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By now, you've probably been hearing or reading a lot about Citrix's relationship with Intel...or at least we're hoping that's the case!
Most of the recent news has been focused on our joint collaboration in the development of Citrix XenClient. XenClient is one of the most exciting projects in Citrix's history and we can't wait to see how the project changes the definition of desktop virtualization. With that said, there are optimization activities currently underway with our Citrix Deliver Center products, such as Citrix XenServer and Citrix XenDesktop that are worth talking about too!
Intel and Citrix have a long history of working together to deliver end-to-end solutions for the enterprise. From how Citrix XenServer works with Intel Xeon processors to how Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop work alongside Intel vPro technology to our joint development of Citrix XenClient, there is a great story in this partnership.
At Citrix Synergy 2009, Tom James, Business Development Manager, Digital Office Platform Division from Intel presented how solutions and technologies from Intel work with Citrix Delivery Center. For those of you who weren't able to attend Synergy or those who could but didn't have a chance to check out this session, it's available here for your viewing pleasure.
In this webinar you will learn:
- About recent server consolidation testing conducted in the Citrix Lab with Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenServer and Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors
- About the upcoming local desktop virtualization platform - XenClient - Citrix is developing in conjunction with Intel and how we see it changing the client landscape moving forward
- About the other collaboration areas from a technical perspective and how they add customer value
Check out the webinar!
I moved to California from London just over 11 months ago. Obviously there is a significant cultural and climatic shift involved and a settling in period is a necessity to find your feet. Having travelled all over the world I have embraced as many aspects of different cultures and enjoyed experimenting.
One such aspect I have noticed here in California and in fact right throughout the US is the love of cheese. A meal smothered in cheese is normally accompanied by a side dish of, guess what, MORE cheese. Normally I reserve this dairy delight for a cracker or with some wine but 'Here' it is on everything.
Ordering a Cheeseburger with no cheese always raises a quizzical look from the waitress and a thought process which starts with "You are weird" and progresses to "Is he a serial killer?". Even the lactose intolerant demand that their lunch, dinners and daily snacks have heavy cheese content. Asking colleagues, "why do they have so much cheese on their food?" the simple answer was, "it tastes so good with cheese".
One technically gifted colleague decided to explain this using the analogy that Citrix XenApp and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services(the technology formerly known as Terminal Services) have the same relationship as cheese and hot meals(zzzz). The hot meal is the platform, Microsoft, and the cheese is the value-add, XenApp, which brings the meal to life. Beating this analogy to a quick death, then Citrix has a number of cheeses, Citrix XenDesktop, Essentials for Hyper-V and Branch Repeater which embrace and extend the Microsoft Platform to supply a sumptuous meal.
All of these great combos can be found here at the New Microsoft/Citrix Community Portal where we've consolidated all related news, blogs, articles, videos, etc... into the feeds section of this page. We've also created an area that highlights all related forum threads and postings. Look for answers to your burning questions, participate in an existing discussion, or you can tell us if our cheese is good or if it stinks - let me remind you that all the best cheeses stink 
PS Does eating cheese in the evening give you nightmares?
In what could quite possibly be the best quote from any 80s movie, the character Mike Damone said in Fast Times at Ridgemont High "wherever you are, that's the place to be." Well, that's definitely true if you're visiting the new Citrix Community page for Intel.
Within this one page you'll have all information on the Citrix and Intel relationship available at your fingertips...or mouse click so to speak.
Interested in learning about Citrix's latest activities with Intel? We know your time is valuable and that's why we've consolidated all related news, blogs, articles, videos, etc... into the feeds section of this page. We've also created an area that highlights all related forum threads and postings. Look for answers to your burning questions, participate in an existing discussion, or post a new thread. Epitomizing the true nature of community... this page is here for you!
Did you know that Citrix and Intel are working together to jointly develop a bare-metal Type-1 client hypervisor? Learn about and stay up to date on our joint collaboration of Citrix XenClient. View demos, read blogs and let us know what you think about this upcoming solution.
But it doesn't stop there! Get information and results on our joint product validation, benchmarking and scalability tests. You can even let us know how you're working with Citrix and Intel solutions together in our Community Verified area.
You're only one click away from all things Citrix and Intel. Stop by the Citrix Community page for Intel and check back often! And don't forget to follow us on Twitter!
To finish off with another Damone line, "isn't this great?"
One of the most requested features from Service Providers and Enterprises is IP Address Management (IPAM). I can't tell you how many times I have listened to customers ask for a platform that manages IP Addresses effectively on a large scale, even to the point of managing disparate classes and subnets. What happens when two companies merge, do you munge spreadsheets or do you have this software yet? It's not only the software that is unique but that it runs as a XenServer VM in Para-Virtualized mode, meaning it is high-performance. Even better is these run in linux. 
Nixu Software specializes in software designed for DNS, DHCP and IP address management. To run Nixu Products in a virtual machine environment, simply download the ISO installation media from their website and boot up a new virtual machine. The installation media auto-installs the entire server stack.
Unlike traditional computing appliances that require specific hardware to run on, Nixu Products provide a quick and cost-efficient way to migrate and consolidate core network services such as DNS and DHCP to virtualized computing environments. By streamlining tedious network and system management routines, Nixu Products offer exceptional availability and ROI.
Here are some of the Highlights of using NIXU DNS and DHCP in a XenServer VM:
- Centralized IP Address Management
- Merge/Join IP Blocks
- Split IP Blocks
- Subnets in use – report
- Subnets free – report
- Addresses in use – report
- Addresses free – report
- Runs in XenServer as a VM, optimized for Para-Virtualization
- Supports pv-ops
- Supports IPv6
- Uses secure communication between secondary name servers, using keys
- Role based administration
- Assign subnets to administrative domains
- Supports BIND syntax
- For the BIND junkies
- Has a configuration checker
- Automated installation and maintenance reducing management overhead
- Centralized management of all nameservers
- Hardened design for security
WATCH this video tip:
Download the Nixu / XenServer Integration Guide.
Read about Nixu Software here.
Read about Citrix XenServer 5.0 here.
Download Citrix XenServer 5.0 here.
Tap into the power of AppExpert!
