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GUS PINTO: It's noticeable the steady growth of conversations around virtualization within organizations and in the Internet today, more specifically around server and desktop virtualization.
Microsoft is readying up Hyper-V, and a lot of technologies to allow these technologies to actually happen for the large enterprise. It's going into market in partnership with Citrix and its Xen Hypervisor.
I guess the question is, what is your true feeling about virtualization in the enterprise on the server and desktop base? Is this just really hype or is this something you guys truly believe is going to happen?
RAY OZZIE: No, it's absolutely fundamental. It is absolutely going to happen.
I would say you have to take desktops separately. The logic behind virtualization on the desktop is completely separate from what it would be on the server, and in some ways it's different within the on-premises world versus the cloud. So, I'll just touch upon those independently.
Before I do that, though, let me just say that from a TS perspective, Terminal Server based deployment will always be more efficient than virtualization. It was a designed-in, multi-tenant model within the OS. So, if there are applications and solutions that fit the TS model, that's just a terrific model to use, and I would encourage organizations to use that model.
Within the enterprise, virtualization, the simplest and most straightforward way is to just make the best use of the datacenter resources that you can from a consolidation perspective. This is we are absolutely taking it seriously.
There are two phases of that consolidation. Phase one is bringing things together, meaning if you have a scale-up cluster or a scale-up, some expensive configuration of hardware, how can you package much usage on that piece of hardware as you can? The other one is then movement of images amongst the different machines within the back-end. You'll see investments progressively from us in both of those realms.
Taken to the extreme within the cloud, virtualization is absolutely critical. Virtualization is key to making the best use and securely isolating properties from multiple customers that might not use even a full inexpensive CPU, and moving them geographically or whatever to provide resilience and robustness. So, it is something that's extremely important.
On the client I'll only say that the uses of it, the way that the Mac uses it to run Windows and stuff, it's clever. Parallels, they're very clever technologies.
The way that you'll see us take advantage of it over time more and more on the client is our mechanisms around ensuring compatibility. App compat is a very, very challenging thing, and you want to continue to make progress with the operating system. We look to it as another tool in the toolbox to try to help in the compat world without -- enabling innovation while still enabling assurance of compatibility.
~snip~
I will be posting the Video with Q&A shortly.
Gus Pinto - Technology Evangelist
Microsoft MVP | gus.pinto@citrix.com
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
Ian Pratt
, one of the founders of the Xen Project, recently gave an inteview at FOSDEM.org about his recent talk at the FOSDEM 2008 conference. FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting.
Here are a few snippets from the interview.
Last time, XenSource was not yet acquired by Citrix. What were the reasons to consider this sale?
I think we were doing pretty well as XenSource, but one of the challenges we faced is that it takes time to build a 'sales channel' to distribute software. Citrix already have a great sales channel, so the acquisition provided a great opportunity to take Xen to the mass-market.
What kind of open-source commitment do you expect from Citrix?
Citrix have been great in supporting the open source side of things, funding folk to work full-time on open source Xen, and also funding a full time Xen programme manager. The management understand the importance of a strong Xen community and the need for the project's independence from Citrix's own Xen products.
The change was always going to make some members of the community nervous (just like when we originally formed XenSource), but it's the same group of people and we intend to carry on just as before. One difference is that we now have 'xen.org' to provide a clear independent identity for the Xen project, and also the Xen Advisory Board to help govern the project.
How does Xen's future look on Windows platforms?
Lots of people use Xen to run Windows VMs -- after all, Windows arguably needs virtualization more than Unix OSes. I reckon that something like over 80% of the VMs running on XenServer are Windows.
You can read the entire interview at the FOSDEM.org site
. In the past FOSDEM events, videos of the talks have been posted. None of the 2008 talks are posted yet, but soon you should be able to download the video of the entire talk by Ian Pratt at the FOSDEM video site. UPDATE: You can now download a pdf of Ian's presentation at FOSDEM.org here.
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.
Anyone interested in learning more about the open source Xen solution built by the community at Xen.org can attend the North American Xen Summit in Boston, MA, June 23 - 24 as part of the USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference. The USENIX event is from June 22 - 27 with training sessions from the 22 - 24 and a conference from the 25 - 27. Plans are underway to host a day long Xen training session for the 22nd and include sessions from Xen Summit in the USENIX conference. A discount will also be offered to all Xen Summit attendees interested in going to the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.
More information on the event and registration information will be available soon; in the mean time, mark your calendars. Also, a European Xen Summit is also in the plans for later this year in London. Stay tuned...
For those of you working with Xen 3.1, be aware that Xen 3.2 is now launched and available at xen.org.
===============================================================
CALL FOR PAPERS
3rd Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing (VHPC'08)
as part of Euro-Par 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain
===============================================================
Date: August 26-29, 2008
Euro-Par 2008: http://europar2008.caos.uab.es/ Workshop URL: http://xhpc.wu-wien.ac.at
SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
Abstracts: February 4, 2008
Full Paper: April 14, 2008
Scope:
Virtual machine monitors (VMMs) are becoming tightly integrated with standard OS distributions, leading to increased adoption in many application areas including scientific educational and high-performance computing (HPC). VMMs allow for the concurrent execution of potentially large numbers of virtual machines, providing encapsulation, isolation, and the possibility for migrating VMs between physical hosts. These features enable physical clusters to be treated as "computation pools", where a variety of execution environments can be dynamically instantiated on the underlying hardware. VM technology is therefore opening up new architectures and services for HPC in cluster and grid environments, but consensus has not yet emerged on the best models and tools. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on virtualization in HPC environments, with the goal of sharing experience and promoting the development of a research community in this emerging area.
