KVM has officially been released in Linux Kernel 2.6.20 as of Feb 4. The inclusion of KVM in the Linux kernel instead of Xen doesn’t seem to bother Xen project leader Ian Pratt according to http://www.devxnews.com/.

“Xen is a true hypervisor, whereas KVM is a legacy virtualization solution akin to VMware Workstation, VMserver and Microsoft Virtual PC,” Pratt told internetnews.com. “It lacks the benefits of para-virtualization performance enhancements that have been pioneered by Xen and are now being copied by VMware and Microsoft.”

Ian also stated that he isn’t looking for Xen to be included in the Linux kernel anymore stating:

“Putting Xen into Linux doesn’t make sense: hypervisors are different beasts from operating systems, so they share little code.”

Of particular interest are the comments about VMware copying Xen’s para-virtualization techniques. Although I doubt VMware will comment, I’d love to hear what they have to say about that.

You can read the Devx article here.

As my buddy jtroyer pointed out, there is an aspect of the “Salary Graphs” that doesn’t get scene until you view the larger versions. That is the # of jobs with each keyword:

Notice the litle blue bars that I circled and how it’s much lower for XenSource.

If we use another service from http://www.indeed.com/ we can see the trend for new jobs with specific key words. Here’s a comparison of new jobs for VMware, Xen, Xensource, Virtual Iron:

Imitation really is the highest form of flattery. Virtual Iron has recently released their own Virtual Appliance program which they call the “Virtual Appliance Exchange”. This of course is a direct copy of VMware’s Virtual Appliance program, and a direct result of all of the push that VMware has been putting behind the Virtual Appliance concept.

Remember the Virtual Iron blog post titled “First VMware ignores you, then VMware laughs at you, then VMware fights you, then you win”? Maybe that should have been titled “First you copy, then you create FUD, then you copy some more”.

OK, so the idea of a Virtual Appliance is a natural progression to virtualization, but shouldn’t Virtual Iron be creating new concepts? Shouldn’t they be focusing on developing new technologies that VMware hasn’t come up with already? Shouldn’t they be pushing the envelope?

Maybe they are and I’m just not seeing it. Am I wrong?

Virtual Iron - Speak up and tell me I’m wrong!

(Side thought: Shouldn’t VMware have trademarked the term “Virtual Appliance”?)

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.