In his blog, Ken Hess talks about how some companies complain that they're not realizing the savings in hardware, software and management that they hoped to from server virtualization. While he eventually points out that they can, in fact, benefit from "greening" (power, cooling and real estate) and service contract savings, he misses the fact that companies can realize significant savings in each of these areas -- if they implement the right solution.

• He says: "You don't save money on licensing the commercial Operating Systems you run in virtual machines."  Let's look at the obvious candidate, Windows Server. (We'll look at WS2008 -- but the numbers are similar for WS2003.)  It's certainly true that if you took ten servers with Standard licenses and 5 CALs and moved them to ten virtual machines on one server, you'd still pay (10 * $999 =) $9990. But you could also license that same configuration with a two-processor Datacenter Edition license ($5998), which supports an unlimited number of virtual machines on one box, plus 50 CALs (two 20-CAL packages at $799 each plus two 5-CAL packages at $199 each, or $1996) -- for a total of  $7994.  That's a savings of $1996, or 20%.  Add an affordable virtualization platform, like Citrix XenServer Standard Edition, and you're still ahead of the mark.  (NOTE: these prices have been corrected based on the per-processor licensing model of Datacenter Edition.)
• Next: "You don't save money on the host hardware---it is typically a very high-end server running into significant money territory." But that assumes that (a) organizations will run their business on bare-bones kit and (b) there's no excess capacity.  But, of course, a consolidation strategy depends on excess capacity, and most businesses buy decent servers even for their lower-end deployments.  And, for that matter, the price of "very high-end servers" isn't what it used to be.  You can get a pretty beefy box -- dual quad-core processors, 32GB memory, 3TB internal storage -- for about $7K, and consolidate ten or more servers onto it.
• And furthermore: "And you won't save any money by getting rid of system administrators---since those virtualized systems still need patching, software installation, user account maintenance, security sweeps, and so on." Well, most companies wouldn't admit to anyone other than the occasional shareholder that they're looking to get rid of system administrators -- but what they will admit, and what really drives the savings, is that they're spending a higher percentage of their IT budgets than ever before on maintenance and management of existing systems (many companies are reporting that the number is approaching 80%), and that they'd like to be able to free up IT staff to innovate their systems and use IT to drive the business faster. And that's not an easy one, for the most part -- it's true that in most cases ten virtual machines still means ten things to patch and manage... But... That doesn't take into account innovative approaches such as the provisioning capabilities in Citrix XenServer, Platinum Edition.  With Platinum Edition, multiple virtual servers (and physical ones, too) can be streamed from a single pristine golden master, with applications streamed into the virtual machine. One golden master means one image to patch and maintain -- and significant reductions not only in storage costs but in management costs as well.

The benefits are there -- you just have to know how to realize them.  Consider the best approach for you -- or make a Citrix Solution Advisor your trusted partner in developing your solution.

 Do the math.

Eric Horschman of VMware recently posted on his blog about the ESX memory overcommitment feature. It can be a utilization benefit in some use cases, especially with lightly used virtual desktops. But Eric describes it as if it's somehow a game-changing economy.

The test he uses to support the claim is very impressive - if what you want to do is to power on virtual machines. If you're going to look at their screensavers all day while you do your work with a pencil and paper and abacus, power-on statistics are meaningful. And the moment you power on is the time you get the most out of page-sharing: nearly all pages are either operating system and services code pages (which are identical from guest to guest in many cases) or all-zero (which are all initially mapped to the same physical page).

Unfortunately for this scenario, I like to use my computer. I may push it a little further than some, but... I currently have a 20000-message Outlook mailbox and a 25000-message Thunderbird mailbox open, a 60-page Word doc, a 260-page PDF, five different browser tabs with graphics-intensive web pages... and, oh, yeah, I'm playing music in iTunes too. Not so much page sharing going on any more - in fact, I'm using 2GB on my 2GB notebook pretty consistently. And since now only 15% or so of my machine is running pages that it has in common with other people's machines - unless, of course, our tastes in music and our correspondence are identical - well, how do you think all that page sharing is really working out?

What do you think happens when those pages start to un-share, as people start doing real work? How big do you need to expand those balloons, and how much do you have to starve those guests, to keep your 5:1 memory allocation? And if you can't balloon 5:1, how much do you further degrade it when you start using the hypervisor swap file?

(Besides, try those numbers again with XenServer Standard Edition at $900 for the license and first year's Subscription Advantage, with 8GB or even 16GB in the system, versus ESX at 4GB, instead of adding servers, and see how both the cost and the user satisfaction come out.)

This is a stunt, showing penny-wise savings of an inexpensive resource (memory) at the pound-foolish cost of an expensive resource (user time and patience).

