Somewhere out there!

Redhat has acquired Qumranet the developers of KVM. Will be interesting to see how this plays out in the Linux virtualisation world.

I haven’t tried KVM yet as I’ve been too busy and Xen is more mature – but many of the accounts I’ve read seem to indicate that for Linux its performance is very good maybe better in some cases than Xen. Management is another issue, but that is just a matter of time and development enegry.

From lwn.

Some links on migrating from Vmware to XenServer. Particularily converting vmdk to xva, and dealing with removing Vmware Tools.

• Thread: Howto for migration from VMWare ESX
• Virtual Disk Migration Utility 1.1
• Converting a Physical Disk to a VMWare Virtual Disk
• Thread: VMware Linux guest to Xen
• VMWare to Xen Migration
• Thread: Migrate VM under VMWare Workstation 6 to XenServer
• Thread: v2xva failure in converting .vmdk files? – phantom disks in vmx can make v2xva fail.
• VMware KB #1308 – Cleaning Up After Incomplete Uninstallation on a Windows Host– removing Vmware Tools can be troublesome. Check this kb article and also note the following location in the registry.
• VMware server memory controller service failed to start

The vmmemctl.sys driver is missing from your system or the registry contains the wrong image path. The \??\ is normal in the path.

If you selected the default path for the VMware Tools, your registry imagepath should look like the example below.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VMMEMCTL]

This post on Is ZFS ready for primetime? is disconcerting. I’ve put a lot of effort recently in engineering a zfs based storage server to backend a xen cluster. I haven’t put much up here and a back injury has restricted the amount of seat time. Without much tuning I’ve put together a TB+ system that provides 85Mb/s over NFS to a RAIDZ2 pool.

Throughout the whole period it has been a constant struggle to get Opensolaris working, figure out ancient Solaris ideas about system management. Sort out a kernel bug that caused crashes when running bonnie++.

Being held ransom by the idea of needing a Sun support contract at some future unknown date due to a bug in zfs seems to me as a losing position. Being forced into that position I think misses the point of opensource. Zfs provides striking advantages with checksums and simple snapshots, easy offline remote replication. But without the idea that your data is safe there is no point.

I can put together a Linux storage system without thinking and manage it without much thought. The lack of constant time snapshots is going to hurt, but at least I know the exact same system will still work in 2 years without any changes.

I missed this in the morning, but saw it later on Daniel’s post.

In September, possible with a launch at VMworld 2007, VMware will announce a new promotion called Foundation, bundling together three ESX Servers Started Edition and one VirtualCenter (capped to manage those three virtualization hosts) for $3,000.

VMware, XenSource, and the future of virtualisation

The XenSource acquisition opens up the possibility that virtualisation, under Citrix sponsorship, will shift into delivering full desktops–a combination of an operating system and user application set–as virtual machines that are refreshed frequently. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, say Citrix officials, that one day such virtual machines will follow mobile workers around via the Internet, converting any available PC into a personal desktop. Virtualisation so far has been mostly a consolidation play in the data center or in the developer’s test bed, where one piece of hardware can be virtualized into several different test environments.

It is interesting in the context of the above comment that an original goal of the Xen project was global mobile computing. Maybe the XenSource-Citrix link isn’t so complicated after all, and driven by strong vision on both sides.

From Support Forums : Accessing file based storage? …, how to actual a VHD disk image in the console for XEv4:

You will need to attach the VDI to dom0 (Please refer to “xe vbd-create”). This will mount the VDI as a device in dom0, which you can then “lomount” to get hold of the exact partition on that disk.

XenSource to spin off Xen project:

What does this mean exactly? It could be a spin-off, if the comments from XenSource CEO, Peter Levin, are taken literally. “We’ll be working on an independent body to take over some of the Xen project,” he said.

Something like this would help a lot to sustain the community.

It’s official Citrix are buying XenSource, they don’t indicate the amount in their press release but it is stated elsewhere the amount is USD 500 million.

It’s good that the XenSource guys have realised their work. Although of course that now leaves us wondering what next for XenServer as a platform.

As I expected. It seems if you purchase a perpetual licenses by lunchtime Friday 17th August it will be maintained at the existing level. Software maintenance is set at 20%. So when your current software maintenance period expires, the XE annual fee will jump from $150 to $750 and XS will jumped from $0 to $150.

Buying XS today at $99 vs Monday at $750, is probably a worthwhile consideration if you have a small Xen project in the near future.

XenSource have just issued apress release on the new version 4.0.

Apart from the long delayed new features, tucked at the bottom is new pricing: