Year: 2006

Quoting from the Stratus official announcement:

Stratus Technologies, Inc., a leader in IT technology and services for continuous availability, and XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen™ hypervisor, today announced they have signed a collaborative agreement with the goal of fusing continuous availability and virtualization technologies to create new IT infrastructure solutions with superior reliability, flexibility and manageability.
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Under terms of the non-exclusive agreement, Stratus will work with XenSource to include XenEnterprise as an integral component in Stratus’ Continuous Processing architecture…

Number of vendors ready to offer management tools for virtualization platforms continues to raise. The last one is Managed Objects which is expected to announce a new solution in 2007, as reported by IT Week:

IT management software specialist Managed Objects has revealed plans for a new suite specially designed for monitoring and managing virtual machines.
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Speaking exclusively to IT Week, Managed Objects’ president and CEO Siki Giunta said the rapid adoption of virtualisation software by many firms meant there would soon be a surge in demand for software capable of monitoring how virtualised systems impact business processes.
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“We want to be there with a product when companies realise they need that management. There will definitely be a big announcement in 2007.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Mike Laverick published a long (1h 20m) interview with Patrick Lin, Director of Product Managementm Datacentre Platforms at VMware, and Michael Di Petrillo, Senior System Engineer for the VMware Competitive Intelligence Team.

The interview is very technical and aims to answer several questions raised in VMTN forums, where Mike often provides support.

You may want to check list of questions Mike submitted before listen the whole interview.

Ruben Spruijt, Senior Consultant for PQR, wrote a 8 pages comparative overview between Microsoft SoftGrid, Altiris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) and Citrix Streaming Server (codename Tarpon).

It’s just a comparison of technology approaches, without in-depth evalutation of architectures or performances.
And it’s only partially reliable since the Citrix Streaming Server is still in early development stage, with a planned release for H1 2007, with a subsequent change (introduction of PortICA protocol for Windows) in architecture in H2 2007.
But it may still be interesting for who has no idea of how these products work.

Read it at source.

Kimbro Staken, CTO at JumpBox, published on the corporate blog a procedure to convert a VMware virtual machine image in something working with Parallels virtualization products.

The whole process depends on QEMU capability to understand a .vmdk format and translate it in a raw hard disk image. It also has several major issues:

• once migrated guest OS will not necessarly recognize new hardware exposed by Parallels, it depends on how many drivers are installed
• if the original VMware hardware included virtual SCSI it will not work at all, since Parallels only support virtual IDE
• if the original VMware virtual machine image is splitted on several .vmdk files you have to join them together before converting

Please note that this approach would probably be even more painful when the guest OS is Windows.

If you are not doing an amatorial experiment I strongly recommend choosing a more reliable solution, able to adapt a saved hard disk image to any underlying hardware (something usually called V2V migration). Or wait for Parallels Transporter.

Quoting from JumpBox official announcement:

JumpBox, a new virtual appliance development service, announced today that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program. JumpBox virtual appliances are a way to simplify and speed up the deployment of server-based software both for the software vendor as well as the consumer…

At the moment JumpBox just offers a beta virtual appliance called vTiger, a customer relationship management solution, available for VMware, Xen and Parallels virtualization platforms.

Processor.com published a short but very useful interview with Raghu Raghuram, Vice President for Products and Solutions Marketing at VMware, about common errors of virtualization newcomers:

• Not setting up a good system to track testing before deployment
• Not building enough redundancy into the hardware powering your virtual machines
• Not changing your process workflows to account for virtualization
• Failing to account for virtualization in disaster recovery preparation

Unfortunately such errors happen more frequently in small businesses where, even wanting, budget constrains limit capability to follow some of these precious advices.
So a last warning emerges: virtualization saves big money but the path towards it is not cheap. Even with free virtualization products.

The VMware Technology Alliance Partner ThinPrint, a german company focused on mobility and printing solutions for enterprises, released a special version of its flagship product, .print, for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) environments based on VMware Infrastructure 3.

The solution abstracts real drivers, automatically providing a virtual printer into VDI virtual desktops, compressing on the fly to-be-printed documents and sending them to a remote computer (real or virtual as well) where real printer drivers are installed.

The best feature probably is ability to work in 32 and 64bits environments, since not every printer available today is provided with drivers for new architecture.

Check a demo here.

A recent SearchServerVirtualization article is rather interesting, reporting a survey made among readers reveals 40% VMware customers also uses Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

No reasons are provided to explain this overlapping but in my experience virtualization customers implements both technologies to understand which one is easier to manager, or better integrates in their own infrastructure, or has better performances. More rarely it just depends on political reasons, to avoid vendor lock-ins or to blindly follow advices from preferred system integrator.

The article is also interesting because it implictly compares Microsoft Virtual Server with VMware ESX Server, and reports customer prefer the former when:

• are unfamiliar with Linux (needed to do basic administration under ESX)
• need a faster and cheaper starting solution (since Virtual Server is free of charge)

This comparison is pretty odd since VMware releases Server (formerly GSX Server) which is as free as Virtual Server 2005, and it’s available both for Linux and Windows, so companies using only Microsoft technologies still can spend their knowledge without wasting time in new training.

The inappropriate similarity between VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is unfortunately pretty common and depends on several factors:

• VMware poor marketing message, snubbing GSX Server since ever and pushing ESX Server as the only reliable enough product to be used in production
• Microsoft misleading marketing message, pushing Virtual Server as really able to compete with ESX Server (which, as said so many times, is not the case)
• Hundreds of consultants and tents of journalists, poorly skilled on one or another product, spreading confusing messages to already confused customers

Next version of Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES), actually offering Netware 7 directory services on top of Linux OS, will include Xen and support for the just announced ZENworks Virtual Machine Management.

OES 2 is expected in Q2 2007 and may feature improved Windows guest OSes performances, thanks to the recent company agreement with Microsoft.