A very short update on Cloud Computing...
EMC: Build Their Own Server...
We remember that during EMC World in June 2012, EMC started the process of building their own cloud system... without Cisco.
EMC: The Missing Switch...
EMC acquired Nicira, to fix their hole in their networking stack, as discussed during VMWare World 2012 in August 2012. VMWare also started selling cloud engineering professional services.
Cisco: The Missing Hypervisor...
This left Cisco in a very difficult position - where would Cisco go to get a Hypervisor? Cisco just tool a significant equity stake in Parallels, in order to gain one. Perhaps, they should have thought about KVM on Illumos.
EMC & Cisco: The Missing OS...
While EMC and Cisco are continuing to gobble up components (still missing an OS) for their proprietary clouds, Oracle had released The First Cloud OS back in 2012 - it was called Solaris 11. Of course, Microsoft can't be left behind, copy'ing Oracle, saying Windows Server 2012 is the First Cloud OS! LOL!
Of course, Illumos is still an option for both EMC and Cisco... and Cisco would not have needed to buy an equity stake in Parallels, had they gone the Illumos route from the beginning. Joyent has been selling Clouds on Illumos for some time, even appearing in Gartner's Magic Quadrant starting in 2009.
What was Cisco thinking?
Showing posts with label hypervisor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hypervisor. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
EMC: Building The Cloud, Kicking Cisco Out?
EMC: Building The Cloud, Kicking Cisco Out?
Abstract:
EMC used to be a partner in the Data Center with a close relationship with vendors such as Sun Microsystems. With the movement of Sun to create ZFS and their own storage solution, the relationship was strained, with EMC responding by suggesting the discontinuance of software development on Solaris platforms. EMC purchased VMWare and entered into a partnership with Cisco - Cisco produced the server hardware in the Data Center while EMC provided VMWare software and with EMC storage. The status-quo is poised for change, again.
EMC World:
Cisco, being a first tier network provider of choice, started building their own blade platforms, entered into a relationship with EMC for their storage and OS virtualization (VMWare) technology. EMC announced just days ago during EMC World 2012 that they will start producing servers. EMC, a cloud virtualization provider, a cloud virtual switch provider, a cloud software management provider, a cloud storage provider, has now moved into the cloud server provider.
Cisco Response:
Apparently aware of the EMC development work before the announcement, Cisco released FlexPods with NetApp. The first release of FlexPods can be managed by EMC management software, because VMWare is still the hypervisor of choice. There is a move towards supporting HyperV, in a future release of FlexPods. There is also a movement towards providing complete management solution through Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud. Note, EMC's VMWare vCenter sits as a small brick in the solution acquired by Cisco, including NewScale and Tidal.
NetApp Position:
NetApp's Val Bercovici, CTO of Cloud, declares "the death of [EMC] VMAX." Cisco has been rumored to have been in a position to buy NetApp in 2009, 2010, but now with EMC marginalizing Cisco in 2012 - NetApp becomes more important, and NetApp's stock is dropping like a stone.
Cisco, missing a Server Hardware, Server Hypervisor, Server Operating System, Tape Storage, Disk Storage, and management technologies, decided to enter into a partnership with EMC. Why this happened, when system administrators in data centers used to use identical console cables for Cisco and Sun equipment - this should have been their first clue.
Had Cisco been more forward-looking, they could have purchased Sun and acquired all their missing pieces: Intel, AMD, and SPARC Servers; Xen on x64 Solaris, LDom's on SPARC; Solaris Intel and SPARC; Storage Tek; ZFS Storage Appliances; Ops Center for multi-platform systems management.
Cisco now has virtually nothing but blade hardware, started acquiring management software [NewScale and Tidal]... will NetApp be next?
Recovery for Cisco:
An OpenSolaris base with hypervisor and ZFS is the core of what Cisco really needs to rise from the ashes of their missed purchase of Sun and unfortunate partnership with EMC.
From a storage perspective - ZFS is mature, providing a near superset of all features offered by competing storage subsystems (where is the embedded Lustre?) If someone could bring clustering to ZFS - there would be nothing missing - making ZFS a complete superset of everything on the market.
Xen was created around the need for OpenSolaris support, so Xen could easily be resurrected with a little investment by Cisco. Cloud provider Joyent created KVM on top of OpenSolaris and donated the work back to Illumos, so Cisco could easily fill their hypervisor need, to compate with EMC's VMWare.
