One last thing from TechDays
I gave the OpenSolaris Virtualization Technologies talk at Sun TechDays in Sydney, and there were a couple of slides from that I really wanted to post here as this stuff continues to surprise people. First, let's go back a few years. When we first started exploring the technology that became Solaris Zones, we quickly realized it was a very powerful idea, and while we were creating the basic version for Solaris 10's initial release, Glenn and team went off to implement Trusted Solaris using Zones. A little later, Nils and team went off and implemented "Brand Z" - a general mechanism to allow a Zone to have a completely different system call interface, which in turn allows a zone to have a completely different OS personality, and for example, to allow us to run the userland components of a Linux distribution in a zone.
The most recent application though, is one that has some interesting properties which illustrate some of the properties of virtualization more generally. That's Project Etude, which Dan Price and his colleagues delivered into Solaris 10 a few months ago - the essential concept being a Solaris 8 Zone running on a Solaris 10 system. This slide from marketing shows where the Brand Z personality component for Solaris 8 lives in the usual zones architecture picture.
Other than "because we can" :-) why did we do this? Well, the really compelling point associated with this technology is how we can move our Solaris 8 / SPARC customers forward from their older, under utilized, power-hungry hardware to the latest generation of power efficient SPARC hardware. Like the commodity SPARC microprocessors in the CoolThreads family of servers based on the Niagara processors. Looking from a 2008 vantage point, Solaris 8 seems like quite an old operating system now, and many of the machines it was originally installed on are from the same era. In the meantime Moore's law has advanced, and when combined with the CMT capabilities of Niagara, has enabled us to create very powerful, but extremely power efficient systems that can be used to consolidate multiple machines-worth of workload. There are obvious analogs in the legacy Windows / legacy x86 world that's powering the Windows consolidation move across the industry. But the thing I like about this customer case study below, is the actual numbers involved.
The 8800W and 275W numbers are power consumption comparisons, the BTU numbers are cooling costs. Smaller is better! These are real cost and power savings, and I think it illustrates that maybe there's some interesting comparative work to do here - comparing the efficiency of consolidation using different virtualization technologies e.g. zones vs. hypervisor virtualization technologies. A complex problem to characterize, yes. And interesting trade-offs between isolation, management complexity, business agility and performance. But our repeated experience is that this path is proving very effective for our customers.
Final reflection - I remember wondering why I had to learn all about classical thermodynamics in my engineering courses. What did that have to do with computers and communications technology? And now the irony is that for many of our datacenter customers, their number one concern is the basics of classical thermodynamics and the brutal economics associated with it - getting ever more computational work done while saving power and reducing the need for cooling.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolarisTechnorati Tag: Solaris
Posted at 03:26PM Mar 26, 2008 by tpm in Solaris |
Sydney to Stuttgart
So, here I am still on the road, starting to write this in Stuttgart airport, after spending a couple of days with the VirtualBox team. We've been introducing them to Sun, and doing a first pass on the roadmap ahead. The usual balance of lots of things we'd like to do, with software physics nipping at our heels - there's always more to do than we have people or time for!
Talking about VirtualBox in Australia was great fun; I introduced it to the audience of my keynote, which as I remarked in my earlier post was one of the largest audiences I've presented to. The full talk should eventually make it to the techdays site, but there are a couple of slides I wanted to review here now for people that can't get them and don't have time to navigate the site to find them. Basically, my talk was about Open Source Virtualization and Project Indiana, and how the two are connected. At first sight, one might imagine that they're not particularly connected at all. VirtualBox is an open source desktop hypervisor, a key component in our virtualization technology portfolio, but otherwise only related to OpenSolaris as a possible host and guest OS. VirtualBox is part of a more general application lifecycle picture involving xVM server and xVM Ops Center, as is nicely captured in this marketing graphic.
On the other hand, Project Indiana is, among other things, about bringing the technology of distribution to the OpenSolaris technology code base. This graphic from Ian Murdock's presentation at the Hyderbad techdays conference captures this notion of the OpenSolaris core surrounded by additional, up-to-date, packages from various open source communities nicely.
And this one summarizes the Indiana project goals:
So what is the connection between them? The connection is in the technology called the distro builder. This is the part the takes the recipe for a distribution that performs a particular set of functions and capabilities, and translates it into the right set of interdependent packages that can perform that function. At first sight, this seems a bit of a niche interest too. After all, relatively few people want to build OS distros .. surely? Well, it's more than you might think. In fact, if you take a look at many IT organizations, they tend to build something very similar for their internal use as a way of reducing costs. They rarely if ever take a vanilla OS install from a vendor. There's always some customization; packages added, removed, administrative pre-configuration of various kinds. So one important target for our distro builder technology are those IT organizations. Another important target are the developers creating virtual appliances to demonstrate their technologies. You can find these virtual appliances on lots of companies web sites these days - usually a file-based image that you can download and quickly instantiate on top of a hypervisor. The advantage being that you -don't- have to install and configure the software you're interested in exploring directly on your desktop operating system - you run it inside a preconfigured OS as a virtual machine. Then when you tire of the demo, you can discard it quickly, and completely, by discarding the virtual machine. So here's the graphic I kludged up to represent how the Indiana project and VirtualBox fit into that picture.
