PC blade manufacturer ClearCube has become the first non-server vendor to OEM VMware’s ESX hypervisor, which it will sell to customers implementing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

As indicated in an article this April, ClearCube will sell ESX on a per user basis, rather than per host. This makes it cost-effective to run fewer virtual desktop sessions per blade, explained Tom Josefy, ClearCube director of product management. With this arrangement, IT managers can “guarantee a great end user experience but don’t need to have 30+ users per server to amortize the cost of ESX,” he said.

Josefy said ClearCube expects customers to be able to run up to about 12 VDI sessions on one of its R2200 PC blades, for a list of about $250 per seat including support. “At higher numbers it’s at least a 50% reduction in cost per seat,” he said.

Josefy also weighed in on Microsoft licensing for virtual desktops. Thus far, two licensing models have emerged. With Windows XP, the EULA requires each user to have a “unique set of bits” in the form of a full packaged product, he said. Microsoft’s Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) model, on the other hand, charges “per access device, per year” and is only available to Microsoft Software Assurance customers, typically large enterprises.

Small companies, Josefy said, “will like the Windows XP full packaged product,” even though “they do have to worry about when XP goes end of life.” Large companies, on the other hand, “are looking at the [VECD] program because it’s simple [for them,]” he said.

Of course, VECD requires that they move to Vista, which in ClearCube’s testing, has been shown to consume more resources. How much more? Josefy couldn’t say yet. “I don’t know it it’s a 10% penalty, a 20% penalty, or what.”

“Who’s using Microsoft Virtual Server or any Microsoft platform for virtualization?” That question has been asked in at least one session of the many conferences I’ve covered this year, and every time one lone user has raised his hand. I’ve talked to those users, and every one only uses Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 for a few virtual machines.

By contrast, almost every hand goes up when asked, “Who’s using VMware?” The others usually say they’re trying out Xen variants.

Rather than making me play “find the user in the haystack,” I asked SearchServerVirtualization.com’s readers — all IT professionals — to write to me about their Virtual Server experiences.

As Andrew Dugdell noted on his blog, I offered a $5 coffee card to respondents.

About a dozen IT managers responded. For the most part, IT managers are running Microsoft Virtual Server in a limited way, just in a few VMs. Two consultants had clients using VS in production. 

Most are using VS for testing and evaluation of products and not in production. Other than that, some interesting uses for Virtual Server were cited, including using virtualization and VS to run old 32-bit operating systms and applications on 64-bit hardware; providing an environment for quicker, less hardware-bound disaster recovery; using VS to run Linux-based spam filters.

Some had tried VS and turned away from it. One said that “Microsoft is woefully out of touch in not providing USB support for their virtual technology. VMWare Workstation…provides all the connectors and hookups I need.” Another said that getting support from Microsoft is a “chore”. Also, he said, the Virtual Server Web interface didn’t work well, Microsoft didnt’ make release 2 of VS a free update “as they had promised” and it ran slower than VMware GSX Server.

We’ll be posting more responses in the comments for this post. I’d also like to hear more Virtual Server stories, either in comments below or via email at jstafford@techtarget.com. Sorry, folks, the coffee cards have all been taken.

Looking for more about Virtual Server’s pros and Cons? I ran into an interesting conversation on Andrew Connell’s blog, where readers responded to his plea for their experiences with VMware versus Microsoft virtualization products.

Ok, if you got that joke, you either are or were a long-haired hessian from the 80’s, just like I was. First off - I’m sorry I’ve been silent for so long. I’m buying a house, my wife and I are expecting again, and I’m hiring staff as well as kicking off LOTS of real projects at work. Anyway, with that, allow me to start the blogging again!

I just came back from the Intel Premier IT Professionals session in NYC, and while it was geared largely on the desktop space (apparently the Fall event will focus more on Servers), they spent some time covering virtualization and the new hardware coming out to support virtualization. The agenda covered Intel’s VT extensions that help improve system virtualization performance, and is such a key component of Virtual Iron’s and other Xen-based products. Without this (or AMD’s equivalent), there could be no way of making Microsoft operating systems run on Xen hypervisors. Intel also covered my grrr-item of the year - Windows Vista’s virtualization-friendly license that is friendly only for the Enterprise Edition, but I’ll grrr on that elsewhere. My favorite item of this year’s new hardware - Turbo Memory.

