This is been a huge Public Relations time for Intel, 3 huge companies have announced switching to and or back to Intel CPU’s over the past year.

So, the question is why. The magic number is 4. Both AMD and Intel are pushing their quad core cpu’s. AMD’s Barcelona is consider a true quad core cpu. Intel’s quad core is argued that it isn’t a true quad core, because it is technically 2 duo cores on the same die.

Lets look at the count:

Companies switching to or including AMD:

1. Dell, site:www.dell.com
Companies switching to or including Intel:

1. Google, site:www.google.com
2. Apple, site:www.apple.com
3. Sun Microsystems, site:www.sun.com
What does this mean? AMD has made announcements about their chips being faster for virtualization. According to ZDNet: (Read Complete Article)

Barcelona has specific features to deal with some of those performance issues, Ben Sander, a principal member of AMD’s technical design staff, said in a speech on Tuesday at the Fall Processor Forum.

AMD and Intel are vying for share in the x86 server market. Intel’s Xeon chips were the first to provide some hardware support of virtualisation, but AMD’s newest processors now also support it.

Sources:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37230

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39285641,00.htm

http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-6153431.html

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,61984834,00.htm

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1225351.html

Weekend Post (off topic, but still fun to read):

Underground virtualization has gone mainstream.

Many old school gamers, children of the 80’s, and nerds who never owned an 8bit system are doing it. They are using emulation software on their desktops and laptops to play a few rounds of Zelda or Super Mario Brothers. Many of them never had to blow into a cartridge to get it to work. I’m not saying wiping a $50 game disc on your shirt isn’t as fun, but it just doesn’t result in the same amount of laughter. But why the real significance? Nintendo has decided to listen to the masses. They are now cashing in on their game libraries from years past.

The new Nintendo WII (pronouced WII) includes “Virtual Console,” this virtual console is able to go online and download roms of many of the favorite old school games to play in the virtual console. No more yard sale hunting (see links below). Now you can get games just like you get your iTunes music.
What does this mean for virtualization as a whole? It is bringing the word into homes, through your tv set and game console. If you have some piece of old hardware, and maybe a few games for your 64 then you are in luck. There is emulators out there for most all old systems.

The major issue of video game emulation lies in 2 fold, getting the games onto the pc, and the emulating the speed. The tiny processor of a Nintendo could easily be emulated on a low grade Pentium, but as you move up the ranks, the video power of the gaming systems is noticed. I have tried a few n64 emulators on my current laptop, and they are slow. The laptop running XP and a onboard video card doesn’t have the power left for video rendering that a n64 has (maybe something to do with windows being a memory hog). So imagine trying to render ps2 games? or now a Xbox? Those systems are dedicated devices where the processing power is focused on the video rendering. Is it worth buying a $500 video card to emulate a $300 game system? probably not.

Next some systems, such as PSP, Gamecube, and Dreamcast have propriety media. If you can get it to slide into your drive doesn’t mean it will play. And then once you get it onto your system can you even burn a copy to play it again on the console (wait that is pirating, dissregard). No the formats are very specialized to prevent the reading and writting of the media to any system other then the original media.

The release of these classic games allows the masses, to legally, cheaply, and safely play the games. No chance of getting a virus from a p2p firesharing network, no risk of the system crashing due to a bad dll, just plan and simple fun with a credit card.

Feedback and a donation of a Wii system for further testing are welcome.

Sites of Interest:

A couples 3 years of yard sales finding of classic gaming systems

Cheap A$$ Gamer Wiki

http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/nes/

http://www.zophar.net/nes.html

Attend InfoWorld’s Virtualization Executive Forum
February 12, 2007
Hotel Nikko in San Francisco

How can you make the following 10 goals of enterprise virtualization part of your IT organization’s reality?

Improve server utilization.
Lower hardware costs.
Reduce power and cooling requirements.
Increase system uptime.
Accelerate server, storage, and desktop provisioning.
Increase data protection.
Reduce security risks.
Ensure rapid disaster recovery.
Create a flexible infrastructure.
Enhance business agility.

The best place to start is InfoWorld’s Virtualization Executive Forum, coming to San Francisco on February 12, 2007.

