VM-Net

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.

One of the areas I recently added on this site is a place to recommend good books I’ve read or are currently reading about virtualization and related technologies. With the release of vSphere behind us we are about to see the first crop of books on vSphere about to be released. The first three of these books are:

VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security Securing the Virtual Environment

Complete Hands-On Help for Securing VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure by Edward Haletky, Author of the Best Selling Book on VMware, VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise

 As VMware has become increasingly ubiquitous in the enterprise, IT professionals have become increasingly concerned about securing it. Now, for the first time, leading VMware expert Edward Haletky brings together comprehensive guidance for identifying and mitigating virtualization-related security threats on all VMware platforms, including the new cloud computing platform, vSphere.

 VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security begins by reviewing basic server vulnerabilities and explaining how security differs on VMware virtual servers and related products. Next, Haletky drills deep into the key components of a VMware installation, identifying both real and theoretical exploits, and introducing effective

Paperback: 552 pages

Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (28 Jul 2009)

Language English

ISBN-10: 0137158009

ISBN-13: 978-0137158003

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Mastering VMware vSphere 4

As part of the highly acclaimed Mastering series from Sybex, this book offers a comprehensive look at VMware vSphere 4, how to implement it, and how to make the most of what it offers.

Now that virtualization is a key cost–saving strategy, Mastering VMware vSphere 4 is the strategic guide you need to maximize the opportunities.

Coverage Includes:
 

• Shows administrators how to use VMware to realize significant savings in hardware costs while still providing adequate “servers” for their users
• Demonstrates how to partition a physical server into several virtual machines, reducing the overall server footprint within the operations center
• Explains how VMware subsumes a network to centralize and simplify its management, thus alleviating the effects of “virtual server sprawl”

Paperback: 696 pages

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (11 Sep 2009)

Language English

ISBN-10: 0470481382

ISBN-13: 978-0470481387

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VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference

VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference is a quick-reference guide for day-to-day administration of VMware’s newest virtual infrastructure software.

The book includes design features such as thumb tabs, secondary and tertiary tables of contents, and special heading treatments to provide quick and easy lookup, as well as quick-reference tables, lists, and step-by-step instruction to provide VMware administrators answers on the spot.

This book is the perfect companion to any book on VMware, including Sybex’s Mastering VMware titles.

Paperback: 496 pages

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (13 Nov 2009)

Language English

ISBN-10: 0470520728

ISBN-13: 978-0470520727

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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.