Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center?

Eddie: Intel's Open Source Technology Center is a great place where I learned, grew up and contributed. The team here in China is young, open and skillful, and we all are in a very good atmosphere to help each other and work as a team. Each individual contribution is small, but we are proud of the whole team effort. That is the sole reason we received an Intel Achievement Award in 2006.

Dawn: How are you involved in performance tuning work for open source virtualization projects?

Eddie: I started my virtualization life in early 2004, and started working on open source virtualization projects, i.e. Xen, at the end of year. Performance is critical to the success of open source virtualization projects, but it was not that good at that time. I started the work with help from the team, accumulated all the expertise necessary and was able to improve it dramatically both in Xen and KVM.

Dawn: Can you tell us more about your efforts with SR-IOV Networking in the Xen project?

Eddie: SR-IOV, as part of Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity, is a significant product to improve I/O virtualization performance. It takes the advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology for directed I/O, i.e. VT-d, to reduce the intervention of hypervisor in I/O sharing. As a team, we implemented the SR-IOV support for open source virtualization and tuned the performance to achieve close to native performance.

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't working at Intel?

Eddie: I like to spend time with my kid, playing chess or having fun together.

We have only 24 hours left until the General Availability (GA) of Windows 7 and so tomorrow Windows 7 will be in the hands of consumers for the first time. With the release of Windows 7, along with the release of some awesome new processors from Intel, it was time for a new personal notebook and also for a companion netbook as Windows 7 has been designed to work great on netbooks.

If you've been following this blog for sometime you'll know that I use Hyper-V for virtualization within Windows Server 2008 R2, the server variant of Windows 7, with this in mind I found the HP Envy 15. Inside this machine is the mobile Core i7 processor which is quad-core and supports hyper-threading allowing the execution of 8 concurrent threads, and for virtualization there is 16Gb of DDR3 memory.

I also ordered the HP Mini 311 which is powered by an Intel Atom processor as a companion device that can be used when travelling. I chose this netbook over others on the market because you can install 3Gb of DDR3 memory. 

I'll be blogging next month about the experience of Windows 7 on both the Core i7 and Atom processors, specifically with the software developer in mind.

It should also be mentioned that this blog post does not represent an endoresemnt, by Intel Corporation, of the particular laptop and netbook models shown above. I purchased these machines based on my own research and my own requirements.

Windows 7 is an outstanding operating system (imho) and I'd be very interested to hear what you think of the operating system and the Core i7 and Atom processors.

Out Of Band KVM is no triviality. Imagine your PC user calls you with a connectivity problem: You can ask her questions about the system... or you can use Intel KVM to control her system, seeing her screen and controlling her mouse -- discovering that the network driver isn't installed is a breeze, and fixing it is as simple as inserting the installation disc in your own machine and executing it through IDER (previous Intel AMT features are, of course, available concomitantly).

Intel KVM will show you the entire remote desktop in any case, even in a BSoD, or with a missing hard-disk or CPU.  As much as this is exciting, this sounds scary: what if users want some privacy?
Well, all and any KVM connection starts with a secure graphic output containing a secure password, and this password is required in order to make the connection. This means that there is no Intel KVM session unless the computer user is now in front of the screen and willing to give control. The remote session is indicated to the user, and he has also full control to halt the session at once at the press of a mouse. Reviewed by an internal privacy review board, the technology is planned to be friendly to IT Managers and users alike.

This new feature will be available in some of the 2010 platforms, and is an incredibly useful addition to the other manageability (and remote desktop or KVM) solutions IT shops already have in their toolbox.
In a recent demonstration I performed for local IT Managers, the reception was overwhelming! Instead of performing this full demo on the web, I'll let you with this teaser.

We'll be soon posting on this blogs new information about this technology (with videos!). Stay tuned, it is going to be an exciting topic!

Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center (OTC)?

Wilfred: We have a great mission here and a great team of people to make it happen. People are not shy about questioning the status quo. We get to work on challenging problems and we get to do these with the best and brightest inside Intel and in the community. If you're into bleeding edge stuff, OTC is the place.

Dawn: Can you tell us more about the work that Intel is doing for open source virtualization?

