Time for preinstalled Virtuozzo?

Microsoft has just published their “Windows Principles (Twelve Tenets to Promote Competition)”. You can read them in full at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/windowsprinciples.mspx

My favorite is tenet #1:

1. Installation of any software. Computer manufacturers and customers are free to add any software to PCs that run Windows. More broadly, every computer manufacturer and customer is free to install and promote any operating system, any application, and any Web service on PCs that run Windows. Ultimately, end users are free to choose which software they prefer to use.

Now, OEMs can preinstall Virtuozzo on their Windows machines without being too worried about Microsoft’s reaction. Do you think that pre-installation of Virtuozzo can save users time and money or users would prefer to do it themselves? Post your comments and vote for preinstalled Virtuozzo.

SWsoft Developer Network just went live

I’m very excited to announce that my team has just released the SWsoft Developer Network (SWDN). People familiar with MSDN will easily recognize where the inspiration came from J Read more in the press release and FAQs. For Virtuozzo users, the big news is the availability of developer licenses. If you subscribe for Professional Developer Plan (free for the whole year), you’ll be able to download and use Virtuozzo for development and testing purposes – free. In other words, everyone can download and play with Virtuozzo in their test labs.

Microsoft goes Xen

Of all recent virtualization-related announcements, an announcement of Microsoft/Xen partnership is the most commented. Alessandro Perilli’s virtualization.info site posted an interesting comment and VMware’s reaction was immediate, too. Industry analyst Neil Macehiter provides insightful comments, as well. Let me join with few observations on my own:

·         MS knows Xen. Xen was originally developed as a research project at Cambridge University, UK sponsored by Microsoft. Architecturally, the upcoming Microsoft hypervisor is very similar to Xen, which of course might be just a coincidence. With all of this in mind, it should not be a huge technical challenge for XenSource engineers to “enlighten” Linux to run on top of Microsoft Hypervisor when it makes its debut (which appears to be no earlier than 2008).

·         The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It looks like the move by Microsoft with the help of the enemy Xen is aimed to displace the enemy of the enemy VMware, at least at the lowest levels of virtualization stack. Now we’re told that the built-in paravirtualization-based Windows hypervisor will run Linux on Windows without sacrificing any performance.

Here is my conclusion:

·         The funny thing is, all of this misses the point because the value of virtualization can only be fully realized with effective management tools, which will increasingly differentiate virtualization solutions. Meanwhile, Microsoft must enable Linux to run on Windows virtualization and has engaged XenSource to help. Microsoft wants people to believe if you use Windows-based virtualization, Linux will somehow work and XenSource will support it. It’s sort of like being at the starting gate when the race has already taken off.

·         With this partnership, Xen loses its advantage as the only platform for running paravirtualized Linux. Now, why would channel partners invest in training their staff to sell and support Xen if they can just wait until Microsoft releases its hypervisor, which they will need to adopt anyway. Is Xen just desperate? Are they trying to get acquired by MS? No? Then, please, explain to me how Xen is going to make money if their core technology is free and their management tools are way behind VMware?

What is your opinion?

Virtualization benchmark

After some thinking, we decided that SWsoft needs to take a lead and help create a virtualization benchmark that would allow IT organizations to assess different aspects of server virtualization technologies.

Here is the current thinking about the benchmark, and as usual I’m looking forward to comments:

·         The benchmark will be focused on server virtualization. When we have desktop product, we’ll focus on a benchmark for desktop technologies, but for now, it’s just servers.

·         The benchmark will be comprehensive and will measure several aspects of the technology.

·         SWsoft will work with all interested parties – virtualization technologies vendors, hardware and software vendors and, of course, benchmark vendors – to ensure that the benchmark is accepted by the entire industry.

Here is the current thinking on the metrics of the benchmark:

·         Isolation - We’ll determine how strong and complete the isolation between virtual environments is. Hereafter, by “virtual environment” I mean not just Virtuozzo VE but rather a system partition created by a virtualization technology.

·         Security - We’ll perform several attacks on the target system, trying to measure how robust the system is.

·         Manageability - We’ll perform typical management operations – such as provisioning, starting and stopping of virtual environments and applications – and measure how long does it take to do those as well as how easy or confusing it is for an admin to do them.

·         Performance - We’ll run a series of well-known performance tests, measuring performance of a single environment as well as performance of multiple concurrently running environments.

·         Scalability - We’ll measure how well a technology can use the resources provided by the hardware.

·         Density - We’ll measure how many concurrent environments it is possible to run with acceptable performance.

·         Resource management - We’ll determine if resource management capabilities provided by a virtualization technology are adequate for the test scenarios.

Tests won’t correspond to metrics 1:1. For example, performance will probably include several tests, while density will probably be measured in the same performance tests.

That’s it for now, but there will be more. I’ll do a separate post for each benchmarking metric, trying to communicate:

·         Why it’s an important metric

·         How we’re going to measure it

·         My speculation on results

Meanwhile, please, send me your thoughts (or post a comment) on

·         What metrics should be added/removed from the benchmark

·         What real-world scenarios we should try to emulate

·         What are specific benchmarks you think we should re-run in virtualize environment?

Looking forward to your comments!