Blog posts tagged with 'virtualization'
The new XenApp template for XenServer has generated a great deal of interest. There have been a several posts about XenApp on XenServer on the Citrix Blog (read Dan Feller's posts here, here, here and here). You can listen to an interview with Dan about this topic as part of the Citrix Delivery Center podcast here.
Recently Laura Whalen in our Solutions Marketing team put together an excellent slide presentation that covers the reasons why you would want to virtualize XenApp on XenServer.
One of the first few slides of the presentation reviews the business case for virtualization based on data from IDC and Gartner. It occurred to me as I reviewed this slide that this might be a good opportunity to add in some slides I recently put together for a different purpose.
A couple of months ago I was asked to give a presentation to some non-technical business leaders in my area about virtualization. As I thought about how to explain to these CEO's and CFO's why virtualization gets so much buzz, it seemed obvious to focus on the costs savings. In my opinion, the server consolidation and costs savings created by server virtualization are a primary driver in most companies first foray into server virtualization. Rapid deployment, high availability and disaster recovery obviously play a huge role in expanding the reach of virtualization, but in my experience the costs savings of consolidation are the biggest initial factor. The ridiculously high costs of energy these days make this costs savings even more important.
After making that decision, I decided to take some data I saw in a webinar by John Humphries of IDC and Simon Crosby of Citrix (archive here
) to use as the basis for the presentation to these business leaders.
Of course, a slide presentation full of numbers is no more effective than a presentation filled with technology jargon. I decided to use as many visuals as I possibly could so I did not put the audience to sleep in the first two minutes. I added in numerous stock photos (mostly from istockphoto.com), some public domain pictures from USA.gov and a few photos and screen shots of my own to make a very visual presentation. I have taken a few slides from that deck and added them into the deck built by Laura Whalen.
The template for the other slide deck included a black background. I was not able to get the graphics to work properly in the standard Citrix template (with a white background) without many hours of pixel by pixel editing. I was able to use the transparent re-color feature of PowerPoint 2007 to convert the graphics from Laura's presentation to work with a black background, however.
My Frankenstein presentation creation is embedded below.
(click here to see the presentation in full screen)
Scalability of XenApp on other virtualization products has prevented many from using server virtualization with XenApp. One of the highest priorities after the acquisition of XenSource was to improve this scalability. The new XenApp template does this. You can virtualize the management components of your XenApp farm and individual XenApp servers to gain the availability, management and disaster recovery benefits. We have found that for many resource intensive applications a one vm to physical server provides the best scalability. You can still gain the availability, management and recovery benefits for those servers.
Since there are many notes included with this presentation (mostly from Laura) I have uploaded a pdf of the notes pages (in a zip file to shrink the size a bit).
EDIT: The posts and podcast interview I did with Dan Feller provide much more in depth coverage of this topic. To avoid any confusion, the x64 version of XenApp is recommended for use with XenApp on XenServer. The server utilization number referred to in the slide deck is from an IDC estimate of all servers, not just XenApp servers. As I mentioned in the post and you can see from the documentation provided by Dan, most XenApp servers running applications for users will be the most scalable when one vm is running on one physical server. The cost savings from reduction in servers comes into play with those servers because XenApp running on XenServer is much more scalable than any other virtualization platform based on our testing. That greater scalability will lead to a reduction in servers when using server virtualization. Further, the ability to consolidate license servers, data collectors, and other components offer additional consolidation savings. All of this is in addition to the deployment, support and high availability savings possible with server virtualization.
Edit #2: I have received a few emails asking to see the slides I created for the non-technical audience of business leaders. You can find the presentation "The Buzz on Virtualization" here. This is a very high level overview. One technical person told me it was so high level his grandmother could understand it (I do not think he meant that as a compliment ... 
). It did work very well for the audience where I presented it. I like to experiment a great deal with slide design and you can see that in this deck.
This next embedded presentation dives down into the technical details of how live migration of a virtual machine happens with XenMotion.
You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.
In a previous post, I embedded a presentation (thanks to SlideShare.net) that briefly reviewed the new server virtualization features of Citrix XenServer 5.
This next embedded presentation dives down into more technical detail for each of the new features.
You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.
During a recent presentation I gave to one of our alliance partners, an interesting question came up during the discussion - How can a commercial software company build a business based on open source software? After the question was asked, I saw many heads nodding in agreement. On the surface, this question may appear to be difficult to answer.
An excellent way to answer this pressing question can be found in a very intriguing book called Wikinomics. There is a story in the opening chapter about GoldCorp, a gold mining company. The story of the GoldCorp Challenge highlights the power of working with a very diverse group of people to take innovation and creativity to new heights. Rob McEwen of GoldCorp used that creativity and innovation to build a very successful business.
Read this short excerpt from the opening chapter -
It was late in the afternoon, on a typically harsh Canadian winter day, as Rob McEwen, the CEO of Goldcorp Inc., stood at the head of the boardroom table confronting a room full of senior geologists. The news he was about to deliver was not good. In fact it was disastrous, and McEwen was having a hard time shielding his frustration.
