Year: 2006

Summary
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is Microsoft’s server-side virtualization product. Virtual Server has been designed to allow users a great deal of power and flexibility in hosting virtual machines in mission-critical Enterprise deployments without having to invest in additional hardware.

In this clear and concise book, Microsoft MVP Anil Desai discusses the benefits of virtualization technology and covers the essentials of working with Virtual Server 2005, including installation, configuration, creating a virtual machine, and installing a guest operating system. It covers the technical architecture of Virtual Server, topics related to disk, CPU, memory, and network resources, as well as procedures for administering host and guest operating systems.

While this book is a superb introduction to Virtual Server 2005, it also covers advanced topics, such as the methods and practices for improving host resource utilization and for monitoring virtual machine performance. This book is the recommended prerequisite reading for the forthcoming book from Rational Press, The Rational Guide To Scripting Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, which focuses on programming Virtual Server 2005 with scripting and automation.

Technical accuracy is assured by Mike Sterling, Program Manager on the Windows Virtualization team at Microsoft.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Benefits of Virtualization
• Chapter 2 – Virtualization Concepts
• Chapter 3 – Planning for Virtualization
• Chapter 4 – Installing and Configuring Virtual Server
• Chapter 5 – Setting Up a New Virtual Machine
• Chapter 6 – Configuring Virtual Machine Hardware
• Chapter 7 – Understanding Virtual Disk Architecture
• Chapter 8 – Networking Architecture
• Chapter 9 – Virtual Server Security
• Chapter 10 – Managing CPU and Memory Resources

Abouth the Author
Anil Desai, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a Microsoft MVP in the area of “Windows – Servers.” As an independent consultant based in Austin, TX, Anil specializes in evaluating, implementing, and managing solutions based on Microsoft technologies. He has worked extensively with Microsoft’s Server products and the .NET development platform.

Anil is the author of numerous technical books focusing on the Windows Server Platform, Virtualization, Active Directory, SQL Server 2000, and IT management. He has made dozens of conference presentations at national events and is also a contributor to technical magazines.

Read the virtualization.info review.

VMware is finally approaching the release of Server (formerly GSX Server) launching a new build (24927) labeled as release candidate 1.

Apart bug fixes this build provides:

• Enhanced performance optimizations
• Experimental support for SUSE Linux 10.1 as guest and host operating system
• Experimental support for 32-bit and 64-bit FreeBSD 6.0 as guest operating systems

Download it here.

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

Quoting from CRN:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will enter beta testing in late July and ship in December, executives said Wednesday.

Beta 1 of the server is slated to be available in late July and Beta 2 – which will incorporate the Fedora Core 6 build — is planned for release in mid September, said Daniel Riek, a product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, based in Westford, Mass.
…
RHEL 5 will include core virtualization based on the Xen open source virtualization hypervisor as well as integration with the company’s directory and certificate servers. It will also offer support for Intel and AMD virtualization extensions, stateless Linux clients, single sign-on and an improved driver model for third party ISVs
…
“The release schedule depends on Xen readiness … It’s the only real gatekeeper on the schedule,” Carr said. “If Xen isn’t ready, we’ll wait until it is and there isn’t anything else we’ll wait for.”…

Read the whole article at source.

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

Techworld published a nice article about the lack of mature management tools for various aspects of virtualization, which is something I strongly agree with:

…
But as virtual machine technology moves out of development labs and into production server environments in large numbers, some administrators are finding that the growth of virtual servers is getting ahead of the tools available to effectively manage them.

Existing server-monitoring tools are increasingly aware of virtual servers, but most aren’t yet sophisticated enough to interpret feedback in a virtual machine context.
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“Some of the things you monitor no longer mean the same thing,”
…
For many organisations, identifying the root cause of virtual server problems and rectifying them remains largely a manual process. As the number of virtual machines in the data centre increases, solving those problems in an automated way becomes more urgent.

Performance monitoring is just one aspect of virtual machine management. Other tasks include optimising the mix of virtual machines that should reside on each physical server to achieve the best possible performance; automating virtual machine provisioning, load balancing, patch management, configuration management and fail-over; and enabling policy-based orchestration to automatically trigger the appropriate responses to events…

Read the whole article at source.

Processor published an article on the same theme:

…
“The trend toward server consolidation is an attempt on the part of IT departments to try to reduce the number of servers to reduce some of the complexity,” says Susan Davis, a vice president of strategy at Egenera. “However, as virtual machine technology becomes more widely used, the complexity problem could actually get worse. As an example, if today a company is managing 100 servers, in the future they may need to manage 1,000 virtual machines—thus adding complexity.”
…
Vishria notes that virtualization costs only add to the perception of complexity. According to Vishria, a driving force behind virtualization is that, while hardware costs have plummeted in a six-to-nine-fold reversal from just a few years ago, labor costs have risen three times as high as they were in 2000. Meanwhile, while SMEs are investing about 3% of their budgets on hardware each year, labor costs have grown to 10% of budgets and will continue to escalate. Virtualization addresses the rising labor cost issues, but the confusion comes in when data centers consider the fact that adding a new Dell PowerEdge server is cheaper than ever…

Read the whole article at source.

