There are many, many choices available when it comes to virtualization technologies. Even within server virtualization, there are many options. Once the choices have been narrowed, it is still a chore to wade through the options and limitations to determine the best fit for a given datacenter environment.

Some frequent decision points include:

• Is your environment large enough to bother virtualizing?
• If you are running VMware, should you consider Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2?
• Can Hyper-V run other guest operating systems?
• What should a Windows-only shop do?

To help ease the effort, we’ve created a decision flow chart involving the two contenders on the short list at most sites – VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2. This chart starts from your current infrastructure and leads you through the important decisions, and to the conclusions you are likely to reach.

The chart is based on much more detailed information provided in our vSphere vs. Hyper-V whitepaper available for download in this blog posting as well as the associated talk available here.

Hopefully this chart will help you make your server virtualization decisions. Please get in touch if you would like to review the whitepaper or have us evaluate the virtualization options for your datacenter. (Please click on the image for a full-size view.)

We’ve just announced the next NEOSUG (New England Open Solaris User’s Group) meeting

You Are Invited to the New England Open Solaris Users Group

Topic: All Virtualization all the Time

When: October 6th, 2009 6:00PM to 9:00 PM

Where: Sun Microsystems Burlington Campus; 1 Network Drive, Burlington, MA

RSVP: To Linda Wendlandt: lwendlandt at cptech dot com lwendlandt@cptech.com

Registration Required! – so we can plan food and drink

Join Eric Sharakan, Kais Belgaied, and Peter Galvin in an update on LDOMs, Solaris on Xen, project Crossbow (network virtualization), and Solaris Containers.

AGENDA:

6:00-6:20: Registration, Pizza and Beverages

6:20-6:30: Introductions: Peter Galvin, CTO, Corporate Technologies

6:30-7:30: Presentation: Logical Domains & Solaris on Xen – Eric Sharakan, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems

7:30-8:00: Presentation: Crossbow – Kais Belgaied, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems

8:00-8:30: Presentation: Solaris containers – Peter Galvin, CTO – IT Architecture, Corporate Technologies

**** Also we’ll be giving out official NEOSUG T-Shirts and other trinkets, and copies of the OpenSolaris CD and instruction manual.

For more details on the talks please visit the NEOSUG web site at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ne-osug/

In May, we published a blog entry about Sun’s “T” servers (also known as CMT or coolthreads). Those servers are terrific for some applications but are sometimes an ill-fit for others.  That blog posting was expanded into a full column for ;login: Magazine, which is available to USENIX members. Thanks to USENIX, we are allowed to republish the column to make it available to non-members. You can download the full column here:

  August 2009 Usenix ;login: column (150.9 KiB)

A client invited us to give a presentation at their internal IT conference based on the virtualization whitepaper that we published last month.  The whitepaper is available in this post. Registration is not required, but if you register, we will let you know when the next whitepaper comes out. We have a simple privacy policy and we will not fill your inbox with junk.

The talk went over well, including a lively discussion of the pros and cons of both approaches and how they would fit into the client’s infrastructure.

We are making a .pdf of the talk available today, containing much of the content of the talk.  You can download the talk here: 

  Virtualization Presentation - VMware vSphere vs. Microsoft Hyper-V (659.7 KiB)

Also, if you are in the Northeastern U.S. and are interested in hearing this talk first hand, please get in touch and perhaps we could present the talk at a lunch-and-learn event at your company.

We’re pleased to make available our first whitepaper. This one is a technical analysis of  vSphere 4 vs. Hyper-V R2. If you have any comments, please post them here.

The Executive Summary should give you guidance as to whether this whitepaper will be of use to you:

The battle to be your virtualization vendor is in full swing, and it has important ramifications for the vendors involved, and for your data center. The goal of this whitepaper is to analyze the technical aspects of the two major choices: VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2 (as part of Windows Server 2008 R2). This paper considers server virtualization alone, not desktop virtualization or “presentation virtualization”. Certainly presentation virtualization will be an important aspect of the virtualization gamut, but with the entry of Microsoft into the server virtualization market, and the still-unrealized huge potential for server virtualization, this is a topic of great interest to many datacenters.

