http://andyleonard.com qstat -u aleonard -s z Sun, 22 Jan 2012 03:46:31 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/30/monday-6302008-links/ http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/30/monday-6302008-links/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:05:37 +0000 Andy http://andyleonard.com/?p=44

Prediction: Citrix will drop the open source Xen hypervisor for Hyper-V. The rest of the open source world drops Xen for KVM. – Lengthy speculation about the future of Xen now that Hyper-V is out. If this turns out to be correct, I think it leaves Sun in a particularly awkward spot, given that the work they’ve done on integrating Xen with Solaris. (Seen at virtualization.info and vinternals.)

]]> http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/30/monday-6302008-links/feed/ 0 http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/20/what-i-think-you-ought-to-read-6202008/ http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/20/what-i-think-you-ought-to-read-6202008/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:14:52 +0000 Andy http://andyleonard.com/?p=35

Red Hat adopts KVM: what happens to Xen now? – I work in a VMware ESX shop right now (other than all those Solaris Zones and FreeBSD Jails and OpenVZ VEs, that is) – no Xen or KVM. However, given the serious pain in the butt that timekeeping is in Linux guests on ESX, I’ve been sorely tempted to look at running Xen for some Linux virtuals under CentOS 5, in the hopes that this isn’t a problem there. Guess I’ll hold off on that now. (Yeah, I’ve read all the docs, and Linux time sync generally sorta kinda usually works until it doesn’t – it just shouldn’t be that much of a flail.)

10 Gigabit Ethernet and VMware – A Match Made in Heaven – Lengthy and interesting article on 10GbE, VMware, consolidation and datacenter Ethernet – dismissive of Infiniband’s chances of becoming the One True Network Fabric.

Blocks and Files: Between a server or storage array place – More commentary on Chuck’s commentary on HP’s flash announcement. Quote: “Another aspect of this is that a flash SSD cache for a servers needs to plug in to the server’s bus and the supplier doesn’t have to worry about getting a Fibre Channel interface onto flash SSDs which is needed to plug them into existing Fibre Channel slots in a storage array. STEC has an effective monopoly on this (with EMC having its own mini-monopoly because of its exclusivity deal with STEC which ends in a few months) until Emulex’ SSD-tweaked SATA-to-FC bridge chip becomes available at the end of the year. ” Which is probably why NetApp recently announced this instead of flash drives.

]]> http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/20/what-i-think-you-ought-to-read-6202008/feed/ 0 http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/10/reading-list-6102008/ http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/10/reading-list-6102008/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:06:34 +0000 Andy http://andyleonard.com/?p=28

Eucalyptus – “EUCALYPTUS – Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems – is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces.” If VMware is perhaps working on responding to EC2, this could be thought of as EC2′s response to VMware ESX, in a way – although it’s coming from UCSB, not Amazon. Notable: This is a product that layers on top of a Rocks cluster installation. (Seen at High Scalability.)

]]> http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/10/reading-list-6102008/feed/ 0 http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/09/links-692008/ http://andyleonard.com/2008/06/09/links-692008/#comments Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:24:28 +0000 Andy http://andyleonard.com/?p=27

Performance Isolation of a Misbehaving Virtual Machine with Xen, VMware and Solaris Containers – A paper comparing the ability of VMware (Workstation), Xen and Solaris Containers to isolate virtual machines from each other with regards to performance. Quick summary: VMware and Xen go one-two in protecting one virtual machine from another, and Solaris Zones lag far behind, a definite trade-off to consider if you’re inclined to use zones for their higher density. I would expect similar results to what was reported with Solaris if the authors had also looked at OpenVZ and FreeBSD Jails – in fact, (anecdotally) I’ve seen generally the same behavior with OpenVZ and Jails, although OpenVZ does give you a lot of knobs to adjust (if performance isolation is a concern for you with OpenVZ, you may want to look at all the options it gives you before making decisions about its suitability). It would have been nice to see more details about the Solaris configuration used in the paper, and to have had the work repeated with a recent OpenSolaris build – substantial work appears to be being done in this area (for example, Improved Resource Management and Zones Integration). Seen at blog.scottlowe.org.

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