virtualization.info

Last week the virtualization security startup HyTrust announced its second round funding: $10.5M, led by Granite Ventures and Cisco.

The first round was equal to $5.5M, provided by Trident Capital and Epic Ventures.

Only Len Rand, Managing Director at Granite Ventures and former General Manager of Strategic Marketing and Global Alliances in Intel, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Director. Nobody from Cisco.

On top of this, HyTrust also announced that Jim Gannon, the former Director of Global Accounts at VMware, joined the company as its new Vice President of Sales.

Labels: Cisco, Funding, HyTrust, Leadership, Security, VMware

Just in case the entrance in the server market and the alliance with EMC and VMware were not clear enough, Cisco decided to clarify even better that taking over HP market share is the primary goal:

And it's not a secret that EMC and HP compete in the enterprise storage space.
The only problem is that HP is one of the strongest VMware partners today.
The two could move from partnership to fair "co-opetition", as the Industry likes to call it today, but for how much time?

Labels: Cisco, HP

The VMware | Cisco | EMC coalition is waiting for Acadia to start its business and begin the implementation, administration and delivery of their new datacenters-in-a-box.

Meanwhile the three companies prepare and publish key documents to understand how the VBlock computing stack is designed and how it can be used.

Specifically, the documents published online are:

1. The Deployment Guide
   Deploy a full Vblock (for delivery) as an integrated whole
2. The Rapid Provisioning Guide
   Simplify Rapid Provsioning across the entire stack whether you are a service provider or an enterprise customer
3. The Reference Architecture Guide
   Detailed configuration specification, how it is tested, etc.

Only the Reference Architecture is available for public access. It includes information about Vblock configuration type 1 and type 2.

The other two documents can be accessed only by VMware, Cisco and EMC partners.

Chad Sakac, the EMC Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance, reveals that customers are also looking for Vblock 0 configurations and even smaller than that.
The VCE Coalition anyway is not ready yet to publish details about Vblock 0 stack because “there are specifics that need working out”. Below you can see the prototype developed by the three:

Sakac also informs that the current Vblock roadmap developed by VMware, Cisco and EMC extends to 2012.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, Papers, VMware

Thanks to the help of VMware, it really seems that Cisco is turning into a virtualization vendor.

The company’s interest in virtualization has its roots in mid-2007, when it invested $150M in VMware, but the ambition to play a major role in this industry became evident with the launch of Unified Computing System (UCS) and the announcement of a coalition with EMC and VMware.

Just yesterday, Cisco announced a second alliance with NetApp to jointly deliver a private cloud architecture called Secure Multi-Tenancy. Of course such cloud is powered by VMware virtualization.

A much bigger anyway was announced a couple of days ago and passed under the radar of most: Cisco launched an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offering for service providers.

With this initiative, Cisco is basically pushing a specific architecture to simplify the jumpstart to IaaS cloud computing. The recommended design implies the use of many Cisco gears (from the MDS to the Nexus 700), of any storage backend of choice (even if EMC is the first suggestion) and, guess what, VMware vSphere 4.0 as the foundation virtualization platform:

Service providers that want to embrace this approach just have to call Cisco which will provide pre-tested and validate product configuration guides and obviously all the components.

Cisco is truly leveraging the cloud computing opportunity by suggesting that its complexity can be tackled with ready-to-go solutions for the customers’ piece of mind.
In doing so, the company is turning into a formidable selling machine for VMware that, over the long run, will disturb the partnership and joint activity of VMware and HP (which is preparing to react after the acquisition of 3Com).

Labels: Cisco, Cloud Computing, VMware

Today, with a joint webcast, VMware, Cisco and NetApp announced a new partnership.

The three companies created an architectural blueprint, and they jointly own the intellectual property (IP) of it, called Secure Multi-Tenancy.

It’s available today, since it doesn’t include any new product or technology, ready to be implemented and deployed through partners.

The announcement is nowhere near the launch of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition that VMware, Cisco and EMC used to shake the market in November 2009, but takes a similar approach in offering pre-tested and validated computing stacks.