The workshop will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each followed by 10 min discussion sections.
Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations.
The workshop will also include a 30 min panel discussion by presenters.
TOPICS
Topics include, but are not limited to, the following subject matters:
- Virtualization in cluster and grid environments
- Workload characterizations for VM-based clusters
- VM cluster and grid architectures
- Cluster reliability, fault-tolerance, and security
- Compute job entry and scheduling
- Compute workload load leveling
- Cluster and grid filesystems for VMs
- VMMs, VMs and QoS guarantees
- Research and education use cases
- VM cluster distribution algorithms
- MPI, PVM on virtual machines
- System sizing
- Hardware support for virtualization
- High-speed interconnects in hypervisors
- Hypervisor extensions and utilities for cluster and grid computing
- Network architectures for VM-based clusters
- VMMs/Hypervisors on large SMP machines
- Performance models
- Performance management and tuning hosts and guest VMs
- Power considerations
- VMM performance tuning on various load types
- Xen/other VMM cluster/grid tools
- High-speed Device access from VMs
- Management, deployment of clusters and grid environments with VMs
- Information systems for virtualized clusters
- Management of system images for virtual machines
- Integration with relevant standards e.g. CIM, GLUE, OGF, etc.
PAPER SUBMISSION
Papers submitted to each workshop will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee and external reviewers. Submissions should include abstract, key words, the e-mail address of the corresponding author, and must not exceed 10 pages, including tables and figures at a main font size no smaller than 11 point. Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the conference to present the work.
Accepted papers will be published in the Springer LNCS series - the format must be according to the Springer LNCS Style. Initial submissions are in PDF, accepted papers will be requested to provided source files.
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
Submission Link:
http://www.edas.info/newPaper.php?c=6123&
IMPORTANT DATES
February 4, 2008 - Abstract submissions due Full paper submission due: April 14, 2008 Acceptance notification: May 3, 2008 Camera-ready due: May 26, 2008
Conference: August 26-29, 2008
CHAIR
Michael Alexander (chair), WU Vienna, Austria Stephen Childs (co-chair), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Jussara Almeida, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brasil Padmashree Apparao, Intel Corp., US Hassan Barada, Etisalat University College, UAE Volker Buege, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, Simon Crosby, Xensource, UK Marcus Hardt, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany Sverre Jarp, CERN, Switzerland Krishna Kant, Intel Corporation, US Yves Kemp, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Naoya Maruyama, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Jean-Marc Menaud, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France José E. Moreira, IBM Watson Research Center, US Yoshio Turner, HP Labs Andreas Unterkircher, CERN, Switzerland Dongyan Xu, Purdue University, US
GENERAL INFORMATION
The workshop will be held as part of Euro-Par 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain.
Euro-Par 2008: http://europar2008.caos.uab.es/
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.
For all you super technical people out there looking for a great explanation of how the Xen Hypervisor works and was designed, I highly recommend getting the following book: The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor by David Chisnall. I bought it from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Hypervisor-Prentice-Software-Development/dp/013234971X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199980643&sr=8-1
I get no kickback on the order but thought people who wanted to really understand the Xen Hypervisor and how it works would like the information.
For those of you interested in the Brussels event I blogged about yesteday; here is a 30% discount code for the event: XENORG
If you are in Europe near Brussels and want to learn more about the open source solutions of virtualization, I recommend looking into a conference for January 22 - 23, 2008 at http://www.profoss.eu
Speakers currently scheduled for the event are from Sun, AMD, Novell, The 451 Group, Citrix, and many other leaders from open source projects. The event is sponsored by companies such as HP, Oracle, Unisys, and others.
Text from the Event Home Page:
Welcome to the Profoss website. If you're a professional user of Information and Communication Technologies, you'll be happy to know that Profoss brings you quality events where you will actually learn things, without commercial talks.
Profoss' objective is to spread objective information about the possibility to use professional solutions based on alternatives to proprietary and closed products. We focus on organising informative events, each dedicated to one subject, where professional IT people can get the information they need to make informed decisions. We also want to put you in contact with local professionals able to support you in your projects.
As you are smart enough to draw conclusions, we'll provide objective information so you can take the best decision based on your work environment, your experience, your knowledge, etc... We're not trying to sell you anything. We're only trying to bring you the most interesting information.
We don't think that to make an event interesting, it has to be expensive. This makes Profoss events accessible to employees of bigger companies as well as SMEs, where open solutions can have a significant added value.
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 innovation and creativity 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.
Don Tapscott, one of the authors of Wikinomics, gave a presentation to Google on his book. You can see the video of that presentation below -
As I posted earlier, the Xen Project is benefiting a great deal from the mass collaboration of developers from Intel, AMD, IBM, HP, Sun and Oracle working on this second generation hypervisor. We are able to build on top of this creativity and innovation in much the same way GoldCorp did.
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 innovation and creativity .
