Year: 2007

A new patch on the work could drastically improve performances of Windows guest operating systems for KVM hypervisor, included in Linux kernel since version 2.6.20. This is what Anthony Liguori, IBM software engineer and long time Xen hacker, reports in his personal blog:

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At this past KVM Forum, Ben Serebin , from AMD, shared an interesting observation. Windows guests only access the TPR with instructions that are at least 5 bytes. The significance of 5 bytes is that that happens to be the size of an absolute call on the x86. This means that you can replace any of the TPR access instructions with an absolute call without the need to do fancy dynamic translation. If you’re very clever about hiding routines within the BIOS (it turns out, Windows always has a valid virtual mapping to the BIOS), you can actually rewrite TPR access instruction to instead be calls to functions, that you provide, that access the TPR in a more efficient way.

Avi Kivity posted an implementation of this to KVM recently. The results are quite dramatic. Windows XP installs are at least twice as fast–perhaps even faster. The very latest Intel processors have a hardware feature that ends up with the same result but the nice thing about a purely software approach is that it will work with older processors.

This code hasn’t made it’s way into a KVM release yet as it needs a bit more testing and clean-up. I suspect we won’t see it in a release for a couple more weeks but once it’s there, you can reenable ACPI in your Windows guests and enjoy good performance…

Read the whole post at the source.

Symantec just published results from a survey conducted by Ziff Davis in September 2007 among 800 data center managers of Global 2000.

Numbers about virtualization are interesting:

• 90 percent of respondents are at least discussing server virtualization; 50 percent are implementing virtualization strategies
• 91 percent are at least discussing server consolidation; 58 percent are implementing consolidation strategies
• 75 percent of respondents are considering storage virtualization as a potential solution
• 59 percent of respondents indicate Web applications are the most likely to be moved into a virtual environment, followed by database management applications, selected by 42 percent of respondents

as well as numbers about skill shortage (not directly related to virtualization adoption at today, but soon to happen):

• 86 percent of respondents have difficulty finding qualified applicants
• 68 percent report staffing is challenging because data centers are too complex to manage
• 60 percent believe staff skill sets are too narrow
• 57 percent indicate that employees’ skills do not match their current needs

Read the whole report at the source.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Leading the industry beyond server virtualization, Egenera Inc. announced today that it will make Egenera PAN Manager software available on other vendors’ hardware platforms as part of its new software business. PAN Manager delivers Data Center Virtualization by combining server virtualization with network and storage virtualization to transform IT infrastructure into flexible, scalable assets that can be allocated as needed – resulting in rapid time to market, dynamic scalability and cost-effective high availability.

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Integrating PAN Manager with third-party platforms outside of the company’s own BladeFrame system will enable customers to leverage the benefits of the industry’s most sophisticated and advanced data center virtualization software in a much broader fashion, while increasing Egenera’s addressable market and global distribution channels…

Update: Fujitsu Siemens is going to be the first company to OEM the Egenera Pan Manager in its PRIMERGY server line.

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, Inc., the leading provider of server infrastructure repurposing software enabling real-time infrastructure for large enterprise data centers, today announced the appointment of Ali Zadeh to the role of president.

Zadeh’s distinguished career in the information technology industry spans more than 25 years, including COO of NeoPath Networks, recently acquired by Cisco. Previously, Zadeh was vice president of international sales at Network Appliance, where he was responsible for 40 percent of the company’s revenue, and managed a global team of 500 employees and 200 resellers in 50 countries. Prior to NetApp, Zadeh was vice president of sales and marketing at Initio Corporation. Zadeh also served at Adaptec where he managed OEMs, distributors and representatives for strategic accounts…

VMware just released an uncommon update for both ESX Server 3.0.2 and VirtualCenter 2.0.2.

Dubbed Update 1 the new package acts as a patch accumulator but also brings in some new features. In particular:

• ESX Server 3.0.2 Update 1 (build 61618)
  The Update 1 introduces support for new Intel Quad-Core Xeon 7300.
• VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 1 (build 61426)
  The Update 1 introduces the new VCB Role, with a specific set of user privileges which can be assigned at host and cluster level, and image customization for 64bit versions of Windows 2003 Standard / Enterprise Editions and Windows XP Professional.

Download ESX Server 3.0.2 Update 1 here and VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 1 here.

VMware just updated its free P2V/V2V migration tool to version 3.0.2.

The new release (build 59994) is mainly aimed at bug fixing but also extends support to some critical products:

• Support for 6th geneation VMware virtual hardware (Player 2.0, Workstation 6.0, ACE 2.0, Fusion 1.0 virtual machines)
• Support for Acronis True Image 9
• Support for Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 7

Download VMware Converter 3.0.2 for free here.

After just one month since release 3.2 Thinstall is ready to move forward and introduce a new release.

Application Virtualization Suite 3.3 introduces one major feature: capability to generate MSI installers for virtualized applications. This permits system administrators to integrate Thinstall applications with their existing inventory tools like ones from Microsoft, IBM, Altiris, LANDesk, BMC and CA.

Download a trial here.

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

Techworld published an interesting interview with Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Data Center and Desktop Platforms at VMware, about future of virtualizationl.

A couple of answers are particularly interesting:

Q: What new products will we see over the next 12 months?

A: What we are introducing today is what gets deployed over the next 12-18 months, such as 10 gig networking, AMD’s virtualisation indexing, IO virtualisation built into cards, MPIV on storage cards, up to 32 cores. Other things that will happen in the ecosystem – we see a great wave of IO virtualisation, increasing cores, and from our own product line – I can’t talk about specifics but you’ll see us being concurrent with these technologies as they come out.

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Q: AMD has spoken about the support it will be providing for code parallelisation – can you say what that means for VMware?

A: Yes, we’ve always said that virtualisation is the killer application for taking advantage of the virtualisation support built into the processors, such as the support for threads at the processor level, such as hardware interfaces to have multiple virtual channels so applications can talk to them in parallel. To take advantage of all that without having to rewrite the application or OS – virtualisation is the only way to do it. So we are focused on that, working with AMD and Intel. It’s the next golden age of virtualisation.

Read the whole interview at the source.

Quoting from ComputerWire:

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“The Virtuozzo Management Console will also have the ability to manage Parallels Server,” said Rudolph. “We’ll deliver the ability to migrate a workload from a Virtuozzo container to a Parallels virtual server and back. If a customer is running Longhorn with 12 containers in Virtuozzo and one of them is a database that needs to be continually up and running, they’ll face the challenge of how to upgrade some of the other containers. Now, however, they’ll be able to migrate the ones that need upgrading to an isolated virtual server in Parallels, upgrade and test them, then migrate them back.”…

Read the whole article at the source.

Thinstall continues to pursue its OEM business model already successful with LANDesk, Provision Networks and BMC.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Thinstall, a leading Application Virtualization Platform Solution, and Macrovisionâ Corporation today announced the integration of Macrovision’s AdminStudio product with Thinstall’s virtual application technology to make it easier for IT administrators to package applications for virtualization. Customers using the products together can benefit from an easy to use, low-cost system that simplifies packaging applications for virtual desktop management.

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The integration enables software applications to be packaged into a “Thinstalled” single, self-contained executable (EXE) file, for immediate distribution by IT administrators. Customers using the new release of AdminStudio, version 8.6, can benefit from the integration by speeding up software migrations and deploying custom, commercial and legacy applications directly into Thinstall’s Vista-ready Virtualization Platform…