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Sun Bare Metal Hypervisors Now GPLv3
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Sep 12, 2008 09:37 AM
from the make-it-up-in-volume dept.
from the make-it-up-in-volume dept.
ruphus13 writes with some more news for people foretelling the death of VMware. Sun has open sourced their xVM server, their bare-metal hypervisor virtualization solution. What used to once be the cash cow for VMware is now coming under increased threat, and Sun is once again turning to the Open Source community as a weapon. "Sun xVM Server is an outgrowth of the Xen project — which raises the question of why a company would go with Sun's version rather than the Xen one. Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris (as well as other chips and operating systems), Sun is also building a services and sales organization around a commercial version of xVM server... If you want to kick the tires or cut your costs, you can hop over to xVMServer.org, download the source (GPL 3) and join the community. But Sun is betting that, as deployments move from an initial testing phase to active usage, large organizations will be willing to pay for guaranteed support (starting at $500 per year per physical server)."
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cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:cheap (Score:5, Informative)
Truth be told, the new xVM from sun (they bought VirtualBox) is pretty good. Certainly better than VB used to be, since it'll now actually boot windows XP and stuff. If their bare metal stuff is as good, I may just jump ship here.
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Re: (Score:2)
Seconded. VirtualBox is damn fine, and running Windows 2000 in a VM on a Leengux host seems to be a heck of a lot less strain on the host system than the free VMware Player is. (Core 2 Duo, 1GB memory, Kubuntu 8.04.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think it will be as successful as they hoped. Sun is far too late to this x86 virtualization game. LDOM's and Containers, and Xen are great technologies, but they just haven't been nearly as flexible as VMWare's offering. Management of the environments (LDOM/Containers/Xen guests) has been very kludgy. This is where VMWare has really gained dominance, and I suspect will retain it. They are years ahead in virtualization management.
Not to nitpick too much, but there's some apples/oranges comparisons here. Xen is a paravirtualization technology, whereas VMWare is a straight-up virtualization technology. Paravirtualization is usually more efficient with like operating systems, so it does play to a different segment.
It's like saying VMWare is better than Qemu, though Qemu lets me emulate arm and sh4 architecture machines and VMWare doesn't. Different tools for different jobs.
Re:cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
> Xen is a paravirtualization technology, whereas VMWare is a straight-up virtualization technology.
That may have been true at some point. But, Xen has long ago supported full hardware virtualization (allowing it to run an unmodified OS, such as Windows). And, VMware now supports paravirtualization via "VMI" which they got included in the standard Linux kernel.
In any case, the more important issue is their management capabilities. Xen has struggled in the past because its management was weak compared to VMware. If Sun can put their resources into improving the management side of things, they could make an impact.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> Xen is a paravirtualization technology, whereas VMWare is a straight-up virtualization technology.
That may have been true at some point. But, Xen has long ago supported full hardware virtualization (allowing it to run an unmodified OS, such as Windows). And, VMware now supports paravirtualization via "VMI" which they got included in the standard Linux kernel.
In any case, the more important issue is their management capabilities. Xen has struggled in the past because its management was weak compared to VMware. If Sun can put their resources into improving the management side of things, they could make an impact.
Xen's primary strength, however, is paravirtualization. Anything else on top of that is what you make of it.
Also, there's a nice Virtual Machine management console available in the newer Linux distributions (libvirtd-based). Not perfect, but a step in the right direction for those of us which require paravirtualization.
Re:cheap (Score:5, Informative)
We've already shipped over 6 million copies of our desktop hypervisor (xVM VirtualBox), which is available under GPL v2 from virtualBox.org. You should go check it out.
We're putting a lot of resources into virtualization and we're going to surprise people.
-Steve Wilson
VP, xVM
Sun Microsystems
http://blogs.sun.com/stevewilson
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Re:Is Sun astroturfing a product? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
and while not one of the heralded 4-digit user ID's, an 6-digit id starting '159' would seem to indicate he's been aware of /. for sometime as well...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:cheap (Score:5, Informative)
Pricing Information
Sun offers standalone subscriptions for Sun xVM Server software and Sun xVM Ops Center, as well as additional options that offer the combined benefits of the two products, allowing customers to virtualize and manage at Internet scale. Commercial subscriptions are priced annually in four-socket increments and provide premium 24X7 support, access to the latest, up-to-the-minute patches and updates, as well as installation and training. Available pricing options include:
* Sun xVM Server software: Priced at $500/year per physical server.
* Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription: Priced at $2000 per physical server per year, the enterprise subscription is designed to simplify the management of large scale virtualized environments and includes advanced features, such as management of live migration and of multiple network storage libraries.