Quickly making its presence known among senior technologists and business management, Enterprise Virtualization combines server, storage, application and desktop virtualization technologies to create a more flexible, cost-effective infrastructure, ease the deployment of servers, applications, and client systems, and pave the way to dynamically manage your IT environment.

InfoWorld’s full-day conference offers unparalleled access to industry luminaries and influential peers, providing you with exclusive networking opportunities with technology thought-leaders. Immerse yourself in compelling case studies, discussions of real-world pains and gains, and the practical guidance you need to implement a virtualization strategy for your business.
Conference topics include:

• Report from the Front Lines — early adopters share their experiences implementing and managing virtualization
• From Physical to Virtual: Planning and Deployment — prescriptive guidance for migrating systems from a physical IT environment to a virtual infrastructure
• Storage Virtualization Strategies — how virtualization can ease storage management, improve data availability, and create a foundation for disaster recovery and business continuity
• Enterprise Application Virtualization — how enterprise-oriented grid technologies meet fluctuating application demands through a shared services architecture
• Desktop Virtualization — a survey of approaches to virtualizing desktop systems and client applications, the benefits, the costs, and the challenges
• Putting Virtualization to Work for IT — a look at the many ways, from load balancing and software support to demos and training, that virtualization can deliver unexpected benefits to IT
• Better Testing Through Virtualization — best practices for configuring and managing virtualization in test and development environments

This conference is limited to 200 seats. Confirm your participation today by registering at www.VirtExecForum.com

The security of the internet is based on random numbers, and everyone relies on it. But I have a screenshot I took, that makes me wonder how secure a virtual system could be. Have a look at the screenshot and decide for yourself:

You may be wondering why Solitaire is a security glitch? Well look at the two vitural machines, they are both running solitaire, one is Windows 3.1 and the other is Windows XP Pro. I opened up each of the solitaire windows to visual compare the difference between the operating systems when I notice something. The order of the card deals was IDENTICAL. And I realized that the security glitch is as follows, all virtual machines use the same CPU so that means it could lead to security issues. I haven’t figured out what the security glitch might be, just thought I needed to post the screenshot.

What else comes to mind is this, is virtual machines emulated hardware identical? So can an operating system running on a virtual machine tell if you change it onto a different computer? Here is why I’m wondering. If you build a virtual hard drive with Windows XP. Shutdown the system, duplicate the drive and create a virtual machine and boot will it notice? So is so what does it notice? What it keeping it from being installed once and then duplicated to make maybe 10 virtual machines or maybe 100? It looks like there is going to be a huge potential for a preconfigured virtual machine downloads from pirated sites. What microsoft needs to do is create a required virtual machine as a licensing server. Doesn’t have to be a full virtual system, could just be a just a small network tool. But basically allow there to be some volume licensing control panel, so a complete key list could be entered into the host system, and distributed during installation.

With normal licensing it is very easy to count: 5 computers = 5 copies of 2k3 server. Virtual machines is a huge fuzzy area. Recently the vista EULA has been reviewed and commented on in regards to the 1 machine 1 install limitation, banning home virtualization. It makes MSDN Subscription look even more tempting to be able to test out parallels on the highly anticipated intel core 2 duo mac mini. But really once you get dynamic virtual machines which can be halted, hidden, duplicated and destroyed all with a few clicks how will it be possible to keep track of the number of licenses needed to be legal?

SPEC has welcomed SWSoft into the virtual server performance rating group. SPEC is a organization for benchmark standards in high performance computing. Other players in the group include: AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VMware (listed in alphabetical order). All of these companies have taken a slightly different approach to virtualization and have huge potential market growth as virtualization expands in the future.
My Take:

SWSoft, using their variation of paravirtualization, will probably fight for server tests to show off their best features. Which isn’t wrong, all the companies are going to push their best features. But what should the virtualization standard be based on? There are a few different flavors of virtualization, mainly paravirtualization, operating system virtualization, and native virtualization. I feel that there will be two standards, full native virtualization with off the shelf software, and then full optimized os virtualization.