For those unfamiliar with Turbo Memory, it’s best described as this - picture a flash (NAND) drive that sits between your regular hard drive(s) and your CPU/Motherboard/RAM. There it acts as a cache for frequently used data (kind of like a CPU’s cache) and helps offload read/write to your hard disks, thereboy mitigating one of the last real bottlenecks in the architecture of modern PC-based systems. From my understanding, TM is tied to Vista’s ReadyDrive system for full functionality, but that will only last for so long before the concept moves into competitive production and other vendors figure out how to detach the TM concept from Vista and make it as invisible as normal hard disk cache. It hasn’t yet hit the server chips, but is expected to by this time next year. From a server virtualization point-of-view, this is important since disk I/O is one of the biggest problems with getting a large physical-to-virtual machine ratio. As each virtual machine is accessed, it calls for disk access to it’s virtual disks, as these requests go to the hardware via the hypervisor and/or host OS, they queue up, slowing down performance. The Turbo Memory concept is one that can be applied to help mitigate this problem. As it stands, I may just get a Vista Desktop with dual disks and Turbo Memory, load it up w/ 4GB RAM, and throw in a huge number of VMs via VMware Server and then via Virtual PC. Throw in some load simulation scripts, perfmon logging and a little elbow grease, and I might have some interesting numbers to show against an entry-level server running W2K3 and similar hardware. The test won’t be worth much on the books, since Vista’s got client-related limitation that make it an inefficient platform (10 connections, anyone?) for hosting virtual machines, but for the fun of it and for the raw numbers that show what Turbo Memory can do, it’ll be worthwhile.

While there I also met the Regional Director for Virtual Iron, who I’m going to be following up with to see about getting my Virtual Iron demo rolling.

Going back to my “poker-based” review system, I give turbo memory’s concept a solid 9 pokers.

I just returned from Microsoft’s WinHEC conference in Los Angeles, where I traveled in hopes of getting some juicy virtualization news. Alas, Microsoft dropped its virtualization bombshell last week – that it will eliminate key features from the Windows Server Virtualization beta that will ship with Longhorn — so no news was to be had, per se.

But even if Microsoft doesn’t have much to show in the way of shipping, competitive hypervisor, one thing I came away with is that the company is clearly paying extremely close attention to virtualization, and has its best minds on the job.

Speaking in a session called Virtualization Technology Directions, Mike Neil, Microsoft general manager in the Windows Server Group, said virtualization stands to be one of the key “scale-up” apps to run on a next generation of servers featuring multi-core processors, and thanks to 64-bit operating systems, terabytes of memory.

One positive aspect of being late to market with Viridian is that Microsoft can develop it to take advantage of hardware virtualization assist technologies going in to chips — CPU virtualization in Intel-VT and AMD-V, but also new features like MMU, DMA remapping, interrupt handling and I/O virtualization. “The software layer for virtualization doesn’t go away, but we do see the hardware taking on some capabilities that will make the virtualization layer thinner — and hopefully more robust as well,” Neil said.

Neil, as a former employee at Connectrix, the first virtualization company Microsoft acquired, recalled how “we didn’t have any hardware assist, and spent a lot of our time working around the limitations of x86 that made it very difficult to virtualize.” VMware, I’m sure, was in the same boat.

Taking advantage of hardware assist capabilities is what Microsoft calls “enlightenment,” which Neil further described as “an intimate arrangement between the kernel and the hypervisor.” But don’t think Microsoft wants to invite everyone in to this cozy party. “We’re not trying to drive this as a standard,” Neil said. Other companies, notably VMware, are espousing paravirt-ops, but not Microsoft.

That’s not to say that hardware assist solves everything — it doesn’t, not by a long shot. Some of the challenges Neil called out include the shift to network storage, increased data rates and ever-expanding storage requirements. When it comes to memory and I/O bandwidth, “there are changes that are going to need to occur,” Neil said. Today, “the straw that we’re sipping the data through is too thin.”

Another area of concern Neil cited is security. “It’s unfortunate that we’re in a situation where malicious software is a business. Hackers aren’t doing this because they are pranksters or its fun, but because they make money off it.” It stands to reason, therefore, that “the hypervisor, as the lowest level piece of software on a system,” is a place where people are going to look to compromise a system. “If I can get at the hypervisor, I can get at all the VMs,” Neil said. Furthermore, today, virtual machines do not know if they’ve been “hyperjacked,” he said; “understanding the layer of software beneath [the VM] will become more and more important.”

