opteron 2435 systems. According to Advanced Clustering, their goal was "to show the peak performance in terms of GFLOPS (billion floating point operations per second)" of the comparison systems.

In their tests, Advance Clustering attempted to keep platform specifications as uniform as possible (OS, power supply, hard drive). Due to Nehalem's tripple-channel memory, differing amounts of memory were used in the comparison and Advanced Clustering compensated by making adjustments to the problem size in an attempt to utilize 100% of available systems RAM accordingly.

The results showed that AMD's Istanbul delivers 15% more GFLOPS  at a 30% savings in effective system cost ($/GFLOP). Advanced Clustering comments that while Istanbul delivered a higher GFLOP rating than Nehalem, it did so at only 79% of its theoretical potential due to the weaker memory bandwidth of the Socket-F system. From our conversation with AMD's Mike Goddard, we are told that a lot of Istanbul's potential - including much higher memory bandwidth - will realizable only in its sockted G34 incarnation. By that time, the comparison will likely be between Intel's 8-core Nehalem-EX and AMD's 12-core Magny-Cours product.

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...

Discover IOV and VMware NetQueue on a Budget

While researching advancements in I/O virtualization (VMware) we uncovered a "low cost" way to explore the advantages of IOV without investing in 10GbE equipment: the Intel 82576 Gigabit Network Controller which supports 8-receive queues per port. This little gem comes in a 2-port by 1Gbps PCI-express package (E1G142ET) for around $170/ea on-line. It also comes in a 4-port by 1Gbps package (full or half-height, E1G144ET) for around $450/ea on-line.

Enabling VMDq/NetQueue is straightforward:

1. Enable NetQueue in VMkernel using VMware Infrastructure 3 Client:
   
   
   
   1. Choose Configuration > Advanced Settings > VMkernel.
   
   
   2. 
      
      Select VMkernel.Boot.netNetqueueEnabled.
   
   
   
   


2. Enable the igb module in the service console of the ESX Server host:# esxcfg-module -e igb


3. Set the required load option for igb to turn on VMDq:
   The option IntMode=3 must exist to indicate loading in VMDq mode. A value of 3 for the IntMode parameter specifies using MSI-X and automatically sets the number of receive queues to the maximum supported (devices based on the 82575 Controller enable 4 receive queues per port; devices based on the 82576 Controller enable 8 receive queues per port). The number of receive queues used by the igb driver in VMDq mode cannot be changed.

Quick Take: VMware - Shanghai vs. Nehalem-EP

Johan De Gelas at AnandTech has an interesting article comparing a 2P Shanghai (2384, 2.7GHz) vs. 2P Nehalem-EP (X5570, 2.93GHz) and the comparison in VMark is stunning... until you do you do your homework and reference the results. Johan is comparing the VMmark of a 64GB configured 2P Opteron running ESX3.5-Update 3 against a 72GB configured 2P Nehalem-EP running vSphere (ESX v4.0).

When I see benchmarks like these quoted by AnandTech I start to wonder why they consider the results "analytical..." In any case, there are significant ramifications to larger memory pools and higher clock speeds in VMmark, and these results show that fact. Additionally, the results also seem to indicate:

• VMware vSphere (ESX v4.0) takes serious advantage of the new hyperthreading in Nehalem-EP


• Nehalem-EP's TurboBoost Appears to render the value proposition in favor of the X5570 over the W5580, all things considered

Judging from the Supermicro VMmark score, the Nehalem-EP (adjusted for differences in processor speed) turns-in about a 6% performance advantage over the Shanghai with comparable memory footprints. Had the Opteron been given additional memory, perhaps the tile and benchmark scores would have better illustrated this conclusion. It is unclear whether or not vSphere is significantly more efficient at resource scheduling, but the results seem to indicate that - at least with Nehalem's new hyperthreading - it is more efficient.

Platform	Memory	VMware Version	VMmark Score	Rating (Raw/ Clock Adj.)	Per Tile
HP ProLiant 385G5p (2xOpteron 2384, 2.7GHz)	64GB DDR2/533	ESX v3.5.0 Update 3	11.28 @8 tiles	100%/ 100%	100%
Supermicro 6026-NTR+ (2xX5570, 2.93GHz w/3.2GHz TurboBoost)	72GB DDR3/1066	ESX v3.5.0 Update 4 BETA	14.22 @10 tiles	126%/ 106%	101%
Dell PowerEdge M610 (2xX5570, 2.93GHz w/3.3GHz TurboBoost)	96GB DDR3/1066	ESX v4.0	23.90 @17tiles	212%/ 174%	100%
HP ProLiant DL370 G6 (2xW5580, 3.2GHz w/3.3GHz TurboBoost)	96GB DDR3/1066	ESX v4.0	23.96 @16tiles	213%/ 172%	106%
HP ProLiant DL585 G5 (4x8386SE, 2.8GHz)	128GB DDR2/667	ESX v3.5.0 Update 3	20.43 @14 tiles	181%/ 174%	104%
HP ProLiant DL585 G5 (4x8393SE, 3.1GHz)	128GB DDR2/667	ESX v4.0	22.11 @15 tiles	196%/ 171%	105%

