VM-Net

Today VMware announced the end of VCB and hinted at a point revision of its flagship product vSphere some time in 2010   in an e-mail sent to partners today. Although this was to be expected with backup providers releasing products compatible with vSphere you can read the full announcement below.

VMware Backup Product Strategy
VMware released vStorage APIs for Data Protection(VADP) with the vSphere 4.0 release in May, 2009. VADP is the next generation of VMware’s backup framework. We have also been working with several backup partners to integrate VADP into their solutions to make backup of vSphere Virtual Machines fast, efficient and easy to deploy compared to VCB and other backup solutions. Several of our major backup partners have already released VADP integrated backup products and we expect most of the major backup partners to have VADP integrated backup software by the upcoming feature release of the vSphere platform in 2010.

Future Product Licensing
Given the strong interest and adoption of VADP by our backup eco-system and the benefits offered by VADP compared to VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), we are announcing the End of Availability for VCB starting with next vSphere feature release in 2010. Starting with the next vSphere platform feature release, VCB will be removed from vSphere platform. VADP integrated backup products (including VMware Data Recovery) will be the recommended option for efficient backup and restoration of vSphere Virtual Machines. This will allow us to focus new value added feature development on VADP instead of two backup frameworks (VCB and VADP). You can find more information about the use of vStorage APIs for Data Protection in our Developer Community. For information on the availability of VADP integrated release of your backup product please contact your backup vendor.

End of Availability
With the release of the next vSphere platform, we will continue to provide the binaries for VCB, but they will not be compatible with the next platform release. We will continue to provide support for VCB on the current vSphere platform per the VMware support policy.

Virtual Iron was certainly not a big player like VMware or Citrixin the virtualisation market, but the company did hold a great deal of promise. In the acquisition announcement, Oracle described Virtual Iron as a “leading provider of server virtualisation management software. However a little over a month after it acquired Virtual Iron Oracle has decided to kill the Virtual Iron business and keep only the technology, according to a report in The Register.

Whilst things looked remarkably bleak for Virtual Iron customers VMware today announced that it is offering existing Virtual Iron customers an easy way to migrate their Virtual Iron deployments to VMware vSphere 4, the industry’s leading virtualisation platform.

For those Virtual Iron customers who have a current license and support contract VMware is offering a  good discount off the list prices on the following products:

• VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard

 

• Support and subscription (SnS) on VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard

Proof of a current Virtual Iron license and support contract will be required to qualify for the VMware offer. Promotional pricing is limited to the number of Virtual Iron licenses supported by a current support agreement. The offer is valid through September 30, 2009.

VMotion is one of those features of  VSphere, and of VMware infrastructure 3, that is quite simply amazing the first time you watch it move a live vm from one ESX server to another with any disruption. However to achieve this magical feat VMotion requires a network link of at least LAN speed to complete the task.

As cool as this is, one question often asked is, “How do we take that one step further, and perform VMotion between datacentres?” This, of course, is a non-trivial thing to do.  There is the challenge of moving a VM over distance (which involves some degree of additional latency) without dropping sessions. To maintain sessions with existing technologies means stretching the L2 domain between the sites, not pretty from a network architecture standpoint. And then there is the storage piece. If you move the VM, it has to remotely access its disk in the other site until a Storage VMotion occurs.  

Last year, Cisco and VMware began the task of trying to solve these long distance VMotion issues with the target of seamlessly migrating a VM between two  separated by a reasonable distance. The joint Cisco/VMware lab in San Jose has run number of tests over varying distances (simulated with reels of optic fiber) as a proof of concept.

This was demonstrated at Cisco Live in San Francisco. The demo as it stood incorporates a distance of 80km (50 miles). See above the above diagram.

This proof of concept is aimed at the following requirements:

1. Load balance compute power over multiple sites: Migrate VMs between datacentres to “follow the sun”  or to simply load balance over multiple sites. Enterprises with multiple sites can also conserve power and cooling by dynamically consolidating VMs to fewer datacenters (automated by VMware Dynamic Power Management (DPM))—another enabler for the Green datacenter of the future.
2. Avoid downtime during DC maintenance:applications on a server or datacenter infrastructure requiring maintenance can be migrated offsite without downtime.
3. Disaster Avoidance: Data centers in the path of natural calamities (e.g. hurricanes) can proactively migrate the mission critical application environment over to another data center.

Use cases #2 and #3 above also require a Storage VMotion to move the disk image to the alternative datacentre.

In January 2008 Microsoft acquired Calista Technologies and those attending one of the last presentations at the  annual Microsoft partner event, held in Houston last year, were  luck enough to be given a brief glimpse of Calista’s desktop session manager. Since then however Microsoft has been very quiet about its VDI plans.

Few details about its solution, possibly based upon Calista’s Virtual Desktop (CVD) and Hyper-V, are available at today beside the original  list of supported hypervisors, VMware and Citrix ones, along with Microsoft Terminal Services platform.

On the paper CVD has some real potential. CVD provides support for 100% of all file and streaming media types available for a modern Windows desktop experience without the need for dedicated hardware or software on the client. Specifically, CVD eliminates the need for media player software and software codecs that increase client management costs, and which impact client interfaces when media codecs are not available for a particular application or client platform.

CVD optimizes the RDP protocol to drastically reduce network bandwidth requirements and improve the user experience in bandwidth-constrained and high-latency environments. For example, CVD’s patent pending, visually lossless compression algorithm achieves data accelerations of as much as 20x supporting a high quality standard business desktop usage, including rich media, at 1Mbit/s per user.

However while in the past Microsoft is implicitly admitting that its Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is not optimised for multimedia streaming but with the up and comming release of Windows 7 and the much improved RDP 7 has Microsoft integrated some of the Calistia’s technologies into RDP. One thing is for sure though Microsoft is going to overlap Citrix ICA more than ever.