Results for: Performance with a Little Help from our Friends
Virtual Provisioning Server – A Successful Real World Example
A colleague of mine, Nick Rintalan, wrote an excellent blog post on whether one should virtualize Provisioning Server. If you have not read it, then I recommend you check it out here: http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/02/22/should-i-virtualize-provisioning-server/I am an avid supporter of virtualizing Provisioning Server. Servers today are just too powerful and it is a waste of resources to run things on bare metal. Let’s face it, the average ...
Sizing LUNs – A Citrix Perspective
In my last blog I talked about why NFS was "recommended" and mentioned that I'd talk about LUN sizing with block-based protocols in a future blog...well this is it! Have you ever wondered why organizations create LUNs a certain size? Have you ever wondered why some organizations put a single Virtual Disk Image (VDI) on a LUN and others put 20 VDIs on ...
Open Source Switching
Multilayer Virtual SwitchSimon Crosby already talked about it, and it is already here. Open Source Routing's powerful counterpart, Open Source Switching is available now. Open vSwitch is a multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. The goal is to build a production quality switch for VM environments that supports standard management interfaces (e.g. NetFlow, RSPAN, ERSPAN, CLI), and ...
Citrix Provisioning Server Gets Virtual with SR-IOV
Hi Folks,I wanted to share the excitement buzzing around the Intel booth with you, with regard to the SR-IOV announcement, and a follow up to Simon Crosby's earlier post. VMWare and Hyper-V don't have SR-IOV support yet, Citrix XenServer supports it in the shipping code of XenServer 5.6Why It's Important:NO SR-IOV (all network traffic is handled by VMM or Dom0) then:Users see slower performance, because ...
Performance with a Little Help from our Friends
There is an interesting change afoot in virtualized networking. Both VMware and XenServer are boasting richer network stacks, with the goal of simplifying the management of policies (firewalling, QoS etc) for each virtual interface in a dynamic virtualized world.In our case, the new Open vSwitch has been in beta for a while and will ship in our next release, Cowley. Changing ...
NetScaler Goes Virtual
Even since we acquired XenSource, we've been asked "will Citrix make NetScaler available as a virtual appliance?" Actually, folks familiar with NetScaler we're asking for a "software version" of NetScaler long before that. But with the XenSource acquisition, the question volume definitely ratcheted up. Well, if you're reading this, then most likely you know the answer to that question is a most definite "yes."Today, during ...
ESX Benchmarking – Only for vGods
Last week was a good one for XenServer. Within just a few days of each other:Virtualization Review published benchmark performance test results that showed XenServer to be "the porsche of hypervisors" while acknowledging the excellent runner-up performance of Hyper-V (no surprise there - same architecture, smart chaps, large team) and the rather pokey performance of ESX An announcement that SAP has selected XenServer for virtualization of its XenApp farms, ...
VMware ThinApp featured in yet another deeply flawed “independent” performance assessment
Comments on the "Application Virtualization 2008-2009 Performance Assessment" published by Devil Mountain Softwarehttp://www.xpnet.com/appvirt2008.pdfhttp://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/xpnet_Performance_Review_of_AppVirt_Solutions.pdfRemember the kid in grade school who would announce that his dad was a CIA agent or something like that in order to win friends and influence people... or at least 4th graders? You know, the kind of scenario where you were filled with the sense of "does this kid even know how ...
Xen is Dead! Long Live Xen!
I was recently on a panel in Stockholm moderated by Brian Madden and Alessandro Perilli where, with Mike Neil, Avi Kivity, and Lance Berc, I enjoyed an engaging discussion on the future of virtualization. The event was a great opportunity for the audience to dig into different products and vendor strategies and Brian and Alessandro allowed none of us to wriggle away from the real issues. Definitely the ...