Abstract:
EMC used to be a partner in the Data Center with a close relationship with vendors such as Sun Microsystems. With the movement of Sun to create ZFS and their own storage solution, the relationship was strained, with EMC responding by suggesting the discontinuance of software development on Solaris platforms. EMC purchased VMWare and entered into a partnership with Cisco - Cisco produced the server hardware in the Data Center while EMC provided VMWare software and with EMC storage. The status-quo is poised for change, again.
[EMC World 2012 Man - courtesy: computerworld]
EMC World:
Cisco, being a first tier network provider of choice, started building their own blade platforms, entered into a relationship with EMC for their storage and OS virtualization (VMWare) technology. EMC announced just days ago during EMC World 2012 that they will start producing servers. EMC, a cloud virtualization provider, a cloud virtual switch provider, a cloud software management provider, a cloud storage provider, has now moved into the cloud server provider.
Cisco Response:
Apparently aware of the EMC development work before the announcement, Cisco released FlexPods with NetApp. The first release of FlexPods can be managed by EMC management software, because VMWare is still the hypervisor of choice. There is a move towards supporting HyperV, in a future release of FlexPods. There is also a movement towards providing complete management solution through Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud. Note, EMC's VMWare vCenter sits as a small brick in the solution acquired by Cisco, including NewScale and Tidal.
[Cisco-NetApp FlexPod courtesy The Register]
NetApp Position:
NetApp's Val Bercovici, CTO of Cloud, declares "the death of [EMC] VMAX." Cisco has been rumored to have been in a position to buy NetApp in 2009, 2010, but now with EMC marginalizing Cisco in 2012 - NetApp becomes more important, and NetApp's stock is dropping like a stone.
[former Sun Microsystems logo]
Cisco's Mishap:Cisco, missing a Server Hardware, Server Hypervisor, Server Operating System, Tape Storage, Disk Storage, and management technologies, decided to enter into a partnership with EMC. Why this happened, when system administrators in data centers used to use identical console cables for Cisco and Sun equipment - this should have been their first clue.
Had Cisco been more forward-looking, they could have purchased Sun and acquired all their missing pieces: Intel, AMD, and SPARC Servers; Xen on x64 Solaris, LDom's on SPARC; Solaris Intel and SPARC; Storage Tek; ZFS Storage Appliances; Ops Center for multi-platform systems management.
Cisco now has virtually nothing but blade hardware, started acquiring management software [NewScale and Tidal]... will NetApp be next?
[illumos logo]
Recovery for Cisco:
An OpenSolaris base with hypervisor and ZFS is the core of what Cisco really needs to rise from the ashes of their missed purchase of Sun and unfortunate partnership with EMC.
From a storage perspective - ZFS is mature, providing a near superset of all features offered by competing storage subsystems (where is the embedded Lustre?) If someone could bring clustering to ZFS - there would be nothing missing - making ZFS a complete superset of everything on the market.
Xen was created around the need for OpenSolaris support, so Xen could easily be resurrected with a little investment by Cisco. Cloud provider Joyent created KVM on top of OpenSolaris and donated the work back to Illumos, so Cisco could easily fill their hypervisor need, to compate with EMC's VMWare.
[SmartOS logo from Joyent]
SGI figured out they needed a first-class storage subsystem, and placed Nexenta (based upon Illumos) in their server lineup. What Cisco really needs is a company like Joyent (based upon Illumos) - to provide storage and a KVM hypervisor. Joyent would also provide Cisco with a cloud solution - a completely intregrated stack, from the ground on up... not as valuable as Sun, but probably a close second, at this point.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Virtualizations: LPARs, LDoms, Xen, KVM, VMWare, and HyperV
Virtualizations: LPARs, LDoms, Xen, KVM, VMWare, and HyperV
IBM LPARs
IBM LPARs is a premium proprietary virtualization technology which sits on top of IBM POWER architecture. It leverages the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) in order to manage operating system resource requests from other domains.
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/virtualization/VIO
"This allows a single machine to run multiple operating system (OS) images at the same time but each is isolated from the others. POWER4 based machines started this in 2001 by allowing many Logical Partitions (LPAR) to run on the same machine using but each using different CPUs, different memory sections and different PCI adapter slots. Next came with POWER4, the ability to dynamically change the CPU, memory and PCI adapters slots with the OS running. With the introduction of POWER5 in 2005, further Virtualization items have been added."http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/powersys/v3r1m5/index.jsp?topic=/iphb1/iphb1_vios_virtualioserveroverview.htm
"The Virtual I/O Server is software that is located in a logical partition. This software facilitates the sharing of physical I/O resources between client logical partitions within the server. The Virtual I/O Server provides virtual SCSI target, virtual fibre channel, Shared Ethernet Adapter, and PowerVM™ Active Memory Sharing capability to client logical partitions within the system. As a result, client logical partitions can share SCSI devices, fibre channel adapters, Ethernet adapters, and expand the amount of memory available to logical partitions using paging space devices. The Virtual I/O Server software requires that the logical partition be dedicated solely for its use. The Virtual I/O Server is part of the PowerVM Editions hardware feature."
SPARC LDOM's or Oracle VM for SPARC
SPARC LDOM's (or now referred to as Oracle VM for SPARC) is analagous to IBM's LPARs. IBM's VIOS appears to be analagous to Control Domain under. The LDom Control Domain can be subdivided between Control, Service, and I/O Domains - to architect redundancy and additional performance in a SPARC platform. LDom's are a free Solaris SPARC bundled virtualization technology.
http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/virtualization/oraclevm/oracle-vm-server-for-sparc-068923.html
"Oracle VM Server for SPARC (previously called Sun Logical Domains) provides highly efficient, enterprise-class virtualization capabilities for Oracle's SPARC T-Series servers. Oracle VM Server for SPARC allows you to create up to 128 virtual servers on one system to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by SPARC T-Series servers and the Oracle Solaris operating system. And all this capability is available at no additional cost."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Domains
"The Control domain, as its name implies, controls the logical domain environment. It is used to configure machine resources and guest domains... The control domain also normally acts as a service domain. Service domains present virtual services, such as virtual disk drives and network switches, to other domains… Current processors can have two service domains in order to provide resiliency against failures. I/O domain has direct ownership of and direct access to physical I/O devices, such as a network card in a PCI controller… Control and service functions can be combined within domains."There are basic technologies available through LDOM's to developers and architects such as cluster-in-a-box, redundant I/O domains, etc.
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19316-01/820-4676/ggtcs/index.html
"In this logical domains (LDoms) guest domain topology, a cluster and every node within that cluster are located on the same Solaris host. Each LDoms guest domain node acts the same as a Solaris host in a cluster. To preclude your having to include a quorum device, this configuration includes three nodes rather than only two."
Xen
There are some similarities to the way these former hypervisors and Xen is architected. Various implementations of Xen exist, such as Citrix Hypervisor, Oracle VM for x86, and OpenSolaris based Xen (now a project under Illumos.) Xen is an open-sourced hypervisor.
http://xen.org/files/Marketing/WhyXen.pdf
"A critical benefit of the Xen Hypervisor is its neutrality to the various operating systems. Due to its independence, Xen is capable of allowing any operating system (Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc) to be the Domain0 thereby ensuring the widest possible use case for customers. For example, many hardware manufacturers leverage NetBSD as their OS of choice for Domain0 and are able to deploy Xen in the manner of their choosing."
"This separation of hypervisor from the Domain0 operating system also ensures that Xen is not burdened with any operating system overhead that is unrelated to processing a series of guests on a given machine. In fact, more are beginning to break up the Domain0 from a single guest into a series of mini-OS guests each with a specific purpose and responsibility which drives better performance and security in a virtualization environment."
KVM
No, this is not a Keyboard switch. Late to the game was a Linux and OpenSolaris based virtualization technology, unfortunately called KVM, for Kernel Virtual Machine. First implemented under Linux.
http://wiki.linuxplumbersconf.org/_media/2010:02-lpc-kvmstoragestackperformance.pdf
Modern OS features such as DTrace and ZFS are now available to KVM after it was quickly ported to OpenSolaris source code base by Joyent for their Open Source SMARTOS cloud operating system and cloud offering
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTc5Ng
"Joyent has announced today they have open-sourced their SmartOS operating system, which is based on Illumos/Solaris. Additionally, this cloud software provider has ported the Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) to this platform.
Being derived from Illumos and in-turn from Solaris, SmartOS does ship with ZFS support, DTrace, and other former Sun Microsystems technologies."
Microsoft HyperV
Some vendors came very late to the hypervisor game. Microsoft HyperV have a similar architecture, available only under Intel & AMD processors, depend on hardware acceleration available under only certain CPU chips from both of those vendors.
VMWare ESXi
VMWare has a great deal of experience in hypervisors, growing out of a software-driven solution, before hardware handlers became popular (and leveraged) in the Intel/AMD world. They provide some of the best backwards-compatibility in the Intel/AMD world.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
VMware architecture Essentials !!
Since VMware vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures & future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture, it is important to understand the differences between the conventional ESX and the lean ESXi virtualization products from VMware.
