VMware said Tuesday that it has acquired application virtualization company Thinstall in a move that will broaden the company’s desktop capabilities.
Privately held Thinstall delivers application virtualization to the desktop and doesn’t require preinstalled software and deployment infrastructure. What’s curious about the deal is that Thinstall is a partner with Citrix, which is increasingly becoming a […]
Right before the Christmas holidays I got a chance to catch up with Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMWare’s chief scientist and one of the company’s four five co-founders. Rosenblum is also an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he leads a group focused on operating systems research. It was at Stanford where Rosenblum and three of his graduate students — Scott Devine, Edouard Bugnion and Dr. Edward Wang — came up with the idea that led to VMWare (VMW). Diane Greene joined them as CEO and the fifth co-founder and the company went public in August, garnering a multibillion-dollar valuation that triggered a virtualization frenzy.
Given that VMWare was in a quiet period prior to the release of its quarterly results, my conversation with Rosenblum was quite general. But he did share with me, among other things, the story of how VMWare got started and his outlook for virtualization in 2008. Here are excerpts from the interview:
How did VMWare get started?
I was a professor at Stanford University and we were building a supercomputer called the Flash Machine. I didn’t want to crunch numbers on this machine, but wanted to use virtualization to see if we could run commodity OSes on [it].
We could, and we wrote a paper about it, and that generated a lot of interest, including from Microsoft, who emailed us and wanted us to come and present to them in Redmond. My grad students who worked with me on the project thought we could commercialize the technology, and in 1998 we launched VMWare.
What was the plan when you launched it?
Clearly, the technology was going to be hard to commercialize, and we decided to focus on doing virtualization on the desktop. We worked on the technology and my wife took care of the business side of things.
It seemed to have been a long time in the making.
It took a lot longer than I thought it would take. We released it first on the Linux platform, because we felt the Linux community would adopt it much faster. That proved to be a good move.
Funny now that you have proved it, there is competition coming out of the woodwork. Oracle and Microsoft, for example.
VMWare clearly is going to have competition. Sure it was nice when we were all alone, but we are very different from these other companies. Oracle and Microsoft, for example, are focusing on single machines for now. That’s a nice thing to do. We used to do that. It is good for server consolidation and it is easier and simpler.
What we are doing is basically coming up with a new way to run the data center. So from that perspective, we will continue to have something better than others.
Let’s talk about the data center for a minute. Do you think the whole architecture of the data center needs rethinking?
We went down a rat hole on how we built the data centers. I am not surprised with all the problems we are having with data centers. In my opinion, the architecture has problems because it was built with inferior solutions. What you had was people placing services on servers in a way that led to lightly loaded machines that were idle most of the time. The whole thing was built for peak performance (and not maximum utilization.) Well, idle machines use as much energy as fully utilized machines. The way out of this is to put more on the machines, and get them to be more efficient and take on the work load that will, to some extent, lower the power consumption.
I wrote about pizza boxes becoming a problem, mostly due to low utilization and higher power consumption. It kind of ties in with your thesis.
You have to see them not as boxes but as resources. People are now beginning to utilize virtualization and federate these pizza-box servers. I think if you start to view them as one unit, you can get more utilization out of them. I think in coming months you are going to see a big push to make all servers (and other hardware) inside a data center look more like a single unit. Ironically, if you look at the future — low-end pizza box servers with multicore CPUs running our software — you will start to see the big machine we were building where we got started.
What is your forecast for 2008 from a virtualization standpoint?
We are in a transition period. I think a lot of people dipped their toes in virtualization and got started with server consolidation. They bought into it the “money-saving” argument. In 2008, I expect people to fully embrace virtualization and extend it to other parts of their businesses, even bringing it in-house and using it for optimizing their desktop infrastructure. More importantly, you will start to see the long-term impact of virtualization in the next 12 months.
This is our last Dan & David Show for 2007, and we look back at some of the major stories and trends of the year. We discuss the impact of the iPhone, cloud-based applications, social networking, software-as-a-service, green IT, industry consolidation and Web 2.0.
You can download the podcast directly to your desktop or MP3 player […]
Our engineering team put ZDNet blogs through a cloud tag blender to render a weighted list of top topics for 2008. In an age when the consumer and enterprise worlds are colliding (but no exploding), Google, iPhone, Apple and Microsoft captured the big buzz of the year in our blogs. It was also a year […]
A few days ago, Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web services (AWS) evangelist visited my class and got a report of what we’d built over the course of the last semester on top of AWS. Each student had built part of a project that eventually used 25-30 independent machines. One weak spot was data storage. […]
I recently sat down with Technical Fellow and SysInternals founder Mark Russinovich to dig a bit into what’s new in the Windows Server 2008 kernel. Of course, we talk about many things including HyperV, application virtualization, kernel architecture (not everybody defines an OS kernel in the same way - tune in to understand why this is the case. Mark has his own definition that may not be the same as yours….).
