Year: 2007

Quoting from InternetNews:

…

If you run more application server instances, the thinking goes, you can do more work, applications can take on more loads, and so businesses derive more value from the enterprise software they’ve purchased. BEA argues that to have a pricing model tied to the underlying hardware and number of CPUs is no longer appropriate.

“For customers to stay with the CPU pricing model in virtualized data centers is restrictive. It’s difficult to take advantage of the flexibility of the virtualization platform and to account and track and plan for software costs,” says Pritchard.

The company is list pricing the solution at $13,000 per instance…

Read the whole article at the source.

While BEA finally moves towards virtualization, even if it just talk about virtual appliance version, other major companies refuse to make same step. Oracle is one of the worst.

Quoting from InformationWeek:

In March, Gartner ignited the blogosphere by stating the obvious: Virtualization creates new attack opportunities.

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Just how risk-exposed are we today? After all, in that same report Gartner predicted that a patch-worthy hypervisor vulnerability would be discovered in a mainstream product before the end of 2008. These potential vulnerabilities fall into two broad categories. First, if you can escape a client OS and move into a host OS, you have access to the data on all the other client operating systems on that machine. And there are whole new realms of rootkits being designed to take advantage of virtualization technology…

Read the whole article at the source.

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

Quoting from the SunGuard official announcement:

SunGard Availability Services today announced it is now offering support of VMware®ESX Server 3.x and the distributed services that are part of VMware Infrastructure through its Operating System (OS) Management Service. With this enhancement, SunGard now provides full management of customers’ systems running in a virtualized environment on the VMware Infrastructure platform-a key milestone in the company’s ongoing virtualization initiative. The service includes a VMware VirtualCenter management server to monitor and manage a customer’s virtual machines, as well as complete monitoring, management and reporting of the physical servers.

…

The enhanced Operating System Management Service featuring support of VMware ESX Server and the distributed virtualization services that are part of VMware Infrastructure is available today.

One week from now VMware will host in San Francisco the biggest virtualization event in history: VMworld 2007.

Upcoming edition is set to be huge for several reasons: major announcements like VMware Infrastructure 3.5, ESX Server hardware appliance, VMware Server 2.0 and Cisco virtual networking, over 10,000 attendees, tents of new virtualization companies.

virtualization.info will be present and for the first time will live blog during three morning keynotes:

• Sep. 11 – Diane Greene (VMware President), Patrick Gelsinger (Intel SVP and GM), Hector de J. Ruiz (AMD Chairman and CEO)
  
• Sep. 12 – John T. Chambers (Cisco Chairman and CEO)
  
• Sep. 13 – Dr. Mendel Rosenblum (VMware Chief Scientist)
  

By the way: first conference day, September 11, virtualization.info will celebrate its 4th birthday, convering virtualization industry since 2003.

If you can’t attend the event be sure to subscribe virtualization.info newsletter or RSS feed.

As expected Sun released Update 4 for Solaris 10 (also called Solaris 08/07), introducing a major enhancement in its OS virtualization technology called Solaris Containers.

New Solaris Containers for Linux Applications (codenamed lx brand or Linux Branded Zone) allows installation of CentOS 3.5-3.8 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.5-3.8 distributions inside a non-global zone.

Inside these zones any 32-bit application for Linux can run unmodified, since Solaris emulates a Linux 2.4.21 kernel, glibc 2.3.2 and partially /dev and /proc interfaces.

Obviously there are limitations: a Linux Branded Zone only supports user-level Linux applications, which implies no device drivers, kernel modules, or file systems.

Sun published a list of applications known for working inside these zones.

Download new Sun Solaris 10 Update 4 here.

After one month of beta testing, Virtual Iron is ready to launch 4th generation of its platform.

Based on Xen 3.1 hypervisor (despite XenSource acquisition by Citrix) this new major release sports some remarkable improvements like:

• 64bit hypervisor architecture
• 8-way virtual SMP
• new management GUI
• Support for Windows Vista and 2000 and for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 guest OSes
• Integration of optimized drivers for Novell SuSE Enterprise Server guest OS
• Integration of PlateSpin products under LiveConvert name

Virtual Iron 4.0 will be available since September 10 at $799 / socket for Extended Enterprise Edition and $499 / socket for Enterprise Edition. Free edition will continue to exist, allowing no more than 12 virtual machines on a single host.

