Year: 2005

Virtual Strategy Magazine produced an interview about Parallels Workstation present and future updates, thanks to Ben Rudolph, Marketing Manager, Parallels.

Read it here.

Virtual Strategy Magazine produced an interesting interview about Slingshot present and future updates, thanks to James Phillips, CEO, Akimbi Systems.

Read it here.

Sun published a new blueprint about virtualization tecnologies and its Solaris 10 Containers partitioning solution:

Part of an emerging family of containment technologies, server virtualization is designed to help reduce server sprawl — the proliferation of individual hardware servers and accompanying management and resource allocation problems.

Today, IT managers and executives are starting to consider a variety of virtualization and containment technologies available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) and other environments. There is also renewed interest among industry and academic researchers in this area, as virtualization is a key technology in the deployment of both computational and business service grid architectures. However, significant confusion remains regarding the terminology and techniques involved, as well as the trade-offs among the range of current solutions.

This Sun BluePrints article focuses on the motivation behind server-oriented containment and virtualization — secure, efficient, and cost-effective workload management — and discusses the concepts, vocabulary, and techniques currently available to help achieve it.

Other forms of virtualization, such as those used for storage and networks, are not discussed. Directed at IT managers, CIOs, and CTOs responsible for computer resource allocation decisions, this article assumes general familiarity with IT infrastructure and management issues, and provides an overview of various solutions. Detailed technical knowledge of the techniques presented is not required.

The first section reviews the requirements and challenges of workload management. Subsequent sections discuss the origins of virtualization and containment, currently available solutions and trade-offs, and a brief discussion of future technologies.

You can download it here:
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/1005/819-3734.html

Before the great webcast about virtualization roadmap, in which the term Windows Hypervisor appeared for the first time in public, Microsoft disclosed more details about its upcomingy tecnology at WinHEC 2005 conference, in April.

The conference material is now available and you can grab the following three presentation slides:

• Windows Virtualization Architecture
• Virtualization Technology for AMD Architecture
• Virtualization Technology for Intel Architecture

The first presentation covers with greater detail what appeared on the public virtualization roadmap webcast, while the remaining two disclose information never appeared till now. So it really worth the read.

Thanks to Ben Armstrong for posting this great information on his blog.

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of data center virtualization and management software solutions, today announced general availability of Version 2.0 of its software platform. The new release responds to growing market demand for Virtual Iron’s software by adding support for the AMD Opteron™ processor and IBM BladeCenter servers. It also expands Virtual Iron’s policy-based resource and workload management capabilities to further streamline data center operations.

Virtual Iron offers enterprise-class virtualization and management at the data center level. While first generation technologies are limited to working on single-machines, or with small clusters of machines, Virtual Iron manages the aggregation and sharing of a large number of server, storage and network elements. This automates many time-intensive manual tasks such as provisioning new servers, moving capacity to handle dynamic workloads, and responding to ongoing availability issues. The resulting benefits include reduced data center complexity, increased agility and resource utilization, and dramatically reduced capital and operating expenses.

Version 2.0 responds to increasing market demand for the Virtual Iron solution running on the AMD Opteron, the world’s first x86 processor for both 32-bit and 64-bit computing. Enterprises can now use Virtual Iron with both single and Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors, giving customers a choice of industry-standard processors to help drive price performance and improve data center manageability.

“We see a number of enterprises looking to leverage Virtual Iron on the AMD Opteron processor in their data centers,” said Joe Menard, corporate vice president, Software Strategy for AMD. “Virtual Iron’s support for the AMD Opteron processor, combined with the throughput and performance advantages of AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture technology, help provide customers the flexibility and efficiency of a virtualized environment, and at the same time reduce total cost of ownership.”

Version 2.0 also extends Virtual Iron’s support for IBM servers to include BladeCenter. With integrated I/O interconnects, networking and built-in redundancy, IBM BladeCenter provides a flexible, high performance foundation for utility computing initiatives. Virtual Iron’s latest release virtualizes all BladeCenter components, including processors, memory, storage and networking, to speed deployments and migrations, while also providing outstanding scalability. Virtual Iron’s policy-based management also makes use of health status information from BladeCenter components to allow automated actions in the event of failures.

