Webcast: Virtualization Infrastructure: Server and Application Decisions

SearchServerVirtualization arranged a new webcast about hardware planning for virtualization projects:

At the heart of an enterprise-level, virtualized infrastructure is the servers. Attend this webcast and get advice from industry expert and consultant Andrew Kutz on the software, server hardware and applications that IT managers need to know about to effectively implement virtualization.

This webcast will cover:

  • The implications, advantages and disadvantages of using legacy servers for new virtualization projects
  • The pros and cons of using 32-bit versus 64-bit servers and blade versus rack and tower servers
  • The compatibility of major virtualization platforms and applications with various server infrastructures

The webcast is available now.

VMware makes available Converter 3.0 beta download

After announcing it at beginning of October VMware finally allowed access to early bits of its new P2V / V2V application, Converter 3.0, which will merge P2V Assistant and Importer.

The beta available (build 33128) for download is called Starter Edition, the rumored free version unable to perform concurrent migrations:


The Starter Edition has also a limitation in its new live migration capability: it cannot perform remote live migrations (performed without installing application inside the source physical machine) if target virtual machine is hosted by ESX Server.
All other kinds of live migrations (local and remote) are supported.


Read Release Notes for supported platforms in V2V migrations and download it here.

PlateSpin partners with Cassatt

After the interesting partnership of PlateSpin and Virtual Iron last month, and Cassatt with XenSource this one, a new important alliance takes place.

Quoting from the Cassatt official announcement:

Cassatt Corporation and PlateSpin, Ltd., today announced a new technology and business relationship to accelerate the move of large enterprises to consolidate their servers and implement automated data center management, with the goal of making IT more responsive to business needs.

With the agreement, Cassatt is able to bundle two PlateSpin products – PowerConvert and PowerRecon – as part of a Cassatt Collage software deployment. These products can help customers accelerate their adoption and usage of virtualization in their data center. Cassatt can now offer the Platespin products, alongside its own products for automating the management of data centers, providing customers with a more complete way to begin and accelerate their adoption of virtualization and move toward making their data centers more dynamic.

The companies also have agreed to provide cooperative support for joint customers and to collaborate on marketing and sales efforts…

Virtuozzo more scalable than ESX Server?

Quoting from TechWorld:

VMware’s flagship product ESX Server and the infrastructure around it aren’t quite good enough for the data centre, according to David Turner, vendor marketing and business development manager at IT consultancy IQ-SYS, formerly Interquad.

The consultancy and networking specialist, whose revenues reached over £35 million in its last financial year, sells only SWsoft’s Virtuozzo, rather than market leader VMware’s product.

He said that Virtuozzo’s value “is in the server farm and data centre, where hardware virtualisation [such as that provided by VMware’s ESX Server] doesn’t add much value to I/O-intensive applications. People couldn’t put multiple ESX Servers in a high throughput application,” he said. Referring to applications such as Citrix server farms and databases such as Oracle, he said that “we get greater scalability with Virtuozzo.”…

Read the whole article at source.

I know some readers that have much to say on this topic. If you have experience of large implementations with both VMware ESX Server and SWsoft Virtuozzo please write a comment.

VMware answers Microsoft on open formats for virtual disks

The change in Virtual Hard Disk (.VHD) format licensing Microsoft announced last week couldn’t stay unaddressed by market leader VMware.

In the corporate blog Dan Chu, Senior Director Developer and ISV Products and Technology Alliances at VMware, underlined:


Last week Microsoft announced that it too is moving to make its virtual machine disk format, VHD, more open. Previously VHD had been covered by a much more restrictive license. We are glad that Microsoft is making VHD more freely usable by third parties. The ecosystem has invested broadly in VMDK, but it is good that VHD now has the same accessibility.

One highly related area we are concerned about is that we?ve seen Microsoft beginning to put restrictive terms on the use of published VHDs. Specifically, it seems that Microsoft is starting to restrict use of their VHDs to MS Virtual Server and Virtual PC only.

