virtualized worlds: November 2007

Thursday, November 22, 2007

a question of support

Nov 10 brought the 3rd revision of MSFT support statements for virtual environments.

This part (though commonly unknown) seems unchanged:

For Microsoft Premier-level support customers running non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software from vendors with which Microsoft does not have an established support relationship that covers virtualization solutions, Microsoft will use commercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential issues with Microsoft software running together with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. As part of that investigation, Microsoft may require the issue to be reproduced independently from the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. Where issues are confirmed to be unrelated to the non-Microsoft hardware
virtualization software, Microsoft will support its software in a manner that is consistent with support provided when that software is not running together with non-Microsoft hardware irtualization software.


While this reflects the MSFT/Novell collaboration:
Microsoft will jointly support certain non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software from vendors with which Microsoft has established a support relationship that covers virtualization solutions. This joint support will include coordinating with the vendor to investigate support issues.


[Microsoft Knowledge Base: 944987]

Friday, November 16, 2007

Performance binary translations vs. paravirtualization



Richard McDougall (former DE at Sun, now Chief Performance Architect @VMware) published a detailed article on performance in VMware's corporate blogs.

Interesting to find: "In a recent study, the performance of Oracle 10g R2 using the Swingbench online transaction processing workload on a paravirtualized Linux guest shows a moderate gain of 10% when using paravirtualized CPU interfaces."


Thursday, November 15, 2007

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Previewing next home server virtualization

VMware Server Version 2 (Build 63231)



preliminary notes:

Install:
- linux: easy (after a small complain that Server Version 1 .0x is newer)
- win: IIS is no longer needed, the webUI looks like tomcat/AJAX
- win: drivers not signed (again)

Management:
- now VI3-ish
- 14 MB plugin for Firefox

Misc:
- Virtual hardware version is 6

- File Browser currently only allows default locations. E.g. if ISOs are stored in /iso you're unable to browse to that location (this reminds me of ESX Version 1.x)

- Server takes notice of moved configurations and reacts with a requester: did you copy or move your VM (instead of UUID behaviour earlier)





Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Oracle goes XEN

With Oracle ignoring virtualization for a long time and technology advancing I always considered a dementi of a dementi a question of time. Well folks, here we go, here goes Oracle to XEN. What a success for the XEN project, which was started in 2003.

What a giant step for mankind virtualization. This is the anticipated step towards application stacks and Mendel's Just enough OS. OS vendors time to wake up, now it's you looking for deals with app vendors.

What's next and who, SAP? :-)



Here's a quick glance at the management capabilities (called OVS Oracle Virtualization Suite). Looks ergonomic and intuitive. Let me spend a bit more time with the real thing.

Yet another question remaining: how does Oracle manage to triple performanceefficiency of Xen (Oracle uses Xen 3.1.1 bits)? Parts of it can be explained via the JeOS concept, yet ...