Citrix XenServer Competition for VMware February 22, 2008
Posted by roxiecat in Citrix, Industry Directions, Industry Vendors/Technologies, Microsoft, VMware, Virtualisation.Tags: Citrix, Citrix Presentation Server, VMware, XenServer
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Citrix have now released XenServer part of their Citrix Delivery suite, is this product going to be a real competitor to VMware I am hoping so but time will tell. Some of the advantages I see with this path Citrix are taking is that they now have a set of products which covers a very good range of customers requirements.
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Virtualising applications with Citrix Presentation server been around forever and a day
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Virtualising desktops, Citrix got in to this market a couple of years ago initially with their Desktop Broker product which essentially just acted as a nice interface between the desktop and VMWare hosting the virtual desktops nice but not a must have. This changed to Desktop Server last year with a few enhancements and less need to rely on VMWare but still not a complete product. Now called XenDesktop and used in conjunction with XenServer no requirement for VMware (according to Citrix anyway).
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Application streaming – with the release of Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 they introduced things such as application streaming up against the likes of Softricity, it appears okay but haven’t seen many customers using this function yet
Newest introduction is XenServer direct competitor is VMWare (and possibly MS Virtual Server) looking at the initial write ups it looks pretty good its based on the Xen hypervisor model so very efficient they have different flavours which follows their existing model (platinum, enterprise, standard etc).
One of the things I quite like is that their management interface does not require a dedicated server it can just be hosted on a desktop from what I’ve seen it looks to have all the functions you’d expect of a management interface, is it useful or easy to use that I’ve yet to see it operational as I’m yet to download my free version and try it out. Its free though you don’t pay for it unlike the VMware console so thats a good thing.
While I don’t necessarily believe that one vendor fits all in this case I think Citrix have done the right thing virtualising the server platform is almost a natural evolution for them given they were trying to virtualise most other things as well. I’d just like to see some real competition in the market against VMware not because I don’t like their products they are very good and well established but just because like anything competition is good.
Price wise looks on par Enterprise edition perpetual cost is US$2600 2 sockets and $400 annual subscription so pricing wise it should compete very nicely with VM, I haven’t seen Platinum Edition pricing but the only obvious difference between it and Enterprise is the ability to Dynamically provision virtual and physical servers so cost wise shouldn’t be far off Enterprise.
The last bit which I think is just wonderful now that Citrix have their own virtualised server product they are quite happy to state that they will support and recommend virtualising Citrix Presentation Server something funnily enough you could never get out of them when it was either Microsoft Virtual Server or VMware.
Opalis Run Book Automation for VMWare (vs Opsware) January 30, 2008
Posted by Joined TCG Effort in Automation, ITIL, Opalis, Opsware, VMware, Virtualisation.Tags: ITIL, Opalis, Opsware, RBA, Run Book Automation
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Last year several of us attended presentations ran by Opalis both in Sydney and Melbourne and called “Tech Workshop: Operational Readiness for VMware and/or ITIL”. Having some time on the hands another chat compilation has been created:
Kelley Johnston: I thought this workshop was going to just be another VMWare product conference where a new version of VMWare was to be announced. It was, and somewhere around election day a nice bit of VMWare VS-O product will surface. Cool, but honestly not earth-shaking. Essentially (a) You will soon be able to boot VMWare hypervisor on a blank system from a thumb drive, and (b) Dell, IBM and HP will now let you buy servers with the VMWare Hypervisor in firmware, on the motherboard, supported by new chipsets from Intel. Worth seeing for the free orange juice, maybe.However, in my opinion VMWare was completely upstaged by a product called Opalis Integration Server that implements what Gartner calls “RBA” (Run Book Automation) with a very comprehensive end-to-end data centre workflow orchestration tool. It doesn’t just document or design work, it does work, as in actually scripts and runs the tasks for you.This is a graphic tool that allows you to develop workflows in the data centre, and it rides on top of some of our old favorites like HP Openview, BMC Patrol, Tivoli, MS SMS, Legato, Symantec, FTP etc. (many etc’s). You grab an icon, draw connectors (interface objects), assign servers (or clone a VMWare instance) and other parameters, move files or trigger other events all via a graphic icon-based UI full of nifty icons that click into object interfaces into products commonly associated with ITIL processes. You can also define your own interface to anything that supports SOAP/WSDL web services.
What does this mean?
It means you can define repeatable ITIL processes and automate them, cut down DC operational costs and improve quality. I mean it.
