Intel delivers new era for virtualization

Quoting from the Intel official announcement:

Delivering the industry’s first hardware virtualization support for desktop PCs, Intel Corporation debuted new processors today that offer businesses improved manageability and bolstered security.

Virtualization allows a platform to run multiple operating systems or applications in independent partitions or “containers” that can be tailored for specific needs such as IT management services and protecting networked assets.

Intel Pentium 4 processor-based desktop PCs are being offered by Acer, Founder, Lenovo and TongFang. Lenovo is now offering Intel Virtualization Technology-based pilot systems to select customers, and broad support for desktop PC solutions from several other system manufacturers is expected in the first quarter of 2006. In addition, leading industry virtualization solution providers including VMware, Microsoft and Xen have joined Intel in support of Intel Virtualization Technology on future Intel processor-based PCs and servers.

Further evolving “built-in” world-class IT security and manageability capabilities for businesses, Intel will deliver the second phase of another premier platform innovation – Intel Active Management Technology – together with virtualization support on its dual-core Intel Professional Business Platform, codenamed Averill, later in 2006. Virtualization capabilities will also be extended to notebook PCs, and the company will first support this through Intel Centrino mobile technology-based platforms in 2006.

Businesses are also benefiting from virtualization for their server applications primarily through enhanced functionality and workload support. Intel announced last week that it is shipping Intel Xeon processors MP with hardware-enabled support for Intel Virtualization Technology. The company will begin shipping this same technology on Intel Itanium processor-based platforms in mid-2006.

Desktop PCs based on the Intel Pentium 4 processor 672 and 662 processors with Intel Virtualization Technology are available today on systems being offered by Acer, Founder, Lenovo and TongFang. The Intel Pentium 4 processor 672 and 662 are priced at $605 and $401 respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities.

AMD roadmap for virtualization

AMD detailed its virtualization technology Pacifica integration in upcoming processor generations at Analyst Day 2005.

In 2006 Pacifica will be integrated in Worstation/Desktop CPUs as well as Blade PCs and Thin Clients.
AMD also reports Pacifica 2006 integration in its whole mobile CPUs line (Turion, Athlon and Sempron).

Take a look at roadmap slides here.

Microsoft unsupported products on Virtual Server environments

On April Microsoft published a Support article about products it won’t support on Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition:

  • Microsoft Speech Server
    Speech Server requires telephony hardware not available in a virtualized hardware environment, and thus Speech Server is not supported when run within Virtual Server.
  • Microsoft Certificate Server
    Certificate Server is supported starting with Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition SP1 and Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition SP1 as the host and guest operating systems.
  • Microsoft ISA Server
    ISA Server is currently not supported running within Microsoft Virtual Server. Support for ISA Server within Virtual Server is expected in a future release.
  • Microsoft Exchange Server
    Exchange is currently not supported running within Microsoft Virtual Server. Exchange will be supported within Virtual Server starting with Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 and subsequent releases.
  • Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
    SharePoint Portal Server is currently not supported running within Virtual Server. Support for SharePoint Portal Server within Virtual Server is expected in a future release.

Please notes that these limitations don’t refer to the just released Virtual Server 2005 R2. So I strongly suggest you to monitor this article for updates.

Credits to Mauro Cardarelli. Thanks to John for notifying me.

Release: Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 released!

Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now RTM. The official website is updated and the Evaluation Kit (aka the download) is coming on the download page.

Microsoft also announced at IT Forum 2005:

As part of its broad strategy to help customers realize the benefits of virtualization and progress toward self-managing dynamic systems, Microsoft has released to manufacturing (RTM) Virtual Server 2005 R2, which will be available in volume licensing and retail the first week of December. Virtual Server 2005 R2 delivers improved performance, availability and scalability for server consolidation, legacy application migration, disaster recovery, and software testing and development. Microsoft will be offering Virtual Server R2 Standard Edition for $99 (U.S.) estimated retail price and Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition for $199 (U.S.) estimated retail price. This new pricing represents Microsoft’s commitment to making server virtualization more accessible to customers at the lowest price point.

I’ll update this page as soon as the bits are available. Meanwhile you can read the two whitepapers Microsoft released for this new product:

With this pricing Microsoft could seriously impact on VMware GSX Server sells, which is not updated since a while.

VMware offers the Virtual Infrastructure Starter Kit

From today VMware started offering a new products bundle called Virtual Infrastructure Starter Kit.

It’s available in two versions (2 or 4 CPUs) and includes:

  • 4 x Virtual Infrastructure Node aka VIN (ESX Server + VirtualCenter Agent + Virtual SMP + VMotion) for 2-4 CPUs (depending on your choice)
  • 1 x Virtual Center Management Server
  • 1 x P2V Assistant Starter Edition (25 migrations)
  • 1 year Gold Support

The price of the Virtual Infrastructure Starter Kit will provide a large discount from the a la carte prices of its components: the 4 CPUs bundle priced around 44.000 Euros will provide a 17% discount, while the 2 CPUs bundle, priced around 22.000 Euros, will provide a 27% discount for Europe customers.

You have to call a VMware Partner for more details.