On May 31, 2006, University of Texas-Austin IT systems analyst Andrew Kutz made a prediction: People will soon be running Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X with no difference in the application space.

“It came true this year with Parallels,” said Kutz (who just joined Burton Group as an analyst) to me recently.

Kutz’s prediction appeared in Virtualization, like string theory, can be saved from its hype, one of his first columns for SearchServerVirtualization.com.

Parallels isn’t the only supporter of Mac OS X virtualization in town. On his blog, Kimbro Staken — CTO of JumpBox Inc. — discussed the other players in this space, saying:

“VirtualBox is a new entry in the virtualization space and is particularly interesting because it has been Open Sourced under the GPL license. This makes the Mac OS X virtualization space a three way race with Parallels, VMWare Fusion and now VirtualBox all having offerings available. Parallels is still the clear leader thanks to its head start and solid Windows integration, but the competition is definitely heating up.”

Kutz scored on this prediction, but I think his call on the outcome of this development is off base. First, let’s look at what he wrote. The column starts out with a bang:

“This article will show that, just as Dr. Edward Witten saved string theory by condensing many efforts and ideas into one elegant theory, Mac OS X is poised to do the same for virtualization by fusing the many implementations of virtualization into one practical and marketable consumer product.”

He doesn’t finish with a whimper:

“Apple is in the best position to become the new leader in a world of consumer virtualization. And they will do so with style, simplicity and elegance.”

Like most Mac enthusiasts, I think Kutz is over-optimistic. I don’t think virtualization, even via an open source product like VirtualBox, will push Apple out of its niches in the consumer market. Some power users — particularly in the graphics, video and music fields — will take advantage of the opportunity to run Mac OS X on commodity hardware; but mainstream users aren’t going to bother.

On the business side, corporate graphics departments will like this development, and their IT managers will enjoy the cost savings of not having to buy separate boxes for those folks.

Hey all,

Since people are loving the useful links page Andrew Kutz pointed out in his last blog post, I thought I’d also toss in our own. This page, Fast guide: VMware how-tos includes advice on: how to install VMware on Linux, VMDK conversions, VMotion, how to install VMware on Windows, guest OS performance tips, VCB script additions, using .NET with the VI3 SDK, VMware Player, VMware ACE and more.

Most companies will run virtual machines on a mixture of server hardware types, but figuring out what app to run on each platform can be challenging, according to open source consultant and author Bernard Golden, a presenter at the Red Hat Summit, happening right now in San Diego.

After sharing his opinions on the pros and cons of the three main styles of server virtualization, Golden sounded off on the most-commonly-used hardware platforms for server virtualization. Here’s a summary of his analysis:

Server type: x86 32-bit
Example: Dell PowerEdge
Applications: Client virtualization; test and development environment
Pros: Widely available; inexpensive; IT skills widely available
Cons: Memory limitation; poor virtualization scalability
Golden says: “Repurposed machines save money in the short term, but they don’t scale very well. You need more robust memory, in particular.”

Server type: x86 64-bit
Example: HP BladeSystem
Applications: Client virtualization; midrange-to-large server virtualization
Pros: Powerful; similar skills to x86 32-bit; larger memory possible
Cons: May be limited in scalability depending upon machine design
Golden says: “64-bit blades are very powerful and offer high density, but they do pose power and cooling challenges.”

Server type: x86 64-bit specialized hardware
Examples: Sun SunFire; IBM System X
Applications: Large server virtualization deployments
Pros: Designed for high-performance scalability; large memory support
Cons: New hardware type for operations personnel; can be costly
Golden says: “This class of server offers the optimal virtualization platform for large-scale virtualization deployments, but their prices may be prohibitive for most organizations. You also have to figure in the cost of training your IT staff into the equation.”

Got questions about servers for virtualization? Disagree with Bernard’s assessments or have something to add? Bernard is a resident expert on SearchServerVirtualization.com and is available to respond to you. Please comment below or write to me at jstafford@techtarget.com.  

Currently, there are three main styles of server virtualization, and each has its benefits and drawbacks, according to open source consultant and author Bernard Golden, a presenter at the Red Hat Summit, happening right now in San Diego.