In just one example, an operational event such as a Tivoli or HP Openview incident can be grabbed by Opalis which can do stuff with it — send emails, configure a new VMWare server after grabbing a configuration from a CMDB, perhaps swap VMX instances, do specific file copies via FTP, do a backup, manage and perform a recovery, add an AD user, run a cron job on some other Solaris server, keep a BMC Patrol support desk incident up to date, acknowledge an Openview event, reset a server, reset a user password, etc etc. and all within a single named RBA process. And you can have processes call other processes, like little reusable ITIL scriptlets.
It’s almost like having a graphic programming language for all those hundreds of little things you do in a data centre. You can also use it as an engine for defining a complex cross-platform workflow that describes say, 90% of a supply chain integration workflow using pre-existing components. I suspect this product will grow beyond the data centre myself — check with me in a year on this.
I’d give the product at least 4 out of 5 stars just from the demo (even allowing for demo deviltry). Very much worth a look. Here’s a nifty screen shot to help, just below. http://www.opalis.com .
Justin Hobson: Seems very interesting, but I just remembered that Opsware is supposed to be a global standard for this kind of toolset.
Either tool aside, these tools are usually great for automating processes, reducing the number of errors when it’s done manually and provided a definable and documented process.
On the flip side though, they are usually costly to implement and as such the most value comes from when they can be deployed in a traditional outsourced environment. e.g. with a structured network that hierarchically connects all out clients back to a central “Manager of Manager (MoM)” type networks, from where all our clients can be managed, with fewer engineers/servers etc.
Without such a backbone we would otherwise end up seeing many disconnected instances of these tools, that will mean increased complexity, licensing costs etc, and whilst bringing some benefits to us/our clients.
Kelley Johnston: It’s a very interesting field. Opsware is good too (incidentally it was acquired by HP in July this year). Would be interesting to see a shootout of Opsware vs Opalis. The latter product is considerably newer, looked very easy to use, very visual and coherent approach, and is apparently gaining market share as well as having being voted “Best of TechEd 2007″. So it’s gaining street cred, even if it doesn’t have the track record of Opsware.
This raises the question — do we keep with the standard or do we evaluate this upstart to see if it does a better job at managing DC operational costs? Standards are good, but you have to weigh a product on the same scales our customers would use, and a better / newer product sometimes comes along that can achieve a better ROI. We’re in this for our customers, not our selves, and they pay the bills. We have to continuously look to improve our offers or our customers will do end-arounds on us.
Technology moves awfully fast. In my experience “easier” generally equates to “cheaper”, so I wonder if the product has improvements that address some of the concerns you mention (I’m not an Opsware guru). As you say, though, either product has got to be better than chasing ops processes by hand. An alternative product might also be attractive to customers who are aligned differently from the HP camp, too. I’d say the best advice is “watch this space”, because Gartner seems to have RBA on its radar now and they’re um, reasonably influential.
PS: http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=116542
Turns out the CEO of Opalis (Todd DeLaughter) is ex HP GM of the OpenView product line.
Ex HP exec jumps ship to chair a product firm, HP buys competing product.
Which virtual server do I choose? January 9, 2008
Posted by krjohnston in Enterprise Architecture, Industry Directions, Microsoft, Systems Integration, VMware.Tags: IT, virtual server, virtualisation, virtualization
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Kelley Johnston, “Large Multinational Consulting & Outsourcing Company”
Spoiler alert: I will not make you skip ahead for the answer — as you’d expect, I’ll say something like “Can’t tell you, mate — it’s horses for courses and you’ll have to decide what works best for you”. There you go, no argument or contradiction possible, and I haven’t committed to anything. The lawyers love me.
Now that that’s over with, those of you who are still interested in a comparison of virtual server platforms (and I thank both of you for staying) will probably agree that there are three major players in this space; Microsoft Virtual Server, VMWare and Xen. I will discuss their merits in terms of Simple Solutions and Hosted (Enterprise) Solutions. A third category, Development Solutions, I’ll leave for another time.
Simple Solutions for the desktop or laptop
Two of the players are free-ish, and one is FOSS (Free Open Source Software) published under the GPL license.
I say “free-ish” with respect to Microsoft Virtual Server, in the sense that Microsoft will only provide the base “Free” Virtual Server in trade for a considerable amount of your personal IP and an explicit agreement to receive, ahem, “targeted marketing communications” for a while. This may be worth your bandwidth (if you don’t mind the minor investment in processed meat products) and there are always inbox filters and the promise of an opt-out after a period of time.