In my blog post from the Xen Summit, I promised to follow up on the Xen Summit once the presentations were posted. Those presentations are now available on Xen.org. Here is a list of the presentations -
Introductory Comments and Xen Status/Roadmaps
Ian Pratt (Citrix, Cambridge), Project Status and Organization
Keir Fraser (Citrix, Cambridge), Roadmap and Releases
Xen Community: A Sampling of Status and Roadmaps
Todd Clayton (Sun), OpenSolaris, Xen and the xVM Project
Clyde Griffin (Novell), Novell Xen Roadmap
Jeremy Fitzhardinge (Citrix, Cambridge), Linux parvirtops status
Aron Griffix (HP), IA64 Update
Add One-half Xen and Stir Briskly
Mick Jordan (Sun), JavaGuest
Gerd Hoffman (Red Hat), Introducing Xenner (Abstract Only Available)
John Zulauf (Intel), Xen Extensions to Enable Modular/3P Device Emulation for HVM
Daniel Berrange(Red Hat), Directions for development & integration of Xen and QEMU
CPUs updates, scheduling, mobile
Tom Woller (AMD), AMD Update
Jun Nakajima (Intel), Intel Update
Scott Rixner (Rice University), Scheduling Pitfalls for I/O-intensive Guests
Sang-bum Suh, Secure Xen on ARM
Xen Networking
Greg Law (SolarFlare), The Convergence of Storage and Server Virtualization
Jose Renato Santos (HP), Netchannel2: Improving Xen Networking Performance
David Edmondson (Sun), OpenSolaris xVM Network Architecture
Xen Memory and Storage
Grzegorz Milos (Cambridge), Memory CoW in Xen
Hitoshi Matsumoto (Fujitsu), SCSI Support Status
Dutch T. Meyer (University of British Columbia), Parallax, A VM Storage Infrastruture
Xen Security
Vedvyas Shanbhogue(Intel), VIS:Virtualization-based Integrity Services
Derek Murray (University of Cambridge), Improving Xen security through domain-zero disaggregation
Joseph Cihula (Intel), Trusted Boot - Verifying the Xen Launch
Xen Deployment
Roman Marxer (Google) - A Xen Based High Availability Cluster)
Dave Lively (Virtual Iron), Running Xen Diskless
Brendan Cully (University of British Columbia), High Speed Checkpointing for High Availability
Donald Dugger (Intel), Updating Xen for the Client Environment
Padmashree K Apparao(Intel), Characterization and Analysis of a Server Consolidation Benchmark
Frank Martin (Oracle), Virtualization of Enterprise DataCenters Using Xen
As you can see from this list, there is wide industry participation in the Xen hypervisor open source project. In this Xen Summit alone there were six presentations from Intel, three presentations from Sun and Red Hat, and two from HP and three from Citrix. In the Spring 2007 Xen Summit, there were eight presentations by IBM, three presentations by HP, two presentations by AMD, three by Red Hat, and seven by XenSource/Citrix. The Xen Open Source hypervisor is pulling in the creativity, innovation, knowledge and experience of a wide range of industry heavyweights. This effort is completely focused on building a highly scalable, stable and a powerful 64 bit virtualization engine.
I will be blogging about some of the individual presentations form the Fall 2007 Xen Summit later.
Rick Vanover of SearchServerVirtualization.com wrote a post called "Why You Must Evaluate Citrix XenServer" -
after attending a summary of the recent Citrix iForum it became clear that XenServer will pose a significant challenge in all areas to the VMware offering asthe resources of Citrix are integrated to the XenServer platform as the products mature.
Rick later writes -
it may be a good idea to determine the differences from the management side between VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer Enterprise edition. There are some differences, and as the next release of XenServer that has had the Citrix touch on the whole build, there should be some exciting new features that will surely give VMware a challenge for the best enterprise virtualization product. Regardless, we all win, as a better suite of products will be made available to the enterprise
You can download Citrix XenServer Express Edition for free here.
Here is a graphic that shows the capabilities between the different versions of XenServer -
With XenServer Express, you can start your evaluation quickly and easily.
If you want an overview of XenServer before you start your evaluation, check out this XenServer Mini-Product Training post.
Doug Brown of DABCC.com put together a Citrix XenServer overview video as part of his new DABCC TV. Doug goes through rthe virtualization capabilities of the Xen Hypervisor and Citrix XenServer with Chas Setchell of 2Virtualize.com . I will be bloggin more about this video later.
After my previous post on the XenServer 4 Mini-Product training , I have received some questions on the differences between XenEnterprise v3 and XenServer Enterprise v4.
Here is some background info on the differences between XenEnterprise v3 and XenServer Enterprise v4.
What New In Citrix XenServer v4?
XenMotion
Seamlessly move virtual machines between servers without downtime.
XenCenter
Unified virtualization management interface, including server, storage, and networking.
Native 64 bit Hypervisor
Scalability and support for enterprise applications
Resource Pools
Efficient configuration, allocation, and authentication for virtualization resources.
XenAPI
Integration with existing management investments, infrastructure and processes.
Here is some background on upgrading to XenServer Enterprise v4 - Upgrading to Citrix XenServer v4
I upgrade from your 3.2 products to your 4.0 product?
Yes, you can upgrade a 3.2 system to 4.0. Simply insert the 4.0 installation CD in your system and boot. When you run the installation process, it will discover your existing 3.2 installation and ask if you want to upgrade it.
