The Linux Beacon--XenSource, Virtual Iron Gun for VMware with Features, Low Prices

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Volume 3, Number 46 -- December 12, 2006

XenSource, Virtual Iron Gun for VMware with Features, Low Prices

Published: December 12, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While XenSource and Virtual Iron are not the same company, they both use the open source Xen hypervisor for server virtualization and they are both putting out new releases of their respective products today. And, perhaps most importantly, both are gunning for the same target: the VMware subsidiary of EMC. And the bullets they are using are lower prices.

XenSource and Virtual Iron have both been working for two years to bring out a competitor to VMware's market-dominating GSX Server (now called VMware Server) and ESX Server products. These hypervisors provide two different kinds of server virtualization--the former allows many different operating systems to run inside a Windows or Linux operating system, while the latter allows a wide variety of operating systems to run on a hypervisor on a bare-metal server. ESX Server, which costs thousands of dollars depending on features, has lots of goodies that allow virtual machines to span multiple processors in a system, move workloads from one physical machine to another, and lets system administrators manage lots of virtual machines on their networks of physical servers. VMware Server and ESX Server also have something else: the lion's share of installations on virtualized X86 and X64 servers in the world, and that is bringing $750 million in sales to EMC and who knows how much profits (the number is very likely pretty high).

The competition in the market from XenSource, Virtual Iron, and Microsoft, which started giving away Virtual Server in April and supporting Linux within partitions on Windows boxes, compelled VMware early this year to start giving an improved GSX Server away for free as VMware Server.

With its ESX Server 3 product, which was launched in June and rebranded as the VMware Infrastructure 3 family, VMware provided a more granular feature set and pricing that matched. However, ESX Server 3 (which is what people still call it, mostly) is still perceived by many as being expensive. Virtualizing a server with all of the goodies--the ESX Server 3 hypervisor and its related management tools, high availability features, virtual file system, VM portability across physical machines, SMP scalability, VM archiving, and so forth--costs considerably more than a server itself. A two-socket server costs around $3,000 loaded up these days, but a license to the Infrastructure 3 Enterprise stack costs $5,750. To virtualize a server and perhaps boost its usage from 20 percent to 60 percent would cost around $9,000--about the same as acquiring three servers. Even the entry Infrastructure Starter edition costs $1,000 on such a machine.

Both XenSource and Virtual Iron agree that VMware's prices are too high, and with the products they are announcing today, they are doing something about it. And, humorously, neither company seemed to be aware that the other was making announcements on the same day with the same basic strategy in mind.

XenSource has already announced its high-end, cross platform (meaning it will support both Windows and Linux) XenEnterprise 3 product, and today will add two more low-end products that will better compete with VMware Server and the lighter editions in the Infrastructure 3 stack from VMware.

XenEnterprise 3 started shipping in September, and it is not the same product as the basic Xen hypervisor that is embedded in Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, which started shipping in July; the Xen hypervisor will also be embedded in the future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, due in March 2007. XenEnterprise can virtualize X64 servers that use the hardware-assisted virtualization features from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, called VT and AMD-V, respectively, and it includes tools to convert physical servers to virtual ones. XenEnterprise supports Windows Server 2003 and can host RHEL 3, RHEL 4, and SLES 9 Linux instances. It costs $750 on a two-socket server, plus $150 per year for maintenance; if you want to pay an annual subscription instead, it costs $488 per year for two sockets. (Pricing is core neutral.) This product is roughly analogous to VMware's Infrastructure 3 Standard Edition.

XenSource is introducing two other products today, and they are aimed at the higher volume segments of the market. One is aimed specifically at Windows shops, and it is called XenServer 3. This product can be used to virtualize a single server and span up to eight virtual machines or 8 GB of main memory, whichever comes first. XenServer is the same exact code as XenEnterprise, explains Simon Crosby, vice president of strategy and corporate development at XenSource. The only difference is that license keys are used to activate different features and provide greater scalability for virtual machines and memory. XenEnterprise also supports Linux, which Crosby says XenSource is not encouraging for this product.

The reason is simple. XenServer 3 only costs $99 per server, which is a very low price. And while both Red Hat and Novell think they can use Linux equipped with a Xen hypervisor to virtualize, consolidate, and manage Windows instances--capabilities that have been promised, but not yet delivered by either Novell or Red Hat--XenSource doesn't think this is the way it will happen. "Our bet is that customers do not want to go off and learn Linux just to virtualize Windows," says Crosby.