His lowdown on the three ways to virtualize provides a handy guide to the options today. Following his list, I offer some links to definitions, how-tos, tips and news about each method.

By the way, besides being a resident expert on SearchServerVirtualization.com and SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Golden is president of Navica Inc., an open source consulting firm, and author of the new book, “Virtualization for Dummies”. Check out his views on server hardware for virtualization in this post.

Here are the top three ways to virtualize:

Virtualization style: Operating system (OS) “container” emulation
Examples: Solaris Containers; SWsoft
Pros: Efficient; does not require additional software
Cons: Isolation; dependent upon OS; limits version choice within guest OS types

Virtualization style: Hardware emulation
Examples: VMware Server; Microsoft Virtual Server
Pros: Relatively easy to install and use; true isolation of OS instances
Cons: Less efficient than paravirtualization

Virtualization style: Paravirtualization
Examples: Xen, VMware ESX, Microsoft Longhorn virtualization
Pros: High herformance; true Isolation of OS instances
Cons: Extra software layer; complex to install and administer

Don’t expect these ways and means to remain fixed in time. In five years, all operating systems will be virtualized, simplifying every aspect of server virtualization from planning to upgrades, Golden predicts. Even better, built-in operating system virtualization will make it very difficult for application software vendors to respond to every helpdesk call by blaming the VM.

For more information on the three top ways deploy server virtualization, check out these resources:

For an overview, read Alessandro Perilli’s analysis of virtualization vendor strategies.

Here’s some info on OS container emulation:
IBM DB2 runs on SWsoft Virtuozzo virtualization; Virtuozzo sidesteps Windows Server costs; Sun boots Unix partitioning on Solaris; and Sun commits to Xen.

Get the scoop on hardware emulation: VMware Server on Linux: Installation through management; Optimizing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005; and emulation defined.

For more on paravirtualization, go to: Paravirtualization with Xen; Xen defined; How-to: VMware ESX, Linux virtual machines and read-only file systems; and Virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Which style of virtualization do you use? What questions would you like to ask our resident expert, Bernard Golden, about server virtualization strategies? Tell all by commenting on this post or writing to me at jstafford@techtarget.com.

In this quick Q&A, analyst and SearchServerVirtualization.com blade server columnist Barb Goldworm offers her views on the news from vendors and users at last week’s Server Blade Summit, which she chaired.

 SSV: How big a deterrent to buying blade servers is power and cooling, based on your observations at the Summit? What cool things are being done about it?

Goldworm: Power and cooling and space are issues for most users, even in trying to expand their rack-n-stacks. Many of them were there because they know they have to do SOMETHING, because they can’t go on like they are. Often there is a list of easy (and not expensive) steps which can be taken, before going to more drastic measures (like liquid cooling). Planning help is available from folks like Eaton and APC, as well as HP and IBM, and others. Advances in hardware and software are continuing to come, with smarter power management, shutting down unneeded processors based on utilization, etc. Processing power per watt is continuing to improve.

SSV: Were virtual desktops — via appliance virtualization, VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) and other models — hotter than you thought, in terms of interest?

We expected virtual desktops to be a hot topic and it was. As people get more comfortable with server virtualization, and start looking at Vista on desktops, virtualization for the desktop and applications are becoming a serious topic. I view this area as a continuum, with different approaches offering benefits for different use cases (from VDI to Citrix to the new IBM workstation blade).  I think we’re hitting the tip of the iceberg here.

It’s hot and users are struggling to understand how it all fits together.

SSV: Looking back at the Summit, what are your overall impressions about the state of blades and virtualization after the Summit?

Goldworm: People have been hearing more about blades for the past year or two, often with a lot of warnings. Many came to the summit looking to get a better understanding of the benefits and the “gotcha’s” and were pleasantly surprised with the progress made in the past year, particularly relative to virtualization. Many of the customers we spoke with were very excited about the benefits that blades and virtualization could bring them, and many seemed to be hearing up-to-date information for the first time (including from their own vendors like IBM, HP and VMware).

As users and channel partners are getting more educated, we will see more and more of the marriage between blades and virtualization.

A nice forums fellow felt like posting a whole bunch o’links to the VMware forums.  Very nice.  Go check it out and clicky.   http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=81191