Can I upgrade from your 3.1 products to your 4.0 product?
Yes, you can upgrade a 3.1 system to 4.0, but not directly. First you must upgrade your 3.1 system to the latest 3.x release, which is version 3.2. Insert the 3.2 installation CD in your system and boot. When you run the installation process for 3.2, it will discover your existing 3.1 installation and ask if you want to upgrade it. Once your system has been upgraded to 3.2, you can upgrade to the 4.0 release following the instructions in the 3.2 to 4.0 upgrade process.
Can I upgrade from your 3.0 product right to 4.0?
No, you will need to move your 3.0 virtual machines over to a 3.1 system. Once you are on the 3.1 version, you can upgrade the same system to 3.2, leaving your virtual machines and their settings intact. You can then upgrade from 3.2 to the 4.0 release.
Can the XenCenter client connect to XenSource 3.x servers?
No, the XenCenter client cannot connect to older XenSource 3.x servers.
Moving Between XenServer v4 Editions -
Moving Between XenServer v4 Products
Is there an upgrade path from XenExpress to XenServer?
Yes, you can take an existing XenExpress install and simply add a new license key which turns that instance into a XenServer instance.
Is there an upgrade path from XenExpress to XenEnterprise?
Yes, you can take an existing XenExpress install and simply add a new license key which turns that instance into a XenEnterprise instance.
Is there an upgrade path from XenServer to XenEnterprise?
Yes, you can take an existing XenServer install and simply add a new license key which turns that instance into a XenEnterprise instance.
Can virtual machines exported from XenExpress, XenServer, or XenEnterprise be moved between the product offerings?
Yes, virtual machines from any of our three commercial products are compatible with each other.
New in Citrix XenServer v4 Recorded Demo -
Here is a link to a recorded webinar by Peter Blum that covers the new features in XenServer v4.
Finally, here is some info on how to convert existing virtual machine built with a different hypervisor to a Xen virtual machine.
VM Conversion from other hypervisors and virtual machine monitors
Can you convert a virtual machine from other virtualization products to your products?
Yes, XenSource provides a free VM conversion tool that allows you to convert existing VMWare and Microsoft VMs to the XenSource import format. You can download the VM conversion tool from the link below.
http://tx.downloads.xensource.com/products/v2xva/index.php
You can also use products from Leostream and Platespin to convert other vendor virtual machines to be usable on a XenSource server.
Can you convert a virtual machine from Open Source Xen to your products?
There is currently no automated mechanism to move VMs from open source Xen to the XenSource commercial products. In a future release the OVA (open virtual appliance) format will allow VMs to be moved between different Xen environments.
Peter Blum from the Citrix XenServer team put together a short (37 minutes) product training for XenServer and recorded it using Camtasia. Below the info on the video, I have posted some info on the hardware support for Citrix XenServer (Processors, memory, storage, network) as well as the virtual machine limitations.
In this video, Peter covers the following topics -
1.Setting up Xen Enterprise and Xen Center.
2.Creating resource pool.
3.Attaching the remote storage.
4.Creating VM
5.Using some of the features in the product.
You can watch (and listen) to this mini product training here.
After you watch the XenServer training video, you may to read about the specific new features in XenServer v4 in this post.
If you would like to go through a quick install yourself, you can download XenServer Express Edition for free. Once you have the code downloaded, it takes about 10 minutes to Xen
Here are some background requirements for installing Citrix XenServer -
Hardware Support
Do I need a system with a 64bit x86 processor to run your software?
Yes, our products require a 64bit x86 processor.
Can I run your server software on a system with a 32bit processor?
No, our virtualization server software cannot be run on a 32bit processor based system. You can however run the Linux P2V capture tool and our XenCenter Management Client on a 32bit system.
Do I need a system with hardware virtualization support for running Linux operating systems?
You can currently run all of our supported Linux guests on a 64bit x86 system without the need for hardware virtualization support.
NOTE In previous releases a system with hardware virtualization support was required to do the initial installation of the latest Linux releases. This is no longer the case.
Do I need a system with hardware virtualization support for running Windows operating systems?
Yes, to run Windows operating systems you will need a 64bit x86 CPU based system that supports Intel VT or AMD-V hardware virtualization technology in the CPU and BIOS.
What is required to run Windows virtual machines?
To run Windows operating systems you will need a system with a 64bit x86 system that supports AMD-V or Intel VT hardware virtualization technology in the CPU and BIOS.
Which Intel VT processors do you recommend for running Citrix XenServer products?
We recommend the following Intel VT CPUs:
* Intel Xeon 51xx series processors (Dual-Core)
* Intel Xeon 53xx series processors (Quad-Core)
* Intel Xeon 71xx series processors (Dual-Core)
* Intel Xeon 30xx series processors (Dual-Core)
* Intel Xeon 32xx series processors (Quad-Core)
Can I use other Intel VT processors with the Citrix XenServer products?
Yes, other 64bit Intel processors including the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors contain VT technology and should work with the Citrix XenServer products. You can find a list of 64bit VT-enabled processors on the Intel website. Also be sure to check with your system vendor to make sure you BIOS supports Intel VT.
Which AMD-V processors do you recommend for running the Citrix XenServer products?
