VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘XenServer’

I’ve had the luxury of staying away from the math of the new vSphere 5 licensing. Honestly, I haven’t read the new guide, and I’ve only skimmed through posts that explore the pros and cons of different upgrade costs and future growth impact scenarios from virtualization admins, consultants, and architects of  various size VMware virtual infrastructures. My opinion to date – VMware’s goal is to be a total Cloud solution, and this change in licensing reflects and fosters that plan. If you are able to correctly size you infrastructure, or if you can oversubscribe it so that you can offset the costs, then the hypervisor with the most features, the best performance, and the best partner ecosystem (in terms of available third party products leveraging vSphere APIs) is still a no-brainer. That would be vSphere 5.

Storm Clouds

I’ve also read the virtualization pundits’ predictions year after year. They usually go something like “this year is the year of VDI”, “sixty something percent of all servers can still be virtualized”, and “VMware’s market share will shrink to the advances of Microsoft and Citrix”. Is the record skipping? (does anyone know what a skipping record is anymore?). Personally, I’ve always felt a balanced market of hypervisor vendors would be the most likely prophecy for the datacenter, but VMware has always managed to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Feature-wise, they continue to do so. But, the recent announcement of licensing changes may have changed things.

Whether right, wrong, misunderstood, reluctant to change, or just emotional, many VMware shops initially viewed the new licensing announcement like dark, thunder clouds approaching. Some reactions were as hot as a flash of lightning. Virtual warning sirens sounded across the community, but after a few days and some damage control from VMware, eventually calmer heads prevailed. But, like in the aftermath of any large storm, people began to build for the future. More so than ever before, public discussion of future plans seem to include a new possibility of alternative vendor virtual datacenters.

An Opening In The Clouds

My hunch is that current VMware shops will  Read the rest of this entry »

Citrix CTO Simon Crosby was our very special guest for VIRTUMANIA Episode 23! The following is the podcast summary:

VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 23 – The Citrix Virtualization Safari. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) of VMETC and Marc Farley (@3parfarley) of 3Par and StorageRap.com with guests and Rick Vanover (@rickvanover) of RickVanover.com and Greg Knieriemen (@knieriemen). This week’s special guest is Citrix CTO Simon Crosby (@simoncrosby / Citrix Blogs). This episode’s conversation covers almost everything going on at Citrix for virtualization. From Citrix Receiver on the iPad, HDX with VDI, development of the Citrix XenClient, XenServer strategy, partnership with Microsoft, to Citrix in the Cloud, Crosby offers inside thoughts and experiences.  VIRTUMANIA is a Infosmack Production.

Before, between, and after the important stuff we also have some fun with Rick’s picture of the wrong end of a giraffe and Dell’s rumored acquisition of 3PAR

Listen to the podcast with the embedded player or subscribe to get a weekly copy so you can listen when convenient.

Check out the VM /ETC VIRTUMANIA Page to listen to past episodes as well as episodes of Infosmack.

Burton Group analysts Chris Wolf and Richard Jones have recently both blogged about certification of Citrix XenServer 5.5 combined with Citrix Essentials Platinum Edition as an enterprise ready solution. Citrix XenServer 5.5 is available as a free download, but managing XenServer via Citrix Essentials requires the purchase ($5000 per host list price) of the Essentials Platinum Edition product.

It’s Official – Citrix XenServer 5.5 with Citrix Essentials 5.5 Platinum Edition is Enterprise-Production Ready is a post by Chris Wolf from his personal blog announcing the certification of Citrix XenServer 5.5 managed by Citrix Essentials Platinum Edition as “worthy of the demands of large scale enterprise environments.”

Citrix has an enterprise-grade virtualization platform says the Burton Group is a post by Richard Jones also from his personal blog that declares “This is a great milestone for the industry as it marks the first time that the x86 market has more than one vendor (VMware) offering an enterprise production worthy virtualization solution.”

Read both posts for more details.

The Burton Group report requires a subscription to access, but Wolf promises to detail the findings at the upcoming Catalyst Conference where he will speaking.

Jones’ blog provides an interesting caveat to the enterprise ready comparison of VMware vSphere and XenServer Platinum:

“However, this is not to say that Citrix XenServer 5.5 exceeds VMware vSphere 4 in features and function.  Burton Group’s production class hypervisor requirements specify technical and product features that fall into three buckets:  Required, Preferred, and Optional.  While Citrix now meets 100% of the Required features, it still falls behind the x86 virtualization leader in the Preferred and Optional criteria.”

Some of the new automation and life cycle management technology for both XenServer and Hyper-V announced today by Citrix will be provided by an integration of VMLogix LabManager and StageManager products with Citrix Essentials. This partner feature integration follows a similar strategy used by Citrix in the past with Marathon Technologies to provide High Availability for guests on XenServer hosts. VMLogix LabManager and StageManager are very similar in name to VMware VI 3.5 Enterprise products that provide basically the same automation and management features.

In the official announcement today, VMLogix explains: Read the rest of this entry »

5 Linux-based Virtualization Companies to Watch on Ken Hess’s Linux Blog is a post about the 5 main server virtualization platforms based on Linux. Ken also mentions the only non Linux based hypervisor, Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

“There’s only one company that doesn’t use Linux for its server virtualization platform. Can you guess which one it is? If you guessed Microsoft, you’re correct. Microsoft is a newbie in the virtualization space but wants in and may make significant dents in the already well-established market that is significantly owned by VMware. For Windows-only virtualization, there may be some validity to the switch to Hyper-V.

For the rest of us, who are either too stubborn or too smart to make the shift to Hyper-V, what are our choices? The following is a list of 5 of the main players in Linux-based virtualization.”

Use the link above to read all of Ken’s original post for some brief info about each platform, but I am listing the 6 products and the links to their free versions for quick reference here. Ken does not discuss nor am I including free hosted platforms such as Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Server. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody talks about running VMware ESX on VMware Workstation, but how come we don’t see more about running ESX on VMware Server 2.0? I’ve tried and been semi successful. This post is sort of a “how to” and kind of “need help” post about this topic.

First, Duncan Epping over at yellow-bricks.com made a quick post to remind himself of the configurations necessary to run ESX/ESXi 3.5 on VMware Workstation 6.5. There are numerous other posts about how to do this, but the post ESX in Workstation contains just the basic information to remember. If you’ve never done this before and you need pictures and a good explanation then I recommend the .pdf from Xtravirt.com titled VI 3.5 in a box.

Trying to take this a step further, I have moved the ESX 3.5 VMs I created on Workstation 6.5 to a VMware Server 2.0 running on a 64 bit Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop. I can start the ESX server VMs just fine, but unfortunately I can’t run the VMs (hosted on the ESX VMs). It’s still a convenient option for learning, testing and configuring the latest builds and features even without running VMs.

Using basically the same configuration settings I’ve also been able to install and run Citrix XenServer 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V on both VMware Workstation and VMware Server 2.0. Here is a screenshot of my VMware Server Summary tab. Click on it for a larger view. Read the rest of this entry »

There were 2 messages from the Citrix Summit 2008 conference in Orlando this week that really stuck with me. I’ve already posted about the first, “XenServer 5 is ready for the enterprise“. The other message was “Use XenServer to host XenApp”.

Virtualizing XenApp is a concept to get on board with in general, but it’s also logical to assume Citrix can best support and optimize their products when they are used together.

The message is that virtualizing existing and future implementations of XenApp (or Presentation Server) on XenServer can

• Reduce physical server count
• Increase availability
• Increase flexibility
• Improve performance

Let me explain how it was explained to me during a hands on lab. Read the rest of this entry »