Wilfred: We have been working for the past five years to add Intel virtualization technologies (VT) to open source virtual machine monitors (VMM) projects. Xen was our initial target, but we have extended our involvement over time to include KVM. Initially, Xen could only boot para-virtualized Linux guest. We added code to enable Xen to use Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x) to boot unmodified guest OSes, like Windows. We worked with the Xen maintainer to extend Xen to 64-bit. We added support for Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed-IO (VT-d) so you can assign PCI devices to guest OS's. We also added support for Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) so you can authenticate the VMM you are booting on a platform. We are now pushing virtualization changes for power management, IO virtualization and RAS.

Dawn: How important are open source virtualization projects, like Xen and KVM, to cloud computing solutions?

Wilfred: Very. Some of the most prominent cloud solutions out there are built on open source VMMs. The cost factor is an important determinant. And the fact that you can get full sources to the VMM means that you can make changes to meet your cloud needs. I truly believe that open source virtualization is powering the cloud.

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't working on virtualization technologies?

Wilfred: What's more fun than work? Seriously. I have kids that are approaching college age. I spend time with them when I'm not doing Intel work.

This virtualization partnership announcement came out on the same day as the Red Hat Analyst day where they gather industry and financial analysts together with Red Hat executives to talk about the performance of the company. Stephen O'Grady from RedMonk and Gordon Haff from CNet both had nice summaries of the analyst event if you want to learn more about Red Hat's strategy and performance.

According to the Red Hat press release, the virtualization certification includes:

• Validation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, with Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guests.
• Certification of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 host with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 guests.

From ZDNet, Paula Rooney's take on this announcement is that "time’s are a changing. Microsoft and Red Hat delivering anything in cooperative fashion is big news and marks more major milestones for interoperability, virtualization and Linux."

Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity, or VT-c, is a collection of technologies that improve the performance of network I/O on a virtualized system. VT-c is comprised of two components at the time of this writing: VMDq and VMDc.

VMDq, or Virtual Machine Device Queues, supports separate queuing for individual VMs on the network contoller itself, thus improving VMM performance by relieving it of the burden to sort incoming network I/O data. Separate queuing also improves fairness amongst VMs and provides several other nice features.

VMDc, or Virtual Machine Direct Connect, uses the PCI-SIG standard called SR-IOV to virtualize physical I/O ports of a network controller into multiple virtual I/O ports, and then to map the virtual ports to individual VMs. The result is near-native network I/O performance for VMs which can now make use of direct access.

Users have asked whether VT-c is a hardware or software-based set of performance features. The answer is "yes" and "yes" -- in other words, both are required to enable VT-c capabilities. VMDq, case in point, requires the hardware support of particular network interfaces, driver support, and VMM support.

More information can be found on VT-c at:

http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/solutions/virtualization.htm

David Ott, Sr. Software Engineer
Software and Services Group

Intel Virtualization and Software Development Forum
http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/virtualization-software-development

VMware will allow you to configure a huge amount of DRAM to a VM, but then won't let you start the VM because it does not know where to store bytes for that VM if it needs to deschedule the VM.

Problem details:

You have installed ESX or vSphere on a disk, and you have created additional virtual machine(s) on that disk.

You want to add a lot of memory to your VM(s). The amount of memory in your VM, plus the size of the root disk of your VM is greater than X.

VMware will not let you boot your VM, because it realizes that it does not have enough space left on the ESX disk to back the total commits it may need to make from the page cache, when it needs to suspend the VM.

Solution:

Create a large enough VMFS disk store somewhere else, or get it from an NFS volume and add it to your host.

In the example pictured below, we created such a VMFS disk store and named it swapesxstore.

Next we edited the host configuration as shown in the picture. We enabled a nondefault swap store by setting the two parameters as shown in the figure below:

Reboot your ESX server and now you can power up your VM using the modified swap file.

We have talked about this IT game in previous posts (here and here), but much of the renewed interest on the game comes from its newest feature: Crisis!
"...the management suddenly slashes your department’s budget. Your mission is to make the business case for upgrades..."
Nothing like a game that accompanies and simulates reality :)

you play the IT manager of a small company with global ambitions. Part of your job is ensuring that everybody’s desktop PCs, laptops and servers keep running smoothly, and the skills your characters acquire during gameplay include knowledge on virtualization, manageability and security. In case you didn't sign for the game yet, go to IT Manager 3: Unseen Forces and start having fun while you learn.

