Virtualization

Novell and Microsoft pact reaches third year mark

This post was contributed to by Pam Derringer, News Writer

On the third anniversary of the 2006 Microsoft-Novell pact, Novell is touting 475 customers who have bought SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates from Microsoft under the settlement. Under the controversial agreement, Novell agreed to give Microsoft either a percentage of all its Linux revenue through 2011 or a minimum of $40 million. Microsoft, in turn, bought $240 million in SUSE certificates that it could then resell to customers with mixed environments who wanted to buy new Windows servers and purchase Linux machines. In addition, Microsoft gave Novell another $108 million as a “balancing payment” in connection with the patent part of the deal.

This joint marketing initiative worked so well in the first two years that Microsoft committed to buying up to an additional $100 million in SUSE certificates in the summer of 2008. To date, Microsoft has only actually purchased an additional $25 million. In fact, SUSE certificate sales boomed so much in 2007 that they were cited as a major factor in SUSE’s three-point market share gain that year vs. Red Hat.

A look at the numbers after three years
While interoperability was the stated goal of the partnership, financial factors were the key motivator for both companies.

“While technical interoperability was the announced basis for the Microsoft relationship, Novell did the deal because it needed to jump start its Linux subscription sales,” said Bill Claybrook, founder of New River Marketing Research, a firm specializing in Linux. “In November 2006, Novell was on the tail end of four or five consecutive quarters of flat SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription sales. At the same time, Red Hat was reporting year over year increases in revenue and subscription sales of 30% - 40%, and Red Hat was already way ahead of Novell in subscriptions sold and in revenue from subscriptions.”
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Red Hat Summit attendee snapshot

This post was contributed by Pam Derringer.

Some came to network. Others to learn. And one came to pick up a prize.

My very unscientific sampling of conference-goers turned up a mix of reasons that motivated people to attend the recent Red Hat Summit, which equaled or exceeded last year’s event, despite the economic downturn and competition from VMware.

But learning seemed to be the prime motivator. For one thing, the assistant of a workshop presenter observed that the company’s technical workshop was more crowded than the general one, which dovetailed with my experience at other sessions. So I’m guessing that attendees, as a whole, were after highly detailed information to help them do their jobs rather than more topical overviews.

And I’ve just got a hunch that KVM and the coming Red Hat Virtualization platform were a big draw. But you could learn something about this remotely, via Webcasts, news articles, or other outlets. So the real advantage to being there is the additional networking factor.

Two attendees whose primary purpose was networking included Steve Giovannetti, CTO of Hub City Media, and Michael Howard of the U.S. Navy’s Spaware System Center in Charleston, S.C. As a new Red Hat/JBoss Catalyst partner, Hub City Media’s main goal in attending (in addition to being an exhibitor) was “getting to know folks and connecting with customers,” Giovannetti said.

Giovannetti said Red Hat’s vision is “great,” and praised its decision to switch to the KVM hypervisor. Although KVM “has a long way to go,” it’s good that Red Hat will support both KVM and Xen in the interim. “Getting all the virtualization vendors to cooperative will be a challenge… but, ultimately, customers will demand portability,” he said.

Howard, one of three government IT staffers I met at the Summit (a remarkable percentage), also viewed the conference as a networking opportunity. Howard’s main task with the Navy the past four years has been to promote the use of open source in the government and offer user feedback to vendors like Red Hat.

“If I give the open source community our feedback, the taxpayers save millions and the government gets software development for free,” he said.

A Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer, the Navy also is using Red Hat’s JBoss Java application platform and is keenly interested in ensuring that JBoss continues in a strong direction, Howard said.

“JBoss has been great,” he said. “Three of the best JBoss developers in the world work for us.”

David Pullman, a systems administrator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he wants to learn more about KVM because NIST is getting ready to expand its use of virtualization. NIST currently has a small virtualization project with Xen and uses a third-party vendor for high availability and live migration. KVM and Red Hat’s SPICE virtualized desktop both sound interesting, he said.

The lone prize-winner I met at the conference was Rick Gideon, chief operating officer of ecommerce.com. Gideon came to the Summit because his company won the JBoss Innovation award for outstanding architecture.

Based in Columbus, Ohio, Gideon’s firm hosts 500,000 websites and collaborated with EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, Zimbra and others to build an intelligent platform for websites that can be provisioned automatically and dynamically, shifting services as needed based on business rules, he said. The platform runs on Red Hat and JBoss.

“We’re looking to begin partnerships, “ Gideon said. “We’ll be building and deploying [the new system] this year.”

What I learned at the Red Hat Summit

To pay homage to the many schoolchildren around the country in the process of relaying what they did on their summer vacation, I thought I’d share what I did last week at the Red Hat Summit with you.

To start with, you can watch most of the Red Hat Summit keynotes and some of the sessions via the video page from Red Hat. This will give you a taste of the large ballroom sessions, and what angle Red Hat’s executives and guest speakers were promoting. Sadly, DreamWork’s Derek Chan’s presentation on how the animation giant is using Linux and Red Hat to render massive 3-D movies isn’t available. The big themes overall were the power of collaboration through open source, interoperability, cloud computing, and meeting business needs faster.

RHEL 5.4 and Satellite 5.3 released, but where is RHEV?
The big news at the Summit was the open availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4. But what was missing was the package of virtualization management tools, referred to as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) for servers and for desktops that are slated to be released “later this year.” The release of Red Hat Satellite 5.3 was also announced, and how the new RHEV tools and Satellite will play together remains to be seen. Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President of Engineering, said that the two are largely complementary and Red Hat will focus on integrating functionality going forward, providing a seamless experience for the end-user. We’ll look forward to seeing all the features of the RHEV release, which Naveen Thadani, Red Hat’s Senior Director of Virtualization explained would be best suited for those who want turn-key virtualization management.

Red Hat Catalyst Partners
The Red Hat Catalyst partner program was launched on the first day of the event, and was seen by some as an effort to appease the unhappy ISV’s who along with some VARs have complained that Red Hat doesn’t “get” partner programs. But at the show the vendors I talked to relayed their satisfaction and enthusiasm for the new program and the promise it offers for codevelopment and packaging of ISV offerings. Some shared with me that in the meeting with partners, when complaints were aired, Red Hat execs pointed to the Catalyst program in their response. It is clear that the company is hoping this initiative will resolve some of the woes of the past – and the partners can do nothing more than be hopeful as well.

The exhibit hall featured many partners displaying their products and I got one to provide a quick demo of their software. Trusted Computer Solutions has created Security Blanket a Linux security product that locks down the operating system and automatically configures it to meet industry standard and customized security requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 are supported (as well as CentOS 4 and 5, Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Fedora 10 and Solaris 10).

Performance tuning and other lessons from the sessions
After a hectic day of press conferences and appointments with various representatives of companies in attendance, I had the chance on Thursday to sit down and listen to some of the session presentations. Red Hat has made some of the session slides available online, including the slides for the back-to-back performance tuning session.

With 131 slides, it is safe the say that Red Hat engineers John Shakshober and Larry Woodman were a bit ambitious, and they didn’t quite get through their deck in the session. But if you are really interested in learning more they provided a lot of good example tools and on slide 128 they provide a list of good resources to check out to learn more about performance tuning. I asked some attendees if they got out of the session what they had wanted. They said that unfortunately, for their high performance computing application that it wasn’t all that relevant, but they had learned some new information and tools that might be helpful. I asked if they couldn’t get Red Hat support to help them with their HPC performance questions and they told me that honestly, they “hadn’t had much luck with that.” I was a bit confused: if you pay for the support, yet you don’t get good help with the support, what’s the point? “Compliance.” So just curious – readers, have you had similar issues? Why do you pay for support licenses on your servers when Fedora is available with no fees?

