VMware releases a tool for ESX virtual machines hot backup

VMware released a two side script (VMsnap.pl and VMres.pl) for virtual machines hot backup on ESX Server 2.5.0:


vmsnap.pl :
This program will perform a virtual snapshot of VMs on an ESX Server.
These virtual snapshots include the virtual disks, configuration file,
nvram file and log files related to the VM. This script will operate on
running VMs only. The backups are stored in vmdk format and are transferred
to an Archive Server or Hot Standby Server.

Limitations :
1. This script can take backup of VM powered on only.
2. The Non-RDM persistent disks are only backed.

Refer to manpage for more details.

vmres.pl :
This program will perform a restore of a VM, backed up with the vmsnap
script, on an ESX Server. The backups are restored from vmdk form to
dsk format after transfer from the Archive Server or Hot Standby
Server.

Limitations :
Only Disks backed up by vmsnap are restored by this script.

Intel accelerates virtual-desktop plans

Quoting from TechRepublic:


Intel will begin to implement technology that will let a user run two operating systems on the same PC this year, an acceleration of the timetable that better matches its chip plans.

Vanderpool essentially divides the resources inside a single PC or server so that it can function like two or more independent machines. Virtualization technology like this is already common in the server market, and Intel had plans to bring it to its Itanium chip this year.

Initially, Vanderpool wasn’t slated to come to desktops until 2006. Now, it will come out in desktop chipsets and processors in 2005. The company also released a preliminary specification on Thursday.

Intel will also release dual-core processors later this year. Vanderpool dovetails with these types of chips. Dual-core processors are made to perform two separate functions at once: Virtualization software can help balance the computing needs of each processing core with the software and other hardware inside the box.

Vanderpool is part of a family of enhancements Intel has been adding to its chips to improve overall computing performance or versatility without necessarily increasing power consumption.

Hyperthreading, the first in the series of improvements, allows a chip to handle multiple functions at once. Another coming in the near future, called Active Management Technology, or AMT, will enable an administrator to shut down a PC remotely if it is spitting out viruses.

Katana Technology changes name and CEO

Quoting form TechRepublic:


Katana Technology, a start-up that aims to link low-end computers into single, more powerful machines, has chosen a new chief executive and has changed its name for the second time in two months, CNET News.com has learned.

John Thibault, a longtime telecommunications technology executive who unsuccessfully ran for the Massachusetts Senate, took over as CEO on Jan. 17. Co-founder and former CEO Scott Davis now is chief technology officer, Thibault said.

The Acton, Mass., company had planned to rename itself VirtuOS Computing, but instead has chosen Virtual Iron, Thibault confirmed in an interview. “VirtuOS is a name no one relates to,” he said.

The name Virtual Iron refers to the approach the company uses to make powerful “big iron” servers out of inexpensive lower-end servers linked with the InfiniBand high-speed networking technology. With Virtual Iron’s software, a single copy of the Linux operating system can span several machines, the company says.

Key to the approach is the idea of virtualization, which breaks the tight link between software and the physical hardware it runs. By making software run on an abstracted, virtual version of the hardware, changes to the real hardware can be made without ruffling the software’s feathers.

Virtual Iron believes the approach will let companies run a host of software tasks on a large group of servers, with different tasks expanding or shrinking as computing demands change–letting hardware be used more efficiently. However, Virtual Iron’s approach is one that established server companies such as Dell have explored but so far not offered.

Thibault’s priorities will be to get the company’s products into the marketplace, secure customer references and round out management, he said.

The new name and CEO aren’t the only changes at the company. Virtual Iron also replaced its vice president of marketing and business development, William Ledingham, with Bob Guilbert. Guilbert previously held the same post at storage specialist NSI Software.

Thibault has led several telecommunications technology groups at Wang and Cisco Systems. He also ran start-ups Coral Networks, GeoTel and, most recently, Convergent Networks. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, he left Convergent and took time out to run for office.

In his short-lived political career, he finds a silver lining. “It was a very humbling experience. I came out a better person,” he said. And his personality wasn’t cut out for a career in politics anyway, he added.

Running start-ups today is different. Not surprisingly, new ventures today must be much more conservative with cash compared with start-ups of the 1990s. “There is much more work being done today with less money to go around,” he said.

But start-ups also are different from more conservative eras because of scandals and poor management troubles at companies such as Enron and WorldCom, he said.

“All the regulatory changes that have been put in place take some of the flexibility that we had in the early 1990s out of building a company. Revenue recognition is much more defined and more rigorous. The types of investments you make in capital changed,” he said. “And the customers are smarter. They aren’t buying technology for technology’s sake or to try it out. You have to come to market with technology that will solve a problem that is definable or understandable.”

Another change is that companies must plan their future beyond an initial public offering or acquisition by a larger company. At Virtual Iron, his goal is to “build a substantial company, take it public and continue to grow it,” he said.

The company has shared some details of its technology but plans to demonstrate and fully discuss the technology at the LinuxWorld and Demo shows in February, Thibault said.

Virtual Iron has raised $20 million in two rounds of investment from Goldman Sachs, Highland Capital Partners and Matrix Partners.

OT: Lack of news

Sorry for this lag. This week a lot of interesting news appeared about actual and upcoming virtualization products but my DELL Inspiron 5150 decided to stop working.
I had a problem with the power socket, solded on the motherboard. Luckily my 3 years warranty solved the problem: I called DELL customer care and their technician arrived at my company office the day after, replacing my motherboard in just a couple of hours. A totally satisfying experience indeed.

I will start posting again tomorrow.

ESG open Kalaya beta program

Quoting from official announcement:


Kalaya™ is a software utility program developed exclusively by Expert Server Group to simplify and automate management tasks and operations for users of VMware™ ESX Server (2.0 or greater) platform.

The Kalaya™ utility makes some of the most complex operations in VMware ESX simple and quick.
Using Kalaya™ Software users of VMware ESX Server can avoid using the cumbersome, time consuming, and sometimes not well documented, command line interface (CLI) for supported tasks. No advanced knowledge of VMware ESX, Virtualization concepts or the Linux kernel is required. In addition, The Kalaya™ utility is fast, accessed thought a secure text interface, offering a quick response time and ease of use.

Kalaya™ Software is installed and accessible from the ESX Kernel. Access to the menu interface is secured through an SSH connection. Kalaya™ is installed in the user directory, with no impact on the ESX kernel itself. The utilities included in Kalaya™ Software are accessible through a menu driven interface and organized by modules such as Back up and File management.

For a limited time, Expert Server Group is accepting applications for enrollment in our Kalaya™ Software Beta Program for Beta site license in the following states: Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticutt, New York and New Jersey.

This news could be rather old, but I really missed it before. Try and tell me how good is (anyway the page is still up).

Investors back new open-source server virtualization company

Quoting from The Linux Beacon:


VMware, the workstation and server virtualization software vendor that pretty much had the market to itself until Microsoft got into the act by buying Connectix last year and launching Virtual Server 2005, just got some new competition. The leaders of the Xen open-source virtualization hypervisor project formed a corporation to sell and support Xen in December and have just secured $6 million from venture capitalists.

Seven years ago, Ian Pratt joined the senior faculty at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and after being on the staff for two years, he came up with a schematic for a futuristic, distributed computing platform for wide area network computing called Xenoserver. The idea behind the Xenoserver project is one that now sounds familiar, at least in concept, but sounded pretty sci-fi seven years ago: hundreds of millions of virtual machines running on tens of millions of servers, connected by the Internet, and delivering virtualized computing resources on utility basis where people are charged for the computing they use. The Xenoserver project consisted of the Xen virtual machine monitor and hypervisor abstraction layer, which allows multiple operating systems to logically share the hardware on a single physical server, the Xenoserver Open Platform for connecting virtual machines to distributed storage and networks, and the Xenoboot remote boot and management system for controlling servers and their virtual machines over the Internet.

