Year: 2007

This is last keynote for this VMworld 2007 day. Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Chief Scientist, will take the stage, which is already full of desktop and servers. Some demos are finally expected today, after the disappointing keynote performed yesterday by Cisco CEO, John T. Chambers.

virtualization.info will live blog during the whole keynote and update this post several times accordingly. Stay tuned!

Mendel on stage. He’s about to show future technologies VMware is working on.

He starts summarizing what today we achieved with virtualization (as a platform for hardware standardization), virtual infrastructure, and virtual machines live motion capabilities (also thanks to new AMD Extended Migration and Intel FlexMigration features included in modern quad-core CPUs).

Time to demo the first improvement which will be implemented in upcoming VMware Infrastructure 3.5: Storage VMotion.
An Oracle virtual machine is migrated from one datastore to another without recognizable impact on performances (big applause).

Now Mendel moves on virtual appliances: VMware is working on streaming virtual appliances for instant power on (applause).

Time to demo this new feature: through a prefetching technology one virtual appliance is being downloaded from one server to a client, and while still on the way the client already starts it. The guest operating system (Linux) boots on desktop before the download finish.
The technology is going to be applied to VDI scenarios as well (big applause).

Now Mendel moves to high availability and introduces the concept of continuous high availability, which is basically extending to memory and input devices interaction what is applied to storage data with continuous data protection (CDP) solutions well-known in security industry.

Time for a demo again: a Microsoft Exchange Server virtual machine is being replicated in real time from one virtualization host to another.
Every single operation is being replicated in real-time, including mouse movements, without recognizable impact on performances (huge applause).

Mendel closes his visionary keynote stating that VMware has just scratched the surface, and will offer many more innovations in future.

That’s all from VMworld 2007. VMware didn’t announce on stage Server 2.0 public beta program (despite one conference session is introduicing it today), but the upcoming continuous high availability that Mendel showed on stage is going to impact so deeply the whole IT industry (as well as the existing VMware partners ecosystem and the competition landscape) that audience is more than satisfied.

Thank you to all readers that stayed wtih us during this live coverage.

During these three days over 50 vendors issued press announcements about new technologies, products, partnerships. So normal news publishing activity will start again between today and tomorrow (due to the high volume of news that will follow next few days you may want to subscribe virtualization.info newsletter or RSS feed to not miss a single one).

Second day at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco and virtualization.info will cover the morning keynote as promised. Yesterday coverage has been seen over 11,000 times. Thank you for staying with us.

Today the stage will completely taken by John T. Chambers, Cisco Chairman and CEO, which is expected to unveil virtual switches for VMware virtual networking, as virtualization.info revealed last month.

Session will start in minutes and this post will be updated several times accordingly.

He starts making a long premise about how corporation needs changed over years, how CEOs and CIOs look for facing same challenges from different perspectives, how Internet impacted on productivity since 1997.

Cisco expects a second major revolution in productivity since Internet introduction, thanks to new generation collaboration / Web 2.0 tools. These tools are changing the support model, the sales model, the way companies innovate and acquire technologies (8 days instead of 45 on average). And they are being adopted in the enterprise market after a successful widespread in the consumer market.
To grant a reliable infrastructure for this second revolution Cisco looks at virtualization and convergence.

The long premise backs now a concept, Datacenter 3.0, where everything is virtualized: infrastructures (servers, storage, network) and services.

Cisco Virtual Data Center is now briefly demonstrated on stage: on a corporate portal a company representative can ask for more resources, the portal connect to VMware Infrastructure through its APIs, and on the back Cisco VFrame orchestrates the provisioning and physical resources partitioning.

Chambers keynote ends stating one of Cisco top priorities for FY08 is virtualization, along with green computing and infrastructure support for sport / entertainment.

In summary this has been a very unfocused and disappointing keynote, without new announcements and for sure not the expected virtual switches (which doesn’t mean it will not happen).

Tomorrow virtualization.info will cover last day keynote performed by Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Chief Scientist.
He will hopefully announce public beta program for VMware Server 2.0.

As announced virtualization.info is present at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco this year to cover live general sessions for all three days.

In few minutes this post will be updated to reflect announcements made by Diane Greene, VMware President, and her guests: Patrick Gelsinger, Intel SVP and GM, and Hector de J. Ruiz, AMD Chairman and CEO.

Diane Greene, VMware President

She starts announcing ESX Server 3i and shows a live demo of it running on a Dell PowerEdge, along with Mark Jarvis, Chief Marketing Officer at Dell.

On stage there is a complete rack of Dell machines, an IBM system and a HP system. On the background the ESX Server starts on a 2 x Dual Core AMD Opteron system with 16GB of RAM.

(moderate applause)

(while Diane is showing a long list of of endorsement videos from top industry OEMs, the press department releases a confirmation that VMware acquired Dunes. virtualization broke the news on Sunday)

Now she mentions new Site Recovery Manager product.

It will allow virtual infrastructure backup on a remote cold site (Diane shows a coast to coast backup and restore example) through integration with 3rd party solutions.

She closes her keynote part mentioning virtual desktop, virtual appliances and green computing initiatives. No official announcement for upcoming Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.

