According to The Register, Oracle is going to kill Virtual Iron fron the end of June 2009. Now, I’m not that surprised, there are a lot of Xen based virtualization products on the market. The only difference between them is the management software. Read more »
Posted: June 20th, 2009 under Random thoughts by Frode.
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I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft Hyper-V which I assume is the hypervisor used in their Azure solution. As illustrated earlier, Hyper-V has its problems, especially with live migration and iSCSI support. But, the Azure have some clever solution on its own. Read more »
Posted: June 19th, 2009 under Cloud computing, Hyper-V, Random thoughts by Frode.
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My interest for virtualization solution includes cloud computing. Now, cloud computing is the new buzzword. Users, system administrators and investors hope that cloud computing will solve all redundancy and administration problems that currently exists. I am currently not that optimistic, especially when I think about all the new problems that cloud computing introduces. Read more »
Posted: June 18th, 2009 under Cloud computing, Random thoughts by Frode.
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Well, it’s been a quiet month. I’m still writing on my project, and I’m searching for a job. In addition, the planning for The Gathering 2009, where I’m the chief information officier, has begun. Read more »
Posted: November 18th, 2008 under Hyper-V, Random thoughts, Readings, VMware by Frode.
Comments: 2
Well, looks like VMware is updating their products again. VMware ESX(i) U3 is available from their site. I have installed it, but did not notice any differences. But hey, I have test lab, let’s be bleeding edge.
VMware: ESX4 beta? :-)))
On the other side, a few experiences the last couple of days: VM’s might get stuck – and there’s no way of killing them on ESXi that I know about, besides rebooting that is. There should be a kill option in the remote CLI!
Another one: suspending one guest, rebooting the host and powering on the guest again does not mean that all the network connections are dropped. My IRC connection stayed up during the reboot and I continued it when the guest was back on-line. Nice!
Posted: November 18th, 2008 under Random thoughts, VMware by Frode.
Comments: none
As I’m currently in the process of writing an academic report on virtualization solutions currently on the market, I have been surfing the web for documentation of quite a few of the products on the market. I have noticed that a number of these solutions are poorly documented. As a general notice, a lot of the solutions lack basic information about limits. For example, I really want to know how many guests I can have on a single server before the hypervisor says “enough” and refuses to power on another guest.
Simply said, there are a number of solutions I wouldn’t have bought today on the basis of their online documentation. This applies to Sun xVM and Parallels. As both Xen and KVM are freely available software, the demand for documentation decreeses, but I think they too should get someone to document their code.
On the other side, VMware have documented their solutions extremely good – and, they have done one thing that I think is critical: all the documentation are available from a single page linked to from the product page. No more browsing of support pages, pages you have to create an user to access and so on. It’s there, available for everyone. And, it is maintained on a regular basis. Kudos!
Just as a side note; Microsoft: Please try to do something similar, your web pages with both microsoft.com, TechNet, MSDN and so are a big mess. Collect all the necessary documentation on one page, please.
Posted: October 14th, 2008 under Random thoughts, Readings by Frode.
Comments: none
Okey, so it’s official, Microsoft Hyper-V is out..
To celebrate, Microsoft held a seminar about both Hyper-V and its management applications. As usual, the number of “we want you to buy this product” words by far exceeded the number of “our technocal solution is cool, but there are a number of improvements we want to include in the next release” sentences. As I am trying to become a good student, I took notes during the whole session (which btw lasted a whole day..).
To recapture some of my previous comments about Hyper-V, please read my previous posts on the subject: 1 & 2.
Comment #1: Just as some news papers already have said; Microsoft are trying to give the impression that they were the one’s who invented virtualization. As I recall, the virtualization techniques and methods first appeared in connection with mainframes in the 70′s and 80′s. The x86 virtualization is mainly a product of VMware after they released their first product and got their first patent in 1998.
Comment #2: “Virtualization should be a service in the operating, it should not try to be the operating system” (quickly translated and somewhat obscurinated by memory loss.). Well, let’s see: We have a virtualization system which is included in the Windows 2008 operating system. When installing Hyper-V, you actually replace the Windows 2008 kernel with a microkernel called HvBoot.sys (the same strategy as Xen is using by the way). Now, how is that different from an operating system as you still have to have the Windows 2008 (which definitively is an operating system) to be able to run virtual systems?
To make matters worse, Microsoft are releasing a Hyper-V server release which is more or less a stripped down version of Windows 2008 with the Hyper-V role and, as I understood it, nothing more. Well, that’s still an operating system in my eyes.
