Year: 2005

Intel published this interesting paper on summer 2005, republished today by Bitpipe:

Underutilization of computing power can be costly. Studies show that for many companies, their IT infrastructure investment has yet to achieve the financial objectives anticipated or provide the expected boost in corporate productivity. A key objective of business is to maximize productivity while minimizing expense, yet many are failing to fully utilize their IT resources. Or they have overlooked the under-tapped capabilities they already have on the racks in their data center. As a result, computing power is wasted because servers are under-utilized.
This white paper explains how to:

• Better utilize resources in your data center
• Avoid unnecessary infrastructure expansion
• Improve network reliability and server utilization
• Better manage IT expenses

Learn about the benefits and advantages of implementing a consolidated virtualization strategy.

Download it at Bitpipe (registration required).

This is a question many of you already started to ask since a while.

What if I take my everyday desktop (workstation or laptop is indifferent) and move it on a virtual machine?

How much this will cost?
Today I can have a virtualization solution at no cost thanks to the just born VMware Player. Or, if I need more, can invest a small amount of money for a complete, brand new Workstation 5.5.

What I gain?
Give me a removable USB 2.0 hard drive (USB keys are still too small for an ordinary workstation space usage), let me move my VM inside it, and fundamentally I’ll have my portable desktop everywhere I need.

Snapshots will permit me (with VMware Player this is going to be complicated) to save my steps before installing something new (like a cumbersome Service Pack or a beta program or anything else) and having multiple branches of my desktop, to consolidate when I’m sure everything works ok.

Snapshots will also permit me to backup my data in a new fashionable way: no more file level copy on a removable backup disk, but the whole VM copy just on the physical machine itself.
As many backup as I want, if enough space. As often as I want (since Workstation 5.5 snapshots can be taken on the background and launched via command line interface, scripting the whole process).
If something goes wrong 1 minute and I’m back. Faster than restoring a Ghost clone.

The hyper-flexible networking features of Workstation could provide me a sandbox environment for host OS: I’ll just unload TCP/IP from my physical network card and just let my desktop VM going on the Net.
Or the opposite…: why don’t I use the host OS below to surf in Internet mantaining safe my desktop virtual environment? When I download something useful from a site I’ll just drag & drop it inside the VM and I’ll be happy.
In this second case I could even run my personal firewall and my antivirus just outside the VM, to avoid unfair I/O performances degradation.

The VMware virtual disks manipulation tools will permit me to enlarge my desktop virtual disk in seconds avoiding additional costs for 3rd parties disk management applications.

The native screenshots and movies capture feature will give me a way to document my work at no additional cost (even if there are a lot of good open source solutions to achieve this in any way).

What I lose?
Surely I’ll lose some performances. Virtualization in desktop products isn’t as fast as in datacenter products. I’m going to forget around 15% or more of my speed, for sure (but this is going to change as soon as AMD and Intel CPUs with virtualization extensions will wide spread).

Then I lose support for some complex graphical applications and last generation games: VMware actually just support Direct3D experimentally (I could choose to install this kind of things in the host OS anyway).

Eventually I’ll lose some money, since adopting this solution is possible only if I have enough RAM inside my physical machine. And considering today’s applications requirements this means at least 1-1,5GB.

And finally I will probably lose sleep, trying to configure the perfect environment…

Quoting from The Register:

Intel will next year launch its third branded PC platform, after Centrino and Viiv, this time pitched at corporate desktops.

As yet there’s no word on the platform’s go-to-market brandname, but it will almost certainly be based on Intel’s ‘Averill’ platform. Averill was announced at the chip giant’s Developer Forum in March this year for availability in 2006.
…
The platform will support Intel’s Active Management Technology, its enterprise-oriented remote-control system, aling with ‘LaGrande’, the company’s upcoming Trusted Computing security sub-system, and Virtualisation Technology….

Read the whole article at source.

Podtech.net realized an interesting podcast with Mike Palin, Leostream COO, about Leostream VMC and other Leostream solutions.

Worth the listening: http://www.podtech.net/?p=221

Podtech.net realized an interesting podcast with Seruei Beloussov, SWsoft CEO, about Virtuozzo and other SWsoft solutions.

Worth the listening: http://www.podtech.net/?p=223

This is nice: Ben Armstrong just posted on his blog a new script for getting events from Virtual Server VMs with VBScript:

Option Explicit

Dim vs, vm, alive

‘Jump to the main routine

main()

‘============================’

sub keepAlive()

‘ This subroutine makes sure that the script hangs around
‘ in order to capture any server events

On Error Resume Next

while (alive = 1)
WScript.Sleep(500)
wend

end sub

‘============================’

Sub vm_OnStateChange(vmState)

wscript.echo vmState

alive = 0

end sub

‘============================’

sub main()

alive = 1

Set vs = WScript.CreateObject( “VirtualServer.Application” )

set vm = vs.FindVirtualMachine(“My Test Virtual Machine”)

WScript.ConnectObject vm, “vm_”

keepAlive()

end sub

‘===========================’

As expected today VMware just announced Workstation 5.5

virtualization.info readers already know everything and probably downloaded it since 24th November 🙂

The bad surprise here is that VMware Player still stays at beta 2 (I thought VMware posticipated the release announcement to have enough time to complete Player 1.0 testing).

As you probably know virtualization.info relies on Google Blogger engine. Blogger is great and becoming better and better every day but has a missing killer feature: post categories.

I know even with search feature it’s very difficult to find articles about a certain topic so I implemented a new Tag Cloud feature: simply take a look at it and discover top 20 keywords on virtualization.info, linked to as many articles as possible about that subject.

I hope this can improve your experience (at least till Google won’t provide post categories or native tagging).

Enjoy your stay!

On September SWsoft released its virtualization products, Virtuozzo for Linux, introducing support to 64bit partitions (they call them Virtual Private Servers or VPS).

Now SWsoft introduces 64bit even on Windows with the release of Virtuozzo 3.5 for Windows.

64 bits support isn’t the only new feature Virtuozzo for Windows is now offering:

• Performance Enhancements
  Create higher virtualized server performance and density for Microsoft Windows servers, applications and middleware
• Full EM64T and AMD64 Support
  Enable flexible use of higher end computing platforms with full support for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications
• Backup Enhancements
  Increase network backup flexibility combined with the ability to restore a single file and create a scheduled backup
• User Resource Reporting and Actions
  Determine top resource users for creating restrictions, further monitoring, charging back for usage or even migrating VPSs to a different server
• External Device Flexibility
  Assign multiple NICs to a single Virtuozzo server and assign an external storage device to a single or multiple VPSs to share external resources and common data or serve other application specific requirements
• Security and Anti-Virus Support
  Leverage compatibility with Symantec Antivirus corporate edition 10.0, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise and AVG Antivirus

Read the whole SWsoft official announcement.

Just few weeks ago Microsoft released Virtual Server 2005 R2 introducing two killer features: a really aggressive pricing and host OS high availability.
The last one is particularly interesting and a definitely most wanted feature even by VMware customers.

VMware products could benefit the host OS high availability soon: EMC Corporation (controlling VMware since 2004) in August 2005 acquired a well-known firm for clustering solutions, Rainfinity.

EMC declared the acquisition is moved mainly because of the Rainfinity Network File Virtualization technology but the acquired company is famous in the IT security market mainly for two producs: RainWall and RainConnect.
Both tecnologies are aimed to provide host and application clustering and network fault tolerance to famous, commercial firewall products as Check Point VPN-1 and Microsoft ISA Server.

At this point EMC could use all Rainfinity know-how (hot backup, host and application clustering, network fault tolerance) to instill a very powerful high-availability technology inside upcoming VMware servers products.