Year: 2006

Mark Clalron wrote a handy tool for Mac OS users working with Parallels Desktop: VM2Go.

It aims to simplify management of virtual machines files, providing following features:

• list all of the virtual machines on your Mac
• show the actual disk space used per machine
• transfer virtual machine and the associated virtual hard disks to an iPod or other removable media
• adjust the hard drive references during a transfer so that the VM will load and run regardless of location
• delete a virtual machine and its referenced virtual hard drives
• backup to DVD-R or CD-R your virtual machine and the related virtual hard disks
• restore from DVD to a folder of your choosing

Download it here.

At the end happened: Jess Coburn tried to benchmark SWsoft Virtuozzo 3.5.1, VMware Server 1.01 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (all for Windows platform) in a web hosting scenario.

Unfortunately Jess wasn’t aware of strict policy VMware applies to customers publishing benchmarks about its products, so removed actual numbers from his report.
But limitation in providing results doesn’t change final response: not much surprisingly Virtuozzo is the fastest.

Before going on and reading please note virtualization platforms benchmarking is a complex task, with multiple issues which VMware and SPEC are currently trying to address. Jess’ comparison has been made without a standard or widely recognized benchmarking approach.
It also compares an OS partitioning platform (SWsoft Virtuozzo) with two server virtualization platforms (VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server), which is pretty risky.
Last but not least used hardware is different for each plaftorm, which totally undermines comparison accuracy.

It may worth to read but evaluate results very carefully.

Quoting from the Hitachi official announcement:

Hitachi America, Ltd., a subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced BladeSymphony with Virtage, the first blade server to provide users with enterprise-class data center functionality. The new product, the latest member of Hitachi BladeSymphony series, includes Virtage, a breakthrough embedded virtualization feature.
The feature, which builds virtualization right into a blade server?s hardware for the first time, provides customers an alternative to third-party software solutions and thus can enable them to decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance.
…
BladeSymphony with Virtage is a 10U chassis, supporting hot-swappable blades capable of running both Windows and Linux. Built on standards-based multi-core Intel processors with Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel VT), the product allows users to combine, scale, and virtualize BladeSymphony blades based on Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 9000 Series processors…

BladeSymphony with Virtage will be generally available in January 2007 and will have a starting cost of $25,000.

Check the announcement webcast here (registration required).

At the moment there are no documents describing how Virtuage works or compares with VMware, Microsoft or Xen hypervisors, so wait before considering this system a valid alternative to existing solutions.

A critical topic about server virtualization, virtual machines isolation, has never been seriously investigated so far. This largely depends on the relatively small audience it has.
As soon as the technology will become integrated in every operating system, underground communities and worldwide security professionals will take much more attention. Usually when it’s too late to prevent damage.

Meanwhile ZDNet underline as some security firms like Sophos are very careful in trusting virtualization:

Paul Ducklin, head of technology for the Asia-Pacific region at Sophos, told ZDNet Asia that the security vendor takes a “somewhat neutral” stance toward virtualization.
…
Virtualization, Ducklin noted, can be very handy in analyzing or working with malicious code. But Sophos does not employ virtualization in its virus labs as it “can’t necessarily trust” that the host machine and virtual machine remain as separate and isolated components.
…
The Sydney-based Ducklin said “there have been bugs and problems” in virtualization programs that could allow malicious code to spillover from the virtual machine to the real machine–though, he admitted, these scenarios were rare…

Read the whole article at source.

Flores Eken wrote a tool for ESX Server 3.x, using the new SDK, able to manage associations of hosts with VLANs ID and portgroup names in a VMware infrastructure:

Download it here.

Thanks to Run-Virtual for the news.

Altris announced the public availability of its Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) 2.1 beta on the Juice portal:

…
SVS 2.1 will improve support for emerging computing environments such as Dell SmartClient/Ardence, HP CCI and IBM Virtual Hosted Client/VMware VDI.

