Novell's Virtualization Partnership

Jane Walker writes "The push for a virtual data center and utility computing continued this week as Novell announced that SuSE Linux would have support for Virtual Iron out of the box." Novell has also guaranteed that 'that all existing independent software vendor (ISV) certifications will not be affected.' From the article: "'The applications certification [component] is huge,' said Novell director of data center applications Justin Steinman. 'Customers want to know that their existing applications are not going to break when they deploy their technology [on a virtual server].'"

Comments

The future of the web hosting business

[spinfire]

More and more companies are getting into providing Virtual Private Server business for customers who aren't quite ready for colocation or dedicated server usage, but have outgrown the basic shared hosting or have special needs. This is a good environment for people who need a web hosting environment which they can configure and customize but don't want the overhead of an added machine. Furthermore, because of the nature of server load it is efficient to put lots of customers on one massive machine.

With the rise of the dual core Opteron offerings from AMD one can have a very nice server which can support a huge number of customers. It won't replace colocation for the people who want a very personalized setup or need lots of power but cheap virtual servers will likely gain a higher market share soon.

So why bring it up?

[PCM2]

The only mention of utility computing in TFA is this:

"The utility computing, base data center model everyone is striving for today cannot be done without virtualization," Walsh said.

I guess the idea is that virtualization can be a step in that direction, but otherwise you're sort of offtopic.

Re:2006 is the year of the next bubble, apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont confuse vanilla low-end boxes with vmware. ESX allows you to have no downtime, snapshots, use resources cost effectivly, etc. Some applications wont spread across boxes some will. You never look at 1 solution to a problem, you look and see what is the best. ESX or upcoming Virtual Iron has many cost savings many problems.

So no, the rest of the industy is not moving in the other direction.

Re:2006 is the year of the next bubble, apparently

[lucabrasi999]

Seems like much of the rest of the industry (google, msft terraserver, etc) is moving the other direction, where they put applications that once needed ten large computers across 200 low-end commodity boxes.

Interesting. So, instead of maintaining 10 pieces of hardware, you now have to maintain 200. And, those 200 boxes will be significantly underutilized (probably in the range of 2 to 5% CPU utilization). So, now, your electric bill goes up for TWO reasons:

1) You are using a larger data center, and

2) You are wasting a significant portion of your CPU

If you are working for a company that is not taking advantage of all of the virtualization technology out there, then you are working for a company that is wasting money.

Re:The Gambit

[KiloByte]

VMware is a fine piece of proprietary software. In fact, it is an absolute must if you have to make a non-trivial installer for a piece of a Windows software -- I can't imagine anyone reinstalling the whole damn thing every test build. And, Windows doesn't support COW.
However, it's expensive. Even VMware Workstation costs as much as a new PC, and around here we can hire a person for two months for that much money. Thus, we own only a single license and gradually move away from it.
Qemu+kqemu is marginally better, at the cost of no user friendliness. However, no Windows version (well, there's always Cygwin+X) and no click&droll interface means that your ordinary admin/coder/user can't make it work.

On the other hand, Xen is in a completely different league. It's not meant to be a quick&dirty tool to test an installer, Xen is pretty much supposed to be used for servers that run permanently.

As an example, the setup I'm finishing a migration to has:
* nothing but firewalling in dom0
* bind9 and reverse squid in dom1
* Apache running production in dom2
* Apache running dev in dom3
* mysql in dom4
* Apache running my personal crap in dom5
Everything but dom1 is IPv6 only, too, just as an extra obfuscation layer. Script kiddies don't know IPv6, you see :p

With this kind of separation, even if you pwn what is visible to you, you are still a long way from getting to the real meat. While Xen can't manage memory dynamically well, there is next to no CPU loss (for comparison, a 2.0s-in-native test takes 2.8s in qemu+kqemu, 57s in bare qemu and 4s in vmware).

And about your problem: yeah, the documentation that goes with Xen is ABYSMAL. In fact, I couldn't get "proper" routed networking to work for the live of me. What I did, was setting up a fake bridge (_not_ tied to any actual physical interface) and tying all domUs to it. Iptables then sees xenbr0 as a regular interface, and lets you employ all your netfilter expertise in a well-known way. Yay.