One things is clear from these VMmark examples: Nehalem-EP is a huge step in the right direction for Intel, and it potentially blurs the line between 2P and 4P systems. AMD will not have much breathing room with Istanbul in the 2P space against Nehalem-EP for system refreshes unless it can show similar gains and scalability. Where Istanbul will shine is in its drop-in capability in existing 2P, 4P and 8P platforms.

SOLORI's take: These are exciting times for those just getting into virtualization. VMmark would seem to indicate that consolidation factors unlocked by Nehalem-EP come close to rivaling 4P platforms at about 75% of the cost. If I were buying a new system today, I would be hard-pressed to ignore Nehalem as a basis for my Eco-system. However, the socket-F Opteron systems still has about 8-12 months of competitive life in it, at which point it becomes just another workhorse. Nehalem-EP still does not provide enough incentive to shatter an established Eco-system.

SOLORI's 2nd take: AMD has a lot of ground to cover with Istanbul and Magny-Cours in the few short months that remain in 2009. The "hearts and minds" of system refresh and new entrants into virtualization are at stake and Nehalem-EP offers some conclusive value to those entering the market.

With entrenched customers, AMD needs to avoid making them feel "left behind" before the market shifts definitively. AMD could do worse than getting some SR5690-based Istanbul platforms out on the VMmark circuit - especially with its HP and Supermicro partners. We'd also like to see some Magny-Cours VMmarks prior to the general availability of the G34 systems.

AMD and Intel I/O Virtualization

Virtualization now reaches an I/O barrier where consolidated applications must vie for increasingly more limited I/O resources. Early virtualization techniques - both software and hardware assisted - concentrated on process isolation and gross context switching to accelerate the "bulk" of the virtualization process: running multiple virtual machines without significant processing degradation.

As consolidation potentials are greatly enhanced by new processors with many more execution contexts (threads and cores) the limitations imposed on I/O - software translation and emulation of device communication - begin to degrade performance. This degradation further limits consolidation, especially where significant network traffic (over 3Gbps of non-storage VM traffic per virtual server) or specialized device access comes into play.

I/O Virtualization - The Next Step-Up

Intrinsic to AMD-V in revision "F" Opterons and newer AM2 processors is I/O virtualization enabling hardware assisted memory management in the form of a Graphics Aperture Remapping Table (GART) and the Device Exclusion Vector (DEV). These two facilities provide address translation of I/O device access to a limited range of the system physical address space and provide limited I/O device classification and memory protection.

Combined with specialized software GART and DEV provided primitive I/O virtualization but were limited to the confines of the memory map. Direct interaction with devices and virtualization of device contexts in hardware are efficiently possible in this approach as VMs need to rely on hypervisor control of device access. AMD defined its I/O virtualization strategy as AMD IOMMU in 2006 (now AMD-Vi) and has continued to improve it through 2009.

With the release of new motherboard chipsets (AMD SR5690) in 2009, significant performance gains in I/O will be brought to the platform with end-to-end I/O virtualization. Motherboard refreshes based on the SR5690 should enable Shanghai and Istanbul processors to take advantage of the full AMD IOMMU specification (now AMD-Vi).

Similarly, Intel's VT-d approach combines chipset and CPU features to solve the problem in much the same way. Due to the architectural separation of memory controller from CPU, this meant earlier processors not only carry the additional instruction enhancements but they must also be coupled to northbridge chipsets that contained support. This feature was initially available in the Intel Q35 desktop chipset in Q3/2007.

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.

Sun Finds a Buyer in Oracle

Sun and Oracle have come to terms on a $7.4B cash deal. Oracle's Ellison rejected a similar deal in 2003 due to bad timing and a PeopleSoft acquisition. Says Sun's post:

"Sun and Oracle today announced a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The Sun Board of Directors has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer."

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

Oracle's press release mirror's Sun's:

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: 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: Cisco Enters the Blade Market

NetworkWorld has a decent article on Cisco's entry into the blade computing market with a virtualization-focused product Cisco calls the "Unified Computing System." It's not commodity stuff, building on "soon to be released" Nehalem processors, 10Gb interfaces and FCoE capability in a supposedly made-for-VMware design.