This tip shows you how to connect remotely to XenServer Configuration Console GUI from XenCenter and save a trip to the Datacenter.
UPDATE
Adding the command line to be typed for Copy & Paste purposes...
/usr/bin/xsconsole
best,
Gus
We're on to the next stop on our trip to Orlando (Project Orlando, that is, the next version of Citrix XenServer). Keeping with our road-movie theme, I'm reminded that many of the great road films involve searching for oneself and for truth. In our journey, our search requirements are more prosaic -- we're looking for resources that have some things in common, so we can manage our growing virtualization environment.
That's where the new search and tagging capabilities in XenCenter come in. If you want to find all of the virtual machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (a simple search), or the ones running Windows that have outdated versions of XenServer Tools (a complex search), or all of the physical servers with over 32GB of memory (a search on non-VM resources), you can construct those searches as easily as filtering your inbox. You can name them and save them. And you can export them and send them to someone else who can then import them to their copy of XenCenter and use them.
What about grouping your resources in ways we at Citrix haven't predicted -- by application, by location, by cost center, by owner, by lifecycle stage? Easy! Every configuration entity -- physical and virtual machines, physical and virtual networks, storage repositories, virtual disk images, and more -- can be given any number of arbitrary tags, based on any schemes you choose. Then you can build searches based on the tags, too.
Searching and tagging make it possible to view and manage your data center resources more easily and with greater scalability, enhancing operational agility. And they're available in XenCenter for every edition of XenServer, from the free Express Edition to the dynamic delivery enhanced Platinum Edition.
We'll end today with a reminder: we're going to be making the beta download available via the download section of citrix.com. Instead of a separate download request form, you'll need to log in with a My Citrix account. If you already have one, you're cool. If you don't, please create one, so you'll be ready to rock the download when the software is available.
See you tomorrow with another set of enhancements in Project Orlando.
No, the title of this post does not refer to a trip to the Mouse Kingdom. And it's not the lost Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movie.
Project Orlando is the code name for the next release of Citrix XenServer. Companies don't just use code names because we think it makes us sound mysterious. Actually, it's because it allows us marketing types to change the release numbers at the last minute for all sorts of arcane reasons, arousing the ire of engineers and release managers everywhere.
We are within a very short time of releasing the public beta of Orlando. So between now and then, I'm going to write about one or two significant new capabilities or enhancements in XenServer that you'll find in Orlando. Then, on the big day, you'll find the announcement here.
One more thing before I do, though: this time around, we're going to be making the beta download available via the download section of citrix.com. Instead of a separate download request form, you'll need to log in with a My Citrix account. If you already have one, you're cool. If you don't, please create one, so you'll be ready to rock the download when the software is available.
OK, that's enough housekeeping. Let's get down to the goodies.
The first major enhancement to XenServer in Orlando is the availability of automated high availability (HA). The infrastructure of XenServer has offered the ability to script or manually manage availability, and the replicated configuration database has removed the potential single point of failure imposed by external management servers. But customers have been looking for more automation, and here it is.
You will be able to take the virtual machines in a resource pool (on Platinum and Enterprise Editions) and identify whether you want the virtual machine to be restarted in the event that the server it's running on fails. You can even identify how high the priority for each one is, so in the case of multiple failures putting resources under stress, your most critical workloads will be returned to service.
We'll also protect the master node of the resource pool, and if it fails, automatically designate another node as master -- no need for manual intervention there either.
In this release, you'll need shared SAN storage to be available -- either Fibre Channel or iSCSI -- to be used in addition to a network connection as the "heartbeat" that determines if your servers are up. (While it's technically possible to store your VMs on NFS and to configure a separate small iSCSI or FC SR as the heartbeat disk, that approach can potentially cause issues if the connections to the VM storage fail while the heartbeat connection does not.)
The built-in HA capability isn't your only option, of course. Our partners will continue to provide solutions that also incorporate application-level protection, replication, remote protection, policy-based management, true continuous availability, and more. But there will be a powerful HA capability that will meet the business continuity needs of most IT organizations right in the box.
(One other improvement will come along as a side-effect: the "automatic placement" capability -- start a VM on any available node -- will get smarter about which system is the best place to start a VM.)
And automated HA is just one of a list of new features and enhancements. Check in tomorrow for the next stop on the road to Orlando,
As part of their coverage of Citrix Synergy,Virtual Strategy Magazine
recorded a video interview with Simon Crosby, the CTO of our VMD division, at Citrix Synergy. In this interview Simon talks about our virtualization products Citrix XenDesktop, XenServer and about great partners like Marathon Technologies.
Thanks to VSM for the link back to the Synergy Underground site as well.
In the great film THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, a newspaperman says, "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." I guess the new slogan over in Palo Alto is "When the facts don't fit your strategy, print the spin."
VMware responded to Citrix's announcement of the XenDesktop edition family with the expected spin and FUD, making reference to outdated pre-release pricing and packaging information, and playing their usual "if we didn't invent it, it's the wrong way to do it" hand. I'll get to that shortly. But what's notable is that they've slipped from spin and FUD over the line - and it's time to call them on it.
They said, "Both Citrix and Microsoft have stated that Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor will replace XenServer."
Wrong, nope, uh-uh, fail, fiction. Never happened. Isn't happening.
I understand where that comes from, of course. Both we and Microsoft have stated that we intend to make the added virtualization and dynamic infrastructure services in current and future versions of XenServer, including...
- the flexible storage repository architecture that makes it possible to mix DAS, SAN, and NAS storage and manage them compatibly
- the storage delivery services adapter interfaces that allow administrators to take advantage of integrated one-click storage setup and use the capabilities of intelligent storage instead of masking them and stealing host cycles from doing the real job of virtualization
- the storage savings and software management advantages of streaming workload delivery, and more
...and making them available on Hyper-V as well as on the Xen hypervisor.
And we've both stated that, for the enterprise-scale management console, we would plug XenServer as well as Hyper-V into Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
And we've both stated that we would make Hyper-V and XenServer run plug-compatible virtual machines, so users could have a choice - or even apply the same dual-vendor strategy to their virtual infrastructure that many major enterprises apply to their physical infrastructure.
