With this year ending and the new one about to start, let me wish everyone a very happy new year. May the new year find you healthy, happy, and safe.

I was checking out the Virtual Iron blog and noticed a post from December 14th. This post titled “First VMware ignores you, then VMware laughs at you, then VMware fights you, then you win” tries to strike out at VMware in the same way the Linux community did against Microsoft.

In the beginning, Microsoft laughed at Linux and completely disregarded it. Next, they fought it trying to stop this “movement”. Finally, they’ve had to except it and learn to live with it. (See my previous posts about the Novell / Microsoft partnership.)

So what does this have to do with Xen? Apparently, a Xen customer received an quickly written email from a VMware sales rep that left some room for Xen to try and spin it in their favor. Now don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Virtual Iron. I’ve raised my eyebrow in regards to the deals that the Xen project has made in the past, but I have nothing against Xen. I just think that this spin on the email is a weak case to make for Xen over VMware.

Let’s go over some of the “points”:

“VMware” wrote: “Virtual Iron only runs on the latest servers equipped with virtualization hardware assist features. That requirement forces users to invest in the newest, most expensive servers, even for test and development pilot deployments.”

“Virtual Iron” responded: We are fully utilizing the latest advances made by the chip vendors (Moore’s Law marches on). Hardware enhancements to Intel® and AMD® processors improve software-based virtualization solutions. These chips go into servers from Dell, HP and IBM. I have no idea where VMware got the idea that these are the “most expensive servers” — I just checked prices at Dell.com and, for the price of just VMware’s ESX Server ($5750 per box), you can buy two Dell servers with VT and Virtual Iron 3.1 Enterprise Edition virtualization software and still have money left over to go to In-n-Out Burger.

Me: I LOVE In-n-Out Burger, but wouldn’t use that as motivation to make IT spending decisions. I think the point that the VMware rep was trying to make, is that for many customers running Virtual Iron means buying new hardware, whereas with VMware you can leverage your existing hardware. By the way, I checked Dell.com also and to get servers that cheap you need to strip quite a bit.

Let’s try again:

“VMware wrote”: “Virtual Iron supports only a small set of guest operating systems - RHEL 4 Update 2 (32 or 64-bit), SLES 9 Service Pack 3 (32 or 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 (32-bit) and Windows XP (32-bit). In contrast, VMware Infrastructure supports over 60 different versions of Windows, Linux and NetWare operating systems.”

“Virtual Iron” wrote: That’s true and, thankfully, you are probably using one that we support. With emerging businesses, the 90/10 rule rules - we focus on the servers used by the majority. This means that we don’t have to burden our cost structure with an obscure OS.

Me: OK, so they’ve got a point there. The majority of customer are using Windows 2003, and yes supporting only that does save Virtual Iron money. However, there is still a lot of Windows 2000, and Netware out there. Believe me, I’ve been in and out of a lot of datacenters in the last few years. I’ve seen some very suprising things.

“VMware wrote”: “Virtual Iron is missing a distributed clustered file system like VMware’s VMFS. This puts every virtual machine at risk of disk corruption when placed in shared storage.”

“Virtual Iron wrote”: Due to our system architecture, we do not need a clustered file system to perform migration of virtual machines. When we were designing the LiveMigration feature into our product, we looked at putting a clustered file system to support shared storage (a prerequisite for migrate). We know a thing or two about clustering. Some of our technical folks invented the early clustering systems. During development, we checked out VMware’s VMFS and come to conclusion that a clustered file system is the last thing we want. Why? It burdens you, the user, with heavy-duty maintenance and administration. So, instead, we built a clever mechanism that takes away that burden. With Virtual Iron, LiveMigration works on a regular file systems - without the need for clustering and without causing corruptions!

Me: OK, so Virtual Iron decided to not user a clustered filesystem. That’s nice. I can see getting away with not using one, but to say that managing a VMFS filesystem causes a burden is where they lost me. Maybe I’ve missed something, but I haven’t had to do a lot with my VMFS filesystems. I have had to plan appropriately to make sure I don’t over burden a LUN, but you have to do that same thing with Virtual Iron.

I just really don’t see their argument.

You can read the whole article here.