I also sat in on “Unmatched Security is Manageable” by Spencer Shimko, senior security engineer, Tresys Technology, about using open source system management tools to configure, monitor, and update the security configuration of Linux systems. He covered the open vulnerability assessment language (OVAL), and OVALDI (OVAL + interpreter). I won’t go into too much detail, but we should have a tip on using the language in SearchEnterpriseLinux.com soon.

On Wednesday I sat in on a session on using iSNS to simplify iSCSI management presented by Shyam Iyer, a development engineer senior analyst from Dell and Mike Christie a software engineer at Red Hat. In the manage and secure “What’s Next” track, this presentation discussed how storage management can be simplified with a plug-and-play environment for iSCSI SANs. Iyer discussed the new features being built into the open source storage name service. He also answered a couple questions from attendees regarding how iSNS and iSCSI will fit in a virtualized environment and the differences between it and DNS. The iSCSI network will fit on virtualized guests the same as it would on a hardware environment, explained Iyer. And in the same way that you can have a primary and secondary DNS, you can have a primary and secondary iSNS.

Overall, the summit provided a great opportunity to see and hear about what businesses are doing with RHEL, and learn more about what the future will bring. Our news contributor, Pam Derringer, has written specifically about some of the examples and case studies that we hope you find interesting and useful. If you feel like you missed out this year, next year’s summit will be in Boston, Mass., and perhaps it won’t be scheduled opposite VMworld.

Researchers boot one million Linux kernels as virtual machines

In a feat of Linux strength, computer scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., announced that they had run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines. Previously, researchers had only been able to run up to 20,000 kernels concurrently. The scientists used virtual machine (VM) technology and its Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration.

The aim of the project is to model malicious botnets, which are often difficult to analyze because they are geographically spread all over the world, explains Sandia’s Ron Minnich. The more kernels that can be run at once, said Minnich, the more effective cyber security professionals can be in combating the global botnet problem. “Eventually, we would like to be able to emulate the computer network of a small nation, or even one as large as the United States, in order to virtualize and monitor a cyber attack,” he said.

Running a high volume of VMs on one supercomputer — at a similar scale as a botnet — would allow researchers to see how botnets work and explore ways to stop them in their tracks. “We can get control at a level we never had before,” said Minnich.
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JBoss and rPath demonstrate choice and customization leading in Linux

This post was written by News Contributor, Pam Derringer.

Sometimes writing or reading tech stories about entirely different products can uncover new trends and ideas. I was intrigued with the JBoss Open Choice Java Application story last week because Red Hat officials said its new framework would enable customers to add specific functionality like clustering, caching, messaging and security in “microcontainers” or do without it, according to their needs.

In addition, for the first time, JBoss customers would be able to choose between three levels of application complexity, and move from one to another within the same management framework. By offering customers choice, JBoss will create major disruption in the Java application world, according to Aaron Darcy, JBoss product line director. Darcy added that customers are moving away from the bloated, one-size-fits-all applications that must contain code capable of doing everything, and opting for slimmer versions more tailored to their needs.

Darcy’s words struck a chord because last fall and again more recently, I wrote about rPath, a startup birthed by former Red Hat staffers who saw scaling problems with large deployments first-hand, and decided to solve the problem by upending the traditional all-purpose horizontal stack, creating a vertical, app-centric Linux-based stack with only the elements that a customized application needs to run. Obviously, rPath-constructed applications, too, are a lot slimmer than all-purpose counterparts. They are also a lot easier to maintain and update, saving time for IT operations staffs say rPath folks.

Although their approaches are somewhat different, the two companies are both reacting, it seems to me, to similar needs for more choice and customization rather than a hefty one-size-fits-all, “that’s all we offer” approach. Is this a trend that will reshape the software industry as we know it? What do you think?

Ubuntu 9.04 release focus on user experience and data center needs

Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced the simultaneous release of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition and the Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition, available for download on Thursday, April 23, 2009, and the Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix, available on Thursday April 30, 2009.

