Archive for Interviews
I recently had a really interesting call with Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt about a significant announcement that should impact many cloud computing decisions in the future.
Simon Crosby
Xen.org is set to release Xen Cloud Platform (XCP). XCP will provide essentially a ready-made set of federated open source cloud enabling projects under a single distribution to help accelerate organizations that want to deploy a private or hybrid cloud.
Press Release Quick Read:
A key focus of the XCP initiative will be to provide technology that permits easy interoperability between internal enterprise “private clouds” and leading external cloud platforms like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers.
The Xen Cloud Platform will accelerate the development of a wide variety of key technologies and standards that address this need in an open, non-proprietary way, including:
- Broad interoperability across disparate virtualization platforms – Through standards such as the Distributed Management Task Force ( DMTF) Open Virtualization Format ( OVF), virtual appliances will be packaged in a hypervisor-independent format for easy transport between internal and external clouds with no proprietary vendor lock-in.
- Support for new and existing applications – Existing applications currently running in enterprise datacenters will be enabled to run in Xen-based cloud platforms without modification. This flexibility will allow users to choose where each application should run based on business needs rather than limitations of the technology or proprietary requirements of their current virtualization or cloud vendor.
- Federated compute capacity – With federated capacity, the process of moving application workloads between
Ian Pratt
virtual datacenters and disparate cloud service providers will be simplified. Standardized virtualization management – Support for DMTF standards will allow complete open management of virtual infrastructures.
- Rich virtual networking capabilities – A powerful open virtual switch will make it easy for cloud providers to add sophisticated network service offerings, including per-tenant network management, intrusion detection, firewalling, routing, and load balancing.
- Cloud-scale virtual storage infrastructures – Advanced storage features required by enterprise workloads will enable virtual machines and their physical storage to be widely separated without disrupting application performance.
Citrix to open source their code
I asked Simon about a detail he had mentioned during their initial comments to make sure I was understanding accurately. He confirmed that proprietary code that XenSource and Citrix developed as value-added features such as XenMotion, virtual switches and storage links will be part of the open-source code from Citrix that the XCP will have as part of the distribution.
My analysis: Why would Citrix open-source their code?
We discussed the the expected impact to Citrix and XenServer. Both Simon and Ian think that having a bigger footprint of XenServer is good for Citrix and ISVs in general because the XCP won’t necessarily be focused on the management layer, but the foundational components to having a stable, functioning cloud platform. After all, Citrix is already providing XenServer for free.
In fact, the orchestration and management capabilities of open source projects Eucalyptus and OpenNebula.org as well as commercial offerings from vendors and cloud providers will integrate with XCP since these projects are Xen-based already.
Simon said the plan is for Citrix Essentials to work with XCP, so this makes business sense to me. Citrix gets more XenServer in organizations that already are running Xen to power their clouds and have an opportunity to sell more Citrix Essentials.
Release Date
Ian said that the release is scheduled for Q409, but reminded me that open-source projects don’t necessarily adhere to firm release dates because of their community-dependent nature. Ian felt that it would be sooner than later however, because all of the components are already being used in production environments, so there shouldn’t be the version 1.0 mystery that most products have and its just packaging them together into a cohesive distribution.
Doubletake Product Suite Announcement
Posted by: | CommentsWhenever you are trying to come up with the best solution for physical to virtual (P2V) migrations, there are several things to consider. Depending on your downtime window, you sometimes have to get really creative. When the downtime window is very short, it also shortens the list of suitable methods to accomplish the P2V task. In that mix of options to have in your solution arsenal, Doubletake is a good one. I recently talked with Bob Roudebush from Doubletake about their new product suite.
Replication often happens at the hardware level with SAN mirroring but that can be costly or just not practical, depending on the project requirements. “Figuring out a way to replicate Exchange from one site to another is always a challenge. We do it with real time data replication with software. Because it’s software, some of the biggest benefits are the cost savings and no big costs with hardware.”
I asked about what host systems Doubletake works with currently and what is on their roadmap. “Our software works with virtual machines as well as physical. We’ve figured out with software what a SAN normally does. We have an edition of our product for ESX and one for Hyper-V, and XenServer is on the roadmap. The Linux version allows for block-level replication.”
Doubletake started out with a nice replication offering, but with this recent announcement, they’re seeking to become more. According to Bob, “The Company we’ve become over the years is much different than when we started. We aren’t just a point problem solver. We now have the ability to move data around in real time without the users knowing about it. For the first time, we are unveiling a workload product suite.”
