I’ve been screaming about it for years. Microsoft is going to try to destroy Linux. When the SCO lawsuit failed they needed to go somewhere else and their recent “partnership” with Novell was just foreshadowing.

Microsoft’s latest claims are that Linux violates 235 of Microsoft’s patents. Excuse me while I laugh for a while….

Let’s review history. Microsoft “stole” Apples technology, which Apple “stole” from Xerox, and now Microsoft is mad that someone “stole” from them. For years Microsoft has been using their monopoly to steal technology, destroy companies, and force the industry to move in a direction that directly profits them.

Linus Torvalds has recenlty responded to Microsoft’s claims with a very witty response stating:

“they’re (Microsoft) probably happier with the FUD than with any lawsuit”

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Monopoly, Microsoft, Linux, Linus Torvalds

I just read this great article on Microsoft changing it’s plans for Virdian:

http://www.virtualization.info/2007/05/microsoft-removes-viridian-key-features.html

Technorati Tags: Viridian, Microsoft

I am at the airport heading home early from TSX. Today’s sessions did not impress me, and I have a lot of work piling up at the office, so I left.

My apologies to everyone who was hoping to hear more about the sessions.

This session was painful. Between the echo in the room and the presenters thick accent, I had a very hard time understanding the presenter.  In fact, within 15 minutes almost half of the attendees had left the presentation.

He started out talking about vSMP technology and resource pools and how these work to provide and manage processing resources.   This is stuff that most everyone here already knew.

Next he went into how ESX schedules time slices for the vCPUs.  I know this only because I read the slides.  Honestly though, I haven’t understood a word the guy has said.  I even asked the people sitting next to me and they were having he same issue.

I honestly didn’t get a thing our of this.

Technorati Tags: TSX, VMware, VMware TSX

This session discusses Capacity Planner 2.5 and some usage considerations.

Right off the bat I’m a little nervous with the presenter. He just said “There should be no concern collecting data and sending it off-site”. I think I know what he meant to say, but what he said isn’t the same. I think he meant to say, “collecting performance data and sending it off site shouldn’t be a major concern”. However, anytime you send a customer’s data off-site this is a concern. If the customer has any compliance issues, then they have to know exactly what information is leaving the site.   You must take the time to educate a customer who is concerned about what data is being sent off-site.  Capacity Planner does not send any sensitive data and once a customer sees the information being send their concerns go away.  However, to just say that it shouldn’t be a problem is very short sighted.

Unfortunately I had to leave this session early to take a call.

This session is targeted directly at discussing competition in the virtualization market place. They started out with an overview of the VMware advantage:

The first item discussed was that fact that VMware has been in the market since 2001 and are in their 3rd generation of releases. Microsoft’s Virtual Server is still trying to get Viridian out to beta, and Xen lacks a large customer base and is not included in the Linux Kernel by default.

The second item discussed is that VMware provides more guest OS’s. VMWare supports over 70 Operating Systems, while Microsoft supports 13 (no 64bit), XenSource and Virtual Iron only support 5 (2 versions of Windows, and 3 of Linux).

The third item discussed was overall TCO. Virtual Iron and XenSource try to compete saying that there per socket cost is less than VMware. However, because VMware is more scalable you can get a greater TCO.

Next, they dove into each competitor.

Microsoft and Xen use generic device drivers to manage the physical hardware and provide resources to the Guest VM’s. The advantage is that you have more hardware available to use. However, the trade off is that the generic drivers are not designed for the workload associated with virtualization. Part of the reason Microsoft’s Virdian is being pushed back is because Microsoft is trying to get better performance and scalability. VMware tried the same thing a few years back and found that writing new optimized driver provided better performance.

Some of the issues associated with OS-centric virtualization are:

Virtualization becomes a component of a monolithic operating system making it more vunerable to bugs and cunerabilities.

When you use a specific OS as a virtualization platform it favors that OS, locking you into that vendor, and provides poor support for other operating systems.

