Why Virtualization on your Smartphone

Most professionals carry two cellphones  one cell phone for work and another for personal use. However, if there exists a Phone capable of securely switching between home and work identities, and in a way your IT manager will approve of, you won’t need two.

How Virtualization is Possible on Android Phones

Smartphones today are powerful enough to multitask apps in background, without any impact on the performance. Vmware had been working to make this possible on current gen 1Ghz ARM processors. In the near future, we would start seeing Nvidia Tegra2 based dual core CPUs, and everything would seem better.

LG is bringing this to practice by tying up with VMWare. VMWare runs as an application on top of the phone’s Google Android OS, and is called Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). Users will simply tap a VMWare icon on the phone’s touchscreen and the phone will instantly switch identities–and phone numbers. On this dualSIM phone, the second identity will be one entirely managed by the corporate IT department, letting them ensure security and compliance regulations are adhered to.

The virtualized Guest will have its own set of apps and contacts, and the IT department will have the power to shut down the work account should the employee lose the phone.

The pont to n ote here is that the concept had been cooking up since a long time. VMWare announced its Mobile Virtualization Platform more that two years ago and demoed it.

Most cell phones use ARM-designed chips, and the company’s latest effort in the form of the Cortex-A15 includes not only improved performance but also virtualization extensions that could dramatically improve virtualization performance.

The two operating systems are able run on the same phone simultaneously, and are entirely separate from each other. The virtualization would be 100% pure neither of the OS would be aware of the other one, however, second OS is likely to be modified in various ways to boost performance in a virtualized environment.

LG would be betting on Android for the host and guest. (Of course Apple, Microsoft, RIM will never license their OS to run in VM.) The host would be a stripped down version of Android that is optimized for performance.

When?

Good question. Soon, very soon.  LG would be announcing this Phone in early in 2011. The phone model is unknown, but we suspect it could be LG Optimus with Tegra2. Few companies have already shown interest in LG’s idea, but there are some questions that are to be answered: Who will buy it – Consumer or Employers?

Whatever the case be, its actually interesting to see how smartphones could phase out PCs. If its not now, it might happen when we see Quad cores on phones.

UPDATE from MWC 2011:

VMware and LG’s demoed the the Virtualized OS at MWC 2011 and we must admit that its pretty slick. The speed of the transition from the owner’s OS to the virtualized OS is nothing short of amazing considering it is all running from the device’s SD card. VMware has started with Android and LG, but there’s apparently nothing holding them back from offering this on any smartphone platform — and honestly, we can’t wait to see more. Checkout the video after a break:

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Taking it further, is Salesforce and VMware, who are turning cloud computing into a Java runtime environment. The companies have partnered to together enable Spring framework based Java cloud. The foundation would be  VMware’s vSphere virtualization infrastructure and will be hosted, of course, at Salesforce.com.

VMforce (the name is obvious) will be able to host any Java application that can be built to utilize existing Salesforce’s database infrastructure. So what this means is that Enterprises and Businesses can build and host their Java applications on the salesforce’s infrastructure just like its possible today with Google’s App Engine. But way more capable.

App Engine limits (and restricts) itself to POJO java applications with limited choice of database: BigTable, a non-relational database (non-RDBMS). However, VMforce will host and run a typical J2ee application on most popular J2ee framework i.e. Spring (using Spring application-hosting layer) and a full blown traditional RDBMS database.

No doubt, Java developers currently lack a simple path to cloud deployment.

“There are over 6 million developers who know Java. It has transformed this industry and brought enterprises onto the Internet. But enterprise Java developers don’t have a clear path into the cloud. Can they deliver these next-generation cloud applications? Is there a gap between where Java is and where cloud computing is going?”

Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, said that “developers value, above everything else, productivity.” He said that, for new applications, deployment to a cloud can increase productivity and reduce internal IT complexity. He said that these benefits are at the heart of the partnership between VMware and Salesforce.

