Year: 2006

Just a couple of weeks after announcing OpenVZ support in its HyperVM 1.2, Lxlabs today announces extended support for Xen and will further enlarge it to include previously unannounced Sun Solaris Containers and VMware products :

Lxlabs, a leading vendor of hosting related software, today announced that they have added full xen management capabilities to their virtualization software HyperVM, and claims that hyperVM is the first and only product offering both software level and hardware level virtualization in the industry today.
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The company also announced that it will support Solaris containers and Vmware in addition to MS Virtual Server, and thus offer the one umbrella solution that can handle every kind of virtualization scenario. The Solaris container support is expected to be released later this year.
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The company hopes that the key feature of hyperVM–the absolute transparent way in which it handles all the different technologies, enabling the customer to switch from one to another without even realizing that that their core technology has changed–will keep it unique in the market, stiff competition from more established players notwithstanding…

Quoting from the AppStream official announcement:

AppStream, Inc., a leader in on-demand application deployment and management, today named industry veteran, Gene Bonacci, as its new vice president of sales.

Bonacci is responsible for building and managing sales efforts and establishing sales and distribution channels throughout North America and Europe.
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Prior to joining AppStream, Bonacci was vice president of sales at Wyse Technology and has over 20 years proven sales management experience in the Information Technology industry.

SearchServerVirtualization published a good article about a never exposed benefit of virtualization: power saving and environmental impact reduction.

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The amount of electricity used, of course, depends upon the server. An efficient low-end server might use as little as 200 watts an hour, while a newer, more powerful server can consume 450 watts. Older servers can use well over 500 watts. In order to calculate the cost of running a server, we need to know the cost per kilowatt hour (KWH). Pacific Gas and Electric says that a good average for businesses in northern California is 15 to 17 cents, and rising. Because servers usually run 24 hours a day, seven days per week, that means the total electric cost per month (at 15 cents per KWH) to operate just one low-end server comes to $22; a newer server costs $38 and an inefficient server costs more than $50.
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Consider, for example, a data center populated with a mix of old and new servers of varying configurations with an estimated average total energy cost per month of $75 each. If the organization consolidates 100 physical servers onto six new two-CPU dual core servers, the net electric/power savings for the 94 virtualized servers comes to approximately $423,000 over five years. If the organization pays $6,000 for each physical server (including tax, shipping and set-up) and commonly refreshes servers once every five years, then additional savings of approximately $560,000 are realized over a five-year period for 94 servers that don’t need to be replaced. This is a combined savings over five years of almost $1 million.

There are additional long-term cost reductions with virtualization. New applications will reside on cost-effective virtual servers instead of new physical servers. This results in lower electric/power requirements and a reduction in network cards, network switches, SAN HBAs and maintenance contracts — not to mention a potential reduction in data center components such as air conditioners, PDUs and UPS devices. Because virtual machines require only about 33% of administrative time as their physical servers, there is a further significant reduction in the IT staff time required to support them….

Read the whole article at source.

Richard Garsthagen, Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, published on his blog another very interesting insight about inner parts of the new ESX Server 3.0.

This time he talks about the new GuestSDK:

Since the release of VI3, VMware has also introduced a GuestSDK. What they have done is open up VMware Tools so your own applications can talk to it and request information about the real outside world, especially about resource consumption. The nice thing about using the GuestSDK is that you can get information fast and very frequent. VMware support querying the VMware Tools for information by at least 4 times a second without major overhead and I have found out in practice you can go much higher then that…

Read the whole article and download his sample program: VMPerfMon.

Quoting from Business News:

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Virtualization and open source are the two technologies that are likely to have the most impact on Brazil in 2007, according to US tech consultancy Gartner.
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Speaking at Gartner’s annual future of technology conference in São Paulo, analyst Carl Claunch said that virtualization will have a proportionally bigger impact in Brazil compared to other Latin American countries due to the importance of mainframe computers in Brazil…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from CNET News:

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Red Hat hasn’t decided whether to use OpenVZ or Vserver, he added.

Xen is the priority for RHEL 5, due to arrive at the end of the year, but after that will come containers, Stevens said. “I’m looking at that as a RHEL 6 thing,” he said.
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Novell, which wants to maintain Suse’s reputation as the first place to find advanced new features for Linux, is more eager and is considering adding OpenVZ in Service Pack 1 of SLES 10. “We are still evaluating if this is something we can take into SP1,” said Holger Dyroff, vice president of Linux product management.

If containers don’t arrive with SLES 10 Service Pack 1, Novell will urge SWsoft to work with Linux programmers so that the software can be easily added to SLES 11, Dyroff said…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the LeftHand Networks official announcement:

LeftHand Networks, the leading provider of complete iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions built using patented network storage clustering technology, today announced support for VMware Infrastructure 3, which includes VMware ESX 3.0 Server and its native iSCSI initiator.
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When VMware and the LeftHand SAN are used in concert, complete server and storage environments are protected from hardware failure due to VMware’s ability to restart a virtual server on a different platform and LeftHand’s ability to stripe and mirror data across the cluster using SAN/iQ Network RAID…

Richard Garsthagen, Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, published on his blog details about a new experimental feature introduced with ESX Server 3.0: the Descheduler Time Accounting (DTA) service.

This service, which has to be installed with a custom setup and has to be manually activated, is an attempt to better control how time is calculated in virtual machines.

The most important point is not the service in itself but the fact erroneous time management impacts on virtualization benchmarks:

Having proper time reporting in a Virtual Machine as always been a challange and there are many ways to solve this. You can use the buildin Time Sync from VMware Tools or use things like Active Directory or NTP. For most applications this works fine, but if you want to run things like benchmark tools this is not sufficient. The more a Virtual Machine get stressed, the worse it’s time sync will go…

Read the whole article at source.

The fact VMware is trying to mitigate issues in performance measurements isn’t a surprise: the company is expected to announce a benchmarking system, dubbed VMmark, at VMworld 2006, in November.

But if time calculation impacts so much on benchmarks then a question raises: assuming every vendor is handling time in its virtualization platform in different ways, how VMmark or any other benchmarking system could really compare performances of different products’ virtual machines?

Quoting from the TeamQuest official announcement:

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TeamQuest Manager 9.2 now provides added support for VMware ESX Server 3.0 extending the company’s performance suite of software for next-generation data centers.
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As an example, a company using TeamQuest software in a virtualized environment can better understand utilization rates, discover how to optimize resources for their virtualized environment, and make informed purchasing decisions that align with their customers’ needs…

Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine published an introductory article about scripting with VBScript for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, covering:

• security
• provisioning
• networking
• virtual machines control

Read the whole article at source.

About this topic don’t forget to check tens of articles from Ben Armstrong and the book The Rational Guide to Scripting Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.