Year: 2006

Aaron Tan, from ZDnet Asia, reported a Microsoft spokesperson statement saying:

For production machines and everyday usage, virtualization is a fairly new technology and one that we think is not yet mature enough for broad consumer adoption.

Sometimes Microsoft marketing strategy is a mistery.
The company is doing a huge investment injecting a new hypervisor (Windows Server Virtualization, formerly codename Viridian) inside the Windows kernel, and catching up the market leader (and almost monopolist) VMware.

It’s hard to believe a Microsoft representative is taking such position just to justify a recent change on Vista EULA, limiting customers capability to run the new operating system inside virtual machines, or to justify technical limitations preventing Aero Glass new interface to be correctly displayed inside a virtual machine.

Anyway it’s worth to remember that other times press capability to distort a statement is amazing…

Quoting from InfoWorld:

…
Gartner’s latest report on servers, released Tuesday, shows that worldwide sales grew by 4.4 percent, based on revenue, to just over $13 billion, and 9.1 percent by unit volume, to 2 billion servers. In the second quarter, sales rose 2.5 percent by revenue and 12.8 percent by unit volume.

“We have seen double-digit growth in the past,” said Jeff Hewitt, research director for Gartner. “Server sales are still growing, but because of virtualization, customers don’t have to buy as many servers.”…

Read the whole article at source.

It really seems the russian virtualization startup Parallels beaten Microsoft on its own game and the market leader VMware as well, releasing before competitors an update (build 2112) for its Workstation product which fully supports Windows Vista, completed just one week ago and already available for MSDN subscribers.

The update is automatically downloaded, free of charge, for current customers thanks to product auto-update feature.

At this point Parallels Workstation is the only virtualization solution officially supporting Vista as guest and host OS.

Download it here.

NetBSD 3.1 has been released, and among new features finally appears official support for Xen 3.0.3 domU.

This way NetBSD becomes second operating system for Xen after Linux. Solaris will come next year.

Download it here.

VMware released a new security advice about VirtualCenter:

The security issue is caused due to the x.509 certificate presented by a server at the beginning of an SSL session is not verified.
This can be exploited to spoof valid servers via a man-in-the-middle attack.

The security issue is reported in the following versions:

• VMware VirtualCenter client 2.x before 2.0.1 Patch 1 (Build 33643)
• VMware VirtualCenter client 1.4.x before 1.4.1 Patch 1 (Build 33425)

Download the VirtualCenter 2.0.1 Patch 1 here and VirtualCenter 1.4.1 Patch 1 here.

At the moment the huge chinese market is still far from virtualization hype hitting US and Europe since a couple of years.

But the situation is going to change and a first sign comes from SWsoft, which announces 30 chinese hosting providers, including HiChina, adopted Virtuozzo in last 6 months.

Readers from China are welcomed to write a comment and tell industry perception about virtualization in their country.

In the upcoming LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit, arranged for 14-15 February 2007 in New York City, attendees will find a whole track about virtualization.

The 7 sessions included in the track will be:

• Case Study: Shared Penguins: How to Have Hundreds of Virtual Servers With a Shared Root
  We have implemented a shared file system, in our zLinux environment. This allows us to share the linux binaries amoung several hundred servers, reducing our disk requirements by 57%. This session will discuss our approach, advantages and disadvantages.
• Virtualization and the Next generation Data Center (Panel)
  Virtualization holds great promise, but many first and second generation virtualization technologies compound the problem by adding cost and complexity in the form of virtual server sprawl, new management requirements and performance overhead. Emerging virtualization technologies are addressing these shortcomings and enabling leading enterprises to take virtualization to the next level. Virtualization has become a key strategy to reduce the complexity and cost involved with managing and operating data centers.

  This panel session will discuss these emerging technologies and examine how they can be leveraged to make the data center more efficient, flexible and agile while dramatically reducing cost and complexity.