Comment #3: 24/7 is nice, we love systems with more and more 9′s. But how can you make that happen with Hyper-V? VMware have VMotion (live migration without down time) and High-Availability integrated in its virtualization software. Microsoft have something they call quick migration. It transfers your virtual machines to another physical hosts. So far so good. But, the move doesn’t happen live. You have to take your host offline for some 20-30 seconds terminating all the network connections to the hosts. So, how do you enable 24/7 operations with Hyper-V? You take the good old clustering techniques and make some clusters with your virtual machines as members. Yay! Complexity, complexity, complexity!
Comment #4: Now, x86-64 (or x64 as Microsoft says) have been on the marked for quite some time. I might understand why you don’t want to support older 32 bit hosts with your virtualization solution; but please, come up with a good list of reasons for why… There actually might be someone out there who doesn’t require 2Gig RAM for every virtual host.
Comment #5: Microsoft claim that VT (AMD-V and Intel VT) dramatically improves the performance. On the other hand, VMware says that they are better off doing everything in software since the programming APIs are far from good. I’m puzzled.
Comment #6: It feels like a big, nasty crocodile with it’s teeth stuck in my ass: Licensing. Or, L I C E N S I N G. Microsoft have never understood that we want simple terms. We want to spend money on software, hardware and beer, not attorneys. With VMware, you pay for the services you want. Only virtualization? –> ESXi is available for free. Enterprise management? –> Buy Virtual Infrastructure. HA? -> License. DRS? –> License. Backup? –> License. You can’t mess that up.
Now, it’s Microsoft’s turn: You can buy Windows 2008 in three different versions (and probably a lot more, but I don’t bother checking their web page while writing this..): Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter. Standard gives you an opportunity to run 1 virtual machine. Enterprise gives you 4. Datacenter? Unlimited. So far, so good. Now, here’s the fun part: You can’t transfer your license out of the country. Say what? If you have data centers in two or more countries, you have to have licenses for every possible piece of software in every country. So much for disaster recovery or load balancing between countries or continents…
To make things even worse: If you virtualize your standard edition, you can only run software on the virtual machine; not the host OS. Headaches, anyone?
Comment #7: The joy of taking a pretty known word and replace it with something that sounds stupid: Enlightenment. As far as I know, enlightenment is a window manager – or a commonly used english word. But hey, standard are bad things: Enlightenment, in the Microsoft world, is just a fancy way of saying paravirtualization. Paravirtualization is the technique of replacing privileged kernel calls with hypercalls which the hypervisor understands. Paravirtualization is used instead of binary translation and gives you some extra bang for your buck. But enlightenment? Yeye…
Comment #8: Speaking of paravirtualization: As far as I know, you can’t use paravirtualization on virtual Windows machines since Microsoft doesn’t want to open up their kernel. Using it on Linux works nice. So, Microsoft have enabled their own paravirtualization spec for use on Windows 2008 Hyper-V hosts with Microsoft guests. Well, that’s a bit annoying, but OK. Well, the best thing is that they have made a translator between the Linux paravirtualization support in Suse SLES 10.2 (Xen) to the Windows Hypervisor hypercalls. Why can’t they use the paravirtualization already implemented in VMware or Xen?! Convert hypercalls or use binary translation? Nice call…
Comment #8: Disk space. Just to make a note of it: The actual hypervisor is 100KiB (HvBoot.sys). The service is 260MiB. And, in addition, you have to download the integrated services install for Linux from Microsoft’s web page. Bloated?
Comment #9: This is probably the biggest killer of them all: Every virtual machine has to have it’s own LUN on your SAN. So, every time you need another virtual machine you have to call your storage manager to get another LUN. Or, at least that’s what they said. On the other hand, they also said that you could store virtual machine disk files on SMB shares and all other kinds of disk drives that WIndows recognizes. I’m confused… And I don’t think I’ll spend time testing it…
Comment #10: Disaster recovery: If you have to use Export/Import to move machines from one server to another (or quick migration..), what do you do if your Active Directory, your disk drive, the server or another feature fails and the server/system becomes offline? Will the virtual machines change ID’s, MAC addresses, config files and UUID? At least VMware asks you to confirm that you want to use the same system ID or generate a new one. Hyper-V asks you to confirm when you try to use the same one, but hey, they warned us pretty good about just copying the machines from one host to another because of the thight (…) integration with Active Directory.
Comment #11: The integration with every other Microsoft product makes me a bit sick. I just want to virtualize servers, not change my whole system to Windows. Just to mention some of the products they bragged about today: Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager, Microsoft System Operation Manager, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Configuration Manager. I guess that a lot of these programs are pretty useful if you have a Microsoft friendly environment, but it’s pretty hostile here in my apartment :-)
Comment #12: Hyper-V has one cool feature: Differencing disk type. This is a type of disk which can expand from another disk image. For example, you can install the operating system first, add a new disk and make the installation read only. Then, the cool part: you can write all the changes to the new disk. Nedlesss to say, you can now use your read only installation as a master image for a lot of installations, removing the need for installing the operating system every time you want a new machine.
