At the end of July VMware published an interesting benchmark about its new vSphere 4.1 platform: over 171,000 concurrent users for a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environment hosted by a single physical server. The virtualization host was a Dell PowerEdge R710 2U rack server, powered by two Intel Quad-Core Xeon X5570 CPUs and 96GB RAM. The SAN was an EMC CX3-40 SAN with two storage processors and 60 146GB hard drives (15K RPM). vSphere 4.1 hosted five virtual machines: three Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition R2 IIS web servers, a SQL Server 2008 SP1 and SharePoint Server 2007 SP2. The SQL Server VM was configured with 2 vCPUs and 16GB vRAM, the other VMs with 2 vCPUs and 4GB vRAM. The workload, a mix of 80% read, 10% search, and 10% modify transactions, was generated by Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Agent. Labels: Benchmarks , Microsoft , VMware

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Former VMware and Sun Microsystems executive Dane C. Smith joins Hillsboro-based ClearEdge Power as senior vice president of sales, marketing and business development. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has released SPECvirt_sc2010, the first vendor-neutral benchmark to measure the performance of datacenter servers used for virtualized server consolidation. The new benchmark also includes options for measuring power consumption and power/performance relationships. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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The announced Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, which will introduce Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V and the RemoteFX technology ( acquired from Calista in January 2008), is expected to be released within the end of this year by Microsoft. Its official beta program started on June 21 and the first build already escaped the Microsoft Connect facility, probably hitting the illegal software distribution channels within the next 24-48 hours. The documents accompanying the beta 1 are already circulating, and they indeed include confirmation of the two major features mentioned above: Changes specific to Windows Server 2008 R2 Dynamic Memory Constraints on the allocation of physical memory represents one of the greatest challenges organizations face as they adopt new virtualization technology and consolidate their infrastructure. With Dynamic Memory, an enhancement to Hyper-V™ introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, organizations can now make the most efficient use of available physical memory, allowing them to realize the greatest possible potential from their virtualization resources. Dynamic Memory allows for memory on a host machine to be pooled and dynamically distributed to virtual machines as necessary. Memory is dynamically added or removed based on current workloads, and is done so without service interruption. Virtual machines running a wide variety of operating systems can use Dynamic Memory; for a complete list, see the “Dynamic Memory Evaluation Guide” at [removed URL] . The guide also discusses Dynamic Memory settings and usage in detail. Microsoft RemoteFX Businesses are increasingly looking to leverage the efficiency and cost savings that can come from a virtualized desktop infrastructure. With the addition of Microsoft RemoteFX in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, a new set of remote user experience capabilities that enable a media-rich user environment for virtual desktops, session-based desktops and remote applications is introduced. Harnessing the power of virtualized graphics resources, RemoteFX can be deployed to a range of thick and thin client devices, enabling cost-effective, local-like access to graphics-intensive applications and a broad array of end user peripherals, improving productivity of remote users. RemoteFX can function independently from specific graphics stacks and supports any screen content, including today’s most advanced applications and rich content (including Silverlight and Adobe Flash), ensuring that end users maintain a rich, local-like desktop experience even in a virtualized thin-client environment. RemoteFX also adds mainstream USB device support to virtual desktop computing, including support for USB drives, cameras and PDAs connected to the client device. RemoteFX also provides a platform for hardware and software partners to enhance RemoteFX capabilities in a variety of possible host, client and network configurations. To use RemoteFX, the virtualization server must be running Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1, the virtual machine must be running Windows 7 Enterprise with SP1 or Windows 7 Ultimate with SP1, and the remote client computer must be running either Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 or Windows 7 with SP1. To connect to the virtual machine, the remote client computer requires an updated version of Remote Desktop Services (included in the service pack for all editions of Windows 7).

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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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Exactly one year ago virtualization.info covered the departure of a notable number of PlateSpin executives from Novell . There’s no way to know how many members of PlateSpin are still at Novell after the acquisition, but apparently the departures continue: Ari Glaizel , co-founder of PlateSpin and main develop of the mighty PowerConvert, has been the Product Manager of PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect for almost two years and a half at Novell. He just left to join NexJ Systems as Senior Product Manager. Peter Dyer has been Product Manager of PlateSpin Recon for almost one year and a half in Novell. He left in January to join Veeam as Systems Engineer. One of the original PlateSpin executives still at Novell is John Stetic , currently Director of Product Management at Novell.

