Year: 2006

Quoting from the Enomaly official announcement:

Enomaly, Inc., an innovator in virtualization solutions, today announced the Beta deployment of Enomalism, a pre-packaged virtualization infrastructure solution based on Xen 3.0 and available under LGPL open source license.

The Enomalism Virtualized Management Console (VMC) is a powerful web-based systems administrator management tool for XEN hypervisor that enables the management of multiple isolated Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to be managed from a central web based interface.
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Enomalism enables customers from a single interface to start, stop and move virtual machines from one physical computer to another without any interruption in service or availability. Enomalism comes equipped with a provisioning wizard which deploys new virtual machines and centralized user management. Customers can manage memory resources changing virtual machine behavior so priorities are easily met.

Download it here.

We already have a lot of informations about next generation virtualization solution from Microsoft, codename Viridian, unofficially called Windows Hypervisor since beginning.

Microsoft itself provided them on end of last year with Virtualization Roadmap webcast delivered in October 2005.

Another detail about recovery capabilities now leaks out from Gartner Symposium 2006 where George Ou from ZDNet asked to Microsoft representatives:

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The Microsoft speaker mentioned that there were Parent and Child operating systems running on top of the Windows Hypervisor which is leveraging Intel and AMD virtualization technology.

At the end of the presentation, I asked if Child operating systems had a dependency on the Parent operating systems such that they would die if the Parent OS was shut down. The answer was that if the Parent operating system died, a new Parent OS would be elected and all the Child OSes would continue to run…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the moka5 official announcement:

moka5 today announced its formation and entry into the desktop virtualization technology business. A spin off from Stanford University’s Computer Science Department, moka5 plans to revolutionize the way consumers and businesses view and use everyday computing environments.
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The founding team is comprised of a combination of Stanford University PhDs and seasoned professionals from Microsoft, Sun, Symantec, XenSource and Akamai, to name a few companies. Leading the charge at moka5 is Monica Lam, Professor of Computer Science, currently on leave, from Stanford.
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The years of research at Stanford led to the creation of a third-generation system architecture, or LivePC(TM), that delivers optimized PC management, security and mobility.
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Based on virtualization, the LivePC technology allows users to work on any operating system, with any applications, on any device in a completely maintained, up-to-date and secure environment. The LivePC opens a new world of work and play where the technology developed allows actively managed computing environments to be run locally on any PC efficiently and transparently. This technology is ideal for businesses, universities and government…

SiliconBeat reports beta product will be available within 90 days.

Quoting from eWeek:

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Lenovo, for its part, is nearing the introduction of a virtualization appliance-like software module designed to augment its Rescue and Recovery software.

The module, to be unveiled along with a new version of Rescue and Recovery on May 16, is one of Lenovo’s ThinkVantage Technologies. The manufacturer bundles the add-ons in its PCs in an effort to help cut management costs for businesses.

Rescue and Recovery 3.1, like its predecessors, will serve to back up a PC’s data and then restore it upon a crash or after a malware attack.

A feature dubbed Antidote Delivery Engine, which works to patch software before it’s restored on a PC to ensure that a machine won’t become immediately reinfected, will gain a virtualization module, said Lee Highsmith, program manager for ThinkVantage Technologies at Lenovo in Raleigh, N.C.

The module will turn Antidote Delivery Engine into a virtual appliance of sorts, allowing the application to reside in its own partition, making it more resistant to crashes and ensuring it can still be reached by IT managers even if the PC’s operating system has been compromised, Highsmith said.

The engine’s virtualized state can also allow it to act as a gateway of sorts for network traffic and, among other things, allow it to ensure that an infected PC does not get back on to a company’s main network without having been patched and rendered safe, Highsmith said.

Thus, the “virtualization Module is the way to improve the ability to lock down systems and extend the ability to recover them,” he said…

Read the whole article at source.

Enterprise Open Source Magazine published a comparison between Win4Lin 2.7 and VMware Workstation 5.5.1 for Linux.

There are a lot of funny parts with an even funnier conclusion:

While both products behaved as advertised, I had a better feeling about Win4Lin at the end of test. The lukewarm reception I got from VMware left me feeling that if I ever needed support, I might be left hanging.

Despite the fact that VMware performed faster, Win4Lin certainly performed fast enough for me. Also, through no fault of its own, VMware is probably overkill for your average desktop GNU/Linux user. If we desktop users need to use Windows at all, likely a single instance will do.