A client of any type – fat, thin, blade or virtual – will be able to instantly “Subscribe” to SVS layers that are stored on a standard network share. User settings and data will remain persistent on the network even when the user moves to a different physical client or boots to a new baseline virtual client…

Anyway this first beta doesn’t expose new features, which will appear later.

Download it here.

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

Quoting from the CA official announcement:

CA today announced Unicenter Advanced Systems Management (Unicenter ASM) r11.1, a platform-agnostic solution that provides centralized management for virtualized and clustered server environments—enabling customers to continuously assess, manage and optimize system resources to ensure service availability and reliability.

Unicenter ASM automatically balances workloads in complex environments that include clusters and virtualized platforms. Through pre-defined business policies, it performs centralized dynamic resource brokering across virtualized server resources. If the performance of a mission-critical application begins to degrade and additional memory or CPU capacity is required, Unicenter ASM can automatically reallocate available resources to that application. Unicenter ASM can also make resources available by moving the least critical application on the virtual machines to a different server. If and when the demands of the mission-critical application diminish, Unicenter ASM will then automatically reallocate resources to other applications as necessary.
…
Unicenter ASM enables customers to leverage their investments in a wide range of virtualization technology—including HP MC Service Guard, IBM HACMP and pSeries LPAR-capable eServers (P4 and P5), Microsoft Virtual Server and Cluster, Red Hat Advanced Server cluster, Sun Enterprise and Mid-Range servers, as well as Sun Cluster and Sun Fire, Veritas Cluster Servers running Solaris and Windows, and VMware ESX/GSX Servers…

Unicenter ASM is immediately available as a Unicenter Network and System Management add-on module and costs around $30,000. Xen support will be introduced with a following update planned for end of this year.

Quoting from MacNN:

On November 23, the US Patent & Trademark Office published two of Apple’s patent applications which were both filed in July 2006 and respectfully titled ‘Virtualization of graphics resources.’ Apple’s patents relate generally to computer graphics, and more particularly to virtualizing resources for computer graphics.
…
Graphics resources are virtualized through an interface between graphics hardware and graphics clients. The interface allocates the graphics resources across multiple graphics clients, processes commands for access to the graphics resources from the graphics clients, and resolves conflicts for the graphics resources among the clients.

In one aspect, the interface is a graphics kernel that assigns an identifier to a resource when allocated by a graphics client and the client uses the identifier instead of an address for the resource when requesting access to the resource.

Because the native command structure for the graphics hardware is unaffected by the virtualization, neither the applications nor the hardware require modification to operate in conjunction with the present invention. Furthermore, because the virtualized resources appear as unlimited resources to the graphics clients, the clients can be simplified since, for example, they are no longer required to de-fragment or compact their assigned resources…

Read the whole article at source.

Dennis Zimmer wrote a new book about VMware virtualization products, this time (finally) in English language:

VMware delivers the next wave in virtualization software. Server and Player are free and offer huge savings in time and resources.

Many professional IT users now enjoy the opportunities virtualization opens up. If you’ve ever wanted to understand the buzz around virtualiza-tion then this book is for you.

For both the professional and the personal user, it gives a solid overview including all the necessary user tips.
Offering a great introduction into this complex area, this book will answer all your questions.

From installation to the choice of the right hardware, from creation to configuration, it’s all inside.
Basics, concepts, and designs are clearly presented in a way that is easy to un-derstand.

Whether you are a system administrator or engineer, a user of VMware GSX, or simply interested in virtualization, this book is all you need.

Three chapters are available online for free:

• Chapter 8 – Virtual Networks
• Chapter 12 – VMware Tools
• Chapter 15 – VMware Server

Read reviews and buy it in the new virtualization.info Bookstore.

In these hours the operating system (a Fedora Core variant) image which will power thoudands of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) notebooks has been released in public.

You can download it and install inside a virtual machine from VMware, Microsoft, Parallels (also for Mac OS users), or inside QEMU. No paravirtualized image for Xen, sorry.

Some technical steps are required but it works.

Download it here and try from yourself. Or check feedbacks from current testers here.