VMware is the latest craze not so much because of the shift it is supporting back to the Data Center, but because of it escalating stock price (NYSE:VMW). We have had our own experience with VMware (Demo #1, Demo #2) and you are welcome to give the VDI Total Cost of Ownership Calculator a try.



Pieter Van Den Abeele worked on the VMware project for Genesi and is shown here making an Open Client demonstration to Raquel on location in Belgium (Network Configuration Diagrams). We discussed VMware a bit yesterday in our blog (Keeping the PowerPC Dream Alive) for all those interested.

R&B :-)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

While vmware is the best known virtualisation engine, there are some others. Most notably Xen, which contrary to vmware is completely open source. The company behind Xen (XenSource) was just bought by Citrix, a major vendor for terminal server products for half a billion dollars... I use both technologies, and it is hard to decide, which is better.

BTW: Xen is ported to PPC, even if only to PPC64 at the moment. Do not expect the same from vmware :-)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Well, the idea is not to leverage virtualisation of Power Architecture, but to leverage virtualisation in any case and use the Open Client as.. a client. x86 thin clients are still power hungry (don't believe AMD when they say the Geode takes up 0.9W, they have 4 other chips they're not counting, and the integrated peripherals on the SoC are missing from their power testing benchmarks) and tend to come with Windows CE licenses and suchlike.

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Matt Sealey

Yes, Xen is ported to PPC64, but is any PowerPC distribution
offering it with GUI:s like Xen in Suse 10.1?

Virtualization is the latest thing and together with Software-
as-a-service, will drive the IT-market forward the coming
five years.

VMware is the number one virtualization manufacturer and
with Virtual Infrastructure 3 they have more functions than
Xen. VMware Vmotion is working perfectly and Xen Live
Migration is still in its early stages. VMware has an excellent
License Management Server for OS licenses. Does Xen have
this?

What you do is that you purchase 100 Windows Server
licenses, and then you put 100 licesenses in VMware.
Virtual Center will then keep count on these licenses and
make sure that you never launch more servers than you
are licensed to.

For us preferring Linux this is no issue. But out there,
there are loads of Windows servers.. Giving them an
easy way of keeping track of licenses is worth alot of
money.

But yes, VMware is very expensive. You pay per core
in your cluster. Xen is free. But as a company investing
a few millions in blade servers would probably prefer
having someone to blame when it breaks down, so that
would have you contacting XenSource. XenSource are
still cheaper than VMware, but they are also offering
less features, and not to forget - less engineers.

There are many good VMware engineers out there.
VMware have had their educations and certifications
for a few years now. What can XenSource offer?

I'm sorry to say this, but VMware is like Microsoft.
They dominate the market and have all the best
engineers tied to them. These two things are one
of the most important things to take in account when
you decide which virtualization technology you would
choose.

Xen would be what Linux was 10 years ago. It has
potential, but is not really there, yet.

I'm all for healthy competition and I wish Xen all the
best.

From my own experience with Xen in Suse, I got a
very bad impression when I couldn't use both cores
in my virtual machine. You can't do that with Parallels
either.

That is one of the first questions you get in VMware's
new virtual machine wizard..

---

So what did my babble have to do with PowerPC. Well,
like has been said. Xen is available for PPC64. On x86
hardware-virtualization are built-in to the CPU. Both
Intel and AMD are offering their respective technology.
This helps speed up the virtualization alot, and PPC64
would need this as well. But what PPC64 CPUs are out
there? Not many, about.. One, the PPC970 in it's different
versions.

To even take PowerPC seriously in the virtualization
field, new powerful and energy-efficiant CPUs with
hardware virtualization are necessary.

However, running virtual desktops with open clients
is a way to use it for the EFIKA.

But I don't really seethe reason why one should.
Just as I don't really seewhy some build big VMware
clusters, just to run Citrix desktops on. When a native
Citrix farm is much, much faster. I have been to seminars
about this, sponsored by VMware and Citrix, but I don't
really see why one would do it. It sounds like Citrix
just want to be on the train, instead of standing at the
trainstation..

A Citrix farm is already a cluster of many servers and
they can take about twice as many clients as the same
server running on top of VMware. It's just a big waste
of resources, and will force the company to buy more
servers, instead of less.

Xen PPC still has some missing functionality, so it's not yet integrated into SUSE. But anyway, the YaST gui is only to get started with a problem, not to cover every little detail. One can use any number of host CPUs, have any number of virtual CPUs in a guest, which makes optimal CPU usage a lot more easy. This needs some text editing, or some XenSource or third party tools I never cared to try.

I run a number of Xen servers and they run fine. I use of course openSUSE, which is free, and consolidated many little services and clients on a few big iron machines. The combined cost of these brand server machines is just about 1/3 of all these services hosted on smaller individual servers (including the price of a spare server), use of electricity is also just a fraction. I must admit, that I never had the luxury of calling a support line, so I don't care much about vmware engineers :-)

But, as Matt mentioned, EFIKA is the most power efficient thin client solution, and virtualization (no matter, if it is vmware of Xen) makes the server side more efficient.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Peter:
You are correct about efficiency.

But, why would you run the EFIKA desktops virtual?

I haven't really understood why you would do that,
instead of running native Linux desktops. You will
loose so much power and consume so much energy
(from extra servers), than the few Watts saved using
EFIKA instead of x86 thin clients. You willend up
consuming more energy.

Well, try to run OpenOffice on EFIKA, and you will understand... Please take a look at http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/proj ... /entry/543 It is possible (actually already for decades) to run most applications locally, while running some heavy weight applications remotely (like OpenOffice, Grass GIS, etc.). This is how I used ArcInfo at the University from my Linux desktop.

But even in a pure thin client - big iron situation, power consumption will be considerably less. A desktop machine spends most of its time idle. I measured about 3W for an idle EFIKA with Radeon but no HDD, 50W+ for the same on Pegasos and 70W+ for a desktop PC. A few servers and many thin clients consume less, than many desktop PCs. And they are also easier to manage. Many EFIKA as dekstop and no terminal server at all works only, if no heavy weight apps are needed and easy management is not a concern...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Yes, I know why you need to run the applications
remotely.

But why, why, why, would you run these in a much
slower virtualized environment, instead of native
on these terminal servers?

This is the question I've had since my first post,
why run Terminal Services, Citrix, whatever in
a virtual server?

Genesi is pushing for VMware here. I can still not
understand what they need VMware for in this
environment. It will consume more server resources
which means more electricity will be wasted.

It's counter-productive and definetaly against the
low power EFIKA.

Who said we were pushing for VMware?

Any money in the clients can be subsidized by the infrastructure. It is just a game of incremental improvement to keep the customer paying for an "optimized" solution. The control rests at the data center where the big money is spent. Pricing the clients is all part of the packaging. Eventually virtualization will not be "real" enough and we will move on to the next hot thing...go grid! Seriously, it should be a utility and one day it will be priced that way too.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Thank you for your reply.

It's just that I've seen VMware many times in your blog,
including this EFIKA client infrastructure.

That's why I thought you were pushing for a virtualized
desktop solution.

FYI, this just in...

August 23, 2007: 12:15 AM EST

Riding a wave of virtualization and server refreshes, IBM (NYSE: IBM) was the number one server vendor in the second quarter, posting growth in x86, UNIX and System z servers, analyst firm IDC said today.

According to IDC, IBM had a 31 percent share of overall servers in the quarter, increasing year-to-year revenue 17 percent in x86 servers, seven percent in System p UNIX and four percent in the System z servers.

What architecture is most important to IBM?

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com