Virtual Iron is also delivering new levels of flexibility and operational efficiency for managing complex, enterprise-level workloads such as J2EE application servers with Version 2.0. The software demonstrated excellent performance in a recent benchmark test, SPECjAppServer2004®, which measures commercial J2EE application servers. The benchmark was created by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC).

“The enhancements we’ve delivered in Version 2.0 are a natural extension of our core capabilities and a direct response to customer demand,” said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron. “These enterprises are moving beyond single-server partitioning and leveraging the full power of data center virtualization and the dramatic gains it offers in agility, performance and operating cost.“

At the same time Virtual Iron announces sales expansion:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of data center virtualization and management solutions, today announced several key milestones as part of a company-wide expansion. The moves include the appointment of former VMware Sales Executive, Evan Eckstein, as Vice President of Sales, the opening of three new sales offices in New York, Atlanta and Silicon Valley, and the company’s move to new headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts. With the expansion, Virtual Iron continues to establish itself as one of the emerging leaders in the data center virtualization and management market.

At Virtual Iron, Eckstein will be responsible for growing the company’s customer base and furthering relationships with its technology and re-seller partners. He brings more than 18 years of high technology industry sales experience and a strong track record of success in enterprise software and services. During his tenure at VMware, Eckstein led a team that grew revenue 25% quarter over quarter while managing a hybrid distribution channel of direct and inside sales reps, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) sales partners and value-added resellers (VARs). Previously, he held sales and sales management roles with Verisign/Guardent, Route Science, International Network Services and NCR.

In addition to Eckstein’s appointment, Virtual Iron has expanded its direct sales presence in North America with new sales offices in New York, Atlanta and Silicon Valley. The company has also relocated its corporate headquarters from Acton to Lowell, Massachusetts. The new location boasts 28,000 square feet of state-of-the-art space at the Cross Point Towers. With these moves, Virtual Iron is positioning itself to meet the increasing demand for its data center virtualization and management solutions and support its growing list of customers, partners and re-sellers in North America.

“Our recent success is driving expansion across all aspects of the company,” said John C. Thibault, President and CEO of Virtual Iron. “Evan Eckstein brings deep knowledge of our target markets and a great track record in building customer and partner relationships. In combination with our new sales team, we are well positioned to penetrate new markets and continue to hire the best talent in areas such as engineering, marketing, sales and administration.”

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that the VMware Technology Network (VMTN) received the Software Development Magazine Readers’ Choice award in the Most Innovative Tool category. VMTN is an online virtual infrastructure resource center at www.vmtn.net with broad technical and product resources designed to transform how software is developed, distributed and deployed.

“This award is a great endorsement of VMTN and we’re honored to continue to be recognized by the development community for our nonstop innovation,” said Karthik Rau, senior director of product management at VMware. “Since we launched VMTN in June of this year, it has become the leading resource for developers to understand new advances in virtualization technologies and to learn how to successfully develop and deploy applications in virtual environments.”

Software Development Magazine launched the Readers’ Choice awards in 2003 to discover which tools its readers find most valuable in the trenches, and the awards program continues to evolve, highlighting different aspects of the development process and the industry.

“Popularity contests are tricky to manage, but we think that in our third year of the Software Development Readers’ Choice awards, we’ve achieved a balance,” said Alexandra Weber Morales, editor-in-chief of Software Development Magazine. “The trick is to recognize not only ubiquity, but quality and customer loyalty.”

VMTN includes:

• Pre-built application environments in VMware virtual machines. With VMTN, VMware is leading an initiative to create the industry’s most comprehensive collection of pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software applications, all packaged within virtual machines and available for download to any software developer. Industry-leading software vendors BEA Systems, MySQL AB, Novell, Oracle and Red Hat are among the first to distribute their software in virtual machines.
• Entire application environments can be pre-installed, pre-configured and “saved” within a best-practice virtual machine. Developers can eliminate many of the traditional stumbling blocks associated with testing, evaluating and deploying new software by using these pre-built applications within virtual machines. Recipients of these virtual machines can quickly and easily run them on VMware Player, which is available as a free download at www.vmware.com/download/player
• VMTN Subscription, which provides a powerful suite of VMware products, support and upgrades in a convenient, low-cost annual subscription of $299 per user. VMTN Subscription provides a consistent virtualization platform for development and test that is designed to increase the productivity and efficiency across the software development lifecycle, reduce cost and complexity and improve software quality.
• VMware products, validated by millions of users, are available in a suite designed and priced specifically for developers. VMTN Subscription includes VMware Workstation for individual developer productivity, VMware GSX Server and a developer version of VMware ESX Server with Virtual SMP for team collaboration and VMware P2V Assistant for migrating physical systems to virtual machines.
• In-depth technical resources, peer-to-peer discussion forums and insights from virtualization experts. VMTN is a virtual infrastructure destination designed to help developers and IT professionals share knowledge and best practices and develop, test and deploy applications in virtual environments

