Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Quoting from the OpenVZ official annoncement:
The OpenVZ project today announced availability of its operating system level server virtualization software for Fedora Core 5, which only recently became available.
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The OpenVZ kernel for Fedora Core 5 is available for download from http://openvz.org/download/kernel/fc5.
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Templates for Fedora Core 5 are available for download at http://openvz.org/download/template/…
Quoting from InfoWorld:
A year ago, the news that Xen virtualization support in the Linux kernel was just around the corner grabbed headlines.
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But today, the Xen hyperpatch has still not yet been merged with the Linux kernel. And in the meantime, some believe there may now be an opportunity for more than one hypervisor in the Linux kernel.“Architecturally, there are increasing discussions in the industry about the equivalent of an API on a hypervisor level, within the Linux kernel,” said Andrew Morton, maintainer of the Linux 2.6 kernel, whose full-time work on the Linux kernel is sponsored by the Open Source Development Labs. “Theoretically, different hypervisors could play in there, without it being restricted to one default hypervisor. Different, competing hypervisors would be able to provide the virtualization functionality, and ultimately the virtualization itself would become so transparent and good that users would not need to re-certify the same version of the kernel when running on top of a hypervisor.”
A year ago, the headlines suggested that Xen had won the Linux virtualization battle. But has the delay in the Xen patch for Linux kernel support left the door open for VMware?…
Read the whole article at source.
Quoting from the VMware official announcement:
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that PC Professionell, a leading German publication, has named VMware Player the Most Innovative Software Product of the Year. This marks the second consecutive year that VMware has been honored by PC Professionell. VMware ESX Server was named the Most Innovative Network Product in 2005…
Quoting from VMware official announcement:
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that the VMware Technology Network (VMTN) Subscription received CMP’s Software Development Jolt Product Excellence award in the testing tools category for “jolting” the industry by helping to create faster, easier and more efficient software.
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Information on CMP’s Software Development Jolt Product Excellence awards is available at www.sdmagazine.com/jolts/2006index.html.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been moved and revamped.
Check the new Virtualization Industry Roadmap!
Microsoft just announced the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise edition available as free of charge. This is great but customers and analysts are asking themselves why the price of this product dramatically dropped over time until today.
Trying to mitigate speculations the company arranged and released an interview with Zane Adam, Director of Product Marketing in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft.
He stated about the cut-price:
PressPass: Why is Microsoft making Virtual Server available at no charge?
Adam:…we want to make virtualization more broadly accessible and affordable so our customers can realize benefits in areas like server consolidation, disaster recovery, application re-hosting, and software test and development.
We believe that Virtual Server is already the best server virtualization technology for the Windows Server System and more than 5,000 customers are using the product today.
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In the Windows Server Longhorn wave, virtualization will become part of the Windows platform via Windows hypervisor technology, and our customers will be able to run an unlimited number of virtual operating systems on one physical server running Windows Server Longhorn Datacenter Edition. In light of this and other market trends, I believe customers will think twice before spending thousands of dollars for other virtualization products that very well could be at no charge in a couple of years.
Talking about the first part of this quote I never heard Microsoft giving away a technology for free when it aims to spread it as much as possible, mostly if the company considers it the best technology on the market.
In the second part Mr. Adam is obviously referring to VMware ESX Server. He fundamentally said customers should not invest in VMware technologies since they now can have Virtual Server 2005 for free and within 2 years will have the Windows Hypervisor for free as well.
Is Microsoft pretending upcoming VMware Server and Xen (now freshened with Virtual Iron 3.0) are not existant? Is Microsoft pretending companies to wait 2 years for a product that could change in any moment and competitors are offering today? Is this the Redmond giant strategy? Really?
Read my insight about Microsoft stragegy to have a better picture of how the company is moving and why had to release Virtual Server 2005 for free.
As already known by all virtualization.info readers since last week, Microsoft has reshaped Virtual Server 2005 R2 offering, providing the Enterprise edition free of charge (not a free 180 days trial) and suppressing the Standard edition.
Quoting from the Microsoft official announcement:
Today Microsoft announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now available as a free download. This also will apply to the forthcoming service pack 1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2.
In addition, Microsoft announced the availability of virtual machine add-ins for Linux and a technical product support model for Linux guest operating systems running on Virtual Server 2005 R2.
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With Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, customers can run up to four virtual operating systems on one physical server at no additional cost. Today’s announcement enables customers to easily and cost-effectively run Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition with Virtual Server 2005 R2 for server consolidation, application re-hosting, disaster recovery, and software test and development…
Users connecting to the Microsoft Connect site, the repository of beta programs replacing the old Betaplace, and checking available programs will see a new beta available for enrollment since end of March: Virtual Machine Additions for Linux.
As reported:
Virtual Machine Additions for Linux can be installed in qualified Linux operating systems when running as guests in Virtual Server 2005 R2.
Supported operating systems actually are:
Check the related Knowledge Base article for updates.
Microsoft states that customers who report interoperability issues with Linux guests or virtual machine add-ins will be routed to a team that is specially trained to troubleshoot issues related to Linux guests within Virtual Server 2005 R2.
Quoting from the VMware official announcement:
VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that its virtual machine disk format specification for defining and formatting virtual machine environments is openly available, downloadable and free of charge to encourage use by all developers and software vendors.
In addition, VMware is committed to supporting any other open virtual machine disk formats broadly adopted by customers and working toward converging on open standards in this area.
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Software vendors like Akimbi Systems, Altiris, BMC Software, PlateSpin, rPath, Surgient, Symantec and Trend Micro are leveraging the VMware virtual machine disk format specification to develop value-added products for customer virtual infrastructure environments.
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Additional information on the VMware virtual machine disk format specification is available at www.vmware.com/vmdk.
Following Steve Herrold example, Diane Greene, VMware President, and several other company executives started blogging since today.
On the Greene’s corporate blog there are some interesting thoughts that could help reader understanding where VMware is moving or at least where VMware is looking.
A real interesting sencence from today’s post is related to virtualization standards:
4. Benchmarks.
There are starting to be multiple offerings for virtualization and the customer needs a way to evaluate the performance of the different offerings on apples to apples basis.
There should be a benchmark that can show the performance in real-world relevant ways and also in a way that requires as inexpensive a setup as possible.
The other new blog, The Console, will collect insights on virtualization industry as well from several other VMware executives.
The first post is from Dan Chu, Senior Director Developer and ISV Products and Technology Alliances, which speaks about virtual appliances, referencing virtualization.info for the insight about VMware strategy: The long chess game of VMware (thank you!).
This is a great move to provide customers a deeper insight of what is VMware and what the company is trying to do. But bloggers shoud to be very careful in not sending out posts that are just a reprise of press announcements: readers expect from a corporate blog new and unique contents nobody else could provide, not a remark of what they already read on the press feed.