The virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009 will take place in May 5-7 at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, co-hosted with other three great events (Citrix iForum, Network World Live! and Geek Speak).
On Dec 1st we launched a Call for Papers to deliver some great contents on stage.
In one month, despite the closing quarter and the holidays, we received an amazing 95 submissions.
As promised, today we publish all of them, title and abstract, so you can vote for the most interesting ones and help us to build the event you’d like to attend.
We just removed any reference to the speaker, so there’s an exclusive focus on the topic.
To simplify the whole process we setup a Digg-like interface where you can anonymously promote (up arrow) or demote (down arrow) each presentation.
You can even comment each abstract (and we encourage you to do so), so the speakers can have some early feedbacks and fine-tune their presentations to match your needs.
Last but not least there’s a search if you are looking for something in particular and don’t want to browse all the 95 submissions.
Here we go: http://cfp.virtualizationcongress.com
Some of the proposals you’ll find there:
- Building a Business Case for your virtualization projects
- Cloud Computing Adoption Model
- Designing a Stable Virtual Infrastructure
- Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren't Telling You
- iPhone Virtualization
- Power and Cooling in the Datacenter
- Security Architecture for VDI
- Virtual Infrastructures: Scale Up or Scale Out? Rack or Blade form factors?
- Virtualized Storage for Virtualized IT: Best Practices for Maximizing Efficiency, Flexibility, and Data Protection
- VM Sprawl Case Study Findings
Labels: Announcements, Events
As our readers know virtualization.info tracks the evolution of the virtualization.info since 2003 thanks to the huge help of an overwhelming number of news sources, including mainstream news portal, corporate and personal blogs, web forums and newsgroups.
While most news sites don’t shine for their analysis, the overall quality of the blogs is very high.
This year a number of them really impressed for the value of the content and the knowledge of their authors.
virtualization.info recommends (in no special order):
- blog.scottlowe.org - Authored by Scott Lowe, National Technical Lead for Virtualization at ePlus Technology
- IT 2.0 - Authored by Massimo Re Ferrè, Architect at IBM
- Mike D’s Blog - Authored by Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware
- Rational Survivability - Authored by Christofer Hoff, Chief Security Architect at Unisys
- Virtual Geek - Authored by Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance at EMC
Labels: Announcements
At the beginning of this month virtualization.info announced the Virtualization Congress 2009, to be held at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, from May 5 to 7.
This year the event will be co-hosted with the Citrix iForum, Network World Live! and Geek Speak (this last one will be offered as part of the Virtualization Congress ticket). More information about this are here.
To build the agenda we issued a Call for Papers that ends Dec. 31, 2008.
We accept proposals from any industry entity, including independent professionals, solution providers and of course virtualization vendors.
So far we got over 50 submissions that we’ll publish next Monday (January 5th) here, asking our readers to vote for the most interesting ones.
Our pre-registrations highlight a special interest for best-practices and designing sessions about most topics around virtualization (from application virtualization to virtual lab management, passing through chargeback), and so we urge the brilliant virtualization architects and engineers that make our readership to share their experiences and submit a presentation during these last three days.
We are keen to bring on stage some independent voices to build some real-world knowledge.
If you are an expert about one specific vendor it’s great.
If your presentation crosses the boundaries of a certain product it’s even better.
Submit here: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/cfp.htm
Labels: Announcements, Events
The evolution of the virtualization industry in the last five years clarified how the market prefers hardware virtualization over any other kind of approach.
Application virtualization certainly is the next big step towards a “liquid” data center, but so far it’s still far away from the mainstream adoption.
The third platform virtualization technique that we track at virtualization.info, something we called for a long time OS partitioning, is the OS virtualization.
As our Virtualization Industry Radar highlights the only commercial players in this segment are Sun and Parallels (formerly SWsoft).
But the Sun presence in this space is very limited: its Solaris Containers (aka Zones) are available only for Solaris 10 and while the product became very flexible in the last two years, it’s clear that the company is moving its investments on hardware virtualization.
This makes Parallels the uncontested leader in this market.
The company, not worried by competition, had the opportunity to grow in the profitable niche of web hosting where hardware virtualization was not the best option.
Why no other vendor ever tried to develop and sell OS virtualization?
Even Microsoft publicly disclosed its interest for this technology in 2006 but never translated it into a real action.
Whatever the reason is, things may be changing as a new player emerges from the stealth mode: iCore Software.
The company was co-founded in 2007 by by a group of students from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technologies (MIPT), which is ironic considering that SWsoft/Parallels founder, Sergei Beloussov, is Russian as well.
It’s CEO and co-founder is Artem Prokopenko.
No other information about the company is available at the moment.
iCore brings OS virtualization to the clients, selling its containers, called Virtual Accounts, as different user personalities for working, gaming, browsing, etc.
At the moment the company offers its product for free on Windows XP only and claims just 1-2% overhead.
