Responsible disclosure? Not quite, VMware
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Enterprise, Microsoft on
If you find a bug in a competitor’s product do you… A: Tell them about it? B: Tell a journalist about it? C: Tell your customers about it? D: put an anonymous video of it on YouTube, then tweet the video as if you had nothing to do with it?
For some reason, the marketing team at VMware decided that D was the way to go when they got their hands on some VMware-internal video of Hyper-V ‘crashing’, adding in a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument blaming Hyper-V for the MSDN site not keeping up with the Windows 7 RC downloads on the morning of April 30th (rather than Microsoft’s explanation of the site traffic increasing not by 100% as had expected, but by 500% - and isn’t being that much in demand is a pretty good problem for Microsoft to have?). Shame that they declined to include the necessary technical details about the test or even to put their name behind it until Microsoft dug out that the YouTube poster was actually Scott Drummonds of VMware.
When the Hyper-V team asked for some details about the test, VMware’s Bruce Herndon popped up to explain the video, express regret that the discussion is in a public forum (presumably that one is actually aimed at Drummonds) and ask why there was so much “kerfuffle” over it. Probably because posting videos on YouTube defaming the competition isn’t a good idea for anyone (Microsoft included). Probably because VMware came across like a group of pranking teenagers confronted by their parents. And probably because the copy of Hyper-V that you see blue-screening is apparently running on pre-release Intel hardware that you get under the kind of agreement that says you won’t do benchmarking on it, certainly not for public consumption.
It’s obvious from the tenor of the Microsoft blog posts that the virtualisation team is hopping mad; I don’t blame them. Unfortunately, arguing in public can come across more as a spat than a serious debate and benchmarks and stability tests are too important to anyone using virtualisation in anger to be left to YouTube videos and obviously partial arguments. In saner moments, VMware knows this: the EULA for ESX explicitly states “You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study.”
I’ll be as surprised as the Hyper-V team if VMware has found a bug rather than proving that anyone can crash any system if they approach it with that intention. And I don’t know whether it raises issues of third-party certification. When I asked Jeff Woolsey at TechEd why RIM had just certified BES 5 for virtualisation under VMware and not Hyper-V, he pointed out that you don’t need to certify apps to work with Hyper-V because for virtualisation to be useful, it has to be the same as working with Windows Server (or the server OS of your choice) - it should be the hypervisor that’s tested, not the apps. As with Windows 7, Microsoft has spent a lot of time testing thousands of applications with Hyper-V. If we do need third-party tests, it’s going to have to actually be a third party conducting them - not an interested party.
Even if the video had shown a legitimate problem in a well-constructed test, releasing it anonymously on YouTube would be reprehensible. As an enterprise customer, wouldn’t you like VMware to act like a mature and responsible software company that you could count on to work with other vendors to deal with problems in a constructive way? As it is, I’ll be taking any benchmark claims from VMware with a pinch of salt from now on, and I expect many enterprise IT shops will feel the same.
-Mary
Rated: 66.09% (23 votes)
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Hyper-V Server R2 boots from flash
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows 7, Windows Server, Windows Vista, virtualisation, Windows, Enterprise, Microsoft on
Getting virtualisation deployed just got a lot faster.
We’ve spent the morning with Microsoft’s Jeff Wooley, one of the team leads that helped put together Hyper-V, talking about live migration. However, one final thing he said was a bit of a scoop…
It turns out that Hyper-V Server R2, the next release of Microsoft’s standalone virtualisation platform, will boot from flash disk. That’s a big new feature that will help speed virtualisation deployments - all you’ll need to do is duplicate a set of flash drives for all your servers. All your hard disk space is working space for your VMs, and storage for your VHDs.
Oh, and it’ll be free.
That’s not bad.
While you’re thinking that way, flash drives are a good way of installing the latest generation of operating systems. It’s easy enough to make a bootable flash drive in Windows with just a few commands:
1. diskpart
2. list disk
3. select disk 1
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. select partition 1
7. active
8. format fs=fat32
9. assign
10. exit
Then all you need to do is copy Windows Vista’s (or Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008) DVD ROM content to the drive. Simply issue the following command to start copying all the content from the DVD to your newly formatted high speed flash drive: xcopy d:\*.* /s/
Just plug in the drive, and you’re ready to install - very quickly. If you’ve just got an ISO of an installer, this is a good alternative to burning a DVD…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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On (Private) Cloud Nine
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Cloud, virtualisation, Enterprise, Windows, Microsoft on
Microsoft’s Management Summit isn’t your usual IT conference. It’s a gathering of the unsung heroes of the IT pro world, the system administrators and the system managers who run the networks that keep businesses of all sizes running. They’re here in Las Vegas to understand Microsoft’s server management roadmap, and get training with the latest tools.
