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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This week the CEOs of both VMware and Red Hat offered very interesting comments on cloud computing that the mainstream press has republished. First, Paul Maritz, VMware’s CEO, said that customers are now ready to invest in cloud computing after months of putting off the decision due to the economic downturn: There was a qualitative change in our customer base in the last 18 months…Now, customers really want to go do this. True or not, one thing is sure. Maritz has all interest in saying so since VMware is about to release its vCloud Service Director (vCSD) in mere two months . James Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, did even better by saying that clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins: The industry has to get in front of the cloud wave and make sure this next generation infrastructure is defined in a way that’s friendly to customers, rather than to IT vendors. … Our customers can run the workload in their data center or migrate it to multiple cloud providers… and we’ll support you on it and your ISVs will support you on it. Whitehurst has all interest in saying so since Red Hat is working on a commercial implementation of the open source Deltacloud project , a meta-API that allows to interoperate with different cloud computing platforms.

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virtualization.info

Citrix launches today the public beta of XenServer 5.6, which is released as open source since February, and Essentials for XenServer 5.6. The list of new features include: Dynamic Memory Control (DMC) This feature can increase the number of VMs per host by permitting the memory utilization of existing VMs to be compressed so that additional VMs can boot on the host.

When Red Hat announced its decision to switch virtualization technology, moving from Xen to KVM, in June 2008, it generated a lot of buzz. It was a dangerous move, considering that the platform was pretty new, that its creator and maintainer was a young startup, Qumranet, and that no ISV was actually supporting its applications inside it. On the other side KVM was integrated in the Linux kernel after just six months of development , and Red Hat eventually acquired Qumranet to get the knowledge, the people and the influence to return the most on its risky investment. Nobody followed Red Hat: Citrix, Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun and of course its primary competitor Novell continued to work on Xen. Fast forward to late 2009: Red Hat is finally ready to unveil its commercial implementation of KVM, introducing Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 , Enterprise virtualisation Hypervisor (REVH) and virtualisation Manager for Servers (REVMS)

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The virtual machines per core (VMs / core) ratio is a measurement unit that virtualisation vendors use with extreme prudence to provide a rough idea of the server consolidation level that can be achieved on their hypervisors. This ratio can be greatly influenced by several factors. The most important one is the kind of application workload that will run inside guest operating systems. Depending on this element alone, some customers may end up having as low as 2:1 ratios while others may experience much higher values, so the best answer to any question around this topic is “it depends”. To be honest, VMware is the only vendor that publicly disclose this number, while all its competitors, including Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle and Parallels, never exposed information about it so far.