We recommend the followingAMD-V CPUs:
* AMD Opteron 12xx series processors
* AMD Opteron 22xx series processors
* AMD Opteron 82xx series processors
Can I use other AMD-V processors with the Citrix XenServer products?
Yes, many other 64bit AMD processors contain the AMD-V technology and should work with our products. You can find a list of AMD-V-enabled processors on the AMD website. Also be sure to check with your system vendor to make sure you BIOS supports AMD-V.
AMD Sempron processors do not currently contain AMD-V technology.
Can your products run on a 64bit Intel VT or AMD-V laptop system?
Yes, the products can be run on 64bit laptops for demonstration purposes, but we recommend running on a server system for production use.
Can your products run on a 64bit Intel VT or AMD-V desktop system?
Yes, the products can be run on 64bit desktop systems, but we recommend running on a server system for production use.
What does the AMD-V and Intel VT technology do?
The hardware virtualization technology from AMD and Intel allow Xen to efficiently handle certain virtualization-unsafe x86 instructions that a virtual machine may call during its normal course of operation. In first-generation virtualization systems, complex software layers must watch all executing machine code to rewrite unsafe x86 instructions on the fly. The Intel VT and AMD-V technology intercept these unsafe instructions and pass control to the Xen hypervisor to return a valid response to the virtual machine without a complex and performance-hindering layer of software.
You should check with your system supplier to determine if your system has Intel VT technology. Generally, systems with Intel VT will have an option to turn on Intel Virtualization Technology in the BIOS under Processor, CPU, or Advanced Configuration menus.
In addition, the first part of the Citrix XenServer product installer performs a check on your system that alerts you if Intel VT technology is not detected before making and changes to your server.
How can I tell if my AMD based system has AMD-V Technology?
You should check with your system supplier to determine if you system has AMD-V technology. A good rule of thumb is that AMD processors that support DDR2 memory have the AMD-V technology.
In addition, the first part of the Citrix XenServer product installer performs a check on your system that alerts you if AMD-V technology is not detected.
Do your products support dual-core or higher core processors?
Yes our products support multi-core processors, including quad-core processors from both AMD and Intel.
Memory Support
Do your products support memory sharing between VMs?
Xen and the Citrix XenServer family of products do not currently support memory sharing. Sharing memory between virtual machines imposes a performance penalty on VM memory operations. Generally you don see much savings from memory sharing in other products, since the operating system and applications don use most of the memory on a system. The data and file caches which are unique per VM use most of the memory which can be shared.
Do your commercial products support memory ballooning?
The core Xen technology currently supports memory ballooning and this capability will be included in our commercial products in a future release.
What is the maximum amount of memory that your products can use on a physical server system?
XenServer Enterprise is based on the 64bit version of Xen, which allows it to use up to 128GB of physical memory.
XenServer is also based on the 64bit version of Xen which allows it to use up to 128GB of physical memory.
What types of local storage can be used with your products?
All three Citrix XenServer products support IDE/PATA, Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI, and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
What types of non-shared remote storage can be used with your products?
The following forms of non-shared remote storage can be used:
* Hardware FC: Connections to storage area networks via fiber channel HBA from Emulex and QLogic.
*
Hardware iSCSI: iSCSI storage connections made with a hardware iSCSI adapter
The following forms of -shared remote storage can be used:
* Software iSCSI: iSCSI storage connections made with our built in software iSCSI initiator
*
NFS: NFS storage connections made with our built in NFS client.
What products support shared remote storage?
Shared remote storage is only available in our XenServer Enterprise product.
What products support non-shared remote storage and local storage?
All of the Citrix XenServer Family of Products support non-shared remote storage and local storage.
What is the difference between remote storage that is shared and non-shared?
Non-shared remote storage (such as FC SAN or an iSCSI SAN via hardware iSCSI adapters) can be used with our product, but will act like locally attached disk. When virtual machines are stored on non-shared remote storage, they cannot be live relocated between systems, they also cannot be automatically placed on other servers when they are started. With non-shared storage, the VMs on that storage can only be seen by one virtualization server.
Shared remote storage (such as connections to an iSCSI SAN via our built in software initiator or our NFS client) allow a VM to be accessed by multiple virtualization servers. This allows for VMs to be XenMotioned between systems. It also allows for automatic placement of virtual machines as they are started.
Do your products support software iSCSI?
Yes, we include a software iSCSI initiator with the product. We use the open-iSCSI initiator. Our Software iSCSI initiator can be used for remote connections to shared remote storage.
Do your products support hardware iSCSI adapters?
Yes, we support using the QLogic 405X series of iSCSI HBAs for remote connections to non-shared remote storage.
Do your products support NFS based storage?
Yes, XenServer Enterprise supports NFS based shared remote storage.
Can I use a regular software NFS share from a general purpose server with your XenServer Enterprise product for remote shared storage?
While you can use a regular NFS share from a general purpose server, we highly recommend using a hardware NFS appliance for proper levels of performance. We recommend that a hardware NFS appliance with high speed non-volatile caching be used (for example, Network Appliance Filers).
Can I boot your products from an iSCSI based SAN?
We don currently support booting the product from an iSCSI-based SAN.
Can I boot your products from a fiber channel SAN?
Yes, the products support boot from SAN with Emulex and QLogic HBAs that have boot from SAN capabilities.
Do your products support multipathing for fiber channel SAN?
