Year: 2007

Quoting from the Evault official announcement:

EVault, Inc., a Seagate Technology company and the trusted expert in complete data protection solutions, today announced general availability of the EVault VMware Plug-in for customers of the EVault Protect Software as a Service (SaaS) and EVault InfoStage licensed software, and service providers offering data protection services powered by EVault technology

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The EVault VMware Plug-in leverages and extends EVault’s DeltaPro technology to virtual environments by backing up and compressing only new and changed data at the block level, which enhances network performance, decreases the backup window and lowers the overall storage footprint.

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Data is securely sent offsite to one of EVault’s seven secure Tier III and IV datacenters, which are all SAS 70 Type II certified.

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The EVault VMware Plug-in is available now as an add-on for EVault SaaS and software customers as well as through service providers offering data protection services based on EVault technology.

Quoting from the Trigence official announcement:

Trigence, the leader in virtualization at the application level, today unveiled its Trigence Channel Partner Program for value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators and consulting firms.

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As part of today’s news, Trigence has announced partnership agreements with AsiaFootPrint and OnX Enterprise Solutions, Ltd. In addition, Trigence is seeking to add new qualified channel partners in the coming year to help drive further growth in the application virtualization space…

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, the leading provider of server repurposing software for large data centers, and 3Leaf Systems, provider of next-generation virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers, today announced a relationship between the two companies that allows seamless interoperability between the Scalent V/OE software and 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server in customers’ heterogeneous IT environments.

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Scalent V/OE enables any managed server software stack to boot from and access specific SAN LUN segments from any physical or virtual machine — on the fly, without requiring changes to underlying physical assets. The 3Leaf V-8000 virtualizes the I/O for large pools of servers, delivering limits and guarantees to both networking and storage interfaces, allowing service levels to be dynamically modified as application demand changes…

Read the whole XXX at source.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera Inc., the data center virtualization company, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 7,178,059 to the company for its innovation in N+1 disaster recovery. Entitled “Disaster recovery for processing resources using configurable deployment platform,” this patent further confirms Egenera as a leader in verifiable, cost-effective disaster recovery. Since the company’s inception in 2000, Egenera has earned numerous patents in virtualization, failover, and power and cooling.

Egenera’s disaster recovery technology simplifies and accelerates moving entire clusters of servers, including their storage and networking connections, to a remote site. Leveraging Egenera’s Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture, clusters are reinstated within minutes at the new site, without hardware configuration. A single back-up site can adopt the configuration of any number of primary sites on demand. This unique N+1 approach provides complete yet simple disaster recovery at the lowest cost, without the physical and management complexities typical of physical replication approaches…

Recent release of Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 introduces capability to perform virtual machines live back through Volume Shadow Service (VSS) feature included in Windows Server 2003 hosts.

Unfortunately, as virtualization.info exposed during Service Pack 1 beta program, this capability cannot be leveraged by NTBackup included in every Windows edition, but users need 3rd party backup solutions.

Anyway Microsoft customers can obtain virtual machines live backup as well without buying 3rd party solutions, but just using upcoming Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007, which further complicates company position on this issue.

Technical steps to integrate Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and DPM 2007 are now detailed in a new webcast Microsoft arranged for June 21.

Register for it here.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced that VMware Workstation has won the 2007 Visual Studio Magazine Readers’ Choice Award in the Development Tools category. Winners were announced in the June 2007 issue of Visual Studio Magazine…

VMware continues to achieve endless awards on its products. This isn’t a real news. What is interesting instead, is VMware continues to collect awards from Microsoft development community.

In this years Microsoft put huge efforts and investments in development tools, and became a recognized leader not only because of programming languages but also because of developments tools.

Virtualization plaftorms are today the most needful tool for any developer on the planet, and Microsoft had the opportunity to take the virtualization market this way since Connectix acquisition in 2003. But never did, allowing competitors to succeed in its own reign.

For June 25 SYS-CON Media arranged first edition of Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City.

I’ll moderate a panel on June 25 (with Thinstall founder and Layer-7 co-founder) about issues and strategies in virtualization adoption, and will present a session on June 26 talking about current situation of virtualization market, challenges virtualization customers and vendors are called to address, and future trends.

