Citrix is looking for beta testers for their upcoming release of XenServer featuring a Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS).
The Citrix DVS capability allows XenServer customers to centrally apply networking policy and gain visibility into VM network interfaces in a centralized manner. It also enables the persistence of VM network policy and state through mobility events.
The Citrix DVS leverages Open vSwitch (http://openvswitch.org/) running in the individual XenServer hypervisors.
There has been a lot of discussion about the Enterprise Stack and if any one vendor will ever own the whole thing. While that is a grand vision for any of the companies named below (and sure to bring applause from their shareholders on “analyst” day), I simply don’t see customers ever allowing it to become reality. Customers don’t want to be locked in. In my opinion, the virtual enterprise stack is what will win, but there will be lots of different vendor choices up and down that stack….and by the way, it probably won’t actually be hosted in the Enterprise DC (but that is another discussion).
Via: What is the Enterprise Stack?
For the first part of this year, customers are voting with their wallets and they are choosing…..drum role…..everyone (see How Much Integration Is Too Much in the Cloud?). Unlike the Internet bubble burst back in 2000/2001 where companies like Cisco stole market and revenue share from the rest of the networking industry during the recovering, this recovery looks like it might be shaping up to be a little different. Back in 2001, the technology didn’t really evolve very much between the time of the burst to the point where the recovery really kicked in. Sure, it got faster and cheaper, but architectures fundamentally stayed the same (they just got some new bells and whistles). Blade servers started to emerge and networks saw a lot of movement from 100M to 1G at the access layer but virtualization hadn’t really kicked in yet. Since November of 2008, customers have had a lot of time to reevaluate their entire IT stack AND a lot of new architectural solutions have emerged. Amazon’s EC2 and Rackspace’s Cloud Hosting have given customers direct access to more cost effective data center resources that they can access on demand. Google Apps have given companies big and small complete business solutions (email, docs, spreasheets, sites, etc) that can be spun up and online the same hour the company opens it’s doors. VMware’s vNetwork Distributed Swith/Cisco’s Nexus 1000V, OpenFlow & Open vSwitch, HP’s Virtual Connect, Palo Alto Networks NG Enterprise Firewalls, Cisco’s Nexus 5000/2000 combination (foundational to Cisco UCS) and Arista’s 7×00 w/ vEOS are all examples of fundamentally new capabilities introduced since the downturn which customers can now leverage to harness their increasingly complex and highly virtualized data centers.
The point is that customers today are faced with much greater IT challenges than they were in 2008 and the technologies are dramatically different…not necessarily all of them better, but definitely different. And, there are a lot of new IT solutions warming up their engines to go out on track for the first time and see what types of lap times they can turn in. Should be fun!
There has been a lot of hub-bub made earlier this year about the fact that Red Hat was dropping Xen from RHEL 6.0 in favor of KVM and that this would ultimately lead to Xen’s demise. You can read through the timeline of events here and details about when the drop was first spotted here.
Citrix Senior Marketing Director John Humpheys has done a short write up on 3 aspects of server virtualization where XenServer is actually seeing a lot of traction (data center, cloud, desktop). Last I checked, these are THE major 3 areas.
Open vSwitch 1.0 was recently posted at openvswitch.org. Check out a quick write up at virtualization.info. And another at Infoworld.
The open vSwitch development effort was brought on following the introduction of VMWare’s DVS and Cisco’s Nexus 1000V last year. This effort brings advanced networking capabilities to hypervisor platforms like Xen, XenServer and KVM.
I am trying to get my company’s session approved for this year’s VMWorld. When you aren’t a Platinum sponsor, it is a little bit more difficult to get these things pushed though. So, I am asking for help from anyone who has a VMWorld account to go and vote for the session. Many of you have been asking me what Nicira is up to. This session is a great way to find out. Here are the session details and link to cast your vote.
Cast your vote here
Title: Reworking the Network to Support Today’s Virtualization & Cloud Demands
Speaker: Martin Casado, Nicira CTO and Founder
Company: Nicira
Session Id: PC8430
Abstract: “The networking industry is lagging far behind the virtualization trends which are transforming our datacenters into pure resource pools of compute power. Traditional approaches to networking hamper the adoption of virtualization with scaling and mobility limitations, vendor lock-in on hardware platforms & management APIs, and an inability to seamlessly bridge physical and virtual topologies. This session will review a networking architecture that offer the guarantees of the physical network, while retaining the flexibility of the cloud. Solutions will be described which tackle problems such as providing strict isolation, bridging physical networks, providing accurate SLAs and billing information, and offering inter-subnet migration with persistent IP addresses. In this talk, real world experiences designing & building multi-tenant virtual networking infrastructures which scale to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines and tens of thousands of tenants will also be discussed. “
