Year: 2007

The youngest virtualization competitor innotek has yet to affirm first version of its desktop solution for Windows and Linux, VirtualBox, but it’s already set to challenge Parallels and VMware on Apple space too.

The company in fact just opened public beta of VirtualBox for Mac OS X, which is based on upcoming version 1.4, introducing 64bit guestOS support and capability to import VMware virtual machines (.vmdk files).

Since innotek is releasing VirtualBox as open-source under GPL license, it may become over time a serious threat for Parallels dominance and current VMware efforts to regain market shares.

Download the beta here.

Popular virtualization vendor Parallels has a very complex story.

At beginning of 2004, just after VMware acquisition by EMC, the german company Netsys GmbH entered the virtualization market as third virtualization player, with a product called twoOStwo, mainly focused on IBM OS/2 virtualization, which was provided by a russian development team called Parallels Ltd.

After just four months, in April 2004, this new solution completely disappeared for unknown reasons.

One month later, in May 2004, twoOStwo re-surfaced with the new name Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA), owned by a company called Serenity System International. Parallels Ltd. was still in charge for development but NetSys completely disappeared.

After one year of limited progresses the SVISTA project has been abandoned, and in September 2005 Parallels launch its virtualization solution once again, this time as independent vendor, under the name of Parallels Workstation.

Six months later virtualization.info discovered Parallels was actually controlled by russian entrepreneur Serguei Beloussov, already owning another virtualization vendor called SWsoft and disaster recovery provider Acronis.

Few months later, finally SWsoft unveils this relationship and publicly declares acquisition of Parallels.

Now Parallels and its owner SWsoft are going to face a lawsuit from original financier Netsys, which believes original twoOStwo copyrights are infringed, and just requested a full trial in Berlin count court to determine how much of original product is still inside today’s Parallels solutions.

Despite its result, this trial may impact on Parallels products distribution at least in Germany, where Netsys is determined to enforce its rights as much as possible.

After hitting release candidate status with Workstation 6.0 / Player 2.0 / ACE 2.0, VMware is now focusing on its most recent product, Lab Manager, acquired by Akimbi last year, which just reached 2.5 public beta status.

In this new version (build 212) VMware introduces:

• Automatic Server Pool Cleanup (set policies to undeploy and clean up unused virtual machines)
• Storage Server Maintenance (see how much disk space you could free up by consolidating or deleting virtual machines)
• Managed Server Maintenance (quickly undeploy and redeploy virtual machines on new managed server hardware)
• iSCSI and NFS support for virtual machines repository
• 64bit guestOSes support
• Sun Solaris 10 support
• vSMP virtual machines support

Lab Manager 2.5 release notes also expose an upcoming ESX Server 3.0.2, which will be supported side by side with 3.0.1.

(virtualization.info readers also know VMware is working to release Virtual Infrastructure 3.1 in near future)

Enroll for the beta program here.

VMware also published an introductory paper on virtual lab automation available here.

From his corporate blog Nate Clinton, Windows Update Program Manager at Microsoft, announces Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) is going to expose a new family of supported products, Virtual Server, within few days.

This update, which should be applied to current WSUS 2.0 and upcoming WSUS 3.0 (still in release candidate status), is remarkable: after imminent Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 release, Microsoft is not expected to further update its existing virtualization platform, directing new customers to future Windows Server Virtualization hypervisor (codename Virdian).

Since WSV is still far away from release (planned 180 days after Windows Server codename Longhorn RTM, which is expected before the end of this year), Microsoft may have decided that the best strategy at this point for Virtual Server customers is providing bug fixes through WSUS.

Read the original news at source.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Quoting from CRN:

The Xen project will soon release an API for developing high-end management features like those in VMware’s VMotion and Virtual Infrastructure 3 platform.
At the annual Xen Summit held this week at IBM’s Watson facility in Yorkstown, N.Y., the open-source project leaders said the Xen 3.05 update with the new API and enhanced 64-bit support would be available within a few weeks.

The 3.06 update with support for Intel’s VT-d and possibly AMD’s VT-d will be available in the next two to three months, said Ian Pratt, project lead.

