The VMware’s annual conference, the VMworld, will take place at the end of August in San Francisco and while its agenda includes many interesting sessions for many different kind of virtualization professionals, in July virtualization.info published a short list of sessions recommended for everybody. It turns out that VMware recorded a video teaser for some of them, and one includes a hint about a major networking feature that the company may announce during the show keynotes. The session is  TA8361 – Future Direction of Networking Virtualization , performed by Howie Xu , Director of R&D at VMware. Xu is at the company since June 2002 and has been in charge of the Distribute Virtual Network (vDS) component of vSphere architecture, of the integration with the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch, and of the Network I/O Control feature  introduced in vSphere 4.1 .  He’s also one of the people behind several VMware’s acquisitions, including the B-hive one ( May 2008 ) and the Blue Lane Technologies one ( October 2008 ). Xu is directly responsible for the VMware’s vision and company-wide strategy about networking and I/O virtualization, so what he says in his video is definitively reliable. According with Xu, VMware wants a “more transparent, consumable, deployable, manageable and billable” virtual network, which clearly addresses many needs of cloud computing. Xu specifically says that the company will announce an open, extensible networking virtual chassis platform and a networking OS , which he calls a “network hypervisor”. He also added that VMware and its partners will announce a number of services built on top of this platform: networking security, load balancing, application acceleration, IP address management, performance management, etc. This may translate in a new API that mimics the approach already used with VMSafe or with the vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI). Or maybe this is something bigger. A number of people reported that the thing may be called vFabric , since the term appears in the whiteboard in the video. While this is entirely possible, it’s also unlikely: vFabric is trademark introduced by QLogic in May to call its virtual InfiniBand fabrics technology. So either VMware acquired QLogic, or QLogic is one of the launch partners, or vFabric is there for other reasons. Or VMware is going to have a litigation over the name usage soon. Click here to view the embedded video. Thanks to Storage CH Blog for the news. Labels: VMware

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Believe or not, the first blade system in the history of Cisco, the Unified Computing System (UCS), was launched more than one year ago . Since March 2009, Cisco managed to enter a number of data centers, also thanks to the tight relationship with VMware and EMC . In May The Register reported a sequential revenue growth last

Just a couple of weeks ago virtualization.info announced that Cisco selected Rent-A-Lab (RAL) to host all Unified Computing System (UCS) road shows and bootcamps arranged in Europe for this year. But there’s much more happening at our busy on-demand data center in Zurich. Today we are happy to announce that NetApp joined the list of prestigious sponsors that are powering RAL. Thanks to NetApp, the infrastructure now features two FAS3140 arrays, each with four 4GB FCP ports, six 1GB NICs, one dual-CNA for FCoE and 10GB Ethernet, and one Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) II 256GB. The PAM II (aka Flash Cache) is an array controller resident, intelligent 3/4 length PCIe card with onboard SDRAM that is used as a read cache and is integrated with DataONTAP via FlexScale which is software that provides various tuning options and modes of operation. It’s a especially desirable component in VDI environments and we can’t wait to try it with the virtualization platforms we have here. The two FAS3140 arrays come each with a grand total of 24 300GB SAS 15K RPM drives and a boatload of software: ASIS, CIFS, Cluster, FCP, Flex Clone, iSCSI, Multistore, NearStore Option, NFS, pammii, snapdrive_windows, snapmanager_hyperv, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, SnapVault ONTAP Primary, SnapVault ONTAP Secondary, V-Series (Gateway). On the side you can see a picture of the new gear already in place in the virtualization.info Rent-a-Lab racks.

