HP has recently published a reference architecture for VDI environments based on Citrix XenDesktop 4, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The 24-pages report describes a platform powered by BladeSystems c7000 blade servers, ProLiant BL460c G6 blades, StorageWorks P4800 G2 SANs and HP Thin Clients. The document includes the bill of materials (BOM) and a performance analysis. Quite interestingly HP used the tool Virtual Sessions Indexer (VSI), developed by the Dutch solution provider Login Consultants and used in the popular independent benchmark Virtual Reality Check (VRC) Project.   The VRC Project has been already validated by Citrix and somehow  recognized by VMware too . According to the benchmark, this system can serve approximately 800 concurrent users using Microsoft Office 2007 and Internet Explorer applications. Labels: Citrix , HP , Microsoft , Papers , VDI

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Finally, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) released the first industry standard benchmark for hardware virtualization and OS virtualization: SPECvirt_sc2010 The standard body is working on this since November 2006 . The benchmark designed to simulate the activity of three typical workloads: a web server, a Java application server and a mail server. To do so it leverages existing SPEC benchmarks, modified to measure performance in a virtualization environment: SPECweb2005, SPECjAppServer2004 and SPECmail2008. SPECvirt_sc2010 adopts the same approach used by the VMware benchmark VMmark, the tiles, to measure scalability: the framework deploys additional tiles until overall throughput reaches a peak and all virtual machines continue to meet required quality of service (QoS) criteria. The web server workload is made by three tiers: a file server, an infrastructure server and of course the web server. They are hosted in two virtual machines (file server and web server are together). The application server workload is made by two tiers: a backed database server and of course the application server. They are hosted in two VMs. The mail server workload is made by just a single tier: the IMAP mail server, which is hosted inside a single VM. A sixth, additional workload called SPECpoll has been created and put into an idle virtual machines. It sends and acknowledges network pings against the idle server in 100% load phase to measure its responsiveness and to all VMs in the 0% load phase (active idle) during power-enabled runs. The benchmark is also able to measure power consumption and power/performance relationship. It’s not available for free: it costs $3,000 with discounts for qualified non-profit and educational institutions. Customers may believe that the availability of this standard finally closes the endless discussions about the value of VMmark, originally introduced more than three years ago , the VMware’s restriction in using it to compare vSphere against other products, and the quality of independent alternatives like the Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) or the Anandtech vApus Mark . Unfortunately, it may not be the case yet. The SPEC virtualization subcommittee that developed it in fact includes the following members and contributors: AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Parallels, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Trigence, Unisys, and VMware. For some reasons anyway, the press announcement issued by the SPEC only includes a subset of the names: AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Red Hat, Unisys and VMware. Microsoft is not there. And Citrix is not even a member of the subcommittee. It’s unclear if the two support this benchmark or not. If they don’t, then that customers will get only some benefits: now will be able to use SPECvirt_sc2010 to compare multiple hypervisors, but until all players will validate the benchmark, the results will always be questionable.