Whitepaper: Automating Xen Virtual Machine Deployment

Kris Buytaert, CTO of X-Tend, the leading Linux and Open Source integrator in Belgium, published a whitepaper about Xen integration with SystemImager, the popular Linux project for automated installation and software distribution:

While consolidating physical to virtual machines using Xen,we want to be able to deploy and manage virtual machines in the same way we manage and deploy physical machines. For operators and support people there should be no difference between virtual and physical installations.

Integrating Virtual Machines with the rest of the infrastructure, should have a low impact on the existing infrastructure. Typically, Virtual machine vendors have their own tools to deploy and manage virtual machines. Apart from the vendor lock-in to that specific virtual machine platform , it requires the administrators to learn yet another platform that they need to understand and manage, something we want to prevent.

This paper discusses how we integrated SystemImager with Xen, hence creating a totally open source deployment framework for the popular open source Virtual Machine monitor. We will document both development of our tools and go more in depth on other infrastructure related issues when using Xen

System Imaging environments in combination with Virtual machines can also be used to ensure safe production deployments. By saving your current production image before updating to your new production image, you have a highly reliable contingency mechanism. If the new production environment is found to be flawed, simply roll-back to the last production image on the virtual machines with a simple update command!

Read the whole paper at source.

Virtualization moves beyond proof of concept in the volume server market

Quoting from the IDC official announcement:

Virtual servers translate to real dollars as spending around virtualization activities will balloon to nearly $15 billion worldwide by 2009. According to new research from IDC, a disruptive change is at hand as customers rapidly adopt virtualized servers – partitioning of smaller 2-4 way x86 systems using software developed specifically for the volume server space – in an attempt to contain costs, leverage existing IT resources, and seamlessly handle growing workloads.

“IT professionals are embracing virtualization across all segments of the server market, but growth is particularly strong in the volume server space,” said Matt Eastwood, vice president of IDC’s Worldwide Server research. “The risky, higher value IT projects, once reserved for more scalable servers, are now being addressed by lower-cost alternatives.”

IDC’s multiclient study, Server Virtualization 2005: Understanding the Adoption of Virtualized Server Resources, identifies the partitioning opportunity for enterprise system vendors and assists them in aligning their business models with customer requirements. This study also identifies the impact of network and software vendors’ willingness to partner with systems vendors in order to achieve a common goal of support scale-out and scale-up server partitioning strategies in increasingly heterogeneous environments.

To purchase this multiclient study, please contact IDC Sales at 508-988-7988 or [email protected].

Read more at source.

Intel launches Pentium with Virtualization Technology

Quoting from CNET News:

Intel is expected to launch new processors on Monday starting with its Pentium line that have the ability to subdivide tasks in a hardware feature called Virtualization Technology–or VT.

While VT is currently found in some of Intel’s Xeon processors, this is the first time that the chipmaking giant has extended the technology to the desktop.

Intel is currently offering two chips with VT enabled. The 672 and 662 are currently shipping in desktops being offered by Asian PC makers Acer, Founder, Lenovo and TongFang. The Intel processors are priced at $605 and $401 respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities.

Beyond the single-core Pentium 4, Intel is expected to enable its dual-core Pentium D to run VT in the first quarter of 2006. By the first half of next year, Intel expects to fill out the rest of its product line including its next-generation Xeon and Itanium server processors as well as its Pentium M for laptops, Taggard said.

Read more at source.

Installing Oracle Real Application Clusters on VMware

Tarry Singh published for Database Journal two step-by-step articles on how to configure a VMware Workstation (and GSX Server) environment to install and configure Oracle 10g Release 2 Real Application Clusters (RAC):

I will be starting a little Oracle RAC series with VMware and will be fondly calling it “RACing ahead with Oracle on VMware.” This first part is intended to give you a brief introduction to setting up VMware and the importance of other tools such as VNC, freeNX or NoMachine, PuTTY, etc. I hope that you will enjoy reading these articles (and hopefully start playing with it) as much as I will enjoy writing them (while playing with them).

You want to run Oracle on multiple platforms? You want to be able to install once and then go ahead and play with the database after having set it up once and not need to reinstall the software (especially on various distro’s of Linux where OS installations could take a toll on your motivation?) With the introduction of OPS and from Oracle 9i onwards RAC (Real Application Clusters), you are very curious to learn these newer technologies, you want to watch and learn how RAC works but unfortunately you just have one computer at home. Even at work it’s not just that easy to get a couple of machines , if not servers, to hook them up, build clusters and have them all shared Cooked or RAW via a SCSI let alone JBOD, SAN or NAS.

Fortunately there is an answer to your (our) prayers. Thanks to VMware, you have a technology that offers virtualization. I began using VMware a couple of years back. It started with a mere curiosity to experiment on other Operating Systems and soon enough I had Oracle 8.1.7 installed on Redhat 8.0. It was fun to see Oracle run and behave differently on a totally different OS and without damaging my current Windows installation. I also tried my hand a dual boot (using PartitionMagic 8.0) but it was way too complicated. There are however other products like Microsoft Virtual Server but we will stick to VMware as it supports various OS’s such as Fedora, RHEL, SuSe, Solaris (still experimental though), Windows. Check out this comparison of several Virtual machines if you are further interested.

Go on with part 1 and part 2.