Year: 2007

VMware published a very interesting 19-pages paper about Exchange 2003 achievable performances in a ESX Server 3.0.1 virtual machine hosted by Dell hardware:

This paper discusses the performance and scalability of Exchange Server 2003 when it is deployed within virtual machines hosted by VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 on a Dell PowerEdge 6850 server with a Dell-EMC CX500 FC SAN.

The Heavy user profile from Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2003 Load Simulator benchmarking tool was used to simulate the Exchange workload. Results indicated that a uniprocessor virtual machine can support up to 1,300 Heavy users.

Our experiments also show that consolidating multiple instances of these uniprocessor Exchange virtual machines on a PowerEdge 6850 can cumulatively support up to 4,000 Heavy users while still providing acceptable performance and scaling…

Read the whole paper at source.

In May 2007 Sun published an interesting 18-pages paper about scalability capabilities of its Sun Fire X4600.

The paper is interesting mainly because Sun used VMware VMmark as benchmarking platform, joining a group of vendors (Dell was the first one) who trusts virtualization vendor measurement approach:

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The VMmark benchmark gives IT organizations a way to objectively compare the scalability of different virtualization platforms. A beta version of the VMmark benchmark was used to assess the combination of VMware Infrastructure 3 software, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server, and the Sun StorageTek 6540 Array configured with varying amounts of CPU, memory, I/O, and storage resources.

The benchmark runs a highly resource-intensive workload on the server to measure scalability characteristics. The results demonstrate that a four-socket Sun Fire X4600 M2 server can manage twice the number of active virtual machines as a two-socket system. An eight-socket server can handle 3.5 times the number of virtual machines as a two-socket system.

The benchmark’s VMmark performance metric shows that performance scales with server capacity as well: a four-socket server scaled to 1.93 times that of the two-socket server, and the eight-socket server scaled to 3.07 times the two-socket server…

Read the whole paper at source.

Techworld published an interesting interview with XenSource Founder and CTO Simon Crosby.

Interviewer started talking about recent OEM agreement inked with Symantec, but Crosby’s answers about virtualization industry are much more interesting:

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Q: Is VMware really that horrible? A: Unlike VMware, Microsoft doesn’t compete with its channel but leaves room for an ecosystem. It’s a superb platform player. Microsoft is very conscious of its scale and leaves pockets of $100m markets around for its partners. Our relationship with Microsoft is strong, will remain strong, and strengthens every day. Microsoft has been a very supportive partner.

The chink in VMware’s armour is the weakness of its ecosystem — all its partners are under threat. That said, I wouldn’t fault VMware entirely. VMware has grown very fast — they had to do that so I can’t fault them for it, but no-one’s making money out of VMware. There’s a general sense of unease.

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Q: How do you see virtualisation evolving over the next two years? A: Hardware vendors will certify the hypervisor and it’s up to the customer to do everything else. Customers want to virtualise everything else because the savings are so huge — the confidence in virtualisation is high but it’s too complex for the average guy.

On the client, virtualisation technology has to be invisible and work using [management] technology such as Intel’s vPro. There also has to be a viable ecosystem or it’s a niche product…

Read the whole interview at source.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc. announced today that the exchange offer by VMware and EMC Corporation has been extended and will now expire at 11:00 a.m., Pacific Time, on August 9, 2007, unless further extended. Any such extension will be followed by a public announcement no later than the next business day after the offer was scheduled to expire. The offer had been previously scheduled to expire at 11:00 a.m., Pacific Time, on August 6, 2007.

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The depositary for the exchange offer has advised VMware and EMC that, through 11:59 p.m., Eastern Time, on August 1, 2007, a total of
approximately 7,940,000 shares of EMC stock underlying EMC options and approximately 2,340,000 shares of restricted EMC stock were validly
tendered and not withdrawn, representing approximately 64.5% of the outstanding shares of EMC stock underlying EMC options and approximately 40.2% of the outstanding shares of restricted EMC stock eligible to be tendered…

IPO is expected for August 13 or 14.

Related roadshow webcast and prospects are available here.

Creator of popular disk-imaging suite WinImage, releases today new version 8.1 introducing support to VMware virtual hard drive format .vmdk.

This means customers will be able to create, extract files, defragment .vmdk files without need of accessing VMware product itself.

WinImage already supports Microsoft virtual hard drive format, .vhd, since version 8.0.

Download a trial here.

Quoting from the Asigra official announcement:

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With 64-bit Televaulting, Asigra addresses the shortcomings of the current backup and recovery methods for protecting virtualized server environments by providing the following:

• Agentless backup optimized for virtualized server environments
• Any-to-any restore capability (P2P, P2V, V2V, V2P)
• Live VM backup
• Centralized management of VM backup and recovery
• Compliance-ready VM backup
• File-level recovery at the VM and guest OS level
• Bare-metal recovery

…

AppStream just released a minor update of its application virtualization and streaming engine, reaching version 5.2.2.

This new build introduces several enhancements but it mostly introduces support for Intel vPro technology and Microsoft Windows Vista operating system.

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

Quoting from CRN:

Symantec is hoping to revive interest in the concept of storage resource management with the introduction Wednesday of Veritas CommandCentral 5.0.

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CommandCentral 5.0 now does discovery and mapping of guest operating systems to VMware ESX servers to the back-end arrays, and reports on the total capacity allocated, capacity claimed, and the percent of capacity which is used by ESX and the guest operating system.

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CommandCentral 5.0 now scales to about 3,000 host servers, about 6 petabytes of storage capacity, and 12,000 switch ports, compared to about 1,000 servers with version 4.3, Soderbery said.

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We need to map the virtual servers to the host servers and storage,” he said. “5.0 provides mapping with VMotion, so we can have two virtual machines working together for failover. When a server fails over, we need to map the new server to the mirrored disk, and when the server comes back, we need to fall back to the primary storage. It can get pretty harried about which is the correct copy of the data.”

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CommandCentral 5.0 lists for about $1,000 per server in small and midsize enterprise environments, Soderbery said…

Read the whole article at source.

Symantec continues its progression in virtualization market extending support of most of its storage-related products to virtualization platforms. Biggest step so far has been OEM agreement inked one week ago with XenSource.

After opening beta program for esxReplicator 2.1, it’s now turn for Vizioncore flagship product: esxRanger.

This new 3.2 version introduces new features like:

• VSS quiescing
• Restore to Separate Datastores
• NoZip Restores

Download this beta here.

Despite Propero acquisition was never formalized, VMware is working hard to integrate acquired technology into ESX Server ecosystem.

The company is now preparing to launch first beta of its new VDI Connection Broker based on Propero technology and it’s calling for nominations.

To better understand how VMware-Propero offering will position on hosted desktop market, a great help comes from Massimo Re Ferrè, Architect at IBM, which in February created a comprehensive connection brokers comparison chart.

If you are interested in this program send an email to this address.

As soon as VMware will launch this new product its partners will likely start making agreements with competitors, like Provision Networks which partnered with Virtual Iron, with HP, with IBM and with Thinstall.