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The 2010 edition of the VMware’s conference VMworld is approaching fast. The company already published the session catalog which, easy to guess, has a strong focus on private cloud computing and the upcoming vCloud Service Director (vCSD, formerly codename Project Redwood). virtualization.info recommends a few sessions: DV7180 – ThinApp : What’s New and Future Vision This session will detail new features and enhancements to the ThinApp product since VMWorld 2009, including the 4.0.3, 4.0.4, and 4.5 releases as well upcomming releases that occur between now and VMWorld 2010. The second half of the session will present part of our vision for the future of application virtualization and demonstrate some demos of possible future technology. MA7140 – vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Patterns This session focuses on the building blocks for a vCloud architecture. Using Design Patterns is fundamental for a successful design and deployment. We will provide a Conceptual Model including the requirements and constraints and conceptually represents what we are trying to produce. The Logical Design shows the relationship of the components. This session uses the experience of the VMware TS Cloud Team for deployments with Enterprise Private Cloud and with Cloud Providers. MA8027 – Provisioning Cloud Computing on Vblock using VMware vCloud Service Director This session focuses on provisioning vApps in cloud environment. Starting with at the hardware layer, provisioning of UCS servers in Vblock architecture, applying server profiles and related policies. Moving up the stack with installing and configuring vSphere, applying host profiles, creating and deploying network/storage policies. Carving out resource, network and storage pools for Cloud computing using VMware vCloud Service Director. Create Service catalogs, apply cost models using Chargeback, deploy vApps in multi-tenant environment. MA8030 – Saving Time with vCenter Orchestrator Starting with a demo of how to use the bulk operations workflow to maximize your investment in vCenter Orchestrator, we will walk through how to modify a few workflows that saves a few minutes of your day. We will also show some of the best practices of writing workflows. MA8092 – Cloud Futures: The Infrastructure Authority To realize the potential of private cloud, infrastructure must be capable of not just dynamically provisioning and optimizing systems, but also not violating any security, regulatory, or organizational policy constraints in the process. In many enterprise environments, dynamic IT consists of several disjointed solutions and oftentimes blind faith that policy, security, or regulatory constraints will not be broken. The bottom line – someone has to be in charge. The infrastructure authority (IA) is the future nerve center of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) operations. Among the many roles the IA possesses are: • Provides a central metadata store • Leverages common data models to request or offer services • Maintains physical, virtual, and policy dependency maps • Ensures security and regulatory compliance • Ensures that service level requirements are met • Stores and enforces organizational policy • Ensures accurate capacity forecasts • Integrates with third party management and orchestration tools to authorize IT operations such as provisioning or relocation before they proceed Typical questions answered by the IA include: • Are security zoning rules checked before live migrating a VM? • Do any policy restrictions prevent VMs from migrating to different data centers or to public cloud infrastructure? This session takes a practical look at the emerging role of the IA, and details how existing management frameworks such as VMware vCenter and industry standards such as OVF can be used in this capacity moving forward. MA8181 – Optimizing Capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ This session will provide recommendations and best practices to optimizing your VMware virtual infrastructure capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ. The session will provide a deep dive into how CapacityIQ analyzes and forecasts capacity utilization, how it identifies unused capacity and how it predicts your future capacity needs. It will explain the key CapacityIQ concepts and methodology as well as help you understand and interpret all the data presented. MA8649 – VMware Server Configuration Manager: Our Foundation for Compliance in the Private Cloud Compliance to regulatory requirements and IT standards is an important issue that drives many IT initiatives including security and threatens to limit cloud adoption. Learn how Server Configuration Manager (SCM) enables customers to ensure compliance and provide visibility and control of their IT infrastructure. SCM helps automate mundane tasks, reduce manual errors and increase application availability. Learn how SCM can help your customers dramatically reduce their operating costs, and experience firsthand this new solution which provides a foundation for compliance in the cloud. (for partners only) PA9444 – VMware Service Provider Cloud Licensing Programs This course will give you an overview of VMware’s licensing and pricing strategies for VMware Service Provider Partners. It will also cover program elements including requirements and key benefits of the VMware Service Provider Program. As cloud computing continues to evolve, VMware is enhancing and clarifying our licensing and pricing models to ensure our Service Provider Partners have the best in class pricing and licensing models along with world class product and programs. PC8051 – Infrastructure Technologies to Long Distance VMotion – What Is “VM Teleportation”? Join this session and learn about infrastructure technologies purpose built for long distance VMotion and Cloud federation. Using existing technologies such as vSphere and active-active virtual storage models, you will discover new innovations to move active VM’s and workloads over distance without disruption. New techniques and best practices such as the conception of “VM teleportation” will be illustrated and discussed. Discussion of VM HA and DRS behavior and best practices with stretched vSphere clusters, including new changes in vSphere. Learn also about upcoming technologies that can help overcome limitations with current technologies including VMotion over geographies, and the support of cloud computing and federation. PC8422 – Introduction to vCloud API We envision the vCloud REST API to become a key technology for managing, provisioning and automation in the vCloud infrastructure. The API is a major part of the vCloud offering and there will be a significant interest from both Service providers, Enterprises and ISV to implement custom solutions on top of the API or to consume/manage cloud services from the vCloud ecosystem. In this presentation we will describe the design and the architecture of the vCloud API, will present the key concepts and idioms of the API, and will deep dive into the user (which is focused on provisioning) and the admin API (which is focused on automating and managing the cloud infrastructure). In addition few major usage scenarios of the vCloud API will be explored. SE7835 – Securing Your Cloud This session will provide an overview of the core security Features in VMware’s new VCloud Services Director Product. We will provide an overview of the architecture, key security features, how a Service Provider or Enterprise can offer a secure IaaS platform to their customers using VMware’s VCloud Services Director features and outline a roadmap for planned new security features in upcoming releases. SP9721 – How to Use Virtual I/O to Provision and Manage Networks and Storage Resources in a Private Cloud Join this session to learn best practices for using virtual I/O to provision network and storage resources within a private cloud. With live demonstrations and practical examples, we will show how virtual I/O lets you assign, provision, and manage network and storage resources based on application and user requirements. You will learn the key elements of virtual I/O and how this technology changes the connectivity landscape to deliver far more connectivity and more bandwidth to servers than is possible with traditional I/O. We will discuss practical tips on how to run more virtual machines per server while delivering a superior, more predictable user experience. Virtual I/O fundamentally re-defines and streamlines resource provisioning. Join Camden Ford — a seasoned storage and networking architect — to learn how to make the most of these capabilities. Create, manage, and even chargeback for new value added services, and get the most from your virtualization deployment. TA8218 – VMware Storage Vision A VMware engineering executive will describe VMware’s multi-year vision for storage. The discussion will cover strategic directions such as: • How VMware sees storage architectures changing to meet the needs of virtualized deployments for SMB, enterprise datacenter, VDI deployments, and service provider clouds • How VMware sees changes in application architectures impacting its products’ interaction with storage over time • VMware’s directions in its own storage product line as well as its strategy for partner engagement and growing the capabilities of the storage hardware and software ecosystem TA8361 – Future Direction of Networking Virtualization Virtual Switch becomes an integral part of today’s data center. What is the next big wave of new technology coming in the cloud era? The speaker will discuss how upcoming new virtual networking technology that can significantly improve data center efficiency, elasticity, QoS, and SLA.

