Year: 2006

Quoting from the SYS-CON India:

VMware announced plans to support paravirtualized Linux and Solaris x86 operating systems in future releases of VMware virtual infrastructure platform products — Workstation, GSX Server and ESX Server.
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“VMware’s support for paravirtualized Linux and Solaris x86 operating systems and our experience with enabling virtual operating environments for more than 10,000 enterprise server customers is consistent with our continued commitment to give customers greater choice,” said Jeffrey Engelmann, executive vice president of marketing at VMware.
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VMware’s support for these additional operating systems means more customers can gain additional leverage from using VMware’s management software VirtualCenter with VMotion technology across heterogeneous operating system environments. This further extends the applicability of VMware virtual infrastructure as an enterprise-wide strategy…

Read the whole article at source.

Note that the article quotes Mr. Engelmann statement but no official announcement has been made so far. It’s highly probable this news had to be disclosed no earlier than next week.

Following a trend started by Sun with its Grid (and evaluated by many other companies like Nortel), Amazon launched a public virtual computing facility: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The facility is powered by Xen, granting customers flexibility:

Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs

and full control:

You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth

courtesy of Cast Blog

In other words whole the Sun Grid permits customers to run submitted applications in the grid computing facility without direct access to Solaris Containers configuration, Amazon EC2 grants full control over virtual hardware, guest operating system, installed applications and even virtual network between virtual machines (as stated in the preliminary documentation).

The whole thing is remotely configured, launched and managed by web services, so I expect community made GUIs to appear very soon.

Exactly like the Sun Grid, Amazon EC2 has a pay-per-use model:

• $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed)
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic)
• $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3)

Amazon isn’t new to mass-scale virtualization projects since already launched its storage virtualization facility Simple Storage Service (S3) earlier this year.

Create an account to use EC2 here.

Personally I was expecting VMware to be the first launching such service, considering the company have all pieces to provide a similar offering:

• a datacenter-class virtualization platform (ESX Server 3.0)
• a datacenter-class management tool (VirtualCenter 2.0)
• a very promising automation solution, gained after Akimbi acquisition (Virtual Lab Manager 1.0, formerly Slingshot)
• a plethora of datacenter-class storage solutions, granted by its owner EMC

In no cases VMware could have a better chance to prove reliability of its own products.

Quoting from the The Register:

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This week we’ll be taking a look at the talented workers at two of our favorite start-ups – Nuova Systems and Montalvo Systems.
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Well, of special note, we’ve found VMware’s founder and former CTO Ed Bugnion – not pronounced ‘bunion’ – at Nuova as the start-up’s VP of engineering. Bugnion used to be a graduate student of fellow VMware founder and Stanford professor Mendel Rosenblum.

Nuova has managed to keep the nature of its products pretty quiet, although Bugnion’s presence helps confirm some of the rumors we’ve heard. Our sources claim Nuova is working on a virtualization system that would combine server, storage and networking technology in a single box. The system is meant to align with Cisco and Intel’s larger strategy around Data Center Ethernet (DCE).
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Broadly, DCE is a proposal to add more virtualization to networks and make it possible for myriad types of traffic to share Ethernet networks. It’s not hard to image a company such as Cisco seeing Nuova and DCE as a means of encroaching on the turf of Sun, IBM, HP and Dell. But Cisco would prefer you don’t think about that just yet.

Who else is at Nuova? Well, there’s Fabio Ingrao, the project lead for server start-up Fabric7. And there’s Dan Lenoski, the former VP of engineering at Cisco. You’ll also find a bunch of former Juniper, Netillion and Sun Microsystems executives. Quite the talented bunch…

Read the whole article at source.

Microsoft published its first paper about upcoming Virtual PC 2007:

Virtual PC 2007 is next version of Virtual PC and includes all the previous features and capabilities found in Virtual PC 2004, plus the following improvements:

• Optimized for Windows Vista
  The virtualization architecture has been optimized for Windows Vista to provide improvements in performance, system resource usage, and stability.
• Improved performance based on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2
  Virtual PC 2007 leverages the performance improvements introduced in Virtual Server 2005 R2.
• Provides support for 64-bit host operating systems
  You can run Virtual PC 2007 on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista. This means you can run 16-bit operating systems (such as Windows 98 SE) which are not supported natively on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista.
• Provides support for sound devices in Windows Vista guest operating systems
  Virtualized sound device drivers are available to Windows Vista guest operating systems. This allows Windows Vista guest operating systems to play sounds through the host operating system sound devices. Other guest operating systems will continue to have sound support as it exists in Virtual PC 2004 today.

Read the whole whitepaper at source as soon as possible: Microsoft inadvertently left some revision comments in the document, suggestion it shouldn’t appear online yet.

Thanks to VirtualServer.tv for the news.