A third one appeared on SearchOpenSource:

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Key vendors like IBM, Microsoft, VMware Inc., XenSource Inc., Virtual Iron Software Inc. and others are hard at work on management tools, and several are on the verge of releasing beta versions. But fully formed server virtualization management tools will be unavailable until probably sometime next year.

Specific gaps identified by analysts and users include tools to facilitate patch management, x86-based server aggregation, backup and restore management, and workload balancing optimized for virtual servers. With the gaps identified, forthcoming management tools have been scheduled for release…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

IBM today announced new software that assists customers in virtualizing their entire technology infrastructure by tracking the use of computing assets across different types of systems. The software also supplies companies and IT outsourcing providers with a simple method to bill internal departments or individual clients for the amount of computing they actually consume.
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The Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager is designed to simplify how IT outsourcing companies track virtualized data centers used in outsourcing engagements, and accurately bill each of their clients. The software allows for virtualization of shared servers, and it eliminates the need for outsourcing companies to provide separate servers to each customer to help meet service level agreements.
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The software is also aimed at individual companies who manage their own virtualized IT by providing a simple way to bill internal departments that use shared computing resources. For example, a marketing department may have increased usage during a particular month because of a special promotion, and the IT department can accurately bill them for increased computing needs.
…
The IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager is currently available through IBM or IBM Business Partners for IBM x86 servers and the mainframe. The IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager will be available for System p server later this year. Pricing for the IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager for System X begins at $599 per server and $75,000 for mainframe customers in the United States…

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Quoting from the Parallels official announcement:

Parallels today announced the immediate availability of the release candidate 2 (RC2) of Parallels Desktop for Mac, the first virtualization software that gives Apple users the ability to simultaneously run Windows, Linux or any other operating system and their applications in a stable, secure high-performing, virtual machine alongside Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Apple computer.
…
As part of Parallels’ commitment to simplicity, and in response to many user requests, the company has integrated Parallels Compressor Server – a powerful management tool that can reduce the size of Windows 2000, XP or 2003 virtual hard disks by 50% or more – directly into Parallels Desktop.

The enhanced product will be available for sale at $79.99, $150 less than the cost of buying stand-alone copies of Parallels Desktop for $49.99 and Parallels Compressor Server for $179.99. As an extended promotion, Parallels plans to offer the enhanced product at $49.99 for 30-days following its release…

Read full Release Notes and download it here.

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

Quoting from Mac OS Rumors:

In recent weeks, the core feature set and low-level changes to the Mac OS X codebase have been firmed up in preparation for focused efforts to produce a “WWDC Preview” release in early August to be shared with developers in attendance of Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (Aug. 7-11).

This Preview Release will not include all of the high-level features and extra software that will be present in the final release due out next summer; nor will it be anywhere near production quality in terms of hardware support or crash-free reliability.
…
Apple is soon to introduce its “Mac Pro” line, which will sport Intel’s “Conroe” desktop Core 2 Extreme processors with up to two four-core processors for a total of eight CPUs.
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Core OS changes Although many details of the new Darwin/Core OS changelog are heavily embargoed for obvious reasons with the WWDC Release still being two months away and the final Leopard release still a year off, we can summarize a few of the less closely guarded improvements being made according to sources in Cupertino:

• …
• Simultaneous (e.g. not dual-boot) operating system virtualization technology derived from quiet efforts in this area at Apple over the past five years will allow Leopard owners to run OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris and other operating systems simultaneously with near-native performance and no need for third party software. This may help explain Microsoft’s lack of interest in developing VirtualPC for MacIntel…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:

The recovery of an entire Windows® server has never been an easy task. Today, Double-Take® Software and PlateSpin formed a partnership to offer centralized backup of entire Windows servers with a full recovery solution that is fast, flexible and hardware-independent. Customers using Double-Take by Double-Take Software coupled with PlateSpin PowerConvert experience continuous, whole-server protection and bare-metal recovery.
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The complementary solution from Double-Take Software and PlateSpin is optimal for disaster recovery because it creates a copy of an entire server, including the OS, applications and data. The server and its applications can be replicated locally or across long-distance WAN connections, to a central backup repository. Systems can then be quickly restored to the same or different hardware, or even to a virtual machine. The simple recovery process leverages Double-Take real-time protection capability for a continuously updated copy of the data and PlateSpin PowerConvert’s OS Portability technology which provides hardware independent restore, eliminating the need to reinstall or reconfigure a failed system.

Traditional imaging or backup solutions require recovery to identical hardware or data protection involving point-in-time based image captures. This results in out-of-date image archives requiring administrators to manually reinstall and reconfigure the server’s OS and applications before recovery can occur. The time to recovery can usually take hours and even days in some situations…

Quoting from World Peace Herald:

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Experts tell UPI’s Networking that more than 45 percent of servers in corporate networks purchased in the coming year will be “virtualized,”
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According to another research firm, New York-based TheInfoPro Inc., nearly 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies are now in the process of “virtualizing” their servers, and another 30 percent are developing plans to do so. That means nearly all large companies are pushing the trend.

The market, consequently, for software to service this movement is big, and will be $15 billion by 2009, according to research from International Data Corp…

Read the whole article at source.