Looking back over the years of reading computer reviews of standard desktop computers, back to the day of the 486 and low end Pentium’s, I remember how I used to test a new computer, Solitaire. It was free, fun, and included with every version of windows. When you win at Solitaire the cards drop, the speed the cards drop is directly related to the speed of the computer. It runs faster on a Pentium then it did on my first 386. I have tried it inside of Virtual Server 2k5, with Windows 3.11 and i fill post my findings later on that. Full Native should be the first rating, how fast can 1 box run X number of VM’s with full server installs running standard stress tests. Scores could be reported as 5×800 score or 10×569 or 20×340 etc.

A simple test sequence of:

1. Local Hard Drive Access (file copy test to VHD)
2. Local Memory Access (Intensive Memory read write test)
3. Lan Access (file transfer testing across a physical network)
4. Local File Transfer (file transfer between virtual machines)
5. CPU Power Tests ( transaction processing, I always enjoy Towers of Hanoi to max out my CPU’s)

Now the advantage of running this or similar test sequence on a host system, each virtual machine will be at the same sequance in the series at the same time. So any automatic optimization to move resources between virtual machines will not pay off. When one machine needs the ram, they will all need it, when one needs the bandwidth, they all need the bandwidth.

More on this later…
Sources:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2007/01/swsoft_assists.html

http://networkblog.itproportal.com/?p=282

http://hitechinfoguide.com/news/SWsoft-Assists-SPEC-with-Virtualization-Benchmarking/

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/03/09/1443686.htm

Question of the Day: What is the largest hardware market share without a virtual machine?

Answer: Apple OSX.

With a growing market share, and now using standardized intel hardware why isn’t there a Macintosh OS X 10.4 virtual machine?

This seems like it could be pretty simple. Take a program like Xen, and adjust emulated hardware to match that of a Mac and it will run OS X.

Hardware virtualization has emulated hardware from Sony (playstation), Nintendo (NES, SNES, Gameboy, etc), Atair (2600), Commodore, Apple Computer (Apple IIe, Mac Classic) and Standard Intel x86 machine. So how soon until we see this? Well recently we have seen the announcement of Parallels being owned by SWSoft, This means, they have close ties and understand of the Mac kernel, and how to do machine virtualization. So how long?

Apple has spent more money then anyone protecting their name, and future names, and have even fired employees for testing out OSX on their own equipment. So I doubt they will allow people to release software which could run OSX on no mac hardware. But will they be able to stop it?

The future of Virtualization is open source, it can be modified and adjusted to fit your needs. If you need to build a radio station data center your virtualization needs will be different then a doctors office. So will the off the shelf VMWare or Microsoft software be the best match. No, you will see customized virtual enviroments, such as a shoutcast vm, email vm, and even digital xray vm.

Intel and Sun form a very powerful partnership (read complete article):

Intel® Xeon® processors power Sun’s hardware and software solutions

Sun will deliver a comprehensive set of Intel® technology-based systems, with plans for single, dual, and multi-processor based enterprise servers, telecommunication servers and workstations supporting Solaris*, Windows* and Linux. Sun intends to announce the first Intel Xeon processor-based systems in the first half of 2007. With the Intel and Sun Microsystems strategic alliance, IT customers can deploy the Solaris OS - an enterprise class, mission critical UNIX Operating System - on Intel Xeon processor-based servers. The scope spans Solaris, Java, Intel Xeon processors and other Intel enterprise-class technologies over a multi-year period collaboration agreement.

Solaris* optimized for Intel® Xeon® processors

In the coming months, Sun and Intel will combine the breakthrough performance, scalability, and reliability of the Quad-Core and Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processor-based server systems with the Sun Solaris OS. The Solaris platform is supported by over 2000 ISVs on hundreds of platforms that deliver the scaling, functionality and security capable of handling explosive network growth. This combination will provide IT with enhanced OS performance and reliability.

Sun will launch the first of these systems for dual and quad-core processor-based servers in the first half of 2007. In addition, Sun and Intel will extend the collaboration to greater than four Intel Xeon processor scale-up systems and optimize those systems for the mission critical, enterprise class Solaris OS.

This is a great news. Partnerships will help both parties. The next 3 years is going to be some huge shake ups in the server marketplace. With virtualization allowing for software and hardware to mix easily, in a true open market, the best will survive. When a company can buy a server from sun, cpu’s from Intel, OS from Red hat, and load on VMware virtualization software, then load Virtual Machines from any provider, linux, windows, bsd, maybe even Apple.