We’ll see if this young company as the numbers to compete against the monopolist Parallels.
iCore Software has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
Labels: Market Trends
The US startup Virtual Computer continues to unveil bits of its upcoming product, NxTop, which manipulates server and client virtualization to build an innovative VDI environment.
At the beginning of this month the company launched a private beta program and now it demonstrates some high-speed 3D graphics on virtualized laptops.
One of the biggest challenges in adopting a hypervisor on consumer equipment like workstation or notebooks is granting satisfying performance that won’t damage the user experience.
But the hypervisors developed so far for server virtualization just emulate most of the physical devices so that quality display or audio cards are just unusable.
Virtual Computer developed a special version of Xen to address this shortcoming on client side, and now it’s ready to show how it works when dealing with a 3D video cards and some graphic-intensive software like Quake and Google Earth:
Labels: Virtual Computer
The just released Kernel 2.6.28 includes more than 104 patches for the virtualization engine KVM, included in Linux since 2.6.20.
One of those patches is specially important as it allows the mapping of physical PCI device to a specific virtual machine through the Intel Virtualization for Directed I/O (VT-d) technology.
Intel introduced VT-d in early Q1 2006 but so far only Novell and Oracle supported it in their Xen implementations (as the virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide highlights).
The PCI direct access grants higher performance but lower flexibility in a virtual infrastructure: for instance a VM can only map as many devices as are physically present in the platform.
Nonetheless it’s a critical step to bring high-performance virtualization on consumer equipment (something often called client hypervisor) like laptops.
Red Hat, which is the main contributor of KVM after the acquisition of Qumranet, has all the interest to achieve the goal as the company executives clarified last month.
Meanwhile KVM continues to get new features: in its last build, KVM-82, the platform allows users to nested virtual machines when running on AMD CPUs.
Labels: KVM, Red Hat
Just like most IT companies, the VMware stock performance is not exactly outstanding.
A little more than one year ago VMW reached $124.83 per share, and now it is near its minimum at $22.32.
But things can go worse.
Before Christmas Techworld reported an interesting note appeared in the last Morgan Stanley research about VMware:
First, Q4 is off to a slow start and we believe VMW may struggle to hit consensus. Second, ELA (VMware's Enterprise Licence Agreement) momentum is slowing, which likely removes a major driver of license growth. Third, headcount will weigh on margins in the first half of 09.
This comment led to a “Sell” recommendation on VMW shares.
Morgan Stanley is not alone: even UBS cut its rating from “Neutral” to “Sell” last month as reported by ServerWatch.
But the fact that UBS is the largest VMware stockholder after EMC raises some additional concerns.
Labels: VMware
One year and a half after its launch, the benchmarking platform that VMware called VMmark got some serious traction among OEMs.
The results page shows more than 30 analysis submitted by the biggest OEMs, including Dell, HP, IBM, Sun and Unysis.
Easily to predict, VMmark got zero acceptance from the other virtualization vendors, making the tool only partially useful.
Despite that, VMware competitors, did nothing to seriously develop a common standard or at least to adopt the only alternative available today: Intel vConsolidate.
Their only action in the last 18 months has been to join the SPEC virtualization benckmarking group. It’s unclear what progress the project made so far.
While waiting for the SPEC, VMware is trying to further involve the industry players by forming a review panel.
In theory the panel should grant a more transparent evaluation of the submitted benchmarks, creating the conditions to widely adopt it.
In practice the panel membership is by invitation only.
The founding members of the new VMmark review panel are AMD, Dell and HP.
Unless VMware chances the admission rules and at least Citrix and Microsoft jump in the effort will not change much.
Labels: Benchmarks, VMware
One of the biggest limitation of Virtual Server 2005 was the impossibility to backup the running virtual machines with NTBackup.
When Microsoft moved to Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V this limitation was finally removed, but the capability is not exactly out of the box.
To achieve the goal customers must manually create some new keys in the Windows Registry so that the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Service (VSS) writer can interact with the new Windows Server Backup (WSB).
The configuration also has some serious limitations:
- WSB only supports volume based backups: if the VM configuration file and the actual virtual hard drive (.VHD) are stored in different volumes, all volumes must be selected.
Conversely, when performing a recovery from backup, the entire volume or volumes must be restored. - Live backup is not supported for those VMs that have dynamic disks. In such case only offline backups can be performed.
- If the VM has more than one snapshot the restore will fail (there’s a workaround for this)
- Live backup is unavailable for those guest OSes that don’t support VSS, like Windows 2000 or XP, as well as those guest OSes that don’t have the Hyper-V Integration Services installed.
In such cases WSB will put the VM in a saved state, backup the snapshot, and finally restore the VM.
Of course Microsoft has all the interest to keep these limitations so that most demanding customers will be forced to look at the new Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1.
Labels: Microsoft, Tech