* Sun xVM Infrastructure Datacenter Subscription: Priced at $3000 per server per year, this option includes all the features in the Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription in addition to physical server monitoring, management and advanced software lifecycle management capabilities.
* Sun xVM Ops Center: Available from $100 per managed server up to $350 a year, depending on customer selected features, along with a required $10,000 Satellite Server annual subscription for Sun xVM Ops Center.
There are some significant technical restrictions as well if you dig deep you'll find
Disk on which xVM server is installed
* SATA or SAS (serial SCSI) * Fiber Channel to a JBOD * IDE disks are not supported
Attached storage
* NFS/TCP/IP/ethernet remote storage * CIFS remote storage
Networking
* Ethernet-based NICs supporting the Solaris GLDv3 driver specification * only MTUs of 1500 bytes are supported
* For Windows guests, customers wanting full Microsoft support should run xVM Server on Windows Server 2008 logo certified hardware.
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Those are restrictions??? (Score:3, Insightful)
-IDE drives are not supported as in who uses them in a real server anyway??
-NFS/TCP/IP/ethernet remote storage * CIFS remote storage -- as in that's not enough??
-NICS supporting the Solaris GLDv3 driver specification-- fine
-only MTUs of 1500 bytes are supported (when did you see one smaller recently??)
- Windows Server 2008 logo certified hardware-- that's about all of the servers I know, sadly.
Sun may thwart this one, too, but I'll give them a fighting chance. The model's somewhat sound but I'm eager to see
They're called Jumbo Frames, Jimbo (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody wants smaller MTUs, but with 1 and 10 gigabit ethernet, they sure as hell want larger ones.
Re: (Score:2)
GBE is FC at the MAC-- and a 1500 byte MTU is totally suitable. As for larger/jumbo frames in 10GBE(+), there's an increase in overhead admittedly.... but what relevant server doesn't use a TOE card to handle that anyway? Mostly moot, IMHO.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Right, so every extra frame you send you tack on an extra 14 or 18 bytes.
A gig of data transmitted with 9000 byte jumbo frames is only about 120,000 frames. Its about 716,000 frames with 1500 byte frames. Even with low-end overhead of 14 bytes its 8 Mbytes of extra data transmitted, and that's on a single gig of data.
And even with offload engines, there's still other legacy BS at the hardware level that isn't completely eliminated and has to get done more often because of the extra frames being transmi
Re:cheap - Bad statistics would lie if they could (Score:5, Insightful)
So... disclaimer. I'm a VMware employee, so I do know all about both these benchmarks (even if I had nothing to do with them). Agree the first VMware benchmark was quite skewed, looking at Xen instead of XenSource. The XenSource benchmark showed up, it showed Xen ahead in system-call microbenchmarks (hardware virtualization does well there, but lots of system calls with no I/O isn't representative of the real world) and more or less even on everything else. VMware approved XenSource's whitepaper for publication about two weeks later (which, BTW, is no longer on Citrix's website and not visible on Google). The comparison was not apples-to-apples - XenSource switched from Xen 3.0 to Xen 3.2 in the comparison, and didn't make any software-virtualization/hardware-virtualization tweaks. In other words, XenSource's benchmark was just as skewed as VMware's. And everybody who knows anything about benchmarking knows it.
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison. They never cared about a performance comparison - it was all a PR stunt to get a great big /REDACTED/ document posted to news sites / blogs.
VMware does not forbid negative benchmarks; they do forbid stupid benchmarks. Usually, some amateur runs Passmark 2D, which is a system-call microbenchmark that doesn't even keep time correctly in a virtual machine. Every single person complaining about that EULA has never bothered submitting results - almost all submissions get approved.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison.
Wouldn't it be in vmware's best interest to get rid of the idiotic EULA restrictions then? Trying to shut people up makes you look bad. Letting people publish stupid benchmarks and then demonstrating how they're stupid makes them look bad. Openness is always the answer. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Censorship just makes you look like
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't take it as a flaimbait, but when VMWare itself will "keep time correctly" in the guest with respect to the host? No other VM/virtualization software I've used so far exhibits this strange "clock skew" behavior.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The summary of that whole mess: XenSource / Simon Crosby got more PR mileage out of making a big deal of EULA restrictions than from any actual performance comparison.
So why not remove the stupid EULA restriction?
Hatta already made the point, but it is worth repeating. This is really the same issue that Lessig's Change Congress movement is about - it doesn't matter whether cash contributions skews the political process or not, the mere existence of contributions is sufficient to cast doubt on the neutrality of the political process in the mind of the populace.