But we've never said that Citrix would drop Xen in favor of Hyper-V. And Microsoft has never said so either. Shame, shame.
Citrix has a long history of delivering solutions that add value in a supplier-agnostic way to Microsoft and Citrix's own technologies. It's worked well to the tune of over a billion dollar a year and continues to grow. In that picture, for RDP/ICA/XenApp, you can now substitute Hyper-V/Xen/XenServer.
I understand how this idea of choice confuses VMware. After all, while they've said the value of virtualization going forward is in the services that run above the hypervisor, they seem to believe they should only add value if it's their own hypervisor.
They're free to refuse to work with your choice of underlying virtualization technology, of course. But Microsoft and Citrix both think you should have a choice. That's why SCVMM will manage Hyper-V, XenServer... and VMware ESX.
And that's also why XenDesktop gives you choice, rather than being a one-size-fits-all, inflexible solution that disregards the different ways in which companies build their infrastructure and assign and resource their employees. One way is the virtualization technology in it. XenDesktop includes XenServer licenses... but you can use it with Hyper-V if that's your choice. Heck, you can even use it with VMware ESX! You'll still have to pay the VMware First-Generation Hypervisor (In)Convenience Tax, of course, so the economics go out of whack.
The other main area of choice is how you deploy and provision virtual desktop operating systems and applications. For operating systems, the VMware approach is simple: for every virtual machine, allocate a separate virtual disk, with its own software stack. Sure, they can use their cloning capabilities and the deduplication in some storage systems to add space-efficiency (reactively), but they still need to create a separate virtual disk for each virtual machine. And update it. And hotfix it.
Guess what? XenDesktop can be used that way too. But lucky for our customers that it doesn't have to be - they can take advantage of the operating system streaming capability of the Provisioning Server component of XenDesktop, and gain not only storage savings, but the management savings of shared "golden-master" images, where you patch once and the changes are automatically delivered at reboot to tens, hundreds, or thousands of users. It's a choice - though our recommendation is an obvious one.
What about applications? If you do it the VMware way, you can install them into every image. Again, a thousand copies of a dozen installed apps means 12,000 things to patch and update. (Though someday soon, once their acquired client-side-only app virtualization acquisition exits beta and is in the market, they'll have to figure out what The Right Way for their users is...)
Guess what? XenDesktop can be used that way too. But lucky for our customers that it doesn't have to be - they can take advantage of the application streaming capability of XenApp (included in some XenDesktop editions), and get access to a new, pristine desktop and all their apps every time. Or they can even use hosted applications inside that environment. The complexity of installed applications or the flexibility of both server-side and client-side app virtualization: again, a choice - though it's clear what we'd recommend AGAINST...
VMware also cited a blog post whose real contents showed pricing advantages for XenDesktop... but used it to imply that the pricing was too high! And they implied that XenApp was required in a XenDesktop configuration... which it isn't.
They also claimed that trial users are leaving XenDesktop for VMware. Well, Diane Greene did say that "2008 is the year of pilots for VMware VDI." Hmmm, what about the 10,000-seat customer who switched from being an intended reference for VMware to give us an order on the first day our product was released, for instance? Sounds like a VDI "pilot" that's been grounded.
Oh, and here's a look at a ballroom-full of customers and partners at Citrix Synergy who are showing how they really feel about the "uncertain future" of XenDesktop by protesting. Sitting, listening attentively, and applauding is how you protest, right?
The bottom line, then: the my-way-or-else choice? Or real choice? It's not that the Virtualization Empress Has No Clothes - it's just that they're "one size fits all" - and that approach never works.
PS: I've spent so much space clearing the air that I barely have room to tell you that, in addition to being a great virtualization platform in XenDesktop solutions and general-purpose server virtualization workloads, XenServer provides the lowest overhead for virtualized XenApp delivery, as low as less than 8%, and point you to this white paper. Compare it to other virtualization solutions yourself, using your own XenApp workloads.
Simon Crosby, the Chief Technology Officer of the Virtualization and Management Division of Citrix, participates in a recurring podcast with Virtual Strategy Magazine called "10 Minutes to Xen".
Here is a list of the topics discussed in the most recent edition -
VSM speaks with Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer, Citrix XenServer, about Citrix XenServer development and release of XenServer 4.1
Podcast Summary:
Length: 11:18
- Introduction
- Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer, Citrix XenServer (:10)
- New announcements and news about the release of XenServer 4.1 (:18)
- Citrix XenServer partnership with Netapp (2:13)
- XenServer 4.1 shipping now and available for download (5:35)
- Management of physical & virtual server environment from one location (6:30)
- Where XenServer stands now in the marketplace (8:03)
- Upcoming release of Microsoft hypervisor & how XenServer is working with Microsoft (9:20)
- For more information on Citrix XenServer (10:30)
- Close
You can listen the full podcast here.
Yesterday Citrix announced a new XenServer pricing modelthat is already creating headlines across the industry. XenServer is the first server virtualization product to do away with the complex and outdated per CPU socket pricing, moving to a per server model. Administrators no longer need to worry about counting the numbers of sockets, cores, CPUs etc - servers is what matters.
Part of the Citrix DNA is to simplify and streamline the whole customer experience - in addition to building intuitive and easy to use products, we extend the ease of use concept to how the product is evaluated, purchased and supported. Citrix XenServer doesn't have a plethora of confusing options and add-on packs - everything is bundled into one or more editions within the product line, dramatically reducing the size and complexity of our price lists and the purchasing & ownership experience.
We noticed that selling based on per 2 CPU sockets was causing confusion in the marketplace, especially between sockets, CPUs, and CPU cores. In the days of multiple core CPUs does pricing per physical CPU make sense? How many administrators know exactly how many sockets are in their organization - (everyone knows the number of servers) - Per server just makes sense.
So for XenServer 4.1 each license is an entitlement to support a unique physical server within the organization. In addition we support both annual (12 months usage) and perpetual licenses. We're defining per server as industry standard 2 and 4 socket servers, as these represent apprximately 99% of all servers - 8 CPU (and above) servers are specialized systems and we continue to offer unique pricing.
Moving forward you're going to see a continued focus on ease of use, making Citrix XenServer the best server virtualization choice!