The companies together believe that this gap must be filled, so that we can deploy Real business Java apps to the cloud, giving developer more power to deliver the next generation of application development and deployment.

VMforce should open up to the public this fall. With vSphere being mature enough for most Cloud apps, it would help  in evolution and maturing of Cloud-based Java application.

How it Works:

On top of vSphere, the VMforce cloud will offer a Spring application-hosting layer and a database. Developers will use the SpringSource Tool Suite to build and deploy applications built specifically for the VMforce cloud. Those tools will include automatic analysis tools that can call out the portions of an application that will need to be changed to work in a cloud environment.

The app deployment and maintenance will be done via “The SpringSource Tool Suite” ,a  free development environment. To create a new application, there are a number of wizards but nothing new that needs to be learned. New applications can also be created using Spring template wizards.

However, the bad part: Applications using Enterprise JavaBeans aren’t candidates for moving to VMforce, and other Java EE applications would require significant rework in order to run in that environment. The VMforce platform is targeted at developers creating new Java applications for the cloud. This could be a big limitation of this Cloud service.

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Virtualization has been around for more than decade in Zen, VMWare, VirtualBox, parallels, and several others. Of these VirtualBox is the fastest but not as feature-Rich as VMWare products. VMWare Fusion is inclined towards Mac based Platform to virtualize almost any OS.

Mac users are deprived of certain apps that never made it to Leopard like certain VPN clients, etc. The best way is to run Windows inside Mac rather than having a dual-boot which wastes alot of time, Virtualization is the best solution.

VMWare Fusion 3, releasing later this month, is designed to take advantage of both the recently released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and the upcoming Microsoft Windows 7. Fusion 3 is the most feature-full virtualization solution — Suitable and effective for Desktop users, than any other previous version of Virtualization apps. So let’s go through the best feature one by one:

Faster Performance, Scalability

Fusion 3 has got some cutting-edge enhancements that improves the overall performance. The hypervisor (core of Virtualization) has been re-written to support faster interactions between Host OS Kernel and the guest. Some of the things like USB get direct memory access, making I/O faster.

VMWare Fusion 3, unlike previous versions, natively supports the 64-bit kernel and allows users to run 64-bit guest operating systems, even if their Mac is running the 32-bit kernel. 64-bit maps to larger memory addresses and hence scales higher.

GPGPU: General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit or GPGPU ,as the name says, enables users to use the idle GPU do to general purpose computing that normally is done by CPU. Snow Leopard is known to to leverage this heavily. VMWare Fusion3 is also rumored to take advantage of this one. So expect more powerful virtualization.

Seamless Integration
VMWare Fusion 3 will offer Snow Leopard users the best way to run Other OSes: Windows, Linux or Leopard Server on their Macs. This is justified by the improvement in Unity mode. This is something unique. It let’s users access the Windows Start menu, Applications from Mac desktop, rather than inside the VMWare window, alongside Mac apps in the dock and in the menu bar. This makes accessing files, apps and documents from your virtual machine even easier and more seamless than what we have seen in the past. Here is one running Chrome:

Better Graphics Support: Aero, DirectX 9

Virtualized setups still lag behind when it comes to 3D graphics and gaming, but that gap is getting smaller and smaller. VirtualBox is a fairly decent virtualization solution for graphics. But it doesn’t do it well. In fact, no virtualization program does it till date: Fusion 3 is the first one to break the barrier and let the GPU do the magic. The Result? Aero Support for Windows 7 and Vista.

With the power that drives iMac, MacBook Pro and Macbook, all users should have the ability to see Aero’s glassy delight inside the VM. Though it will run best with the new MacBook Pros that have Nvidia Graphics.

The story doesn’t end here. VMWare Fusion 3 also supports OpenGL 2.1 and Direct X 9.0c — which means that depending on your graphics card, you can even play games in Windows without having to use any tool like: Boot Camp. Of course they will never be as-good-as native OS graphics. Still, it’s a biggest step towards graphics in Virtualization.