Integrations appearing in this release are particularly important.

First of all Virtual Iron is enforcing its relationship with Novell, which seems more interested than ever in virtualization vendors (they tried to acquired XenSource much before Citrix.
This relationship may also be part of bigger plans: Novell has a unique partnership with Microsoft to improve their hypervisors interoperability, Virtual Iron just joined Microsoft Interop Alliance, and now Novell and Virtual Iron work together on performances improvements.

Secondarily the fact PlateSpin strengthens partnership started one year ago with Virtual Iron means the company is slowly changing its relationship with VMware, from partners to competitors (upcoming VMware Infrastructure 3.5 will deliver intergrated P2V and server consolidation tools).
In this scenario PlateSpin has all interests in enforcing alliances with alternative virtualization vendors, and Virtual Iron surely is a good one.

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

SWsoft is preparing to announce several things, according to The Inquirer. One of them is acquisition of Sphera:

…

Beloussov disclosed that he is closing on “several” acquisitions, one of which is likely to be announced early next week. This will be a company analogous to Opsware, the automation outfit that recently agreed to sell out to HP. Beloussov wouldn’t name the company but Israel’s The Marker is reporting the target as Sphera, a company that specialises in management tools for software-as-a-service firms.

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Two major releases are planned for the next few months: Virtuozzo v4 and the first release of Parallels Server…

Read the whole article at source.

While The Inquirer cannot confirm the acquisition, virtualization.info backs TheMarker claims, after discovering evidences that some Sphera employees are now updating their profiles to reflect SWsoft acquisition, which should have completed in June 2007:

A longer term big announcement will be integration between hardware virtualizatoin provided by upcoming hypervisor Parallels Server and OS virtualization provided by Virtuozzo.

In this scenario datacenter automation is critical to achieve a liquid datacenter, where the best virtualization approach is automatically chosen depending on technical constrains and workloads type.

German startup innotek releases today new version of its desktop virtualization solution for Windows and Linux (and Mac OS in the near timeframe): VirtualBox 1.5.

Competition against VMware and Parallels is hard, mostly because of newest interface improvements both companies launched in the Apple market, and which will probably port on other versions of their products. So innotek is trying to beat competitors on time, and introduces seamless window capability in this new release of VirtualBox.

VirtualBox 1.5 also introduces support for 64bit Windows host OS and IBM OS/2 guest OS.

Complete list of changes is available here. The product is available free of charge as usual, under GPL license, here.

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

Quoting from the Embotics official announcement:

Embotics, the Virtual Machine (VM) Lifecycle management company, today announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program. Embotics is helping enterprises maximize the benefits of server virtualization through Virtual Machine (VM) lifecycle management, with traceability and control for both online and offline VM assets…

Still in stealth mode, Embotics is expected to launch its first product at VMworld 2007, next week in San Francisco, going to reach other notable competitors like Surgient, VMLogix and VMware itself, in this segment since one year with Akimbi acquisition.

It’s almost sure Embotics product will be cross-platforms since the company also adheres XenSource (now acquired by Citrix) ISVs Partner Program since one September 2006.

Embotics has been included in virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Quoting from the AMD official announcement:

…AMD today disclosed details about “AMD-V Extended Migration”, a feature dating back to the First-Generation AMD Opteron processor that enables virtual machines to migrate between different versions of AMD processors. AMD has worked with VMware, the industry leading virtualization software provider, to refine this feature in order to enable a key functionality designed to help IT managers fully leverage the benefits of virtualized IT infrastructures. In addition, to further contribute to the industry discussion around how to implement and manage virtualization capabilities…

AMD-V Extended Migration provides the necessary support for virtualization software to mask the differences between CPU generations, facilitating the safe live migration of virtual machines between servers running different generations of AMD processors. This includes existing single-core and dual-core processors and all future AMD processor revisions, including the upcoming “Barcelona” Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, the first native x86 quad-core microprocessor.

Novell, Qumranet, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Virtual Iron, VMware and XenSource are among the leading virtualization software vendors with the capacity to take advantage of AMD-V Extended Migration…

AMD released a very technical 17-pages whitepaper about this technology which worths a read: Live Virtual Machine Migration on AMD Processors.

Intel is working on a similar tecnology called Flex which will appear on upcoming quad-core motherboards.