Up and Down the Network Stack

Virtualization Ecosystem Requirements

Following this piece  in EDN, I was contacted by a number of folks from the financial services sector who frankly were confused between the techno-babble they were hearing from industry sales types and the simplicity they had expected to result from the adoption of virtualization.

I thought it would be amusing to arm you with a few pertinent questions / requirements. All of these are likely to be met with blank stares or more techno-nonsense. But getting these sorted are essential if virtualization is to establish ubiquity in the ecosystem. Keep asking, one day you might actually get something .....

</begin in-a-perfect-world >

1. Migration of VM Guests should be possible cross CPU vendors and cross virtual OS vendors

2. Persistence of VM Guests over multiple generations of hardware and virtual-OS software should be guaranteed by vendors and backed by standards
         
3. There should be a complete and open virtualization management API to enable my choice of management tool(s)

</end in-a-perfect world >

10 Gigabit Ethernet and VMware - A Match Made in Heaven

Thanks to Steve Grantham, who pointed me at a nice blog entry of the above title, which provides a good overview of the technology trends being driven by virtualisation.

Virtual Geek (aka Chad Sakac) says:

Back when I was in the valley (so this was 4 years ago), a buddy of mine worked at a tiny IP (not Internet Protocol - Intellectual Property) company focused on high-end IP blocks for networking and storage (going after Hi/fn and the others in that space).   He showed me their A0 spin, and told me "This chip will do 10GbE BaseT over Cat6 cables, full TCP offload including segment offload, and all iSCSI offload".  COOL. "oh and we think we can mass produce it for $25 per chip".   DROOL.   

Well, fast forward 4 years, and they are out of business :-)

..... GOOD news is that another company has been able to realise this device.

Go Green with Server Consolidation

You may have taken the glossy adverts with something of a pinch of salt, but PG&E (utility company) is serious about offering businesses rebates based reductions in power consumption by virtue of server consolidation. This rebate currently stands at 8c per kilowatt-hour reduction. See here for more details.

PG&E stipulate that servers must be decommissioned in order to gain the rebate. Perhaps they should look more closely at a scheme whereby the servers are re-provisioned either within the organisation or elsewhere in order to avoid the scheme being energy neutral (energy savings balanced by the cost of early replacement of existing servers).

BTW I'm hearing more and more that organizations are employing the migration feature provided by server virtualization in order to load balance for energy efficiency. Live migration of a complete operating system over a 10GBASE-T Ethernet network in total takes order 5seconds to complete  with a down-time measured in milli-seconds - clearly a powerful tool.

Simon / Xen / Cambridge / Citrix / 10GBASE-T

Hey did you know Simon Crosby is one of the most influential people in IT. It's official.