Virtualization and Grid Computing

All this Windows cloud news afoot. Make sure to read this post on the GoGrid blog:

Windows in the Cloud? Been there, done that!

GoGrid has already almost a year of proven experience providing Windows Server 2003/2008 to end users… we are also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

An interesting project I ran across, it started in 2004.

From http://vcl.ncsu.edu/:

The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is a remote access service that allows you to reserve a computer with a desired set of applications for yourself, and remotely access it over the Internet.

You can use all your favorite applications such as Matlab, Maple, SAS, Solidworks, and many others. Linux, Solaris and numerous Windows environments are now available to all NC State students and faculty.

Leasing custom environments to “public-ish” users via PXE or similar technology was happening in other places in 2004, but I never saw anything at this scale.

It is clear that some kind of reconfiguration/resetting happens:

What rights do I have on the VCL machine?

On custom Windows and Linux environments you have adminstrative and root level rights. Since the VCL system reloads each expired reservations with a clean environment, there is no threat of any residual data being left on a machine for the next user.

On Linux and Solaris Lab machine environments, you only have user level rights. The same premissions as you would experience at the console of a walk-in lab.

I wonder when they added the VM support mentioned at http://vcl.ncsu.edu/help/general-information/how-it-works:

The management nodes each control a subset of the VCL resources. These can be blades, virtual machines or lab machines. Currently, a set of individual blades or virtual machines can only be managed by a single management node. Typically there are anywhere from 80-120 physical computer nodes (blades) under one management node. Again the physical computer nodes can either be running a bare metal environment or a Virtual Machine hypervisor.

Here are deployment stats captured on Aug 25, 2008:

• Total blades online: 438
• Total blades offline: 87
• Active Reservations: 49

Cool.

Massimo Re Ferre’ asks: Will Microsoft sunset VMware? (responses on the VMTN forum)

One of the parts to note is the claim in his VMware / Microsoft comparison that VMware is trying to “change the rules” by participating in the creation of a new IT platform rather than focusing on mere server consolidation. From that section:

The next frontier would be Virtual Appliances which is a very different way to develop and deploy applications compared to what we are doing today.
[…]
This is a fascinating scenario and as you can imagine it involves more than just developing a hypervisor with a management interface: it involves creating a new culture on how we deal with IT, taking all the pieces apart and rebuild our datacenters in a much more efficient way.

Quoting from this article on the Novell/Microsoft deal:

Users can host Windows Server as a paravirtualized guest on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, using the Xen virtualization technology embedded in the Linux operating system.

Very interesting. The only paravirtualized Windows we’ve heard of so far is the proof of concept the Xen team did at Cambridge several years ago which was protected by NDA. I wonder what the exact licensing terms are — and what mechanism will Microsoft use to (try to) prevent people from running their domU kernel on other Xen installations?