Specifically, the fault-tolerant architecture includes VMware vSphere and vShield, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), the Nexus 1000V virtual switch and MDS Switches, and NetApp
MultiStore with Data Motion technology:

VMware, Cisco and NetApp designed the architecture around four principles:

• Availability allows the infrastructure to meet the expectation of compute, network, and storage to always be available even in the event of failure. Like the Secure Separation pillar, each layer has its own manner of providing a high availability configuration that works seamlessly with adjacent layers. Security and availability are best deployed from a layered approach.
• Secure Separation ensures one tenant does not have access to another tenant’s resources, such as virtual machine (VM), network bandwidth, and storage. Each tenant must be securely separated using techniques such as access control, VLAN segmentation, and virtual storage controllers. Also, each layer has its own means of enforcing policies that help reinforce the policies of the adjacent layers.
• Service Assurance provides isolated compute, network, and storage performance during both
  steady state and non-steady state. For example, the network can provide each tenant with a certain bandwidth guarantee using Quality of Service (QoS), resource pools within VMware help balance and guarantee CPU and memory resources, while FlexShare can balance resource contention across storage volumes.
• Management is required to rapidly provision and manage resources and view resource availability. In its current form, each layer is managed by vCenter, UCS Manager, DC Network Manager, and NetApp Operations Manager, respectively.

Compared to the VMware-Cisco-EMC Vblock computing stack, this solution seems to lack a unified management console that can coordinate all the other pieces (in the VCE Vblocks that piece exists: it’s the EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager) but the description above seems to suggest that future generations will have something different.

Overall, the blueprint is really interesting and customers may welcome this new attempt to reduce their investment in the design phase. The only problem is that the customer’s security department has to trust vShield, a virtual firewall that VMware acquired from the startup Blue Lane Technology in November 2008 and that was launched in early 2007.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, NetApp, Security, VMware

In the past months virtualization.info documented how the Cisco entrance in the server market with its Unified Computing System (UCS) is having a major impact on the landscape.

The move is especially dangerous because it involves powerful allies like EMC and VMware, and delivers a platform that is designed from scratch to be a virtual data center in a box.

The most nervous among its competitors seems HP, which openly criticized the UCS and then acquired 3Com to strengthen its networking offering.

HP also released a competing platform, called BladeSystem Matrix, which doesn’t bundle yet with any specific virtualization platform (VMware vSphere support is still experimental).

The first public comparison between the two blade systems comes from Steve Kaplan, Vice President Data Center Virtualization Practice at INX.
his technical analysis is well worth a read.

Labels: Cisco, HP

Since the release in May, Cisco updated its virtual switch for VMware virtual infrastructure, the Nexus 1000V, a couple of times.

The second update arrived last week, introducing a number of key features. Most of them are security-oriented and very welcome.

The most prominent anyway is a JAVA-based GUI installer for the Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM).
The GUI allows to perform several actions like create the VMware port groups, VLANs, enable the SSH service, register the Nexus plug-in inside vCenter Server and restart the VSM.
Cisco published  a video to show it in action:

Nexus 1000V 1.2 also includes:

• Layer 3 control
  a VSM can be Layer 3 accessible and control hosts that reside in a separate Layer 2 network
• Virtual Service Domain (VSD)
  Virtual service domains (VSDs) allow you to classify and separate traffic for network services.
  Interfaces within a VSD are shielded by a service VM (SVM) that provides a specialized service like a firewall, deep packet inspection (application aware networking), or monitoring.
• iSCSI Multipath
  The iSCSI multipath feature sets up multiple routes between a server and its storage devices for maintaining a constant connection and balancing the traffic load.
• DHCP Snooping
  DHCP snooping acts like a firewall between untrusted hosts and trusted DHCP server.
• Dynamic ARP Inspection
  Dynamic ARP Inspection (DAI) validates ARP requests and response.
• MAC Pinning
  If one or more upstream switches do not support port channels, you can use MAC pinning to assign each Ethernet port member to a particular port channel subgroup.
• Static Pinning
  You can use vPC-HM to configure a port channel subgroup so that traffic is forwarded only through its member ports by assigning (or pinning) one of the following to the subgroup: vEthernet interface, the Control VLAN e Packet VLAN.