Last month I posted about Ian Pratt's presentation on the Xen Open Source Hypervisor at the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developer's European Meeting) Conference. FOSDEM has posted videos of all the sessions. As the one of the primary founders of the Xen Open Source Hypervisor Project, Ian has unique insight into the Xen Project. http://video.fosdem.org/2008/maintracks/FOSDEM2008-xen.ogg
The next virtualization vendor on up in my series of posts digging down into CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" is PlateSpin.
In my last post on this series, I got a bit ahead of myself and posted that Marathon Technologies was next. I had just seen some videos of Marathon working with XenApp and got a bit ahead of myself. Marathon is after PlateSpin.
Here is what CIO Magazine has to say about PlateSpin -
PlateSpin continues to win over customers even as some free conversion tools have become available, says Burton Group's Wolf. PlateSpin's P2V conversion tool, PowerConvert, has remained relevant due to its expanded use models, including disaster recovery staging and virtual-to-physical conversion capabilities, Wolf says. Also, PlateSpin added chargeback reporting to its PowerRecon product, an interesting reporting and management tool, just as many IT groups are trying to figure out how to do chargebacks to business units in the virtualized world.
As you may have heard, Platespin and Novell recently announced that Novell is acquiring PlateSpin.
PlateSpin did a podcast interview with Virtual Strategy Magazine last year.
Podcast Summary: Length: 18:10
- Introduction
- Fastest growing companies in Canada (00:15)
- Server consolidation and disaster recovery (00:20)
- P2V and assessment tools (00:30)
- How PlateSpin helps companies adopt Data Center infrastructure (00:42)
- Unified Workload Management (01:55)
- Virtualization and provisioning (02:10)
- Planning to have the workload in the right place at the right time (03:30)
- Provisioning, protecting, moving, optimizing and profiling workloads (03:45)
- Power Recon for awareness, Power Convert for change (04:20)
- Together for agility and improvement (05:00)
- Latest release of Power Recon (06:00)
- Very large data centers, thousands of servers (06:20)
- Greening the datacenter (07:16)
- Inventory Power in a datacenter (07:43)
- Incentives to reduce power (00:20)
- Disaster recovery DR (08:34)
- Testing recovery programs (09:24)
- Physical to virtual infrastructure failover (11:07)
- What differentiates PlateSpin (12:07)
- Sneak Peaks(14:10)
- Final words about changing datacenters(00:20)
- Closing
PlateSpin has three products today, PowerConvert, PowerRecon, and a new virtual appliance product called Forge. Here are some brief product overviews.
PowerConvert
PowerConvert is the first and only solution that remotely decouples workloads from the underlying server hardware and streams them to and from any physical or virtual host with a simple drag and drop.
By removing the dependency between a data center's infrastructure layer and the business applications that run on it, PowerConvert allows organizations to continually match service level requirements with available resources by rapidly reconfiguring, relocating and optimizing servers - all from a single point of control without having to be in physical contact with source or target servers.
You can view a replay of a PowerConvert webinar here.
PowerRecon
PlateSpin PowerRecon provides new levels of intelligence, visual analysis and forecasting for optimizing the data center by collecting hardware, software and services inventory for all server workloads with absolutely no manual effort. PowerRecon remotely gathers workload utilization statistics for a clear and concise picture of the application services running in the data center and how their resources are being used. PowerRecon supports the green data center by allowing organizations to assess the potential cost savings in power, cooling and space that can be achieved through consolidation.
With broad support for today's distributed, multi-platform environments and unprecedented scalability to accommodate the world's largest data centers, PowerRecon provides a true enterprise-scale workload profiling and planning solution. When combined with PlateSpin PowerConvert, organizations gain a complete end-to-end solution with tightly integrated planning and execution for data center initiatives.
PowerRecon provides analysis and planning for:
- Server Consolidation
- Consolidated Recovery
- Green Computing
- Data Center Optimization
- Capacity Profiling & Planning
- Asset Management
- Workload Profiling
- Virtual Infrastructure Management
The PowerRecon webinar replay is here.
Forge
The PlateSpin Forge appliance ships with prepackaged storage, consolidated recovery software and virtualization technology that is ready to go out-of-the-box. The standard configuration protects 25 server workloads up to a total of 2.5 terabytes of data. For larger implementations, multiple appliances can be deployed.
By dramatically reducing the time and specialized technical resources required to plan, provision, deploy and test a recovery environment, PlateSpin Forge puts workload protection and recovery within reach for small and medium-sized businesses as well as departments or branch locations within larger enterprises. With PlateSpin Forge, organizations can begin reliably protecting their physical and virtual workloads in a matter of hours as opposed to months.
I found a couple of quick PlateSpin PowerConvert overviews on YouTube (made by ITDVDs.com)
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I did an earlier post on PlateSpin that includes a link to a video interview at iForum.
Next up on the list is Marathon Technologies (I am sure this time! ). Again, I have posted about Marathon before (such as this post and this post . Marathon Technologies has an excellent solution that not only integrates with XenServer but XenApp as well. I have quite a few videos to show this teed up for my next post in this series.
The next virtualization vendor on up in my series of posts digging down into CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" is Equallogic, theiSCSI vendor acquired by Dell recently.
Here is what CIO Magazine has to say about Equallogic -
These products can help enterprise IT radically reduce storage costs using a SAN. (Before iSCSI, the only other mainstream option was fibre channel, a technology that's too complex and expensive to manage for many companies.) Within storage, iSCSI is a hot growth area: IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher) expects 25 percent of all external storage sold in 2011 to be iSCSI-based.
Equallogic is a very respected name in iSCSI and storage in general. The company recently won one of InfoWorld's "Technology of the Year Award" for 2008 in Storage.
EqualLogic PS3800XV
EqualLogic's PS3800XV iSCSI array represents the highly evolved state of iSCSI SAN arrays with panache. Fully featured and blazingly fast, this SAS-based array will easily find a home in infrastructures of any size, although the cost will keep it out of smaller shops. For infrastructures that don't need 2Gb or 4Gb Fibre Channel, and most don't, iSCSI is the way to go, and EqualLogic is showing us all how it's done.
