Now that the SPEC has finally released the first industry standard benchmark for hardware and OS virtualization platforms , customers may believe that there’s no more need for the VMmark proprietary framework that VMware released in July 2007 . VMware has a different opinion and last week announced the public beta of VMmark 2.0. While SPECvirt_sc2010 and VMmark 1.x measure the performance of a single virtualization host, VMmark 2.0 has been designed to benchmark a whole virtual data center. This implies measuring complex operations like manual and automated (or DRS-initated) vMotion, Storage vMotion, as well as virtual machines cloning and deployment. On top of that, VMmark 2.0 also features more resource-intensive workloads, including: a multi-tier OLTP workload (DVD Store 2) consisting of a 4-vCPU database VM and three 2-vCPU webserver VMs driving a bursty load profile a multi-tier social networking workload (OLIO) consisting of a 4-vCPU web server and a 2-vCPU database server a mail server workload (Microsoft Exchange2007) consisting of a 4-vCPU mailserver a standby server with just one vCPU For the large majority of customers, benchmarking entire virtual infrastructures may sound completely useless at today. There are even doubts that the market really needs to benchmark a single virtualization host. But going forward, the design of VMmark 2.0 seems a good start to benchmark fully automated Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform, which already seems a concrete need looking at the efforts of companies like CloudHarmony , Compuware and even Web Hosting Talk . Of course, until VMware drops its restrictions on VMmark’s EULA, nobody will be really able to use it. Labels: Benchmarks , VMware

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Surprise, surprise.  Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, may have an issue with the (ab)use of the term “cloud computing” (and frankly it’s very hard to not agree with him) but the rest of his company seems busy preparing to embrace the IT-as-a-service model in a big way. To be fair, Oracle announced cloud-ready products in September 2008 , allowing core products like Database 11g, Fusion Middleware and Enteprise Manager to run inside Amazon EC2. Oracle itself acts as a cloud hosting provider, opening its Platform for SaaS (the one where CRM on Demand and Argus Safety run) to external developers. Anyway the company didn’t touch at all the infrastructure layer so far. The corporate FAQ page about the topic simply suggests to look at the Oracle virtualization offering to those customers that are looking to build a private cloud. But the offering is about to become a lot more articulated. CONTINUE READING… Cross-post from: cloudcomputing.info/en/

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Microsoft just announced an on-premises version of its Azure cloud computing platform that will be available to hosting providers and customers through an appliance (or better: a large number of racks of appliances). Microsoft is still mum about the Azure capability to run as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, and there’s no trace of this feature in the online version of the platform, at the point that there are doubts about the company’s plans to compete against Amazon EC2 as previously announced . But a new confirmation arrives exactly from this new Azure appliance. The just published FAQ page about the product in fact, clearly mentions the IaaS capability: How is Microsoft Windows Azure platform appliance different from running a datacenter with Windows Server, Hyper-V and System Center? The Microsoft Windows Azure platform appliance allows customers and partners to deploy Windows Azure and SQL Azure in their own datacenters. The appliance is a turnkey cloud platform that runs on hundreds to thousands of servers optimized to deliver hosting services and massive scale-out applications, PaaS, SaaS, IaaS or high performance computing . Windows Server, Hyper-V and System Center is a versatile, customizable server platform that allows customers and partners to build and run a dynamic, virtualized infrastructure and private clouds. So, with this move Microsoft is not only going after Amazon, but also after VMware and its upcoming vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly project Redwood), that will be supposedly unveiled in September at the VMworld 2010 conference.

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At the Structure 2010 conference on cloud computing, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, former Amazon executives who led the development of the Amazon EC2 public cloud service, announced that they are launching Nimbula. Nimbula’s business and technology focus is on blending EC2-like scale, agility and efficiency with private infrastructure customization and control. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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Yes, it’s true: virtualization.info already used the “Diane is back” theme in February, when the founder and former CEO of VMware sort of reappeared on the virtualization market as an investor of the startup Nicira . But Nicira still is in stealth mode at this point and the Greene’s role in there will probably be all but operational. She may be more active in another startup that emerges today from the stealth mode: Nimbula (formerly Benguela). Greene will be a board member, advising an interesting team of former Amazon and VMware employees. The company has been founded in 2008 by Chris Pinkham (CEO) and Willem van Biljon . Pinkham is the former Vice President of Engineering at Amazon.com, where he spent five years, and one of the founders of Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). van Biljon was an Amazon Director, leading the EC2 development team, but in his career he founded Mosaic Software and managed it for over 11 years. With these two guys there are Martin Buhr (Vice President of Sales and Business Development), the former Business Development Director for Amazon Web Services (AWS, the home of EC2) in EMEA, Reza Malekzadeh (Vice President of Marketing), the former Senior Director of Marketing at VMware, and Amber Rowland , the former Group Manager of Exec and Global Communications. Malekzadeh left VMware in May 2009 , Rowland left in Q4 2009 . During a briefing with virtualization.info, Pinkham refused to disclose how many other ex-VMware employees are at Nimbula, or how many are moving there, but the impression is that the startup is really looking for the successful team that built what we could call today VMware 1.0 . Nimbula has already secure $5.75M in its first round of investments, led by Sequoia Capital and VMware. The startup has been able to attract talents and interest from the virtualization market leader as its mission is to offer an EC2-like platform for private cloud computing. Its flagship product, Director, is able to deploy a virtual infrastructure on bare metal, and deliver on top of it all those services that are critical in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms: workload management, monitoring, metering & billing, authentication (with support for LDAP and Active Directory), federation. Director is also in charge of controlling the network and storage layers, and it offers APIs that can be accessed by the CLI, web based clients and JSON Rest calls. It is designed to scale well beyond the limits of most virtual infrastructures available today on the market, to connect to public cloud platforms (like EC2, of course) and to support multiple hypervisors. At the moment, anyway, the product only supports Xen and KVM. The company plans to support VMware too but not in its first release. Nimbula Director also has a strong focus on multi-tenancy and security, through what the company calls the authority framework. This includes granular control over who consumes what, enhanced logging for compliance, policy-driven provisioning and topology-independent security rules. The product is currently available in beta for a really small number of selected customers. The company plans to officially launch in H2 2010. Nimbula has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar .

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Second day here in Prague for the Catalyst Conference 2010. Yesterday virtualization.info reported about a subset of the agenda, providing live coverage of three sessions about Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing. Today the focus will shift on server and desktop virtualization, including a promising session about client hypervisors. The first session we are going to cover is titled Server Virtualisation, Mobility, and Shared Physical Infrastructure: New Beginnings , performed by Chris Wolf , Research Director at Gartner. Wolf is on stage. He starts describing the state of the union for the virtualization market: many companies now consider virtual infrastructures as the default platform for all x86 applications, and this platform is the foundation of emerging standard architecture models designed by vendors like VMware, Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft and HP, featuring a deeper integration between servers, storage, networks, security and management. Part of emerging trend is achieving greater density. Wolf mentions the endless debate rack-form-factor servers vs blade systems, and he still recommends 2-way rack servers. Another emerging trend is adopting more than one virtualization platform. Wolf reports that practically all organizations have at least two: a bare-metal one (type-1 VMM) for production virtual machines and a hosted one (type-2 VMM) on many end-users workstations, for development, testing, etc. Wolf also reports that customers usually run separate server and desktop business units, choosing VMware or Hyper-V for server consolidation and XenServer with XenApp for client consolidation (aka VDI), while non-critical workloads are served by free products from all vendors. The adoption of multiple virtualization platforms implies working with more tools and images, in an environment where portability is complex. Of course the benefit of this is that the lock-in is reduced. On the security front, there’s a disconnection between security and operations. Some solutions are emerging but they aren’t ready to offer truly secure multi-tenant environments. On top of that we don’t have any standard security model. On the networking front, layer 2 switches are being converted into virtual switches (Cisco is leading the effort with the Nexus 1000V and the Open vSwitch project, supported by Citrix, is following) and other network appliances are following too. This may translate in a revenue shrink for networking vendors. The effort to extend existing virtual infrastructure to become IaaS private cloud infrastructures is good on paper but it’s extremely difficult. Wolf predicts that it will take up to 5 years to reach an acceptable maturity level.

This week virtualization.info is in Prague, Czech Republic, to follow and report about the Burton Group (a Gartner independent subsidiary) Catalyst Conference 2010 Europe. The event features a specific

Certeon, provider of virtualized WAN optimization and application acceleration, today announced that nScaled, a leading provider of cloud computing services, is joining Certeon’s global Partner Program as a provider of Certeon aCelera virtual appliance software solutions. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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In March Dell greatly boosted the popularity of the open source management console for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform based on KVM: Eucalyptus. The product, part of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) Linux distribution maintained by Canonical, has been included in the OEM’s PowerEdge C Servers. Now Eucalyptus Systems, the company that maintains the console, is leveraging the exposure window and releases the second version of the product, available in open source and commercial editions. The major new feature is the support for Windows guest operating systems (2003, 2008 and 7) along with new accounting and user group management capabilities. All features that are only available in the Enterprise Edition of Eucalyptus. The Enterprise and Open Source editions have other major differences, like the support for VMware ESX or the direct access to SAN management:

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While VMware continues to morph its corporate mission by acquiring more companies in the SaaS and PaaS cloud computing markets and continues to change its leadership team , its stock performance continues to improve. This is what happened in the last two years, starting mid June 2008, just two weeks before Paul Maritz replaced Diane Greene as CEO of the company and VMware started to expand in completely new markets: EMC continues to own about 80% of the company and from time to time buys additional shares to keep its control at that level. It seems the case for the last investment: EMC bought 90,000 VMW shares, equal to $6.2M, as reported by TheStreet . In April EMC bought 160,000 VMW shares , equal to $9.1M.

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