Labels: Cisco, Releases, virtual networking

Chad Sakac, the Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, published today an extensive and informative article about the Virtual Compute Enviroment (VCE) coalition products called Vblocks.

Along with the fresh news about Acadia, this helps a lot to understand the big picture of how the virtualization ecosystem may change in the near future.

First of all, Sakac informs that the coalition is developing a formal certification process to properly recognize as Vblocks a group of core elements that VMware, Cisco and EMC recommend.
This is to avoid that Vblock-like solutions popup everywhere.

Secondarily, and most importantly, Sackac details some of the capabilities of the Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), the management platform that EMC released to control the Vblocks as a whole:

• It can subdivide the entire Vblock (compute, network, storage) and sets of Vblocks into multi-tenant management domains
• It extends the idea in Cisco UCS Manager of a “service profile” including in the service profile any associated Cisco MDS and other Cisco Nexus/Catalyst network configuration needed.
• It can manage many UCS systems and Vblocks from a single console.
• It can enable simple state configuration changes over time – by default, the UCS, network, and storage element managers aren’t focused on “compliance over time”
• It can take service profiles and copy/paste them with a single click on a multi-UCS environment.
• It can schedule application of profiles and multi-step Vblock provisioning tasks
• It can report out on jobs, and even provide audit reports and check off processes…
• It can check against compliance with best practices: like “check to see that all service profiles are bound to templates, and aren’t homebrewed”:
• It can check with compliance for configuration errors: for example here, automated error checking like the example below (looking for duplicate MAC addresses)

EMC published a 8-minutes demo of Ionix UIM about multi-tenancy that is worth a check:

Sakac even suggested some features that we customers could expect in Ionix 2.0:

• It will further extend the “service profile” idea to provision the underlying storage
• It will provide a “service catalog” for their entire Vblock – end-to-end deployment right up to adding the vSphere host to the cluster (or creating a new cluster) with a single click
• It will provide a “pool of pools” management model for vSphere, compute, network, storage
• It will provide the same tools for compliance and remediation across baselines

Labels: Cisco, EMC, VMware

Along with the announcement of the Virtual Compute Environment (VCE) coalition in November, Cisco and EMC also announced the creation of a joint venture called Acadia, which has the purpose to design the Vblocks products, operate them on behalf of the customers and transfer them from hosting partners to customers data centers if required.
VMware and Intel invested in this joint venture too.

So far there was no additional information about the company but the fact that it will start operating in 2010. Yesterday NetworkWorld provided a lot of details about the board of Acadia:

• Howard Elias, President and Chief Operating Officer of Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services at EMC
• Gary More, Senior Vice President of Advanced Services at Cisco
• Rob Lloyd, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Operations at Cisco
• Mitch Breen, Senior Vice President of Global Channel Strategy and Sales at EMC

NetworkWorld also unveiled that the new company will have 130 employees and will begin its operations in Q1 2010.
Elias may become the company chairman.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, VMware

So far we have dedicated a lot of space to Oracle, in terms of what virtualization offering it could provide and what mistakes may compromise its presence as a relevant player.

The Sun acquisition has not closed yet, so the company cannot disclose any specific plan. Without concrete information about that, what we have published so far, and what follows below, is pure speculation.
Nonetheless it’s worth spending some more time evaluating the strategy that Oracle may put in place and how it may impact the current players.

As already said many times, now the company is in the unique position to offer an entire computing stack, including servers, storage, the hypervisor, the operating system, the middleware, some of the most used business applications, thin clients, a VDI connection broker and an enterprise management software to coordinate all of the above.
Leveraged in the right way, and assuming Oracle may become a credible virtualization player, it represents a remarkable competitive advantage for some customers (while others can clearly see it as a painful way to lock themselves in).

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and now Red Hat, have to deal with multiple vendors and support thousands of different hardware and software components (VMware just launched a certification program for software. Why did they have to do that?). And a lot can go wrong when your hypervisor is the glue that keeps together servers, storage, network, guest operating systems, enterprise management agents, guest middleware and guest applications.
Oracle is the only one, in the virtualization market, that could say, “We know exactly what happens at every level of the stack, because we provide all the components; we can guarantee the behavior and the performance of our virtual infrastructure because there are no 3rd parties involved.”