The suite’s key capabilities include:
- Workload Portability (Double-Take Move): Move workloads between any combination of physical and virtual hardware (P2P, P2V, V2P or V2V) within datacenters for hardware refreshes, or across locations for datacenter migrations and consolidations.
- Workload Backup (Double-Take Backup): Continuously backup workloads and recover them on-demand to a new physical or virtual machine. Using CDP capabilities, recovery can also be done at the item level to any point in time.
- Workload Availability (Double-Take Availability): Ensure the availability of critical IT workloads for disaster recovery and business continuity using real-time replication and failover that can protect individual applications, entire servers or virtualized workloads running on VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.
- Workload Flexibility (Double-Take Flex): Easily manage any workload by booting it from iSCSI SANs, regardless of hardware.
I think Doubletake Flex is an interesting product. Bob said, “The idea is to make it easier to manage a workload to boot from network instead of local disks. Using the standard hardware you can boot to the iSCSI SAN. Blade servers are a good example. You may not have a lot of storage, and you can boot to an iSCSI LUN. We have a central console and assign MAC address to LUNs and it contacts to our management server to see where it needs to boot from and then it boots from the iSCSI SAN. ”
So, whenever you are faced with a ridiculous downtime window for your conversions, make sure to check out Doubletake’s solutions.
I’d like to thank Bob for taking his time to discuss the new Doubletake product suite.
Citrix Partners React to Upcoming VMworld Announcements
Posted by: | CommentsIt what may be the worst-kept secrets in our business, the leaked announcements coming next week from Citrix at VMworld Europe are getting a great deal of attention. I recently discussed some of my thoughts in an article with Colin Steele at Techtarget .
The article was a follow up to this article where I didn’t agree with many of the Citrix partners that are frustrated by how Citrix has handled XenServer. I’ve always read the situation quite differently and I think that its starting to become more public how Citrix knows what they are doing with XenServer, Hyper-V and the Microsoft relationship.
Citrix still has more interesting announcements that haven’t been widely spread yet, so there’s more to come next week. I will say that nobody has been more successful than Citrix when dealing with Microsoft to mutually benefit both companies.
Check Out My Interview With Steve Keilen and Jerry Melnick from Marathon Technologies
Posted by: | CommentsI had a chance to talk with the fellows from Marathon Technologies recently. Steve and Jerry discuss the Citrix partnership and how the HA features from Marathon technologies are integrated with XenServer 5. The interview is located here.
Interview With Peter Levine from Citrix
Posted by: | CommentsCheck out my latest interview with Peter Levine, the Senior Vice President and general manager of the Virtualization division at Citrix. Peter and I discussed the new XenServer and how it competes and works with Hyper-V.
Citrix Announces 3D Capabilities in XenDesktop: 10x Less Bandwidth
Posted by: ssnowden | Comments CommentsI recently spoke with Calvin Hsu from Citrix regarding the new capabilites they are including in the Enterprise and Platinum versions of XenDesktop. Citrix HDX is the blanket name for a suite of protocol enhancements that are focused to improve the end user experience of graphically intense applications on XenDesktop.
If you haven’t tested virtual desktops yet, they are a great solution and work really well to a targeted subset of the normal enterprise end user population. Task-based workers and users with little or no graphically intense applications are prime candidates for desktop virtualization, but users that do require more graphics, to this point, haven’t been good desktop virtualization candidates.
I tested the beta of HDX when it first came out, and it does improve the graphical experience appreciably. I could actually watch YouTube videos on XenDesktop.
10 Times Less Bandwidth
Citrix says they conducted tests pitting HDX versus Teradici PCoIP with host hardware accelerators. According to Citrix, they set up two machines exactly alike, one using HDX and the other using Teradici PCoIP with the hardware host card. Citrix says the results showed the machine with HDX consumed 10 times less bandwidth versus the PCoIP machine.
My analysis:
I fully expect VMware to make an announcement that shows the exact reverse results that Citrix is showing. But I think the take away from this is bigger than the tit-for-tat numbers games that vendors particpate in for marketing. If HDX can help deliver graphical content to end users better and is 10x more efficient than the competition; that will force the competition to step up their quality, and a better experience to more of the end user population is the result. That’s good for us because we take yet another step in the progression of having a legitimate option to provision fully functional desktops from the data center to much more of the end user population.
I’d like to thank Calvin for his time talking with me about desktop virtualization in general, and HDX specifically.
More on Teradici is located here and more on HDX can be found on this web site.