Patrick Gelsinger, Intel SVP and GM

He says Intel recognizes several virtualization usage models: static server consolidation, multi-OS workstation, dynamic load balancing (meaning capability to automatically move workloads depending on demand), high availability / disaster recovery and in future mainframe migration.

New features of Intel processors are shown: FlexMigration, Extended Page Tables, Virtual Processor IDs.

Now he details future technical challenges of virtualization: I/O Virtualization, Energy Efficiency, Reliability, Metering and Quality of Service, Security and Fault Tolerance.

Back on Intel virtualization features Patrick shows Intel VT-d architecture, supported on Intel Platforms since this year, and new Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq), which reduces CPU utilization acting on network interfaces cards.

He closes with a mention of the new Intel quad-core Xeon 7300, showing 30% better performances and scalability when used with ESX Server (benchmarked with Intel vConsolidate).

Hector de J. Ruiz, AMD Chairman and CEO

He starts talking about AMD efforts in green computing creating energy efficient solutions. AMD achieved 76% reduction in power consumption in its Austin datacenter with 7 ESX Server 3.0.

(big applause)

He now mentions AMD estimation for near future: 15% shipped servers will be for virtualization purposes within 2010, with a $20 billion spending by that time.

On stage now Leendert va Doorn, Senior Fellow at AMD, to introduce new AMD quad-core Opteron (codename Barcellona).

He start talking about new AMD nested paging technology called Rapid Virtualization Indexing.

He also covers tomorrow’s datacenter, completely virtualized, where disaster recovery and manageability become the most important things.

That’s all for today’s keynote. Biggest announcements are probably set for tomorrow’s keynote, performed by John T. Chambers, Cisco Chairman and CEO, and last day’s keynote, performed by Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Chief Scientist.

Four years ago virtualization.info published its first page (under the name of Blue Alliance Project).

It started with a precise mission: aggregating all scarce news about virtualization technologies and companies in 2003.
In these four years virtualization raised so much attention to become the most important technology since Internet advent. And press coverage about virtualization turned into a daily overload of articles.
virtualization.info continues to exist and turned its misson accordingly, moving from news aggregation to strict news filtering.
No more than ten news posts per day, every day, so that every system administrator, decision maker, analyst and investor out there is sure to find only relevant informations, in a single place, and with mimimum waste of time.

Today virtualization.info achieves over 150,000 pageviews / month plus over 60,000 feed views / month, and it keeps growing. Thank you for reading and supporting since so much time.
And this is just the beginning: virtualization.info will unveil several major projects within the end of this year and beginning of next one.

For now let’s celebrate with a live coverage of VMworld 2007 keynotes.

virtualization.info is expanding and looking for collaborators. If any reader wants to pass on the other side of the screen, he can send an email.

VMworld 2007 in San Francisco is yet to start, but VMware is already preparing next year’s event calendar.

The biggest news is that the company will arrange in 2008 two VMworld editions: one for US, planned in Las Vegas (Sep. 16-18), and one for EMEA, planned in Cannes (Feb. 26-28).

The existing VMware event called Techincal Solution Exchange (TSX), initially reserved for partners, will be probably absorbed by the new european edition of VMworld.

Is yet to be seen if VMware will use this second stage as a real first-class stage, with products announcements and fresh sessions.

The biggest application for virtualization is definitively in disaster recovery. And this is why virtualization vendors like PlateSpin are pushing the concept since a long time already.

virtualization.info broke the news last month that VMware is ready to conquer this market as well with a new product.

Now VMware officially confirms its efforts announcing the new Site Recovery Manager (SRM):

VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today announced VMware Site Recovery Manager, a pioneering new product for disaster recovery automation.

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VMware Site Recovery Manager is designed to simplify and automate the disaster recovery process so that customers can reliably recover from data center outages in hours rather than days. Working with VMware Infrastructure, VMware Site Recovery Manager can help eliminate the complexity and unreliability of manual recovery and also eliminate the cost and complexity of maintaining duplicate but idle infrastructure at a recovery site.

…

VMware and its storage partners including EMC, EqualLogic, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Lefthand Networks and Network Appliance are working to support the use of leading storage replication capabilities with VMware Site Recovery Manager…

VMware stays pretty mum about this products architecture and features until tomorrow, when VMworld 2007 will start, but first partner to announce support for this solution, Emulex, reveals some details:

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Currently, data centers using VMware Infrastructure and EqualLogic’s virtualized SAN solution benefit from consolidation, flexibility and simplicity that provide advantages for disaster recovery operations. Now, EqualLogic is working with VMware to enable VMware Site Recovery Manager to support and seamlessly leverage PS Series Auto-Replication. As a result of this effort, joint customers are expected to be able to automate critical recovery processes and test full recovery of VMware Infrastructure environments that have been replicated between two EqualLogic SANs with minimal impact on production services…

virtualization.info will blog live from the stage during all three days keynotes to tell more about this new product and others VMware will announce.

