Virtualization and Grid Computing

News via GRIDToday: Oracle Does Virtualization and Microsoft’s virtualization about face.

VMware Workstation 6.0 is now availabe, see the press release for a list of new features.

One of the highlights for me is the experimental record/replay set of features. Read more about that in Steve Harrod’s The Amazing VM Record/Replay Feature in VMware Workstation 6 and for some details see this entry from Vyacheslav (Slava) Malyugin: Workstation 6.0 and the death of irreproducible bugs.

As far as I can tell this does not let you step in reverse or set breakpoints in the “past.” That has been done before, this Workstation news has me revisiting the cool paper from the University of Michigan: Debugging operating systems with time-traveling virtual machines.

Anyhow, with Workstation 6, the ability to replay a hard-to-reproduce bug over and over and step through instruction by instruction — and to have it wrapped in the nice Workstation interface — is going to be pretty useful for a lot of people (including myself).

They’ve included a number of things to make this more than a novelty like gdb integration, increasing the pace of time during replay, and the optional ability for the guest VM to itself decide when it is being recorded.

Forum users commenting on the ESX boot process at this VMTN Forum topic:

Very roughly, Linux starts up, gets to a certain point in the process where it loads a certain kernel module … that kernel module freezes the whole system, inserts ESX’s kernel as a hypervisor, then resumes Linux as the first guest OS. (The kernel module is NOT the hypervisor - it’s a mechanism to load a hypervisor). After that point, the Linux session (the Console OS, COS) continues to boot as a normal guest would, and is essentially a shell interface plus a convenient container for a few apps (like the host agent, which communicates with the rest of VI3).

and:

All of the above is a very complex way of saying that the Console Operating System, or COS, is a modified RedHat Linux distribution created specifically to interface with and manage the underlying, proprietary and unique, VMware kernel.
[…]
It becomes confusing to neophytes because of the relationship with the COS. It is usually the first thing that most see and so they incorrectly assume that they have been misled or lied to.

Massimo Re Ferre’ asks: Will Microsoft sunset VMware? (responses on the VMTN forum)

One of the parts to note is the claim in his VMware / Microsoft comparison that VMware is trying to “change the rules” by participating in the creation of a new IT platform rather than focusing on mere server consolidation. From that section:

The next frontier would be Virtual Appliances which is a very different way to develop and deploy applications compared to what we are doing today.
[…]
This is a fascinating scenario and as you can imagine it involves more than just developing a hypervisor with a management interface: it involves creating a new culture on how we deal with IT, taking all the pieces apart and rebuild our datacenters in a much more efficient way.

Add “On Appliance” to Your “On Premise” and “On Demand” Strategies

I saw this session in person, it was good. I don’t need convincing of the benefits that the software/virtual appliance model brings: I think the benefits exist for many scenarios and they most all stem from the presence of a strict separation of complexity concerns (not a reduction in overall complexity of software). But hearing what the panelists had to say about deployment scenarios and challenges in the commercial software business world was good for me.

I liked the idea of using a VM deployed at a customer’s site to be a sort of customer facing front-end in a SaaS model — a hybrid of over-the-WAN “on-demand” and “on-premise”. This session also moved me to evaluate Zimbra which looks pretty helpful for replacing some mail/collaboration daemons I run (though moving to their clients full time and abandoning Sylpheed/Claws seems unlikely).

rPath Brings Amazon Web Services to Customers

It will work like this: software developers use rBuilder to build an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that is stored using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Then, with a single click, rBuilder and rBuilder Online users can boot their software appliances on Amazon EC2.

I just ran across this virtualization for Linux overview table, a wiki page that was first started at the end of December. It doesn’t give you a sense of some important factors in making such a choice (maturity, community, tool ‘ecosystem’) but I was definitely pleased to find this page. There are also a lot of interesting links hanging off the entry and sidebar.

Today Ewan Mellor of XenSource gave a run down of old and upcoming Xen management interfaces (on the Xen-API mailing list). Quoting:

• xend-http-server: Very old and totally broken HTML interface and legacy, generally working SXP-based interface, on port 8000.
• xend-unix-server: Ditto, using a unix domain socket.
• xend-unix-xmlrpc-server: Legacy XML-RPC server, over HTTP/unix, the recommended way to access Xend in 3.0.4.
• xend-tcp-xmlrpc-server: Ditto, over TCP, on port 8006.
• xen-api-server: All new, all shiny Xen-API interface, available in preview form now, and landing for 3.0.5.

Here is the whole email.

Those are just the management interfaces released with Xen, here are some others…

Note that these all do not have the same semantics, “remote” can mean very different things (grid, wan, intra-cluster, human vs. programmatic interface).

• Virtual Workspace Service (I work on this)
• XenMan
• DTC-Xen
• Enomalism
• xen-shell
• Argo
• Xen + CIM
• openQRM
• MLN
• Xenmanager
• using SystemImager
• XenSource Products
• Virtual Iron
• Cassatt
• BixData
• Egenera
• HyperVM
• ToutVirtual
• Enigmatic
• Xen and Moab Workload Manager
• IBM Director
• Usher
• Tycoon
• SmartDomains
• Intel Grid Programming Environment
• Novell ZENworks Orchestrator
• Ganeti

I’m surely missing some. If you can think of others, please add a comment. [[Thankyou for the additions everyone!]]

“Xen for remote use”:

• http://workspace.globus.org/clouds/ (Nimbus Cloud @ University of Chicago)

“Xen for sale” (infrastructure itself not available for download or purchase):

[[ This list is looking good recently though missing EC2: http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/VirtualPrivateServerProviders/ ]]

• http://aws.amazon.com/ec2
• http://www.trenden.net
• http://www.vpsland.com
• http://unixshell.com (directs to http://www.tektonic.net/managed.html)
• http://rimuhosting.com
• http://xelhosting.com
• http://www.ProVPS.com
• http://www.zhosting.de
• http://www.xenplanet.com
• http://www.budgetdedicated.com
• http://www.sitioshispanos.com
• http://www.profitux.com
• http://www.virtualisgep.hu
• http://www.xtrahost.net/xenvps
• http://vps.ispbrasil.com.br
• http://www.quantact.com
• http://callisia.com
• http://powervps.com
• http://www.linode.com
• http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/services/vds
• http://gplhost.com/hosting-vps.html
• http://www.slicehost.com
• http://www.easyvpshost.com