Year: 2006

Quoting from the Intel official announcement:

Intel Corporation today announced that it is now providing VMware Inc. certified virtualization solutions for some of the company’s server platform and motherboard products.

For the first time, server vendors from around the world which participate in the Intel Enabled Server Acceleration Alliance (ESAA) program will have an opportunity to adopt and market VMware’s popular products to their IT customers.
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Intel ESAA platforms are now included on VMware’s hardware compatibility list, which expands the range of certified target platform for VMware Infrastructure to companies such as ACER, Bull, Compusys, HCL, Itautec, Gateway, Lenovo, Inspur, Maxdata, MPC, Powerleader, Samsung, Verari and WiPro…

Ardence application virtualization and streaming vendor released the fourth version of its platform.

The new product features an architectural redesign, granting increased scalability, and the new Common-Image functionality, allowing to stream an identical OS/application image to computers with different network interface cards (NICs), different chipsets and different audio and video cards.

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

From the same creators of Win4Lin a new product hits the first release: Win4BSD.

Win4BSD, just like Win4Lin, is a QEMU/KQEMU commercial repackage which currently allows customers to run Microsoft Windows on FreeBSD, PC-BSD and Desktop BSD.

Support for OpenBSD and NetBSD is expected in future releases.

This first release offers among others following features:

• One-Click-to-Windows provides extremely easy installation of Windows
• Runs Windows 2000/XP Applications and Desktop on BSD at near-native speed
• Ability to display either full desktop mode or “floating” application mode
• Full support for audio playback and recording

Download it here.

With this new release the Win4Lin company seems to re-organize itself under the new image of Virtual Bridges.

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

Quoting from the Cassatt official announcement:

Cassatt Corporation, an innovator in providing enterprise software to enable dynamic IT infrastructures, today announced a partnership with XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the Xen open source hypervisor, under which Cassatt will be able to sell XenEnterprise alongside Cassatt’s products.
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The Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM) is built using a vendor-neutral architecture, which will allow customers to host any combination of virtual machines. XVM will support XenEnterprise in the next release of the product later this calendar year…

Surgient released its new version of the management platform for Microsoft and VMware virtualization product.

Among new features:

• Support for heterogeneous virtual lab environments
  Lab configurations often require support from multiple virtual infrastructure technologies and can include virtual machine images of different types and versions. With Surgient v5.0, the deployment requirements for each image in a lab configuration become invisible to the end-user
• Advanced management capabilities and tools
  Version 5.0 of all Surgient Virtual Lab Management Applications include an entirely revamped management console with new capabilities for managing pooled servers and how those systems are dynamically allocated
• Enhanced reporting tools and data
  New reports in version 5.0 deliver information on lab usage, server usage, historical user activity, future reservations and predicted usage
• Enterprise virtual lab scalability
  Enterprise organizations can require hundreds or thousands of virtual servers to be deployed concurrently across multiple pre- and post-production functions
• SOAP XML Web services interfaces for advanced integration
  Version 5.0 includes a Web services API for advanced integration of virtual lab management capabilities with enterprise test management, learning management, live virtual classroom and other systems

Surgient prices the Workgroup edition beginning at $35,000.

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

Surprisingly VMware just published a new beta program enrollment page for a new product able to do physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations: VMware Converter.

The new tool seems to merge 2 existing solutions from the company: P2V Assistant, aimed at P2V operations, and Virtual Machine Importer, aimed at V2V operations.
But the most interesting thing is VMware Converter will feature live conversion capability (no need to shut down source machine to perform conversion), a feature at today offered only by PlateSpin with its PowerConvert 6.0.

The product is expected to support all VMware products as destination, including VMware Infrastructrure 3:

The beta is expected to begin in early October: enroll for it here.

Update: InternetNews revealed VMware will offer a free version of this new product, able to perform a conversion at a time.

The Enterprise edition, able to perform multiple migrations at the same time, will be aslo free but only for customers already purchasing VirtualCenter.

The product is expected to ship within 6 months.

Finally PlateSpin could have a serious competitor to front.

The long rumored minor update for VMware Infrastructure 3 is finally in shipment: the company Vice President of Technology Development, Steve Herrod, published on his corporate blog a long introduction to benefits of new 64bits support for several guest OSes:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Standard and Enterprise Server R2)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 64-bit (UP7, UP8)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit (UP2, UP3)
• SuSE Linux Server (SLES) 10 64-bit
• Sun Solaris 10 (U2)

As already reported in several previous posts this new build (32039 for ESX Server, 32042 for VirtualCenter) also introduces no downtime migration from ESX Server 2.x and new ESX Server 3.0.1.

Read the whole Release Notes here. Download it here.

Richard Garsthagen. Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, published on his blog an interesting statistics about raise of requests for virtualization jobs.

Richard mention an average increase of demand up to 68%, counting North America countries but also UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Norway.

As far as I can see the most notable absent is Germany, one of the most active european countries for virtualization since the very beginning.
But apart this missing it’s true the interest for virtualization professional figures is rising. You can check from yourself looking at published job announcements in the brand new virtualization.info Job Board.

Jase McCarty, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), published on his blog a notable trick to achieve on-the-fly modification of Microsoft Windows virtual machines templates in a VMware ESX Server with VirtualCenter infrastructure at deployment time:

What is my objective:
To be able to take a standard Clone, or Template, and deploy it with a root partition size greater than the original Clone, or Template, without using any third party tools.

Why is this useful:
By giving the ability to deploy Windows VM?s with variable sizes, less templates will be necessary, while being more flexible with regards to virtual disk space…

Read the whole paper at source.

Richard Garsthagen. Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, unofficially announced on his blog licensing strategy VMware will adopt since November about upcoming quad-core processors:

Effective November 1st VMware will update their licensing policy to define a ?processor? as up to four cores. Meaning if you buy a 2 way Quad Core server, you will only need a 2 processor license from VMware.