VMWare is a bit simpler to download, and provides their free VMWare Player for those of you happy to run a pre-existing appliance (self-contained application designed for a virtual environment) or work within the elegant simplicity of … ah, I just checked and you don’t even get a command prompt, looks like you need to upgrade to Workstation to get one of those. That costs money after the 30 day free trial expires. Works fine for all of that.
Xen is free, but requires a specific operating system port in order to run; it won’t run a native version of Windows, for example. This is supposed to improve performance. This also means the software is free, but getting it to work for you on anything other than specific non-Windows platforms would require a fair bit of support. I’d rate this either “Free, but not terribly useful” or “Useful, but expensive to support” with little in-between. Because I find this situation terribly confusing (i.e. it wouldn’t fit my prose style) I’ll skip discussion of Xen until a later time, or you can see what Citrix has done with their recently acquired services group XenSource.
Here’s the syllogism:
• Microsoft Virtual Server only runs on Microsoft systems currently running Internet Information Server (IIS).
• Microsoft Virtual Server will run on 64-bit machinery, but will not support 64-bit Windows instances.
• VMWare plays on multiple platforms including Microsoft operating systems, and will support 64 bit instances on 64 bit hardware.
• Xen plays only on versions of operating systems specifically ported to Xen.
Would any of these be useful to your garden-variety desktop or laptop user? Well, the two free-ish ones are good — it’s not that hard to set up IIS on a PC or laptop (see MSDN for how to do this http://www.iis.net/articles/view.aspx/IIS7/Explore-IIS7/Getting-Started/Overview-of-IIS7-Setup) provided you’re running at least Windows XP Pro or greater, the XP Home version being presumably insufficiently cosmopolitan to talk to the Internet.
VMWare doesn’t care, it’s kind of “run what you brung” so any virtual machines you run will need to bridge communications to the outside world. On the plus side, you don’t have to worry about IIS running before setup; on the negative side, you still have to setup your own web server within the Virtual Machine (VM) on anything you develop. It seems to provide the least irritating download and installation experience, though, with a simple download link for the player.
What I Do
My favourite Simple Solution on the desktop and laptop is to run VMWare Player using a pre-configured appliance package such as Deki Wiki. This is fairly interesting, in that it’s a VMWare instance running on top of XP Pro, within which a tailored Debian Linux instance runs an application consisting of Apache web server, Mono applications server (which is, strangely enough, a Linux port of a Windows development API) with MySQL holding the data together.
But don’t let this disarmingly simple implementation throw you. Just download the appliance and point VMWare player to the file and follow the few simple prompts for passwords and suchlike, and you’re in. The overall installation packaging is pretty smooth. Being mostly text-based the Wiki flows along fairly quickly, but your mileage may vary when the connection count goes up. Hard stats would be interesting, but I haven’t stress-tested it.
It’s best to stand between the screen and any passers-by while the appliance is booting, to avoid having to explain what it’s doing. Once it’s all running, of course, nobody knows / nobody cares what the platform is because on the Internet nobody knows what breed of mutt you are.
Downside — since I’m running a bare-bones desktop, I don’t have access to my own DHCP server. The Deki appliance consumes a DHCP address like it should, and keeps a consistent and unique generated Media Access Control (MAC) address in a well-behaved manner, but since I’m too lazy to talk to the network guys or dig into the Debian instance I have to address the Wiki page via it’s TCP-IP address e.g. http://127.0.0.1 (substitute appropriate IP address). Such is life. Bookmark it.
The positive side of this is I can get a new Wiki instance up and running in about five minutes. This can be highly useful at times.
Enterprise Solutions
Here’s where you find the thorns, giving you much opportunity for sweet regret if you get it wrong or (worse) if you don’t try at all.
You’ve still got the three major players as per above, but you’ll be paying for the very non-free versions because you’ll need the additional features. So drop the “free” meme now, it’s in the way and doesn’t meet the dress code. We’re talking servers here.
In an Enterprise environment the very compelling arguments for virtualisation come down to (a) you can make better use of valuable hardware footprint, and (b) rolling a version of a server implementation is as simple as copying a file.
You’ve heard this before. Some of you (you there, on the left) will have discovered that you have developed a library of versions of whole operating systems implementations in rather rotund files that you have to manage. Disk is nearly free on the Enterprise scale, but you don’t often have enough on tap and utilisation mounts up fast. You will be investing in storage.
Management of this library of versions becomes somewhat problematic, as you generally wouldn’t trust Visual Source Safe or PVCS to scale to the number of files of this size. Something is needed to track and move the virtual server files appropriately. In a hosted, shared services environment you may end up with libraries of hundreds of files, each needing their own tracking data.
