Year: 2006

While server virtualization approaches offered by VMware, Microsoft, Xen, Parallels, Serenity Virtual Station, SWsoft are more or less understandable for potential customers, Virtual Iron, present on the scene since 3 years, has never been completely clear and the just announced Virtual Iron 3.0 for Xen could make things even more confused.

Virtual Iron entered the market 3 years ago, providing a virtualization technology comparable with VMware one.
The company became famous mainly for the additional feature of server aggregation: the capabililty of clustering several physical hosts, to provide a distributed virtualization hypervisor.

Today Virtual Iron is abandoning its proprietary virtualization stack to adopt and enrich the open source Xen hypervisor.

This doesn’t mean Virtual Iron is offering just a set of enterprise management features around Xen, competing against XenSource (at least if they are still on the known mission), Red Hat, Novell and all others trying to add value to the hypervisor.
Virtual Iron has replaced the Xen dom0 with an in-house developed one, called Open Virtual Layer and distributed with GPL license, enhancing it to provide unique features like 64bit and 32bit virtual machines concurrent run capability, unmodified Microsoft Windows guest operation system run capability, and improved performances.
(if you are interested in take a look at Xen 3.0 architecture here)

While it’s true that Virtual Iron 3.0 needs virtualization aid from AMD/Intel modern CPUs (and won’t work at all without them), it’s the first real Xen-based implementation able to compete against VMware and Microsoft with Windows virtualization, featuring para-virtualization performances and something upcoming ESX Server 3.0 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 still cannot provide: 32bit / 64bit VMs mixed environment support. For free in some cases, revaling with upcoming VMware Server and to be repriced today Virtual Server 2005 R2.

What this means for the virtualization market? At least 4 things:

• Xen has now a real chance to demonstrate how good is the para-virtualization approach outside research laboratories and small testing environments
• A serious VMware competitor for enteprises could be finally arrived, obliging them to reduce ESX Server prices
• Several companies, with enough know-how could try to do the same, as soon as new AMD/Intel CPUs become widely deployed
• Microsoft, with the accumulated delay in planned Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian), could have to face an even more competitive market than expected

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

…
Virtual Iron Version 3 product suite will include:

• The Xen Open Source Hypervisor, which supports multiple 32 and 64 bit operating systems and takes full advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology. It also supports multiple physical CPUs, large memory and other physical server resource management.
• Virtual Iron Virtualization Services, an open source software stack available under a GPL license, that includes virtual storage and network connectivity, virtual server resource management, server logical partitioning, high performance drivers, and hot-plug CPU and memory.
• Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, which includes a web-based graphical user interface to administer the virtual environment. It uses a built-in policy engine which provides advanced capabilities such as LiveCapacity, LiveMigrate, LiveRecovery and LiveMaintenance, and an event monitor to optimize application performance, ensure high availability and simplify resource management. Virtualization Manager also enables rapid provisioning and reconfiguration through operating system templates and cloning.

The new release will be available in three editions:

• Open Virtual Iron for Xen/ Community Edition
  will be available at no charge via download from www.virtualiron.com/products/Downloads with a GPL license.
  This edition supports the Xen development community and includes the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack.
• Virtual Iron 3 for Xen / Professional Edition
  will also be available at no charge via download from www.virtualiron.com/products/Downloads.
  This edition supports partitioning and management of a single server and is comprised of the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack under a GPL license, and the Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, with a limited use commercial license.
• Virtual Iron 3 for Xen / Enterprise Edition
  for multi-server configuration and support.
  This edition is comprised of the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack, under a GPL license, and Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, available via a commercial license, which enables advanced capabilities for high availability, disaster recovery, workload management and policy-based automation.

Virtual Iron 3 for Xen will be available for Beta testing supporting Linux guests in July 2006 and Windows guests in September 2006.
Average pricing for Enterprise Edition will start at $1,500 for a single server, including Virtualization Services and Virtualization Manager…

WindowsITPro is going to offer a webcast on 4th April about Windows Server 2003 R2 and Virtual Server 2005 R2:

Virtualization technology can help you more efficiently utilize existing IT resources, achieve higher levels of application control, and reduce overall IT costs. As business demands on IT change and grow, make the best use of the servers in your arsenal by learning how to effectively leverage virtualization technology. The ability to run up to four virtual instances of Windows Server 2003 EE on only one licensed server reduces your costs dramatically and increase IT’s value to the business.