. “VMTN Subscriptions provide our engineers with a cost effective way for developing and testing within virtual development environments,” said Dave Wilkes, vice president of engineering at Novell. “Both product development and corporate development environments are dynamic, requiring flexibility to achieve a more productive development environment. We gain the productivity we need both as a solutions partner and corporate customer of VMware.”

More information on Software Development Magazine and the Readers’ Choice awards is available at www.sdmagazine.com.

Quoting from eWeek:

Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. is aggressively pushing to get Xen virtualization technology included in the Linux kernel as quickly as possible.

Brian Stevens, the newly appointed chief technology officer of the Raleigh, N.C., company, said that previous efforts to merge Xen into the kernel ran out of steam when nobody stepped forward to drive them. Red Hat is now stepping forward, Stevens said.

This move comes as Microsoft Corp. is pushing its own virtualization products and recently relaxed some of its licensing requirements around Windows Server 2003 to facilitate more pervasive adoption and use of those technologies.

Part of the Red Hat emerging technology team’s efforts will be to drive the Xen virtualization technologies as part of the Linux kernel rather than as part of a sidebar project, as is currently the case, Stevens said.

“My goal is to get this done in the most collaborative way possible with anyone in the community who wants to participate,” Stevens said, adding that Red Hat is committed to putting on this project enough of its staff who have the technical knowledge necessary to get the work done.

In addition, it recently hired an additional six staff members in the virtualization area alone. “We haven’t been able to focus enough on this until now to help get it done. So we’ve stepped up to work on this and help get it done. We’d like to have this done in the next two months. I don’t think it’s a long-term project at all,” he said.

A big part of the strategy is making virtualization and its management a part of a Linux system, “so this is not just maturing the technology but having the operating system itself, the kernel itself, be intimately aware that it is being virtualized so that it participates,” Stevens said.

Andrew Morton, the current maintainer of the Linux 2.6 kernel, who works for the Open Source Development Labs, in Beaverton, Ore., told eWEEK that he had expected a submission of Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratories’ Xen virtualization technology for merging into the Linux kernel quite some time ago.

“But Red Hat is a strong engineering company, and I trust them to produce a good contribution and to support it,” he said.

Once a contribution emerges from a development team, Morton said he will actively identify other stakeholders and solicit their feedback. “There are quite a few stakeholders here, including XenSource, Red Hat, IBM and Intel,” he said. “VMware is also working on virtualization in general, and they will provide feedback on the proposed design.

“I’ll then make decisions based upon that. As we haven’t recently gone through that process on Xen, I am not able to predict who will react, and how. So, the bottom line is that it is too early for me to say how it will turn out,” Morton said.

Ian Pratt, of the University of Cambridge in England and the leader of the Xen project, said there were a number of reasons for the delay in including Xen in the kernel. Primarily, Xen 3.0 had suffered from a bit of feature creep. Physical Address Extension (PAE) 32b support and Virtualization Technology, for example, were added very late in the cycle. “We were aiming for an end-of-summer release, but this now looks on target for December,” Pratt said.

It didn’t make much sense to start preparing patches for sending upstream until the Xen 3 guest API was close to being frozen, because there is a significant resource cost in maintaining multiple trees, he said.

“We hit this point a month or so back, and there’s actually been a lot of activity since then,” Pratt said. “We’ve done a first cut reorganization of our patch into the form that was agreed on at the last Xen summit, forward ported it to the head of Linus [Torvalds’] tree, and put out a call for help to Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and all the other stakeholders to help us beat it into shape. It’s great to see them stepping up and promising to commit some of their best guys to help.”

The technology is certainly ready for inclusion in the kernel, he said. Rearranging the patch into a form that fits in better with the existing code base needs to happen first, but this is fairly mechanical.