If Microsoft constrains software licensing of the content within VHDs so that the VHDs can only be run on Microsoft products, then there won?t be any real openness or interoperability for VHDs. We hope that Microsoft is committed to interoperability and open implementations for VHDs, and that the chokepoint isn?t simply moving from one prohibitive licensing constraint (VHD format licensing) to another (VHD software licensing)…

Read the whole article at source.

Release: Xen 3.0.3

Xen reached the minor release 3.0.3 as planned in September, after being delayed from initial release date in July.

New features included are:

  • a new easy-to-use CPU scheduler which includes weights, caps, and automatic SMP load-balancing
  • support for Xen-oprofile to allow measurement and optimization of code paths
  • greatly enhanced support for unmodified (“hvm”) guests including Windows and legacy Linux operating systems
  • support for dynamic-allocation and copy-on-write disks
  • packet segmentation offload in guests to improve network performance
  • enhanced support for IA64 (IPF) systems and initial support for Power

Packages for Red Hat and Novell distros are available here.
A demo liveCD has been released accordingly and The Coding Studio published a screenshot walkthrough of it:


After this release both XenSource and Virtual Iron are expected to launch new betas of their products, introducing support for Windows virtual machines on AMD SVM or Intel VT CPUs.

Another Xen update, 3.0.4, is expected before Christmas.

Microsoft updates Virtual Machine Additions for Linux beta

Microsoft silently released the new 1.1 version of its Virtual Machine Additions, actually in beta on the Connect website.

The new version introduces support for following operating systems:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
  • Red Hat Linux 9.0
  • Red Hat Linux 7.3
  • SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
  • SuSE Linux 10.0
  • SuSE Linux 9.3
  • SuSE Linux 9.2

Enroll the beta here.

Thanks to Virtualserver.tv for the news.

Webcast: Getting Started with Virtual Iron 3 – From Installation to Virtual Infrastructure Management

Virtual Iron arranged a new 30 minutes webcast for November 1st to evangelize on its new platform.

Covered topics:

  • Physical environment setup
  • Virtual Iron installation
  • Partitioning and management of a single virtualized node to achieve the benefits of consolidation
  • Tips, tricks and cool features
  • Introduction to the Virtual Iron Forums

Register for it here (limited seats).

Egenera appoints new CTO

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera Inc., a global leader in datacenter virtualization, today announced the appointment of Peter J. Manca to chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering. Mr. Manca formerly served as Egenera’s senior vice president of engineering, having spent the past five years guiding all aspects of product development, product management and program management. He has more than 20 years’ experience in enterprise computing.

Mr. Manca’s expertise spans a wide range of critical enterprise datacenter technologies including virtualization, operating systems, large-scale architectures and open standards. In particular, his leadership and experience in virtualization technologies has led to the continued progression of Egenera’s advanced PAN (Processing Area Network) architecture. As CTO, Mr. Manca will lead product planning by working directly with customers to understand their most difficult challenges and guide Egenera’s architecture, hardware, and software engineering teams to translate those requirements into solutions. Vern Brownell, the company’s founder, has assumed the role of chief strategy officer, where he will continue to drive Egenera’s strategic technology direction and counsel customers…

VirtenSys collects $12 million Series A funding

Quoting from the Virtensys official announcement:

VirtenSys Ltd., a leading developer in the emerging and fast growing PCI Express? IO virtualization market, today announced the closing of a US$12 million first round of financing from a syndicate including Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), Celtic House Venture Partners (CHVP) and GIMV. SEP led the deal with SEP, CHVP and GIMV co-investing equally. The investment enables the Company to add to its team, complete its product development and generate initial revenues.

VirtenSys, a fabless semiconductor company, provides critical IO virtualization solutions to the data centers, storage and networking infrastructure markets.

VirtenSys was founded in December 2005, and has assembled an exceptional team of experts in semiconductor and system development across a wide range of protocols and technologies with background at ICL, Fujitsu, Power X and Xyratex. The majority of the team was most recently with the Integrated System Division of Xyratex…