Migrate Old Windows Machine to Mac Seamlessly

VMWare has made it easy for people to migrate their existing Windows PCs to a Virtualized version seamlessly. so, if you are new to Mac, don’t worry you get your old Windows along. Here is the official video on how to do it.

This was already possible with Parallels, but VMWare Fusion 3 goes beyond. It lets the user connect to their old Windows machine  over the network and copy that computer into a new virtual machine. Pretty cool ehh ?

Verdict and Availability:

If you migrated to Mac from Windows, this is one killer app you can’t live without. Stop Multi-booting for trivial apps , when you an Virtualize them.

VMWare Fusion 3 is now available for pre-order at VMWare’s site, the Apple Online Store is selling it for $79.99. Existing VMWare customers can upgrade via VMWare’s site on October 27th for $39.99 and the upgrade is free for new Fusion 2 users.

Cisco and VMware  announced a method for using VMotion across data centers that are located as far apart — 200 kilometers.

Users have been pushing VMware to offer a method of allowing VMotion to be used between data centers, and this reference architecture is a step in the right direction. But it is only a step and not a true failover technology. It does not replace VMware’s disaster recovery product, Site Recovery Manager.

The long-range Vmotion technique was originally demonstrated at Cisco Live! But VMware formally announced support for it. It can be used with Cisco switches that support VLANs, namely the Catalyst 6500 as well as the Nexus 7000. It requires that users implement VMware’s latest product, vSphere.

The current reference design provides only what its makers refer to as “Disaster avoidance” not “disaster recovery.” Long-range movement of a virtual machine using VMotion must be performed manually (although users could write scripts to move VMs.)

As per Cisco:

VMotion solution and CiscoLive!, we have been working dilligently with VMware to develop and refine the solution.  Inter-data center workload mobility has a lot of moving parts involved.  Essentially, you need to be able to address three areas:

1. Mobility at layer 2
2. Mobility of the data, since there is seldom value in moving the workload if it loses access to the data it needs
3. Mobility at layer 3 and of services

Technical issues with the network and storage have yet to be solved to allow VMotion to support more automated long-distance failover. These include an inability to maintain an IP address if a VM is moved from one ISP to another, for instance from a data center in New York to another in San Jose. Likewise, storage is a problem. Until storage vendors come up with a way to support active/active SANs for the same VM moved between two physically far locations, no-latency failovers won’t be possible between data centers.

Some of the features are better found in Oracle’s VirtualIron.

How good is this new Technique?

This technique is not recommended, and not supported by VMware, when users have Disk Raw Mapping (DRM) turned on and used with clustered servers on either side.

All that said, for Cisco users wanting to deploy vSphere, this design can be practical in helping them manage VMs between data centers. It can be used for disaster situations where users have warning (tornadoes, hurricanes). It can be helpful for load balancing applications between data centers to offset an expected traffic spike. It also represents major progress on the network portion of the long-range VMotion problem.

The reference architecture is available for  from Cisco’s blog.

Did any one ever thought a Virtualization giant like VMWare would buy Java based Framework developer Company “Spring Source”, popular for it’s “Spring Framework”, used in most J2EE web applications today.

VMWare’s acquisition of SpringSource, is the most significant development in the history of the Java development platform, after the Oracle-Sun deal.

VMWare is now into serious Cloud Computing. The company sees its role in the cloud, very crucial. The acquisition of the commercial open-source middleware/framework company makes perfect sense. First make your Virtualization highly resilient, portable then partner with Networking giants for Virtualization Aware Networking, and then jump into software market.
SpringSource gives VMWare a development “platform,” the next step,  to deliver in VMWare-based cloud services and a unique Ecosystem to define both application construction and deployment architectures.