You will learn:

• How to use Windows Server 2003 R2 EE in conjunction with Virtual Server 2005 R2 to get the most out of your existing hardware
• How virtualization technology can help you address your company’s critical business needs
• How to gain increased application control, and better control over your entire infrastructure while reducing overall IT costs

Register for it here.

In a CNet News article I already mentioned here, Stephen Shankland reports:

…
Barriers between these formats are not insurmountable.
For example, XenSource licensed Microsoft’s VHD and will offer the ability to import virtual machines created with Microsoft Virtual Server, Crosby said, and VMware shared its format as well…

HP with Intel and VMware released a paper about its HP NC7170 and NC6170 dual-port server adapters:

This white paper discusses the IT benefits that enterprises can gain from VMware GSX Server and VMware ESX Server virtualization software when using HP multi-port network adapters with Intel technology.
…
High-speed Gigabit Ethernet NICs in a small form factor play an essential role in the virtual infrastructure model—server networking functionality is important for secure management of ESX Server, for enabling VMotion technology and for meeting the network throughput requirements of multiple virtual machines.

In particular, best practices for VMware ESX Server call for at least three dedicated network connections. Multi-port HP adapters are the optimum solution, providing extra ports to support the virtual infrastructure in one server slot and freeing input/output (I/O) slots in servers that require additional ports. HP multi-port NICs with Intel technology also allow IT administrators to configure redundant ports to improve throughput and reliability…

Download it here.

Quoting from CNet News:

The hidden benefit from virtualization is that users can unpack a ready-to-run collection of software components–operating system and all–and drop it onto a fresh, empty partition of the computer called a virtual machine. No muss, no fuss, no driver updates, no configuration file tweaking, no conflicts with other software.

Virtualization essentially lets the companies selling the software handle the tricky part also provides a clean slate for installation.
…
Virtual installation will happen, but XenSource’s Crosby understands the change won’t happen overnight, “I think it’s going to be a fairly profound change for the industry to get there.”

Read the whole article at source.

Computer Business Review did a nice overview of today’s application virtualization solutions from Altiris and Softricity, also discussing upcoming Citrix competing technology:

…
Late last year Citrix announced it too would be developing application streaming technologies to make centrally managed desktop applications available on- and off-line to client machines.

With its Tarpon development Citrix plans to use the same Application Isolation Environment (AIE) technology as it does in its Presentation Server Version 4 system.
This will package up and then stream applications from one machine to another where they are then executed locally on the client. Again, the applications themselves are not really installed but rather, it is their files, DLLs and registry settings that are executed in an AIE…

Read the whole article at source.

Ben Armstrong provided a cool script to convert Virtual Server 2005 virtual hard disks (.vhd) from dynamical to fixed size:

set vsApp = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”,”localhost”)

TargetVHDpath =Inputbox(“Enter path and name of VHD to convert:”)
FixedVHDpath =Inputbox(“Enter path and name of VHD to create”)

set target = vsApp.GetHardDisk(TargetVHDpath)

set convertTask = target.convert(FixedVHDpath,1)

while not convertTask.isComplete
wscript.echo “Conversion is ” & convertTask.PercentCompleted & “% complete”
WScript.Sleep 2000
wend

wscript.echo
wscript.echo “Conversion complete”

Be sure to read the original post for updates and comments.

Quoting from SearchOpenSource:

…
Cypress is the code name for the next release of OES, due out in early 2007. It will have a number of new features targeted at Novell’s traditional customer base. One of the key components is the baked-in operating system support for Xen 3.0 virtualization. Server consolidation is one area of keen interest to many enterprise customers and Novell wants to meet those needs with its products.

With the virtualization support comes a new capability called NetWare viX. In a nutshell, it’s a Xen-optimized virtual environment for running the NetWare 6.5 kernel aimed at helping customers move to the Linux environment. NetWare viX provides complete backward compatibility for NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs), NetWare management tools along with support for new hardware…

Read the whole article at source.

VMware just launched it’s last builld (22874) of its free server product called Server, introduced in February and replacing the well-known GSX Server.

The new beta 2 includes support for using VMware Server Console to connect to and configure GSX Server 3.0 installations (the opposite will not work) and introduces a special set of C APIs, going in addition to existing vmCOM APIs (for Windows hosts only) and vmPerl APIs:

• Connect / Disconnect to Host
• Find Items (virtual machines) on a host
• Create a shapshot of a VM and check how many snapshots there are
• Remove or revert to a snapshot
• Delete a VM from your host
• Open a virtual machine
• Power on, off, suspend or reset a VM
• Upgrade the virtual machine’s hardware
• Read out errors

Download it here.