It's all about the applications and their performance; minor cost savings don't matter much in the face of user revolt.

We are pleased to introduce the public beta release of Citrix XenServer 4.1.
Citrix XenServer 4.1 is a service pack that enhances the previous v4 release.  New capabilities and improvements include:

• Scalability and Performance
  • Twice the number of simultaneous running VMs
  • Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI - formerly nested page table, or NPT) support for modern AMD processors
  • VLAN support in Standard Edition
  • Improved Citrix Presentation Server performance and maximum number of user sessions
• Reliability and Manageability
  • Host NIC bonding for fail-over (configured via CLI)
  • Centralized logging
  • Configuration of network management interfaces via the CLI
  • Update/patch management integrated in XenCenter
  • Java bindings for XenAPI in SDK
• Storage
  • Shared Fibre Channel storage support (initialized via CLI)
  • Enhanced support for NetApp filers, including snapshot and cloning
  • Windows guest disk hot-remove
  • iSCSI improvements
  • Support for hot-plugging USB storage as a storage repository
• Host System
  • Rolling pool upgrade support
  • NIC driver updates (e1000, BNX2, TG3)
  • Support several 10Gb network adapters (Mellanox/Chelsio)
  • Improved hardware support
• Guest Support
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 32-bit and CentOS 5 32-bit install from physical CD
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 x64 and CentOS 5 x64 guest support
  • Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 x86 and x64 guest support
  • Windows Vista x86 guest support

There's been a lot of noise recently about the complexities of patch management in a virtualized world -- a lot of jockeying for last place, as it were, in the "Whose Patch Tuesday is Biggest" contest.

XenServer has had a relatively small number of patches, and in the case of security advisories, we've been consistently able to announce the fix for an issue very quickly, or in one case, even before the vulnerability was publicized.

But it's true that virtual platforms can add complexity to patch management.  While other Citrix technologies -- Provisioning Server, for instance -- can reduce the impact of patching significantly, the maintenance of the virtualization server platform itself is an major concern.

We don't talk about future features very often, but here's one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer -- which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now -- that is worth crowing about.

Pool-wide patch management has been integrated into the product, and, in conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, will allow you to:

• Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
• Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
• Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
• Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
• Apply the patches
• Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically

...All in a single guided process.

 Just another step to help you feel more secure about security (and stability and performance and manageability).

Watch the web for public beta availability and more info.

It's hard to believe how much has happened in a year on the Citrix XenServer front.

Well, of course, there's that acquisition thing.

But I'm thinking about the product itself.  Just one year ago, XenEnterprise 3.1 had only been available for one month.  That means we had only recently released support for Windows guests.  We were a 32-bit platform, with support for local storage only.  XenMotion and resource pools were only in our plans, as was the large memory and enterprise guest support that 64-bit virtualization would enable.

From a development perspective, then, it was a great year.  And we're not the only ones to think so.  There are the ever-expanding throngs of Citrix XenServer customers, of course.

But it's always great to have external validation as well.  Which is why we're proud to report that TechTarget has announced its opinion of the best products of 2007, and Citrix XenServer has topped the list -- twice!

SearchServerVirtualizationhas named Citrix XenServer, Enterprise Edition the Gold winner in its Best Virtualization Products category. (That Other Virtualization Company placed third, and that was for a workstation-class product.)

And SearchEnterpriseLinux has doubled the good news by naming the same product the Gold winner in its Best Virtualization for Linux Servers category.  (The Other Guys?  No award at all.)

 Word is out: Citrix XenServer is the simplest and most effective virtualization solution.  We're the (double) gold standard.

For those of you who are new to the world of XenServer, welcome to our blog! Those of us former XenSource folks, along with many of our new compatriots at Citrix, will be bringing you information about our products and solutions, what's going on in Xen and the rest of the virtualization marketplace, and tips and advice on how to have the most successful and rewarding virtualization experience possible.

To give you a little background on where we are and where we've been, I've brought over most of our posts from our blogs that were formerly at blogs.xensource.com.

 A little bit about me, from The Official Bio:

Roger has driven product and marketing strategy for some of the most successful infrastructure software technologies of the past decade, including VMware ESX Server and VERITAS Volume Manager, and introduced and developed the application-aligned storage management solution space at VERITAS. He served as vice president of marketing at Trigence and Sychron, and in a variety of marketing, product management, and product support roles at Hewlett-Packard, Consera, Sendmail, MIPS, Celerity, and Prime Computer. Roger studied Critical Studies (English/Film) and Computer Science at Dartmouth College.

And, all that aside, what do I do today?

Communicate.