…

The ability to do library relocations of Windows guests, another new feature in the 3.05 update, is significant because it will allow the dynamic relocation of Windows workload, essential for ISVs to offer VMotion-like features, Pratt said. The Xen software has supported library locations for Linux for several years, he added…

Read the whole article at source.

InfoWorld published a brief but interesting comparison of two managed virtual desktop solutions: Kidaro Managed Workspace 1.0 and Sentillion vThere 2.0.

Both products scored 8.4/10 but reviewer considers Sentillion solutions more flexible and effordable:

Kidaro Managed Workspace covers all of the VM management essentials while delivering significant innovation in the areas of desktop integration and network bandwidth optimization during VM deployment. However, it’s literally twice as expensive as Sentillion vThere and lacks the flexibility of the vThere.net hosted service.

Sentillion vThere leverages a robust, hosted authentication and validation service to simplify the provisioning and deployment of VM images to desktop and laptop systems. A well-rounded management solution with strong support for VPNs, vThere delivers the advantages of a hosted model at a price point close enough to VMware ACE to woo fence-sitters.

Read the whole comparison at source.

SWsoft will launch tomorrow a virtualization starter pack at $1,198 dollars including support.

The new offering targeting enterprise audience will include a 2-CPUs license for up to 4 installations of Virtuozzo for Windows or Virtuozzo for Linux, all management and P2V migration capabilities, and 1 year Silver Premium support subscription.

Customers will be able to purchase this bundle online here, since tomorrow.

Quoting from the Thinstall official announcement:

Thinstall, the leading Application Virtualization solution provider, today announced it has joined the prestigious SAP Enterprise Services Community Advisory Group (CAG) for Virtualization, headed by Roland Wartenberg, Director of Virtualization Strategy at SAP Labs, Palo Alto. The group has formed in response to customer demand for solutions to implement virtualization strategies.

…

Thinstall is recognized as a leader in application virtualization, and joins member companies Cisco, EMC, Intel, NetApp, Novell, Virtual Iron and VMware in the newly-formed advisory group…

Quoting from the Emulex official announcement:

Emulex Corporation today announced the results of an independent evaluation report that compares the performance of Emulex HBAs to that of QLogic HBAs in VMware ESX virtualized server environments. The report by Demartek, a firm specializing in independent analysis and lab verification testing of server, storage and security technologies, found that overall, Emulex HBAs outperformed QLogic HBAs in 2K, 4K and 8K block sizes with four guest operating systems running in a VMware environment. Several characteristics were measured, including I/Os per second (IOPS) and Megabytes per second.

…

The Emulex HBAs were up to 9% faster in read IOPS, 31% faster in write IOPS and 31% faster in total throughput at these block sizes referenced. These block sizes in particular are commonly used by Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases…

Read the whole performance comparison here.

Quoting from the ClearCube official announcement:

ClearCube Technology, the market leader in centralized computing solutions, today announced ClearCube Sentral™ version 5.5, part of the industry’s only solution that manages virtualized PC desktops and dynamically delivers the required level of PC resources to end users. Building on the industry’s first connection broker technology, Sentral v5.5 manages mixed physical PC blades with VMware-enabled virtual machines to seamlessly incorporate virtualization technology into centralized desktop computing without sacrificing end-user performance.

…

With its virtual abstraction layer, ClearCube Sentral v5.5 is able to support multiple virtual machine types. Sentral v5.5 now includes direct interaction with VMware’s ESX3 APIs to control-power on, power off, hibernate, pause and cold start-virtual machines from a single networked location. Sentral v5.5 identifies virtual machines without the need for an agent in the VMware ESX3 host operating system, and allows customers to create true virtual desktop solutions, managing both physical and virtual machines together to always ensure sufficient end-user computing power availability. Sentral v5.5 also supports distributed PC blades and virtual machines at multiple locations while still managing from a single console to reduce IT management costs…

In future ClearCube Sentral, which will be available since May 2007, will also support other virtualization platforms provided by Microsoft and XenSource.