Year: 2006

vizioncore arranged a new webcast for October 25th about backup strategies with new VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and the popular esxRanger on VMware Infrastructure 3.

Register for it here.

up.time software, producer of the server monitoring tool up.time, introduced support for VMware ESX Server in its new release.

up.time 4, which is conversely supported by VMware, works with ESX Server 2.5x and new 3.x.

Ben Armstrong published a new useful script, this time for monitoing hearbeat signal generated by Virtual Machine Additions installed inside Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 VMs:

Set vsWMIObj = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\.\root\vm\virtualserver”)
Set vms = vsWMIObj.ExecQuery(“SELECT * FROM VirtualMachine”,,48)
For Each vm in vms
Wscript.Echo “==============================================”
Wscript.Echo “Virtual machine: ” & vm.Name
Wscript.Echo “Heartbeat Count: ” & vm.HeartbeatCount
Wscript.Echo “Heartbeat Percentage: ” & vm.HeartbeatPercentage
Wscript.Echo “Heartbeat Interval: ” & vm.HeartbeatInterval
Wscript.Echo “Heartbeat Rate: ” & vm.HeartbeatRate
Next

Checke the original article for comments and updates.

Readying the launch of the incredibly suffered Windows Vista, Microsoft is clearing last important details and published the new EULA for XP successor.

The new license astonishingly disallow customers purchasing Vista Home Basic and Home Premium to use their brand new OS inside any kind of virtualization platform:

USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES.
You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.

While the use of may not is very confusing, it suddenly becomes clear compared to explicit permission reported in Vista Ultimate:

USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES.
You may use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system on the licensed device.
If you do so, you may not play or access content or use applications protected by any Microsoft digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other Microsoft rights management services or use BitLocker. We advise against playing or accessing content or using applications protected by other digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other rights management services or using full volume disk drive encryption.

Another very important thing to note is this license term doens’t apply only to Microsoft, VMware and Xen-based virtualization platforms, but also hits other virtualization technologies, like OS partitioning offered by SWsoft with its Virtuozzo.

Where is the benefit in disallowing virtualization of lower-end operating system editions? This move is dimming value of virtualization and seems totally against the huge investment Microsoft itself done so far, offering Virtual PC and Virtual Server products free of charge.

Update: Ed Bott published on his ZDNet blog a very interesting follow-up of this story, detailing in an interview with a Microsoft representative several scenarios.

I still believe this licensing term is very inadeguate to satisfy raising needs of virtualization.

Each Microsoft Windows customer should be allowed to install his own OS on bare metal (desktop or laptop) and be free as well to install a second copy inside a virtual machine, moving it wherever he needs (developer or not).

A comment to the Ed’s story underline how this new approach could be lead by problems Microsoft is having with Windows Product Activation (WPA) in virtual environments.
It’s evident WPA cannot remain as is if Microsoft really wants to change image customers have of the company and spread virtualization to gain back a dominant market position.

Changing the WPA is the solution, not licensing terms.

Along with Xen, OpenVZ is surely the most active open source project about virtualization at the moment. But while Xen has been slowed down by VMware in its path towards integration with Linux kernel, OpenVZ found no obstacles so far and its development team annouces a main contribution to be included in upcoming kernel 2.6.19:

• IPC virtualization (contributed by OpenVZ’s Kirill Korotaev and Pavel Emelianov)
  This is functionality that enables different processes to create shared memory segments, send messages to each other, and use semaphores. In a virtualized system, you don’t want a container (VE) to see IPC objects from another container.
• utsname() virtualization (contributed by Serge Hallyn from IBM)
  utsname() returns basic information about the kernel being run (same as displayed by uname -a) — such as the kernel version/release, host and domain names, and system architecture (for example, i686). So, before we had a single utsname structure in the kernel, visible to all the processes. Why do we need to virtualize it? At the very least every virtualized system should have its own hostname. We might want to change other fields, too.
• preliminary PID namespaces feature (mostly contributed by Eric W. Biederman, and also some bits from Oleg Nesterov, IBM’s Sukadev Bhattiprolu and Cedric Le Goater)
  Every container (VE) should be able to use its own set of process IDs (PIDs), and should not see another container’s PIDs. Eric’s approach is to not use pid directly in the kernel, but use a pointer to the struct pid — a structure that could hold both PID and VEID (i.e. container ID). Submitted set of patches cleans up different places in kernel where it uses PID directly, to switch to struct pid.

