virtualized worlds: April 2009

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Crisis? What crisis? -- Venceremos la crisis!

Crisis? What Crisis?
1975, A&M records, Supertramp

Crisis
1983, EMI Int'l, Mike Oldfield

Crisis
2009, VMware Inc. @ Q1 earnings call: 12.6% decline in license revenue

Venceremos la crisis!

2008, Alan GarcĂ­a @ APEC economic forum

2009, Citrix Systems, @ Q1 earnings call: 150% YOY growth in XenServer business

Storage Link explained at technical level

Peter Benoit, engineering director for StorageLink and his 57' deep dive video (45mb) with Barry.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Quo vadis?

After a huge marketing campaign, what has been announced today by Paul?

Version 4, tagged cloud OS. Truth is 'internal cloud' it's simply a new name for "Farms" (Citrix calls it "resource pool"). Yet there is no connection to 'external clouds'. -- And those would have to wear a 'VDC-OS'-shirt as well to work with the local 'internal cloud'.

OK, on to performance: There's a claim like '
30 percent increase'.
Well lets take a look at foot note #1: they are comparing quad-core intel and six-core intel. Guess who wins.

The next claim is already softer: 'an estimate increase of 30% for XenApp'. I suppose the same hardware comparison is used for this assessment.

Let's compare quad-core with quad core and compare
Xeon E5405 vs. Xeon E5570 and use a hypervisor where you can actually publish benchmarks without a huge approval process: SQL DBhammer on XenServer 5: '53 percent increase'. Citrix didn't even bother to enable Nested Page Tables (NPT)


Monday, April 20, 2009

xen to the power of two

Oracle surprises with a $7.1bn offer for Sun. The first thought might not be virtualization, but a second should be virtualization. After Citrix XenServer (11%) Sun's Hypervisor (7%) is the second Xen-based Hypervisor in production [NetIQ, Aug 08]. OracleVM will increase the percentage a bit.

What's the result?

VMware (56%) faces strong xen competitors:

- Citrix XenServer, outperforming VI3.5 41% (Tolly) to 100% (IBM/Trost); Sales up 40% in Q4 according the Q4 earnings call

- Oracle/Sun, the most prominent company denying OracleDB support on virtualization platforms except the Xen-based OracleVM; ready to distribute a JeOS-like OracleDB turnkey solution.

- XenCloud, Xen based clouds in production at Amazon, Google et all

Just one more thing


What'll happen to VirtualBox? Ready to be merged with hosted Xen? ;-)








Friday, April 17, 2009

TNG George: The next generation of XenServer

Carl Fischer posted the announcement for beta for the next release of XenServer:

Project George contains several highly-requested new features:

  • Active Directory integration. Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
  • Workload balancing. Guest and host performance metrics are used to create star ratings for individual VM placement and balancing recommendations for resource pools to achieve optimal performance.
  • LVHD. Fast cloning and snapshots are now supported on all SR types through integration of our software VHD stack and LVM-based Storage Repositories (SRs).
  • StorageLink integration. CLI-only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR that adds native standards-based support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion, and NetApp storage arrays over iSCSI and Fibre Channel with automated initiator/fabric/array management.
  • Expanded guest OS support. RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.
  • Enhanced beta problem reporting system. We've deployed an enhanced problem reporting system for use with the George beta. The forums will still be used for discussion but issues with the product can now be reported via a Jira-based ticketing system that supports designating issues as public or private. No more having to FTP your Server Status Reports (aka bug-tools)!

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The return of performance comparisons: 'XenServer vs. VMware'

Tolly Group just released their benchmark findings in the endless performance discussion. This time test methology and findings were approved by VMW, so it's no longer XenServer vs BrandX.

The bottom line: XenServer 5 outperforms VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 by 41%.







[https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/17477/TollyGroup_XenServer_vs_VMware_%20Apr2009.pdf]



Sunday, April 12, 2009

XenConvert 2 with OVF support

Citrix just released a tech preview of XenConvert.

Highlights:
- OVF support
- V2V Integration

Find it at
MyCitrix Downloads -> Citrix XenServer/Essentials -> Betas/Tech Previews

or here