There’s another company that is in a similar position, but in a completely different market: Apple.
Apple develops its software and its systems, and is fully in control. Steve Jobs considers this one of Apple’s biggest assets:

We're the only company that owns the whole widget -- the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guy can't do.

It is a lock-in, the growing number of issues around the iPhone App Store approval process confirms this, but it’s a huge success.

Of course the consumer market and the enterprise market are different worlds, but Oracle may well pitch its virtualization offering in the same identical way.
If so, Oracle is going to compete with the just born Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a nice acronym that also means VMware Cisco EMC, the three companies that founded it.

The value of VCE products, the self-contained virtual data centers called Vblocks, is not only in the hardware and software that make the units. It’s in the fact that VMware, Cisco and EMC design, produce, test and certify the units to serve a specific amount of virtual machines, for a specific amount of users, interacting with specific workloads, that perform in predictable ways.

In other words the VCE coalition saves the customer the huge investment of designing his own data center and the costs of designing it in the wrong way.
When the customer buys a Vblock, he is not just buying the hardware and the software. He is also buying the know-how that these three companies put in the machines. A know-how that he would have to produce by himself or buy somewhere else.

To validate this approach, VMware Cisco and EMC had to form a new entity and share investments, because none of them controls the full stack. Oracle does, and if the future of IT will be dominated by modular data centers, where a single vendor provides self-contained units that customers just stack up together, then Oracle now has the opportunity to become a leader in that future just as much as Cisco.

The difference between Cisco and Oracle is that the former has already clarified its interest in doing so and took several steps to change its current image of networking provider, while the latter… well, the latter still is the well known database giant. And no more than that.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, Oracle, VMware

As expected, today VMware, Cisco and EMC announced a special alliance, a coalition as they call it, dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE).

This entity will share investments to sell the components, training and consulting for a number of bundle packages called Vblocks.

The VCE will also count on a partners ecosystem, which already counts on six system integrators: Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro.

The Vbocks can be deployed at customers data centers or hosted online. 
To design them, operate them on behalf of the customers, or just transfer them from the hosting facility to the customers data centers, Cisco and EMC created a special joint venture called Acadia
VMware and Intel invested in Acadia too, and the company will start operating in 2010. 
It’s not clear why the system integrators above cannot do that instead of Acadia.

At its launch VCE will offer three Vblocks:

• Vblock 0
  entry-level configuration available in 2010
  supporting 300 up to 800 virtual machines
  leveraging Cisco's UCS and Nexus 1000v, EMC's Unified Storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform
• Vblock 1
  mid-sized configuration (undisclosed launch date) 
  supporting 800 up to 3,000 virtual machines
  leveraging Cisco's UCS, Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC's CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform
• Vblock 2
  high-end configuration (undisclosed launch date) 
  supporting up to 3,000-6,000 virtual machines 
  leveraging Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS), EMC's Symmetrix V-Max storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform

VCE will develop and offer additional bundles over time for shared services, applications and vertical industry solutions.
“Shared Services” and “Applications” is where the interest should focus the most. There, it’s possible to see popping up the hosting provider Terremark, where VMware invested $5 million, and SpringSource that VMware acquired in August for $420 million.

All Vblocks will be ISO 27001 compliant.

To manage these data-centers-in-a-box as a whole, EMC is offering a new management product called Ionix Data Center Insight.

Ionix will not replace the vSphere and UCS management consoles, but will coordinate them, gluing them with an application management stack that controls what happens inside the virtual machines:

The most important question around this partnership is: why these VMware, Cisco and EMC have to form a coalition to validate and sell their products as a commercial bundle?
Their architects already produce jointly validated infrastructure blueprints that customers can use to design new data centers. 
Part of their channels already sell their solutions together where it makes sense, and more will do if the products works better together.
Their customers don’t need a new brand and marketing brochures to buy the idea of cloud computing and private cloud. Cisco alone (in terms of selling servers) is new enough to generate interest and concerns.

