Year: 2006

Quoting from the XenSource official announcement:

XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced the appointment of Larry M. Augustin to the company’s Board of Directors. A recognized industry expert, Mr. Augustin is one of the group who coined the term “Open Source”, and has written and spoken extensively on the subject worldwide. Mr. Augustin is currently an independent investor in and advisor to a variety of early stage technology companies.
…
Mr. Augustin currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Fonality, Hyperic, JBoss, Medsphere, OSDL, Pentaho, SugarCRM, and VA Software. Prior to becoming an independent investor, he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners. In 1993 Mr. Augustin founded VA Linux (now VA Software), where he served as CEO until August 2002 and led the company through an IPO in 1999. As a result of its success, in 2000, Worth Magazine named him to their list of the Top 50 CEOs…

PlateSpin just released a new version of its capacity planning tool, introducing a critical feature: the Consolidation Planning Module.

For the occasion published a dedicated press release:

PlateSpin today announced the general availability of the Consolidation Planning Module for PlateSpin PowerRecon, a completely automated analysis engine which determines optimal fit between application workloads and server resources.

The Consolidation Planning Module takes hardware, software and performance information gathered by PlateSpin PowerRecon, and automatically recommends an optimal allocation of servers to the most appropriate virtual hosts such as VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, or Microsoft Virtual Server.
…
The Consolidation Planning Module expands the capabilities of PlateSpin PowerRecon with the following features:

• Automatically analyzes the five critical dimensions of workload: CPU, Disk, Memory, Network, and Time across hundreds of servers simultaneously
• Target server templates allow users to input virtual host server characteristics of their preferred makes and models prior to purchasing them
• Modeling of virtual host utilization and allocation of VMs to those hosts
• Time-based analysis to stagger multiple workloads evenly across virtual hosts
• Automatically determines number of host servers required as target for a given set of physical servers to consolidate
• Analysis support for both Windows and Linux servers

…
The Consolidation Planning Module is available for purchase immediately. Existing customers with maintenance agreements can download the update from the web site at any time.

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

Quoting from the rPath official announcement:

rPath, provider of the first platform for creating and maintaining Linux software appliances, today announced it has been notified by Congressman Brad Miller’s office that it is a recipient of a $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Department of Energy (DOE).

rPath will use the grant to enable its rBuilder platform to create Xen virtual machine images for deployment in grid environments such as the Open Science Grid.
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rPath’s virtual appliance technology solves this problem by combining applications with their operating environments in virtual containers which can be run on any available grid…

During the Bill Gates keynote at WinHEC 2006 Microsoft demonstrated the new Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian), definitively called Windows Server Virtualization.

Jeff Woolsey, Window Virtualization Program Manager, showed:

• a migrated Virtual Server 2005 virtual machine inside the Windows Server Virtualization
• a running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 guest OS
• a running 64bit Windows Server 2003 guest OS powered with 2 virtual CPUs
• how to add or modifiy virtual hardware to a powered on virtual machine without downtime (in particular they added a virtual NIC and changed memory assignement from 4GBs to 5GBs)
• a running 64bit Windows Server codename Longhorn guest OS powered with 4 virtual CPUs

All of this from a dedicated Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in.

Microsoft also announced that Windows Server Virtualization will be able to live add storage to virtual machines and support up to 8 virtual CPUs.

Note that live modification of virtual hardware are features not provided by any virtualization vendor while more than 2 virtual SMP is offered just by Xen.

Later, during the Bob Muglia keynote the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager (codename Carmine) was demonstrated as well.

Eric Winner, Virtual Machine Manager Lead Program Manager, showed:

• how to perform a physical to virtual (P2V) migration
• how to provision new virtual machines from a masters’ library in an automatic way (through the Self Service Portal)
• how to redistribute virtual machines on physical hosts depending on workload

In his keynote Muglia also mentioned application virtualization (obviously referring to ongoing Softricity acquisition) and OS partitioning, mentioned by Microsoft itself 1 month before WinHEC.

The sneaking message is that Microsoft is going to provide all three major virtualization tecnologies in the Longhorn wave: server (or hardware) virtualization, OS partitioning and application virtualization.