Beside me there will be top level speakers from EMC, Microsoft, Sun, Virtual Iron, SWsoft, Scalent, CiRBA, etc..

I’ll also cover the Track Chair role for this event so I will be happy to meet as many attendees and vendors as possible during all event timeframe and discuss about virtualization technologies at 360 degrees.

Check the agenda here (on the right sidebar) and register for the event here. (SYS-CON is co-hosting several events on the same location, the same day, so one registration pass will grant you access to all of them).

(to see other events where I’ll have a lecture check my speaking schedule)

Not happy enough comparing ESX Server 3.0.1 with Xen 3.0.3 and with XenEnterprise 3.2 (on multiple NICs scenario), VMware is now presenting a third analysis, still against XenEnterprise 3.2, but this time on multiple virtual machines scenario:

In a companion paper we looked at loading up a single virtual machine (VM) with multiple netperf instances, each running over its own NIC (Network Interface Controller). This effectively exposes the real virtualization overhead of high-throughput networking. While there are some real-world use cases that require this much network bandwidth in a single VM, a much more common scenario is spreading this bandwidth over many VMs running on one physical machine. This is a natural result of consolidating servers. For this paper we used the same hardware and software as in the multi-NIC paper, but performed a “scale-out” test: each of several VMs had a 1 Gbps physical NIC dedicated to it and each communicated to a similar dedicated NIC on the client machine through a netperf/netserver pair. The VMs did not share NICs. We hope this will lead to a better understanding of the performance issues involved with virtualizing networking…

Read the whole paper at source.

Massimo Re Ferrè, IT Architect at IBM, just published on his personal blog a very interesting article providing an architectural overview of most popular hypervisors on the market: VMware ESX Server 3.0, Xen 3.0 and upcoming Microsoft Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian):

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As you could see from these pictures VMware ESX implements what it is referred to as the “VMKernel” which is a bundle of hypervisor code along with the device driver modules used to support a given set of hardware. The size of the VMkernel is known to be in the range of some 200.000 lines of code or a few MBytes. On top of that there are a so called VMware Console OS that is in fact a sort of system virtual machine that is used to accomplish most administrative tasks such as providing a shell to access the VMkernel, the http and VirtualCenter services to administer the box. The Console OS is not typically used to support virtual machines workloads as everything is handled by the VMkernel.

On the other hand Viridian and Xen implement a different philosophy where the so called “Parent Partition” and “Dom0” play a different role than the Console OS. The hypervisor implementation in Viridian and Xen is much smaller than that in the ESX implementation and in fact it is in the range of some few thousands lines of code (vs the 200.000 of the VMKernel) or some KBytes (vs the MBytes of the VMKernel). However the Viridian/Xen implementation pretty heavily involves the usage of the Parent Partition / Dom0 as far as device drivers are concerned. In fact they are using these two entities to “proxy” I/O calls from the virtual machines to the physical world. On top of this proxy function of course the Parent Partition and Dom0 also provide higher level management functions similarly to the VMware Console OS. So in my opinion claiming that the Viridian / Xen hypervisor is “thinner” than the VMKernel is partially true since VMware decided (for their own convenience) to put stuff into the VMKernel that on the other solutions did not just evaporated… they are merely called differently and are included in different “locations”…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the 451 Group official announcement:

The 451 Group believes that virtualization is transforming the datacenter, and the next wave of virtualization technology will benefit desktops and applications. These improvements will lead to greater efficiency and power savings as this virtualization layer of software abstraction is added to the enterprise software infrastructure.

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The market has already seen $1.5bn in M&A activity related to desktop and application virtualization over the past 24 months, and 451 analysts predict that there is more to come…

It’s not hard to recognize huge interest vendors have for application virtualization: between 2006 and H1 2007 we assisted to major acquisitions operated market leaders like Microsoft (acquiring Softricity), Citrix (acquiring Ardence), Symantec (acquiring Altiris) and Google (acquiring GreenBorder).

Unfortunately The 451 Group analyzes together desktop and application virtualization technologies, which includes in analysts opinion also what we call today presentation or session virtualization (terminal services like technologies). Each of them follow very different approaches and have different class of challenges and impact on infrastructure. Customers should be very careful in evaluating all these technologies in the same way.