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The open source virtualization platform KVM has been included in the Linux kernel since version 2.6.20 , in February 2007, and slowly made its way into many popular Linux distributions, including Knoppix, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora, and very soon Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES). Despite that, smaller ISVs have been shy so far to build on top of KVM and offer low cost virtual infrastructures that could rival with the only significant player in this space at the moment: Red Hat. Things may be changing in the near future: now that Red Hat is investing in promoting its RHEV virtual infrastructure and there’s a growing awareness around KVM, new platforms may start to appear. The first example is KaOS, a lightweight, open source KVM-based virtual machine monitor developed by Carbon Mountain. KaOS still is in its early stage ( version currently available is 0.61 ), and only features a command-line user interface for the most basic administration tasks, but Carbon Mountain is working on a virtual infrastructure management console called inVrastructure and has made available a SDK. The company is betting on the idea of virtual appliances, and architected KaOS to be a platform for VAs rapid provisioning. In a way that is similar to the concept of the Virtual Appliances Marketplace, originally launched by VMware in 2006 , Carbon Mountain is offering a bunch of pre-configured Linux virtual machines that can be delivered directly on the KaOS platform. Customers can subscribe the service to access them and receive support accordingly. The company is also working on another project, Cloud Integration Fabric, to integrate KaOS with 3rd party public clouds like Amazon EC2 and GoGrid. Carbon Mountain may be just the first one of a series of ISVs that try to capitalize on the ubiquity of KVM and its community-driven development.