The vision constructed by SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson a while ago, speaks to an environment in which developers can declare not only how objects should connect with one another, but how they should be packaged into virtual machines and deployed into the virtualized infrastructure:

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a Platform as a Service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.

The impact of this acquisition has focused on how it plays as a competition to Microsoft Azure, which–when combined with the Hyper-V virtualization platform–threatens VMWare’s dominance in the enterprise. Forrester Research thinks it’s much more than that, however:

VMware has a bigger agenda SpringSource helps to fulfill making vCloud bigger than simply an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) alternative and keeping Microsoft at bay. Enterprises are already demanding that cloud environments and internal cloud solutions support their hypervisor standard VMware. So it wasn’t going to be a stretch to get vCloud adopted, assuming it delivered as promised. But the battle isn’t IaaS, it’s becoming the equivalent of the operating system for the next generation data center and you can’t achieve that aim without applications; and you can’t become application-relevant without being relevant to developers.

Stephen O’Grady says it’s not just about the development and integration, but also about tooling:

When (colleague Michael) Cote and I met with SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson at OSCON a few weeks ago, one of the primary topics of discussion was the development experience. This could wind up one of the unheralded benefits of the acquisition: Rod gets the tooling story. He understands that Microsoft, again, is setting the bar for the development experience by allowing its developers to localize the cloud environment via Visual Studio. With VMware’s virtualization capabilities, the tooling story for SpringSource could get very interesting vis a vis cloud development and deployment.

Everyone is excited about the future of cloud computing — There are technologies evolving for both public and private clouds that give developers just as much control over every element of how their applications are built, deployed, and operated as they have had in the past.

These technologies are a combination of declarative descriptive configuration policies and automated software and systems that can interpret those policies and respond as required.

SaaS is a key-player in today’s industries. Spring Framework has done wonders in this. SaaS offerings allow customization at levels of granularity unthinkable before Spring demonstrated dynamic instantiation. Custom applications deployed to IaaS offerings could declare that they require a isolated networks for backplane communication, connectivity to two different storage systems by name (perhaps even one in the cloud and one through FCoE), or provide monitoring through specific protocols.

VMWare is not the only company that can currently achieve this vision. Microsoft is in a great position to allow a similar story for its developers, assuming it partners with the right systems companies to push dynamic configuration beyond Hyper-V into the physical infrastructure layers. .Net and the Microsoft tool set are already quite capable of delivering significant coordination between application development and deployment. Citrix and Red Hat, by contrast, do not yet seem to have such a sophisticated vision.

BTW, VMWare got cloud monitoring powerhouse Hyperic in the deal as well.

What’s your take on VMWare’s acquisition of SpringSource. Is it as important as the cloud pundits, or is there little excitement worth raising hair here?

Sources- CNet, Betanews, WSJ

Is it State-of-the-Art or pre-launch advertising? In any case I believe that Cisco’s overview of this new (and at least partially proprietary) hardware-centric approach to Network Virtualization is a must read. It contains a very sound summary of the network challenges in virtualized environments, a recap of VMware’s Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS), Cisco’s Nexus 1000V and a somewhat vague introduction to concepts such as port profile, VN-Link and vEth.

Here is what Cisco’s Whitepaper describes:

• Core layer, the high-speed packet switching backplane for all flows going in and out of the data center

• Aggregation layer, providing important functions such as the integration of network-hosted services: load balancing, intrusion detection, firewalls, SSL offload, network analysis, and more

• Access layer, where the servers physically attach to the network and where the network policies (access control lists [ACLs], quality of service [QoS], VLANs, etc.) are enforced

Effects of Virtualization

Figure 1. Comparison of Access Layer Connectivity Options in (1) Nonvirtualized Rack-Optimized Server, (2) Virtualized Rack-Optimized Server, (3) Nonvirtualized Blade Server, and (4) Virtualized Blade Server