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Last week, during its Synergy 2010 conference ( see virtualization.info coverage ), Citrix announced the availability of XenServer 5.6. This is the first update since Citrix decided to release XenServer as a free and open source hypervisor in February 2010, and with it Citrix completely changed the naming convention for the product. The stand-alone product called Essentials for XenServer doesn’t exist anymore: the enterprise management capabilities that it offers have been integrated in the XenServer package, and distributed across four different editions: Free (the one fully open source), Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum. In details, the XenServer 5.6 new features are: Dynamic Memory (reported as “Memory optimization in the chart above”) Dynamic Memory, a memory overcommit technology, auto-adjust the memory of running virtual machines, but keeps the memory within a range of pre-defined functioning limits (dynamic minimum and dynamic maximum) as specified by the administrator.  When DMC is enabled, even when hosts are full, XenServer will attempt to reclaim memory (by reducing the memory allocation of running VMs within their defined dynamic ranges). In this way running VMs are squeezed proportionally at the same distance between the dynamic minimum and dynamic maximum for all VMs on the host. So, while DMC is on and the host’s memory is plentiful, all running VMs will receive their Dynamic Maximum Memory level. When DMC is on and the host’s memory is scarce, all running VMs will receive their Dynamic Minimum Memory level. Support for guest operating systems is limited . Automated Workload Balancing Workload balancing (WLB) offers the ability to reduce power consumption by consolidating workloads on the smallest number of hosts and powering off unused hosts.  WLB configuration includes the option to exclude specific hosts from WLB algorithms. Host Power Management Power Management features include support for wake-on-LAN and vendor-specific implementations from HP, Dell, and others. Role-based Administration Administrative users can be assigned one of several roles, which govern the actions they are able to complete from XenCenter and the command-line interface (CLI). StorageLink Site Recovery Enhanced integration with storage-level replication enables recovery of an entire virtual infrastructure at a secondary disaster recovery site. Performance Alerting and Reporting Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS/Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 Support for up to 64 logical processors, 256 GB RAM, and 16 NICs per host Support for OVF import/export in XenCenter Essentials still exists but just for Microsoft Hyper-V. XenServer 5.6 will be available for download starting May 28.

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Yesterday, during its Synergy 2010 conference in San Francisco ( see virtualisation.info coverage ), Citrix announced the availability of XenClient: the free client hypervisor formerly known as project Independence. As published yesterday, the XenClient build released yesterday is Release Candidate. A lot has been said about the huge delay that both Citrix and VMware accumulated to launch their client hypervisors, and the reasons behind it. Despite that, Citrix managed to release a pretty stable version of the platform before VMware could do the same with it Client virtualisation Platform (CVP), and managed to support nine average laptops ( three from HP, three from Lenovo and five from Dell ). After the keynote, virtualisation.info sit with Peter Blum , Director Product Management and Marketing for this new platform, who detailed a lot of aspects never published before on XenClient. The first and most important information to know about XenClient is that it doesn’t require Intel vPro . A lot has been said about this topic too, and both Citrix and VMware have been criticized for the choice to have vPro as a mandatory requirement to run their client hypervisors, when much smaller competitors like Virtual Computer and Neocleus don’t need it. Well, at least for XenClient, Intel vPro is highly recommended but not a mandatory requirement. At today vPro is an umbrella for multiple Intel technology: VT-x, VT-d, Active Management Technology (AMT) and Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). In its current form, XenClient only requires VT-x and VT-d. The reason why Citrix is highly recommending to have a laptop certified for all Intel vPro technologies, is that in future XenClient may leverage the other two, like TXT to encrypt virtual desktop images. To guarantee remarkable guest OS performance, Citrix is not just leveraging VT-d. The company is using para-virtualized drivers for the top three Windows guest OSes: XP, Vista and 7. At the moment, there’s no official support for Linux guest OSes, but the company reports that it works. There will be several editions of XenClient. The current one is called Express and integrates the Citrix Receiver and another, new component called Synchronizer, which is needed to remotely provision virtual desktops and security policies on the hypervisor. While Synchronizer takes care of virtual desktop provisioning, there’s not a specific solution to provision the XenClient platform itself on bare metal laptops. Anyway the product features a PXE subsystem and thus it can be used with any third party enterprise distribution product, including the Citrix Provisioning Server. Citrix tentatively expects to release the GA of XenClient in Q3 2010. The product is and will remain free and (mostly) open source. Source code is available already now but, like it happens for XenServer , it doesn’t include some proprietary components, like the user interface to switch from one virtual desktop to another. As already said in our previous articles, XenClient is based on the same virtualisation engine of XenServer, which is based on Xen. At the moment XenClient is built on top of Xen 3.x. The new Xen 4.0 engine will be implemented as soon as it matures a little in versions 4.x. Contrary to what the press reported on the reasons behind such delay (XenClient was originally expected for the end of 2009), the biggest technical challenge is not to support the myriad of laptop configurations on the market.

Like pretty much every other big vendor in the IT space, VMware has many ways to hit competition. A very efficient one is to criticize other vendors though non-corporate blogs. This allows the company to be way less polite than what customers expect, while not keeping full responsibility for the critics if something wrong is said. This approach has additional benefits: it allows customers to read a brutal (brutal, not necessarily brutally honest) review of products that may be hard to evaluate, it obliges competitors to defend their approach clarifying technical details that wouldn’t be revealed otherwise, and eventually it leads to counter-attacks, which expose additional weaknesses on both sides. Over the long term this turns into a futile marketing skirmish (see the multi-year VMware-Citrix one), but at the beginning the information exposed could be really valuable. This is what is going to (hopefully) happen between VMware and Red Hat now that the former completely smashed the new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform, launched in November 2009 . A VMware Senior Engineer, Eric Gray , in fact recently published on his popular, personal blog, a series of articles analyzing multiple aspects of the new RHEV offering. On RHEV Manager availability: RHEV-M is one seriously mission critical component of the RHEV infrastructure, so it is surprising to see that there are no high-availability options for RHEV-M — no clustering or other redundancy support. Even the approach of protecting RHEV-M by deploying it in an HA VM is also impossible — something that works just fine for vCenter Server and even System Center VMM .

Yesterday Dell announced a number of initiatives around cloud computing. One of the is the launch of the PowerEdge C Servers , available today globally. The interesting part of the news is that PowerEdge C machines will be offered with a new technology option : the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) platform.