Virtually There: Steve Herrod's Blog

Mon, 27 Feb 2006

In the February 9th entry, I mentioned "keep an eye on the Virtual Machine Center as there's much more excitement coming there soon..." Well, today is soon!

With the launch of the free VMware Player and VMware Server software, it's quite easy and inexpensive to realize the benefits of virtualization. Of course the first thing you want to do after installing this software is try out a virtual machine.

That's where the Virtual Machine Center, now renamed Virtual Appliances, comes into play. It's a library of virtual machines providing a variety of ready-to-go operating systems, applications, and utilities. Forget searching for hardware, going through installation challenges, or worrying about corrupting your machine's pristine setup... simply download the fully encapsulated, hardware-independent virtual machine and power it up as easily as an appliance. That's why we call these virtual appliances!

Contributions to the list of Virtual Appliances have been growing quite rapidly, and there are several interesting downloads available today including a browser appliance, firewall packages, VOIP applications, and content management systems. Now it's time to take these contributions to the next level with the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge!

VMware is giving out $200,000 in prize money for the best appliances in a variety of categories including:

• Best Developer Appliance
• Best Consumer Appliance
• Best Server Appliance
• Best Collegiate Appliance (must be a full-time student)
• VMTN Community Choice Appliance (voted by the VMTN community)

For all of the details as well as the list of our distinguished judges, check out: http://www.vmware.com/challenge

First place is $100,000 so dust off those creative juices and create a great virtual appliance for the world to use!

posted at: 14:32 | | | permanent link

Thu, 16 Feb 2006

As mentioned earlier, we've been hard at work on the next major revision of our virtual infrastructure software. This includes VMware ESX Server 3.0, VMware VirtualCenter 2.0, and add-on modules such as VMotion™, Distributed Resource Scheduling, and Distributed Availability Services.

Today I'm pleased to announce that we have released the second beta of this software and are shipping it to 2,700 testers. This is a substantially larger beta program than we have previously used with these products (though VMware Workstation, VMware Player, and now VMware Server are accustomed to significantly larger numbers). Our QA team has done a great job of pounding on this software, and we’re excited to let more of the world give it a whirl.

I will write about the various features and development process in more detail in upcoming entries. Today I'll highlight the higher-level drivers of this release.

• More workloads: We want to enable even more applications as candidates for virtualization, and we're including several improvements towards this end:
  • Bigger guests: ESX Server 3.0 introduces 4-way Virtual SMP and support for up to 16GB RAM per virtual machine. This is up from today’s size of 2-way Virtual SMP and 3.6GB RAM per virtual machine, and it should let more of the higher-end server workloads "fit" in a VMware virtual machine.
  • Performance: We've made improvements across the board with particularly targetted focus on larger databases, custom Linux applications, Citrix, and web servers. I'll go into more detail on this in the near future.
  • Experimental support for 64-bit guests! Yes, on supported hardware, we'll enable 64-bit guests.More on this in a future entry!
  • Experimental support for Solaris 10 (x86) guests!

  
  

  

• More manageability: In a recent survey, we found that more than 25% of our customers are standardizing their x86 server deployments around our products. This standardization requires large-scale, unified management of hundreds of ESX Server hosts and thousands of virtual machines. We're focusing on these large scale deployments and also improving several other areas:
  • Tighter control: VirtualCenter 2.0 offers better control over VMware ESX Server instances and virtual machines through improved inventory models, interactive topology views, and an upgraded graphical user interface that integrates ESX Server host management. Gratuitous screen shots to the right.
  • Centralized license management: VirtualCenter 2.0 centralizes license management for greater deployment flexibility and easier license tracking.
  • Fine-grain access controls and audit trails: VirtualCenter 2.0 offers configurable, tiered group definitions and finer-grain definition of access privileges. It also maintains an audit trail of all significant changes.
• More Virtualization Services: We're also adding on to basic machine partitioning to begin exploiting the advantages of having a virtualization layer. In this release we're rolling out three virtualization services:
  • Distributed Availability Services enables high availability without the cost or complexity of clustering by detecting failed virtual machines and automatic ally restarting them on alternate ESX Server hosts.