VMware published a very interesting performance study on VMware Infrastructure 3 used as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI):

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The actual number of desktops that a specific configuration of servers can support varies depending on such hardware characteristics as the processor type, the amount of memory installed, the storage configuration, the network configuration, the remote protocol used, and the demands of individual users (typing speed, applications used, frequency of access, and so forth). We ran experiments to study two such workloads with clients using the RDP protocol for remote display…

Read the whole benchmark analysis at source.

Thanks to Puneet Chawla, R&D Engineer at VMware, for the news.

VMware published a technical note about requirements 3rd party tools should meet:

In general, VMware recommends that users avoid running third-party software in the VMware ESX Server service console.
Clear exceptions to this policy are software packages explicitly identified in ESX Server compatibility guides.

This technical note outlines the reasons for this recommendation and guidelines developers should follow when writing software to run in the ESX Server service console.

Read the whole whitepaper at source.

I would stress on the VMware recommends that users avoid running third-party software in the VMware ESX Server service console part.

Thanks to About-Virtualization for the news.

Christian Mohn discovered a critical update in the VMware EULA:

VMware has updated their VMware Tools EULA, effective immediately. This change makes it legal to redistribute the VMware Tools package inside a pre-packaged appliance as long as the base OS is Linux. This is a welcomed change that should make it easier to pre-package the tools package inside distributed appliances.

This change does not, however, allow the tools to be redistributed in an appliance running on Microsoft Windows, but the legal implications of redistributing an appliance with a Windows base is far more involved than just the VMware tools package….

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from ZDNet:

Analyst group Gartner believes that virtualisation will allow Microsoft to create a more flexible operating system platform in the future based around modularity.
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The claim, which has been rejected by Microsoft, stems from the argument that the current Windows architecture is unsustainable for Microsoft and its customers.
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In a research note released this week, Vista Will Be the Last Major Windows Release as We Know It, the analyst group claims that the trend of building ever more functionality into Windows may be reversed thanks to the virtualisation technology which will soon be integrated into the operating system…

Read the whole article at source.

After bitter statements around Xen maturity of these last weeks from Red Hat, Novell and XenSource itself, the company finally launches its first commercial product based on the open source hypervisor: XenEnterprise 1.0.

The product adds commercial grade features and support to Xen 3.0 and XenSource built around it also a sales channel infrastructure, a technical certification program and a much discussed agreement with Microsoft.

In this first release XenEnterprise introduces following features:

• Simplified installation and physical to virtual (P2V) tools
• Support for Intel Virtualization Technology (VT)
• Multiple Xen hosts management
• Real-time monitoring of server and guest performance
• Administrative console for Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell operating systems

Despite Intel VT help at the moment the product doesn’t support Microsoft Windows virtual machines, which is expected to be introduced in Q4 2006, along with other guests operating systems support and extended P2V capabilities.

Check an introductory demo of management interface here.

XenSource bases its licensing model on host machine processors number, introducing annual and perpetual subscription options, with volume discounts.

It has to be verifed if customers will accept to pay for a product which still doesn’t offer support for all operating systems and which is already expected to change.

At the moment XenEnterprise seems to bet on extended managent support capabilites, but this further exacerbate competition considering threat from upcoming multi-virtualization-platforms management tools, like Enomalism, HyperVM or SWsoft, newest Linux distribution from Novell and Red Hat, and direct competitor Virtual Iron.

In any case it’s a kind of ironic the company offers a product called Xen-Enterprise and its CEO claims just before the commercial launch the underlying engine isn’t ready for datacenter deployments.

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

After collecting huge success on Apple community for its Desktop 1.0, Parallels come back on the Windows/Linux front and open its Workstation 2.2 beta program, introducing support for AMD SVM virtualization extension.

Quoting from the Parallels official announcement:

Parallels announced it is beginning public beta testing for Parallels Workstation 2.2 for Windows and Linux, which delivers faster performance, better OS stability and stronger virtual machine isolation than previous versions.
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Key upgrades and new features in this Workstation 2.2 Beta include:

• A redesigned, more user-friendly interface
• Full support for AMD Secure Virtual Machine Technology (AMD SVM) that drives unmatched virtual machine speed, performance, stability and isolation on SVM-powered computers.
• Improved overall performance and stability.
• Support for primary OSes running on machines with up to 32 CPUs
• Shared Folders – easily share files and folders between operating systems
• Improved fullscreen mode that automatically resizes virtual machines to match your screen’s native resolution
• Support for dynamic primary OS video modes, custom video modes and 32 bpp video modes
• Full Unicode support lets users name files in any language
• Support for multi interface USB devices
• Full support for Windows Mobile 2005 devices
• The default network adapter automatically bridges to the most readily available network
• Change network and bridge type on the fly
• WiFi support for Linux primary OSes
• Better sound recording and playback
• Smoother mouse synchronization for primary Linux OSes
• Improved performance for Sun Solaris running in virtual machines
• NetBSD can now be run in a virtual machine as a guest OS
• Better USB support and performance
• A more powerful, easier to use Image Tool
• Easier installation on Linux primary OSes

Enroll the beta here.

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