According to David Marshall of VMBLog.com, Equallogic was awarded "SAN Product of the Year" at the TechWorld Awards last year.
I did not find any podcasts with Equallogic, but there is no shortage of videos on YouTube.
This first one gave me a chuckle. Marc Farley of Eqallogic asks "What's in Your Basement?" apparently in response to a Hitachi Blogger. Marc Farkey tells the world how much of a geek one SE at Equallogic is -
Only a true hard core geek would have to run a network sniffer to find all the computers on his home network. His parents must be very proud...
Soon after the Dell acquisition was announced, the head of Equallogic Don Bulens was interviewed by Dan Bricklin (who just happens to be the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first ever spreadsheet).
Finally here is one more video about the Equallogic strategy with Dell as told by Eric Schott (Director of Product Management of Dell/Equallogic) in an interview with Uberpulse.com
Citrix has a very strong partnership with Dell, so we can expect much more partnering activities with Dell Equallogic in the future.
Next up on the list is Marathon Technologies. Regular readers know that I have posted about Marathon before (such as this post and this post . Marathon Technologies has an excellent solution that not only integrates with XenServer but XenApp as well. I have even more content on Marathon Technologies to add for the next post...
A couple of weeks ago CA released the results of a virtualization management survey they commissioned. I finally got around to reviewing it this week (download the slides here). The survey digs down deep into why these companies made the move to server virtualization, what benefits they feel were a result, what are the management challenges, and how those virtualization investments were measured (if at all).
Here is how the respondents are described in the study (on slide 3) -
- This study was conducted among IT management at companies with an annual revenue of $250 million or more and investing or planning to invest in virtualization technology.
... - The U.S. study was conducted between October 11, 2007 and October 24, 2007. The non-U.S. portion was completed between November 6, 2007 and November 12, 2007. A total of 300 surveys were completed online in the following regions:
U.S. - 100 surveys
EMEA - 100 surveys: UK (50) and Germany (50)
APAC - 100 surveys: Australia (75) and Korea (25)
Chris Preimesberger of eWeek had this take on the study -
New research reported Feb. 12 that worldwide, 54 percent of large enterprises rate management of their virtual server environment as a critical or high IT priority. Yet only 45 percent think their companies are doing an effective job in this area.
...
Fifty-six percent of respondents are using multiple platforms/vendors for server virtualization management, while 35 percent are standardized on one platform. Sixty-eight percent of the respondents rated the importance of centralizing the management of multiplatform virtualized or physical environments as critical or very important.
Only 35% of worldwide companies who responded to the survey have standardized on a single vendor platform. With fair use in mind, I pulled a just a few screen shots from the slides to give you a visual (all of which are copyrighted by CA) -
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Even more interesting is the fact that only 40% of companies that responded expect to be standardized on a single vendor 18 months from now.
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There may be more competition in the marketplace than some other companies would have us believe.
Another part of the survey I found very interesting is the primary drivers and benefits. In my experience, cost reduction from server consolidation is the primary driver that starts most server virtualization projects, and other factors (like disaster recovery) drive expansion. This is true for many of the companies in this survey.
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The top four benefits for worldwide companies are "Ease of hardware provisioning and software deployment", "Lower TCO" , "Optimizing System Performance" and "server consolidation". I would argue that three of these are tied directly to costs, and those three lead by a wide margin in the US. I am surprised to see performance and load balancing beat server consolidation by 1% worldwide, however.
One very interesting note from the report is on the return on investment (ROI) of server virtualization. The survey found 45% of worldwide respondents did not have any method in place to to measure the ROI of virtualization solutions (slide 34). Another 26% worldwide "don't know" if they have been able to measure their server virtualization ROI. Network World reported last year on another study by CA that reported "40% of 800 IT organizations polled worldwide were uncertain if their use of server virtualization technology was successful" There certainly appears to be an opportunity to help measure the return on the investment in server virtualization.
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The overall conclusions from the survey are presented on slides 38,39, and 40. Other conclusions are that security and software licensing are big issues to these companies. In my opinion, The reality is that this is still a relatively new market (compared to many other IT markets) and there are many challenges and opportunities for the vendors in this space. I highly recommended reviewing the report when you have a few moments.
Next on up in my series of posts digging down into CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" is Embotics. Here is CIO Magazine's take -
Embotics calls itself a "VM Lifecycle Management" company...The product aims to reign in the problem of "rogue VMs" that IT may not know about, and lets IT apply policies and automation to the job of tagging and tracking each VM in the company. Embotics claims early success with customers in regulated industries who face extra audit pressure. "They are taking a lifecycle perspective, really looking at integrating security controls, change management and policy from one dashboard," Elliot says.
Embotics is a startup founded in 2006. In addition to the CIO Magazine list, eWeek Channel Insider added Embotics to the "10 Technologies and 20 Vendors You Should Know for 2008" list (that title just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?)
Their product is called V-Commander. Here is how they describe it on their website -
Introducing Embotics V-Commander
Server virtualization has been rapidly adopted by IT managers to solve problems while increasing flexibility for business response. But as the VM pools grow, management complexity increases, leading organizations to slow down their adoption of server virtualization or consume valuable resources.
Managing VMs can be much like herding cats
Virtual machines (VMs), are very different from their physical counterparts, and managing them can be much like herding cats. Like cats, VMs are mobile, they can disappear from view, they have "children", that can be subtly different from their parents, they can be "adopted" by any member of the IT staff, and have lifecycles that range from minutes to years.
And like cats, every time you think you have an handle on them, everything changes..
Embotics V-Commander - the "cat herder"
Embotics' V-Commander™ software application is a centralized, policy-based VM Lifecycle Management™ and control system for VMs that allows organizations to gain better oversight and control over their VM environments.
V-Commander™ frees up IT staff for more important tasks and expands their ability to take advantage of the inherent flexibility and agility of server virtualization."
I love the metaphor of "herding cats" for virtual machine sprawl. David sent me a presentation on Embotics and I pulled some screen shots from that to show some visuals from the product.
Here in the Operations view of V-Commander you can see some of the capabilities of V-Commander to control both online and offline virtual machines.