Since a virtual server instance is at least as complex as a normal server, you have to change your scale of thinking to think of whole systems, and you’ll need something better than a “readme.server_instance_nn” to describe the state of the server inside the file. Can you read individual files without bringing the instance online? This can be very important — consider the chaos that would result if you had two instances of the same DHCP server online, for example, and start getting duplicate TCP/IP addresses in the wild. Painful! You would be best served in a shared environment if you could look inside the virtual image before you bring it online, to identify it clearly or tweak a parameter. Microsoft has plans to provide this functionality, as well as the means to move virtual machines between instances in a physical server farm based on server utilisation. This was demonstrated at TechEd 2007 as “System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (VMM)” and (here, let me haul this link up…urgh…you suppose they make these out of lead?…here:) http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/scvmm/default.mspx .
You will also need to consider tools to convert an existing server into a virtual server, too, since real dollars can be saved by consolidating your legacy servers this way. Many old networks have suffered server sprawl over a long time — you might have entire servers devoted to say, WINS plus a few little scripts that nobody is game to throw away, sitting there sucking dust down the fans for years, and you might have dozens of these examples of organic growth on the shelves. Moving these servers to a well managed rack is a good thing, but doing it manually would be expensive and potentially dangerous. Much better if you could point and click and have it all converted for you. Click, grab the system partition, registry, all the fiddly bits, turn it into a virtual instance, just a file now. You can then play server dominos with the old cases (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_tXcRYOYZ0).
Bare Naked Servers (Hypervisors)
VMWare is soon to release a version of their Hypervisor on thumb drive that allows you to boot directly to a Hypervisor instance with no (other) underlying operating system. This will allow you to run multiple VMWare instances without unnecessary overhead of a supporting operating system. This can mean supporting another VM instance on the one box, at least. This is A Good Thing. Xen is oriented toward this approach, without the dramatic flourish of waving a thumb drive at people. Think of it as sort of a “thin server”.
Care and feeding of the common NIC
You may also have discovered that some of your servers are busier than others, and perhaps running several servers on the same box based entirely on CPU utilisation was not always a good idea; perhaps you didn’t plan for the burst I/O rates. With the wrong hardware, it can get worse — operating systems on PC hardware talk to the BIOS layer, so every I/O instruction has to be trapped and go through the one contended CPU’s BIOS framework. When you consider that multiple instances of operating systems base their asynchronous thread scheduling behaviour on when and how an I/O completes and announces the completion of interrupts back to the operating system, the added complexity in handling these interrupts can cause severe I/O throttling. One server to one BIOS, no problem — interrupts go back and forth with wild abandon and all are happy. When multiple servers funnel through the single BIOS however, the overheads in tracking when an I/O completes can be very expensive. This is the problem that caused the “virtualisation has crap I/O” meme to get out into the wild.
Fortunately this is no longer true — with the right chip set, virtualised I/O can be nearly as fast as separate servers. The solution to this is in the silicon — both Intel and AMD now offer CPU’s and motherboards designed specifically to support a hypervisor (i.e. they do not offload the Ring 0 instructions to the BIOS) so be careful how you shop for the underlying server hardware.
Beowulf meets the Mainframe
Another method of server virtualisation takes an IBM Z-series mainframe and puts a few thousand Linux servers into it under VM. This fits the definition of “server virtualisation” but veers off into the non-Windows friendly environment (many people believe running Windows under the Linux “Wine” emulator does not qualify as Windows-friendly) and will not be covered here. Check the IBM web site if you’re interested, at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/virtualization/ .
It all works, you’re going to save money, but you’re going to need help
Anybody can download a version of one of these Windows virtualisation products and get it to work. It’s a clever bit of technology, but it’s not that hard to download an appliance and get it to run. Once you get past the first few virtual instances though, your new-found competitive edge will likely lead to more business, and more virtual server instances to manage. It can all become rather complex rather quickly, and a good strategy would be to plan ahead and choose the options that allow for growth. These may not be the options that work for you on the desktop, and the need to change the way you look at traditional LAN infrastructure may be a learning ramp you’d like to avoid investing in. As always, today’s miraculous cost reduction solutions can become tomorrow’s chaos if you don’t stay on top of it. You might want to consider engaging an experienced SI as an aggro reduction strategy, to keep from eating up all your savings. Us, for example, <name withheld for now> (/shameless plug). We can help you release your potential.
Further reading:
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/solutions.mspx
http://www.citrixxenserver.com/Pages/default.aspx
Kelley is a senior solutions architect for “Large Multinational Consulting & Outsourcing Company”’s Consulting Group, and is proud of the grey hair he still has.