VMware is taking a lot of risks with this move.
HP alone sells 36% of all virtualized servers. And it has EDS.
Dell just acquired Perot Systems, which is one of the biggest consulting arms in the world to sell the VMware-centric Dell virtualization portfolio.
IBM just has to think about Red Hat and its new KVM-centric offering, and it could be a dangerous competitor on a global scale.

Months ago virtualization.info published an article suggesting that VMware may be slowly morphing into an infrastructure management company that will compete with BMC, CA, HP and IBM.
Maybe it’s not VMware, it’s EMC that has this ambition. Ionix seems to imply so.
And because Cisco may have a similar ambition too, and both can’t afford to become an infrastructure management company in 2010 without controlling the virtual layer, VMware is the mandatory addition.

Maybe the VCE coalition is just an attempt to generate significant results that can validate a future merger.
VMware, Cisco and EMC all have a neutral position in the market today. 
All have a solid relationship with the entire ecosystem (except their direct competitors), including Microsoft (except of course for VMware).
While this coalition doesn’t change much, apparently, an actual merger would drastically change the way these companies behave. And the shareholders may not consider the move worth losing the current market alliances.
But, if a coalition could produce amazing results in 12-18 months of work, then it would much easier to justify the new Ciscoware.

While waiting to see if the merger will take place or not, it’s worth to consider once again how this coalition will impact the other OEMs that so far preferred VMware over Microsoft and Citrix.
A number of smart people suggested that this partnership will not change anything, but it’s worth to remind that Cisco has a significant stake in VMware, that Intel and VMware just invested in the new Acadia joint venture, and that VMware just sent out a message to its sales channel that says:

…The Virtual Computing Environment coalition offers organizations of all sizes an accelerated approach to data center transformation with dramatic efficiencies that promise significant reductions in both capital and operating expenses. As a result, organizations will no longer have to choose between best-of-breed technologies and end-to-end vendor accountability…

Who knows if HP, Dell and IBM consider this a non-problem.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, VMware

At the end of the last week Reuters broke the news about an upcoming joint venture between EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco.

The three should announce a new product portfolio this week, called vBlock, probably gluing together Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus, EMC V-Max and VMware vSphere, which the joint venture will sell as a hosted service.
And if the customer wants it, the vBlock gear can be moved inside the company’s boundaries.

At the end of September virtualization.info published an article about the strong alliance that these three companies are building and how it’s going to impact the VMware partnership with the other OEMs and how it’s going to influence the perception that customers have of the VMware position in the market.

We expect the official announcement before publishing further comments, but it’s clear that this joint venture is going to modify the landscape in some serious way.

Update: In an interesting interview with John McCool, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center Switching and Services Group at Cisco, that Network World published today, the joint venture (codename Alpine) is mentioned but the executive refuses to comment about it.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, VMware

Since the VMware acquisition at the end of 2003, EMC always said that its new subsidiary had to stay independent to win the market.
A few really trusted those words at the time: nothing like virtualization has driven the storage spending in the history of enterprise IT (and it’s just the beginning, wait for VDI to become mainstream).
It was hard to believe that EMC wouldn’t leverage its relationship with VMware to declass NetApp, HP, IBM, Sun (now Oracle) and others as second choice options when designing virtual data centers.
But over the years the storage giant demonstrated its commitment to keep VMware independent.
For a period of time EMC was even accused of not doing enough, lacking that minimum integration that customers expect between two technologies as complementary and connected as the VMware hypervisor and the EMC storage array.

If EMC ever used its influence on VMware to damage its competitors, virtualization.info is not aware of it and no customer or reader ever complained about that.

Now everything is changing.

It’s not changing in the sense that EMC has started to adopt sneaky or illegal techniques to better position inside the virtual data center.
It’s changing because the EMC commitment is no more to let VMware play nice with every storage vendor in a very balanced way.

The new EMC commitment is to develop, evangelize and deploy solutions that work with VMware better than anything else available from competitors. And they are doing well. Really well.