With release of upcoming VMware Infrastructure 3.5, VMware will also introduce a new edition of its flagship product: ESX Server 3i.

virtualization.info broke the news one month ago, revealing VMware was working on this product side by side with Dell, IBM, HP and other OEMs, to ship it pre-installed on a small Solid State Drive (SDD).

Last week IBM was the first to announce support for this product, in the new System x3950 M2.

Today VMware finally confirms the existence of this new version:

VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today introduced VMware ESX Server 3i, the industry’s next generation thin hypervisor to be integrated in server hardware from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, NEC and others.

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Based on VMware ESX Server which has set the standard for a production proven, stable and mature hypervisor, VMware ESX Server 3i is a “bare metal” hypervisor that partitions a physical server into multiple secure and portable virtual machines. Designed for optimal scalability and performance, VMware ESX Server 3i’s innovative new architecture also provides unmatched security, reliability and manageability in a compact, 32 MB package.

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Hardware vendors are expected to begin shipping VMware ESX Server 3i within their products by the end of 2007 and over the course of 2008. In the future, VMware ESX Server 3i will also be available for download at www.vmware.com….

Rumors say that ESX Server 3i started from the personal work of a single VMware employee, who crafted and maintained a liveCD version of every new ESX Server release, until somebody probably tought it was a viable solution for real market.

VMware provided no informations about prices of this version but it’s suprising the company stated the new edition will be available for download from the website: initial informations revealed that ESX Server 3i installation and updated would be an OEMs exclusive.

XenSource, just acquired by Citrix, announced its own hypervisor OEM edition last week.

For a long time VMware sold a simple VDI solution, called Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) only through its sales channel, leaving room for its partners to market their enhanced connection brokers to general public. But at a point the company decided to seriously invest in the segment and silently acquired UK firm Propero.

Now after five months VMware is ready to announce integration of Propero technologies in VDM second generation:

VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today announced an end-to-end virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution with the introduction of VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2, the company’s next generation connection broker. Today’s news extends VMware’s comprehensive line of desktop virtualization software and services to bring new levels of security, mobility and manageability to global enterprise desktop users.

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VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2 is a component of VMware VDI, an end-to-end desktop virtualization solution that enables organizations to centralize desktop management and control using the VMware Infrastructure 3 platform. Through tight integration with VMware Virtual Center, VMware Virtual Desktop Manager delivers enterprise-class virtual desktop management while providing end users with a familiar desktop experience…

At the same time VMware opens related open beta program, which should go live shortly.

The final release is expected before the end of the year.

With this operation VMware seriously risks to kill its own VDI ecosystem, considering most customers will prefer to go for a tightly integrated solution made by same vendor rather than having to handle with multiple vendors incompatibilities.

Ther first consequence will be a massive opening towards competitors, but considering XenEnterprise will get Citrix Desktop Broker integration in the near timeframe because of acquisition, few companies remain: Virtual Iron, which is already working with Provision Networks, Microsoft, SWsoft and its subsidiary Parallels which is expected to release its own hypervisor before the end of the year.

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

Quoting from the AMD official announcement:

AMD today introduced the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, the world’s most advanced x86 processor ever designed and manufactured and the first native x86 quad-core microprocessor. Designed from inception for the most demanding datacenters, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers from global OEMs and system builders can deliver breakthrough capabilities to customers in a time of dramatically escalating performance-per-watt emphasis.

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Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture excel in virtualized environments because of the integrated memory controller4 for reduced memory latency, and Rapid Virtualization Indexing, a new AMD innovation in AMD Virtualization technology designed to reduce the overhead associated with software virtualization. Rapid Virtualization Indexing takes functionality that was previously performed in software and greatly accelerates it by performing those functions within the CPU to help enable near-real time application performance…

Rapid Virtualization Indexing is AMD implementation of nested tables technology virtualization vendors will be able to use to further reduce performance degrade introduced by Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs).

VMware will introduce support for this technology with release of upcoming ESX Server 3.5 (formerly 3.1).

After one year and a half since release of Virtuozzo 3.0 for Linux and 3.5 for Windows, SWsoft is finally ready to unveil new generation of its OS virtualization platform.

The 4.0 version introduces some important new capabilities like:

• A new GUI, able to manage multiple virtualization hosts
• A centralized architecture, sharing templates and backups among all virtual environments
• An enhanced P2V migration tool, able to update on the fly a physical box from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003 and deploy it inside a virtual environment
• A granular access control system, support LDAP
• Virtual instances snapshots through Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS)
• Bandwidth management
• Physical CPUs masking (limit amount of CPUs a virtual instance can see)
• Integrated SNMP MIB
• Support for virtual SCSI drives inside virtual instances
• Support for Microsoft Network Load Balancing and Cluster Services inside Windows virtual instances
• Support for Red Hat Cluster Services inside Linux virtual instances
• Support fo host-level fail-over of virtual instances
• Support for physical hardware sharing between several virtual instances
• Support for VPNs and DHCPs inside virtual instances
• Support for 3rd party backup solutions at host-level (Microsoft, EMC, Symantec, IBM, CA)
• Support for VLANs

The beta program, which will start at the end of September, can be enrolled here.

SWsoft expect to release Virtuozzo 4.0 before the end of this year.