With the new 9.04 server edition, Canonical has worked to extend the range of enabled servers, with 45 of the most popular mid-range servers from IBM, Dell and Sun and HP tested in the Canonical labs.
Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition will preview Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). Ubuntu is the first commercially-supported distribution to enable businesses to build cloud environments inside their firewalls. With Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, organizations can explore the benefits of cloud computing without the data or security issues associated with moving data to an external cloud provider. Following a successful beta program, Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04 will also be fully available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Mark Shuttleworth, CEO, Canonical shared some of the server improvements in Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition include substantial improvements in some key applications for mail and other common infrastructure requirements.

“There has been an extension of work around suspend and resume of servers,” said Shuttleworth. “Amazon’s EC2 elastic computing meme will penetrate deeply into the enterprise. And organizations will want that same elastic computing internally, along with the power saving capability. The best method is suspending or resuming. Through effective use of elastic computing, we think we can greatly improve the energy savings in the data center.”

Shuttleworth referred to the concept of cloud computing as “the new hotness,” and says that Canonical has chosen to give it a very specific focus in this release. An image of Ubuntu 9.04 is now on EC2, so anyone interested in prototyping on Ubuntu 9.04 can fire it up on EC2. Shuttleworth shared that Canonical has a firm commitment to continue to release updates in the cloud. A description of other Ubuntu virtualization efforts and a more detailed report on the current position of Ubuntu in the data center and enterprise IT environment was published on SearchDataCenter.com at the beginning of April.

Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition improves user experience
Mark Zimmerman, CTO, Canonical explained some of the new features in Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition include a reduction in start-up time from 45 seconds to 25 seconds. According to Zimmerman, the release also includes an improved notification subsystem, which is the first in a series of design-led improvements.

“We are really working on improving the intrinsic experience of using Ubuntu on the desktop,” explained Zimmerman. “The notification subsystem has a standardized way of displaying [notices], that adds to the polished feel of the desktop.”

In addition, the desktop version of Ubuntu 9.04 features OpenOffice.org 3.0. This release of OpenOffice includes a lot of compatibility between Microsoft Office suite products that can make the user experience more seamless and easy, and wasn’t available at the last Ubuntu Desktop Edition release.

Data shows down economy spurs Linux adoption

A Novell-sponsored IDC survey reveals a surge in the acquisition of Linux driven by the worldwide recession. More than half of the IT executives surveyed are planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. If that’s not positive enough, more than 72% of respondents reported that they are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009, with more than 68% making the same claim for the desktop. The study surveyed more than 300 senior IT executives spanning manufacturing, financial services, and retail industries across the globe, as well as government agencies. The survey results are a good update to the fall 2008 Purchasing Intentions survey we conducted that hinted the economy would impact Linux adoption.

Linux has been gaining ground in the enterprise, as was seen with Red Hat’s impressive results from 2008. We said back in January that open source would do well in a down economy, and now there’s data to back up the prediction.

In the IDC survey, the leading reason given for migrating to Linux was an interest in lowering ongoing support costs. More than 40% of survey participants said they plan to deploy additional workloads on Linux over the next 12-24 months and 49% indicated Linux will be their primary server platform within five years. (Is anyone else surprised by that number?) Among those hesitant to adopt Linux, lack of application support and poor interoperability with Windows and other environments was cited as the primary concern, indicating the key areas that need more work. Companies have made great strides where interoperability is concerned, but clearly more work needs to be done before Linux can gain more ground. We have covered Red Hat’s recent interoperability agreement with Microsoft, Canonical’s effort’s toward certification on HP servers, and reviewed the leadership of Novell in interoperability efforts. But, clearly the market needs more assurance that Linux will meet their critical business needs.