Here is the game trailer:
IT Manager 3: Unseen Forces on Intel's YouTube channel

1. Starting with the simplest one spotted...OpenSolaris has issues with one major OEM's hardware when IOMMU is enabled. After some debug runs, turned out IOMMU was disabled in BIOS, and it was reporting a bad register base for the IOMMU base address. We are attempting to overcome this in an upcoming fix.
2. We know RMRR region is for early DMA before OS takes over a device. for e.g like legacy usb keyboard emulation on a system that has no ps2 ports. The first one we ran into was simply RMRR's werent reported, even though they were used. The way you would find that is by looking at the e820 map, and the fault report from iommu driver. If the address matches a reserved range in e820, then thats it. In order to overcome this, we basically ended up mapping all reserved range to provide a 1-1 map for usb host controllers. Due to the ill effects of SMI that gets involved in the legacy emulation process, you would find sometimes system hangs as well.You can also test by just disabling "Legacy Keyboard Emulation" in your BIOS settings to work around, if the OS driver isnt handling it right. Some BIOS's even dont provide a way to turn that off, which the only option is to disable vt-d by using cmd line means during boot. -B intel-iommu=off during boot via grub command line option.
3. Some BIOS's end up using memory for DMA before handoff to OS and reporting some other section incorrectly. As long as BIOS has marked them reserved the above fix should work. The bad case is if BIOS doesnt put those in reserved e820 map, then all bets are off, since OS would also attempt to use the same region. Talk to your BIOS vendor. OpenSolaris doesn't have an easy way to dump e820, unless you use -B prom_debug=true, but it gets too noisy. Still not in a simple form like the Linux boot logs during screen.
4. This one is brutal... There are some strange cases, where a device is used for managebility reasons. The problem is the managebility engine is using the device via some firmware control. The issue is OS doesnt know about this device and hence cant setup any translation tables for this device. Don't recall if the spec disallows RMRR's for devices that arent OS visible, but that might be one way to get around the problem. If the designers weren't on drugs they would have given a dedicated IOMMU for this device.
5. This was observed on a Toshiba Tekra M10. I was told the BIOS issue is fixed but not sure. Luckily OpenSolaris doesn't use physical page 0, and always removed from the map. It looks like BIOS usb support requires this page to be mapped or you end up in SMI illness for your system. We ended up mapping page0 for usb devices and the problem goes away. You can also disable legacy USB emulation and it would work otherwise. There is an option to disable all these workarounds, but thats purely for academic experience, you generally dont need to mess with it.

Alright... thats it for now folks... Until the next issue.. Adios!

The news about open source and cloud computing continues with the Eucalyptus launch of Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE), which provides a solution for using VMware virtualization technologies, Xen, and KVM with on-premise Eucalyptus cloud implementations. Here are a few details about the product from the Eucalyptus press release:

"For EEE, Eucalyptus leverages vSphere, ESXi, and ESX virtualization technologies to provide an on-premise cloud in the data center. EEE also includes an image converter that helps users develop VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2. Moreover, Eucalyptus supports popular open source hypervisors such as KVM and Xen, enabling EEE customers to choose the most appropriate software stack for each cloud application while maintaining a single cloud API that is Amazon compatible."

Sam Dean from the OStatic blog says that EEE "can be thought of as a set of bridges between cloud platforms and virtualization environments." Cloud computing and virtualization naturally fit well together, so it isn't surprising that we're seeing more announcements about interoperability between cloud and virtualization products, like this announcement from Eucalyptus and the previous release from Xen. I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg now, and I expect to see this trend continue toward open source solutions at the intersection of cloud computing and virtualization.

James Staten from Forrester Research sees this as a positive step:

"Now Xen.org is delivering a complete product that IaaS clouds can more easily deploy, Linux distributions can deliver and that end customers can install knowing that storage, deployment, monitoring, reporting, policy-based automation and most other management tasks are consistently executed. This also makes Xen plus Eucalyptus a more complete cloud-in-a-box, open source solution.

Clearly this move benefits Citrix’ aims as well. The company carrying the Xen.org flag will be contributing all its cloud-relevant technologies to this open source project including its StorageLink, virtual switch, virtual appliance, and VMware-to-Xen VM conversion (Project Kensho) technologies. Many early IaaS cloud leaders have their own solutions in these areas but are likely to welcome this IP so they don’t have to maintain their unique solutions long term.

Hopefully with this move the days of cloud incompatibility, at least between Xen-based clouds, will come to an end just a bit sooner."

