Year: 2006

Cassatt introduces today (but delivers from December 29th) a major update in its management solution Collage.

The Collage 4.0 Cross Virtualization Manager (XVM) component now extends support to VMware ESX Server 3.0, Xen 3.0 and XenSource XenEnterprise 3.0 platforms, but also includes a new Network Virtualization Service (NVS) able to dynamically provision network resources to a pool of virtual machines.

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

Quoting from the Hyperic official announcement:

Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, announced today the availability of the industry’s first virtualization management solution Hyperic HQ for VMware. This pioneering solution enables data centers to consolidate complete discovery, monitoring, analysis and control of all application, system and network assets, both inside and outside of the virtual machines powered by VMware.
…
The complete Hyperic HQ for VMware product is now available to all data centers via open source licensing at www.hyperic.com. Hyperic HQ for VMware supports VMware GSX Server and VMware ESX Server 2 and 3…

Quoting from the Availigent official announcement:

Availigent, a leading provider of Application Service Management software for Linux-based, dynamic data centers, said today it has signed an Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) agreement with XenSource, Inc. to provide an integrated application management solution. The agreement will integrate Availigent’s Duration virtual application management software with XenSource’s XenEnterprise, a platform virtualization solution.
…
Duration uses unique, rule-based Application Virtualization technology to provide application monitoring, fault detection and stateful recovery of Linux applications without application or OS kernel modifications…

Geert Baeke published a short but insightful review of new VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) introduced in VMware Infrastructure 3.

Company marketing material doesn’t clarify in details how this feature works and several customers may find odd its approach. This technical overview provides a better understanding.

Read it here.

InfoWorld Test Center published an extensive review of version of VMware ESX Server and VirtualCenter, now blend under the name of Infrastructure 3.

The product achieved a score of 8.7/10 and InfoWorld concluded saying that:

VI3 reinforces VMware’s standing as the leading virtualization platform vendor. Plenty of new features including iSCSI support and Distributed Resource Scheduler, as well as improved performance, will grease the wheels of server virtualization in enterprise datacenters. VI3 does have rough edges, including the absence of 10-Gig support, but overall it’s a hit.

Read the whole review at source.

Quoting from IT Business:

Most Canadian enterprises are achieving about half the consolidation ratios per processor that vendors claim virtualization will bring, according to a report published by Info-Tech Research on Wednesday.
…
visits or in-depth phone interviews with more than 30 companies two months ago, Info-Tech concluded that vendors are exaggerating the number of servers that can actually be consolidated through virtualization, inflating the technology’s potential…

Read the whole article at source.

While not expliclty said, this article is clearly referring to VMware, the only virtualization vendors who indicates in official documentation average expected VMs/core consolidation ratio, depending on chosen product.

In years Microsoft never declared such value, which highly depends on several factors but it’s critical for customers when facing return on investment calculations.
Xen development team and commercial companies offering it, XenSource and Virtual Iron, didn’t as well. And neither the russian start-up Parallels ever expressed a position about this topic, even if they are still focused only on desktop virtualization where this value is not fundamental.

While it’s possible VMware reported a too optimistic value, it’s worth to remember that a certain VMs/core ratio is achievable only approaching a virtualization project with enough knowledge: the most delicate part in server consolidation projects is recognizing physical server candidates for P2V migration and architecting the virtual datacenter accordingly.

Skilled virtualization architects know that migrated services need to be arranged in a rational way inside virtualization platforms, trying to balance low and high workloads together.
Most of times missing suggested consolidation ratio depends on a poor design.

Parallels continues to release updates to its virtualization solution for Apple Mac OS at a frenetic pace.
It’s evident they aim to release this new version for upcoming MacWorld in San Francisco, planned for 8th January.

The new build (3036) introduces:

• a display rendering feature called Coherence, mimicking seamless application approach introduced by Citrix in remote desktop, able to show Windows applications inside a virtual machine as part of the underlying Mac OS desktop
  (check a nice screencast here)
• a P2V/V2V migration tool called Transporter, able to migrate physical PCs and VMware/Microsoft virtual machines
• drag & drop between Windows guest OSes and Mac host OS
• capability to virtualize a Windows partition made with Apple BootCamp
• a new user interface with a virtual machines catalogue

Download the new beta here.

Meanwhile Apple continues to deny they are working on native virtualization capabilities for new Mac OS release, codename Leopard.

After its launch in summer 2006, Sentillion launches second release of its vThere, a security wrapper for desktop virtualization platforms.

At the end of November the company replaced the underlying virtualization engine, moving from VMware Player to emerging Parallels Workstation.
Now vThere 2.0 introduces notable features:

• Enhanced Image Compression
  Improved vThere image compression to provide rapid download of vThere images allows for even faster rollout of the technology to large numbers of remote workers, including teleworkers, branch office employees, contractors, business partners or temporarily displaced employees who require immediate access to corporate
• A securely-hosted Web site for image distribution
  Through www.vThere.net, organizations can quickly provision vThere images to remote users. Users can download and access their vThere images through a simple one-click process
• Centralized Activation Management
  Activations of vThere images can be managed centrally, allowing for license management control, de-provisioning of images and management reporting
• Image Revocation services
  vThere images can be automatically revoked from the end-user computing device according to system administrator policies for employee termination or as needed
• Centralized Policy Management
  Improved capabilities for managing security privileges and access policies associated with vThere images, such as file sharing and local USB port access
• Location specific computing
  vThere will detect whether the image is being accessed remotely or on the enterprise network and manage the network access automatically

Pricing for Sentillion’s vThere solution is $125 per user. The vThere image creator toolkit is $795 per administrator workstation. vThere 2.0 is available immediately.

vThere is the only competitor of VMware ACE in years, and considering the weak marketing message of VMware for its youngest product, there is a real chance Sentillion and Parallels have a real opportunity to gain market shares against the Palo Alto company. Mostly considering raising trends in endpoing security.

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

Once again Ben Armstrong, Program Manager of Virtual Machine Team at Microsoft, provides a veru useful tip for Virtual PC customers:

In Connectix Virtual PC 5.0 we moved to using a new BIOS and also moved from the 430TX chipset to the 440BX chipset.

One problem that this caused was that Windows virtual machines created on earlier versions of Virtual PC would not boot because they could not find the chipset they were looking for. The solution we came up with was simple. When booting a virtual machine would check the version information on the virtual hard disk, if the virtual hard disk was created with an earlier version of Virtual PC we would change the identifier on the motherboard chipset to the 430TX identifier (even though we were still emulating the 440BX chipset).

It turned out that this work just fine.

Dennis Zimmer released a free tool able to convert VMware ESX Server 2.x virtual machines in VMware Server ones, so it can be used as cheap disaster recovery site if ESX suffers a fault.

Download it, free of charge, for command prompt or GUI.

It’s worth to remember this task will be achievable as well with the upcoming VMware Converter 3.0, now in beta.