A major driver in this new strategy is Cisco: the networking giant doesn’t have any real competition in the virtualization space at this point, and this puts the company in the position to demand for an unprecedented level of commitment to its new partners EMC and VMware.

If unpleased, Cisco can go to Citrix. Or Microsoft.
And both VMware and EMC know that networking is the next biggest bottleneck in the virtual data center of tomorrow.
Simply put, Cisco is too important (with or without its unified fabric effort) to let it go.

Nobody here is trying to say that the EMC effort entirely depends on Cisco. 
Their effort depends on a long-term vision that finally makes a lot of sense and that is embraced at all levels inside and outside the company.
The synergy/symbiosis with Cisco is just accelerating the events.

NetApp, HP and IBM (assuming that one day Big Blue will start paying attention again to the x86 market) have a huge problem.
It doesn’t matter how good their solutions in the virtual data center are. It doesn’t matter how tight the integration with VMware vCenter is.
There’s a growing perception that EMC is the way to go. And a growing perception that there’s nothing on the market that can compete with the triad VMware-Cisco-EMC.

These companies have three options: do nothing, start to spend a massive amount of energies in countering the EMC activity and gain back the attention of the VMware audience, or build something similar elsewhere.
Of course this last option is the most interesting. Something may happen around Citrix and Microsoft in the coming months.

Labels: Alliances, Cisco, EMC, VMware

At the beginning of July virtualization.info reported how VMware, Cisco and EMC (the VCE triumvirate?) are working together to execute virtual machines live migrations across data centers that are 80 km (50 miles) away from each other.

Well, what was considered an impressive yet experimental configuration in July became an officially supported scenario in September.

The three companies discussed three different scenarios for long-distance VMotion at VMworld 2009 and announced the joint validation for one of them, where VMware supports a 200 km live migration (assuming you can satisfy some pretty demanding requirements):

Chad Sakac, Vice President of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, has as usual provided a comprehensive coverage of the session that is really worth a review.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, VMware

For months now HP had to tolerate the coverage that press, blogs, forum and newsgroups dedicated to the Unified Computing System (UCS) that Cisco officially launched in March.
Even virtualization.info, which never considered the blade technology as strongly related to virtualization, has closely followed the UCS announcements, believing to see a new paradigm of integration between a virtual infrastructure (VMware vSphere in this case) and the physical layer below it (but this is something that Cisco still has to demonstrate).

Cisco just entered the x86 server market, and while it already appears in a very strong position thanks to its partnership with VMware and EMC, it still is a newcomer,
No customers would easily jump on the new bandwagon without a careful evaluation of the Cisco strategy, capability to execute, technology value and ROI.

But the word is that the network giant has closed a deal with VMware to replace HP as the server provider at the upcoming VMworld 2009. And there more than 10,000 potential customers will see the UCS in action there.
Additionally, the way VMware is pushing the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch inside its new vSphere Enterprise Plus packaging may drive many customers away from the HP ProCurve networking equipment over the long term.

So HP must be feeling the pressure if decided to dedicate the July issue of its The Real Story newsletter to UCS, criticizing the Cisco blade system on many fronts.

The content of the message is relevant to the virtualization.info audience as it includes criticism about the virtualization aspect of UCS:

…Before considering a giant switch to a giant switch vendor please consider the following issues:

…

When a customer adds the Cisco Nexus 1000v for VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus with 24x7- 3 year support it adds an additional $1138.70 per processor. This extra cost adds up fast, considering that a rack of 48 two-processor servers would cost an additional $109,315.20 just for the Nexus 1000v software.

…

it appears that traffic even between two virtual servers running next to each other on the same physical would have to traverse the network, making an elaborate “hairpin turn” within the physical switch, only to traverse the network again before reaching the other virtual server on the same physical machine. Return traffic (or a “response” from the second virtual machine) would have to do the same. Each of these packet traversals logically accounts for multiple interrupts, data copies and delays for your multi-core processor.