Our products do not currently support multipathing for fiber channel SANs. Dynamic Multipathing support is planned for a future release.
Do your products support shared storage between systems?
XenServer Enterprise includes shared storage technology for Software iSCSI and NFS.
Does your products support using raw disk?
Yes, our products use LVM technology to create a storage repository which contains one or more disks or LUNs. This storage repository is then split up automatically to create virtual disk drives for the XenVMs. Note that the virtual machine will see a virtual disk drive, not the raw disk.
Do the Citrix XenServer products support virtual disk formats such as VHD?
When using remote shared NFS storage, XenServer Enterprise will storage virtual hard disks in the Microsoft VHD format. We also have a converter tool that allows you to convert a VHD (Microsoft Format) or VMDK (VMWare format) VM to our VM import format.
Does your product support software RAID?
Yes, the product allows the use of the Linux mdadm tools to create software RAID volumes. A technote on setting up software RAID can be found in the Citrix XenServer Knowledge Base. We generally recommend that you use a true hardware RAID solution for the best system performance.
Does your product support hardware RAID?
Yes, the product supports using standard hardware RAID controllers that are included with OEM systems. We also recommend 3Ware and Areca controllers for 3rd party RAID controllers. You can find a complete list of adapters on our online HCL. Our HCL can be found at http://hcl.xensource.com
Does your product support HostRAID or FakeRAID hardware/software RAID solutions?
No, our product does not currently support using lower end hardware/software HostRAID or FakeRAID solutions. We recommend using true hardware RAID controllers with our products.
Do your products support thin clones of existing virtual machines?
Yes, XenServer Enterprise, when using remote NFS shared storage or local storage with VHD-based VMs, supports thin-cloning of an existing VM template. Thin cloning allows you to create copies from a virtual machine template with minimal disk space usage. The original VM template is used as a base read-only disk, and any copies you create from this template will only require disk space to store differences in your newly created virtual machine.
Thin cloning also allows you to create new VMs very quickly. Since you don need to copy and virtual disk drives, new VMs can be created in only seconds.
Do your products support fast cloning of existing virtual machines?
Yes, XenServer Enterprise, when using remote NFS shared storage or local storage with VHD-based VMs, supports fast cloning of existing virtual machine templates. The original VM template is used as a base read-only disk, and any copies you create from this template will only require a small virtual disk drive to track changes. This allows XenServer Enterprise to create new VMs in only seconds.
Do your products provide disk snapshot support?
Virtual disk snapshotting will be provided in a future release.
Do your products support AoE (ATA over Ethernet)?
No, our products do not currently support AoE based storage.
Networking Support
Do your products support virtual networks that only operate between VMs?
Yes, administrators can create virtual networks that connect VMs running on the same physical system together over an internal virtual network.
Do your products support multiple physical networks?
Yes, administrator can create multiple physical networks that attach to NICs on the physical system.
Can VMs connect to multiple networks?
Yes, VMs are able to connect to multiple virtual and physical networks.
Do your products support single VLANs to a physical NIC?
Yes, the networking system allows the use of VLANs that connect to physical network interfaces on the physical box. In this setup one VLAN is connected to each physical NIC on the box.
Do your products support multiple VLANs to a physical NIC?
Yes, when using XenServer Enterprise the networking system allows splitting multiple VLANs on a single physical link into multiple virtual network switches.
Do your virtual networks pass all packets to all VMs?
No, our virtual networks act like a layer 2 switch. The virtual machines will only see traffic designated for that virtual machine.
Can I put the virtual NICs and networks into promiscuous mode?
Yes, you can put a virtual NIC into promiscuous mode to see all traffic on a virtual switch. Please search our knowledge base for the details.
Do your products support bonding or teaming of physical NICs?
This feature is planned for a future release.
Product Limits
What is the maximum amount of memory that your products can use on a system?
XenServer Enterprise is based on the 64bit version of Xen which allows it to use up to 128GB of physical memory.
XenServer Standard is also based on the 64bit version of Xen which allows it to use up to 128GB of physical memory.
XenServer Express is also based on the 64bit version of Xen but is limited to using up to 4GB of physical memory.
How many processors can your products use?
XenServer Enterprise can use up to 32 physical CPU sockets with up to 32 CPU cores.
XenServer Standard can use up to 32 physical CPU sockets with up to 32 CPU cores.
XenServer Express can use up to 2 physical CPU sockets with up to 8 CPU cores.
XenServer Enterprise and XenServer Standard support running up to 50 virtual machines per server at the same time. Keep in mind that the actual maximum number of VMs that can be run per server is generally bound by the amount of memory on the box and the memory requirements for your virtual machines.
XenServer Express supports running up to 4 virtual machines at the same time.
How many virtual machines can be created on your products?
We don currently limit the number of virtual machines that can be created on our products. We do have limits on the number of simultaneous virtual machines that can be active and running at the same time.
How many physical NICs do your products support?
All three products support up to 4 physical network interfaces.
How many virtual machines can run per server on your products?
XenServer Enterprise and XenServer Standard support running up to 50 virtual machines per server at the same time.
XenServer Express supports running up to 4 virtual machines per server at the same time.
How many virtual CPUs can you allocate to a virtual machine?
Linux and Windows VMs can use up to 8 virtual CPUs.
How much memory can you allocate to a virtual machine?
