Third generation of the Superdomes

HP has announced that the third generation of its “big iron” machines is available - http://news.com.com/Welcome+to+HPs+third+Superdome/2100-1006-6045653.html. Each superdome has anywhere from 8 to 64 Itanium 2 CPUs. With upcoming dual core Itanium chips, it will go up to 128 high-performance cores per server. How can someone efficiently utilize such power? Hardware partitions are a good option, but they are not very flexible. Resources cannot be dynamically re-allocated between partitions, and, more importantly, there is the manageability overhead of maintaining an instance of the operating system in each partition.

I think the natural choice for Superdome customers is to use Virtuozzo for Linux for IA-64 architecture. It’s the only virtualization software available for Itanium, and has the same sophisticated real-time resource management as its x86 sibling and provides the same manageability advantage of patching all environments at once. Actually, Virtuozzo is already being distributed with Itanium machines. We’ve just announced an agreement with another major vendor of Itanium-based servers - http://www.wcm.bull.com/internet/pr/rend.jsp?DocId=114977&lang=en.

Stay tuned, coming soon I’ll explain the manageability advantages of Virtuozzo operating system virtualization over hardware and hypervisor-based virtualization.

VMWare Best Practices Forum

Yesterday, I went to the VMWare best Practices Forum to learn more about people using virtualization in the real world. I learned some new stuff:

VMotion complexity. Man, it’s complex! To use VMotion, you need a machine with Fiber Channel SAN (no iSCSI yet) and at least 2 (3 is recommended) network interfaces. Plus, not all the hardware that can run ESX is compatible with VMotion. Contrary to the expectations, you cannot always move a VM from one ESX machine to another ESX machine – they must have compatible chipsets.

ESX Overhead. VMWare customers were invited to tell a success story. They consolidated their old servers, running 1 app per CPU with barely 5% utilization, and achieved 40-60% utilization. The resultant density is 3-4 apps per CPU on the target machine. Well, 4 apps at 5% each accounts only for 20% of CPU utilization. That means that VMWare itself used 20-40% of the capacity. VMWare takes up more resources than the useful workload. Am I missing something?

Performance monitoring does not work. It turned out that performance monitoring tools (Windows performance counters and PERFMON) do not work correctly inside VM if you try to use them to monitor your virtual hardware. You need to use different tools. Overall, from what I learned, there are a lot of cases, when virtual machine needs to be handled differently than physical machine. A virtualization abstraction, at least as implemented by VMWare, is a fairly leaky abstraction – be careful with your assumptions.

Well, in any case, VMWare is still a very respectable mature technology. Even if it requires more resources than the useful workload that it runs, it still provides very significant savings to its users. Naturally, I wonder how much money could be saved using Virtuozzo, which provides much lower overhead and much better manageability.

We were there first !!!

I must tell the truth to the worldJ In a few news articles, including the one cited in my previous post, Virtuozzo is mentioned as a technology that follows the same approach as Solaris Containers. The truth is that we’ve started working on Virtuozzo in late 1999 and we’ve been selling it since 2001. Virtuozzo for Linux is a very mature technology with more than 5 years of real-world history.

If you take a careful look at Solaris and Virtuozzo, you’ll find that they’re very similar, but Solaris is few years behind on features such as management tools, zero-down time migration, resource management, manageability, etc.

We have more than 6,500 physical servers running Virtuozzo and more than 300,000 Virtual Environments running in production across the world. I wonder how these numbers compare to other virtualization technologies.

Thumbs up for OpenVZ

Red Hat has just announced its plans to integrate virtualization in Fedora Core and RHEL - http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-6049764.html. Although Xen would be the first technology adopted, Virtuozzo (actually, its open-source variant OpenVZ) will follow fairly soon. Moreover, Linus Torvalds himself has expressed strong interest in merging key OpenVZ patches into the kernel - http://lwn.net/Articles/171025/. He seemed to immediately recognize the value that lightweight OS-level virtualization can bring to various open-source projects, not just OpenVZ.

With SuSE hopefully adopting OpenVZ soon, a key part of Virtuozzo technology is quickly moving into mainstream, at least on the Linux platform. Great for us, great for Linux users!

IDF minutes

IDF rules. Thank you, Intel, and especially Ron for inviting us to IDF. Plenty of interesting information, lots of promising contacts – overall great.

Yes, Virtuozzo is a virtualization technology. No, it’s not a VMM or hypervisor. After two days at IDF, it turned out that the most difficult task is to explain the difference between classic virtual machines and Virtuozzo. The classic approach has been around for so long that people think it’s the only one possible, and they need a little bit of help to start thinking outside this box. That said, once the difference is clear, everyone is very impressed with our technology.

Here is how I’ve been explaining the difference between Virtuozzo and VMMs.

All Virtuozzo VEs (virtual environments) share the same kernel and, if so configured, applications – both on disk and in memory. Sharing is copy-on-write, so any VE can safely alter the shared files and memory pages, if needed.

Thanks to the sharing, VE only carries the bits that are unique, unlike a classic VM that carries all OS, all applications, swap file and what not – both on disk and in memory.

As a result, a typical VE image is 10-20 Mbytes in size - about 100 times smaller than VM image – and can be deployed very fast. Also, our customers typically have 200-400 VEs per CPU – about 100 times more than the number of VMs one could have – those are real life numbers from the customers.

Pay once, patch once, have it all. Sharing saves our customers a lot of money. First, they don’t have to pay for additional OS licenses running inside VEs. Second, patching incurs significantly less downtime – you only need to apply the patch once per computer, regardless of the number of VEs on it.

Because Virtuozzo doesn’t interfere between OS and hardware, there is no need to virtualize or emulate physical devices - all resources of the machine can be made available to a single VE – all 64 CPUs, 256 GBytes of RAM, all disks, all network interfaces.

Go Parallels. Speaking about classic VMs. There are scenarios where Virtuozzo can’t help, such as demonstrating a Linux version of Virtuozzo on my Windows laptop. I used to use VMWare to demo the product, but not anymore. My 3 demo VMs – one with Virtuozzo Windows and two with Virtuozzo Linux – now run under Parallels Workstation. Parallels had a booth next to ours – that’s how I met them. They have a very robust product for a bargain price of $50.


What’s next? I’m still digesting all the cool stuff Intel presented at IDF – perhaps I’ll share some of my thinking in this blog. Stay tuned.

Let's get started!

I’m Ilya Baimetov, a Product Manager at SWsoft - starting this blog at IDF (Intel Developer’s Forum - http://www.intel.com/idf/us/spring2006/) in San Francisco. Intel invested in SWsoft and we’re Intel’s virtualization technology partners – they got us a little booth in the “Virtualization Technology” part of the Expo.

I’m very upbeat about being here at IDF. We have just shipped new releases of Virtuozzo for both Windows and Linux - check out the details here.

Virtuozzo Windows is now version 3.51 (a lucky number for Windows, if you’re old enough to remember its history). The most important new feature is VZP2V (Physical to Virtual migration) – you can now migrate your existing Windows 2003 server inside a Virtuozzo VPS.

Virtuozzo for Linux is now 3.0, featuring live migration of Virtual Private Server between physical nodes. Conceptually, it’s close to the similar features of VMWare ESX and Xen, but it doesn’t require SAN. That’s true – we migrate the local storage from one VPS to another, and we manage to make it virtually unnoticeable for the clients.

And, of course, both Windows and Linux versions now have support for the latest OS versions (Windows Server 2003 R2 and Linux kernel 2.6), improved performance and other small but important features that our customers asked us to put in the products.
Please, come see us at IDF, booth 946.

Stay tuned for the news from IDF!