Work on the Xen hypervisor began in 1999 at Cambridge, where Pratt was irreverently called the XenMaster by project staff and students. During that first year, Pratt and his project team identified how to do secure partitioning on 32-bit X86 servers using a hypervisor and worked out a means for shuttling active virtual machine partitions around a network of machines. This is more or less what VMware does with its ESX Server partitioning software and its VMotion add-on to that product. About 15 months ago, after years of coding the hypervisor in C and the interface in Python, the Xen portion of the Xenoserver project was released as Xen 1.0. According to Pratt, it had tens of thousands of downloads. This provided the open source developers working on Xen with a lot of feedback, which was used to create Xen 2.0, which started shipping last year. With the 2.0 release, the Xen project added the Live Migration feature for moving virtual machines between physical machines, and then added some tweaks to make the code more robust.

At this point, companies on the bleeding edge in high-performance computing and financial services told Pratt that what he really needed to do was set up a company to offer full support for the product, like Linux, MySQL, JBoss, and other popular open source programs have. So Pratt incorporated XenSource in Palo Alto, California, and hired Nick Gault, founder of a company called Network Physics, a company that sells network management software. “Great open source software becomes a commercial product,” explained Gault, “whether the project founders want it to or not. Eventually, the companies actually using the software start demanding real tech support and services.” And to make that happen, XenSource needed money.

Luckily, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sevin Rosen Funds, two of the big names in venture capital backing of IT firms, have lots of money and are always looking for a way to strike it big. With VMware now a subsidiary of disk maker and wannabe software powerhouse EMC after forgoing an initial public offering last year and now selling its software to the tune of $250 million a year and doubling each year, Kleiner Perkins and Seven Rosen smell a hot prospect when they see one. And so they just kicked $6 million to XenSource.

Gault says that XenSource will keep its development team in Cambridge, and that the $6 in Series A funding will be used to beef up Xen 3.0, due in the second quarter of 2005, with support for 64-bit Xeon and Opteron processors. That money will also be used for marketing and for packaging up Xen in different ways for different customer sets. Xen 4.0 is due to be released in the second half of 2005, and it will have better tools for provisioning and managing partitions. As Pratt puts it, the technology in Xen is solid, but it is not currently the easiest thing in the world to use. That sounds a lot like open source software.

While Xen will present an interesting challenge to VMware in the open source community, it appears to have a major architectural difference. VMware’s hypervisor layer completely abstracts the X86 system, which means any operating system supported on X86 processors can be loaded into a virtual machine partition. This, says Pratt, puts tremendous overhead on the systems. Xen was designed from the get-go with an architecture focused on running virtual machines in a lean and mean fashion, and Xen does this by having versions of open source operating systems tweaked to run on the Xen hypervisor. That is why Xen 2.0 only supports Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.2, and NetBSD 2.0 at the moment; special tweaks of NetBSD and Plan 9 are in the works, and with Solaris 10 soon to be open-source, that will be available as well. With Xen 1.0, Pratt had access to the source code to Windows XP from Microsoft, which allowed the Xen team to put Windows XP inside Xen partitions. However, now that Microsoft has acquired Connectix to roll out Virtual Server 2005, it seems doubtful that Microsoft will work with XenSource to make Xen-compatible versions of Windows.

When Intel and AMD put virtualizing hardware (Intel’s is called Vanderpool Technology) inside their respective X86 processors, Pratt says that it will be possible to run native Windows inside Xen partitions without having a tweaked version of the Windows code. What is true for Windows will be true for all operating systems, presumably, and that means any closed-source OS that runs on X86, Opteron, or Itanium will be able to run inside Xen partitions right out of the box, provided those chips have the virtualization features.

Pratt says that eventually, Xen will support Itanium platforms, and there is talk about putting it on Power-based servers from IBM as well. The software is not tied to the X86 hardware as tightly as VMware seems to be with ESX Server.

The Xen project makes Xen available under the GNU General Public License for free. XenSource, says Gault, will probably sell an enterprise-class compiled software and support offering for about $1,500 per server, with a version aimed at small businesses with fewer servers and support features costing $500 per server. The initial commercial packages of Xen should be available in a few weeks.