It does not matter whether the EULA restriction is used only to stop stupid benchmarks, the mere existence of the
Re:cheap - Bad statistics would lie if they could (Score:4, Informative)
No, this is not what happened at all. Simon Crosby (biggest blowhard ever), shot his mouth off proclaiming that VMware are a bunch of idiots, but he can't show it cause of the EULA. Well, unbeknownst to all his readers Xen had submitted their paper to VMware for approval, which they did approve and Xen published. It showed that Xen was competitive in most of the benchmarks, but fell short in a number and beat ESX in only 1, SPECjbb on Linux.
Good luck finding anything from this whole exchange, Citrix purged there blogs of the entire ordeal. Here [xensource.com] is the paper WITH the data, no redactions. I am not seeing this "everywhere else Xen killed", could you point it out to me?
As a side note VMware is very liberal with their benchmark policy. As long as you actually benchmark in a sane manner they will let you publish no matter the result.
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Slightly OT , but can someone explain... (Score:5, Insightful)
... why a VM has to "support" a given OS such as Vista or Solaris or Linux?
FTA: "Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris..."
Surely if these VMs truly are PCs emulated in software with standard emulated devices then surely any OS than runs on the PC architecture and has drivers for these devices will install and run on these VMs regardless?
Re: (Score:2)
Incomplete Emulation (Score:2)
Adding an OS to an existing emulator may be as simple as adding a few additional functions to extant code. In real life, though, it can require rewriting many modules to account for unique OS specific behavior and parameter passing bugaboos.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is long precedent in the meat world of hardware requirements for operating systems. There are physical "PC architectures" than can't run some OSes. An extreme example, an IBM PS/2 isn't going to be able to run Vista. Less extreme - clever people can get OS X running on some non-Apple hardware, but not all.
A VM is just like another set of hardware - that may or may not satisfy the requirements of the OS and/or work as advertised.
I'm frankly impressed that they work so well! Even after years of usin
Guaranteed Support? (Score:2)
I'd be leery of any company promising me guaranteed anything. Guaranteed support could mean anything from a full-fledged support staff to an automated phone system designed to loop callers back upon themselves.
If you have worked wiuth Sun.... (Score:2)
.... you know the support is good.
They will stay with you across time zones as the Sun raises if you have a major problem.
not a milk cow (Score:5, Informative)
Actually their bare metal hypervisor - ESXi comes for free as well (although not GPLed, but we're not talking about ideology here are we)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, it makes a huge amount of money on its bare metal hypervisor. I haven't exactly analyzed their profits based on individual products, but I'd be willing to bet that their bare metal hypervisor and associated technologies is where the big money is made for them. For companies like VMware, it's the enterprise market where they traditionally reap the big profits, and VMware has been a major presence, if not THE presence until recently in the enterprise virtualisation market.
Also, I think you don't qui
Beer ware (Score:2, Funny)
ZFS (Score:3)
Please put that under a new license.
More info here [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Why not give OpenSolaris a whirl instead? Or FreeBSD? Or a Mac?
Face it, CDDL is just much more compatible and fosters more sharing than GPL. It was a good choice.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not give OpenSolaris a whirl instead? Or FreeBSD? Or a Mac?
Because linux is the most popular open source operating system out there, and if Sun really wanted to play nice with the community they'd make it available to as much of the community as they could.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If they only wanted to play nice with the biggest community, all others be damned, they'd have just ported it to Windows
Re:ZFS (Score:5, Informative)
So, why not quit complaining about the permissive license ZFS is under, and start complaining about the restrictive license Linux is under? ( your post should read "Please put Linux under a new license" )
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Re: (Score:2)
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.
Linus' licencing inflexibility will hurt us all (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Also worth noting that even if ZFS was GPL3 (Sun prefers GPL3 over 2, it seems), then that would still not be good enough for Linux. So yes, this is where Linus' choice of license is giving us some problems. Overall it was a good choice, but this is the bad part.
It was foolish and short-sighted for Linus to release Linux under the GPL v2 only, and not GPL v2 or later, as recommended by the Free Software Foundation. Now it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to relicense the kernel under another license (the missing "or later" part), as there have been far too many contributors, some of whom are dead, in prison, or have otherwise vanished from the Community.
Sun prefers GPL v 3 as it does a better job of keeping the code free, particularly with respect to software patents, which, while not a problem for those of us lucky enough to be in Europe (not a problem for the moment, anyway), are certainly a concern in the US and other nations the US has bullied into adopting similar legislation.
