Year: 2006

Hello everybody.

I would spend just 1 minute to introduce you 3 new/revamped virtualization.info features:

• Virtualization Industry Radar
  After the Virtualization Industry Roadmap here’s the Radar: the complete list of companies involved in application and server virtualization markets that virtualization.info monitors on daily basis.
• Monthly archives
  Archives have been completely revamped: now, instead of publishing the complete body of all month’s posts (generating a huge, slow and hard to check page), you’ll just have the titles list for the month.
  I found myself this arrangement much more useful, bringing a immediate, easy to read picture of what happened so far.

  Try taking a look at the ongoing June archive.

• Search
  Also search has been revamped: it’s now much more precise, relying on Google Co-Op engine, and results has been integrated in the layout.
  Check it here.

I invite everybody reading this post by feed or email to spend 1 minute and check these changes online. I hope they will further improve usability and overall value of virtualization.info.

Many more things to come. Stay tuned!

Approaching the final launch of its free enterprise-class product, Server (formerly GSX Server), VMware is expanding the list of supported host and guest operating systems.

In this new build (27828) the support has been extended to:

• SUSE Linux 10.1 as host and guest OS (full support)
• 32-bit Ubuntu 6.x as host and guest OS (full support)
• 32-bit Sun Solaris 10.x as guest OS (full support)
• 32-bit and 64-bit FreeBSD 6.0 as guest OS (full support)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Update 8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 4 (experimental support)
• 64-bit Ubuntu 6.x as host and guest OS (experimental support)
• 64-bit Sun Solaris 10.x as guest OS (experimental support)

As you can notice the most notable change is the long awaited full support (yes, with VMware Tools) for Sun Solaris 10, initially made available in Virtual Infrastructure 3.

Read the complete Release Notes and download it here.

Scott Herold wrote a nice article about using upcoming free VMware Server to set up a low cost mirror machines for ESX Server 2.x installations:

…
With VMware’s pending release of VMware Server new opportunities for low cost disaster recovery are becoming available for enterprise environments. Many organizations are looking for a low-cost alternative to building a parallel VMware ESX Server infrastructure at a disaster site. VMware Server is adding an additional level of recoverability to virtual machines that would typically be ignored or delayed in the event of a disaster.

Taking a backed up virtual machine from VMware’s ESX Server isn’t as simple as restoring the data to a destination VMware Server system and powering it on. There are slight differences in the VMDK data files that need to be addressed before the virtual hard drive is in a format that is readable by VMware Server. The best part of the solution is that it can be done with a simple text editor…

Read the whole article at source.

From his blog Richard Garsthagen, Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, announced what probably is the most important change in the virtualization world these days: VMware modified it’s End User License Agreement (EULA) to permit publishing of benchmark tests on its products.

Quoting the referred part of EULA:

You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study. Please contact VMware at [email protected] to request such review.

This new arrangement doesn’t introduces real freedom in comparison tests since every company or independent analyst is subordinated to VMware, which may or may not agree on benchmarking approach (and not necessary being right).

It’s also evident VMware changed the EULA in this way to oblige the industry to agree on its own benchmarking methodology, which should be imminent now.

The whole move seems to contradict recent VMware efforts to standardize virtualization market.

A better approach in that direction would be publish an open benchmarking methology, which VMware, Microsoft, Xen, Parallels, SWsoft and others can approve, and which everybody can contribute submitting modifications. Then changing the EULA to permit benchmarks publishing only if based on the open source methodology.

I wonder what opinion SWsoft has on this, what opinions have other vendors, and most of all what customers really would like to have.

Comment on! VMware is reading.

At WinHEC 2006 Microsoft presented in details its new operating systems, Windows Vista and codename Longhorn, backup capabilities.
A new feature called CompletePC Backup will be able to produce a block level image of the whole machine while it’s running, thanks to the Volume Shadow Service (VSS), and restore it from bare metal, thanks to the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), even on different hardware.

The most interesting news for virtualization administrators is that the backup format used is .vhd, the virtual disk format used by Virtual PC and Virtual Server.
This should mean, even if Microsoft didn’t state it clearly, that anyone will be able to backup a running Vista or Longhorn and restore it inside a virtual machine. Which is a way to do physical to virtual (P2V) migration.

The idea of using backup capabilities for P2V tasks isn’t new: few months ago Acronis launched last version of its flagship product, TrueImage, with a new feature called Universal Restore, capable of modifying on the fly the HAL and other drivers needed by operating system during restore on virtual hardware.

Look at the WinHEC 2006 presentation Backup And Restore In Windows Vista And Windows Server Longhorn.