This whitepaper covers the following topics:
› A summary of virtualization technologies and terms.
› The reasons to consider virtualizing.
› The features of virtualization and the effect it has on application implementation, and datacenter facility implementation and management.
› The impact that future server technology will have in driving virtualization, based on the need of datacenters to achieve optimal resource use and optimal application performance.
› Decision criteria to use in determining when and how to virtualize a datacenter.
› A description and comparison of the features and pricing of vSphere and Hyper-V.
› An analysis of the current state of virtualization and best practices to consider when deploying virtualized infrastructure.
› Our prognosis of the future of virtualization, the expected next feature sets of virtualization, and the future of data centers management and application deployment.
› Advice on how to determine which of the virtualization offerings to consider and how to test that chosen path.
› Reference pointers and suggestions for further reading.

The whitepaper is free and available for download in .pdf format. Registration is not required, but if you register, we will let you know when the next whitepaper comes out. We have a simple privacy policy and we will not fill your inbox with junk.

  Virtualization Whitepaper - VMware vSphere vs. Microsoft Hyper-V (1.1 MiB)

You are invited to: The New England Open Solaris User Group (NEOSUG) Meeting

When: June 23rd, 2009 6:00PM to 9:00 PM

Where: Sun Microsystems Burlington Campus; 1 Network Drive, Burlington, MA

RSVP: To Linda Wendlandt: lwendlandt at cptech dot com lwendlandt@cptech.com

Registration Required! – so we can plan food and drink

Read more…

Sun uses three CPUs as the basis for its products: SPARC VI and VII, SPARC T1 and T2, and x86. Choosing the best CPU, in the best system, to solve a problem is more challenging the more choices there are. Frequently, I’ll be asked to recommend a best-fit solution. Sometimes, I’ll need to debug the performance of a system to determine where its bottlenecks are and if it is the best-fit for the workload. Frequently the “T” CPUs are used in the wrong environment, causing users and sysadmins to be unhappy with the provided performance.

In this blog entry I’ll talk about how to determine whether a given workload will run well on Sun’s T servers (the servers that use the T CPUs).

The T servers have one to four sockets. Each socket holds a CPU with up to eight cores. The CPUs currently range up to 1.4GHZ in clock rate. Each core can have eight “hot” threads, in that eight threads can be making progress on the CPU without the system performing a context switch. However, there are not 8 computation engines per core. Rather, each of the eight threads is round-robin scheduled on the core. For details of the architecture of the Niagara CPUs take a look at the Sun Niagara page. An architecture diagram of a single socket of Niagara II CPU is shown here for easy reference.

These T system CPUs are more than just integer units, adding to the expectations of stellar functionality. Each chip also includes eight cryptographic accelerators and eight floating point units, in some configurations the systems also have dual 10-Gb ethernet ports. Finally, Logical Domains, or LDOMS, are an included virtualization technology that allows at the maximum a virtual machine per thread. The T systems have won many benchmarking records, including world record single socket SPEC integer and floating point benchmarks. So what could go wrong?
Read more…

As promised previously, we’ve posted the second FAQ. The Solaris System Analysis FAQ is now live. The purpose of this FAQ is to provide details on how to determine the cause of a performance, reliability, or functionality problem of a Solaris system. There is a link to the new FAQ in the menu bar on the blog front page. If any of the data is inaccurate, please email. If there is something missing, send the question along and we will take a look at it.

I’ll be teaching two days of my Solaris tutorials at the Usenix ATC conference in San Diego during the week of June 15th. Hope to see you there!

My April 2009 column has been published in ;login: Magazine. This month it’s The Sun Virtualization Guide- making sense of and decisions about the various Sun virtualization options. LDOMs, Containers, Domains and Xen are all options worth considering, and this guide leads you through what each does and when to use them. Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login:, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).