It’s a long road from SMS to System Center, but it’s one that Microsoft has been diligently treading for a decade now. What started as a tool for managing updates and software installs is now a complete suite of system management tools, covering everything from data protection to virtualisation to service level agreements to Linux (yes, Linux). It’s now a set of tools that will help run all aspects of a heterogeneous business network, with hardware and software from many different vendors.
One of the underlying themes of this years event is The Cloud. Not just the public cloud of Azure, but the scale-up scale-out elastic business networks that are starting to appear in private data centres. Even though they’re private, the automated, virtualised workloads they host share in many of the features of public cloud services - and they will even migrate from one to the next.
Tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Operations Manager help define just where virtual servers can be placed, and rules and policy can manage live migrations from server to server (if you’re using the next version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor) - along with application and storage virtualisation tools.
Bob Kelly, Microsoft VP Server and Tools, drilled down into this in his MMS 2009 keynote, calling the private cloud “Reliable, Predictable, Automated”, which he described as a long term investment for Microsoft as part of its Dynamic IT programme. Clouds are platform as a service, designed to scale up and out, and for reuse. They’re reliable highly available systems built for redundancy - which you need to deliver IT as a service.
One example of this is Hotmail, where server failures are replaced on a monthly schedule (the engineers go round the racks swapping out the boxes with the red lights). There’s no rush to make fixes, the load just moves transparently as soon as a problem occurs - what Kelly calls a “self healing system”, where the network has been automated for cost and reliability, reducing the number of people per server and removing the risk of errors. By building this type of infrastructure you do the work up front, so the network is knowledge-based, model oriented, and you can provide remediation in minutes, not days or hours.
It’s all part of the evolution of IT, from mainframe to client server to web to cloud. There are two models:
- A public cloud - very few companies delivering the data centres for this, so there will only be two or three or four public clouds.
- A private cloud - business enterprises will want the same features as the public cloud for their own data centers.
So how do we get there? Kelly talked about the path to cloud computing, which he said was “Virtualise, automate, deliver.” The most important part of the path is virtualisation, as you can’t do any of the rest without it. Once you’ve virtualised, automate what you can and move to service level management with policy control - and finally make sure the business understands what you’re doing and howto take advantage of it.
Private clouds are here to stay - they’re the new mainframe, only this time built on commodity hardware, general purpose operating systems, and open management standards.
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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AMD to the future
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Power, AMD, virtualisation, Processors, Futures, Enterprise, Hardware on
Last week saw the 6th birthday of AMD’s Opteron CPU, the core of its server product line. We were among a small group of journalists and analysts at AMD’s Sunnyvale campus for the event - which also included the launch of a new generation of silicon, and the unveiling of AMD’s Opteron roadmap for the next few years.
Pointing out that “the server market is very different”, AMD’s Nigel Dessau opened the even with a look at the way the server market has been changing over the last few years - with a move to throughput rather than clock speed with multicore systems, to virtualisation, and to designing for energy efficiency, all with the aim of changing the economics of the data centre. The result has been increaded server density and utilisation - more bang for your buck in less space!
So what happens next? Dessau suggests that “The way you assemble architectures is what makes the difference.” That’s why AMD puts so much into its CPUs, with much of what we’d normally consider to be the supporting chipset - including memory controllers - on the same silicon. It’s not quite a system on a chip, but it’s getting very close these days.
Pat Patla, the GM and VP of AMD’s Server Business Unit unveiled the new hardware. This was the roll out of the Istanbul product range, a six-core processor for existing two, four and eight socket systems with what he said was “30% more performance than the previous generation at the same power”. Istanbul also brings all of AMD’s power management technologies into one place as AMD-P.
Istanbul isn’t the end of the story - the next chapter is already being written in. AMD is already sampling its next generation processor, the 12-core “Magny-Cours”, which despite being a terrible pun, is a rather zippy piece of silicon - we watched a 48 core demo system much its way through several benchmarks. It’s not that far away, either, and should ship in 2010.
Virtualisation is a target market for the next generation of silicon, and it will add support for virtualised I/O. With I/O devices virtualised there’s a lot of scope for new application and new ways of working (as well as a chance to virtualise applications and servers that previously were locked into existing hardware). It’s all part of the Infrastructure 2.0 model, where management tools take advantage of hardware to deliver flexible self-managed virtualised data centres.
The other part of the AMD story is how it’s working on power management, with products available in different thermal bands - including a low power range intended for single and dual socket high density applications, ideal for cloud data centres. There’s a lot to be said for this approach, especially as all the features of the high end, high power CPUs are in the energy efficient versions. Dense deployments need greater efficiencies, as data centre costs are a huge proportion of the costs incurred in running a cloud service. With an average power of 40W, the EE series processors will help keep those cooling and power costs down.
Magny-Cours is only part of the AMD roadmap, and the company’s current architecture is a long term play (which is good for virtualisation, as it will allow asymmetric migrations, letting businesses use older hardware for disaster recovery purposes). The next generation will be 32nm devices in 2011, a 12 to 16 core device codenamed Interlagos and a 6 to 8 core device codenamed Valencia.
–Simon
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D2C - evaporating your data centre
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, virtualisation, Applications, Storage, Server on
We’ve all heard of P2V - taking a physical server and making it virtual. Now it’s time to start thinking about D2C.
Mary and I have just finished an intense couple of days at the DEMO09 event in Palm Springs, where 39 companies had 6 minutes each to unveil a new product. Most were consumer technologies, but there were a few for the IT Pro readership, with one of the most interesting being AppZero’s.
Getting applications to run in the cloud can be an issue. Most cloud services are proprietary, and where there’s scope for you to build and run your own cloud servers, you’re often limited to working through unwieldy and complex web interfaces. Even Amazon’s AWS isn’t that easy to use.
That’s where AppZero’s tools come into play. They can take an existing set of servers and replicate them straight into Amazon’s cloud. First servers are converted into virtual application appliances - whether Windows, Solaris, or Linux. There’s not much overhead - AppZero claims less than 3% - and once wrapped as a single VAA file it’s easy to move them just anywhere - whether it’s around your data centre or up into the cloud. Instead of configuring applications and operating systems, a move is as simple as a file copy.
There’s a control panel to help manage and set up cloud servers for your application appliances - helping you avoid the hard work in setting up EC2 servers. It’s not perfect yet (the DEMO09 version was a beta), and there’s no way of specifying Amazon’s European servers rather than the US network. However, there’s a lot of promise in the service, taking a Datacenter to the Cloud, making D2C reality.
Something to look out for!
–Simon
(in Palm Springs)
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Servers
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Enterprise, virtualisation, operating systems, linux, Intel, HP, Server, Windows, Microsoft on
Server sales went down 3.8% and up 4.9% this summer. That’s up if you’re counting how many servers companies have been buying in EMEA in Q3, by nearly 5% and down by just under 4% if you’re counting how much they cost. It’s the biggest fall in the amount spent on servers since the end of 2005, and la the news is much worse in Western Europe, at least for server vendors. Revenue went down 7.6% compared to last year, although unit sales are only down by 0.6%; that means you can buy almost as many servers as you did last year and pay rather less for them.
Dig into the IDC figures and there are some other interesting trends. Central and Eastern Europe are using more and more IT and it’s not just commodity x86 servers (up by 15/9%); pricier Itanium, mainframe and other non x86 servers went up by 22% and IBM saw almost 50% increase in revenue for z OS here. Windows didn’t lose any revenue this year either, all though all other server operating systems did, including Linux (although only what IDC calls a ‘very minor drop’); in fact Windows gained another 2% of server OS market share across EMEA.
It’s still the year of blades: up by 37.5% in sales compared to last year, and now 12% of all server sales by revenue. IBM lost as much on falling sales of x86 servers as it made on System z mainframes. Sun’s SPARC Enterprise systems sold well but Sun still lost share in the server market. Like IBM, it’s losing out to Dell and HP: HP was the number one server vendor with 2.4% growth, mainly because of ProLiant sales. Dell had a small increase in revenue and a 4% increase in shipments: more than HP but much less than the double-digit growth it had been seeing in previous quarters.
So, yes, servers sales are down overall and manufacturers will be hurting; but so far it seems to be canny buying that’s affecting the market as much as buying fewer servers. And that makes me think that while some companies may be skipping new servers in favour of SaaS and the cloud, more are just tightening their belts. The credit crunch has led to plenty of mergers and acquisitions (some more voluntary than others); that’s a lot of heterogenous IT systems to integrate, which means less time to go building new systems that need new servers - and more servers in a business that might get better economies of scale.
