SWsoft signs support agreement with Microsoft

Let me explain few things about our recent press release - http://www.swsoft.com/en/news/id,12003

·         SWsoft will be a true single point of contact for support for Virtuozzo customers. Our customers won’t have to contact Microsoft support in addition to SWsoft support for Virtuozzo for Windows issues. Instead, if there is any issue that requires help from Microsoft, we’ll contact Microsoft support engineers on behalf of our customers, and sort it out and then we'll respond to our customers.

·         Again, the agreement is not about providing free Microsoft support to our customers. This would not solve the main problem – finding out the solution, even when the problem occurs on the boundary between the technologies of different vendors. SWsoft gets 24x7 access to Microsoft support, so that when a customer has a problem, we can solve it using the best resources available from SWsoft and Microsoft engineers.

·         Microsoft is SWsoft's best partner and we will be doing more with them for our mutual customers. Overall, this agreement is a great thing for everyone involved – customers, SWsoft and Microsoft.

·         Effectively, all server applications are now supported under Virtuozzo – Microsoft has agreed to help us resolve any issues that our customers have, regardless of the application.

·         Lastly, this agreement was driven purely by the volume of customer demand. In my opinon, it validates OS virtualization as a server virtualization technology for us and the rest of the world.

 

Virtual appliances – from idea to reality

For quite a while, virtual appliances have been one of the hottest server virtualization themes. The idea is to package an application as a pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run virtual machine. Virtual appliances provide important benefits:

·         An ISV can pick and custom-configure the OS, which becomes merely a library, much like QT, STL or MFC. There is only one platform to develop and test for, and the configuration is always known.

·         Zero installation and zero configuration – just copy down the image and run it. Plus you get all the manageability benefits of virtual machines – migration, backup/restore, HA, etc.

However, there is a price to pay for having an entire OS embedded into each appliance.

·         OS sprawl – every application now comes with its own OS instance that needs to be maintained and updated. I’ve already written about it here and here.

·         Size – each appliance image contains an entire OS and a swap partition/file for it – at least 1GB, even of the OS instance is highly customized and stripped down. It takes a non-trivial time to send such image over network. It also takes a non-trivial amount of storage to keep a library of such images.

Images are large because the OS inside the appliance, however customized and stripped down, is still responsible for the bulk of the image size. Compared to the OS, application is much smaller and much less complex. Remember the old joke?

A man is walking down the street with two large suitcases. Someone asks him what the time is. The man puts down his luggage, looks at his watch and tells the exact time, temperature, air pressure, weather forecast for next week and closures of the local roads for next month. “Wow, nice watch” – “indeed”, says the man, looking at the suitcases, “but these batteries are killing me.”

Only in this case a proper analogy for the OS would be a pick-up truck, not two suitcases.

·         Desktop – Windows cannot be distributed with an application, which means that desktop appliances, which in my opinion may have even greater potential than server ones, are out – at least for now.

·         Updates – since the OS inside the appliance is probably customized, standard update and patch management software won’t work. This means that each ISV now needs to become a service provider just to distribute the updates for the applications. Administrators, in turn, will have to deal multiple service providers just to get the applications updated.

·         Security – typically, enterprise IT tightly controls which OSes are allowed and how locked-down they are. With virtual appliances, they lose this control and have to completely trust the appliance vendor to take all the necessary security measures.

To be fair, virtual appliances are a great idea and these problems are not at all insurmountable. Virtuozzo already solves most of them, and we know how to solve them in the Parallels products line, too. It’s only a matter of time and resourcesJ

 

VMware goes public

Yesterday, EMC announced its plans to sell 10% of VMware in an IPO. It attracted so much attention I decided to throw my 2 cents into the pile of news hype. OK, trying to be brief:

• VMware’s IPO is definitely a sign that virtualization market is quickly going from red-hot to white-hot, which is very good news for any virtualization vendor. Especially for the two-in-one company like SWsoft with Virtuozzo and Parallels.
• A 10% sale makes VMware about as much independent from EMC as Parallels is from SWsoft. It’s unlikely that EMC competitors - IBM, HP, Fujitsu and others - will now consider VMware a much better partner candidate.
• Going public means having a solid long-term strategy. Yet, so far, the EMC/VMware merger has been a financial move. VMware has not done much to integrate its product line with EMC, and has mostly acted on its own.

The last point brings us back to the question – will virtualization become an integral part of existing platforms or a platform on its own? VMware apparently is going for the latter, putting itself against Microsoft and Linux – so far successfully. However, in just a couple of years, with Viridian/Xen hypervisors and Virtuozzo integrated into existing platforms and a number of management vendors supporting multiple virtualization technologies, it will be a very different game.

About benchmarking

As far as I know, VMware still does not allow 3^rd parties to benchmark their product. Fortunately, VMware has benchmarked their own product and made the results publicly available. Here (http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2007/02/a_performance_c.html) and here (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/hypervisor_performance.pdf) you can find a comparison of VMware ESX and Xen.

I applaud VMware for publishing industry-first comparative virtualization benchmark. Here are my comments that I hope will help VMware to make the comparison more accurate:

·         Take the latest version of Xen – Xen 3.0.4 has been around for a while.

·         Include Linux guests. Xen has never claimed any decent support for Windows. As all of virtualization-savvy people know, under Xen approach (para-virtualization), achieving maximum performance would require modifying source code of Windows, which only Microsoft can do. The only version of Xen that is supposed to provide decent Windows performance is Xen Enterprise 3.1 running on VT-enabled CPUs.

·         Use Xen Enterprise on VT-enabled hardware. It is Xen Enterprise (not the open source version) and ESX (not VMware Server or Workstation or Player) that are positioned for enterprise workloads.

·         Use multiple guests and Virtual SMP. The paper says that Xen could not boot SMP Windows and it was not possible to run multiple guests under Xen. Well, I’m sure if Xen Enterprise was used, some of the problems would go away. I’m also sure that they could call Xen tech support and ask for help J.

·         Limit the “performance comparison of the hypervisors” to performance (not features or manageability) and hypervisors (the lowest-level components in V-stack). It may be true that Xen suffers from “the lack of such RAS, scalability, management, and distributed virtualization capabilities”, but it’s not really relevant to the subject of the paper.

·         Add Virtuozzo to the pack? There is nothing in the workloads that would prevent running ESX against Virtuozzo. I’m quite sure that both multiple guests and SMP guests would workJ

The very last question I have – if I run the very same tests myself on ESX and then Virtuozzo and Parallels – will VMware allow me to post the results?