Year: 2006

GRIDtoday published an interesting interview with Kevin Haar, CEO at Appistry, about the complimentary nature of grid computing and virtualization, and how these two technologies — along with some others — play a key role in creating an application fabric.

Read the whole interview at source.

I wrote a piece about grid computing some months ago: Virtualization is the first step of a long walk called Grid Computing.

While the full agenda still has to be published VMware provided some hints about hot topics of this year VMworld conference.

Apart obvious massive presence of sessions about just released VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3), the company will show a preview of Assured Computing Environment (ACE) 2.0 and will possibly release Workstation 6.0, anticipating what customers will see in subsequent releases.

Customers expect the release of Workstation 6.0 hoping VMware will broaden host OS support finally including the much acclaimed Apple Mac OS X for Intel architectures, where Parallels Desktop is now the only virtualization solution available.

Also around ACE 2.0 there are some expectations, considering the product has not been updated since one year and now VMware is talking about virtual appliance authoring.

At the moment the are no mentions to other two very interesting products expected from the company: a virtual machines provisioning solution, coming from the acquisition of Akimbi, and a much more misterious security tool dubbed Integrity which virtualization.info discovered last month.

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

IBM today announced the company’s mainframe and POWER-based virtualization technologies have achieved one of the computer industry’s most stringent security certifications, illustrating IBM’s virtualization leadership.

In the security certification — known as the Common Criteria’s Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) — IBM achieved one of the highest levels of certification for logical partitioning, IBM’s premier virtualization technology used by its servers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously.

IBM’s mainframe logical partitioning technology received a Level 5 rating, IBM’s POWER-based virtualization received a 4+ rating.

Before IBM only VMware submitted its products to Common Criteria evaluation, obtaining the EAL 2 certification for ESX Server 2.5.0 and Virtual Center 1.2.0.

The value of Common Criteria is concrete, even if a great security expert like Bruce Schneier have a different opinion.
As Richard Bejtlich correctly noted everything depends on Protection Profile, which can be declared in a sharp way to easily obtain the certification.

Quoting from the Devon IT official announcement:

Devon IT and Mainline Information Systems today announced a virtual desktop and thin client terminal bundle using VMware ESX. This comprehensive virtualization solution is available through Mainline Information Systems with IBM eServer xSeries Systems or IBM BladeCenters.
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With VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure in place, anytime someone needs a new computer, it is easy and inexpensive to create a desktop with a thin client. The new user can use remote desktop protocol (RDP) to connect to a virtual XP machine. This bundled solution is available for under $1000 per desktop…

Quoting from Webwereld:

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VMware is expected to announce within two weeks the date of its first customer conference to be held in Australia.

Paul Harapin, VMware Australia/New Zealand managing director, said local interest in virtualization technology is so strong customers “contact us constantly”.
Harapin said adoption rates have been high and as a result virtualization maturity in Australia is on par with the US.
A little over a year ago VMware had three staff in Australia, Harapin said, and numbers have increased ten-fold since then…

Read the whole article at source.

Ron Oglesby wrote a very long and detailed article about VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) initiative, exposing scenarios where it fits better than Microsoft Terminal Services / Citrix Presentation Server solutions:

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In this article, we’ll quickly go through an example use case that a VDI solution will fit almost perfectly and the types of use cases where it doesn’t fit. (When VDI doesn’t fit it’s generally for cost reasons. I mean it would be great to have multi-node clusters for every server on the network but we don’t do it because of cost.) Once we look at the history of SBC and when to use VDI, I’ll then draw a “pie in the sky” VDI solution from the bottom level (the VMs) all the way to the top level (the management tools). I’ll note the components of the solution that are already available and, more importantly, describe in detail the components do not exist yet that are being looked at by numerous vendors…

It’s worth to read.

A new no-critical security flaw has been published by Secunia:

A security issue has been reported in VMware, which potentially can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain knowledge of sensitive information.

The problem is caused due to missing return code checks of the “chmod()” call in vmware-config.pl when setting permissions for SSL key files. This may potentially result in insecure read permissions being set on the key file.

Read the VMware original advisory and patch your systems as soon as possible.

As you probably read everywhere on the net yesterday the worldwide famous Winternals (and its freeware arm Sysinternals) has been acquired by Microsoft.

Its creators, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, will conseguently be part of the company and Mark will occupy the top role of Technical Fellow.

In this new position he will guide and influence Microsoft in several areas included virtualization, as he suggested on his Sysinternals blog:

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That’s what makes being acquired by Microsoft especially exciting and rewarding. I’m joining Microsoft as a technical fellow in the Platform and Services Division, which is the division that includes the Core Operating Systems Division, Windows Client and Windows Live, and Windows Server and Tools. I’ll therefore be working on challenging projects that span the entire Windows product line and directly influence subsequent generations of the most important operating system on the planet. From security to virtualization to performance to a more manageable application model, there’s no end of interesting areas to explore and innovate…

Read the whole post at source.

Few months ago Acronis announced its last bare-metal backup solution, TrueImage 9.1, with a new feature called Universal Restore, able to serve as P2V migration tool when restoring an image inside a virtual machine.

Now Symantec announces some notable changes in its well known LiveState backup solution, including a new add-on module called Restore Anywhere, clear answer to Acronis Universal Restore:

Symantec Corp. today introduced Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery , which incorporates functionality from Symantec LiveState Recovery with new, simplified deployment, delivering comprehensive, disk-based Windows system protection. As a stand alone solution, Backup Exec System Recovery complements Backup Exec for Windows Servers, which is optimized for data protection.
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Flexibility is also enhanced by allowing administrators to perform system restorations even if there is no hardware available by restoring recovery points to virtual environments in VMware (P2V). When new hardware is available, or existing hardware is repaired, the servers can easily be restored from a virtual machine back to a physical machine without impacting business continuity (V2P)…

I expect Microsoft to announce something similar even without launching a new product, since a backup feature, CompletePC Backup, recently introduced in upcoming Windows Vista saves the physical computer image in .vhd format (used by Virtual Server 2005 to store virtual machines).

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of software solutions for creating and managing virtual infrastructure, today announced the appointment of Matthew Connon as vice president of business development.
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Connon joins Virtual Iron from Fast Search & Transfer Inc., a $100 million, publicly-traded, enterprise search software company, where he was most recently vice president of OEM sales. At Virtual Iron, Connon will lead the company’s efforts to expand its OEM and reseller relationships with strategic global partners and global consulting firms…