Lastly, money talks. Since it’s likely that a single Windows instance will do, the $89 Win4Lin Pro price tag is a lot easier to swallow than the $189 tag on VMware.

Read the whole comparison at source.

Summary

With User Mode Linux you can create virtual Linux machines within a Linux computer and use them to safely test and debug applications, network services, and even kernels. You can try out new distributions, experiment with buggy software, and even test security. Now, for the first time, the creator and maintainer of User Mode Linux shows how to put it to work hands-on. Jeff Dike covers everything from getting started through running enterprise-class User Mode Linux servers. You’ll find authoritative advice on bootup, compilation, administration, specialized configurations, and much more.

Contents

• What User Mode Linux is, how it works, and its uses in Linux networks
• Key applications, including server consolidation, development, and disaster recovery
• Booting and exploration: logins, consoles, swap space, partitioned disks, and more
• Copy-On-Write (COW): UML’s efficient approach to storing filesystem changes
• In-depth discussion of User Mode Linux networking and security
• Centrally managing User Mode Linux instances, and controlling their hardware resources
• Implementing clusters and other specialized configurations
• Setting up User Mode Linux servers, step-by-step: small-scale and large-scale examples
• The future of virtualization and User Mode Linux

About the Author

Jeff Dike, an engineer at Intel, is author and maintainer of User Mode Linux. Well known throughout the Linux technical community, he has been active in Linux kernel development for more than five years. He holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.

Quoting from the Emulex official announcement:

Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), the most trusted name in storage networking connectivity, today announced that its LightPulse® Fibre Channel HBAs used within VMware ESX Server are qualified and supported by HP for storage area network (SAN) connectivity to HP StorageWorks XP, EVA and MSA arrays, and HP ProLiant server solutions.

This qualification enables customers implementing VMware virtual infrastructure software – for partitioning, consolidating and managing servers in mission-critical environments – to deploy HP-branded HBAs from Emulex for high performance SAN connectivity to the HP StorageWorks and HP ProLiant server solutions.
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The Emulex HBAs supported by HP include the LP1050-based models of single- and dual-channel HBAs.
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In addition to today’s announcement, Emulex is working closely with VMware on a number of initiatives, including the forthcoming release of Emulex’s LightPulse Virtual HBA technology to the broader market.
As more IT managers are looking to virtual infrastructure for consolidation, increased resource utilization and management flexibility, the Emulex LightPulse Virtual HBA technology in conjunction with VMware VMotion technology and VMware ESX Server, enables each virtual machine or guest operating system to own and access a dedicated World Wide Port Name (WWPN), even when several virtual machines are sharing the same physical host bus adapter.
This new capability enables each guest to be managed independently, using SAN best practices for security and configuration management, such as fabric-based zoning and storage Logical Unit (LUN) mapping…

The famous IT Spending Survey from Goldman Sachs research group tracks, among others, which IT vendors are most requested at spending time among top 1000 worldwide companies.

The 2006 survey, conducted in mid-April on a 100 IT executives sample (half of them CIOs) and published on 5th May, still reconfirms VMware as the most purchased technology in US, after being at first position on 4 surveys of 6:

Server Watch published a nice article about needs of server consolidation:

Listen closely to the vendor community,and it sounds like everybody is ditching their small servers and either consolidating onto a few larger machines or buying a bank of blades that can be more tightly controlled.

We wondered how rampant this consolidation really is. Turns out, here, too, it depends on whom you ask.
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“Server consolidation does not appear to be that rampant,” says Chip Nickolett, president of Comprehensive Solutions, a systems integrator and consulting firm with experience in server consolidation based in Brookfield, Wisc. “It is mainly performed by larger companies with a complex and robust infrastructure that have been looking at this as a way to reduce cost and provide more flexibility and ease of management.”
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There are times, however, when it may be prudent not to engage in server consolidation. IDC analyst Kelly Quinn points out that it takes careful preparation to conduct such a project, and that a vital part of that step is defining what – if any – value will actually be derived from it.

“Don’t engage in a server consolidation project until you’ve proven you can derive benefits from it and have thoroughly prepared both your personnel and resources for the process,” says Quinn. “It’s like the old adage goes, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Microsoft just updated his recently released Virtual Server 2005 R2 Management Pack to include support for SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

The new version maintains same build version 05.0.4000.0000.

Download it here.

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

Thanks to Virtualserver.tv for the news.