Year: 2006

About Virtualization reports a very interesting scoop: second generation VMware ESX Server and VirtualCenter have been submitted to Common Criteria on 28th December 2004 for EAL 2 conformance certification unde the Operating Systems category.

I’m not able to find the related Protection Profile to further comment.

The certification has still to be granted at today.

Update: The EAL2 certification has been granted on March 27th, 2006.
You can check Security Target, Validation Report and Common Criteria Certificate here.

Quoting from X-bit Labs:

The long-awaited launch of the new reincarnation of AMD Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon 64 FX processors for the Socket AM2 that will allow using DDR2 SDRAM is scheduled to take place at Computex 2006 that will be open in Taipei, Taiwan, in June.
…
AMD is expected to launch two dual-core CPUs for Socket AM2 on June 2006: Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and Athlon 64 FX-62. Both processors will be based on F core revision working at 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz respectively. This way, the new AMD core will not only acquire DDR2 memory support, but also will increase the frequency potential of the dual-core AMD processors without switching to new production technology. Just as the previous E core revision, the upcoming F core revision will still be manufactured with 90nm SOI process.
…
Here I would like to note that most of the solutions for Socket AM2 will start sampling in the end of this month already. AMD’s server partners will get their hands on the first Opteron samples for Socket F starting with April 30th , and the retail models will be available for pre-ordering on April 15th.
…
F core stepping processors will support Pacifica visualization technology and Presidio data protection technology, which will require new chipsets and BIOS updates for the mainboards. Only the budget Sempron processors will have no Pacifica support. HyperTransport bus frequency for Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 and Opteron processors will remain equal to 1GHz, and Sempron CPUs will support 800MHz bus.

Read the whole article at source.

I’m personally waiting for the first AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ notebook to switch over my actual DELL Inspiron 5150 powered by Intel P4 3.06GHz.
I’ll test it with supporting virtualization products and will review it on virtualization.info.

During these months several rumors went around about the upcoming last Virtual Server updated before the new Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian).

Today, Jeff Woolsey, Lead Program Manager Windows Virtualization, during an official webcast, definitively unveiled what’s coming with codename vNext:

• Intel Virtualization Technology and AMD I/O Virtualization Technology CPUs support
  This won’t further improve performances of Windows guest OS but will improve other OSes performances.
• Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Service (VSS) support
  This unluckly won’t provide virtual machines live backup as many expected, but will just automate operations of saving VM state, shutdown it and restore it at the saved state.

As already reported there will be no support for 64bit guest OSes until Windows Hypervisor.

Jeff also stated there will be a public beta program in 1H 2006.

Scott Herold reports on VMTN Forums about a new product in development from Vizioncore called esxReplicator:

Vizioncore is working on a product called esxReplicator which is capable of doing VMDK level replication across the network. There is a rules engine that can synch your data based on 2 criteria…the amount of time passed (every hour), or after a certain amount of change (32MB). As soon as the threshold is hit, the difference is sent over the wire to a remote location. Because you have full control over size or time incriments, it is a very fast replication once the initial sync is done. Because the differentials are so small, there is no performance impact to the guests in the configuration.

I have no ETA on release or timeframes of the product, it was something that they introduced and demod at the VMUG (VMware User Groug) meeting.

Microsoft opened the MMS 2006 conference registration.

Till now just few sessions on virtualization are published on the draft agenda but this year the topic could become a key argument:

• Management of Virtual Server using the COM api and integration with MOM
• Managing backups in Virtual Server 2005 R2 through MOM
• Platform Management Futures

VMware released an updated version of ESX Server 2.5.2 VMware Tools just for RHEL 4.0 Update 2.

Download them here.

Andrew Dugdell produced a nice webcast on how to build a 2 nodes custer with Windows Server 2003 R2 and WinTarget iSCSI, since Microsoft Virtual PC hasn’t SCSI support.

If you’re in need of some tests and cannot work with Virtual Server 2005 this is a valuable resource for you.

Watch it here.

The Microsoft Virtualization Team released a 1 hour movie about virtualization basics and deep technical details on Channel 9 Going Deep show series.

They focused on upcoming Windows Hypervisor architecture, virtualization security model, Apple MacOS x86 guest OS, virtual networking, Singulary research OS, programming language used for virtualization technologies.

A great insight for newbies and virtualization experts. View it here.

Are you already thinking to run the upcoming (well…2 years expected) Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian) on your brand new 32bit server? Think again.

Ben Armstrong remembered us that since the WinHEC 2005 conference, Microsoft stated that upcoming virtualization hypervisor, based on codename Longhorn Server, will run just on 64bit processors, and just if they have virtualization support.

So better reconsider your orders and go for Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) or AMD with I/O Virtualization Technology CPUs.

Quoting from the Sun OpenSolaris official annoncement:

Today, we’re making the first source code snapshot of our OpenSolaris on Xen project available to the OpenSolaris developer community.

There are many bugs still in waiting, many puzzles to be solved, many things left to do. A true work in progress. Why are we doing this now? Because we don’t believe the developer community only wants finished projects to test. We believe that some developers want to participate during the core development process, not after, and now this project opens its doors to that kind of participation.

We have a snapshot of our development tree for OpenSolaris on Xen, synced up with Nevada build 31. That code snapshot should be able to boot and run on all the hardware that build 31 can today, plus it can boot as a diskless unprivileged domain on Xen 3.0.

Running on Xen, OpenSolaris is reasonably stable, but it’s still very much “pre-alpha” compared with our usual finished code quality.

The planned goals of this project are (from Robert Milkowski’s blog):

• x86 and x64 paravirtualized guest kernels supporting dom0, domU, and driver domains
• All reasonable combinations of Solaris, Linux, *BSD, and other paravirtualized OSes should interoperate
• Live migration, whole OS checkpoint/resume
• MP limits and scale to match Xen’s capabilities
• Maximal portability to enable Solaris-on-Xen ports to other architectures
• Observability and debugging to enable performance work, RAS, system management, and sustaining
• Support fully virtualized guests (though this is mostly a Xen capability, rather than an OpenSolaris capability per se)
• Explore trusted platform capabilities

Read the How-To guide here.