Key to the recent interoperability efforts has been virtualization. This is a good move according to the survey results as nearly half of respondents stated that moving to virtualization is accelerating their adoption of Linux. A notably high, 88% of those surveyed plan to evaluate, deploy or increase their use of virtualization software within Linux operating systems over the next 12-24 months. An increase in virtualization uptake was seen in our 2008 Purchasing Intentions survey, which revealed that virtualization interest was influencing server purchases.

In our recent newsletter, we asked readers to tell us what’s missing from all of these agreements. We encourage you to share your thoughts here. What would you like to see in terms of specific application support or capabilities? What’s missing from the interoperability landscape?

Red Hat’s virtualization suite based on KVM

Red Hat has announced their virtualization strategy for 2009, kicking off another week with a webcast and press releases on some pretty big changes for the market. Red Hat shared that these changes were in response to market demands for virtualization. Navin Thadani, senior director of virtualization business at Red Hat shared that the big three obstacles for virtualization are cost, performance, security and scalability, and that the company’s strategy aims to help customers overcome these.

The company’s virtualization products (launching in the next three to 18 months) include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor
• RHEL 5.4
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform

The biggest change is a shift to using the kernel virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor, and shifting away from Citrix’s XenServer. This move is the next logical step, following Red Hat’s acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008. Qumranet came with virtualization solutions, including its KVM platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

In the company’s webcast, the question was asked “Why does the industry need another hypervisor?” Despite the fact that is amused some in the IT world, Thadani coolly stated that while Xen was the best hypervisor on the market in 2007 when RHEL 5 was released, “the KVM hypervisor has demonstrated that it offers superior capabilities… so it will be the strategic direction for the future development of our virtualization product portfolio.” He also explained that Red Hat will continue to support Xen until 2014.

Thandani said that by choosing KVM, performance woes would be resolved, citing up to 98% bare-metal performance. He highlighted that KVM, as part of the Linux kernel, takes advantage of the development work that has gone into Linux, including the hardening effort. Additionally, Red Hat and other developers have worked with the government on SELinux, a built-in Linux security component missing from other hypervisors in the marketplace.

Current virtual machine (VM) deployments max out in the 1,000s of machines, and thus they are unable to meet current business needs for more complex operations. Thadani shared that Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers is designed for large-scale systems management, and is capable of scaling to thousands of hosts with Red Hat’s new search-driven user interface, which allows administrators to easily manage a large number of machines, scaling up to the tens of thousands of VMs. High-performance virtualized machines is the area that Red Hat is positioning itself to lead in, according to Thadani.

The stand-alone Red Hat Virtualization Manager for Servers is designed to be implemented with shops less familiar with enterprise Linux. According to the company, it is:

A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will be the first open source product in the industry to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and virtual desktops, featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring, and reporting.

Thadani explained the difference between the stand-alone and integrated virtualization management offerings, equating them to the difference between a point-and-shoot camera and a SLR camera.

“From the stand-alone standpoint, we’ve designed it to be easy-to-use and easy to deploy,” says Thadani. “It is for enterprises without a lot of Linux experience, and we’ve made it easy to use. It’s a new market for Red Hat.”

To sum it all up, Red Hat is harnessing the power and current buzz in caused by virtualization technology and taking advantage of the current economic climate to move into new markets. No pricing has yet been released for the products, but it’s open source.

Red Hat and Microsoft sign virtualization interoperability agreement

This morning I was sipping my coffee and browsing what my Twitter friends were saying, when I discovered some big news had been released today. Urged by customer demand and OEM concerns, Red Hat and Microsoft have announced a virtualization interoperability partnership. Matt Asay, a fellow Twitterer and blogger, pointed out that there would be a webcast at 11 EST, and with 15 minutes to spare, I got ready to get the details. Essentially, Red Hat has become a Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Partner (SVVP), and Microsoft is now a Red Hat partner for virtualization interoperability and support. The basics of the agreement are outlined by Red Hat on their SVVP FAQ page.