XenServer 3 will be distributed by Tech Data in North America, and peddled in turn by another 250 resellers; Tech Data is providing Level 1 and Level 2 tech support for those resellers, since XenSource doesn't want the hassle of that job--certainly not for $99. If the volumes pick up as Crosby is hoping, XenServer could also be distributed by higher-volume distributors, such as CDW.

And, because everybody in the virtualization market needs a freebie to build up a potential customer base, XenSource will also today debut XenExpress, a free version of the XenEnterprise toolset that comes with the same P2V and console management tools as the other XenSource products, but which will be limited to a single server with a maximum of four virtual machines. XenExpress will not have any support options, but if customers want to pay $99 or $750, they can instantly upgrade to XenServer or XenEnterprise and get support. VMware is offering paid-for support for its freebie, VMware Server. And VMware Server and Infrastructure 3 are definitely not the same code base.

Incidentally, the Windows guests for XenSource products require the VT or AMD-V feature, but Linux does not. XenSource is supporting Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP guests right now, and will add support for Windows Server 2000 and for Windows-based virtual machines that span more than one processor in the first quarter of 2007. XenSource is also working to add 64-bit guest support, live migration of virtual machines, high availability and failover for VMs, and shared storage support in the first half of 2007. Many of these functions have already been delivered to the market by VMware.

Over at Virtual Iron, which has been undergoing a transformation in the past year, the company's Virtual Iron 3.1 product is finally ready for prime time. This product is important because it is the first one that Virtual Iron has delivered that supports Windows.

When Virtual Iron launched almost three years ago, its goal was much more than virtualizing servers. It was to be able to use fast interconnection networks to create a virtualized computing platform that could span up to 16 processors in a single system image. The Virtual Iron 3.0 product announced in April moved the company off of its own hypervisor to the Xen hypervisor (or, more accurately, one of several variants of Xen) and ditched the requirement for InfiniBand interconnect; it also required the use of the VT and AMD-V features to help out with the virtualization of operating systems. The whole shebang is wrapped by the systems management tools that the company created to manage server clusters and virtual servers inside of those clusters.

With Virtual Iron 3.1, and thanks to the VT and AMD-V features, the company can offer support of unmodified Linux and Windows operating systems inside virtual machines. (Solaris 10 also runs, but has not yet been certified.) The Xen hypervisor implemented by Virtual Iron supports a maximum of 96 GB of main memory per virtual server and can span up to 16 processor cores in a single system image. Those cores can be on a single four-socket server using quad-core processors, or they could be 16 single-socket, single core machines. Virtual Iron doesn't care.

Being something of an underdog in terms of brand-name recognition, Virtual Iron is being aggressive on pricing with the Enterprise Edition of its product, and is charging only $499 per socket. (The company is core neutral like VMware and Xen are when it comes to software pricing.) Mike Grandinetti, Virtual Iron's chief marketing officer, says that this software provides the functionality of VMware's Infrastructure 3 product at one-fifth the price. The Enterprise Edition is a multi-system license, which as the name suggests, means it can span multiple boxes up to that 16-core maximum. Customers can get a 30-day free trial of the software. Support contracts range from 15 percent to 25 percent of the license fees annually, and span from the silver-level Web-based support up to the full-tilt-boogie, 24x7 platinum-level support.

And, to help sow a large installed base of customers who might some day pay for the Enterprise Edition, Virtual Iron is offering a single-system variant with a free perpetual license. This freebie product can run on a single machine (so pack those cores in, ladies and gents) and provide up to 80 virtual machine slices. It can support 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux operating systems, just like the full Virtual Iron product.

Both the free and Enterprise Edition of Virtual Iron 3.1 support live migration and dynamic capacity allocation of resources (such as CPU, memory and I/O capacity) to partitions; these features are called LiveMigration and LiveCapacity. Virtual Iron 3.1 also has an automated recover tool to cope with hardware failures, called LiveRecovery, and a server maintenance tool that lets hardware be reconfigured while keeping the applications running on machines in the multi-system cluster. The 3.1 release adds support for Intel's quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon 5300 processors, as well as support for tens of virtual machines per processor core and a new virtual disk partition manager.

"We have actually made the Xen hypervisor work," boasts Grandinetti. "And we're putting a product out into the market that is equivalent to the full VMware enterprise product at a fraction of the price. We are going to open up the mainstream server virtualization market in a big way, and our VARs and our partners are going to benefit." As for Virtual Iron being less well known than either VMware or XenSource, Grandinetti is non-plussed. "With only about 5 percent of the X86 and X64 servers virtualized, we think it is very early in the game, and there is a lot of virtualization to be done yet in the data center."