The product gives you the ability to track which template was used to make a virtual machine and put an "id tag" on a vm so you can track its entire lifecycle. 
In this view, you can monitor a virtual machines history, see its parent and child vms, and execute a list of commands on the virtual machine.
The Policy screen gives you an idea of some of the capabilities V-Commander gives you. You can set policies to alert you when an unknown virtual machine is powered on or or off, quarantine unknown virtual machines, or disable any deployment of an unknown virtual machine.
The combination of id tagging, lifecycle management and visibility and control of unknown virtual machines is very intriguing, not only for server virtualization, but for desktop virtualization with XenDesktop as well.
David Lynch, the VP of Marketing of Embotics, has been active since Embotics announced their V-Commander product last fall. As always, Virtual Strategy Magazine (I love the new look to their web site) can be counted on to do a great podcast interview with Embotics.
Podcast Summary: Length: 18:17
- Introduction
- David Lynch, VP of Marketing, Embotics (:10)
- About Embotics and David's role at the company (:20)
- V-Commander explained - centralized policy-based management and control system for virtual machines (1:38)
- Differences in managing physical and virtualized environments, and how Embotics has addressed the challenges posed by virtualization (6:15)
- Embotics' plans for supporting different platforms (11:38)
- Viewpoint: the future of virtualization - where we go from here (13:10)
- For more information about Embotics (16:48)
- Close
David Lynch did an interview with Tarry Singh of "Virtualization for Everyone". This interview is from November 2007.
Embotics is a solid, well funded private company. These guys seem to know pretty well what they are coming out with. They are still doing a private beta with select customers and are gaining tremendous insights (Geez, I can imagine!) on its role within an organizations.
What I liked about David was that he engaged me in a conversationalist style, we are all stuck in this hyped-up hypervisor age. Microsoft and all other guys are jumping in with their products, but we need to address serious issues around the virtualized data center (partial or full).
I am very curious to check out the Embotics product...
Tarry does a great job with his questions in this interview.
David and his team have been busy getting the word out. Mike Vizard of eWeek also did a podcast with David Lynch last month and Anil Desai did a webcast with Embotics for Search Server Virtualization as well.
Embotics joined the Citrix Global Alliance Program in November of 2007, and is currently working on their integration into XenServer. According to David Lynch, part of the plan is to use the look and feel of XenCenter for this new offering. I look forward to seeing what they put together for XenServer. Once XenDesktop is launched, I can see an even greater need for virtual machine life cycle management by a tool like Embotics V-Commander.
Next on the list is Equalogic...
Ashlee Vance of the register has unfortunately mis-told the story about XenServer and Symantec Storage Foundation. So just to ensure all the facts are out there, this is the story:
XenSource signed an important partnership with Symantec about 9 months ago, that would allow us to integrate Symantec Storage Foundation as an included volume manager in XenSource's XenEnterprise product. The deal was based on the realities of the XenSource situation at the time - namely we were an independent company with our own routes to market. The Symantec Storage Foundation would be included for customers at no additional charge, when they purchased XenEnterprise. Also included in XenEnterprise is a standard Linux based volume manager, LVM, as well as storage repositories for VHD based virtual hard disks on NFS, and iSCSI "LUN per VDI" storage.
When Citrix acquired XenSource, our route to market changed - or rather was amplified - by the Citrix channel partners. The Symantec agreement, which we still view as critical to our ability to address the massive installed base of storage without requiring customers to change their processes, training or technologies for storage management, is now being re-drafted to expand its scope and to ensure that there is complete alignment between Symantec and Citrix in the market. A key part of this is ensuring that the channel is trained to distribute, install and support our product and all of its component technologies, including those of our partners where relevant. Although our integration work against Symantec Storage Foundation is complete, we have not yet completed the work necessary to ramp the channel training, support and certification with the additional Symantec storage management capabilities, so it has been omitted from the XenServer 4.1 release.
Ashlee inferred that this is all about Citrix trying to make money from the deal. The contrary is true. We're keenly interested in helping our partners make money from what we do with XenServer, because it divides the overall value pie more equitably across the ecosystem and thereby strongly incentivizes the channel and our partners to deliver more Citrix product.
The omission of Storage Foundation from XenServer 4.1 should not be read as any change in the strength or strategic nature of our partnership with Symantec. On the contrary, Symantec is possibly our most strategic ISV partner, because Citrix is not, and never will be a storage management vendor and Symantec offers one of the industry's most powerful capability sets for managing the diverse storage infrastructure used by our customers today. Our product is built to take advantage of the powerful storage management products provided by our partners, and in the area of volume management, Symantec is the market leader and a key go-to-market partner. Suffice it to say that as soon as we have nailed down the specifics of how to go to market with Symantec now that we are part of Citrix, we believe our solution will be much more compelling than the closed, proprietary storage architecture of VMware's, and we are going as fast as we can to get it finalized.
Rich Crusco of Frameworkx.com has just posted a great three four part review series of the Tech Preview of the Citrix WorkFlow Studio. Here is just a small portion of some of Rich's thoughts and screen shots from three very detailed and thorouugh posts on the Tech Preview.
In his introduction to Part 1 of his series Rich writes "This is part 1 in a series of articles to be released that will give you a preview of Citrix Workflow Studio, a powerful orchestration tool for a dynamic delivery center. This preview article, the first in many, will go into the overview of Citrix Workflow Studio and its role in Dynamic Delivery and Process Automation."
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Here are some quotes from Rich's post :
Business Points Addressed:
- Complete Solution - Provides automated end-to-end creation, provisioning, and deployment of datacenter servers.
- Ensures Compliance - Tracks and controls via workflow, common administration tasks.
- Maintains Standards - Enforces consistent, streamlined automation of business rules and practices.
- Improves Efficiency - Significantly reduces server administration workload using scripting, workflow, graphical administrative console, and reporting capabilities.
- Promotes Rapid ROI - Automates the management of datacenter servers for potentially millions of users.
Technical Points Addressed:
- Simplifies Server Configuration Creation - Pre-configured tasks provide step-by-step guide for configuring complex or standard server settings and then outputs them into a PowerShell script.