Recently, the MinWin project was in the press after a university video lecture by a Microsoft Windows architect was released on the net. Most people confuse MinWin with Windows Server 2008’s ServerCore technology - the confusion stems from the incorrect assumption that ServerCore is a byproduct of the MinWin work. In fact, they are not at all related. Mark explains the differences and hopefully this will end the confusion…
Of course, Mark spends time on the whiteboard in this interview, drawing out the kernel architecture, explaining HyperV, touching on application virtualization (running client applications without having to install them locally - tune in to understand what I mean…).
Channel 9 is and has always been about showcasing the humans behind our technologies in addition to drilling into how we make our products, and of course why we do what we do (in a technical sense). Mark is a huge addition to the Windows family and his technical leadership is already being felt throughout buildings 26 and 43. Mark tells me about how life is going inside the Mothership, what a Techincal Fellow is (it’s the highest level of engineering career stage at Microsoft), individual contribution versus management, and more.
As always, it’s an honor and pleasure to spend time talking with Mark. He’s one of our brightest technical minds and Windows architecture is in very good hands.
Enjoy.
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Filed under: Desktops
Microsoft isn’t exactly known for releasing things early, but that’s just what its done with the beta version of its new Hyper-V virtualization software, which is included as part of Windows Server 2008 RC1 Enterprise. As Microsoft itself points out, that was originally only expected to be released in the first quarter of 2008, but it says it decided to let things loose early in order to let customers evaluate the feature and provide feedback before the final release. The software itself takes aim squarely at VMWare’s territory, allowing users to configure an array of virtual machines and run multiple operating systems simultaneously. If betas aren’t your thing, however, you can look for the final version to roll out “within 180 days” of the release of Windows Server 2008.
[Via TG Daily]
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If you spend enough time talking with fans or purveyors of the various virtualization technologies, eventually the conversation will shift around to the migration of “live workloads” - the movement, in other words, of running software. VMWare talks about this quite a bit, and Red Hat hastened to point out this feature in its latest release.
There are a variety of reasons users would want to do this. Say, for the sake of argument, that you have a workload running on a failing hardware platform. Would it not be preferable to seamlessly move it to an uncompromised machine? Of course. Ditto for consolidation, upgrades, and a host of other situations.
What I’m curious about, however, is when this will become less a virtualization feature and more of a backup standard practice.
At RedMonk, for example, we have an automated set of scripts that backs up our webroot, MySQL databases, and various other configuration files nightly to S3. If or when our underlying hardware - a Sun V20z - fails, I’m confident that I could recreate our current environment, less a few hours worth of comments depending on the timing, within an hour or two. Assuming that I can arrange new hardware, which is in our case a rather bold assumption.
If we were to leverage virtualization capabilities, however, we could easily back up the environment itself as an instance snapshot - a capture of our workload and applications at a particular point in time. It’s not migrating a live workload, per se, but rather an image of one. Given this ability, the time required to recreate the software environment is reduced to the time it takes to click a few buttons.
Combine that with Hardware as a Service (HaaS) platforms such as EC2/S3, which can provision new hardware near instantaneously, and the mean time to recreate hicks - our production server - would drop from an hour or two to a minute or two.
For virtualization customers, of course, this notion is (very) old hat. A significant percentage of VMWare’s customers embrace the technology strictly for the purpose of disaster recovery. Larger customers, too, are not likely to discover anything new in this combination as the cost of downtime is such that they already have elaborate backup solutions in place.
But it seems clear that the combination of open source virtualization technologies and economical HaaS options has dramatic implications for down market customers, customers that typically cannot afford to maintain a complex backup infrastructure.
What would be the simplest means of economically assembling a virtualized infrastructure, I wonder? What pieces would I need to cut redmonk.com’s potential downtime by hours?
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It was an exciting morning… we made two big announcements at Oracle Open World.
First, we announced a key relationship with Dell, through which they’ll be OEM’ing Solaris, and directly supporting customers running Solaris on Dell systems. Second, we announced our free/open source virtualization roadmap, starting with xVM and xVM OpsCenter, our hypervisor and management product set.
With the Dell relationship, Michael joined me on stage (after I assured him there would be no uninvited hugs), and kindly offered me a Dell t-shirt (I gladly accepted). You can watch the whole keynote here.