IBM pledges to make Xen more secure

Quoting from Slashdot:


An anonymous reader writes “In the latest posting on the Xen developer list, IBM pledges to make Xen more secure by porting its secure hypervisor (sHype) architecture to it. In their posting, IBM discusses an SELinux like access control frame work, resource control and monitoring and trusted computing support for Xen. It appears that a lot is happening on the Xen front (for example, the announcement of XenSource Inc. and Intel’s code drop in the xeno-unstable.bk tree for their super secret VT CPU).”

Here the post:


From: Reiner Sailer
sHype Hypervisor Security Architecture for Xen

I am a member of the Secure Systems Department at IBM”s TJ Watson Research Center (http://www.research.ibm.com/secure_systems_department/).

Our group has designed and developed a security architecture for hypervisors (called sHype). We have implemented it on an x86-based IBM research hypervisor. We now plan to contribute this to Xen by integrating our security architecture into it.

sHype is based on mandatory access controls (MAC). This allows Xen to use access rules (formal policy) to control both the sharing of virtual resources as well as the information flow between domains. The Xen port of sHype will leverage the existing Xen interdomain communication mechanism and we expect near-zero performance overhead on the performance-critical paths (e.g., sending or receiving packets on a virtual network, or writing or reading shared memory). The sHype access control architecture separates policy decisions from policy enforcement. It is modeled after the Flask security architecture as implemented in SELinux (http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/fluke/html/flask.html). Our design is targeted at a flexible medium-assurance architecture that can support anything from simple security domains to multilevel security (MLS) and Chinese Wall policies.

Merging the sHype access control architecture with Xen is the first step toward our goal of hardening Xen to support enterprise-class applications and security requirements. We are working on the following items to achieve this goal (which we intend to contribute spread out over this year):

* Port sHype to Xen

* Add stronger security/isolation guarantees (confinement) to what is currently available through Xen”s (and other hypervisors”) address space separation mechanisms, e.g., to enable information flow Control in Xen

* Enhance Xen to support trusted computing under Linux using TCG/TPM-based attestation mechanisms

* Enhance Xen to support secure resource metering, verification, and control.

* Apply our experience in automated security analysis to Xen to make it more robust

* Make Xen suitable for Common Criteria evaluation

We are confident that our work will significantly contribute to Xen in the security space and that it is a good fit with the Xen roadmap. We look forward to interacting with the Xen community on the design and implementation of our architecture.

Reiner
__________________________________________________________
Reiner Sailer, Research Staff Member, Secure Systems Department
IBM T J Watson Research Ctr, 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne NY 10532
Phone: 914 784 6280 (t/l 863) Fax: 914 784 6205, [email protected]
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/s/sailer/

VMware’s open source rival gets marquee backing

Quoting from Linux Business Week:


Kleiner Perkins and Sevin Rosen, two star-studded VCs, have put $6 million in Series A money in Palo Alto, California-based XenSource, the outfit started by the founders of the open source Xen hypervisor virtualization software to commercialize the stuff.

Xen is available free under the GPL.

XenSource is hoping to make money by selling support and subscription services to Xen users.

XenSource CEO Nick Gault said the funding would go towards building support and service capabilities, hiring more people, ramping up sales and marketing and developing better packaging for Xen by way of an installer and some management tools.

Gault expects to expand the company’s staff from its current eight people to 30-35 by the end of the year.

According to Gault, Xen has 100 users using it in a production environment.

Gault said XenSource would work with its partners Red Hat and Novell to promote Xen and implied the two Linux distributions would offer Xen soon.

Xen is designed to consolidate servers by letting multiple operating systems and applications run on the same server.

It runs on x86 architecture and currently support Linux 2.4 and 2.6, NetBSD, FreeBSD and Plan 9.

However, Xen does not support Windows yet although Gault expects to be able to by the middle of this year.

Gault acknowledged that Xen didn’t expect to have a Windows port anytime soon because of licensing issues. He credited Intel’s assistance in the form of contributing 20-40 man-years of source code and putting anticipated virtualization support in its hardware for Xen’s decision to move up Windows support.