The small Toronto-based gold-mining firm was struggling, besieged by strikes, lingering debts, and an exceedingly high cost of production, which had caused them to cease mining operations. Conditions in the marketplace were hardly favorable. The gold market was contracting, and most analysts assumed that the company's fifty-year-old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, was dying. Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, the mine seemed destined for closure, and Goldcorp was likely to go down with it. Tensions were running at fever pitch. McEwen had no real experience in the extractive industries, let alone in gold mining. Nevertheless, as an adventurous young mutual fund manager he had gotten involved in a takeover battle and emerged as Goldcorp, Inc.'s majority owner. Few people in the room had much confidence that McEwen was the right person to rescue the company. But McEwen just shrugged off his critics.
He turned to his geologists and said, "We're going to find more gold on this property, and we won't leave this room tonight until we have a plan to find it." At the conclusion of the meeting he handed his geologists $10 million for further exploration and sent them packing for Northern Ontario. Most of his staff thought he was crazy but they carried out his instructions, drilling in the deepest and most remote parts of the mine. Amazingly, 2 few weeks later they arrived back at Goldcorp headquarters beaming with pride and bearing a remarkable discovery: Test drilling suggested rich deposits of new gold, as much as thirty times the amount Goldcorp was currently mining!
The discovery was surprising, and could hardly have been better timed. But after years of further exploration, and to McEwen's deep frustration, the company's geologists struggled to provide an accurate estimate of the gold's value and exact location. He desperately needed to inject the urgency of the market into the glacial processes of an old-economy industry.
In 1999, with the future still uncertain, McEwen took some time out for personal development. He wound up at an MIT conference for young presidents when coincidentally the subject of Linux came up. Perched in the lecture hall, McEwen listened intently to the remarkable story of how Linus Torvalds and a loose volunteer brigade of software developers had assembled the world-class computer operating system over the Internet. The lecturer explained how Torvalds revealed his code to the world, allowing thousands of anonymous programmers to vet it and make contributions of their own.
McEwen had an epiphany and sat back in his chair to contemplate. If Goldcorp employees couldn't find the Red Lake gold, maybe someone else could. And maybe the key to finding those people was to open up the exploration process in the same way Torvalds "open sourced" Linux.
McEwen raced back to Toronto to present the idea to his head geologist. "I'd like to take all of our geology, all the data we have that goes back to 1948, and put it into a file and share it with the world," he said. "Then we'll ask the world to tell us where we're going to find the next six million ounces of gold." McEwen saw this as an opportunity to harness some of the best minds in the industry. Perhaps understandably, the in-house geologists were just a little skeptical.
Mining is an intensely secretive industry, and apart from the minerals themselves, geological data is the most precious and carefully guarded resource. It's like the Cadbury secret-it's just not something companies go around sharing. Goldcorp employees wondered whether the global community of geologists would respond to Goldcorp's call in the same way that software developers rallied around Linus Torvalds. Moreover, they worried about how the contest would reflect on them and their inability to find the illusive gold deposits.
McEwen acknowledges in retrospect that the strategy was controversial and risky. "We were attacking a fundamental assumption; you simply don't give away proprietary data," he said. "It's so fundamental," he adds, "that no one had ever questioned it." Once again, McEwen was determined to soldier on.
In March 2000, the "Goldcorp Challenge" was launched with a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants with the best methods and estimates. Every scrap of information (some four hundred megabytes worth) about the 55,000-acre property was revealed on Goldcorp's Web site. News of the contest spread quickly around the Internet, as more than one thousand virtual prospectors from fifty countries got busy crunching the data.
Within weeks, submissions from around the world came flooding in to Goldcorp headquarters. As expected, geologists got involved. But entries came from surprising sources, including graduate students, consultants, mathematicians, and military officers, all seeking a piece of the action. "We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems. There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry," says McEwen. "When I saw the computer graphics I almost fell out of my chair." The contestants had identified 110 targets on the Red Lake property, 50 percent of which had not been previously identified by the company. Over 80 percent of the new targets yielded substantial quantities of gold. In fact, since the challenge was initiated an astounding eight million ounces of gold have been found. McEwen estimates the collaborative process shaved two to three years off their exploration time.
Today Goldcorp is reaping the fruits of its open source approach to exploration. Not only did the contest yield copious quantities of gold, it catapulted his under-performing $ 100 million company into a $9 billion juggernaut while transforming a backward mining site in Northern Ontario into one of the most innovative and profitable properties in the industry. Needless to say McEwen is one happy camper. As are his shareholders. One hundred dollars invested in the company in 1993 is worth over $3,000 today.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Goldcorp Challenge is the validation of an ingenious approach to exploration in what remains a conservative and highly secretive industry. Rob McEwen bucked an industry trend by sharing the company's proprietary data and simultaneously transformed 2 lumbering exploration process into a modem distributed gold discovery engine that harnessed some of the most talented minds in the field.