…

Cisco has defined a new proprietary frame protocol; VNTag, for UCS’s Network Interface Virtualization model such that an attached physical switch, according to Cisco, cannot be connected to just any IEEE 802.1D compliant Ethernet switch.
Another example: If a customer wants to connect an existing blade environment, such as an HP BladeSystem with a Cisco 3120 switch integrated in it, a Nexus 1000v soft switch would be unable to pass a VN-Tag to an upstream Nexus 5000 switch. In other words, Cisco’s VN-Tag approach doesn’t even work with their own switches!…

The other non-virtualization-related issues described in the message are important as well, and well worth a deeper analysis of the HP claims.

Labels: Cisco, HP

In December 2008 a new startup called iCore Software entered the almost empty OS virtualization market, where Parallels is a leader (and potentially a monopolist if Oracle will kill the Solaris Containers technology as soon as it completes the acquisition of Sun).

At the moment iCore targets the consumer market but, as often happens in IT industry, as soon as the first investment will come in (and with it a bunch of seasoned board advisors), the strategy may change quickly.

At the moment their product, Virtual Accounts, is still in private beta and may appear hopeless in a highly competitive market where VMware (Workstation/Fusion), Parallels (Desktop) and Sun (VirtualBox), and soon VirtualPC embedded in Windows 7, are pretty mature and already address most of the customer needs. Anyway Cisco seems to have a different opinion.

The networking giant recently hold a global Business Plan Competition for university and business school students. Over 1,000 students applied, including the graduated PHDs that funded iCore in 2007: Artem Prokopenko and Nikita Parfenov.

iCore didn’t win the competition but Cisco selected the company as one of the 16 finalists.
As result Cisco will work with them in “leading the next wave of disruptive technologies by providing mentorship and professional assessments regarding their submissions”.

Labels: Cisco, iCore Software

It’s not a secret that virtual machines live migration is perceived by most virtualization professionals as a must-have feature.
After trying to dismiss its value for months, even Microsoft is putting a major effort in promoting it now that its upcoming Hyper-V R2 finally offers it.

The problem with VM live migration is that it doesn’t work beyond a single network segment where two or more virtualization hosts share the same SAN space.
The first vendor that will be able to offer such feature over a WAN link will change forever the way we think disaster recovery.

VMware is working on long-distance VMotion since a while now, but the last time we checked (at the VMworld 2008 analyst briefing) the company was skeptical about delivering the technology in a short timeframe (like 12-18 months) because of complex technical issues.
Nonetheless a long-distance VMotion was demonstrated just last week with the help of Cisco.

The two companies showed how a VM live migration is possible between two data centers away 80km (50 miles) from each other, “fighting” against a 400us latency for each fibre cable.

A long time may pass before this technology reaches the production stage, but VMware and Cisco are really innovating here and deserve maximum attention.

Labels: Cisco, Disaster Recovery, VMware

VMware, Cisco and EMC are really putting a massive effort in promoting the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform that Cisco unveiled in March.

One of the most interesting things produced in this effort is the whitepaper that Cisco just published on his website: Scalability Study for Deploying VMware View on Cisco UCS and EMC V-Max Systems.

The triad managed to setup and document a VDI environment based on VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 4 with 640 virtual desktops (Windows XP with 512MB vRAM and 8GB vHD), served by four UCS blades (160 seats per blade), each with 96GB RAM and the new Intel Xeon 5500 Quad Core CPUs.
Which is four times what was achieved on Dell M600 blades.

The description of the environment is extremely detailed and goes deep into the configuration setup and the performance analysis. It’s really worth a read.

Thanks to Virtual Geek for the news.

Labels: Cisco, EMC, Papers, VDI, VMware

Now that Nexus 1000V, the first virtual switch for VMware vSphere is out for sale (and we know everything about it), Cisco is free to publish detailed demos of the product in action.

The company just uploaded two new HD videos on Facebook that cover how vEthernet interfaces relate to VMware vNICs, what are port-profiles, how to create them with a SSH console and how to apply them with the vSphere client, how to monitor the network statistics of a virtual machine despite its migration from a host to another with vMotion.

Both are worth a check:

• Nexus 1000V Demo - Part 1 (10:59 min)
• Nexus 1000V Demo - Part 2 (10:43 min)

Labels: Cisco

The Register just broke the news about the price of some Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) prices.

