Year: 2006

Quoting from The Register:

…
We recently sat down with VMware CEO Diane Greene and asked her to discuss how the virtualization market will evolve in the coming years. How will VMware fend off these attacks and defend its pricing?
…
El Reg: So you have Microsoft and Xen attacking you with relatively immature products, and meanwhile, you’re building out your tools arsenal. Is that the immediate plan – to focus on the tools?

DG: We are doing two things.

We are moving the platform forward, which is a huge job. In the last year, there has been Intel’s VT, AMD’s Pacifica, multi-core chips and 64-bit. That was just moving with the industry.
Internally, we added SMP support and performance enhancements and all the different devices. And then we are spending millions and millions of dollars on our labs for certification and testing.
That is a huge effort that we are going to continue.

Then, the solutions we are definitely moving forward. We are adding distributed availability services where you can failover and then you get distributed resource management where you get load balancing across a cluster. Then, we have consolidated backup and single console monitoring and security controls across the cluster of virtual machines.
And then we are also exploring really interesting areas in the labs where we are pushing virtualization to see what it’s going to do. We did the Player, which is incredibly exciting for us.
It’s over 400,000 downloads now. All these people are building interesting virtual machines.

El Reg: I know you wouldn’t dare reveal a future, unannounced product, but could you give us a flavor for something in the labs?

DG: On the high-level, what we see is that the data center will transform to where you can manage your hardware separately from your software, and you can think about them as more aligned with what is going on in the business.
We also see really hard security problems that can be solved by using virtualization…

Read the whole interview at source.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

A new patch just went out from VMware for its mainstream product.

This patch fixes just one bug:

This patch fixes a timing issue in the LSI Logic MegaRAID driver shipped with ESX 2.5.x. This issue causes ESX Server systems using LSI Logic MegaRAID controllers to become unresponsive when storage management agents are installed on the service console.

VMware has seen this problem on Dell non-blade systems when storage management agents are installed on the service console. However, the issue may also be triggered by other applications that communicate directly with internal MegaRAID firmware.

Donwload it here.

Thanks to David Marshall for the news.

Mike Healan, from SpywareInfo, wrote a four-part article about VMware Player and the Browser Appliance, the pre-installed virtual machine VMware offers to everybody for safe browsing.

The Browser Appliance, based on Ubuntu Linux and powered by Firefox, is good but needs some adjustments if you plan to use it frequently. So Mike explains how to tweak it for package updates, how to save environment changes, how to exchange files with the host OS, and so on.

It’s worth to read if you are not a VMware and Linux expert.

Thanks to VMTN Blog for the news.

Ben Armstrong continues his Virtual Server development series, this time explaining how to handle events from a managed application:

• Setup the managed application appropriately to talk to the Virtual Server COM interfaces
• Declare your Virtual Server COM object ‘WithEvents’ as follows:

Private WithEvents virtualServer As VMVirtualServer = Nothing

instead of:

Private virtualServer As VMVirtualServer = Nothing

• Create a subroutine to catch the event:

Public Sub virtualServer_EventLogged(ByVal logMessageID As Integer) Handles virtualServer.OnEventLogged

‘Do something with the event
msgbox(CStr(logMessageID))

End Sub

You should read the original post for helpful comments and further explainations from Ben.

Today’s virtualization barely permits us to disregard what kind of resources we really have inside our servers.
Companies like VMware, Microsoft, Xen, etc. are offering solutions to share (although still not in a dynamical way) CPU power, memory, storage and partially networking within a single server (or a cluster). Companies like Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, etc. are offering solutions to share applications within a single server (or a cluster).
If you think these technologies could be just refined and nothing else, think again.

In our near future virtualization will permit us to disregard where our servers are located in our datacenter (something VMware is trying to approach with VMotion technology).
Then, in a farther tomorrow, virtualization will also permit us to disregard where our servers are located among multiple datacenters, even of different companies.
And so on, up to the final goal of disregarding everything but the application we are trying to use. That application tasks will be processed in a distributed way, among all available datacenters in the Net, which is possibly called Grid Computing (while the pay-per-use of Grid Computing is possibly called Utility Computing).

Benefits of such a distributed environment are huge:

• maximized available resources usage
• increased computation power
• increased resources availability
• maximized high availability

just to name a few.

Virtualization is going in that direction and someone is already trying to reach those results. But there are millions of technical problems to solve, from scheduling to security, from accounting to system management.
And without a common virtualization framework we won’t reach the final goal anytime soon.

So if you asked yourself why VMware is trying to establish virtualization standards this could be the answer: VMware is looking for grid computing much before any other company.

If you feel Grid Computing a fascinating subject you should absolutely read the free IBM Redbook Introduction to Grid Computing.

Thanks to David Marshall for speed up this post writing.

Last month VMware released its Community Virtual Machines, collecting all available vendors and communities pre-installed virtual machines in a VMTN dedicated site.

But QEMU, probably the most known open source virtualization project, has one repository as well: FreeOSZoo.

FreeOSZoo, maintained by Stefano Marinelli, provides you several pre-installed images of open source operating systems including Linux, BSD and Solaris variants.
For the project mission and the distribution policy you won’t find any Windows or other commercial OS images.

Thanks to OSNews for the news.

Softricity organized a new interesting webinar about virtualization and security:

Hardening operating systems is clearly critical to protecting government IT from rogue software installations and viruses. It is an incredibly tedious and imperfect process: the more applications you manage, the more complex the hardening process and the harder it is to cleanly remove applications. Even worse, requirements for some applications require write permissions that open you to security risks.

But there is a solution: Softricity application virtualization. It lets you reduce applications to a single file that includes all the required dependencies short of operating system services, and execute them in a protected memory space that abstracts applications from the OS.

The event is scheduled for 8th February. Register for it here.

Update: Recorded event is now available here.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Quoting from News.com:

Sun Microsystems later this year will introduce virtualization technology to let its newest Sparc-based servers run multiple operating systems simultaneously, thus catching up to a feature already built into Unix machines from rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
…
This calendar year, on the T2000 and T1000, we will introduce our first generation of virtualization to bring people beyond the container technology Solaris 10 already offers,”
…
Xen is the future, Yen said. Although the company developed its own logical domain software, Sun eventually expects it will become one with Xen.
“Eventually we expect Xen will get industrywide acceptance, and we’d like to be part of it. Some time, probably in the second half of 2007, we will merge,” Yen said…

Read the whole article at source.

Virtual Strategy Magazine published a new interview with Fred Johannessen, Program Executive for Capacity Management and Provisioning, and David Wagner, Director of Solution Marketing for Capacity Management and Provisioning.

Here it here.

Ben Armstrong posted an interesting script structure to catch non-standard events on a virtual infrastructure, thanks to the Virtual Server generic event handler.

Check it here.