On the left side is the distro builder, on the right side is the developer to deployer flow using VirtualBox on the desktop, and xVM Server and xVM OpsCenter in the data center. If you want to find out more about the IPS packaging system that underpins this picture, then I'd recommend starting on Stephen Hahn's blog.
An open question we've pondered for a while is when virtual appliances will move beyond internal-use and demo-ware to be a mainstream style of SW distribution. There are several vendors who would like this to be true sooner than later. But the question is open for several reasons, performance is a universal concern, licensing of well-known proprietary operating systems in this context is another issue. Another important barrier is how to resolve the support issues for all the software involved that the creator of the application, or facility being demonstrated, didn't write. Let's think about a more concrete example. Assume I'm a developer at a small company, and I create a compelling application that uses various application infrastructure components e.g. an application server, a database, and, e.g. a chunk of ruby-on-rails to do it's work. Then I install and configure it all on an OS image of my choosing, make it into a virtual appliance, then deliver it to my customers that way. That packaging and configuration work I did is a clear advantage to my customer in terms of getting started with the application and exploring the value of the offering - which is one of the reasons vendors are using it more and more for demoware. But having delivered a complete package that way, it seems like as well as being responsible for the defects in my application, I'm now -also- responsible for all the defects in the customized stack I created too. Do I now have to start worrying about all the security patches I might need to include in my virtual appliance? Eeek! That seem really hard. We probably need a better answer to that support question that involves the vendors of the components I used before delivering fully-customized yet fully supported software stacks as virtual appliances really takes off.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolarisTechnorati Tag: VirtualBox
Posted at 12:11PM Mar 19, 2008 by tpm in General |
It's Wednesday afternoon, so this *must* be Melbourne ...
Hmm. My first blog entry on the road; writing this in terminal 3 in Sydney airport with my battery running out. Let's see how well this works.
There are quite a number of Sun software engineers in Australia this week. We've been holding one of our TechDays developer conferences here in Sydney. If you get a chance to attend a TechDay in your city or within reach, I do recommend it: lots of information, lots of cool demos and giveaways, and real engineers presenting interesting talks about what they're passionate about. As an example, I heard George Wilson's excellent talk about the work going on in the opensolaris storage community for the first time today - and was intrigued by how interested the audience was in the ZFS-aware installer demo he showed. It's very clear that engineers all over the world are excited by ZFS.
I had a small part in the proceedings too - I did the community keynote on Wednesday morning, and talked about virtualization, Project Indiana, and the connections between them. Probably the largest audience I've ever spoken too; rather daunting; I hope it made some kind of sense to people. And this afternoon I did an opensolaris virtualization technologies talk. In between those events, I've been flying around Australia, visiting universities in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and (tomorrow) Brisbane. As you can tell from the title of this post, I'm a little dizzy. But as you'd probably expect, I just can't resist talking about Sun xVM, and VirtualBox and doing demos wherever I go. A few people at UTS had heard of VirtualBox, and were simply pleased to hear about the acquisition, the evolving roadmap, and our investment in this technology. Most of the others hadn't heard of it, but were definitely interested. At the conference, I started seeing it on everyone's desktop I caught sight of.
Don Kretsch, and Liang Chen are also visiting the Universities, talking about HPC and HPC Tools which has sparked a lot of interesting conversations. Josh Marinacci was also with us in Sydney, talking to the students about Dynamic Languages. He showed some fun JavaFX demos - you can find them on Josh's blog.
Though it's been tough to keep track of all the people I've met, it's been wonderful meeting students and faculty across the country. Really smart people who are interested in the technologies Sun is working on around Virtualization, HPC and Dynamic Languages. And we were there to listen to them talk about the technical and scientific problems they're working on - mostly around HPC, but also in other areas e.g. the challenges of scale and parallel programming presented by multicore architectures, complex real-time systems, and more.
As an engineer, it's always been important to me to build real things that other people find useful. That's the ultimate intellectual reward for me, and I think for most of the other engineers at Sun. It's not just about sharing and community in some remote, abstract sense, it's about making positive, real, engineering contributions to a community that can then use them. I think that's fundamentally what makes all engineers tick. So, this morning at ANU, I was surprised and pleased to hear of some work they've been doing, assessing the effectiveness of the MPO subsystem (memory placement optimizations, aka interfaces to describe NUMA machines) we built in OpenSolaris for Opteron-based systems. And in particular, they'd been using the lgroup abstraction, which I had a small hand in the architecture and initial design of a few years ago. So it was great to see the lgroup API being used, the implementation assessed against real needs, and found to be doing well; being used just how we hoped it would. And I'm looking forward to connecting these graduate students and their results with my colleagues Jonathan Chew and Bart Smaalders who put the hard work in designing and implementing the MPO code - I know they'll be interested in the results, and looking for ways to make MPO even better.
I think I'm completely smitten with Australia the country. It's my first visit here, and even though I haven't seen that much beyond CS department seminar rooms, the Darling Harbour Convention center, and the insides of various airports, hotels and taxis, I'm really drawn to the people I've met, and the comfortable feel of the culture. I need to come back again on a family vacation so we can sample the great outdoors too, and imbibe the history (and some of the wine). It's also looks to be a very beautiful place outside of the cities - even though I've only seen tantalizing glimpses on this trip.
Technorati Tag: VirtualBox
Posted at 06:05AM Mar 06, 2008 by tpm in General |
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