Watch the Bill Gates keynote (Windows Server Virtualization is at minute 27:00) or read the transcript (Jeff Woolsey’s part).

Watch the Bob Muglia keynote (Virtualization and Virtual Machine Manager are at minute 33:00) or read the transcript (Eric Winner’s part).

Hear a Silicon Valley Sleuth podcast with Jim Ni, Windows Server Marketing Group Product Manager, about Microsoft virtualization strategy.

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

As Run-Virtual confirms, today VMware released the newest build for its mainstream solution, expected for early June.

Since the beta enrollment is closed now, there is no way to download the bits for who is not a beta tester.

Note that this build is not compatible with just released Virtual Machine Importer 2.0 beta refresh.

Cassatt released a 7-pages whitepaper about one of the biggest risk of early virtualization implementations: virtual machine sprawl.

Virtualization technology has tremendous potential to help control the spiraling cost of IT, but virtualization projects often don’t deliver the expected cost savings. The problem is not the concept of virtualization, but the lack of a management strategy that addresses all the costs that result from increasing the number of applications that share each server.

A comprehensive virtualization management strategy that addresses hardware, software, power, real estate, and administration costs is vital to realizing the costsaving potential of virtualization technology….

Download it here.

The Lone Sysadmin published an interesting report about Logical Block Addressing (LBA) issues with ESX Server 2.x (or ESX Server 3.0 beta) and EMC CLARiiON CX700s:

…
The problems I was having were caused by logical block addressing (LBA), a feature of the PC BIOS that reworks the disk geometry so that a disk always appears to have 1024 tracks/cylinders and 63 sectors per track/cylinder.
…
With VMware you get hit twice. Each virtual machine emulates LBA, too, and so each virtual machine is also misaligned by default. Coupled with the misalignment at the VMFS level you have a mess, and each I/O request made by a VM results in a lot of work at the lower level, as well as a lower cache hit ratio and fewer chances for I/O aggregation, write/read combining, etc…

Read the whole article at source.

Thanks to VMTN Blog for the news.

Quoting from the AMD official announcement:

As part of AMD’s ongoing commitment to deliver leading technology for desktop PCs, AMD today announced the immediate availability of the AMD Athlon™ 64 FX-62 dual-core processor, the world’s ultimate processor for PC enthusiasts, and the AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 5000+dual-core processor compatible with AMD’s new socket AM2 platform.

Socket AM2 from AMD is designed to enable next-generation platform innovations such as AMD Virtualization and high-performance, unbuffered DDR2 memory to the award-winning AMD64 architecture.
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OEMs shipping systems with socket AM2 processors include Alienware, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, and Lenovo, as well as more than 40 leading system builders worldwide…

Hardware Secrets published a 10-pages review of Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and AM2 socket.

AnandTech published a 12-pages review of AM2 socket.

Tom’s Hardware published a 62-pages review of AM2 socket.

Quoting from the Stream Theory official announcement:

Streaming application technology provider Stream Theory today filed a lawsuit against Softricity, AppStream and Exent claiming the three companies are infringing on its U.S. patent number 6,453,334.
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Stream Theory stated the U.S. patent office issued the patent on September 17, 2002. The patent describes “Method and apparatus to allow remotely located computer programs and/or data to be accessed on a local computer in a secure, time-limited manner, with persistent caching.” The patent application was originally filed with the U.S. Patent Office on June 16, 1997, and is believed to be the earliest patent in the field of streaming software.

What is really interesting here is that the lawsuit has been filed after Microsoft disclosed Softricity acquisition intentions…

Paul Murphy, from his ZDNet blog’s pages, analyzed the modern virtualization from 2 different point of views.

The resulting insight is populated of very concrete maths and provides a very interesting reading (including related comments):

There are two very different kinds of virtualization making headlines these days. The second one, resource virtualization for management purposes, seems wholly laudable. Whether used to manage storage, processing, or networking a virtual system constructed as kind of unified console for two or more pieces of real hardware can reduce administrative errors, provide unified logging for accountability, and make it easier to shift resources where they’re needed as user applications needs change.

The earlier, and more common, kind of virtualization does the opposite: splitting one piece of real hardware into numerous virtual ones, each of which is then then managed separately and each of which is more resource constrained than the original machine…

Read the whole article at source.