VMware’s first VMworld conference in Europe, taking place in the palais des festivals, especially known for its annual hosting of the film festival. The conference hosted over 4500 visitors and 96 exhibitors, and tons of hour-long sessions were held throughout the 3-day conference (26th - 28th of February).

Some highlights

  • IBM breaks a Microsoft Exchange performance record with the use of ESX 3.5
  • BEA rocking the Java world with LiquidVM
  • Parallels offering their own take on virtualization with a suite of products for several platforms
  • Richard McDougall offers some insights on running databases in a virtualized environment

IBM Performing “Miracles” with ESX

HP, Dell, and IBM all announced support and complete integration of ESX Server 3i with some of their hardware platforms, making the choice of supported hardware for an ESX machine a lot easier.

IBM made a short presentation to answer the question of the impact on the performance of the virtualized system.

Thay ran the test on an IBM x3850 M2 server with 128GB of RAM. The virtual machines ran Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter x64 Edition with Service Pack 2 and Microsoft Exchange 2007 Server Version 8 with Service Pack 1.

The storage used for these tests was an EMC CX3-40 with 225 disks (15 drawers of 15 disks each). Each virtual machine was configured to use two LUNs of 10 disks each for the Exchange database and a three-disk LUN for logs.

According to Microsoft’s guidelines, an Exchange Server with the mailbox role assigned supports up to a maximum of 8 cores and 32GB of RAM. As seen in the picture, the hardware used in the test easily exceeds those specifications.

IBM tried using virtualization to utilize the full extent of the hardware by dividing the resources into manageable packages for the software. Using eight virtual machines with two cores each, they were able to get double the number of mailboxes running on the same hardware. Because each VM can only “see” two virtual CPUs, the software running on them functions every bit as efficiently as on a regular dual-core machine.

Their conclusion is:

The large number of companies already running Microsoft Exchange Server on VMware ESX Server are experiencing improved resource utilization and better manageability as well as lower space, power, and cooling costs. New servers with greater processing power make the transition to Exchange on ESX Server even more compelling.

You can read further info of this intersting test at this link.

BEA rocking the Java world with LiquidVM

In the session led by BEA, WebLogic as virtual application was presented

The company has developed a Java Virtual Machine that is able to run right on top of the hypervisor, doing away with the need to install an operating system on the virtual machine.

This “Virtual Edition” of their WebLogic Server software provides a Java “shell” that communicates with the hypervisor in much the same way it would communicate with a standard OS. They call the technology a form of paravirtualized Java, since the LiquidVM is “aware” of its virtualized state and can be managed from the outside by the WebLogic Operations Control. This allows for application-specific resource management, enabling administrators to allocate resources dynamically, depending on the needs of their applications.

During VMworld, a press release came out stating that VMware will soon be including the LiquidVM VI client into their Virtual Infrastructure product line, allowing their customers to manage Java applications from within the VI user interface.

Parallels Offers Their Take on Virtualization

In a market so heavily dominated by VMware, it may be surprising to see another company trying to offer its own hardware virtualization solutions. Mainly targeting SMBs and the home market with their product line, Parallels wants to make virtualization available to everyone, providing a range of products in several types of virtualization.

From their point of view, virtualization has served two important goals so far:

  1. Development and Testing: Due to its perfectly isolated nature, OS-based hardware virtualization is perfect for this. It provides a solid playground for developers looking for a safe and realistic environment where they can unleash their applications.
  2. Consolidation: This is where hypervisor-based virtualization comes in, allowing for efficient and flexible consolidation of legacy systems, bundling together of small-footprint servers, and powerful management of all these virtual machines.

While Parallels does offer products for both kinds of virtualization, where they really want to make a difference is in what they view as the next big step in virtualization: Providing a platform for what they call the “Virtualized Data Center”, making use of VDI and Hosted IT in combination with the two above technologies.

To accomplish this, they are currently building a suite of tools to support this way of working on as many platforms as possible: Mac users may already be familiar with their OS-based hardware virtualization software known as Parallels Desktop for Mac, while Parallels Workstation has been available for Windows and Linux users for a while now.

Paired with their freshly introduced Parallels Server platform and the newly acquired Virtuozzo OS virtualization software, they believe they can cover all bases perfectly. Parallels Server will be available for all platforms and is hypervisor-based. On top of that, it will also be able to run OS X Server virtualized, making it the very first virtualization solution in which this is possible (and allowed).

To provide full integration between these products and even third-party solutions, the company is working hard on a full range of automation products, aiming for a powerful and centralized management system.


Parallel’s view of the virtualization market and how their products fit into every category.

 

 

 

 

 

What about Virtualized Databases?

In a very interesting session led by VMware’s Richard McDougall, that provided with some insight on running databases in virtualized environments. The session mainly involved Oracle, but according to McDougall, they’ve found the pointers discussed apply to any database system. Right from the start, McDougall did away with some of the most common performance myths and misconceptions, and listed quite a few positives to the use of ESX and Virtual Infrastructure, paired with databases.

When thinking about virtualized databases, many believe them to be too I/O intensive to run efficiently, and as such provide too much overhead. While these concerns are definitely justified, VMware strongly believes that ESX’s strong IO subsystem can handle any database satisfactorily and provide a large amount of extra possibilities that should be enough to convince any database analyst to at least try it.

Making use of a single system to run several databases can be quite a fragile setup, and putting platform-specific high availability systems in place can be a costly endeavor. It’s for this reason that VMware’s “one system fits all” solution might prove very interesting. Apart from the possibility of using VMotion, Dynamic Resource Scheduling, and VMware HA on the systems, there’s the option to easily provide powerful isolation, without the need to buy a new system for every database.

For optimal performance on a virtualized platform, VMware offers the following tuning recommendations:

  • Always use a 64-bit database
  • Try to assign enough memory to the VM to cache the entire database and reduce the amount of IO
  • Make use of Direct-IO uncached pass-through capabilities and Asynchronous I/O (if possible)
  • Use large MMU pages
  • Most importantly, optimize the actual storage layout (such as the number of disk spindles). This will have the largest impact.
  • For Oracle, the log files should be put on the very fastest piece of storage available, preferably dedicated to this task.

Some more justifications Why Oracle Databases Run Best on VMware can be found here.

This entry was made by info from this source and this website.