... in a single browser window. Without Lab Manager, says VMware, the task of provisioning physical servers takes a long time, is expensive and a bad use of IT resources. With it, it takes between seconds and minutes and needs no manual intervention except from the person requesting the resources.
At any point, the user can snapshot the state of the complete set of servers, and the system then creates a URL which refers to that unique instance. This can then be handed to a different part of the development team, which will pick things up at exactly the point and in exactly the condition when the incident of interest occurred. This alone, says VMware, enables efficient complex debugging of problems by teams spread across the world.
InovaWave's DXtreme for Windows is a performance enhancer for virtual machines that lets you increase the number of virtual machines supported on a system, or leave the number unchanged but increase the performance. The company is a little coy about exactly how it does it, but it provides each virtual machine with its own dedicated virtual IO channel — as opposed to having the hypervisor manage all the IO. The company claims that a 250 percent improvement in performance is possible, or 50 percent more virtual machines.
We saw it running on a credible demonstration, and it did indeed improve performance on a variety of IO-intensive tasks by more than 100 percent — however, it also increased CPU usage by a factor of at least 50.
Dave McCrory, chief technical officer and co-founder of the company, says that DXtreme relies on having a connection to a physical hard disk on the server — it won't provide any benefits to network attached storage — but it uses heuristic algorithms to spot patterns that let it speed up even apparently random IO by huge factors. He also said that the technology will continue to outperform other virtual IO even when processors start to include native support — due around 2008.
HP was quietly showing off some benchmark figures for an 80-user system based on thin client, XP and VMware ESX Server 3.0. Each user had an HP Windows CE-based thin-client box, connected to a dual-processor, dual-core Intel-based DL380G5 server, with its own XP image including Microsoft Office 2003 and Norton Anti-Virus Corporate Edition. The server had 16GB of DDR2 memory, and there were 23 72GB SAS drives for a total of 1.7TB of storage.
When running the Gartner Knowledge Worker script, HP claims, 95 percent of task response times came in at under 50 milliseconds — in other words, well within the speed at which responses are perceived as lagging. The whole system was priced at $118,403 — $809 server and $670 client per user — and took 1,720 watts.
Amid the large numbers of virtual machine management, performance tuning, backup and physical-to-virtual products, a small consumer sector is beginning to emerge. Moka5 is packaging up virtual appliances in a format called LivePC that can be carried on iPods and USB thumb drives, and encouraging users to create their own and share them via the company's website.
The idea is to create a self-contained environment with all the bits and pieces a consumer might want to carry with them, and to safely use whatever host computers they come across on their travels. This is quite similar conceptually to VMware's own ACE product, which bundles up secure, managed virtual machines for corporate deployment on untrusted systems — typically, an employee's home PC or a contractor's laptop — but Moka5 actually streams the virtual machine itself to the user wherever they are.
"VMware can't do that," Kelvin Yue, Director of Engineering at Moka5 told ZDNet UK. "Every ACE installation has to carry the full VM with it. We send the VM to the user whenever they plug their LivePC drives into a host".