Along with other members of the XenServer product marketing team, I'm responsible for bringing you the documentation (other than our product manuals) that tell you what XenServer does, what it does for you, how it does it, and why you'd want it.

More to follow.

If you've browsed to www.xensource.com today and found it cheerily rewriting your browser bar to www.citrixxenserver.com, you know this already, but for the rest of you: the acquisition has closed, and we are now the XenServer Product Group (headed by our own Gord Mangione) within the Virtualization and Management Division (headed by our own Peter Levine) of Citrix (headed by Mark Templeton and the rest of the folks who were already doing so).

What does all this mean?

For those of us working here, it means we have new business cards and email signatures. And that's it, for the most part. Some organizations, like sales and marketing, are a bit different, but in general, we're continuing to do the things we're doing... but with significant investment and expansion coming.

For our customers, it means we'll have greater resources for testing and integration, and enhanced support programs coming shortly. And we will continue to advance and enhance both open source Xen and our commercial products. Oh, yeah, you'll have to learn their new names:

• XenExpress is now Citrix XenServer Express Edition
• XenServer is now Citrix XenServer Standard Edition
• XenEnterprise is now Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition
• XenExpress OEM Edition is now Citrix XenServer OEM Edition

There, that's not too big a deal, is it?

And as for open source Xen... we promised that our investment in Xen would continue, with increased participation of other community sponsoring companies in the guidance of the project. I'm not ready to detail what's happening — Simon will do so shortly in his blog as well as many other places — but for now, note the new site taking shape at xen.org.

And as for me... I'm off to Vegas.

Not for a getaway, but to start the next chapter. Come see us at iForum 07 - The App Delivery Expo.

I know I generally post about XenSource-iana, but this one was too good to pass up.

Mixed in with the spam in my blog, I found the following "helpful" comment...

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq ########## or write me xxxxxx(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you 

Mmmm.  Blog-mail.

Just back from VMworld, at which we were a Silver Sponsor.

Props to Christiane Holtzman and her crew at VMware for putting on a fine festival. As John Bara has said, we love VMware... and we got to show our love when VMware engineer Laurence Ramontianu won our grand booth prize, a Sony PlayStation.

We had huge attendance and huge interest -  we brought 1,000 t-shirts to give away, and ran out on the first day by 2pm and hard to bring more.  About two thousand people took away trial copies of XenEnterprise v4. And for our hourly demonstrations, we had as many as 80 to 90 people filling the aisles at each session.

Our partners, too, had a great showing, with their best-of-class offerings that enhance XenEnterprise v4 via XenAPI integration.  While this is by no means an exhaustive list — If I've omitted your product, let me know! — it was especially exciting to see the leading solutions from:

• VMLogix, with their LabManager solution integrated with XenEnterprise offering far more power and flexibility than the former Akimbi product;
• Platform Computing, with their VM Orchestrator solution that will make it possible for users to get affordable policy-based resource management for XenEnterprise from the long-time experts in scheduling and resource management;
• and perhaps most exciting, Marathon Technologies, who managed to pull off the exciting coup of winning a Best of VMworld award for a product (everRun for XenEnterprise) that had the X-word in its name!

All in all, a terrific event.  If you were there and missed us, stop by and see us next year in Las Vegas, or at VMworld Europe in February.  (Look for us under "C" by then, of course.)

And, oh, yes, speaking of Vegas... next stop, Citrix iForum!

OK, I thought I'd have a little fun in the title with Jeff Gould's recent post about Xen that ruffled some feathers last week — especially since he's followed up with a deeper understanding of what XenSource brings to the party with XenEnterprise.

What I'm really getting at, though, in my off-handed way, is this: we are about to make the next step forward in the evolution of our commercial products available for beta testing. (I expect we'll be making the beta download available as early as this upcoming Monday, 9 July.)

The highlights of this release are:

• Greatly increased scalability and 64-bit guest support for real-world applications
• Pooled server and storage resources with XenMotion™ live relocation, enabling dynamic resource management
• Open management integration via the new XenAPI for investment protection for software, skills and processes
• The new XenCenter virtualization management console, delivering more powerful and unified configuration and administration

(Some of these features — much higher capacity limits, resource pools, sharing, XenMotion — are specific to XenEnterprise, while others will apply to all three product packagings. We'll furnish more information on each packaging as release time draws nearer.)

You'll find details of the features, requirements, and supported configurations on the registration form. (If you register before the bits are ready, we'll send you mail as soon as the software's up on the site.)

NOTE: I've corrected this link so it points to the real site.

(If you already registered for the release 3.2 beta, you probably don't need to sign up again — you might want to wait till Monday afternoon PST and check back.)

As always, we look forward to your input. You'll find we've created new forums specifically for the 4.0 beta too.