VM-Net

The leader in offering cloud services Amazon.com is about to get some tough competition from Sun Microsystems which is ready to roll out its new cloud computing product called Sun Cloud today. Sun has stated that its Sun Cloud will speed up delivery of new applications, cut down risk, and lift up computing capacity to meet demand. The company has declared that it will lease the use of servers and data storage space to developers who can access those resources over the Web. Sun will demo it’s cloud services at the CommunityOne developer conference in New York today.

Sun has revealed that Sun Cloud services will initially be available for students, computer programmers and start-ups that cannot afford to buy their own servers and storage equipment. The company has asserted that the first two cloud services – Sun Cloud Compute and Sun Cloud Storage, will be available this summer.

According to   Justin Sorkin Sun’s move is aimed to catch up the flourishing market of cloud computing, in which customers can access the computing power of off-site servers rather than build their own data centers. According to the Wikipedia.org, “Cloud computing is Internet (”cloud”) based development and use of computer technology (”computing”). It is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet.”

With the  release of vSphere 4 looming (21st of May)  Cisco has made its Nexus 1000v virtual switch available to the general public in the form of a 60 day trial. Priced at $695 per CPU on top of the cost of a vSphere Enterprise Plus CPU licence some VMware customers might find Cisco’s vNetwork Distributed Switch a little too expensive, especially when you consider that Enterprise Plus is approximately $600 more expensive than Enterprise.

Whilst the $600 per socket is actually discounted by %50 if you upgrade before December 15, 2009 some VMware customers are arguing that the current pricing and licencing tiers  may negatively impact sales, not only of  Cisco’s  Nexus 1000V but also vSphere itself.  When you consider  Citrix’s recent decision to give away XenServer for free VMware may have opened the door to the competition. I for one feel that the creation of the Enterprise Plus licencing tier, in fact all of the proposed licencing tiers makes little sense and hope, just like in the past, VMware realign/reduce/simply their licencing tiers in a manner that make sense. Starting May 21, we’ll see if customers will  consider the Cisco virtual switch over the VMware distributed switch or even pay the price to replace the basic VMware virtual switch at all.

One of the strange things about VMware’s vSphere product is the number of versions VMware plan to release and the functionality built into each version. I for one find it more than a little odd why the Advanced version should support a higher number of processor cores than the Enterprise version, 12 as opposed to Enterprises 6, whilst Enterprise has DRS and Advanced does not.

Another of these oddities  is the lack of third party multipathing support in any version other than Enterprise Plus. Whilst VMware does offer its own basic multipathing features for virtual machines in all versions of vSphere, APIs in vSphere 4 (Enterprise Plus version) add more advanced multipathing software offered by storage vendors.

Although VMware has never had problems dealing with high I/O  as VMware raises the bar on performance yet again with the release of vSphere 4 more and more organisations will be considering placing even larger workloads in a virtual environment. This will in turn inevatibly place an  increased focus upon disk subsystems, in particular on disk I/O, throughput and latency. Recently however, VMware took a big leap forward in this area in regards to EMC’s announcement of PowerPath/VE.

EMC has been shipping PowerPath (advanced MPIO software) for many, many years.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of licensed copies out there.  Whilst many think of PowerPath as a EMC only product PowerPath supports virtually every operating system, and arrays other than just EMC’s.

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