Year: 2004

Hernán Di Pietro usually write interesting articles about desktop virtualization products on his website.
Often you can also find benchmark tests and comparisons like in this case: Hernán reviewed VMware Workstation 4.5 and compared it with older 4.0 product. Then he also compared WS4.5 GuestOS performance when it runs Windows XP and when it runs Windows Server 2003.

Go on and read whole article here!

Toens Bueker pointed my attention to a Cambridge University virtualization project called Xen.

Quoting from project homepage:

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. We have a fully functional port of Linux 2.4 running over Xen, and regularly use it for running demanding applications like MySQL, Apache and PostgreSQL. Any Linux distribution (RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake) should run unmodified over the ported OS, but there is a Debian Xen 1.2 package for easy install. Christian Limpach has contributed a NetBSD port and a Linux 2.6 port, and with assistance from Microsoft Research a port of Windows XP is nearly complete. A FreeBSD port is in progress.

The Windows XP port is nearly finished. It’s running user space applications and is generally in pretty good shape thanks to some hard work by the team over the summer. Of course, there are issues with releasing this code to others. We should be able to release the source and binaries to anyone that has signed the Microsoft academic source license, which these days has very reasonable terms. We are in discussions with Microsoft about the possibility of being able to make binary releases to a larger user community. Obviously, there are issues with product activation in this environment which need to be thought through.

Also notice this project has a lot of roadmapped high-class features like “live migration” (that VMware calls VMotion) and 64bit architecture support.
Wanna try? Go on and download a custom linux (Red Hat 9) live-cd with Xen preinstalled!

Thanks Toens, this was a big one.

It really seems many users are interested in the new single-man-developed operating system called SkyOS. For this reason Kelly Rush, GUI team manager, realized a video about how to install new SkyOS 6 beta on a VMware virtual machine.
But pay attention: SkyOS is in beta and VMware Workstation isn’t developed to catch SkyOS hardware calls, so everything will run 3-5 times slower than on a physical machine.

In some previous posts I reported Microsoft would eventually provide its own Phisical to Virtual (P2V) migration tool, releasing a modified version of Automated Deployment Services (ADS) free tool.

During a TechEd 2004 session, a Microsoft representative revealed this will happen: a new “Virtual Server Migration Toolkit” will be released in beta (as web download) during Q3 2004, and in RTM during Q4 2004. This toolkit is an add-on to actual ADS 1.0 and will eventually work with Virtual Server 2005 only.
The presentation reports that this Migration Toolkit will be made of some scripts and three executables acting on already captured ADS pc image. Anyway will be a command line tool only.

This could really put a stop to P2V market and grant Microsoft a competitive advantage over VMware and third parties P2V tools companies.

Quite a month ago IBM annonced will release its own Virtualization Engine (should be official name), competing against Microsoft and EMC/VMware.
Probably this surprising announce, after years of partnership IBM and VMware (just think about xSeries and ESX Server bundle), unleashed some reactions at VMware headquarter.
But after three weeks of silence VMware announce partnership renew for three years with IBM, extending virtualization product line that Big Blue can sell with xSeries and (new entry) BladeCenter.

Quoting an article from Web Hosting Industry News:

Virtualization software developer VMware (vmware.com) announced this week that it has extended its strategic alliance with IBM (ibm.com) for three years. The alliance was first formed in 2002.

“With the signing of our expanded agreement and the inclusion of VMware in IBM’s Virtualization Engine strategy, our relationship with IBM continues to grow,” says Diane Greene, president of VMware. “Most importantly, our shared customers will benefit from efficient and flexible IT resources and increased hardware utilization on the IBM eServer xSeries and BladeCenter systems.”

This is strange (but not too much). IBM moves against VMware, but VMware opens arms renewing and enlarging partnership. Some could think this was the right moment to focus on partnership with Dell (since Dell always had partnership with EMC Corporation), instead VMware prefers to lay in bed with a past-friend / future-enemy.
Strange even more thinking that IBM and EMC compete on storage market…

Here an interesting Microsoft article to install WinXP Embedded on a VPC.

A VMware newsgroup user just reported that heard new ESX versions are coming:

2.1.1 which is expected for June (should be a bug fix only release)
2.5 and 3.0 with no date expected

So stay tuned for evolutions!

John Sequeira, mantains a virtualization wiki, able to be drilled down and filtered (by subject, host/guest support, etc.).
It contains a huge quantity of material! If you are looking for a source of virtualization informations here you’ll be really satisfied.

Thanks John!

Some weeks ago I noticed here that 2OS2 project was suddenly disappeared from Internet, without any notice.
Now, following a complex link path I discovered 2OS2 isn’t dead, just renamed (or restarted if you prefer): the new project name is Serenity Virtual Station (or SVISTA) and you can find it at the new website here.

Parallels Ltd. still is the development team, but on their site there’s no mention to SVISTA.
At this point we just sit and wait what’s happen to this new virtualization player.

As PlateSpin press released:

PlateSpin Ltd., a leading developer of solutions that bring flexibility and automation to the data center, announced the availability of PlateSpin PowerP2V(TM), the next generation platform for converting servers between physical and virtual machine architectures. The new platform allows data centers to dramatically accelerate their physical to virtual server consolidation programs by eliminating manual tasks, and reducing human error through automation.
PlateSpin PowerP2V brings increased scalability, flexibility, and extensibility to PlateSpin’s virtual automation technologies. It makes conversions between physical servers and VMware(TM) virtual machines quick and easy by offering a completely unattended conversion model that can scale to hundreds or even thousands of servers. The main features of the new PowerP2V platform include:

– Open Application Programming Interface –
PowerP2V offers
a comprehensive application programming interface (API) for customized
integration with third party applications. The API enables third party
applications to monitor and trigger tasks within the PowerP2V engine
and enables OEM providers to integrate PlateSpin’s conversion
technology into their own product offerings.

I really hope to publish a full review of it here soon. Stay tuned!