At the same time the OpenVZ project approaches for the first time a new hardware achitecture: after supporting x86 and Itanium, it’s now approaching Power architecture, developed by IBM and Freescale Semiconductor, actually heaviliy used in IBM System p5 servers.

After an intense beta testing Parallels finally released at the same time products updates for both Windows/Linux and Mac OS customers.

Parallels Workstation (for Windows and Linux) 2.2 includes following features:

• Full support for AMD SVM and stronger support for Intel VT
• Support for Windows Vista as guest OS
• Better sound and video support
• Better networking support (use WiFi connections in Linux primary OSes, and switch bridge connections between a LAN cable and WiFi connection on the fly in any guest OS)
• Better USB support (including support for isochronous devices and Windows Mobile 5 devices)
• A new shared folder utility lets users share files and folders between OSes

Parallels Desktop (for Mac OS) Update includes following features:

• Support for any Intel-based Apple hardware with any memory configuration (including Mac Pros with up to 16GB of RAM, and the full line of Core 2 Duo iMacs)
• Support for Windows Vista as guest OS
• Support for Mac OS X 10.5 (codename Leopard) as host OS
• Better USB support (including support for isochronous devices and Windows Mobile 5 devices)

I have to say this naming convention is very confusing, making hard for customers to track which product and version they need or are using.
A much straight Parallels Workstation for Windows/Linx and Parallels Workstation for Mac OS wouldn’t work well enough?

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

After posting few days ago a technical article to realize a low-cost NFS storage for VMware ESX Server 3.x, vizioncore returns with another one, this time focused on iSCSI.

Read it at source.

I still suggest to adopt an even simpler solution, realizing low-cost netwrok storages in minutes with:

• OpenFiler (supporting CIFS/NFS/iSCSI)
• FreeNAS (supporting CIFS/NFS)

After a long beta testing Virtual Iron finally published the 3.0 release of its virtualization platform.

This new release is highly expected for 2 reasons:

• the Xen open source hypervisor is now the underlying virtualization engine
• Virtual Iron offers a free of charge version of the platform even for business deployments

Virtual Iron 3.0 is offered in 3 edition, with different capabilities and licensing:

• Professional Edition
  supports partitioning and basic management of a single Virtualized Node (max. 2 sockets) and is available at no charge
• Consolidation Edition
  supports server partitioning and basic management for multi-server configuration and support
• Enterprise Edition
  enables server partitioning for multi-server configuration and advanced management capabilities for rapid provisioning, high availability (LiveMigrate, LiveRecovery), disaster recovery (LiveRecovery), workload management and policy-based automation (LiveCapacity)

Virtual Iron also offers download of open source modified software for this version here.

In any case the product requires a new generation CPU from AMD or Intel among following:

• Intel Xeon 5000 or 7000 series
• Intel Core Duo T2000 series
• AMD Opteron 2200 or 8200 series

The product supports only 2 guest OSes:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 V2 (both 32 and 64bits)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3 (both 32 and 64bits)

but Windows guest OS support is expected in the upcoming Virtual Iron 3.1 version, available in beta in the coming months.

All editions feature a remote deployable Virtualization Manager, powered by a web interface and capability to create and configure virtual machines, perform administrative tasks like backup and restore, investigate real hardware configuration and statistics, etc. in a manual or scheduled way (through a policy system).

Downlad Virtual Iron 3.0 Professional Edition free of charge here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

On the beta site Connect where Virtual PC 2007 program is hosted since some days, Microsoft finally published bits of the product and features of the first beta:

• Hardware-assisted virtualization
  Virtual PC 2007 includes support for virtualization technology from Intel and AMD. By default, hardware-assisted virtualization is enabled if the feature is enabled on the physical computer. You can turn this assistance on or off for each virtual machine by modifying the virtual machine settings
• Support for Windows Vista as a host operating system
  This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces support for Windows Vista as a host operating system.
  Following flavors of Windows Vista are supported : Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate
• Support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system
  This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system.
  Following flavors of Windows Vista are supported : Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate
• Support for 64-bit host operating system
  This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 supports 64-bit host operating systems. However, there is no support for 64-bit guest operating systems

Apply for the beta program here and download Virtual PC 2007 beta 1.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Ben Armstrong published a much appreciated guide for installing Virtual Server 2005 R2 on a Windows Vista RC2 host:

There are two main parts.

First you need to configure IIS correctly. To do this you will need to enable to following subcomponents of IIS:
…
The second part is that you need to run Internet Explorer ‘as administrator’ by right clicking on it and selecting ‘Run as administrator’.

Read the whole article at source.