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July 7, 2010 I’ll be at the VirtualDays 2010 conference in Florence, Italy, hosted by In20, performing the opening keynote about the state of the industry and the emerging trends. During the morning the three major virtualization players will present their solutions. It will be a typical VMware vs Microsoft+Citrix face-to-face on server and desktop virtualization. During the afternoon there will be sessions from IHVs and ISVs that offer key products complementary to virtualization: IBM, EMC, Cisco, Pllar Data Systems, CommVault, Axel and Fujitsu. Italy doesn’t host many independent events about virtualization so this is a welcome opportunity for customers to compare the message and the offerings. If you plan to attend feel free to stop by after the presentation. Alessandro

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When Citrix announced the launch of the Open Virtual Switch project in May 2009 it raised a lot of attention. The early bits of Open vSwitch appeared online in August 2009 , along with a technology roadmap that clears the intention to compete against the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture and the Cisco Nexus 1000V software switch. It took almost an entire year to reach version 1.0 . Meanwhile Open vSwitch became a key component of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) networking infrastructure, another project supported by Citrix. Customers are waiting to see a commercial implementation of the Open vSwitch and how Citrix will integrate it in XenServer and XenDesktop. Maybe the time has come: Citrix briefly announced that a new beta cycle for its hypervisor is about to begin and that the new build will feature a distributed virtual switching technology. Citrix opted to keep this beta private but it’s not shy to share a few details about the new feature: Greater visibility into the networking layer of the XS virtualization platform via standard tools and processes, including RSPAN and NetFlow. Distributed, fine grained networking configuration and control policies, including ACLs and QoS, that apply across VM migrations. The beta is planned to take place from July 12 to August 6, so it’s likely that Citrix plans to release a new version of XenServer (5.7? 6.0?) in time for the VMware VMworld 2010 conference (August 30 – September 2).

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Kevin Goodman , Senior Systems Engineer at Odyssey Logistics , is running an interesting technical blog titled Colocation to Virtualization where he’s reporting about the experience with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform, EMC storage and VMware vSphere 4.0. He recently shared some interesting numbers about the consolidation ratio he’s achieving with such system (a UCS B200-M1): …There are a total of 7 blades in our VMware environment, but only 5 of those are dedicated to our main HA/DRS cluster. That gives us ~240 gigs of RAM for the main cluster. Currently, I am seeing a VM consolidation ratio of about 24 VMs (virtual machines) per B200-M1 blade. The limitation here is definitely the RAM. The CPU itself is less than 25% utilized per blade… Even more interesting, Goodman is sharing details about the VMs density he scored when the virtual machines are running Oracle Database workloads: The server itself is running mainly Oracle database VMs.

CA Technologies and Cisco earlier this week announced they are expanding their relationship through collaborative technology integration. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Open Virtual Switch (or Open vSwitch) is the open source answer (supported and sponsored by Citrix) to the Cisco Nexus 1000V and the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture. Citrix announced the project in June 2009, but the early, public lines of code didn’t appear before August . It took almost one year to move from version 0.90.4 to version 1.0, which introduces a number of features: Configuration database with remote management Per VM policing NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing Support for NetFlow, sFlow(R), SPAN, and RSPAN Support for Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking Support for OpenFlow 1.0 Support for Ethernet over GRE tunneling Support for XenServer 5.5 and 5.6 During all this time the product has been largely under the radars. Citrix didn’t even commit for a commercial implementation, even if Open vSwitch is the default networking interconnection in the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP). But after this point Citrix is expected to leverage the product future versions of XenServer 5.x or in version 6.0. Still in the roadmap: Full L3 support (with NAT) More management interfaces (IOS-like CLI, SNMP, NETCONF) 802.1x/RADIUS Support for hardware acceleration (VMDQ, switching chips on SR-IOV NICs) Open vSwitch can be installed on any Linux operating system as a replacement for the default network bridge tools .

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When Cisco announced the first 3rd party virtual switch for VMware ESX, it raised a lot of interest. Not just because the product was (and still is) an interesting attempt to address the limitations of native dvSwitch shipped with vSphere, but also because it was the first time that Cisco didn’t sell a physical box.

Zenoss has announced the beta availability of a new service assurance product that delivers end-to-end monitoring for private and public-clouds deployed on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). With Zenoss Business-to-Blade monitoring for Cisco UCS, enterprises and service providers are now able to quickly and cost-effectively deploy a unified operations console for their UCS-based services. This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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