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As a few readers may know, Google is fervently working to launch its own operating system. Called Chrome OS and released as an open source project , it uses the Chrome browser as its core engine. Announced in July 2009, Chrome OS is expected to reach version 1.0 within the 2010 holiday season, and to be deployable on x86 and ARM architectures (including upcoming tablet PC devices that will compete with the recently released Apple iPad). The brave ones that want to test the alpha versions of the OS can do that using most hardware virtualization platforms on the market. Parallels even offer support for it . The more we get near the planned release timeframe the more details are shared about how it will work. Fresh information appeared a few days ago about a new feature tentatively dubbed Chromoting . Google briefly mentioned Chromoting in its development mailing list: “We’re adding new capabilities all the time. With this functionality (unofficially named “chromoting”), Chrome OS will not only be great platform for running modern web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser. We’ll have more details to share on chromoting in the coming months.” While many press outlets suggested that Chromoting may be a remote desktop technology, there’s a chance that it’s something completely different, like an application virtualization platform. A few virtualization.info readers in fact may remember that in April 2007 Google acquired a stealth application virtualization startup called GreenBorder . The technology was never rebranded and released to the general public but apparently Google is using it to isolate the many instances of Chrome during web browsing . If true, that means that the GreenBorder engine is already part of Chrome, and that an operating system based on it may leverage the application virtualization layers for additional tasks, like running legacy Windows applications.

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At a point in time between May and June Microsoft has released the first version of a new specification called Application Virtualization (App-V) Volume Format. The 31-pages still-unreleased document , published by Ruben Spruijt of Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) fame, describes in details the file based file-system used by App-V containers, giving enough details to support it in 3rd party commercial and free applications. Microsoft already published another App-V specification dedicated to the file format in February.

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The US startup Liquidware Labs entered the capacity planning market in October 2009 with the first rebranded version of vmSight, the company/product acquired exactly one year ago .

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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This is not exactly a bright moment for Red Hat, which received severe critics from VMware about several aspects of its Enterprise virtualisation (RHEV) platform . While it’s true that this a 1.0 version and it’s then acceptable that it has a number of limitations, it’s still true that Red Hat is supposedly developing this product since at least one year and a half (as soon as it acquired the startup Qumranet ) and that it has to immediately deliver a very competitive product if it wants to play against VMware. And probably to accelerate the process of maturation of RHEV, this week the company announced that Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation Manager (RHEV-M) will become an open source project . Unfortunately this won’t help still for a long time. In a recent online presentation in fact, Red Hat revealed a number of details about its roadmap for RHEV that are all but promising: the upcoming RHEV-M 2.2 will still require Windows Server 2008 to offer RHEV-M high-availability then, customers will have to use Windows clustering services while the product is being ported now in Java so to be used on every platform including Linux, the new Java-Based RHEV-M won’t be ready before another year or so (probably in the form of version 3.0) RHEV-M 2.2 probably won’t support any form of storage live migration On top of that, apparently, Red Hat has no current plans to offer a limited free edition of its KVM-based hypervisor as VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V are. Despite that, and the many limitations above, Red Hat is claiming a significant saving when its virtualisation platform is compared to VMware and Microsoft ones: (quite interestingly, Citrix is not part of the comparison) At the same time Red Hat claims better performance than competitors with several mission critical workloads: Easy to guess, VMware will have something to say about this.

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Today CloudShare announces the availability of FastUpload technology as part of their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. FastUpload includes the secure channel to upload virtual machines from a VMware infrastructure and the virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion process needed to use them to the CloudShare online facility. It seems to have much in common with what the VMware vCloud Service Director (codename Project Redwood) is expected to deliver . CloudShare claims that FastUpload can convert entire VMware data centers in just 15 minutes: the press announcement isn’t clear about this point but it’s quite evident that the indicated time doesn’t include the virtual machines uploading process, which depends on multiple factors. CloudShare also omitted to clarify the security details of the uploading process, a key aspect raising concerns among customers (even if we are not talking about production VMs). The announcement also subtly hints at the involvement of CloudShare in VMForce, the Salesforce hosting facility powered by VMware technology that virtualisation.info detailed last week .

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