Year: 2006

Veeam Software, a new russian startup, just launched a tool to centrally monitor performances and resource usage of multiple VMware virtual machines, both in Server and Workstation in Windows environments.

The tool reports live graphs 5 resources:

• CPU
• Memory
• Hard Disk
• Paging
• Internal \ External networking

Note that some of these values (virtual memory, disk and network) can be tracked with Windows Performance Monitor, even if Veeam Monitor simplify counters setup and recognition of virtual machines.

The price of Veeam Monitor for VMware Server is $200 and Veeam Monitor for VMware Workstation is $30.

Veeam also offers a free version for personal use only with VMware Workstation.

Download it here.

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

Veeam has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Ben Armstrong published another simple yet good hint for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 management:

…
On the computer without Virtual Server – copy VSSRVC.EXE from the computer with Virtual Server (out of the Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server directory) and run ‘VSSRVC.EXE –REGSERVER’. After you have done this you can delete the copy of VSSRVC.EXE. You know have the Virtual Server COM object registered on your computer and should be able to run VBScripts with no problems.

Be sure to read the original post for updates and comments.

Brian Madden published a BriForum 2006 session recording with Ron Oglesby about the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) topic.

The lecture presents a performance comparison between a Windows XP Professional running on VMware platform, running on Citrix platform, and running on Citrix inside VMware.

It doesn’t refer to measurements done with new VMware Infrastructure 3, but can still be pretty interesting for those are considering to adopt the VDI in production.

Watch the webcast at source.

On July 2006 VMware released its first free virtualization product aimed to business use: Server.

Born from the former GSX Server 3.2.1, this product offers enterprise-class features, reliability and flexibility, becoming a desirable choice for companies and high-level professionals.

VMware Server features are similar to ones provided by another famous product from VMware, Workstation, which during the years became the symbol of innovation in virtualization market.

Despite similarities in performances and feature set, Workstation is available only as commercial offering, while Server is available free of charge.
This difference leads customers to confusion and uncertainty when choosing the best product fitting their needs.

Adopted naming policy and company marketing message clearly imply Workstation is a product targeting a single user or small teams’ needs while Server is most suitable for companies needs, but at the moment VMware didn’t release any guide detailing products differences.

To bridge this gap virtualization.info compiled a comparison chart for last releases of these products, underlining existing differences in features set and reporting a small subset of notable similarities.

Download it here.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera, Inc., a global leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today announced that it has raised $26 million in a Series E round of funding. Led by Pharos Capital Group and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the round was completed at a significantly increased valuation over Egenera’s previous financing round. Along with new investors Pharos and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Egenera’s core major investors also participated in the round.

The Series E financing will be used to further accelerate the company’s global growth and to fuel technology innovations in virtualization and utility computing. With today’s announcement, Egenera has raised more than $150 million in private funding…

The SWsoft open source project OpenVZ today launched patched kernel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and an updated version of its main management component, vzctl, now able to assign multiple CPUs to virtual partions (at the moment available only for RHEL 4 partitions).

Download RHEL 4 patched kernel and vzctl here. .

Quoting from the SteelEye official announcement:

…
SteelEye Technology today reached another milestone in Linux application and data protection as it announced two new products.

The first is LifeKeeper™ for Linux v6, an update to its award-winning high availability clustering solution.
…
In addition to protecting VMware ESX Server 2.5, now LifeKeeper for Linux v6 adds management for applications and data residing in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell and VMware Infrastructure 3 systems…

After changing in its benchmarking policy, and while waiting the launch of VMmark, a complete benchmarking system for virtualization platforms, after years VMware starts to disclose some performance measurements on its products:

…
For this set of experiments, we compared a baseline running multiple WebSphere Application Servers on a single server to running each application server on a VMware virtual machine (VM) in a single server. This allowed for the simplest comparison configurations. Each server was separately administered, and each application executed independently, with no load balancing performed across the applications. A shared, non-virtualized, database was used by all applications.

For the baseline measurements in this paper, we chose to run multiple applications using separate application server instances. Running multiple application servers works well when a single server does not use the maximum performance of the server, that is, it cannot maximally utilize the CPU, memory, and other resources.

Another approach is to use virtualization to run multiple guests machines, each with a single instance of the application server. This approach was used for the VMware measurements in this paper. This approach provides greater isolation between the applications. For performance comparison purposes, these experiments ran WebSphere Application Server instances in each guest machine, however, virtualization also provides an opportunity to consolidate different types of applications…

Read the whole whitepaper at source.

Thanks to Run-Virtual for the news.

SearchServerVirtualization published an interview with VMware Vice President of Technology Development, Steve Herrod, which offered some hint for upgrading an ESX Server 2.x to the new VMware Infrastructure 3. Plus he provided some hints about future involvment of VMware in grid computing.

Read the whole interview at source.

At the same time of Workstation 5.5.2 VMware also released Player 1.0.2 (build 29634), with identical improvements.

Download it here.