I just read the following on the VMTN blog:

——-

David Marshall and Wade Reynolds, authors of Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center, have a three-part series at SearchServerVirtualization, VMware ESX Server guest OS performance tips

Part One

* Tip 1: Upgrade to VI3
* Tip 2: Improve your host’s processor and memory
* Tip 3: Enhance your host’s storage
* Tip 4: Optimize your host’s networking

Part Two

* Tip 5: Be aware of VM-to-host placement
* Tip 6: Use remote access carefully
* Tip 7: Virtual machine processors and memory
* Tip 8: Remove unneeded virtual hardware

Part Three

* Tip 9: Update VMware Tools
* Tip 10: Optimize Windows guest operating systems
* Tip 11: Optimize Linux guest operating systems
* Tip 12: Use smart antivirus and backup configurations

I was catching up my buddy Rich’s blog at http://www.goitsolutions.com/ when I read a post about Al Shugart passing away.

For those of you that don’t know, Al Shugart was a pioneer in the development of the harddrive as well as founder of Seagate. I think Rich put it best when he said “without his contributions many of us would not have 10 thousand songs attached to our hip”.

Rich also offers up this link to a speech given by Ron titled: “Half a Century of Disk Drives and Philosophy: From IBM to Seagate“.

Here’s an article on converting VMware VMDK to VHD formats. Not sure why you’d want to, but if you do here’s an article about it.

I missed this when it was first released, but apparently Xensource has licensed the Microsoft VHD virtual disk specifications for Xen 3.0. Why does this bother me? Why should I care that an open source project is embracing Microsoft “standards”?

I care because the open source community has had great success in developing their own standards. Multiple people develop ideas, work on them, and then the best wins out. Not because Microsoft wants them to, but because it’s the best. Sure there are politics in the open source community, but it’s not the same.

This just helps Xen get in bed deeper with Microsoft. No wonder Linus chose to include KVM instead of Xen.

Read the article here:

http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=31396&src=site-marq

Tags: Microsoft, Open Sourse, Xen

What ever happened to UML? User Mode Linux was one of the first open-source virtualization platforms, and yet we hear nothing about it. A quick trip over to the UML website proudly talks about who’s using UML, how UML works, along with a whole suite of whitepapers.

The question is, why aren’t they getting any press. eWeek loves to print stories about how Xen is gaining ground on VMware, so why not talk about UML? In fact a quick search for “UML” only turned up results for the “Unified Modeling Language”. So next I searched for “user mode linux” and got only 8 hits. Of these, only 1 was from 2006 and even then it was only mentioned as a feature of Gentoo Linux.

So why is nobody talking about UML? Anybody have any thoughts? Maybe I can uncover something in the next few weeks.

I didn’t watch the game tonight and could kick myself. I knew the 49ers were playing Thursday this week, but completely forgot!

I’m really upset because the 49ers have a shot at winning the division, and with the Seahawks in first place this is an important game. I’m especially upset because the 49ers came back from behind to score 21 points in the 4th quarter to win.

So, with 2 games left the 49ers need to win both and Seattle needs to lose both go give the 49ers a shot. Will this happen? Over the next 2 weeks the 49ers are playing Arizona and Denver. Arizona should be a win, but Denver probably won’t. If they go 1 - 1 over the next 2 weeks they have a long shot at a wildcard spot.

Bottom line? The 49ers probably won’t go to the playoffs, but they are looking like a team that’s rebuilding nicely. Next season should be interesting.

There have been some interesting changes in the open source world. After a lot of talk from Xen about being included in the Linux kernel, Linux has decided to include KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine).

This is very interesting considering all the work that Xen has done to try and be included in the Linux kernel and how long KVM has been around. So far, I haven’t found anything from Xensource about their reaction to this. I’m sure however that it will be spun in the nicest possbile manner.

Read the article here.

So Microsoft has a partnership with Xen…..

Novell has a partnership with Microsoft….

Xen has a partnership with Novell….

Does this mean we may have a new “Virtual Trinity” on our hands?  However, instead of the “father, son, and holy ghost” we’ve got the “monopoly, geeks, and desperate”.
Are we really to believe that Microsoft is becoming a softer more gentler company, and that they are more open to competetion in the market place? Or, is this just their way to position themselves to take advantage of the amazing abilities of the Open Source community?

Time will tell.

Tags: Microsoft, Xen, Novell