VMware Introduces vSphere 4

VMware released their new product vSphere 4. From their press release they state the following "VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced VMware vSphere™ 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service."

Of all my favorite overused buzzwords "cloud computing" is my favorite because of the wide variety of different computing models it describes. Many people use the term having no real idea what it means just because its the popular buzzword and have no concept that even though your running "on the cloud" your connected to a physical server somewhere with the same physical resources as a standard server. A lot of people fail to do the math of the real costs and think they are saving a bundle of money when in reality their costs have increased using an external provider.

While VMware is guilty of abusing the "cloud" buzzword their new product vSphere is actually rather innovative. From their press release again. "Up to 20 percent additional power and cooling savings with VMware Distributed Power Management which uses VMware VMotion to automatically place all virtual machines on as few physical servers as possible without compromising service levels, and power down physical servers that are not needed. The power savings with VMware Distributed Power Management across all VMware vSphere 4 customers over one year could power a country the size of Denmark for 10 days"

Essentially one could have a cluster of hardware ready to go powered off and have vSphere actively powering on and off servers as needed and using vmotion to move VM's around the cluster. Not only are you not getting wear and tear on your hardware from being powered 24/7 there is an energy and cooling savings as well. Not to mention saving a lot of time with provisioning and capacity calculation. Resources as they are needed power up and down by themselves. Because there is less stress on the hardware it could also last longer as well providing more reliable service over more time. A whole cluster could be installed with more capacity than needed and then left unattended for many years. When the hardware fails its just taken out of the pools of machines. As the compute resources increase more machines in the cluster power on to be utilized providing an almost hands off administration experience for the entire lifespan of the installation.

Now if it were only priced reasonably. The Full featured top of the line version of vSphere costs $3,495 per processor. Their stripped out bottom of the line version is $795 per processor. Depending on your hardware the OS could easily excede the costs of your hardware investment. At these prices power and administrative staff seem really cheap.

ESXtop on ESXi

If you have ssh enabled on ESXi one of the more useful commands for determining system utilization is esxtop. When you run esxtop you get a display of all the processes on the system which is not exactly the most useful information. The program is capable of displaying other information as well. The most useful is the capital V option which shows per VM usage. You can also display disk usage memory usage and network usage as well with esxtop.

Here is a snippet of the help page for esxtop.

Esxtop version 3.1.0
Secure mode Off
Esxtop: top for ESX

These single-character commands are available:

^L - redraw screen
space - update display
h or ? - help; show this text
q - quit

Interactive commands are:

fF Add or remove fields
oO Change the order of displayed fields
s Set the delay in seconds between updates
# Set the number of instances to display
W Write configuration file ~/.esxtop3rc
e Expand/Rollup Cpu Statistics
V View only VM instances

Oracle to buy Sun for $9.50 a Share

Oracle is now going to buy Sun at $9.50 a share in cash. From the article on Sun's front page "Sun and Oracle today announced a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The Sun Board of Directors has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer."

I think that the Oracle purchase is a more natural transition for Sun. Oracle has a large amount of cash which Sun needs for research and growth. Oracle also seems to be rather hands off with their purchases. This will also be beneficial to Oracle as well having slightly more say as to some of the internals of Solaris so that perhaps there may be more integration into the way the database works with the OS.

The IBM deal would have been troublesome for both Sun and IBM. IBM's own UNIX variant AIX would have come into question in addition to lots of blockers being thrown in Sun's path budget wise for by IBM for innovation and R&D.

I hope IBM has learned their lesson as well from this. When you have the deal of century on your desk it does not pay to be cheap and play hardball in negotiations. Someone like Oracle might be around the corner willing to pay more than the asking price and snatch the deal right out of your hands. I suppose the bean counters and negotiatiors at IBM are kicking themselves right about now.

IBM Withdraws $9M Offer to Buy Sun

This weekend IBM withdrew its $9M offer for Sun after the Sun board balked at their lower offer. From the NY Times article.

"After the legal review, I.B.M. shaved its offer Saturday from $9.55 a share, the proposal on the table late last week, to $9.40 a share, said one person familiar with the talks. The offer was presented to Sun’s board on Saturday, and the board balked. The Sun board did not reject the offer outright, but wanted certain guarantees that the I.B.M. side considered “onerous,” according to that person. Sun then said it would no longer abide by its exclusive negotiating agreement with I.B.M., a second person familiar with the discussions said. On Sunday, I.B.M.’s board decided to withdraw the offer."

Sun is now on their own to make their business model work which I think is a good thing. This gives more choice in the Unix market. Doing business with IBM would have ultimately failed anyway due to their drastically different way of doing business. Its good to see Sun able to walk away from the deal mostly unscathed. Now its time for the board and the executives to sit down and do their jobs to make Sun more profitable rather than looking for a quick payout.

Farewell Old Friend

In September 2006 many people marked the "death" of one of the biggest innovators in the computing world Silicon Graphics when they killed off their operating system IRIX and MIPS technology to produce systems made up of commodity processors and Linux. Today Rackable Systems announced their purchase of SGI for 25 million. If you did not consider SGI to be dead in 2006 they certainly are now being bought in bankruptcy by Rackable Systems. Farewell old friend!