Xen’s main rival is VMware, now an EMC subsidiary.

Besides Gault, XenSource founders include Xen project leaders Ian Pratt of Cambridge University and openMosix leader Moshe Bar. Pratt is Xen’s chief architect and Bar is XenSource’s CTO.

Gault reckons XenSource will be profitable by the end of ’06.

As said other times I don’t think XEN can be considered a VMware competitor. Not till it will be able to virtualize Windows operating systems and we’ll see if this become a reality for 2Q 2005…

VMware ACE makes users happy

Quoting from Techworld:

Virtual machines on servers and desktops alike are coming of age, with VMware’s ACE constituting a new front in the technology’s development. It helps that Microsoft recently swept away one of the main obstacles — that is, whether an OS running in a virtualised environment constitutes another iteration and therefore needs another paid-for licence. Clearly, one of the incentives for the Redmond software giant to make this move was concern not to impede sales of its own virtualisation product, Virtual PC.

Virtualisation itself is nothing new — it’s been around since the bad old mainframe days. It’s just that, in the PC environment, hardware is now powerful enough to run one or more virtual computers as containers within a host OS with little perceptible overhead. The only real cost, aside from the virtualisation software itself, is the need for as much memory for each virtual machine as a real one would require. Other than that, you save on all the extra hardware and other overheads.

In addition, you gain more control over virtual systems than over real ones, being able to start and stop it easily and quickly, and prototyping applications and configurations without having to reboot your machine or touch live production systems makes life a lot simpler.

Now, with the launch of VMware’s ACE, at least one of the company’s customers agrees that standardised configurations can be deployed to desktops and other environments more easily. ACE consists effectively of a run-time version of VMware’s virtualisation technology that can, for example, can be shipped out to customers without licensing concerns.

One user, Dave Parsons, software development manager for ALG Software, explains how his company has been using the product since the early beta emerged.
“We’re a small ISV of just 10 people. We’re big workstation users, and the problem we had was doing off-site training with big database applications. If customers don’t have the environment that can support the software needed for training, that becomes an issue.

“The problem is that it takes a lot of time to configure the server systems — we use IIS and SQL Server — and clients when setting up a complex application. With VMware ACE, we have everything configured and loaded beforehand.

“It also allows us to have the systems back up and running quickly if something crashes and, at the end of the session, we can restore the classroom to its default state quickly.”
The idea of using an alternative did occur to Parsons — the base VMware workstation product.

“But we saw the opportunity that ACE provided. We were thinking about using VMware Workstation but ACE gives you the entire PC in a box. If customers don’t have VMware, ACE allows us to create a run-time version and have it run without problems.

“It also has digital rights management in there, so if we forget to de-install, we’ve set it to expire on specific date – such as five days after the install date, it protects our IP and ensures we don’t break the terms of the VMware license.

“It also means that when we’re with working our partners, such as Fujitsu, it allows us to deliver a working system to them with reproducible quality.”
Parsons said that couldn’t think of any major issues with the product.

“There is an overhead but it’s not huge. Disk space can be an issue but XP is only 1.2GB so a 2.5GB image is fine, eve when using products such as SQL Server.

“I can’t see downside to it and lots of different people that I know of are using it. The economics are good, as is the fact that it will run on decommissioned equipment. It proved to be a very interesting idea.”
With that kind of customer endorsement, the fact that ACE now puts VMware — now an EMC subsidiary — two steps ahead of Microsoft is likely to please more than just the product’s marketing managers.

