VMTN Blog

Jason Wiley tries out the Virtual Appliance Import feature in VirtualCenter. OVF really takes the virtual appliance concept to a new (and better) level.

Link: VirtuallyCrazy: Importing OVF File From the Internet in VirtualCenter.

Once this process is complete you have a virtual machine configured with the manufacturer reccomended specifications with almost no effort. I'm really impressed with this process.   Hopefully application vendors will embrace this format as the new way to deploy test machines.   If this is embraced widely in the consumer level virtualization products, this will be a boon for IT people studying for certification exams at home as well.

From the Saturday, February 24, 2007 edition of the New York Times, A Software Maker Goes Up Against Microsoft. As the title implies, the story hook is competition between VMware and Microsoft. But the real issues are how customers are affected by hypervisor lock-in and licensing limits.

In a meeting with corporate customers in New York last month, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said, “Everybody in the operating system business wants to be the guy on the bottom,” the software that controls the hardware. ... When quizzed on Microsoft’s plans, Mr. Ballmer replied, “Our view is that virtualization is something that should be built into the operating system.” ...

VMware, however, points to license changes on Microsoft software that it says limit the ability to move virtual-machine software around data centers to automate the management of computing work. A white paper detailing VMware’s concerns will be posted Monday on its Web site (www.vmware.com), the company said.

“Microsoft is looking for any way it can to gain the upper hand,” said Diane Greene, the president of VMware.

The white paper will be available next week, but in the meantime, if you need to catch up, go check out our blog entries from last November, Freedom from OS lock-in.

Given the subject of the New York Times article, it must of course quickly bring up the ghost of Netscape. The article explains virtualization, the benefits of server consolidation, and gives the basic history of the company and the upcoming IPO. The real issues are touched on lightly -- the article explains well the relationship of virtualization and the OS (inside or underneath?), and it mentions that VMware thinks licensing changes will affect customers and prevent many people from fully utilizing their virtual infrastructure. The article ends back on competition.

Virtual Iron and XenSource take opposing views on Microsoft’s recent moves. “Microsoft sees VMware coming between them and their customers,” said John Thibault, president of Virtual Iron. “So Microsoft is manipulating its license terms to see if it can freeze the market and slow down the trend.” ...

VMware, according to Microsoft, should see the wisdom of the path XenSource chose. In his meeting with corporate customers recently, Mr. Ballmer sketched out a future in which Microsoft would put fundamental virtual-machine software in its operating systems, and “VMware builds on top.”

VMware is leery of such an accommodation, fearing it would prove to be a one-sided bargain. “We will not sign agreements that give Microsoft control of this layer,” Ms. Greene said.

See you Monday for more on the issues.

The open source virtualization solution KVM is now in the new Linux 2.6.20 kernel, along with paravirtualization support. Now that the various communities have hammered out a common paravirtualization interface for different hypervisors (paravirt-ops), both Xen and VMware will be able to run paravirtualized guests using a standard kernel. VMware has demonstrated paravirtualization, and one can envision paravirtualized guests just being another type of guest OS, running side by side with non-pv'd guests on the same hypervisor, all using standard, non-patched kernels.

KVM seems like a special case at this point, but look at this note from last month on LKML below. They are also moving to these same paravirtualization interfaces. This has several implications:

• Three separate hypervisors (Xen, KVM, and VMware) will all be using paravirt-ops.
• The open source ecosystem is working, with at least two open source implementations to this standard interface.
• There exists a commercially-supported, mature platform that is available today and is participating in this ecosystem.
• None of these three solutions are going down a single use, special case path, and there is plenty of room for innovation on top of the standard interface for all participants.

This is good for end users.

Link: New virtualization arrives in Linux kernel | News.blog | CNET News.com.

A new virtualization technology called Kernel Virtual Machine, or KVM, is now an official part of Linux. KVM is included in the 2.6.20 version of the Linux kernel that Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds released Sunday.

In a mailing list posting, Torvalds summarized the changes in 2.6.20 as, "A lot of stuff. All over. And KVM."

Another open-source virtual machine option, Xen, already is under widespread development and is distributed with some versions of Linux.

Link: LKML: Ingo Molnar: [announce] [patch] KVM paravirtualization for Linux.

i'm pleased to announce the first release of paravirtualized KVM (Linux under Linux), which includes support for the hardware cr3-cache feature of Intel-VMX CPUs. (which speeds up context switches and TLB flushes) ... Some aspects of the code are still a bit ad-hoc and incomplete, but the code is stable enough in my testing and i'd like to have some feedback.

Background reading for today's opening keynote at VMworld. There will be no quiz following the session, but there is a tectonic shift going on in IT -- it pays to pay attention.

Overview page: Freedom

There is a significant change underway in systems infrastructure. The traditional infrastructure model of a single monolithic system running a single, monolithic OS and a single application at wastefully low levels of utilization is obsolete.

Karthik Rau: Changing Role of the OS

As the market for virtualization rapidly evolves over these next few years, customers need to ask themselves the following key question: Is it really simpler to have virtualization integrated into the OS and follow the same pattern of lock-in that has dominated the past 20 years of computing, or do I want a world where I have choice and can focus on running a best-of-breed technology stack for each of my applications?

Raghu Raghuram: Hypervisors, Operating Systems and Virtual Infrastructure

With virtualization, there is now an opportunity to implement security, availability and reliability outside the OS, through the virtualization layer. Implementing these services outside the OS delivers significant benefits.  First, the implementation is global in scope - independent of any OS or any application. Second, implementing these capabilities once at the virtualization layer benefits every guest OS and application on every VM. You no longer have to implement and manage agents or software for availability or security or system protection per application. Third, since the implementation is not dependent on the OS, it is inherently less susceptible to attacks on the OS and therefore leads to a simpler, more robust infrastructure.

Dan Chu: Virtualization and Licensing: What Customers Need

Vendors can evolve their licensing to allow customers to take advantage of new technology, or conversely vendors can hold back and seek to inhibit and restrict how customers can use new technology because they feel threatened by it.  Customers have adopted virtualization broadly and made it mainstream, and have been able to drive some significant changes and improvements in licensing and openness.  However, there are also a growing number of areas where specific vendors (Microsoft in particular) are threatening to use licensing to restrict and undercut the benefits that customers and the industry are gaining from virtualization.

Steve Herrod: Virtualization: Open Standards, Interfaces, and Formats

For virtual appliances to achieve their full potential, openness in virtual machine-related interfaces is critical. The real promise is "any software on any virtualization layer". We believe customers should be able to choose and/or purchase a virtual machine consisting of any application running on any operating system and then run it on their virtualization layer of choice.