Hypervisor-Embedded Virtual Switch

Cisco VN-Link

Virtual Ethernet Interfaces

Port Profiles

Figure 2. Relationship Between Virtual and Physical Network Constructs in a VN-Link Enabled Switch (Cisco Nexus™ 1000V Series Switches)

• As a Cisco DVS running entirely in software within the hypervisor layer (Cisco Nexus 1000V Series)

• With a new class of devices that support network interface virtualization (NIV) and eliminate the need for software-based switching within hypervisors

Deploying VN-Link in Existing Networks with the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series

• Virtual Ethernet module (VEM)-data plane: This lightweight software component runs inside the hypervisor. It enables advanced networking and security features, performs switching between directly attached virtual machines, provides uplink capabilities to the rest of the network, and effectively replaces the vSwitch. Each hypervisor is embedded with one VEM.

• Virtual supervisor module (VSM)-control plane: This standalone, external, physical or virtual appliance is responsible for the configuration, management, monitoring, and diagnostics of the overall Cisco Nexus 1000V Series system (that is, the combination of the VSM itself and all the VEMs it controls) as well as the integration with VMware vCenter. A single VSM can manage up to 64 VEMs. VSMs can be deployed in an active-standby model, helping ensure high availability.

Figure 3. Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Distributed Switching Architecture

Deploying VN-Link with Network Interface Virtualization

• For traffic going from the server to the network, the interface virtualizer identifies the source vNIC and explicitly tags each of the packets generated by that vNIC with a unique tag, also known as a virtual network tag (VNTag).

• For traffic received from the network, the interface virtualizer removes the VNTag and directs the packet to the specified vNIC.

Figure 4. Architectural Elements of the NIV Model

Conclusion

VMware VMotion technology, unique to VMware,
leverages the complete virtualization of servers,
storage and networking to move an entire running
virtual machine instantaneously from one server
to another. The entire state of a virtual machine
is encapsulated by a set of files stored on
shared storage, and VMware’s VMFS cluster file
system allows both the source and the target ESX
Server to access these virtual machine files
concurrently. The active memory and precise
execution state of a virtual machine can then
be rapidly transmitted over a high speed
network. Since the network is also virtualized
by ESX Server, the virtual machine retains its
network identity and connections, ensuring a
seamless migration process.

Put more simply, the Windows VM is copied to another physical machine, the switch CAM tables are updated with a gratuitous ARP, traffic flows to the new VMWare server, and the old instance is shut down. All of this is completed in about 2 seconds which is short enough to prevent any TCP session failures. Users don’t have clue.

VMotion can be started manually (for let’s say a change window) or dynamically, based on resource usage, by VMware’s Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS). If a single VMware server’s CPU usage gets above a certain limit, DRS moves a few VMs to another server, balancing the load. Users have no clue.

At the network level, there are two major requirements for VMotion. First, a dedicated, gigabit Ethernet VLAN is needed for VMotion traffic. This dedicated VLAN and bandwidth ensures VMs can be moved without impact to users. Second, and most importantly, the group of servers that VMs can be balanced between must be in the same Layer-2 domain. When a VM moves it cannot change any attributes, like its IP addresses. Thus, all target servers must have connections to the same VLANs as the source VMWare server.

This requirement will definitely lead to an expansion of Layer-2 domains, and thus spanning-tree. VMotion is just too cool and useful to not use. Server teams are going to demand large “VMware Farms” to balance and move VMs around. All of these servers require several physical connections so switch ports will be at a premium. This means more switches and, since all VMware servers must be in the same VLANs, larger spanning-tree fault domains. Spanning-tree and Layer-2 domains were being minimized, or at least significantly controlled, in the last few years in network design best practices. That is likely to begin changing as VMware becomes more mainstream. New technologies like Cisco’s VSS will become very important to limit spanning-tree’s impact (when it goes wrong…and it will go wrong…or at least one of your engineers will go wrong with it).

Still, VMotion….very cool….