- Automates Server Configuration Approval and Audit - Allows administrators to create workflows for administrative tasks with built-in audit and approval steps.
- Automates Server Deployment - The PowerShell extensions allow IT administrators to script server settings using Cmdlets.
- Adapts Server Configuration to Organization - The workflow UI and wizards are completely customizable and editable for custom workflow configurations.
- Enables Workload Delegation - Once a workflow is created, it can be delegated to other administrators for editing and execution.
Rich pulled in screen shots from Citrix WorkFlow Studio as well -
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In Part 2 Rich states "Previously I have outlined what is Citrix Workflow Studio, and so in this article we are going to outline some of the Citrix Workflow Studio concepts, interfaces, and configurations. In this article I will give you a better working knowledge of the components that are needed to be able to create and compose workflows."
Rich does a great job of dissecting WorkFlow Studio and getting down into the guts of this Tech Preview.
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In Part3, Rich dives down into workflow creation.
In this article I will give you a better working knowledge of workflow control tasks, creating workflows, using templates, and running workflows.
This is part 3 in a series of articles that will preview the new Citrix Workflow Studio, a powerful orchestration tool for a dynamic delivery center. In previous articles in this series on Citrix Workflow Studio;
Citrix Workflow Studio - Preview Part 1
Citrix Workflow Studio - Preview Part 2
Previously I have outlined Citrix Workflow Studio, Concepts, Interfaces, and Configurations. In this article I will give you a better working knowledge of workflow control tasks, creating workflows, using templates, and running workflows.
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UPDATE: Rich has added a Part 4 specifically on Variable with WorkFlow Studio.
Rich really digs down deep into the Tech Preview of Citrix Workflow Studio in this series, and includes a lot of visuals to help you get a better feel for what makes WorkFlow Studio tick and how this new program can be a valuable part in your tool kit. The little I have posted hear is just enough to whet your appetite, follow the links to get the three course meal.
Rich and Gus Pinto have a lot of interesting content and some very popular utilities for download (over 2.8 million downloads so far). Check it out at Frameworkx.com.
I met with group of consultants and sales people for a large systems integrator a few weeks ago to discuss server virtualization with Citrix XenServer. During the discussion, someone asked for a demonstration on XenMotion. Unfortunately I did not have the hardware with me at the time needed (two XenServer hosts) to show a demonstration of live migration of virtual machines with XenMotion. After that meeting it occurred to me the best way to have a demo of XenMotion available any time is to post one up on the Official Citrix Blog.
XenMotion is a feature of Citrix XenServer Enterprise that gives an administrator the ability to move a running virtual machine from one XenServer to another. Virtual machines can be moved from server to server without service interruption for zero-downtime server maintenance. Administrators can move running application work loads to take advantage of available compute power.
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XenMotion is a very popular feature of Citrix XenServer Enterprise that works in conjunction with Resource Pools. You can live migrate a virtual machine to any other XenServer host running in the same resource pool. For more on Resource Pools, see this document in the KnowledgeBase.
One of our sales engineers, Adam Lotz, recorded a video of XenMotion in his lab. Adam sent me the video, and I uploaded it to YouTube. In this video, Adam has two XenServer hosts running in his lab with multiple VMs on each.
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In the first 30 seconds of the video, Adam live migrates a running CPS 4.5 virtual machine from one XenServer host to the other. The low resolution offered by YouTube makes it difficult to see admittedly, but you can see the highlighted virtual machine pop over from one host to the other in a matter of seconds.
At about the 1:07 mark, Adam brings up a command window and starts to ping citrix.com. While the virtual machine is running, the ping time is consistently 1 ms. At about the 1:31 mark, Adam clicks and drags the running CPS 4.5 virtual machine from one host to the other to start the XenMotion. He clicks yes when the Confirm dialog box pops up at 1:36. You then see the ping time increases to 11 ms for two pings. The ping time drops down to 9 ms, up to 10 ms, then the virtual machine pops over to the other XenServer host and the live migration is complete by about 1:45 - nine seconds after clicking OK on the confirm dialog box. Next, Adam expands the command window and highlights the ping time to show the impact of the XenMotion. You see the ping time jumped up to 49 ms while the live migration actually occurred, then immediately dropped back down to 1 ms. NO packets were lost at all.
(Since Adam narrates the video live as he shows it, there are portions of the video where Adam built in some talk time, so you see nothing happening on the screen for 10-20 seconds)
I plan to upload the video as an attachment so you can see all the video more clearly at a higher resolution. There is an issue with adding attachments currently, but once that is resolved I will upload the video file.
If you would like to see another video demonstration of XenMotion, Doug Brown and Chas Setchell of 2Virtualize include XenMotion in the extensive technical overview video on Doug's site. You can see the entire video "Citrix XenServer Enterprise v4 Technical Overview Video - DABCC-TV - 12-3-07 - Episode #2" at this link.
You can watch a 37 minute XenServer Mini-Product training here. This blog post includes a video done by Peter Blum of the Virtualization and Management division of Citrix.
I found this info about XenMotion on the Citrix knowledgebase -
Summary
This FAQ article includes questions related to XenMotion using XenServer 4.0.1. Refer to CTX115716 - Citrix XenServer 4.0.1H FAQ for the full set of FAQs.
Q: What is XenMotion?
A: XenMotion is a feature that allows you to move a running virtual machine (VM) from one physical XenServer Enterprise server to another without any downtime.
Q: Which of your products support XenMotion?
A: XenMotion is only provided in our XenServer Enterprise product.
Q: What are the requirements to enable XenMotion?
A: You need at least two XenServer Enterprise servers running in a resource pool.
The XenServer Enterprise servers must have similar processor configurations, some type of remote shared storage such as iSCSI or Network File System (NFS), and a gigabit network connecting them.
Q: How similar do the processors need to be on the XenServer Enterprise servers?
A: To use XenMotion, the processors must be the same type, but can have slight differences (such as CPU speed). So, for example, all the systems would need to have Intel Xeon 51xx series processors. They could be different speeds, so you can mix systems with Xeon 5130 and Xeon 5140 processors. The same is true of AMD processors.
Q: Can you XenMotion a VM between an Intel and AMD system?