With this announcement, the buzz surrounding open source software in the cloud continues. My last post on open source in the cloud talked about the VMware acquisition of SpringSource, and many people are saying that the Xen announcement is designed to take on VMware. The way I see it, competition is good for the users, so I hope to see more of these announcements of innovative new open source solutions for the cloud.

With the current growth rate of cloud computing, it isn't surprising to see VMware increase their focus on the cloud. "Worldwide cloud services revenue is on pace to surpass $56.3 billion in 2009, a 21.3 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $46.4 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The market is expected to reach $150.1 billion in 2013."

While cloud computing seems to be a primary focus of the SpringSource acquisition, it also gives VMware a much stronger position in enterprise deployment, provisioning, and manageability of the environment. Sam Dean sees the acquisition as "a platform play from VMware, emphasizing enterprise software stacks, software development, scalable environments in data centers, and virtualization for making data centers easily fluent with multiple operating systems and environments. It's also evidence that VMware is paying more attention to open source competition."

VMware has been facing more and more competition from the operating system vendors. With this combination of virtualization and enterprise software, people are talking about how VMware is positioning itself to more effectively address this competition. Matt Asay says that operating systems become less relevant when you have virtualization and cloud computing technologies like the model in the diagram above.

Adrian Colyer, SpringSource CTO, and Steve Harrod, VMware CTO, both wrote a greats posts with more technical details about how the VMware and SpringSource technologies combine virtualization and enterprise Java to focus on enterprise software deployment and cloud computing. Both are definitely worth a read if you want to learn more about how the technologies will work together.

Here are a couple of additional virtualization trend data points:

• IDC also sees virtualization as a hot trend in the industry, and they see Linux playing a big role. In a report from April (PDF link), IDC says that people who use Linux now will continue to deploy increased numbers of virtualized Linux instances and expand their use of Linux in these virtualized environments.
• Sam Dean describes a couple of virtualization trends on the OStatic blog: "1) open source virtualization offerings; and 2) free virtualization within operating systems."

There are plenty of open source virtualization offerings available to choose from, including Xen and KVM. VMWare recently announced that it has released a virtual desktop client into open source in addition to it's other virtualization products. However, many users will probably just use the default virtualization solution from their operating system vendor. There are plenty of examples of virtualization solutions being offered by the operating system vendors: Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun or others.

The open source virtualization vendors face plenty of competition from the operating system vendors and other solutions. This kind of competition fosters innovation as the various vendors compete to have the best solution. The key is that there are plenty of options to choose from depending on exactly what you need from your virtualization solution.

With Windows Server 2008 R2 installed and configured with the Hyper-V role you'll need to open the Hyper-V Manager which will initially have no virtual machines as shown here.

Select the Import Virtual Machine option within the actions pane and then navigate to where the exported virtual machine resides upon the file system. It is a good idea to copy the virtual machine which will create a new unique virtual machine ID and select the option to duplicate the files which will allow the virtual machine to be imported again.

If you then click the Import button the virtual machine will be copied to the virtual hard drive folder defined for your Hyper-V environment. Within Windows Server 2008 R2 the default location is:

C:\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual hard disks\

It can take some time to import the virtual machine and so it might be a good time to get some coffee while the virtual hard drive is copied.

Once the virtual machine has been imported you should verify the settings for the virtual machine as there may be some issues that need to be resolved before the virtual machine can be started. In this example the virtual machine was moved from a desktop workstation with 8Gb of memory to a mobile workstation with 4Gb of memory. On the desktop workstation the virtual machine was given 4Gb of memory which is out of bounds on the mobile workstation so this will need to be reduced.

Once the startup memory has been changed to 2Gb the virtual machine can be started within the new environment.

Given that the virtual machine was imported from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2 you'll also have to update the integration services within the virtual machine. You can do this simply by selecting the Insert Integration Services Setup Disk option within the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection.

Essentially that is all that is involved in moving virtual machines from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2.

After receiving an e-mail from Rafael Rivera today, I discovered that one of my previous blog posts, entitled Windows 7 'Incredibly Stable,' Intel Expert Says, was featured in a video on the Microsoft Showcase site. Within the video, Renee James, CVP & GM, Software and Services Group, Intel shares her thoughts on Windows 7 and how Intel will support the operating system. Within the video, Renee confirms that Intel's own internal testing has been "fantastic" and then there you have the Windows 7 'Incredibly Stable,' Intel Expert Says post.

Being quoted in the InformationWeek article was cool although this was very cool also and thank you Rafael for letting me know this was online.