Year: 2007

innotek to launch its own hypervisor, tightly connected with Microsoft

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Germany startup innotek is not just lastest player in the virtualization industry, offering a new hosted virtualization solution called VirtualBox.

innotek is preparing to launch another virtualization product, this time a true hypervisor (like VMware ESX Server, Xen and upcoming Microsoft Windows Server Virtualizatoin or codename Viridian), called hyperkernel.

Based on existing product’s description hyperkernel is going to be the first microkernel based hypervisor on the market (VMware ESX Server vmkernel is not).

The information is interesting not just in itself but also because innotek is based near Stuttgart, but has offices in Dresden too, where a microkernel called L4 is developed as university project (with some interesting applications in virtualization).

Last but not least innotek seems to have a very tight connection with Microsoft, since it Partners page reports:

innotek has a strategic relationship with Microsoft related to its leading edge virtual machine products, Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server. innotek has developed several features of the Microsoft virtualization products.

Is upcoming Windows hypervisor based on L4 microkernel and developed by innotek?

Update: Microsoft provided an official answer to this speculation denying any innoted involvement in current codename Viridian development:

Innotek’s strategic relationship with Microsoft is specific to the development of virtual machine add-ins that allow Virtual PC to run OS/2 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 to run non-Windows operating systems as guest VMs.

Innotek also provides escalation support for OS/2 running on Virtual PC. The partnership is limited to those items. And it has been a successful partnership in that there have been more than 15,000 downloads of the VM add-ins for Virtual Server 2005 R2 in the first 12 months, allowing customers to consolidate servers running up to 9 different versions of RedHat or Suse Linux.

Benchmarks: ESX Server 3.0.1 vs XenEnterprise 3.2 networking performances comparison

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VMware is decided to play the benchmarks game up to the end, and seems to prefer XenSource as sparring partner.

After publishing a much controversial performance comparison between ESX Server 3.0.1 and Xen 3.0.3 (which received a remarkable counter-analysis by XenSource, comparing ESX Server 3.0.1 against XenEnteprise 3.2 beta), now Palo Alto company is back and publishes another study focused on networking performances this time, against XenEnterprise 3.2:

Just a few years ago, generating enough network traffic to push a single 1 Gbps network adapter to capacity would saturate a computer’s main processor. However, processors have advanced in these few years to the point that 1 Gbps networking does not stress a modern native or virtualized system.

In order to better expose the real virtualization overhead of high-throughput networking, it is now necessary to increase the load on the system beyond a single 1 Gbps link.

In this paper, we characterize the virtualization overheads of virtual machines by measuring the performance under heavy networking in a uniprocessor virtual machine. This was done by configuring multiple 1 Gbps Ethernet adapters (“NICs”) in the server, each associated with a netperf or netserver instance running over a unique subnet and port.

The hypervisors tested were ESX Server 3.0.1 (referred to as “ESX301”) and XenEnterprise 3.2.0 (referred to as “XE320”). Both hypervisors were installed with no modifications or tuning.

For each hypervisor, the corresponding “tools” packages containing paravirtualized (PV) network drivers was installed in the guest. The hypervisors were installed on a 4-core, 3 GHz HP DL380G5 system with 16GB of memory. For the virtualized tests, a single virtual machine was configured for each hypervisor with one processor and 1GB of memory, running Windows Server 2003 Release 2 Enterprise Edition (32-bit). During the tests, the virtual machine under test was the only one running in the hypervisor…

Read the whole paper at source.

Microsoft opens Windows Server Virtualization TAP program

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James O’Neill, IT Professional Evangelist at Microsoft, published on his corporate blog opening of Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian):

On Friday the Windows Server virtualization (WSv) team opened nominations for the Technology Adoption Programme (TAP) for Windows Server virtualization aka Viridian. The nomination process closes on May 16th.

I should explain that a TAP is designed to be an opportunity for collaboration between customers and Microsoft to validate a new product. This is achieved through product feedback as a result of deployment of pre-release builds in non-production and production environments. Customers have an opportunity to validate the design and direction of the technology, through discovery of bugs and by submitting Design Change Requests (DCR’s) for the product development team to consider.

The WSv TAP is distinct from any other Microsoft TAP – although it has links with the longhorn server TAP. The WSv TAP is not a marketing or relationship programme: it is strictly an engineering validation programme focused on scenario testing and bug discovery/submission. There are a limited number of places and it is expected to be over-subscribed – nomination does not guarantee acceptance. Participants will be selected to get the mix of characteristics (planned deployments, LHS experience, location, technology, scenario coverage, etc.) needed by the product team.

Participating in any TAP requires a significant level of commitment. The nomination questionnaire, will ask for likely deployment scenarios. If accepted, it is expected that the customer commit to these deployment scenarios. In addition, Microsoft asks that participants test, deploy, and provide timely product feedback for each of the major milestone releases; TAP Participants get 24×7 production support for these releases. Other builds may be be provided for non-production use only and support will not be provided.

To adhere this TAP program contact James O’Neil directly.

IBM to adopt Transitive technology in upcoming System p Application Virtual Environment

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IBM just announced a new feature in its System p machines able to run unmodified x86 32-bit Linux binaries.

To do that IBM is using Transitive technology, QuickTransit, already popular for allowing execution of Sun SPARC binaries on x86 architectures.

Quoting from Transitive official announcement:

Transitive Corporation, the leading provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system (OS) pairs, today announced that its innovative QuickTransit technology is being deployed on IBM System p™ servers, allowing IBM customers to run thousands of native Linux/x86 applications on IBM’s POWER-based servers running Linux . A beta version of the software, named IBM System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE), was released this month by IBM.

Transitive’s QuickTransit technology serves as the foundation for IBM System p AVE, which is designed to enable Linux/x86 applications to be consolidated with AIX 5L™ and Linux on POWER applications on a single server, thus significantly expanding the software ecosystem for IBM System p servers, and saving software developers valuable time and resources to support the System p architecture…

As Mark Cathcart, Distinguished Engineer at IBM, reveals on his personal blog, IBM plans to release this technology in H2 2007.

Enroll for the IBM System p Application Virtual Environment (pAVE) here.

Tech: Using Windows Vista BitLocker to encrypt virtual machines

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Ben Armstrong, Microsoft Virtual Machines Team Program Manager at Microsoft, published a very interesting article explaining how to encrypt a Virtual PC / Virtual Server virtual machine using BitLocker technlogy introduced in Windows Vista (despite a virtual machine doesn’t have a Trusted Platform Module to do that).

The whole process implies performing a special Vista installation process involving virtual floppy disk.

Read the whole article at source.

Surgient names Fred Pazos Vice President of Worldwide Sales

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Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced the appointment of Fred C. Pazos to the position of vice president of worldwide sales.

Prior to joining Surgient, Pazos was vice president of sales and marketing for Exadel, a privately-owned software services and products company that provides rich application components to create business applications. At Exadel, Pazos developed and implemented a successful strategy to increase on-line sales that resulted in 275 percent growth in a 12 month period. Before Exadel, Pazos was vice president of sales and services at Everdream Corporation, where he developed alliances that grew the company’s channel business from zero to 35 percent in the first 18 months. Pazos also held vice president, sales roles at Intraware, a publicly-traded software company that provides electronic software licensing and delivery solutions. His experience also includes senior sales and marketing roles at IBM, Wyse Technologies and Hitachi America…