Year: 2007

VMware acquires Propero

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Propero is a UK company (with a US subsidiary) active in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) space since early launch of VMware VDI Alliance in April 2006.

Its product, workSpace, is a VDI desktop broker for VMware ESX Server and Citrix Presentation Server, but Propero is also working with IBM, XenSource and Microsoft for supporting their platforms.

So far nor VMware neither Propero disclosed the acquisition, but today VMware released a S-1 Registration Statement needed for its summer IPO.

This public document includes several annexed, including a List of Subsidiaries, reporting all companies controlled by VMware:

  • Akimbi Systems, SARL.
  • Propero, Inc.
  • Propero Limited
  • VMware Australia Pty Ltd
  • VMware Bermuda Limited
  • VMware Canada Inc.
  • VMware Germany GmbH
  • VMware Global, Inc.
  • VMware International
  • VMware International Limited
  • VMware Singapore Pte Ltd.
  • VMware Software India Private Limited
  • VMware Sweden AB
  • VMware UK Limited
  • VMware, K.K.

Propero is listed along with Akimbi, acquired in June 2006, and worldwide VMware headquarters.

After virtualization.info broke the news VMware is expected to release a public statement about this document or a press release disclosing the acquisition.

Meanwhile check VMware S-1 Registration Statement, List of Subsidiaries attachment and a video demostration of Propero workSpace.

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

Microsoft launches Virtual Machine Manager 2007 beta 2

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Announced at MMS 2007 and planned for upcoming WinHEC 2007, Microsoft released earlier than expected System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 beta 2.

Some of promised features are finally available:

  • PowerShell integration
  • P2V migration capabilities (Windows Server 2000 and 2003 only)
  • V2V capabilities (import of VMware virtual machines)

Some others features depending on Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian), like Live Migration (VMware VMotion-like capability), are missing because of hypervisor delay. But Virtual Machine Manager beta 2 already supports new Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 release candidate.

According to this release Microsoft published original Bob Muglia’s keynote at MMS 2007 introducing new features, and an introductory paper describing product’s architecture.

Microsoft also disclosed some informations about one possible licensing scheme for SCVMM:

Another alternative for acquiring the Standard OML through Volume Licensing programs are the Microsoft System Center Server Management License (“SML”) suites.

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The Enterprise SML will be available in Q4 CY2007 and will include the Enterprise versions of the OML and Data Protection Manager Management License, as well as the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Server Management License, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007.

Last but not least Microsoft unveiled this version of SCVMM will not support Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian) beta at public launch. To see such integration we’ll have to wait for SCVMM 2007 R2 public beta, planned for Q1 2008.

Enroll for the beta here.

Linux kernel 2.6.21 with VMware VMI and KVM para-virtualization support is out

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As announced last month, newest Linux kernel version, 2.6.21, includes for the first time an adapted version of VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), able to interoperate with paravirt_ops virtualization interface.

At this point new Linux distribution going to use this kernel version will be able to run paravirtualized in upcoming VMware Workstation 6.0, and at a later time in Server and ESX Server new releases.

But kernel 2.6.21 also introduces remarkable new KVM features:

  • Initial paravirtualization support
  • Live migration (the guest continues running even while being migrated) support
  • Host Suspend/resume support
  • CPU hotplug support

SteelEye introduces VMware VirtualCenter high-availability with Protection Suite for VMware Infrastructure 3

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SteelEye security provider (and VMware Technology Partner) entered the virtualization space this summer extending its LifeKeeper high-availability solution to ESX Server 2.5 and 3.0. Now the company is going further with this new Protection Suite, introducing high-availability for VMware VirtualCenter 2.0 too.

So at today SteelEye is able to perform:

  • virtual machines fail-over at host level (even deploying VMs back on physical servers),
  • virtual machines data replication over LAN and WAN at guest level
  • VirtualCenter fail-over

This way SteelEye is going to compete against Symantec (for their Veritas Cluster Server for ESX Server), PlateSpin (for their PowerConvert and new disaster recovery initiative) and vizioncore (for their esxRanger and esxReplicator) at least.

Parallels launches Parallels Technology Network and enters virtual appliances market

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Following the successful Microsoft example of MSDN and the not so successful VMware example of VMTN, Parallels is now launching its own developers community network, also preparing to enter the virtual appliances market.

Quoting from official announcement

Parallels, Inc., maker of award-winning desktop virtualization solutions for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, announced today the Parallels Technology Network (PTN) – an online community for users, as well as developers using Parallels virtualization technology to deliver their software in self-contained virtual appliances.

Via the PTN, which is available online at http://ptn.parallels.com, users and developers will have access to a wealth of information related to Parallels virtualization technology. In addition, developers can make their software available to Parallels users as virtual appliances…

According to this announcement Parallels already exposed its Virtual Appliances Directory.

uXcomm acquires Virtugo

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Quoting from the uXcomm official announcement:

uXcomm, the leading provider of software products that monitor, control and optimize virtual and physical server environments, today announced that the company has acquired the assets of Virtugo Software, a pioneer in performance and service level management tools for virtual environments. The combination of Virtugo’s products and uXcomm’s Service-Oriented Management Architecture (SOMA) now enables IT professionals to address a growing problem in the data center: trying to manage 1000s of virtual servers on 1000s of physical servers.

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The combination of uXcomm’s XManage platform, which supports XenSource’s core virtualization technologies, and Virtugo’s VirtualSuite, which supports VMware, provides the first integrated management solution for heterogeneous physical and virtual environments.

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Under terms of the agreement, uXcomm is purchasing all of Virtugo’s VirtualSuite product line, including Perform and PerformLite, Capacity, Optimize, Meter and Connect, as well as the company’s proven and tested architecture. The company is assuming responsibility for all sales and support contracts and has retained several key members of the Virtugo staff, including Chris Dickson, who is joining uXcomm as vice president of business development…

Both Virtugo and uXcomm have been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

XenSource publishes Xen Summit Spring 2007 presentations

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XenSource just published presentations from Xen Summit Spring 2007, arranged in New York in April.

Some of them are particularly interesting like:

Download all of them here.

VMware publishes TSX 2007 presentations

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VMware just made available presentations of european Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX) 2007 conference.

Some of them are particularly interesting like:

virtualization.info was there as guest, and published a report you may want to read: part 1 and part 2.

Slides, supposed to stay private before a news leak happened today, are available here.

Benckmarks: Xen 3.0.3 (unstable branch) vs OpenVZ for Linux kernel 2.6

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After last month comparison of Xen 3.0.2 and OpenVZ for Linux kernel 2.6.16 made by Björn Gross-Hohnacker for his diploma thesis, this time is HP Labs’ turn to perform a benchmark analysis.

This new 14 pages document titled Performance Evaluation of Virtualization Technologies for Server Consolidation exposes a bigger overhead in Xen over OpenVZ:

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In this paper, we evaluate two representative virtualization technologies, Xen and OpenVZ, in various configurations. We consolidate one or more multi-tiered systems onto one or two nodes and drive the system with an auction workload called RUBiS.

We compare both technologies with a base system in terms of application performance, resource consumption, scalability, low-level system metrics like cache misses and virtualization-specific metrics like Domain-0 consumption in Xen.

Our experiments indicate that the average response time can increase by over 400% in Xen and only a modest 100% in OpenVZ as the number of application instances grows from one to four. This large discrepancy is caused by the higher virtualization overhead in Xen, which is likely due to higher L2 cache misses and misses per instruction. A similar trend is observed in CPU consumptions of virtual containers. We present an overhead analysis with kernel-symbol-specific information generated by Oprofile…

Read the whole paper at source.