Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Commercial fork of QEMU made by Virtual Bridges, Win4Lin Pro, reached 3.5 release.
In this new build introduces serveral bug fixes and extended support for Linux distributions, including Ubuntu Edgy Eft.
Download it here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.
To help web developers testing their designs and applications in the dual-world of Internet Explorer 6.0 and new 7.0, Microsoft released a virtual machine with a pre-installed and pre-activated (no WPA) copy of Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2.
It contains IE6 and IE7 Readiness Toolkit and comes as a 500MB compressed image.
The virtual appliance, named Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC Image, can be used with any Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and 2007 beta (or with any VMware product using Importer 2.0 or Converter 3.0 beta).
Obviously Microsoft doesn’t give away its OS for free so there is an expiration time set to Apri 1st 2007, and to download it you have to pass the Windows Genuine Advantage check.
Download it here.
Strangely it has not been included in the just lauched VHD Test Drive Program site, where Microsoft is starting to push their own virtual appliances.
After less than one month from the first beta, the highly expected XenSource XenEnterprise 3.1, introducing support for Microsoft Windows XP SP2 and 2003 (SP0, SP1 and R2 edition) guest OSes, already reaches release candidate status.
The milestone was indeed expected since XenSource plans to publicly release 3.1 before the end of the year.
No new features has been introduced in this new build. The beta program is still open for enrollment.
SearchServerVirtualization published a nice article providing some suggestions for choosing between Linux and Windows as host OS for VMware Server.
It’s just a big short and the analysis could be much more complex, involving aspects as easiness in virtual machines files backup strategy or in performances optimization strategies, but it’s a good beginning.
Read it at source.
Meanwhile many (including me) are waiting VMware will support Sun Solaris 10 as host OS as well. At that point a deep comparison will be even more interesting.
Gartner released a new report, Predicts 2007: Brace Yourself for the Next Wave of Server Technology, detailing how OS partitioning technologies like SWsoft Virtuozzo and Sun Solaris Containers will become mainstream within 2010.
Some press sites misread the news originally appeared on SWsoft site, thinking this prediction refers to all virtualization technologies. Instead Gartner analysts are stating OS partitioning will reach a comparable popularity of actual server virtualization products.
Read the whole report here (registration required).
It’s worth to remember that also Microsoft considers this approach valuable and announced at WinHEC 2006 is doing some long-term investments in this area.
After recent IBM, Opsware, Computer Associates and Symantec moves also Novell enters the virtualization multi-platforms management segment:
Four new solutions from the Novell ZENworks systems and resource management family provide a complete set of integrated ITIL**-based services that automate management across diverse server and client platforms for both physical and virtual environments. These systems management solutions from Novell now manage and schedule heterogeneous virtual machine deployments, including Xen virtualization on Linux, and automate the load balancing of these machines.
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Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management gives organizations the ability to confidently employ virtualization in their data centers, whether running on Linux, UNIX or Windows machines. From VMware to Microsoft to Xen virtualization environments, this policy-based solution automates the process of deploying and managing virtual data center assets, as well as dynamically provisioning workloads and ensuring business continuity. This solution also manages virtualized environments in Novell Open Enterprise Server…
A more detailed list of features includes:
The product will be available on early December with an undisclosed price.
Quite every major IT firm is announcing or deliverying management tools for multiple virtualization platoforms. In most cases this means just extending official support to VMware, Microsoft and Xen-based hypervisors. Other times it means providing new agents. In more rare cases this means launching brand new products, with innovative features focused on datacenter automation.
In any case such big interest from IT industry and not just customers means server virtualization is definitively accepted as a mainstream technology.
Symantec is the last new entry in this hot segment with an updated version of its Veritas Application Director. Quoting from the official announcement:
Symantec Corp. today announced major new capabilities within its Veritas Server Foundation product family to transform the emerging field of Data Center Automation (DCA).
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Application Director enables customers to define an application?s run-time requirements, such as its CPU and memory needs, network and storage connectivity, dependencies across internal application components and tiers, and its business priority. Users can then create and enforce policies based on those requirements to control when and where applications run across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments enabling them to maximize server utilization, increase application availability and flexibly respond to changes in application workloads.
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Application Director also provides a more granular level of visibility and control for virtualized environments by monitoring the applications within the virtual server, the virtual server itself, and the underlying hardware, as well as enabling the user to start, stop, and migrate the applications and the virtual servers across hosts.Application Director currently supports Solaris Zones from Sun, VMware ESX server from EMC, and AIX Micro-partitions from IBM. Symantec plans to aggressively extend this coverage to support all major virtual machine platforms across all major operating systems…
It’s very interesting the choice of Symantec to start with support for Solaris and VMware but not for Xen and Microsoft.
Quoting from the United Devices official announcement:
United Devices (UD) officially enters the mainstream virtualization market today by announcing general availability of solutions focused on virtualizing mission-critical business applications for enterprise data centers and outsourced IT service providers.
UD’s data center virtualization solution, Data Center One, enables automatic provisioning of business applications across a shared pool of physical and virtual IT assets within an enterprise data center.
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Data Center One applies UD’s award-winning grid technology to automatically provision applications on bare metal, manage virtual machines and third-party provisioning tools, and to deploy and manage large-scale enterprise software implementations such as SAP, Siebel or Oracle…
While the product has been declared available right now, at the moment of writing there is no trace in UD website, so no further details about the technological approach are available.
PlateSpin and Cassatt arranged a new webcast for December 5th about joint use of PowerConvert and XVM to push their new partnership:
What you will learn:
- How to intelligently plan for your server consolidation efforts
- How to quickly and cost effectively be able to move physical resources to become virtual ones instead
- What you can do today to move toward a more dynamic data center that can automatically deliver the application service levels you require
Register for it here.
The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.
Start-up Invirtus, already known for its effective virtual machines compressor VM Optimizer, now expands its business entering the P2V market with Enterprise VM Converter.
The product just launched in beta offers interesting features:
Download Enteprise VM Converter beta here. The final release is expected to be available during Q1 2007.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.
The P2V market is getting crowded. We’ll see how newcomers like Invirtus and Acronis will front competition against segment leader PlateSpin and market leader VMware, which is coming with a free product.