• GEP and PGA: Linux Grid Computing in Financial Modeling and Drug Discovery
  Gene Expression Programming (GEP) and Parallel Genetic Algorithm (PGA) on Linux grid computing cluster have proven to be a very effective way of tackling intensive mathematical problems in financial modeling and drug discovery. Based on the features of stock objects, we present our GEP grid computing models including the fitness that appropriated to the special rules of stocks, give experiments and analysis on the real stock price index of NYSE.

  The results show that the precision that predicts by using our models is higher than traditional method. The availability of molecular structures of drug targets and candidate compounds has opened the door for the application of large scale grid computing technology to conduct virtual drug design. Through the use of PGA on Linux grid computing cluster, we developed the computing power to effectively discover potential drug candidates. Our models generate better profiles of combinatorial drug candidates optimized by PGA.

• Virtualize Your Entire Data Center
  Virtualization solutions for Intel’s industry-standard microprocessors are well known in the industry, and data center managers are implementing them increasingly to consolidate servers to achieve higher utilization, provide resilience, and to improve costs by operating much more flexibly than in the past. The latest hardware virtualization technology, which for the first time provides true instruction set architecture (ISA) independence, has synergies with other emerging virtualization technologies that allow managers to virtualize an entire data center without any application source code or binary changes and at speeds comparable to native ports.

  This talk will show you how to consolidate RISC and UNIX workloads onto industry-standard microprocessors, to achieve even greater consolidation than previously. An architectural description introduces you to new technologies for moving applications between platforms. A case study examines the process of virtualizing an entire heterogeneous data center, and a demo gives you a first hand experience of a single virtualized consolidated system supporting multiple instruction sets and operating systems.

• Linux Virtualization Technology Alternatives
  Different virtualization approaches (emulation, hypervisor-based, operating system-level) and their pros and cons are outlined. Details of the OS-level virtualization approach are given, using OpenVZ as an implementation example. Operating system features — virtualization, isolation, resource management and checkpointing — are described, as well as user-level tools. Possible usage scenarios of virtualization are presented.
• Virtualization’s Impact on Enterprise Security
  Virtualization alone does not equal security. As virtualization is rapidly deployed worldwide, it is critical to understand the business risks at the network, application and behavioral levels. Kris Lamb of Internet Security Systems will discuss issues related to securing virtual assets from exploits and malware and how to provide defense-in-depth for your environment. Throughout this session, Lamb will reveal how the evolving virtualization market space can be leveraged to innovate organizations’ security processes to both protect the infrastructure as well as meet the rising standard of due care with corporate compliance.
• Case Study: Living in a Virtual World
  This session will describe the server consolidation project of Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in Marietta, GA. Topics covered will include; needs analysis, proof of concept, design and testing, implementation, cost savings and lessons learned.

Register for it here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been update accordingly.

The SANS Institute is reporting about some malicious program able to recognize virtual machines and avoid installing on them.

Since virtual machines are a great solution for covering honeypot role, some worm writers may want delay their malware discovery refusing to install inside virtual environments.
While this behaviour is meaningful today, it’s doomed to change within few years, when virtual machines will be a de-facto standard both for server and for client (think about VDI) population.

Meanwhile SANS suggests to run a piece of code on physical machines so that they mimick virtual machines answer. This may slow down infections better than any antivirus…

Read the whole article at source.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the first general computing grid based on Xen. Amazon is testing the service since this summer, but at the moment new Xen capability to run Windows guest OSes is still unavailable.

To workaround this limitation Enomaly, the consulting company offering a multi-plaftorm management solution called Enomalism Virtualized Management Console (VMC), managed to run Windows inside EC2 with help of QEMU.

They prepared an extensive how-to for installing Fedora Core 6, QEMU and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 on top. Read it here.

It worth to remember that this scenario is totally unsupported and performances may be less than acceptable, given the two nested layers of virtualization.

The second milestone towards RHEL 5, which will count virtualization amoung its main features, is introducing the technology preview of Xen for Itanium 2 architectures DesktopLinux.com reports.

Some rumors report Red Hat will offer a certain amount of free RHEL 5 licenses where the OS is running inside Xen VMs, mimicking what Microsoft already does with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition.