Year: 2005

Microsoft acknowledges software support on other virtualization platforms

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Until now a big issue VMware customers needed to manage was that Microsoft refused support for any software running on virtualization platforms but Virtual PC and Virtual Server.
This just changed: as stated in this new Knowledge Base article, Microsoft will grant reasonable commercial support for any Premier level support agreement when its products will generate issues on third parties virtualization platforms.

Probably Microsoft management recognized the previous position wasn’t blocking customers from adopting VMware products, and choosed to turn this trend in a valuable money source.
From now a virtualization project including VMware and Microsoft will mean buying a Premium Level support agreement. Which customer will not accept such a requirement?

Microsoft too preparing a consolidation metering tool

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Like just released PlateSpin PowerRecon, Microsoft too is working on its tool for server consolidation projects.
Megan Davis informs that two technology specialists are developing a new report for Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) 2005, monitoring physical servers performances and highlighting candidates for physical to virtual (P2V) migration.

Here you can read the instructions, see some screenshots and grab the report.

Microsoft releases its first eLearning course about virtual products

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When Virtual Server 2005 was released a large amount of customers stared asking for a Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) classroom course about it to be teached on the worldwide CTECs network.
After months from release date Microsoft finally decided to produce a learning material but preferred the eLearning online course format instead of standard classroom MOC.

So here we have the brand new online Course 2288: Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005:


This course prepares students to migrate legacy applications and consolidate server functions by using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.
At the end of the course, students will be able to:

– Install and configure Virtual Server 2005.
– Configure virtual machines on Virtual Server 2005.
– Migrate applications and servers to virtual machines

The product, available for 90 days from buy is priced $99.

PlateSpin launches consolidation needs metering tool

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PlateSpin, famous for the best P2V tool available on the virtualization market, PowerP2V, extends now its products portfolio introducing PowerRecon 1.0.

PowerRecon lets administrators misuring corporate physical servers key resources as CPU, disk, memory and network, calculating utilization and performance trends. This will simplify the task of discovering what servers can be consolidated and will help moving them within the virtual environment, since PowerRecon integrates with PowerP2V.

PowerRecon aims to be a must tool for every virtualization project, even if you choose another P2V solution or you choose to reinstall every physical server in a virtual machine.

The pricing model is subscription based and the starting price is $995 for monitoring 25 servers during 1 month as stated in official press release.

Virtual Server Management Pack for MOM 2005

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Microsoft just released this long awaited management pack:


The Microsof Virtual Server 2005 section of the Virtual Server Management Pack monitors the performance and availability of Virtual Server and virtual machines. By detecting and providing alerts for critical events and performance indicators, this Management Pack helps you correct and prevent possible service outages. As a result, this Management Pack can play an important role in ensuring that Virtual Server and virtual machines are available and working correctly.

By using embedded expertise, this Management Pack provides alerts for performance, health, and availability conditions that indicate problems. In some cases it can even identify issues before they become critical, allowing you to maintain a high level of availability and performance for Virtual Server and your virtual machines. As a result, this Management Pack can reduce the cost of ownership by enabling proactive management and reducing resolution times for identified issues.

Go on and download it here.

Thanks to Megan Davis for this news.

AMD readies Pacifica spec, hires IBM system expert

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Quoting from ITJungle:


Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices held a meeting with developers in Austin, Texas, last week and unveiled some of the key features of the company’s forthcoming “Pacifica” processor virtualization technology. The news came just as AMD announced that it has hired a veteran IBM systems designer who jumped to Opteron-based server maker Newisys when it was founded several years ago.

While AMD told the developers in attendance at its Reviewer’s Day a lot about Pacifica, it has not said much publicly yet. The company is making sure that VMware and Microsoft, which sell the software-based virtualization hypervisors that most companies use today on X86 iron, have been involved in the development of Pacifica; AMD is also collaborating with the upstart, open source XenSource alternatives to VMware’s GSX Server and ESX Server and Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 products.

AMD is being very careful to pitch Pacifica, which is akin to Intel’s “Vanderpool,” now called Virtualization Technology or VT for short, for its Xeon and Itanium processors, as a means of extending the existing software-based hypervisors that VMware and Microsoft currently sell. But the truth of the matter is that abstracting the X86 instruction set and virtualizing it was the real value in the virtualization software that these companies sell, and both VMware and Microsoft, as well as any products that come from the XenSource community, will be relegated–and properly so–to the realm of providing management of virtualization capabilities that are propped up by the chips. This is great news for chip makers like AMD and Intel and for workstation and server customers, but it remains to be seen how virtualization software makers such as VMware, Microsoft, and XenSource will fare. VMware has about 10,000 server customers, and the limiting factors to the adoption of its products have been the relatively high cost of its software and overhead associated with its use; Microsoft has a much smaller installed base, but the same limiting factors. Pacifica and Vanderpool will eliminate much of that overhead, and VMware and Microsoft will eventually have to drop prices on their virtualization products, since they don’t virtualize the hardware to the same extent and since XenSource will be offering similar capabilities across all X86 platforms for what will presumably be a very modest price. The virtualization software business will go to the higher ground of proving who has the best, easiest management tools–and we will all benefit from this substantial change. That is why VMware, Microsoft, and XenSource are getting on board. They still have an excellent chance of making real money, and because Vanderpool will be on the “Montecito” Itanium chips that come out early in 2006, they will be able to support the Itanium platform for the first time. IBM already has similar virtualization hardware and a hypervisor for its Power-based servers, the iSeries and the pSeries, but these are not compatible with VMware, Microsoft, or XenSource products.

Pacifica will be embedded in PC and server chips from AMD that are due in the first half of 2006. It will not be available in the dual-core Opterons that are expected within a matter of months.

In a related announcement, AMD said that it has hired away Rich Oehler, an IBM Fellow who worked on microprocessor and server designs at Big Blue for decades and who was most recently the chipset designer at Newisys, a subsidiary of contract PC and server manufacturer Sanmina-SCI. Oehler, you will remember, is the main designer of the forthcoming “Horus” chipset for Opterons, which Newisys announced last year and is supposed to scale to 32-socket processing in a single system image using a NUMA-like architecture based on four-way cell boards (see Newisys Readies Chipset for Big Opteron Iron for more details on Horus.) Oehler was also the lead designer on IBM’s Power RSIC family of chips and servers, and was one of the key designers of the “Summit” X86 and Itanium chipsets. That AMD has hired him is a big score, but it makes one wonder about the future of the Horus chipset.

Release: VMware Workstation 5.0 released!

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The most long awaited virtualization product is finally available on official VMware site.

As probably everybody knows here the new features:


Multiple Snapshots
VMware Workstation 5 greatly enhances the snapshot functionality available in previous releases of the product by allowing you to take a series of point-in-time, saved-to-disk snapshots of running virtual machines. This makes it easier to capture and switch between multiple configurations and accelerates testing and debugging.
Should a problem arise during testing, you can easily revert back to a prior, stable snapshot. The new snapshot manager displays thumbnails of all your snapshots on a single screen, making it easy for you to track and revert to a previously saved snapshot. Also, when reverting to a previously saved snapshot, Workstation creates a new branch automatically, so other snapshots continue to be available. See Using Snapshots.

Teams
Teams functionality makes it easier to manage connected virtual machines and simulate “real world” multi-tier configurations. A team is your designated group of virtual machines, and the private networks that connect them.
Teams allow you to configure power operations, such as power on/off and suspend/resume, in the exact sequence you desire. You determine network characteristics between the virtual machines in a team, including network bandwidth and packet loss percentages. The console view displays active thumbnails of all the virtual machines in a team, allowing you to easily identify and switch between any of the virtual machines on your team.

Clones
Clones facilitate collaborative testing and debugging, get colleagues up and running quickly with virtual machines, and simplify the process of making a complete copy of a virtual machine. Clones allow you to duplicate virtual machines in two different ways – linked and full.
Linked clones make it easy to set up a library of baseline virtual machines on a shared drive, to be accessed and shared by you and others, without using unnecessary disk space on local machines.
A full clone?a complete copy?is also available when you need an identical virtual machine without the need to locate files within the host file system or to tediously install everything required to duplicate an existing guest configuration.

Improved Multi-Virtual Machine Performance
Workstation 5 includes significant improvements in memory utilization when virtual machines are used concurrently. This allows you to efficiently run multiple virtual machines with much less total memory.

Improved Networking Performance
Workstation 5 offers optional, enhanced networking performance by leveraging VMware’s custom network driver. Once you install the updated VMware Tools, the necessary network drivers integrate seamlessly to offer significantly improved network performance.

Improved Suspend/Resume and Snapshot Operations
Workstation 5 performs significantly faster suspend/resume and snapshot operations, enabling you to spend more time testing and less time waiting for power operations to execute.

New Host Operating System Support
···SUSE Linux Pro 9.2
···SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0
···Mandrake Linux 10
···Windows Server 2003 SP1 beta (experimental support)
···Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 beta (experimental support)

New Guest Operating System Support
···Windows Server 2000 Small Business
···Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 3.0
···SUSE Linux Pro 9.2
···SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0
···Mandrake Linux 10
···Novell NetWare 6.5 SP3
···Novell NetWare 5.1 SP8
···Novell Linux Desktop 9
···Sun’s Java Desktop System
···Windows Server 2003 SP1 beta (experimental support)
···Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 beta (experimental support)
···SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP1 (experimental support)

Other various service pack updates and kernel updates

Improved 64-bit Host Support
···Workstation 5 includes hardware support for AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, and Intel EM64T.
···Software support includes 64-bit host operating systems:
······Windows XP (experimental support)
······Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0
······SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 7, 8, 9
······Windows Server 2003 SP1 (experimental support)
······Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 (experimental support).

Isochronous USB support
Workstation 5 offers support for isochronous USB input devices such as web cameras and microphones, as well as output devices such as speakers. Use your webcam or work with multi-track audio within your guest OS.

Command Line Interface
Workstation 5 offers a new command line interface (CLI), enabling you to create scripts to automate certain manual steps. See Command Line Reference.

Movie Record and Playback
Workstation 5 offers the ability to record your actions within a virtual machine and save the movie in an .AVI format, facilitating team collaboration. Replay the resulting .AVI file on any PC equipped with an .AVI player. A free Windows player is available for download from the VMware web site.
Record steps to reproduce defects in a particular configuration, or record configuration steps prior to running an application. Share the movie with colleagues to enable team collaboration. See Movie Capture.

Improved Linux User Interface
Workstation 5 offers a new GTK-2 based user interface on Linux, which provides an improved look and feel, and enhanced usability.
Easier Upgrades and VMware Tools Installation Improvements
Starting with Workstation 5, on Windows hosts you can automatically install a new release over an existing Workstation release. The installer automatically uninstalls the previous version before installing the new version. Workstation 5 also streamlines VMware Tools installation for Linux virtual machines, by allowing users to install VMware Tools without exiting the X session. See Upgrading VMware Workstation, and Installing VMware Tools.

Support for NX bit
Workstation 5 now supports the no execute instruction bit for guest operating systems that can leverage it. Aimed at thwarting malicious buffer overruns, NX allows properly written applications to designate memory space as executable, so that any code trying to access other memory space is not executed.

VMware Virtual Machine Importer
This standalone utility allows you to convert your Microsoft® virtual machines?from either Virtual PC or Microsoft Virtual Server?into a VMware virtual machine. The VMware virtual machine is compatible with Workstation 4 or 5, completely independent of the previous format, ready to use with all the enhanced VMware Workstation functionality. The original file remains intact. See Converting a VirtualPC Virtual Machine.

Available as usual on VMware download page.