The response from the Dell VP made me reach for a handkerchief (somebody get him a crying towel!) Of course the Cisco solution is "very niche-focused" but it is also very forward thinking. However, with Cisco's record on computing hardware in their embedded products, it's hard to have a lot of confidence in their "first wave" of blades. Likewise, their QC on software needs to be "in the zone" if they are going to be successful in the "densely virtualized" market as this box would imply.

SOLORI's take: Feature-for-feature, Cisco will be alone for a few months as others play catch-up, but catch-up to what market? Are there really lots of enterprise customers out there begging for 10Gb/FCoE-connected blade servers at price-be-damned rates? This approach is moving AWAY from commodity computing and, hence, is a "loser" based on the SOLORI enterprise model.

SOLORI's 2nd take: This could become a juggernaut in the HPC setting with "price-be-damned" and "budgets" come from institutions and governments. It looks as if Cisco's finally found a way to move its pricy 10G products into that space.

Read the entire article at NetworkWorld.com...

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.

Citrix Waving the White Flag? XenServer now free - as in ESXi...

According to a recent announcement from Citrix, XenServer (without advanced features) is now Free (as in April 2009). The question now? How does XenServer/Free match-up to ESXi/Free and what does it mean for the enterprise customer?

See the community announcement here... and the official press release here...

According to their approach - which reads more like ESXi plus motion - the "free" server still needs a significant investment in "management" products to be "enterprise worthy." This still means an "enterprise-class" virtualization product WITH live motion technology can be had for the U-build price, but the revenue shifts from "product license" to "management and service license." Who does that sound like? VMware (ESXi) and RedHat (CentOS).

Since Citrix will retain the intellectual property rights to its closed-source version of Xen, there is no reason to believe a huge number of open source offerings will immediately crop up. It is more likely this is the first salvo in an ever increasing spiral towards Microsoft's acquisition of Citrix and wholesale incorporation of XenSource into its product line.

Still, the "free" tag line is compelling. Citrix is claiming that for "free" you will get from Citrix and XenSource what you would have to pay $5,000 in licensing to VMware. However, the free version of XenSource will NOT have HA, detailed monitoring or cluster management. You will need their $5,000 "Essentials" license for that...

EMC Celerra VSA

Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) are really picking-up these days. Even the legacy hardware vendors are getting into the fray. They're great in the lab and - assuming tailored performance - can fit some really interesting "embedded" applications.

If you haven't had a chance to look at the EMC Celerra VSA then click over to Chad Sakac's VirtualGeek Blog and have a look at his series on configuration and testing. If you have time, check out some of Chad's more visionary stuff while your there - he has some good information on what's to come in the next few months from EMC and VMware...

For the Celerra VSA, look at these two links

Tyan Transport GT28 Overview, Part 2

As I indicated in the earlier posts, the GT28 uses narrow motherboards within a single 1U chassis to create a compact, dual-node HPC platform. Small as it is, the motherboard still packs two socket-F processors, sixteen 240-pin DDR2 DIMM slots, four GigabitEthernet ports, space for an embedded Mellanox Infiniband processor, on board video, a single low-profile PCIe riser slot (x8 slot/signal) and an SMDC slot.

[caption id="attachment_90" align="alignnone" width="389" caption="Tyan S2935 Motherboard"][/caption]

The GT28 is not a quiet machine once powered-up, and with eight 15,000 RPM fans (3-per node plus 2 power supply fans) the system only gets louder under heavy load. Fortunately, the 45nm Opteron processor is easier on the thermal envelope than its predecessors so the fans stay around 9,000 RPM most of the time. That said, you do not want one of these systems in anything but a full rack enclosure as the tell-tale whine of the system fans is not conducive to office work. This is no appliance chassis and it was not designed to be one, but compared to an 8U AIC storage chassis, this thing is quiet.

The GT28 does provide more than your typical standard compact server motherboard in terms of I/O options - especially network. Although we were not testing the Infiniband variant (about $600 additional) this $1,600 barebones systems comes well equipped for a variety of tasks. As I indicated before, the test system is to become part of a four node storage and hypervisor system based on VMware ESXi and Nexenta NAS (using Solaris' ZFS storage) . One node will run ESXi with Nexenta running in a virtual machine and three nodes will run ESXi using both NFS and iSCSI as the virtual shared storage medium (provided by Nexenta).

I do want to drift briefly into a dicsussion on cost. Although rock-bottom prices are not a focus, per-node costs are - especially where relative to non-commodity computing models.