Truth be told, the relationship with Dell has been in the making for a while - I flew down to Texas last year to have dinner at his house (with a fortuitous 180 knot tail wind - sadly, I had return the same night with a 180 knot headwind). If you’re thinking, “hm, didn’t Sun’s relationship with Intel start with dinner, too?” you’re picking up on a theme - great partnerships start with a meal, in my book. At that dinner, we began discussing ways we could work together. Since then, we’ve both heard from a ton of customers that they’re running Solaris (and Sun Software, broadly) on Dell systems - and they’d like us to work together to make the experience a seamless one. It’s important to note, of the Solaris instances distributed into the world, roughly a third run on Dell - that’s certainly motiviation for us both to work together.
Dell and Sun will work shoulder to shoulder to support joint customers. And we expect our respective sales organizations to do the same - in pursuit of the highest quality customer experience possible. We’ll be making joint investments to build new solutions for customers, working to expand the already large Solaris ISV community for Dell systems, and broadly work together to build new business. For customers, partners, Sun and Dell - win/win/win/win.
Dell’s now advantaged in the marketplace, as well, and alongside Intel and IBM, can better serve customers wanting a single hand to shake (throat to choke isn’t the experience either of us are seeking). Reciprocally, Solaris is clearly advantaged by association with Dell, the company that invented volume success in the IT marketplace. The relationship broadens the market for the both of us.
So why are we signing these partnerships, rather than simply locking Solaris to our own hardware? (Yes, I still get that question…) Because locking Solaris to Sun would be like a wireless carrier selling you a phone that didn’t roam - or an automobile manufacturer mandating you buy their gas after you’ve bought their car. There’s probably a market for both, it’s just smaller than the market we’re after - the global market. In which customers value choice.
So thanks, Michael, and the whole Dell team. We’re looking forward to building the market.
We also introduced our new virtualization offering today, the Sun xVM hypervisor, and Sun xVM OpsCenter management suite (the video, above, has a great presentation/demo by Rich Green, who runs our Software biz). I’ll be putting together some thoughts later on our approach to the virtualization market, but in short, for geeks… our xVM hypervisor is a very lightweight kernel that inherits proven virtualization technologies (like ZFS, FMA, Dtrace and Crossbow) from the Solaris kernel - while supporting Linux, Windows and Solaris as guests - imbuing guest OS’s with the properties of the host hypervisor.
We also announced a variety of partners today, most importantly Red Hat, who’ll offer reciprocity with their hypervisor, like Microsoft. As our mothers told us, it’s important for us to be a good guest, and a good host. We plan on doing both.
As with all our innovation, xVM is going to start first in the community, where we can engage the folks who’ll help make this a success - if you have an interest in joining the developer/administrator community we’ll build around openxVM and the OpsCenter management platform, come visit us at OpenxVM.org.
(and finally… for those interested in why our ticker symbol changed again… it didn’t. After a reverse split, the exchanges append a character to the symbol for a period of a few weeks to let them adjust their systems.)
I’m radically increasing Sun’s focus on storage today.
Why? Because the market’s only going to grow, for as long as we’re on this earth, and I believe our talent and assets give us a big sustainable advantage - that we’re planning on exploiting. Aggressively.
How? First, I’m going to be combining our Storage and Server product teams to create a new converged group at Sun known simply as our “Systems” team. The Systems team will focus on the evolution and convergence of computing, storage and networking systems. Talk to any datacenter adminstrator, and that’s what they want to hear - they live in a world managing the (often idiosyncratic) interactions of that trinity (computing, storage and networking - and just wait until they’re virtualized). We want to be in a position to innovate on their behalf, at the system level, beyond the boxes - across blades, racks, disk and tape.
So we’ll still be strongly focused on being a multi-platform storage provider (just as our servers run multiple operating systems, and our operating system runs on every vendor’s servers), but we’re also going to start talking at a higher level to customers that see more standardization and integration in their future datacenters. That’s not everyone, but it’s definitely a trend we’re going to accelerate (and again, that’s what virtualization portends).
Now, why do I believe combining groups make sense? It’s a recipe that works for us. We combined our high volume x64 server group with our traditionally high scale SPARC server group over a year ago - leveraging the volume skills of the former with the scaling skills of the latter. What did that collaboration yield? The highest scale x64 systems in the market. And a refreshed lineup of volume systems powered, interchangeably, by SPARC, Intel and AMD. We also combined our networking expertise to build the best general purpose blade platform below (known internally as C10 or Constellation 10 - 10 blades, vs. “C48,” with 48), with integrated networking and seamless management. Can you tell where the server stops, and the storage starts? I can’t (and in a virtualized world, it’s not terribly important).
Secondly, as our servers clearly show, we’re heading to a general purpose world - in which open and general purpose platforms will be the dominant drivers of growth, for us and the market broadly. The first general purpose storage system from Sun was Thumper (our x4500) - powered by an open source operating system (Solaris), and file system (ZFS - soon to be parallelized by Lustre, a recent acquisition from Cluster File Systems). Thumper rocketed to a $100,000,000 annual runrate within its first two full quarters of shipment (on a $13 billion dollar revenue base, that’s hard to see, but we certainly took notice - at least one competitor did, too).