On a side note:

Wondering about what inside information means, read this sentence and wonder  (read complete article):

Sun Microsystems has had one partner in the low-end server market–Advanced Micro Devices. That appears to be changing, according to a research note from Bank of America Securities analyst Sumit Dhanda.

In the report published Friday, Dhanda writes:

“Our checks indicate  that  Sun  Microsystems will  begin  using  Intel’s  Xeon processors (previously dubbed Woodcrest) for its fast  growing  x86/x64  server product lines. Having used exclusively AMD’s Opteron solution for the past 2-3 years due to its  performance  advantage  vs. older Intel’s Xeon products, we believe that Sun has put the wheels in  motion to rekindle the relationship it once had with Intel on x86 servers.”

Notice the bold word: Our Checks, now the guy works at Bank of America, sounds like he is watching who Sun is paying. This sounds like a scary idea, If I was a massive corporation, I wouldn’t want some stock broker researching my company based on where the money flow goes before announced in corporate reports. This isn’t a big deal for this deal, but with a company like Apple, who is very secretive about their wheeling and dealings, imagine if the checks they sent to Intel got announced well before Apple even had a working prototype. This is a scary idea for stock traders who are associated with BOA.

According to: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2007/01/vmware_admins_m.html

Average VMware salaries for job postings nationwide are 115% higher than average data center salaries for job postings nationwide. (source: Indeed.com)

Here is a quick bar graph illustrating the income of typical IT Employees:

This shows that virtualization pays, and good virtualization pays better.

The cat is out of the bag, and Apple Inc, will probably not buy parallels. Since it is owned by SWSoft. This is a major announcement for the industry because now we have an idea where each of these companies will focus the effort. This announcement creates a virtualization powerhouse. Possibly the first company to make Sun, Apple, and Microsoft shake in their shoes. Think, this company has the most complete range of Virtualization technology, and with that power they can support or deny virtualization host and vms for any major operating system and the industry will follow. If Parallelsoft chooses to not support Vista, or OSX or Red Hat, then the industry will probably be ok with that, and those companies will loose huge licensing contracts due to lack of virtual environment support.
Here is a quote from the orignal announcement. (read complete article in fortune)

This announcement makes a lot of sense for us, and for you. With the combined strengths of SWsoft and Parallels out in the open, we’ve got your virtualization needs covered top to bottom. In short, you can now hit us as a “one-stop shop” to outfit your organization with industry-leading hardware and OS-level virtualization that fits your server and desktop setup, regardless of what combination of Mac, Windows and Linux you may be running.

What will the future bring? SWsoft  has the potential to develop a universal host operating system where you can run Mac OS, Windows or linux on any x86 hardware. I would love to see a real slick lean linux Virtualization friendly kernel, that boots, and then loads your choice of virtual hard drives. The licensing of virtual environments is where Microsoft will make their money, Apple will make it from the hardware, same with Sun and Intel, SW ParallelSoft will make it from the host virtualization software. This could be a great matchup and I hope to see many new and amazing ground breaking applications in the future.

There is 1 major issue,  the current VHD used by Plesk/ Virtuozzo and Parallels can’t be interchanged. Parallels uses Hardware virtualization, where as Virtuozzo uses paravirtualization.

Recently I submitted the following entry to a contest about dream virtualization environments. It isn’t datacenter level virtualization, but it is still taking advantage of the technology. Here is my entry:

My Entry:

In an ideal setup I would have 2 systems, a nice ultra light 12″ intel based macbook laptop for ultra portable applications. This laptop would have OSX 10.5, with bootcamp dual booting to an external firewire drive holding Vista and XP. When I arrive home I would have a nice dual quad core (8 cores total) Mac Pro, also running 10.5, which I could plug the firewire drive right into and boot into OSX or bootcamp. When I have it loaded into OSX I would have the dual 30″ screens 1 with OSX and 1 with Parallels XP/Vista, This would allow me to build and debug websites in the ultimate machine. Someday my dream will come true, where applications will be truely universal, until then I’m stuck writting on this silly dell laptop waiting to be rich.

So what would you do differently? Is firewire too slow? I think it would be kick ass, and 60″ of LCD goodness is hard to top. Let me know your thoughts, or better yet submit your own to them:

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