Next, they went into some myths that Microsoft is trying to perpetuate:

Myth: Microsoft Virtual Server gets better licensing for OS/Apps. - This is not true. Microsoft licensing applies to all virtualization platforms.

Myth: MS does not support VMware Platforms. - Not true. Microsoft will provide “commercially reasonable efforts” for VMware platforms. Also, Dell, HP, & IBM will provide support.

Myth: MS host clustering better than VMotion. - Not true. It’s hard to set up and has to be done for every VM.

Myth: MS to provide support for Linux VM’s. True, but not entirely. MS has outsourced the Linux compatibility layer to XenSource.

Then they demonstrationed MS Virtual Server host clustering.

The Microsoft Demonstration involved setting up a MS host cluster to provide VMotion-like functionality. I can’t imagine doing this for every VM in my environment. Also, when they “migrated” the VM from one host to another 7 pings were lost and a file copy that was going on timed out.

Then they presented some myths that Xen is trying to perpetuate:

Myth: VMware runs VM’s on a thick emulation layer. - Not true. VI3 is a true bare metal hypervisor with a similar code size to Xen.

Myth: Xen performance is better than VMWare. - Not true. VMware is faster with Windows Guests, binary translation is faster than hardware assist, and overall performance was similar. Even Xen’s papers support this.

Myth: Xen is ready for the enterprise. - Xen lacks reference customers, lacks a clustered filesystem, and there are reliability issues in their release notes.

They finished with a Xen Enterprise Management Interface demo. The interface was nice, but lacked advanced features.

Technorati Tags: VMware, TSX, VMware TSX

At every technical conference I’ve ever attended that has been at least 1 guy who I like to call “The Basher”. The Basher is the guy who’s attending a conference and all he does is bash everything. Even more than that, The Basher thinks he is an expert in everything he talks about and does not care if he ruins a session for everybody else attending. They are usually pretty insecure and attempting to prove how smart and important they are.

A good example is at Novell’s Brainshare a few years back. I attended a SuSE Session and there was an old Netware administrator in there who spent the entire hour trying to convince everyone that Linux was garbage and everyone should be using Netware. The presenter got through half of his presentation and most of the attendees left before it was finished.

Now don’t get me wrong. Good health debate is fun, but when you are ignoring the topic being presented, talk more than the presenter, and piss the reset of the session attendees off… you are a Basher.

I just saw my first one of this event. I hope he doesn’t ruin this session.

Technorati Tags: TSX, VMware, VMware TSX

Steve Herrod spoke about where VMware technologie is today, and where it’s going in the future. There was some interesting information offered. Some of the key points he spoke about:

1. CPU core technology. One of the items on VMware’s roadmap is the ability to power down unused cores to save kWh.

2. CPU VT technology. As the next generation of VT technologie comes out more performance will be available.

3. RAM Virualization. AMD and Intel have announced memory Virtualization which will make transparent page sharing much faster with less overhead.

4. Paravirtualization. Paravirtualization can provide higher performance but at a compatibility cost.

5. I/O Virtualization. Passthrough I/O will give the ability to pass I/O directly from a device to a VM. This would provide improved performance, but at a cost of not being able VMotion because we are tied to the hardware. This is something that VMware is working around, maybe using some sort of “hybrid” model.

6. Virtual Appliances. He gave an overview of virtual appliances and the advantage of having these from application vendors.

7. Open Standards. The ability to provide choice to customers, not only in their hypervisor, but in management tools.

8. Partner Collaboration. VMware has a community source program that is a hybrid of open source and closed cource. Community source allows partners access to the source code.

9. vmdev.net VMWare has also started vmdev.net, to stimulate more development and collaboration. Commercial companies and academic researchers work on projects spanning a number of technologies and products, including ESX Server and VMware Workstation, and have a direct influence on VMware’s future technology directions.

Technorati Tags: vmware, tsx, vmware tsx

Sorry I haven’t posted in the last week.  Last week was pretty busy, and this week I’m at VMware TSX in Las Vegas.