PlateSpin extends its operating system portability platform with PowerP2V 4.0

Quoting from official announcement:


PlateSpin today announced the general availability of PowerP2V 4.0, the worlds leading fully automated physical-to-virtual migration solution. With well over 150 customers in its first 6 months of availability, the release of PowerP2V 4.0 is a major step forward in providing the worlds first fully automated Operating System Portability platform, which allows operating systems and their associated applications and data to be moved between physical and virtual machines with zero manual effort for VMware ESX Server, VMware GSX Server, and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

PlateSpin PowerP2V 4.0 now adds flexible and reusable image support for physical-to-virtual machine (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual machine (V2V) migrations for Windows and Linux based servers. In addition to providing direct source-to-target conversions, users can now stage the conversion process by remotely capturing an image of a source physical server or virtual machine and storing it in PlateSpin’s flexible image format on any file medium. Unlike other image-based solutions on the market which require images to be deployed on identically configured systems, PowerP2Vs flexible image format allows a single image to be repeatedly deployed on different virtual infrastructures that have different hardware and software configurations. PlateSpins image format is usable for P2V, V2V, and will be usable for V2P migrations in a future release. This will allow data centers to redeploy and reuse a single image to any virtual or physical infrastructure.

PowerP2V 4.0 also provides a new lights-out feature that automatically issues email alerts should any conversion job fail. This fully configurable feature provides the user with the option of passively monitoring the progress of jobs in addition to actively monitoring jobs through the use of PowerP2Vs real-time job monitor. Through email alerting, users can perform multiple conversion jobs and be notified any time a significant event occurs throughout the conversion process.

Other enhancements of PlateSpin PowerP2V 4.0 include:
– Support for conversions to VMware ESX Server 2.5
– Support for ESX port groups
– Transfer of files with restricted permissions
– Extended NTFS support, such as compressed and sparse files
– Additional support for Windows dynamic disks
– Support for French language OS Support for Red Hat Linux 8

PlateSpin PowerP2V 4.0 with image support is most useful for solving the following data center challenges:

– Server Consolidation for Geographically Separated Data Centers
Many server consolidation initiatives involve source and target servers that reside in different geographical locations, and have little or no network bandwidth between them. With PowerP2V 4.0, data center users have the option of staging the conversion by first capturing the source server into a PlateSpin image format, and then deploying it to a virtual host server in the central data center. PlateSpins new image format support also allows users to maximize uptime by staggering the capture and deploy processes, which allows users to accommodate different availability and uptime requirements for source and target machines. The ability to provide staged conversions based on PlateSpins image format also allows users to repeatedly perform conversions from an image library as an alternative to performing a direct source server data transfer providing a new form of flexible provisioning. Like PlateSpins direct peer-to-peer data transfer method, the image capture and deploy process does not require any physical contact with the source or target machines. Users simply connect to the network where the source system resides, captures the image onto their machine (even a laptop), connects to the network where the target system resides, and deploys the image to the target host.

– Disaster Recovery using Virtual Machines
Many data centers are using virtual machines as warm-backups as an alternative to or in concert with tape backup, for disaster recovery using PowerP2Vs existing automated peer-to-peer conversion. With PowerP2V 4.0, users now have the option of performing backups of virtual machines to a PlateSpin image format, in addition to replicating a server to another virtual machine directly. Should the primary virtual machine fail, users can easily restore the virtual machine to a previous working state from either a PlateSpin flexible image file or the recovery virtual machine instance.
Load Matching between Virtual Host Servers PowerP2V 4.0 allows users to move virtual machines between heterogeneous virtual host servers such as VMware ESX Server, VMware GSX Server, and Microsoft Virtual Server in order to balance loads. Especially useful for non-SAN based virtual host environments, PowerP2V can migrate a virtual machine from an over-utilized host server to an under-utilized host server by simply dragging and dropping a VM from a source host to a secondary virtual host. This effectively allows the user to quickly and easily match VMs with the most suitable virtual hosts to maximize application performance and balance workload.

– Rapid Replication of Production Servers for Application Testing
Using PowerP2V 4.0 with flexible image support, users can capture an entire production server and replicate it to a virtual machine environment in the test lab even if there is insufficient network bandwidth or network connectivity between the production environment and test labs. Users can simply capture a production server to PlateSpins image file format, and automatically and repeatedly deploy it in the virtual host in the separate test lab environment.

– Pricing and Availability
PlateSpin PowerP2V 4.0 is available to the public today and can be purchased for US$3,000 for a 25 conversion license. Unlimited annual and perpetual licenses are also available upon request.