VOL. 1, NO. 2–DECEMBER 2012 VMWARE TECHNICAL JOURNAL Editors: Steve Muir, Rita Tavilla VMWARE VMWARE TECHNICAL JOURNAL SPECIAL THANKS TABLE OF CONTENTS Pat Gelsinger 1 Introduction Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger, CEO Terry Anderson 2 VMware Collaborations Vice President of Global Corporate Communications VMLab: Infrastructure to Support Desktop Virtualization Experiments for Research and Education Alex Garthwaite Prasad Calyam, Alex Berryman, Albert Lai, Matthew Honigford Rean Griffith vQuery: A Platform for Connecting Configuration and Performance Margaret Lowe Ilari Shafer, Snorri Gylfason, Gregory R. Ganger Elastic Resource Allocation in Datacenters: Gremlins in the Management Plane Mukil Kesavan, Ada Gavrilovska, Karsten Schwan 3 VMware Intern Projects Toward a Paravirtual vRDMA Device for VMware ESXi Guests Questions and comments can be sent to [email protected] Adit Ranadive, Bhavesh Davda Intrusion Detection Using VProbes Alex Dehnert Design and Implementation of a Cloud Tenant UI Louis Weitzman, Alister Lewis-Bowen, Elizabeth Li, Jason Fedor 4 VMware Engineering FrobOS is turning 10: What can you learn from a 10 year old? Stuart Easson Storage DRS: Automated Management of Storage Devices In a Virtualized Datacenter Sachin Manpathak, Ajay Gulati, Mustafa Uysal A Social Media Approach to Virtualization Management VOL. 1, NO. 2 2012 1, NO. VOL. Ravi Soundararajan, Emre Celebi, Lawrence Spracklen, Harish Muppalla, Vikram Makhija VMware View® Planner: Measuring True Virtual Desktop Experience at Scale VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com Banit Agrawal, Rishi Bidarkar, Sunil Satnur, Tariq Magdon-Ismail, Lawrence Spracklen, Uday Kurkure, Vikram Makhija Copyright © 2012 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW-TJ-VMWARE-TECH-JOURNAL-VOL1-NO2-USLET-110-cover vSOM: A Framework for Virtual Machine-centric Analysis of End-to-End Storage IO Operations Sandeep Uttamchandani, Wenhua Liu, Samdeep Nayak VMware Sponsored Academic Research Awards Request for Proposal (RFP) Theme: Storage in support of Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) VMware Academic Program VMware® invites university-affiliated researchers worldwide to submit proposals for funding in the general area of The VMware Academic Program advances the company’s strategic objectives Storage in support of an SDDC. Our research interests in the field of Storage for SDDC are broad, including but through collaborative research and other initiatives. The Program works in close not limited to the following topics: partnerships with both the R&D and University Relations teams to engage with the global academic community. • End-to-end application policy-based management and automation • Storage QoS enforcement A number of research programs operated by VMAP provide academic partners • Integrated resource management for storage, networking, and computation with opportunities to connect with VMware. These include: • Storage services, e.g. compression, de-duplication • Annual Request for Proposals (see front cover pre-announcement), providing • Securing Storage in Multi-Tenant environments funding for a number of academic projects in a particular area of interest. • Programming models for Non-Volatile Memory • Conference Sponsorship, supporting participation of VMware staff in academic • Alternatives to Block IO interfaces conferences and providing financial support for conferences across a wide variety • Shared Nothing Storage Architectures of technical domains. • Storage for hybrid clouds (public/private) • Graduate Fellowships, recognizing outstanding PhD students conducting • Emerging storage workloads and applications research that addresses long-term technical challenges. • Energy-efficient storage design • VMAP Research Symposium, an opportunity for the academic community to • Large-scale testing of distributed storage learn more about VMware’s R&D activities and existing collaborative projects. • Scale-out file systems We also support a number of technology initiatives. The VMAP licensing program • NoSQL storage architectures (http://vmware.com/go/vmap) provides higher education institutions around the • Cloud storage for mobile use cases world with access to key VMware products. Our cloud technology enables the Initial submissions should be extended abstracts, up to two pages long, describing the research project for which Next-Generation Education Environment (NEE, http://labs.vmware.com/nee/) to funding is requested and must include articulation of its relevance to VMware. After a first review phase we will deliver virtual environments for educational use. New online education providers, create a shortlist of proposals that have been selected for further consideration, and invite authors to submit such as EdX, use VMware solutions to deliver a uniform learning environment on detailed proposals, including details of milestones, budget, personnel, etc. Initial funding of up to $150,000 multiple platforms. will be for a period of one year, with options to review and recommit to funding subsequently. 2013 Key Dates Visit http://labs.vmware.com/ to learn more about the VMware Academic Program. • March 13 — Two page extended abstracts due • April 5 — Notification of interest from VMware • May 1 — Full proposals due • May 27 — Announcement of final acceptance of proposals Please contact Rita Tavilla, Research Program Manager ([email protected]) with any questions. All submissions should be sent to [email protected]. It’s my pleasure to introduce the second volume of the VMware Technical Journal. As VMware CEO and throughout my career I have emphasized the importance of engagement between industry and academia as an integral part of the “golden triangle” of innovation—organic innovation within dynamic companies alongside innovative research developments with universities and the passion of start-up environments. This volume of the Journal highlights how VMware taps into this approach, with many voices coming together to demonstrate the relationship between our academic research collaboration, internship programs and organic R&D efforts. The journal begins with perspectives shared by collaborators at Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Ohio State University. Their contributions highlight research projects supported by VMware through a combination of financial sponsorship, software donations and participation by our engineers. VMware-sponsored projects such as these span multiple focus areas, such as cluster scheduling, performance monitoring and security in cloud and virtualized environments. We continue to identify new research opportunities, and our next RFP scheduled for Spring 2013 will provide a great opportunity for a number of researchers to begin new collaborative projects. We then feature three papers written by past interns, describing the breadth of projects undertaken by these students while at VMware. Our internship program is a highly structured opportunity for outstanding students to work on a specially defined project, which often leads to significant output such as a research publication or product enhancement. The program fosters long-term relationships, with many interns participating in multiple internships and frequently joining VMware upon graduation. Our PhD interns often integrate their summer projects into their PhD relationships, which in turn contribute to our ongoing academic partnerships—an example of the golden triangle at work! We close this edition with contributions from a number of VMware engineers. These perspectives share how innovation occurs in R&D, whether providing a historical perspective on a key component of VMware’s development infrastructure - FrobOS - or describing a new idea for leveraging social networking to efficiently manage large datacenters. Many of our engineers act as mentors to interns and also participate in research partnerships, thus reinforcing the relationship between every aspect of innovation. We hope you enjoy this edition as much as we’ve enjoyed the collaboration and impact highlighted in the stories we share with you here. We welcome your comments and ideas for future articles— keep the input and innovation coming! Pat Gelsinger CEO, VMware 1 VMLab: Infrastructure to Support Desktop Virtualization Experiments for Research and Education Prasad Calyam Alex Berryman Albert Lai Matthew Honigford The Ohio State University The Ohio State University The Ohio State University VMware, Inc. [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract I. Motivation and Significance In terms of convenience and cost-savings, user communities have Today, common user applications such as email, photos, videos, benefited from transitioning to virtual desktop clouds (VDCs) that and file storage are supported at Internet-scale by cloud platforms, are accessible via thin-clients, moving away from dedicated hardware including HP Cloud Assure, Google Mail, and Amazon S3. Even and software in “traditional desktops”. Allocating and managing VDC academia increasingly is adopting cloud infrastructures and resources in