And then there’s virtualization. The server vendors have been supporting virtualization to the point of putting hypervisors in flash on new servers to get you running 20 servers’-worth of VMs on your new box more quickly. I’ve been asking vendors if this isn’t storing up trouble and lost sales for the future. You might never have bought the other 19 servers, but how about just another two or three? Answers have ranged from blank looks to assurances that it wouldn’t be a problem for long enough to let them find a way around it (often followed by ‘people will always need new servers’) to the very honest ‘yes, but we have to do it these days’. VMware revenue was up 32% for Q3 2008 compared to the year before; growth for 2008 might “only” be 42% rather than 45%. Microsoft has only just got into the serious hypervisor market with Hyper-V but it’s free with Server 2008 so you can expect it grow fast; Citrix and Red Hat have been chalking up the numbers for a few years too. Maybe the credit crunch will be the point at which virtualising servers also comes to mean not buying as many new ones
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We have 7,000 servers. No wait, 13,000. What do they all do again?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Power, Enterprise, Business, Server, Hardware, HP on
Server sprawl. It’s only human nature. I mean, not everything in my freezer is labeled because how could I possibly mistake frozen sliced pineapple for frozen sliced mango or frozen sliced polenta? And it’s obvious that KINGEX is the Exchange server for the Kingston branch and KINGXEX is the Exchange server from the Kings Cross branch and SERVER 111 is either the 111th server we put in or the server we put in on either the eleventh of January or the first of November
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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What do you want to do where today?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Beta, smartphone, operating systems, Web browser, Futures, Google, Windows, Hardware, Windows Mobile, Microsoft on
Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.
This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”.
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Put a price on IT - and a value
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, People, Applications, Enterprise, Server, Business, HP on
It’s time for IT to have its own ERP and CRM, according to HP. That’s what the business technology optimization tools it’s developed are for. Today that’s the product name, but it’s such a good phrase that Tom Hogan, the senior VP and global manager of HP software (and, since he bought EDS, services), is thinking of coming up with some other name so he can keep it as a description. It’s meant to make you think of business process optimization, where you discover the way your company does everything has been wrong all along and it’s going to take an expensive stint of consultancy to fix it.
The way most companies do IT is hand to mouth, piecemeal and manually intensive. Imagine a car assembly plant that hand-wrote scripts to control the robots every time a new part had to be made. If IT departments really were the cobbler’s children they’re often compared to, they’d have been barefoot so long they’d be placed in foster care. Most IT departments can’t add as much value to the business as the technology companies tell us their technology can deliver and that’s not just the gap between hype and reality. In a survey that the Economist Intelligence Unit just carried out for HP, an “overwhelming majority of both CEOs and CIOs” believe that “technology is integral to the success of their company” and 88% of CEOs and 90% of CIOs say they “share similar visions for how technology can deliver business outcomes at their company” - which is close enough that they must be at least on the same page. So what’s the problem? As usual, money.
The 70-80% of the budget most IT departments have been spending on maintenance rather than innovation has only just gone down to 60% according to a new survey in CIO magazine. If you’re doing really, really
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You say Express Gate, I say Palladium
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Silicon, virtualisation, Hardware, Laptop, Mobile, Security, Intel, Microsoft on
Imagine a second, simpler operating system on your PC with fixed features, so it’s more secure - after all, if you can’t add more programs you can’t add a virus either. It would have to start up quickly, so that Windows wasn’t waiting for it, so it would be ideal for listening to music and watching video. I’m not thinking about virtualization per se, although that’s one way to achieve something similar; this is two operating systems side by side, both with access to the PC hardware, but one of them does much more limited and circumscribed things.
Can you tell what it is yet?
No, actually, I’m not talking about Palladium - sorry, Microsoft Next Generation Secure Computing Base. That grew out of an attempt to reassure Sony that it would be OK to allow DVD movies to play on a PC without piracy becoming endemic and turned into a much more useful and visionary idea about using public key cryptography not to identify people but to secure machines. It would have been a good way to implement the DRM it was associated with in the public eye, though wouldn’t have forced it on anyone who didn’t want to run it. Palladium loaded a secure piece of software called the TOR that acted as a secure area that could only run trusted code (written to public APIs), where the apps would be invisible to the main OS - all secured by the machine-specific key in your TPM and some new technology from Intel.
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