Quoting from the Intel patent application:

A method, apparatus and system for transparently unifying virtual machines (“VMs”) is disclosed. An embodiment of the present invention enables a user to interact with various applications on a VM host while unaware of the VM structure on the VM host.
The user may be presented with a unified desktop interface representing a composite and/or unified view of the VM host. Via this unified desktop interface, the user may perform all necessary commands and/or receive output. Invisible to the user, the unified desktop interface represents a unification console. The unification console may be an independent component (e.g., an enhanced VM) and/or a subset of a virtual machine manager (“VMM”) component on the VM host.
In either situation, the unification console may, alone and/or in conjunction with the VMM, route and/or redirect and/or transform and/or filter the user’s commands to the appropriate applications and redirect and/or copy and/or transform and/or filter the output from the applications to be displayed in the unified desktop interface…

Macsimum News wrote an extensive analysis of the application: part 1 and part 2.

Who worked with seamless windows technology in thin computing world should have a clear idea of how the whole thing will appear.

Mike Laverick published a notable 108-pages whitepaper for advanced users on how to perform an upgrade from ESX Server 2.x / VirtualCenter 1.x to new Virtual Infrastructure 3:

This guide is designed for people who already know ESX 2.x and VC 1.x very well.

It based on the “delta” two-day training that can be optionally attended for those people with prior experience. It also contains additional information beyond that course. This guide is certainly NOT for novices or new-users!

Although I’ve chosen to call this an upgrade guide, it’s by no means a definitive statement on upgrading. For that you need to read VMware documentation. I also view this guide as upgrade of skills as well as software.
It is not a comprehensive guide to ALL the differences – just the primary ones. I hope to make this guide gradually more comprehensive, and cover all new features. As you might gather there’s a lot marginal GUI like changes which are not included…

Even if it’s based on beta and RC builds no books are yet available on the topic so it’s the best resource out there right now.

Download it here.

Update: The guide has been updated to reflect VMware product final releases and has been expanded in several areas.

Quoting from TechWorld:

VMware’s virtualisation software, which leads the market by a considerable margin and is fast becoming the platform of choice for server consolidation projects, is too resource hungry, too slow and too expensive, according to the boss of a much smaller virtualisation company.

Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft which sells virtualisation product Virtuozzo, has slammed the virtualisation industry’s standard-bearer, saying that Virtuozzo’s OS shim-style virtualisation is better than VMware’s all round, in that customers can fit more virtual machines (VMs) into a server, and that it’s easier to manage and so costs less to run.
…
On the other hand, VMware reckons its approach is more robust. With Virtuozzo, if the OS kernel falls over, all the VMs are wiped out. This not possible with VMware’s ESX Server because each OS is self-contained and runs above a VMware hypervisor.

“VMware is I/O intensive”, he said, claiming that its overhead could be 5-10x higher then that of his own product. “The problem is that you cannot find out because the VMware licence agreement means you can’t publish performance comparisons,” he said.

Read the full article at source.

This article’s affirmations should be read in pair with SWsoft reporting about Microsoft TechEd 2006 attendees interest in Virtuozzo.

Claims about performances are very interesting: while VMware licensing prevents public publishing of benchmark comparison (something could change soon), I would be glad to read any SWsoft internal analysis and testimony to virtualization.info readers what I found out.

After hearing some debatable claiming from a Microsoft salesman (something Microsoft should start to control much more carefully), Geert Baeke wrote a piece about how differently virtual machines high availability (achieved with host OS clustering) is treated in a Virtual Server 2005 R2 infrastructure and in a ESX Server 3.0 + VirtualCenter 2.0 + VMotion.

The article exposes true differences and it’s worth to read, but approach it carefully. Going beyond a mere technical point of view I would object the comparison should not even take place considering that VMware solution in the scenario starts from 5,750 dollars. Virtual Server offers weaker high availability capabilities but it costs zero.

The real problem is Microsoft insists to compare Virtual Server to VMware ESX Server + VirtualCenter (now called Virtual Infrastructure). It’s not the case. And everybody in the market should avoid to mimic such bad marketing approach.
Let’s compare Virtual Server 2005 R2 with upcoming VMware Server 1.0. That would be much more honest.

The SWsoft blog about Virtuozzo published a small but interesting report of customer interest at just concluded Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference:

• A lot more people are using virtualization compared to TechEd 2005. 80% are using virtualization and 100% are evaluating it for deployments – compared to 50% and 60-70% respectively at TechEd 2005
• VMware users were much more interested to alternative approaches. Last year VMware users may or may not have had the time to talk to us… this year they did
• Hardware virtualization is still used mostly for testing and development. Only about 25% or less of the people I talked to use it in production
• About 80% of the production hardware virtualization users mention “OS sprawl” either as a problem they’re dealing with now or something they’re anticipating in the near future

Read the whole article at source.

I would further investigate why customers could be start looking for alternatives. In this other article SWsoft suggests reasons.