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Sun xVM automation streamlines management of complex virtualized environments
 Hello, Sun Inner Circle readers, it’s Bob Worrall with a rhetorical question for you: Why does virtualization seem to mean different things to different people? It may only be a slight exaggeration to claim that every technology company is now telling a virtualization story. Unfortunately, many of these stories don’t have much to do with realizing the benefits of virtualization as understood by most technical people.
From where I sit, virtualization should make IT run better, faster, cheaper. To get an expert read, I sat down with Mike Wookey, Sun’s CTO and Distinguished Engineer of Sun xVM and Connected Systems, about how Sun plans to get the most out of virtualization. Mike outlined how virtualization can provide tangible benefits without making IT administration more costly and complex.
Worrall: How does Sun’s xVM team view virtualization?
Wookey: The family name says a lot about how the Sun xVM team sees virtualization, because “xVM” is an abbreviation for “the intersection of virtualization and management.” The Sun xVM family, thus far, includes Sun xVM Ops Center, available today, which we'll focus on in this discussion, Sun xVM Server, which is Sun's hypervisor product coming soon, and our recently acquired VirtualBox free and open source desktop solution (formerly part of innotek).
People are turning to virtualization to reduce costs and consolidate. As you mentioned, the benefits of virtualization are usually tempered with administrative complexity, and Sun xVM Ops Center has been designed to easily manage complex environments of both physical and virtual hardware.
In a nutshell, the product is a set of all-in-one tools for automating the management of virtualized environments composed of Solaris and Linux systems running on x64 and UltraSPARC T1 processors.
Worrall: What datacenter management needs does Sun xVM Ops Center address?
Wookey: The datacenter environment is in constant need of updating and fine-tuning. In complex environments with both virtual and physical elements, this upkeep now involves many more moving parts than we could have imagined a few years ago. That increases the risk of things going south very quickly.
To keep virtualized datacenters humming, Sun xVM Ops Center addresses five main areas of an operational lifecycle: discovery, monitoring, provisioning, updating, and reporting. Overall, this provides a comprehensive view into the state of hardware and software configuration. For example, Sun xVM Ops Center fully automates system update tasks, which has wide-reaching ramifications for datacenter operations.
Let’s be honest: Updating systems often gets postponed — even if it means hardware won’t behave as expected. But when hardware does behave as expected, datacenter managers can make better decisions about standards and policies.
In areas like high performance computing, this is a real boon for ensuring that thousands of nodes and systems do what they’re supposed to do. And beyond the datacenter environment, these updating capabilities keep companies in compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, because datacenter managers know exactly what kinds of information are in the company’s computers.
Worrall: Does Sun xVM Ops Center lower the cost of datacenter administration?
Wookey: Automation reduces time spent administering systems, and Sun xVM Ops Center radically slashes administrator time by hundreds of hours. The product uses a console interface for the five main areas of administration I mentioned, and it can scan and understand the state of thousands of different systems with a single click. For example, Sun xVM Ops Center can automatically provision Linux or Solaris OS to a new system to take on the state of an existing system or a predefined installation. It can identify the patches required for more than 100 servers and determine their impact on the systems in about 15 minutes. Restoring a server to pre-disaster state takes about half an hour.
Otherwise, these tasks require manual intervention, which sucks up many, many hours of administrator time. To bypass all this effort, Sun’s Sun xVM Ops Center team created a browser-based interface that makes heavy use of Ajax, so a systems administrator can simply mouse over an item for information about complicated virtualized environments.
Sun xVM Ops Center provides a unified view across disparate systems
Worrall: How does Sun xVM Ops Center stack up to other virtualization and datacenter management products?
Wookey: When comparing Sun xVM Ops Center to other offerings, it’s important to look at the technological foundation of the Sun xVM product family. First, Sun is committed to open sourcing the Sun xVM family, which includes not just Sun xVM Ops Center but also the Sun xVM Server (Sun's hypervisor product). This complementary approach includes not just the cross-platform physical and virtual machine management of Sun xVM Ops Center, but also the Xen-based hypervisor, Sun xVM Server, that enables Windows and Linux guest operating systems to run on one machine.
As your readers probably know, Xen uses Linux to control the way virtual machines access hardware resources. The Sun xVM Server, however, uses a specialized version of Solaris to communicate with hardware, which enables advanced features such as network virtualization, the ZFS file system, Fault Management Architecture (FMA), and the new Solaris Packaging and update solution (IPS).
Second, Sun xVM Ops Center leverages technologies that simply aren’t available with other virtualization and datacenter management systems. Two that immediately come to mind are
advanced software analysis technologies for system updates, the advanced provisioning and hardware LOM management for server management, monitoring, and provisioning. There’s more that’s new, of course, such as the ability to allocate and prioritize bandwidth regardless of whether traffic is coming from a virtual or physical server.
Lastly, we’ve greatly simplified installation and configuration with Sun xVM Ops Center. Other virtualization and datacenter management solutions such as HP Systems Insight Manager and IBM Systems Director require carefully planned deployment and customization into the environment. We have designed Sun xVM Ops Center to be easily deployable with reduced installation and configuration cycles.
Worrall: Does Sun xVM Ops Center support Linux and Windows virtual machines?
Wookey: We’re making sure that the point-and-click interface will be instantly familiar to Microsoft Windows administrators. Sun xVM Server will fully support Windows guest operating systems and Ops Center will have the ability to manage and monitor Windows guests.
“Sun xVM Ops Center will support both Linux and Windows virtual machines.”
Linux users will find that Sun xVM Ops Center manages Red Hat and SuSE machines from the same browser interface that manages Solaris machines. But compared to most Linux update mechanisms — which are usually limited to looking for application-level dependencies — Sun xVM Ops Center provides new levels of insight with in-depth analysis of the effects of patches at the binary level. This should be a welcome development for Linux administrators.
Worrall: What else is ahead for Sun xVM and virtualization at Sun?
Wookey: It’s important to understand that Sun xVM is a broad product line, and the initial release of Sun xVM Ops Center should be viewed as one component in a larger series of upcoming offerings. Nevertheless, this year’s roadmap is populated with some pretty substantial milestones. The next version of Sun xVM Ops Center, for example, will include full APIs to enable the integration of any kind of change management system.
Later in 2008, we’ll release Sun xVM Server on SPARC, which will utilize all the virtualization technologies found in Sun's CoolThreads systems, such as logical domains — or as Sun calls them, LDoms.
Mid this year we will release Sun xVM Server for x64; that will run guest instances of all the major operating systems: Solaris, Linux, and, as I mentioned earlier, Windows.
The upshot of all this is that sooner than later, administrators will be able to run the datacenter as a whole — one large system of shared resources — rather than as a collection of systems. And for many companies, this capability can’t arrive quickly enough.
Bob Worrall
CIO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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