  • Distributed Resource Scheduling improves management and load balancing by automatically moving live virtual machine workloads across ESX Server hosts.
  • VMware Consolidated Backup simplifies and accelerates backup with host-free, LAN-free, agentless backup of Windows virtual machines.
• More hardware support: We also want to enable our products to run on an even broader set of hardware. We're dramatically increasing our hardware compatibility list for this release. We're also adding support for both iSCSI and NAS (NFS) storage targets to our existing Fibre Channel support. These new forms of shared storage should enable the full use of virtual infrastructure in more cost-conscious parts of the organization.

I hope this gives you a feel for why we're so excited. I'll post more details about the various features over the coming weeks, so stay tuned. And feel free to add comments if there are specific areas you'd like to see in future entries.

posted at: 15:47 | | | permanent link

Thu, 09 Feb 2006

On Monday, VMware announced the new VMware Server offering along with a downloadable beta release. This is a free virtualization product for Windows- and Linux-based servers (yes, free as in beer), and it’s the successor to our GSX Server product. We initially had slightly less ambitious plans, but the engineers (such as this one) got excited and added several new capabilities above and beyond today’s GSX Server.  We’re not quite sure how they did it on schedule, but they added lots of goodies:

• The ability to run 64-bit guest OSes: If you have the latest hardware, try out the newest offerings from Microsoft, SUSE, RedHat, Ubuntu, and Sun. What’s even niftier is that you can try out the 64-bit guests on top of a 32-bit host operating system. Cool stuff!
• Virtual SMP: Put your multi-processor (or dual-core) systems to work and give your virtual machines more CPU horsepower to more demanding applications.
• Support for Intel’s new VT-capable processors.
• Support for the latest virtual hardware: VMware Server supports the virtual machines created on our most recent products as well as the growing library of virtual machines available via the VMTN Virtual Machine Center.
• Significant performance improvements
• And several other things I'm surely omitting

The beta of VMware Server comes on the heels of our also-free VMware Player release. VMware Player has had more than 1 million installs already(!), and the VMware Server beta seems to be of similar interest.

And once again, this software is FREE so give it a try… we think you’ll like it! And keep an eye on the Virtual Machine Center as there’s much more excitement coming there soon…

posted at: 09:00 | | | permanent link

Fri, 03 Feb 2006

Hi! I'm Steve Herrod, Vice President of Research and Development (R&D) at VMware. This is my first blog, and I hope it provides you some visibility into what we do within VMware engineering and why we're so excited about the future. Ideally you'll feel like you're "virtually there".

The organization I lead is responsible for several core technologies, products, and partner interactions. More specifically, it includes:

• The monitor group: This group provides the core CPU virtualization used in all of our virtualization products. They've been working on this for several years, and we're very proud of the performance and reliability of their work.
• The vmkernel group: The VMkernel is the hypervisor used in our VMware ESX Server product. Its goal is to squeeze every ounce of utility out of your hardware while providing top performance, rock-solid reliability, and many tools to simplify life with virtualization!
• The service console group: This group works on our Linux-based administrative interface into ESX Server. In addition to providing a shell and tools for advanced configuration and trouble-shooting, the service console enables a large set of existing management agents to run seamlessly in a virtual environment.
• The performance group: This team is tirelessly analyzing the performance of VMware's products and working with developers to continually improve it. Performance analysis in a virtualized environment is quite tricky. Think of the challenges of measuring industry standard benchmarks and workloads... and now consider analyzing several of them at the same time on a single machine!
• The partner engineering group: Guaranteed hardware and software interoperability is an important part of our mission, and this group focuses on the various certifications involved with datacenter-class interop assurances. Check out our current Compatibility Guides. We're constantly expanding them!
• The community source group: This team is responsible for implementing the recently launched the VMware Community Source program. The goal is to enable collaboration between VMware and industry partners by providing access to ESX Server source code and training and mechanisms for contributing changes. Take a peak at the community portal here.

Our rapid growth and aggressive plans for the future make life here quite, err, exciting. By far the best part of daily life is the privilege of working with a very sharp and fun group of people. We're spread across much of the world, but we're primarily located in Palo Alto, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

You might be interested in a few of the conference papers some of the engineers have written. You can also read a few of their blogs here and here.

That's all for now... it's time to get back to work on ESX Server 3.0! I'll dive more into our technology shortly and welcome any suggestions you have for future entries!

posted at: 18:38 | | | permanent link