Microsoft seeks to stem Azure exodus with huge appliance

July 12, 2010 in Virtualizationism by Eric Gray | 11 comments

How big is an appliance, anyway?

Before today, a refrigerator is probably the largest appliance you or I have encountered.  But today, Microsoft announced an Azure appliance that consists of hundreds of servers — a “cloud-in-a-box” that is managed by Microsoft but hosted in a customer datacenter.

Why would Microsoft go through the trouble of creating and managing numerous miniature Azures?  One possible explanation is that customers are trying the proprietary platform to see what the fuss is all about, but not sticking with it — kind of like garlic ice cream at the Gilroy Garlic Festival.  It could just be that Azure is not taking off as everyone imagined.

Customers leaving Azure in droves?

I recently acquired an email from Microsoft, desperately seeking to address an apparent exodus of customers from Windows Azure:

My team is working to understand why some of our valued customers have stopped using their Windows Azure platform subscription(s). I am emailing today to ask you to complete a short survey on why you have stopped using our service.

We will use this information to improve our platform and address issues that may have led you to stop using your subscription. We take your feedback seriously and it will lead to direct action.

Whatever the reason for this sudden shift may be, the most succinct take on the announcement goes to Om Malik, who concluded in this GigaOM article:

Microsoft, it seems, is merely following what is en vogue these days.

Interesting strategy shift:  If customers won’t come to your proprietary platform, see if you can trap them inside a box right in their own own datacenter.  Cloud computing at its finest.

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These are not the files you are looking for

June 21, 2010 in Virtualizationism by Eric Gray | 14 comments

If you have been following along on my Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization series, you may have noticed that the RHEV marketing hasn’t matched reality. Red Hat’s claims about being best in class and equivalent to VMware vSphere are dishonest.  As much as I’d enjoy writing about something more interesting, I do have a few more important realities to share with the virtualization community about this latecomer.

RHEV Comparison Whitepaper

Red Hat published a PDF comparing RHEV to VMware vSphere and Hyper-V.  Here is one of the entries on virtual storage:

Okay, so far so good.  Apparently, as with vSphere, virtual disks are simply files and can be stored on any of the various storage domains.  If you missed the last post on how RHEV Data Centers are limited to a single storage technology, please be sure to check it out — it’s not like vSphere.

As it turns out, the fact checkers were off the day Red Hat released that handy comparison whitepaper.  Because if you actually went through the effort to set up RHEV and create virtual machines, you would never find anything resembling a virtual disk file on the host. Read the rest of this entry »

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Multiple hypervisors? What about multiple SANs?

June 15, 2010 in Virtualizationism by Eric Gray | 11 comments

Some of the cool kids are talking about a multi-hypervisor strategy these days.  Mostly journalists and such who could never truly feel the pain of dealing with two vastly different virtualization management platforms.

As you may recall, Red Hat is attempting to bring their new RHEV product to market by playing the old “don’t get stuck with a single vendor” trick.  Red Hat’s CEO claims:

“…customers don’t want one platform. They want two.”

Let’s save the multi-hypervisor discussion for another day, but shift to the topic of storage diversity.

While there may be a few environments that can standardize on a single storage area network technology, it typically  makes sense to mix and match iSCSI, NFS, or Fibre Channel SANs to optimize for cost and performance.

During my recent foray into the chaotic world of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, I encountered an unbelievable storage limitation with their new KVM hypervisor.

“Virtualization diversity… when and where we say”

VMware vSphere customers are free to mix and match supported storage technologies within datacenters, clusters, and even hosts.

I would have thought that a company like Red Hat that is pushing heterogeneous solutions and multiple vendors might feel the same way when it comes to storage.  But that’s not quite how things go in the land of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

With RHEV, a “Data Center” is configured to use a single type of storage;  all clusters and hosts in that Data Center are restricted to that, so choose wisely:

Storage Freedom

VMware vSphere allows administrators to move virtual disks for running VMs from one array to another — even between different types of arrays — with zero downtime.  Storage vMotion is a very powerful feature and it is simply not available from Red Hat – only VMware.

The Best Choice: VMware vSphere

Virtual machines have differing storage requirements — certainly not a one-size-fits-all component of an efficient virtual infrastructure.  The best platform for building your own private cloud is also the one with the broadest support for today’s storage technologies:  VMware vSphere.

Oh, by the way, did you know that VMware is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s newly-released x86 Server Virtualization Magic Quadrant.  Take a look at the full article — I’ll give a free subscription to the VCritical RSS feed to the first 10 people that spot Red Hat’s position.

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Idle RHEV Hypervisors save power?

May 7, 2010 in Virtualizationism by Eric Gray | 12 comments

Quick datacenter power consumption quiz:

Q: How much power does an idle server consume?

A: Way more than a powered-off server.

VMware vSphere saves energy — and money — in your datacenter by powering off unused hosts during off-peak periods.  Take a look at this new technical paper on VMware DPM that covers the technology in-depth.

Despite competitor claims, this powerful capability is unique to VMware vSphere.

Imitation: The highest form of flattery

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has a seemingly-similar feature called Power Saver that also consolidates virtual machines onto fewer hosts.  However, the RHEV solution stops there — hypervisor hosts simply sit idle with no running VMs; they are not powered off.  No word yet on what the moon and stars in this diagram have to do with an idle host:

Red Hat claims that an idle host requires just 10-15% of the power required for a host with running VMs.  That sounds very generous if you ask me.  Frankly, from the looks of my HP C7000 BladeSystem Onboard Administrator power summaries, it seems quite false.

Update: Bob Plankers actually measured the power consumption of a Dell server in a few different scenarios and found that idle systems still draw significant amps.

Red Hat claims their new virtualization product is “best in class.”  Really?  Which class?

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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: Pentium II Inside!

May 3, 2010 in Virtualizationism by Eric Gray | 12 comments

Hypervisors offer the flexibility to selectively expose a subset of physical CPU features to virtual machines.  The trade-off is broader live migration compatibility at the expense of performance and cutting-edge capabilities.

In a homogeneous VMware ESX cluster, all CPU instructions in the underlying host CPU are exposed to guest operating systems.  VMware vCenter Server also offers the state-of-the-art Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC), allowing administrators to specify a baseline in a mixed cluster that maximizes use of most modern CPU features during transition to newer generation hardware.

VMware ESX 4 CPU Features

CPU-Z is a handy utility that displays comprehensive technical information about a CPU.  Here it is running on a VMware ESX VM powered by an Intel Xeon E5540 “Gainestown” processor — a Nehalem-class CPU with most of  the latest instructions, such as SSE4.1 and SSE4.2:

Virtual machines running on VMware ESX are able to take advantage of those features that are designed to improve application performance — giving you your money’s worth after investing in new hardware.

Now let’s take a look at an alternative approach… Read the rest of this entry »

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