XenServer Enterprise and XenServer Standard allow that
a Linux VM can use up to 32GB of memory
a Windows VM can use up to 32GB
XenExpress allows a VM to use up to 4GB of memory
How many virtual disk drives can be allocated to a virtual machine?
A virtual machine can be allocated up to 7 virtual disk drives. This number also includes a virtual DVD-ROM device.
How many virtual disk drives can be allocated to a virtual machine?
A virtual machine can be allocated up to 7 virtual network interfaces.
I found a link that provides a list of all the actual systems, storage, components, and drivers that have been tested with XenServer. You can find it at this link -[ Hardware Compatibility for Citrix XenServer|http://hcl.xensource.com/] .
I will post more technical background info on the Citrix XenServer product line over the next few days. If you there is some specific information you would like to see, please post it in the comments.
After my earlier blog post on the Best of VMWorld solution for high availability offered by Marathon Technologies, I have received numerous questions about the solution offered by Marathon Technologies specifically for XenServer. Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Marathon, graciously agreed to provide some background info on Marathon Technologies and answer a few other questions.
Barry Flanagan: Many Citrix customers may not be familiar with Marathon Technologies. Can you give us a brief history?
Jerry Melnick: Marathon was founded in 1993 by engineers responsible for developing Digital VAX FT fault tolerant systems. The team used this experience to develop the first software and networking technology that allowed multiple Wintel servers to operate as a single fault tolerant system. In 2003 the company migrated its technology to a software-only product that works with standard off-the-shelf Intel/AMD servers, unmodified Windows and standard, unmodified Windows applications.
Barry Flanagan: Your website describes everRun as Availability Software. What are the three things people show know about how your software solves the problem of unplanned downtime?
Jerry Melnick: First, we don say lightly. Our everRun software keeps critical applications available in industries where downtime equals big bucks, including process manufacturing, gaming, media and broadcasting, financial services and federal markets. We have over 1500 global customers including five of the top ten pharmaceutical manufacturers, four of the top five television networks in the US and over 1000 mid-market companies.
Second, we developed what we call our ComputeThru technology that keeps essential applications running through both network and disk I/O failures. That means they rarely, if ever, experience lost data, lost revenue, or lost productivity due to common system or network failures. And now we working closely with the Citrix to bring our proven availability software to virtual machines. Unlike existing availability solutions that add cost and complexity to the virtual environment, everRun VM is simple and reliable.
Third, everRun provides a much more simplified approach to server availability, whether they physical servers or virtual servers. It completely automates setup, configuration, fault detection and policy management. Automated setup and configuration eliminates the manual configuration other availability solutions require.
Barry Flanagan: Do you have any real world examples of companies who use your solutions?
Jerry Melnick: The world largest commodities exchange uses our software to ensure their pricing board information and order confirmation messages are always available, Wellcome Trust, the organization responsible for the sequencing of one-third of the human genome, uses everRun to guarantee high-availability of genomic data for its research users. And MAN AG, one of the Europe biggest and best truck manufacturers, uses everRun software to make sure all their employees in offices around Germany have continuous access to key applications and data. The division we work with is also a big Citrix customer. You can read about how they use everRun and Citrix software on our site.
Barry Flanagan: Do you have any numbers on the cost of downtime for specific industries?
Jerry Melnick: Here are some industry figures for key applications. Your mileage may vary.
Application Downtime Cost Per Hour
ERP 780,000
Supply Chain Management 660,000
E-Commerce 600,000
Internet Banking 420,000
Customer Service Center 220,000
Electronic Funds Transfer 210,000
Messaging/Email 60,000
Hospital Information System (avg. three hospital IDN with 1400 beds) 60,000
Hospital Information System (avg. single hospital with 500 beds) 15,840
We have an ROI calculator on our web site that can help you determine what downtime on your physical servers is costing your organization
Barry Flanagan: The November 28th webinar listed on your site talks about the Best of VMWorld approach to protecting virtual machines. How did Marathon win a Best of VMWorld award when the product is designed exclusively for Citrix XenServer?
Jerry Melnick: At VMworld, Mendel Rosenblum, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at VMware, highlighted hardware fault tolerance as one of the company three key technology initiatives. But according to Mendel, their solution is still in early development and won be out in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, we demonstrated everRun VM at the show, and we ship the industry first fault tolerant-class virtual machine software in Q1 of next year.
Barry Flanagan: What is different about this webinar? Why should someone working with virtualization technologies attend?
Jerry Melnick: Well, if you didn see the everRun VM showcase at VMworld or iForum, I be explaining how it works. IDC virtualization guru, John Humphreys, will share some real world numbers on virtualization savings based on customer surveys they conducted. And it a great opportunity to hear Simon Crosby (CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division of Citrix) talk about the new economics of server virtualization.
Barry Flanagan: What will an attendee learn from attending this webinar? Are there any takeaways?
Jerry Melnick: John will give you good guidance on how to evaluate and structure your virtualization business case for your management. We be providing attendees with a first chance to use a brand new virtualization and availability ROI calculator that will help make your case. And of course Simon will be thought-provoking as always.
UPDATE: I received pricing info back from Jerry and his team. The final pricing is not yet determined, but here is the TENTATIVE pricing info.