Combine these assets with some of our recent network innovations (like Magnum, the world’s largest Infiniband switch - which is not the smallest variant we’ll build, btw), the Crossbow community in Solaris - and it begins to look like we’ve got all the right ingredients to reinvent the datacenter.
So in this instance, I’m expecting our Systems team to be just as focused on standalone storage and networking - leveraging disk, tape (and all future removable media) - as they are on building great integrated systems (like the Constellation System, above, or our Thumper platform). I’m expecting to see more innovation, faster time to market, and a breadth of opportunities emerging from serving our current customers better than ever, while inviting new customers with a constant stream of high value innovation.
And before I end, I want to focus on one particular group, whose value only grows to Sun every day - our Tape and Archive business. From a market perspective, some data lasts forever - surveillance video, health and insurance records, trading histories, etc. In our view, the market for permanent data will only grow. Today, only tape can maintain the integrity of that data without electricity. And for the datacenters we serve, many are seeing the cost of electricity threatening to eclipse their hardware budgets (yes, I’m serious). For disk storage, over a decade, that’s easy to see - just look at the power bill to run a SAN, mulitply it by a decade.
So while we’ve been selling very large libraries to the largest companies in the world, in mainframe and open system shops, we’ve also begun meeting a variety of startups and web 2.0 companies (some household names, even). With the need for very, very large pools of archived storage (when you collect user generated high definition videos or satellite imagery for planetary social networks, it’s easy to find yourself with peta-scale archive problems).
Tape, with effective indexing and retrieval, represents the most economically responsible (that is, eco-responsible) archive platform for long term storage. Broadly speaking, tape (and in the future, other forms of removeable media) are a core part of Sun’s archive plans. We think there’s a ton of innovation we can bring to that market - now that we’ve done the basic integration (did you know a Solaris powered server is now embedded in our libraries - bringing new meaning to Free Inside!). As we converge high performance networking, virtualization and file system innovation - along with an overall Systems approach - our archive business will benefit just as much as our blades and rackmount systems. They are all, after all, members of the Systems family.
So like I said in the opening, I’m dramatically increasing Sun’s focus on storage today. By bringing to bear the talent and assets we have from across Sun to ensure our success. From where I sit, we have the right leaders and assets, and the right target in front of us.
Now’s a great time to put all the wood behind one arrowhead.
When we double the speed of our computers, our customers don’t buy half as many, they tend to buy twice as many. Hold that thought.
I was with a variety of external audiences yesterday - our business results stirred up some questions, partially based on comments we made about virtualization’s impact on the quarter. Which I thought I’d clarify in a quick note, before a broader summary next week.
I’d like to go on record saying virtualization is good for the technology industry - which seems to be counterintuitive. The general fear is that technologies like Solaris 10 or VMware that help people squeeze more work from the systems they already own is somehow bad for Sun. In my view, quite the opposite is true.
As I said, when we double the speed of our computers, people don’t buy half as many - they tend to buy twice as many. To companies that see information technology as a weapon (that’s not everyone, btw), increasing the power of the arsenal without increasing its price incents more purchases, not less. The same applies to efficiency - a computer in use only half the day is less valuable than one used throughout the day. The objective of virtualization is to increase the level of utilization in pursuit of more value, efficiency and affordability.
And that’s exactly the theory behind the newly bundled virtualization features in Solaris 10 - from Xen to ZFS, Crossbow to Java (fancy names for the same idea - reducing complexity to increase productivity). Solaris 10’s virtualization enables customers to consolidate the sprawling Linux, Solaris and Windows boxes laying around their datacenters, without having to pay exorbitant software licenses for add-on products. We built virtualization in to Solaris 10 not to encourage fewer computer or storage purchases, but instead, more - systems that are twice as utilized are twice as affordable. (When you double the mileage of a car, more people can afford it.)
What impact did those features have on Sun during Q4? When you use Solaris to consolidate lots of small, poorly utilized computers, into a smaller number of bigger computers, you may depress unit volumes. But you bulk up the configurations of the systems you sell (more memory, more cores and threads, more storage, etc.). That’s exactly what we saw in Q4 - fewer, but more richly configured systems, and not just at Sun. But at HP, Dell and IBM, too.
Why? Because Solaris 10 is now running like a champ on their hardware, as well. It’s being used to consolidate Solaris, Linux - and with this release of OpenSolaris, Microsoft’s Windows, as well. (You can get more info here.
As an integrated feature in the operating system.
Because this is all about efficiency - and the most efficient virtualization solution is the one you didn’t have to pay extra to use.