Prior to the webcast this morning, a couple of bloggers had pointed out why this news was a little different than your run-of-the mill partnership. Their emphasis was strongly focused on the lack of patent agreements with the deal — a new turn of events for Microsoft and Red Hat after a few years of battling publicly over the topic.

On his CNET Blog, Asay shared his surprise and adulation of the maturing of both Microsoft and Red Hat to the needs of the market.

Today, Red Hat and Microsoft have together demonstrated that interoperability can exist independent of back-room dealings over patents. Microsoft has increasingly been forced to open its stance on patents by the European Commission, anyway, proving Red Hat’s resolute stance against patents was the right one. But today’s announcement suggests that Microsoft is maturing in its views as to how to interact with open-source vendors.

Asay pointed out that when Novell signed its agreement with Microsoft (in 2006), the announcement was met with criticism of the company from the open source community.

Asay’s Twitter post was a little more to the point (only 140 characters, afterall):

I guess this means, dear Novell, that in fact patent covenants need NOT be included in interop deals, including those with Microsoft

Matthew Aslett of the 451 Group posted a blog 15 minutes prior to the call, echoing Asay’s concerns.

In the webcast, Mike Evans, vice president of corporate development at Red Hat, and Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy at Microsoft, tried to emphasize the customer-focused nature of the arrangement. Evans displayed statistics and sections of a recent IDC report on virtualization that proclaims we are only seeing the beginning of virtualization efforts in enterprise IT, and that more will begin to use the technology in 2009. These statistics match up with a recent survey conducted by SearchDataCenter.com that revealed that virtualization is on the rise in IT departments. In the call, a slide with a quote from Gary Chen, research manager of enterprise virtualization software at IDC, was displayed:

“IDC research shows that Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are two of the main operating environments deployed by enterprises, accounting for 80% of the x86 operating systems running on hypervisors. It is great to see two of the big platform vendors put aside their competitive differences and put the customer first.”

Certainly, the effort is focused on the customer, but today, much of the focus seems to be skewed to the patent and financial language in the agreement. This seems fair, as the struggle between the two companies on the issue of patents has been publicly hashed out for almost three years. Microsoft had held fast to its claim that it couldn’t do interoperability without a patent pledge, but it looks as if Red Hat has won on its argument that a patent deal isn’t necessary to an interoperability agreement.

What do you think? Is this just another agreement? Or does this signify another change in Microsoft’s attitude toward open source collaboration? Or, have both companies just seen the writing on the wall and jumped just in time to take advantage of the virtualization market?

Red Hat proves value can be derived from open source

This week, Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat has issued a “State of the Union at Red Hat” message that at first glance appeared to be little more than a cute press pitch, well-timed with the State of the Union address from the President of the United States, Barack Obama. Whitehurst weaves in the common theme of open source being a “value” during the down economy, talks up acquisitions from 2008, and gives a shout-out to Linux community members JBoss.org and Fedora.

But things start to get interesting at point number six in his list, and I honestly would have missed this if I hadn’t seen the comments of The VAR Guy, who stated “Red Hat is destroying the old myth that there’s no money in open source.”

The VAR Guy’s declaration was based on Whitehurst’s statement with this information about the success of the company:

Weathering the economic storm. Red Hat has continued to execute well in what is a pretty competitive economic climate. In fiscal year 2008, Red Hat became the first open source vendor to cross the $500 million mark in revenues and we’ve also maintained 27 consecutive quarters of sequential growth in total revenue.

Impressive. Or is it? The VAR Guy points out that Microsoft earned 120 times as much during the same year.

Red Hat may be leading in the Linux distribution race thus far, but Novell is charging ahead, on the cusp of releasing SUSE 11, with greater virtualization and interoperability promised. With Novell’s partnership with Microsoft, the company is making gains in the market.

As businesses try to bounce back from the downturn in the economy, open source may be an even more attractive alternative. What do you think? Is Red Hat’s $500 million a true achievement, or is it just an attempt to give credence to open source? Share your thoughts.