Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
VMware ACE is an interesting product applying virtualization for security tasks. I personally found it usable in many enterprise environments where other solutions would cost too much or wouldn’t provide the features I was in need to stay secure and flexible.
I consider ACE one of the most undestimated security product available on market.
VMware just released a new paper on how to deploy ACE in the correct way to limit users ability to damage underlying operating system.
Quoting from the Akimbi official announcement:
Akimbi Systems and PlateSpin today announced an agreement in which Akimbi Systems will integrate PlateSpin’s OS Portability technology into Akimbi’s complex configuration capture-and-restore (C3R) system, Akimbi Slingshot. This partnership will enable customers to more quickly integrate a C3R solution into their software development and test processes and infrastructure, resulting in higher-quality software systems, built more rapidly and at a
lower total cost.PlateSpin’s OS Portability technology enables the complete interchange of data, applications and operating systems across the data center. Integrating PlateSpin’s OS Portability technology with Akimbi Slingshot will allow customers to automate the movement of complex, multi-machine configurations between physical and virtual servers, making it quick and easy to capture “live” interdependent software systems and store, move and restore them across the organization.
“With embedded PlateSpin OS Portability technology, Akimbi Slingshot allows customers to effortlessly import pre-existing test and development systems into an Akimbi Slingshot library, in stark contrast to the painstaking, manual creation of templates and configurations imposed by other solutions,” said James Phillips, CEO of Akimbi Systems. “This capability also lays a foundation for seamless migration of configurations across development, test, staging and production environments.
Akimbi Slingshot is now the only commercial C3R system capable of the automated movement of complex, multi-machine software configurations across the physical-virtual infrastructure boundary.”Announced in September, Akimbi Slingshot is purpose built for use by software development and test teams, and automates the creation, capture, storage, sharing and restoration of even the most complex multi-machine software configurations to a pool of shared servers. Akimbi Slingshot is employed by many of the worlds most effective software development organizations, enabling them to shave months off software development projects, reduce development and test equipment costs and dramatically increase the quality of delivered software systems.
Akimbi’s OEM licensing agreement with PlateSpin provides Akimbi Slingshot with automated physical-to-virtual (P2V), virtual-to-virtual (V2V) and virtual-to-physical (V2P) migration capabilities.
“This is an exciting time for both PlateSpin and Akimbi,” said Stephen Pollack, PlateSpin CEO. “The integration of PlateSpin’s OS Portability technology with Akimbi Slingshot results in a best-of-breed turnkey solution that addresses key pain points faced by software development and test organizations in the Global 2000. The ability of PlateSpin’s OS Portability technology to automate the migrations of data, applications, and operating systems between physical servers and virtual machines is a perfect match with Akimbi Slingshot’s capture and restore capabilities. The result is a winning solution for the expanding virtualization market and for both Akimbi and PlateSpin customers alike.”
Quoting from the PolyServe official announcement:
PolyServe, Inc. today announced the company’s support of Microsoft’s virtualization strategy, technologies and licensing. Additionally, PolyServe reasserted the company’s commitment to the ongoing development of industry-leading server consolidation solutions based on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2.
PolyServe is in lock-step with Microsoft’s virtualization roadmap by providing server and storage virtualization and flexible resource utilization on industry-standard servers and storage. PolyServe Matrix Server™ shared data clustering software consolidates servers and storage into a pool of resources for a true mission-critical, utility computing infrastructure for Windows data centers.
“We share Microsoft’s vision for leveraging virtualization technology to create a more agile, dynamic infrastructure,” said Mike Stankey, president and CEO of PolyServe. “Combining our shared data clustering software with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, we’re able to run multiple applications across a highly available and easily managed cluster of physical servers and storage. The result is an ideal solution for large enterprises that aim to consolidate applications in an on-demand utility for a significant savings in management costs.”
“Microsoft is pleased to work with PolyServe to deliver data center virtualization solutions to our joint customers,” said Zane Adam, director of marketing, Windows Server Division, Microsoft Corp. “The combination of PolyServe Matrix Server and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 delivers immediate benefits for server consolidation, application re-hosting and disaster tolerance for large-scale, mission-critical deployments.”
PolyServe has openly embraced the open, standards-based Windows Server System, and supports Microsoft’s investments in virtualization and virtualization management technologies. Virtual Server 2005 runs seamlessly on PolyServe Matrix Server for a comprehensive consolidation solution for enterprises customers. With Matrix Server software and Virtual Server 2005, it is possible to consolidate applications formerly running on many physical machines onto virtual machines running on fewer physical host servers.
Virtual Server 2005 R2 is a logical addition to the PolyServe family of solutions that support Microsoft customers. The strong PolyServe customer base for SQL Server and Windows file serving applications will benefit by being able to further consolidate multiple physical servers into a shared data cluster with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. PolyServe enhances the Microsoft Virtual Server solution by providing high availability services for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 itself, shared data clustering for benefits in data consolidation and management and PolyServe Matrix Manager, a centralized cluster management console.
Quoting from Bink.nu:
Today Microsoft changed its support towards Microsoft software running on VMware serveres (and virtual software in general).
Untill yesterday if you had a Microsoft Premier Support contract and you had a problem with a Windows server running in a virtual machine running on VMware GSX or ESX server, the support engineer would not help you. In those cases you had to re produce the problem on physical hardware, even with Premier Support contract.
Today that has changed, a bit, read carefully:
For Microsoft customers who have a Premier-level support agreement, Microsoft will use commercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential issues with Microsoft software running in conjunction with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. As part of that investigation, Microsoft may require the issue to be reproduced independently from the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. Where issues are confirmed to be unrelated to the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software, Microsoft will support its software in a manner that is consistent with support provided when that software is not running in conjunction with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software.
Well it’s better then before,
Non-premier customers don’t get this support:
Microsoft does not test or support Microsoft software running in conjunction with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. For Microsoft customers who do not have a Premier-level support agreement, Microsoft will require the issue to be reproduced independently from the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. Where the issue is confirmed to be unrelated to the non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software, Microsoft will support its software in a manner that is consistent with support provided when that software is not running in conjunction with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software.
Complete KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615
Quoting Jeff Alexander blog, via Bink.nu:
One of the most requested applications customers want to see supported on Virtual Server is Exchange. Well today is a good day because we have just announced support for Exchange runnining on Virtual Server. With the release of Exchange Server 2003 SP2 we now support Exchange running on Virtual Server 2005 R2 release. This means you will have to be using Virtual Server 2005 R2 to get this support.
The last I heard is we are 3 weeks away from shipping the R2 version of Virtual Server so this combination of products will be realised very soon.
Check out the web link for more support information:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=320220
VMware released this great paper about deploying one of the most troublesome and critical Microsoft back-end server, Exchange Server 2003:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/exchange_wp_eng.pdf
Here the table of contents:
VMware finally published VMworld 2005 sessions audio recording (mp3) and slides (pdf):
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vmworld
I previously reported some really interesting advanced sessions to see.
Here they are with material links:
On the wikipedia entry dedicated to virtualization a new product reference appeared: TRANGO.
Never heard about it and without any further details I googled around and arrived on the TRANGO Systems company website. Here I found description of a new real-time embedded hypervisor:
TRANGO technology enables processor secured virtualization for major 32/64 bit RISC architectures : ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SH, configurable cores and FPGA soft-cores. It is based on a para-virtualization approach (no instruction emulation): it ensures full predictability and close-to-native performance.
TRANGO hypervisors are based on TRANGO technology and specialized for each CPU architecture.
A TRANGO hypervisor is a very compact micro-kernel dividing CPU resources and address space into virtual MMU-enabled processors. Guest Operating Systems run in CPU user-mode and use one or multiple virtual processors (for Symmetric Multi-Processing OSs).
TRANGO also acts as a very efficient portability layer for guest OSs and RTOSs, providing support for a wide range of processors without any change to the OS’s source code.
TRANGO hypervisor features are:
- Full predictability and close-to-native performance
- Highly optimized and compact code (<20 kilo-bytes, ROM-able, secured boot)
- Support of multi-core and multi-thread CPU architectures, and variably-sized memory pages
- High-performance messaging between virtual processors (guest OS)
- Linux 2.6 and eCos 2.0 ports with developer community
- Support of most guest OS native drivers without porting efforts
- Fully compatible with guest OS native tools, and simultaneous support of TRANGO development, monitoring and debugging tools
- Eclipse Integrated Development Environment plug-ins for TRANGO tools
Note that I never heard of this technology before and never tried it. So I cannot grant these informations are valuable.
But it worth a visit at least to see applications this company suggests for hypervisor technology:
http://www.trango-systems.com/english/applications.html
The famous Tom’s Hardware portal published a summary article on what happened on just finished VMworld 2005, the VMware annual conference.
Here what you can find on it:
You can read everything here.
Robert Petruska produced a wonderful bunch of Windows GUIs for simplifying some VMware command line tasks:
You can download every GUI here:
http://petruska.stardock.net/software/VMware
Update: for Kato’s VDK another GUI is available: Jacopo Lazzari’s Virtual Drive Manager