A: No. You can only XenMotion a VM between systems with the same processor manufacturer and type.
Q: Does XenMotion require you to have the same exact configurations for your server systems?
A: While you do need to have the same type of processor in each system, other configurations can differ. You can have different amounts of memory, different storage controllers, and different network controllers in each system.
Q: What type of storage does a VM need to be stored on to enable XenMotion?
A: A VM must be stored on remote shared storage to allow for XenMotion.
Examples of this are connections to NFS- or iSCSI (through a software iSCSI initiator)-based storage.
Q: What networking speed is required for XenMotion?
A: We recommend that you use Gigabit Ethernet between your physical servers.
Q: How much downtime occurs during a XenMotion?
The actual downtime during a XenMotion is generally 100-150ms. This downtime is so slight that services running in the VM are not interrupted. Most of the 100-150ms downtime is caused by your network switching equipment moving traffic to a new port.
This document applies to:
- XenServer 4.0
- XenExpress 4.0
- XenEnterprise 4.0
For those looking to plunge off the deep end and dive down deep into the theory and thought process behind live migrations in Xen, I also found a link to the original white paper written on live migration of virtual machines on Xen by a number of the developers of the Xen open source hypervisor project, including Ian Pratt (founder of the Xen Project). You can read the entire document at this link
Below is a portion of the of the text from the introduction -
Migrating operating system instances across distinct physical hosts is a useful tool for administrators of data centers and clusters: It allows a clean separation between hardware and software, and facilitates fault management, load balancing, and low-level system maintenance.
By carrying out the majority of migration while OSes continue to run, we achieve impressive performance with minimal service downtimes; we demonstrate the migration of entire OS instances on a commodity cluster, recording service downtimes as low as 60ms. We show that that our performance is sufficient to make live migration a practical tool even for servers running interactive loads.
In this paper we consider the design options for migrating OSes running services with liveness constraints, focusing on data center and cluster environments. We introduce and analyze the concept of writable working set, and present the design, implementation and evaluation of high performance OS migration built on top of the Xen VMM.
A very interesting portion of this paper is the section covering a set of phases for live migrating the work sets in memory.
Moving the contents of a VM's memory from one physical host to another can be approached in any number of
ways. However, when a VM is running a live service it is important that this transfer occurs in a manner that balances the requirements of minimizing both downtime and total migration time. The former is the period during which the service is unavailable due to there being no currently executing instance of the VM; this period will be directly visible to clients of the VM as service interruption. The latter is the duration between when migration is initiated and when the original VM may be finally discarded and, hence, the source host may potentially be taken down for maintenance, upgrade or repair. It is easiest to consider the trade-offs between these requirements by generalizing memory transfer into three phases:
Push phase- The source VM continues running while certain pages are pushed across the network to the new
destination. To ensure consistency, pages modified during this process must be re-sent.
Stop-and-copy phase The source VM is stopped, pages are copied across to the destination VM, then the new
VM is started.
Pull phase The new VM executes and, if it accesses a page that has not yet been copied, this page is faulted in
("pulled") across the network from the source VM.
(This document is written in 2005, so many things may have changed in that time. This paper is specific to the Xen open source project itself.)
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This powerful XenMotion feature for live migration is one of the most popular capabilities of Citrix XenServer 4.0. If you have any specific questions about XenMotion, please post them in the comments. As I find more resources (especially visuals and demos) I will post them on the blog.
While looking at the referring sites in the blog metrics for an earlier post,I just came across a site for a new Xen book called "Running Xen". This book is written by a member of the faculty (Jeanna Neefe Matthews) and several grad students (including a current IBMer) at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. The book is primarily focused on the open source hypervisor, but there is additional content on Citrix XenServer as well.
Here is a description of the book from the website -
We began using Xen in Fall 2003 soon after reading the paper "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" published in the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). After attending SOSP and talking to some of the authors, Jeanna Matthews returned excited about Xen. She and her graduate operating systems course at Clarkson University decided to repeat and extend the results reported in that paper. That class included two of the co-authors for this book, Eli Dow (currently at IBM) and Todd Deshane (currently completing his Ph.D.), who were both studying for their Master's degrees at the time. In the process of repeating the results from the 2003 Xen paper, we learned a lot about running Xen - much of it the hard way! Our goal for this book was to write exactly the material we wished was available when we first started using Xen.
In July 2004, we published the paper "Xen and the Art of Repeated Research" describing our experience with Xen and presenting the results we obtained repeating and extending the results. All the authors, in addition to being a part of the Fall 2003 graduate operating systems course, were also members of the Applied Computing Laboratories at Clarkson University specifically the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI) and the Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory (ITL). These labs were founded to provide students with hands-on experience with cutting-edge computing technologies and to form a community in which everyone both learns and teaches. Other students in the labs - both graduate and undergraduate - began to use Xen as the basis for both production systems and for research projects. Through the years, we have used Xen as the basis for a number of academic papers as well as the basis of award winning team projects. In the process, we have learned a lot about running Xen. It is our goal in this book to share this knowledge with you and to make your experience running Xen as smooth and simple as possible.
Here is the chapter list from the site -
- Chapter 1 - Xen: Background and Virtualization Basics
- Chapter 2 - A Quick Tour with the Xen LiveCD
- Chapter 3 - The Xen Hypervisor
- Chapter 4 - Hardware Requirements and Installation of Xen Dom0
- Chapter 5 - Using Prebuilt Guest Images
- Chapter 6 - Managing Unprivileged Domains
- Chapter 7 - Populating Guest Images
- Chapter 8 - Storing Guest Images
- Chapter 9 - Device Virtualization and Management
- Chapter 10 - Network Configuration
- Chapter 11 - Securing a Xen System
- Chapter 12 - Managing Guest Resources
- Chapter 13 - Guest Save, Restore, and Migration
- Chapter 14 - Xen in the Enterprise: A Brief Survey
- Appendix A - Resources
- Appendix B - The xm command
- Appendix C - Xend Configuration Parameters
- Appendix D - Guest Configuration Parameters
- Appendix E - Xen Performance Evaluation
The Running Xen web site has a page with multiple sites where the book can be purchased here. If you get the book and read it (or already have) I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.