As a result, technologies like ZFS are unlikely to ever make it into the Linux kernel. In the coming decades, as more and more technologies come along like this, Linus' inflexible licensing choice is likely to relegate the kernel to a historical footnote, where other kernels, licensed under either the "or later" clause (or other more permissive licenses) will continue. It's a pity, and I say that as one who has been using Linux since 1993, and will continue using it for the foreseeable future.
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Re:ZFS (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:2)
view the code - not run it (Score:5, Interesting)
http://kenai.com/projects/xvmserver/forums/120-Announcements/topics/59-First-open-source-release-of-xVM-Server?
This release is designed to allow interested parties to view the code - not run it. It will be some time in the future before we have all of the pieces available for you to compile and run your own copy of xVM Server.
But stay tuned, we're getting there :-)
scott
Features (Score:2)
One thing people here are looking for in virtualized environments are snapshots and disaster recovery simplicity. All the products handle moving VMs from one box to another differently, and so far I've heard VMWare is much easier than the rest. So it's not just hardware and OS support, it's ease of management -- which is VMWare's strength (though you pay for it).
xVM is based on Xen... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which has a boatload of problems. The fact is there is enough competition in the market that just being able to be a hypervisor is not enough - you need to measure up and offer proprietary advantages.
The reason this release is not a big deal is that VMWare spanks the performance of every other hypervisor. VMWare ESX networking is magnitudes ahead of every single other competitor in the benchmarks.
Virtual or Paravirtual? (Score:3, Interesting)
Xen, KVM, etc. have existsed for a while now (Score:3, Insightful)
Tried it already -- couldn't make it work (Score:2, Interesting)
The installation of xVM itself on my late-model Dell desktop running a fully updated Windows XP OS but I could never get Ubuntu to install and/or run on three separate attempts. The first time, the Ubuntu install process froze. The second time, it completed but when shutting down to reboot post-install, I got hit with an near-endless stream of error messages and the OS never rebooted. The third attempt also apparently installed but wouldn't boot.
They do claim to support Ubuntu as a guest OS but my experienc
So... (Score:2)
-Sun forks a opensource project - Xen
-Sun continues developing their fork in a propietary way
-Now they release it as opensource! OMG we opensourced it!
Sorry, but this is not interesting. This looks like the typical "I'm going to make my own fork" effort. Sun has probably already lost many of the features being coded in Xen right now just because of the fork.
Why I'm evaluating this... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been tracking xVM for a while now, along with the other major VM players, for my home VM setup. I've downloaded and evaluated ESXi, XenServer Express and Hyper-V. The one difference that xVM will have that the others don't is a web interface for administrating the VMs. All the others require a Windows application, which in turn requires Windows (I haven't tried using Wine). xVM Server can be administered from any platform running a decent web browser.
The other difference between xVM and other Xen-based hypervisors is the base on which it's built. Citrix XenServer is built around CentOS which is used for the Dom0 (the administrative domain). Sun have built xVM around Solaris, so benefits from the FMA (Fault Management Architecture AKA self-healing), Crossbow (virtualised network stack), Dtrace and ZFS.
There is a lot of cool technology in xVM Server and it's certainly worth a look.
Why VMware rocks over all comers (Score:3, Informative)
I've played with Xen, we use zones in Solaris, and I've used Microsoft's Virtual Server offering, but only VMware lets me do the one thing that no one else does: Put up a machine *fast*. I mean, from nothing to a fully working Linux/Windows/whatever machine whether it's a clone from an existing guest, or a brand new one.
I have a lot of projects that are ephemeral; we need a box to test something on and boom, we have a virtual machine that runs pretty darn fast and when the testing is done, we shut it down. No muss, no fuss. No other product on the market is so good about bringing up a machine, throwing additional "hardware" at it when necessary.
The other thing VMware rocks over everyone else is snapshots; I can create branches of branches of snapshots when my testing goes in all kinds of directions, and I can always roll back to any of them. I described it to a coworker as having the entire machine on top of a Subversion repository.
Re: (Score:2)
You would have been way more on topic if you had linked to this instead: http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,39024673,39286675-6,00.htm [silicon.com]
Re:Does xVM really support SPARC? (Score:5, Informative)
xVM Ops Center supports SPARC and xVM Systems. The current version of xVM Server is focused on x86/x64 platforms, but you can use xVM Ops Center to manage Solaris virtualization technologies like Solaris Containers.
http://wikis.sun.com/display/xvmOC1dot1/Managing+Solaris+Containers+With+Sun+xVM+Ops+Center
-Steve Wilson
VP, xVM
Sun Microsystems
http://blogs.sun.com/stevewilson
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