Difference between the VMware ESX and ESXi 4.1
Capability
VMware ESX
VMware ESXi
Service Console
Service Console is a standard Linux environment through which a user has privileged access to the VMware ESX kernel. This Linux-based privileged access allows you to manage your environment by installing agents and drivers and executing scripts and other Linux-environment code.
VMware ESXi is designed to make the server a computing appliance. Accordingly, VMware ESXi behaves more like firmware than traditional software. VMware has created APIs through which monitoring and management tasks – traditionally done through Service Console agents – can be performed. VMware has provided remote scripting environments such as vCLI and PowerCLI to allow the remote execution of scripts and commands.
Tech Support Mode (TSM) provides a command-line interface that can be used by the administrator to troubleshoot and correct abnormal conditions on VMware ESXi hosts.
CLI-Based Configuration
VMware ESX Service Console has a host CLI through which VMware ESX can be configured. VMware ESX can also be configured using vSphere CLI (vCLI) or vSphere PowerCLI.
The vSphere CLI (vCLI) is a remote scripting environment that interacts with VMware ESXi hosts to enable host configuration through scripts or specific commands. It replicates nearly all the equivalent COS commands for configuring ESX.
VMware vSphere PowerCLI is a robust command-line tool for automathing all aspect of vSphere management, including host, network, storage, virtual machine, guest operating system, and more.
Note:
- vCLI , PowerCLI , and vSphere SDk for Perl are limited to read-only access for the free vSphere Hypervisor edition. To enable full functionality of vCLI on a VMware ESXi host, the host must be licensed with vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus.
- Certain COS commands have not been implemented in the vCLI because they pertain to the management of the COS itself and not ESXi.
Scriptable Installation
VMware ESX supports scriptable installations through utilities like KickStart.
VMware ESXi supports scriptable installations using a mechanism similar to Kickstart, and includes the ability to run pre- and post-installation scripts. VMware ESXi also provides support for post installation configuration using PowerCLI- and vCLI-based configuration scripts.
Boot from SAN
VMware ESX supports boot from SAN. Booting from SAN requires one dedicated LUN per server.
VMware ESXi may be booted from SAN. This is supported for Fibre Channel SAN, as well as iSCSI and FCoE for certain storage adapters that have been qualified for this capability.
Serial Cable Connectivity
VMware ESX supports interaction through direct-attached serial cable to the VMware ESX host.
VMware ESXi does not support interaction through direct-attached serial cable to the VMware ESXi host at this time.
SNMP
VMware ESX supports SNMP.
VMware ESXi supports SNMP when licensed with vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus.
The free vSphere Hypervisor edition does not support SNMP.
Active Directory Integration
VMware ESX provides native support for Active Directory integration.
VMware ESXi provides native support for Active Directory integration.
HW Instrumentation
Service Console agents provide a range of HW instrumentation on VMware ESX.
VMware ESXi provides HW instrumentation through CIM Providers. Standards-based CIM Providers are distributed with all versions of VMware ESXi. VMware partners include their own proprietary CIM Providers in customized versions of VMware ESXi. These customized versions are available either from VMware’s web site or the partner’s web site, depending on the partner.
Remote console applications like Dell DRAC, HP iLO, IBM RSA, and FSC iRMC S2are supported with ESXi.
Software Patches and Updates
VMware ESX software patches and upgrades behave like traditional Linux based patches and upgrades. The installation of asoftware patch or upgrade may require multiple system boots as the patch or upgrade may have dependencies on previous patches or upgrades.
VMware ESXi patches and updates behave like firmware patches and updates. Any given patch or update is all-inclusive of previous patches and updates. That is, installing patch version “n” includes all updates included in patch versions n-1, n-2, and so forth.Furthermore, third party components such as OEM CIM providers can be updated independently of the base ESXi component, and vice versa.
vSphere Web Access
vSphere Web Access is only experimentally supported in VMware ESX.
VMware ESXi does not support web access at this time.
Diagnostics and Troubleshooting
VMware ESX Service Console can be used to issue command that can help diagnose and repair support issues with the server.
VMware ESXi has several ways to enable support of the product:
- Remote command sets such as the vCLI include diagnostic commands such as vmkfstools, resxtop, and vmware-cmd.
- The console interface of VMware ESXi (known as the DCUI or Direct Console User Interface) has functionality to help repair the system, including restarting of all management agents.
- Tech Support Mode, which allows low-level access to the system so that advanced diagnostic commands can be issues.
Jumbo Frames
VMware ESX 4.1 fully supports Jumbo Frames.
VMware ESXi 4.1 fully supports Jumbo Frames.
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