The details about the blade system that will turn the networking giant into a x86 server vendor, and potentially into a virtualization vendor as well, are very limited and pricing has been barely mentioned so far.

The Register is now reporting that:

…the UCS B200 M1 blade server, the base two-socket box without the memory extension technology that Cisco hopes will give it differentiation against other providers of blade servers using Intel's "Nehalem EP" Xeon 5500 processors, has a list price of $2,954…

The original article has additional prices about different components. Unfortunately none of them is related to the software side of the thing, like the UCS Manager (that a company slide seems to list at $0), the BMC automation layer or the VMware vSphere 4.0 platform.

Labels: Cisco

The new, much discussed Unified Computing System (UCS) is not here yet, but it’s clear that Cisco is very serious about becoming a major player in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

To further clarify its intention, the company announced that it just hired Christofer Hoff as the new Director of Cloud & Virtualization Solutions.

Hoff comes from Unisys were he was the Chief Security Architect, but he’s mostly known because of his tireless evangelism activity on his personal blog, declared a Top Virtualization Blog of 2008 by virtualization.info.
We had the pleasure to see him in action as speaker and panelist during the Virtualization Congress 2009 US, the virtualization.info’s independent conference about virtualization technologies.

Cisco has the appeal and the pockets to attract other major talents in the virtualization space, and build the dream team it needs to become a relevant and trusted vendor in a market that is so different from the networking one.

Labels: Cisco, Leadership

In the past months virtualization.info highlighted several times how Cisco is silently using KVM as an alternative virtualization platform to VMware.
We always wondered why, considering the investment that Cisco made on VMware.

Now, finally we have an answer to give: Cisco invested in Qumranet too.

Qumranet is the startup that developed and maintained KVM up to the moment it was acquired by Red Hat.
And that’s why Red Hat had a minor but very relevant position during the launch of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) despite its virtualization offering is pretty weak now.

The fact that Cisco invested in Qumranet is not widely known and we had to admit that even virtualization.info overlooked this key information so far.
How the investment links Cisco to Red Hat is not clear but it’s easy to guess that the upcoming Red Hat new virtualization portfolio based on KVM will have an early chance to be bundled with UCS.

Now VirtualLogix, the mobile virtualization startup where Cisco invested along with Intel, is the next most interesting company to watch.

Labels: Cisco, KVM, Red Hat

The long awaited virtual switch for VMware, the Cisco Nexus 1000V, is finally available for the broad public.
In the past months virtualization.info published details of its architecture, its features and its implementation. Now it’s time to try it with the free 60-days trial that is available here.

Cisco priced the virtual switch at $695 per CPU, which has to be added to the vSphere 4.0 license.
To plug into the new VMware platform, Nexus 1000V in fact needs the vNetwork Distributed Switch feature that it’s only available in the new vSphere Enterprise Plus license.
Some VMware customers are arguing that the current packaging and price may negatively impact the sales of Nexus 1000V, which becomes now much less attractive.

Starting May 21, we’ll see if the customers will really consider the Cisco virtual switch a must-have and will gladly pay the premium price to replace the basic VMware virtual switch they used for so many years now.
As usual in virtualization, it really depends on who’s your interlocutor inside the corporate. The guys at the security department may have a slightly different opinion on this product than the virtualization guys.

Labels: Cisco, VMware

It took almost two months to finally unveil the software layer that manages the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system, but Cisco finally made it.

On its corporate Data Center Networks blog Cisco shows the GUI details and workflow in two parts videos.

UCS Manager seems very complex and granular, it exposes the full hardware for each blade, it exposes the logical servers that you want to create aggregating multiple blades in the system, it exposes the networking and the storage layer, and of course it exposes the virtual machines inside each blade.

Each of these layers can be restricted by a role-base access control system.

Unfortunately, and this seems done on purpose, Cisco doesn’t show the details of the virtual machines administration functions. Nonetheless the videos are well worth watching:

• Part 1 - Overview [9:27] (low quality / high quality)
• Part 2 - Service Profiles [10:19] (low quality / high quality)

As usual Chad Sakac, VP of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, has further details about it.

Labels: Cisco