Generally speaking, the killers for Hyper-V will be the licensing model being used on Microsoft’s products and the SAN storage problem. The licensing issue is pretty much one problem I can’t swallow; it is too darn complicated and put too much restrictions on my use. Even though they promised that there won’t be any technical restrictions, you have to have control over which licenses you have and how many you are using currently to sleep well at night. Why can’t they just say “it’s nice that you bought our product, you can now use it as you like wherever you like” instead of this server farm/country crap? And it doesn’t stop there… For the love of god, make it easier!
When it comes to the SAN problem, I just hope that I’m wrong.
Please make a comment if you have some addition information about what I have just said..
September 12th; Update: Oh, I forgot; another fancy feature which wasn’t ready for the first release: Hot-Add of everything; disks, memory, CPU, usb.. you name it. It is supposed to be delivered at “a later time”. I want it now!
Posted: September 11th, 2008 under Hyper-V, Random thoughts by Frode.
Comments: none
Just as anticipated, Microsoft is, according to Virtualization.info, going to give away Hyper-V for free. In addition, they are releasing a stripped down version which does not require the complete Windows 2008 OS. Even so, my original question still remains: do you have to buy a license for Win2008 to be able to virtualize your machines? And still, will the kernel be built with operating system functions in mind instead of virtualization? You can argue that the memory management and resource sharing algorithms are getting pretty good in mainstream operating systems, but I still believe that a specialized kernel for virtualization will be better than the general one which has to take into account a lot of different use and abuse cases.
Well, anyhow, the world of virtualization just got a little bit more exciting. As we all know, competition usually makes the available products and services better for the end users :-)
Posted: September 10th, 2008 under Hyper-V, Random thoughts by Frode.
Comments: none
After using the Infrastructure for some time, I have a list of features I want to see in the next VIC:
1) Live cloning or backup:
I know that VMware have consolidated backup to provide this function, but it requires either another backup program acting as a frontend or a number of command line commands. I’m not scared by the CLI, but the windows command line is rather ugly and pretty much useless. Powershell is supposedly better, but it requires that I read some documentation before using it. I want a quick command integrated in the VIC which allowes me to take a complete copy of my virtual machine and archive it somewhere outside the datastore which it currently resides in. Give me an option to create a complete backup ready to be powered on somewhere else without having to mess around with CLI commands and/or third party backup systems!
2) Storage VMotion GUI integration:
As storage VMotion is one of the new and fancy features in ESX 3.5 / ESX(i), it would be quite nice to do this from the GUI. I suspect that it is scheduled to be integrated in the VIC in either 2.5 Update 2 or 3.0, but I want it now. Again, I know about the different CLI options, but then again: when I have a fancy GUI, why can’t we use it? :-) Thanks to Andrew Kutz for the third party VIC plugin which enables SVMotion in the VIC :-)
3) Linux support for VMware Infrastructure:
I’m a big fan of open source systems and are currently running Linux on all my desktops and laptops. As I have access to the academic part of MSDN (MSDNAA), the cost of aquiring Windows 2003/2008 are virtually zero. Even so, i really want VMware Infrastructure, both the server and the client part, to be able to run on Linux. Currently, my Infrastructure installation is running inside a virtual machine on one of my ESX hosts. This isn’t an optimal solution and I’m pretty sure that VMware does not support this configuration. Being able to run Infrastructure on a linux host instead would mean that I could move it to my storage server. That would mean that I will have one less VM to worry about.
Another problem with the dependence on Windows Server is that it adds significantly to the total price of the virtualization solution. Windows 2003 costs at least $999 while Linux is free. Removing $999 from the total would be nice :-) Removing a Windows host from the list of systems to administrate is even nicer :-)
But, please note this: I don’t want a web client instead of the VIC. The web clients are both difficult to use and extremely slow compared to the current VI client.
4) IPMI integration:
I would be pretty cool to be able to control the power settings of my hosts by sending IPMI commands to the hosts directly from the VIC. As the DRS have some support for controlling the power status (VMware Distributed Power Management) of hosts it might be valuable to have IPMI support directly in the VIC.
Disclaimer: I don’t know how VMware are powering on hosts again after taking them offline when they are idle. I guess that they are using Etherwake to wake up hosts since they have no way of knowing the ip address of the IPMI service processor.
Well, this list might be extended later on :-)
Posted: July 26th, 2008 under Random thoughts, VMware by Frode.
Comments: 2
This page is mostly created to satisfy my need for writing down things discovered while experimenting with virtualization software and computer technology in general. As I am about to write a master’s project about virtualization (see my “Why” page) I have a need for sharing both technical details and general thought. This page should hopefully be updated regulary :-)
Posted: June 24th, 2008 under Random thoughts by Frode.
Comments: none