Day: December 13, 2007

I have been playing with VMWare and Windows and have noticed that some images tend to ask for license validation again and some do not. I have made sure that I have a valid license handy to play with but I might want to take an image and modify it for testing purposes. I might want to run the image on a different machine to test an IO system or test a new graphic interface. Even though I have a license, it some times prompts me for revalidation.

In VMWare there is a control file tagged with the .vmx extension. It saves data like the MAC address of the box or a uuid generated for the VM machine that created it. I have found that you can fool the Windows instance to think it is on the same machine by changing the following parameters.

Ethernet0.addressType = “generated”

Ethernet1.addressType = “generated”

uuid.location = “56 4d 60 58 ac 4d 2d 60-a4 81 7f ef a3 89 c5 ca”

uuid.bios = “56 4d 60 58 ac 4d 2d 60-a4 81 7f ef a3 89 c5 ca”

ethernet0.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:89:c5:ca”

ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = “0”

ethernet1.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:89:c5:d4”

ethernet1.generatedAddressOffset = “10”

I am not sure if this adheres to the legality of the license but it does stop me from having to make the dreaded phone call to Redmond just to port my license to another laptop running in an VM image. It seems that I should be able to run the image on my laptop or desktop as long as I am not running it on both. I am typically not running it more than a few hours every once and a while for testing purposes. I should not spend more time on licenseing and phone calls that I do on testing. Because of this issue, I typically play and test on Linux because there are not the same licensing issues and restrictions. Yet another example of “easy to do business with” getting in the way of innovation.

I have been having internal discussions with a few groups about Oracle VM. I was surprised to find out that this technology has been used internally for more than a year. The two  biggest users are the hosted data centers and Oracle Education. The data center has a policy to deploy images. The education group deploys the hands on seminars and classes using VM images to a server farm.

The product is free to download and use, support cost money. All of the Oracle product suite is supported on this product because engineering has been submitting code changes to the Xen source for a while and testing the product matrix for a while. Complete information can be found in Metalink in Note 464754.1

Paravirtualization means that the operating system knows that it is running in a VM environment. The os hides the fact and presents a standard interface to the applications. PVM is available for Linux with a modified kernel. This allows you to run this on older hardware that does not support hardware virtualization. It is supported in 64-bit and scales upto a 64 core system as well. Each VM can support upto 32 virtual CPUs to aggregate SMP or multi-core chips.

The Oracle VM Manager is currently an XE version of the database with an OC4J connector. The manager is currently only supported on Linux (next release will be Windows) and is manageable from a browser. We are currently building a suite of VMs that incorporate the Oracle stack of applicaitons. We are currently delivering a Linux image. Next will be the database and applicaiton server images pre-installed.

Pricing on the product is no license cost, no live migration cost, no management cost. Support cost is $499 for 2 processor per system per year or $999 for unlimited processors. In OnDemand we went from 6 dual processor boxes (2 prod, 2 dev, and 2 test) consuming 2010 wats at 100% load. If we consolidate this and move dev and test onto the same box we can reduce the box count to four and power consumption to 1180 watts. If we virtualized everything and run production middle tier and database on the same box but different VM instances we can consolidate this to one box and have the middle tier and database dev and test on the other box. We went from 6 systems that were mostly idle to two systems that support multi-tier applicaitons as well as dev and test consuming 660 watts of power. This allows us to reduce server footprint, heat consumption, and keep the management and administration the same.

According to IDC, virtualization is considered a mainstream technology with 22% servers virtualized today with 45% in 12 months. The market should tripple in the next four years with focus on disaster recovery, offsetting new data center construction, and power savings.

The big benefit for this technology is to simplify evaluation and deployment of software. Instead of installing and configurating the operating system and application, we can create a template and allow these templates to be deployed and modified. The time to modify a template is significantly less than the time required to deploy the entire solution. This is a significant potential for partners and ISVs to sell an entire configured solution and not a product that needs consulting to configure and install.

sorry for the non-technical and somewhat repeat of information. These are notes from a webcast that happened yesterday. I figured that the next step would be to go to a vendor that is selling this product and listen to one of their presentations. I also purchased two books. The first is http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Hypervisor-Prentice-Software-Development/dp/013234971X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197562056&sr=1-1
which is the Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor by David Chisnall. The second is http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Hypervisor-Prentice-Software-Development/dp/013234971X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197562056&sr=1-1
 which is Virtualization with Xen by David Williams. I have ordered these books but have not received them yet.