McEwen saw things differently. He realized that the uniquely qualified minds to make new discoveries were probably outside the boundaries of his organization, and by sharing some intellectual property he could harness the power of collective genius and capability. In doing so he stumbled successfully into the future of innovation, business, and how wealth and just about everything else will be created. Welcome to the new world of wikinomics where collaboration on a mass scale is set to change every institution in society.
Open source, wikis, blogging and other new forms of mass collaboration like MIT OpenCourseWare, Innocentive, NineSigma, and YourEncore are discussed in depth in Wikinomics.
Reading this book gave me a much firmer grasp on the real power of building a business by massively collaborating with others to mine for the golden nuggets of creativity and innovation of the open source Xen community. Citrix is able to use those golden nuggets to craft a fully supported and managed commercial software product and business.
Simon Crosby, CTO of the Citrix VMD Division, did an interview with Brian Ducharme of Virtual Strategy Magazine during VMWorld to review the Citrix announcements during the event.
Here are the Citrix press releases from the event -
Citrix Unveils Cloud Computing Strategy and Product Line
Citrix and Marathon Partner to Bring World Class High Availability and Fault Tolerance to Citrix XenServer
XenServer 5 Changes the Game in Server Virtualization with Unprecedented Reliability, Openness and Ease-of-Use
(click the link to play - there is a current issue with embedding videos)
One of the many new features of XenServer 5 is advanced integration with Storage Infrastructure. The Citrix XenServer Adapter for Dell EqualLogic integrates server and storage functionality on a single management interface and delegates tasks according to each platform's core strengths.
As an integrated virtualization solution, XenServer and EqualLogic allows you to maintain high operating efficiency by delegating such advanced capabilities as Thin Provisioning, Fast Cloning, and Automated Snapshots to the EqualLogic SAN. Thin Provisioning helps IT administrators control costs by dedicating only the storage capacity needed in the short term, and maintaining unallocated storage in a common pool for later use by applications or user groups as disk resources are actually consumed. Fast Cloning lets storage administrators create copies of entire volumes as a background process, without disrupting network operations.
Once created, clones can be used to accelerate the provisioning and deployment of standardized VMs, as well as to test new applications, configurations or procedures. Snapshots are efficient captures of storage volumes that can be created without disrupting network operations, for use in backing up or testing data. In addition, XenServer supports iSCSI multipath I/O (MPIO) and simplified disaster recovery, two strategic tools for improving business continuity even in the event of network failures or other outages. MPIO support allows multiple network paths — e.g., separate subnetworks or VLANS — for both the SAN arrays and the virtualization servers,
as a means of both improving performance and safeguarding against Ethernet switch failures or other network problems. Disaster recovery tools apply snapshot and fast cloning technologies to the processes of initial VM placement, the real-time
movement of VMs via XenMotion, and automatic high availability.
Achmad Chadran of Dell Equallogic blogged about this integration from VMWorld -
the integration module goes even further, by:
- Streamlining the VM provisioning process all the way through the creation and assignment of virtual disk drives
- Relieving XenServer resources from having to perform burdensome storage tasks
- Taking storage technology further out of its traditional "black arts" realm and into a more business-focused IT culture
After you try out this integration with your own implementation of Dell Equallogic, you will understand why Achmad says this is a "very cool piece of engineering".
Peter Blum put together an excellent overview video that demonstrates this new integration with Dell EqualLogic.
(click to play)
http://www.equallogic.com/partners/CitrixDemo/xenserver_equallogic_demo_controller.swf
Citrix XenServer 5 allows you to take full advantage of all the powerful features of your storage hardware.
Virtual Storage Management in XenServer 5
Here are some screen shots of the new Storage Wizard -
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Visit XenServer5.com to learn more and download the free XenServer 5 Express. You can watch a recored webinar on Virtual Storage management in XenServer 5 here.
As part of the XenServer 5 release, several new features have been added to XenCenter.
Here is a brief summary of the new XenCenter 5 features -
- Powerful, Self-healing Management Architecture
Unlike other management consoles, XenCenter distributes management data across servers in a resource pool to ensure there is no single point of management failure. If a management server should fail, any other server in the pool can take over the management role.
- Search, Sort and Tag
User-defined grouping and metadata tags allows simple, powerful searching and sorting capabilities across virtual machines, hosts and resource pools based on custom fields to help administrators easily identify and manage virtual infrastructure.
- Performance Monitoring and Trending
XenServer adds new enhanced performance monitoring, reporting and alerting dashboards that make it easy for IT professionals to see both real-time and historical views of virtual machines and physical host performance over long periods of time with virtually no storage or performance overhead.
- Physical to Virtual
Use the new XenConvert feature to move existing physical server workloads to XenServer virtual infrastructure in no time with. Tools are also available to convert other virtual machines to run on XenServer.
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Visit XenServer5.com to see video demos of the new XenCenter and the other new features of XenServer 5.
One of the new features of XenServer 5 is High Availability. Check out these screen shots to get a close up view of how to configure High availability in XenServer 5.
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You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.
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