“We maintained our patch in a form that made our life easier, and helped us track stable Linux versions while getting the stability of our own software right. It’s now time to make the change,” Pratt said.

Pratt’s confident that a patch will be ready to be submitted for inclusion in the kernel within two months, as none of the reorganization and cleanup work that needs to happen is very hard, “but it is essential we get the aesthetics right. But whether Andrew/Linus accept it is a different matter,” Pratt said.

He welcomes Red Hat’s support, saying they have good engineers that are well-known and respected in the Linux community, which is bound to make the process run smoother. “SuSE, IBM, HP are all helping the XenSource team too, just maybe not so publicly,” he said.

Asked what recent contributions the vendors have made to the technology, Pratt said that IBM’s MAC stuff is in, as is support for Intel VT-x. Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Pacifica support is working well too, but will not make Xen Version 3.0.0.

“Further down the line we’re doing some cool stuff with I/O vendors that will result in zero cost I/O virtualization. HP had contributed some useful tools for performance profiling and instrumentation, while SuSE had had helped with PAE support and Intel with x86_64,” he said.

A lot of companies, most notably IBM, are also helping with testing. “We’ve had a lot of support from individuals in the Xen community too,” Pratt said. “Xen 3.0 is a big team effort. It is just taking a little longer than we’d hoped.”

John Loiacono, executive vice president for software at Sun Microsystems Inc., welcomed the move to drive the virtualization technology around Linux forward.

Any aggressive move by Red Hat to get the technology into the Linux kernel will be fully supported by Sun, which is embracing the Xen virtualization technology across its products and plat-forms. It has some of its brightest engineers working on this and is collaborating with others in the open-source community, Loiacono said.

Even Sam Greenblatt, a senior vice president at Computer Associates International Inc., told eWEEK that he is pleased with the progress made with Xen. CA will support anything going into the kernel that supports virtualization. “It’s come a long way. We just want to be careful to make sure it goes in the right way,” he said.

That marks a significant turnaround from earlier this year, when Greenblatt told eWEEK, “We think [Xen] is great innovation, but its concept of virtualization is still not to the point that we want to see in there [the kernel].”

Red Hat’s Stevens said his goal is to make virtualization as ubiquitous as possible, thereby allowing customers to decide whether they need it or not. “Our strategy is around how to make it ubiquitous, what are all the issues that make it ubiquitous and part of the platform,” he said.

“But when you get there, a range of great benefits comes with it, like the agility of being able to migrate workloads, suspend workloads, drive up utilization on a system because now you can isolate workloads from each other whereas before an entire box had to be dedicated to a specific application,” he said.

But this will require an entirely new management infrastructure around it as those that exist today revolve around managing physical boxes. “While people are extending the existing management platforms to virtual boxes, what they are not doing is changing the management paradigm, and that needs to change to one where applications, systems and resources are just meeting for a point in time. This needs to be more of a brokering system than the management of physical systems,” Stevens said.

While XenSource founder Pratt said an “entirely new management paradigm and infrastructure” is not needed to make good use of virtualization, it would enable this and could “save the big shops a ton of money by doing so.”

“XenSource will be one of the companies offering management solutions around Xen, along with a bunch of others. Hopefully XenSource’s will be best as we’ve been working on this topic in the university for a long time, so we have some deep control and automation facilities rather than just a flashy GUI,” he said.

Ulli Hankeln, mantaining his Sanbarrow.com dedicated to VMware hacking, created another great utility: the VMX-builder.

VMX-builder is a simple Windows batch script able to create a VMware virtual machine configuration file (.vmx) from scratch.

I previously posted a method to manually map ISOs to empty virtual machines and run them inside the new VMware Player. With VMX-builder you can speed up the process and create much more complex configuration files.

The utility doesn’t produce virtual disks (.vmdk) from scratch so if you want one inside your virtual machine you still need to follow my manual method.

Update: Someone produced even a super-complete .vmx web builder:
http://www.consolevision.com/members/dcgrendel/vmxform.html

Thanks to Rob for the advice.

SDA Asia published a great article on the subject written by Mike Clayville, Vice-President and General Manager of VMware, Asia Pacific.

It really worth the read.

Virtual Strategy Magazine produced an interesting interview about Virtual Iron present features, thanks to Mike Grandinetti, Chief Marketing Officer, and Alex Vasilevsky, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, Virtual Iron.

Read it here.