Marathon everRun VM integrated bundle (Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition v4 + everRun VM)
Dual socket: $4500 Quad socket: $9000
Marathon everRun VM only (for upgrading existing XenServer installations)
Dual socket: $2000 Quad socket: $4000
As stated above, this pricing is not yet written in stone.
Thanks to Jerry Melnick for answering our Seven Questions. There will be an opportunity to ask Jerry, John Humpreys and Simon Crosby more questions at the end of the webinar.
I am sitting in the Auditorium of Bldg. #3 at the SUN Microsystems Campus in Santa Clara (by far the most impressive campus of any technology company that I have seen BTW) during a break for the Xen Summit.
There have been many very interesting presentations so far at the Xen Summit. All will be posted in the next few weeks for your review. Here are a few thoughts...
Ian Pratt, the original developer of Xen and one of the founders of XenSource, opened up with a roadmap. I missed most of this unfortunately due to a very late flight. Later, we heard from Mick Jordan from Sun Research about a completely Java based VM running on Xen called JavaGuest . Tom Woller of AMD and Jun Nakajima of Intel provided an update and road map for CPU assisted virtualization. Greg Law from SolarFlare gave a very intriguing presentation on using there 10GB Nic and their vNIC driver to greatly improve the Network and Disk I/O throughput in a Xen Environment (they show up to 3X improvement with lower CPU utilization) by directly accessing the hardware. Roman Maxer from Google talked about Ganeti, a new open source tool created by Google for high availability on open source Xen (and used on internal production systems).
I will have much more as the presentations are posted on our web site.
The next partner from the XenSource Pavillion at iForum I would like to highlight is PlateSpin.
Virtual Strategy Magazine also did a video interview with PlateSpin at iForum. In this video Paul Sheridan of PlateSpin covers PowerRecon and PowerConvert.
PowerConvert is described as a migration tool. On the surface, it looks like a simple P2V tool. if you dig down deeper, you quickly find PowerConvert can do a lot more. here is a list I found of all the different types of migrations this tool supports.
P2V
- V2P
- V2V
- P2P
It can do this over the LAN or WAN, and can even do live incrementation migration at the file and block level. According to the product page on their website, this can happen while the server is live and running. I am extremely impressed with the capabilities of PowerConvert. This looks to be an incredibly useful tool for those who are moving to server virtualization. I would love to hear from any readers who have personal experience using PowerRecon in your own environment.
The other product is PowerRecon. I have to admit, the name of this product when I first heard it had me thinking of monitoring voltage on server power supplies. Here is a list of what the product actually does - automates the collection of server inventory, workload and resource utilization data and gives you the ability to do forecasting and trending of workloads. In light of that explanation, the product names makes a bit more sense. The next question for me was, wwhat does this have to do with server virtualization? Since a big part of the dirving force for server virtualization is under utilization of current server resurces, it makes a lot of sense to have a tool to know what the current levels of cpu utilization are for your server farm. The Virtual Infrastructure edition does the same thing for VM power by VMWare. I do not know yet if a XenServer Edition is forthcoming, but I will ask.
PlateSpin recently did a webinar on PowerRecon. Here is the link:
http://www.platespin.com/downloads/downloaddetails.aspx?fid=370
If you have experience using Platespin products, please post your experiences in the comments.
I have found several more partners videos to highlight. I will get to those over the next several days.
One booth I visited in the XenSource Pavilion is Marathon Technologies. I can recall recommending their high availability solution to a number of customers back in the late 90 when I was still an independent consultant. Back then, the solution was hardware and software based. Now, Marathon solution is a completely software based high availability solution and runs on industry standard hardware. Marathon announced a new XenSource specific solution at VMWorld, and won Best of VMWorld for New Technolgoies . John Bara from XenSource (now part of the Virtualization Management Group at Citrix) said this about Marathon:
By integrating everRun with XenEnterprise, Marathon is enabling customers of any size to get simple, enterprise-grade virtualization solutions with FT-class application availability, said John Bara, vice president of marketing at XenSource. is another example of how XenSource is working with partners to ensure XenEnterprise seamlessly integrates as the virtualization platform for a wide-range of high-performance, best-in-class solutions._
In the demo I saw, the v-Available everRun solution from Marathon was able to handle a failure of a hard drive one side of the link and a network card on the other side and continue running. Unlike many other virtualization HA solutions, Marathon solution does not restart the VM after a failure on one side of the link. The Marathon is always running and can handle the failure of a single component of either side, or an entire VM on one side without any downtime. It makes for a very impressive demo.
That demo was of two servers on a LAN. The solutions also works over a WAN. I am still trying to get more info from Marathon Technologies to nail down what are the specific WAN requirements for this new offering. According to the Marathon FAQ the Split Site solution ( a different product) requires 10 ms of latency or less. Assuming has the same requirement, you cannot replicate a VM from a datacenter on the east coast to one on the west coast. According to a few docs I found on the Marathon website, the limit is 100 miles.
Here is a video I found on YouTube of an interview done by Virtual Strategy Magazine.
There was a virtualization webinar last week with Marathon CTO Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Citrix Virtualization Management Group Simon Crosby, and Chris Wolf from the Burton Group. Here is the webinar link .
Marathon has an excellent High Availability solution for virtual machines running on Citrix XenServer. If HA is requirement for you, check it out.
I have several more partner solutions to blog abut as I get time.