Year: 2007

On April 2 VMware will launch its 5th edition of Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX) in Nice, France.

Final agenda with sessions scheduling and description has been published on website. Checking it you’ll discover this edition sports 7 parallel tracks, featuring VMware and guest speakers.

Two of these tracks are dedicated to VMware sponsors with recognized and new speakers, making the event a good opportunity to understand a big part of infrastructure ecosystem around VMware offering. The whole list includes: AMD, Chip PC, Datacore, Double-Take, EqualLogic, FalconStar, HP, Leostream, NEC, Provision Networks, Dunes, Neverfail, Platespin, Soft’IT, Sun, ThinPrint, vizioncore, Wyse and Zeus. Plus others present just with booths.

I’ll be there as guest (to see which events I’ll participate as speaker check my speaking schedule) and will try to provide a live report.

So if you are a virtualization.info european reader I hope you can make it. See you there!

Lunapark6 published an extensive review of new build of Parallels Desktop (until Parallels will start to use a version numbering for this product, there will be no way to exactly tell which version we are talking about, and in fact Lunapark6 refers to it as 1.0).

The review focus on Microsoft Vista and Ubuntu Linux guests installation, on the new Coherence feature, on the embedded physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool called Transporter, and on the included utility for virtual disks optimization called Compressor.

Reviewers provided this conclusion:

The coherence mode, transporter, compressor and shared folders works well within Windows. If you have at least 1 gig of ram and an Intel Core Duo chipset then Parallels runs smoothly. You can install just about every operating system known to mankind within Parallels.

Does not have 3d acceleration (Aero does not work in Vista nor does Beryl or Compiz work in Linux). Coherence, Transporter, Compressor, Shared Folders, Drag N Drop works only within Windows. Does not have a snapshot mode to easily revert back to an earlier installed stage (as an alternative “cloning” is available but uses more hard drive space).

Read the whole review at source.

Ben Armstrong, Program Manager of Virtual Machine Team at Microsoft, unofficially informs that new Virtual PC 2007 hit the 1 million downloads mark in 38 days.

This number will eventually grow despite VMware leadership in both desktop and server virtualization market: Microsoft can count on its MSDN Subscription, which allows the company to reach hundreds of thousands of corporate customers worldwide, which may have not time or are not interested in evaluating competitive offering, or which just prefer to stick with one vendor for the whole software offering.

After just one year VMware put in end of life its own alternative, the VMTN Subscription, unpleasing several of its customers which had similar needs.

Quoting from Windows IT Pro:

…

The current version of the Data Protection Manager disk-based backup solution is targeted at file servers only, but the upcoming version, (2.0) reaches a much broader audience. It will work with both disk and tape storage devices and will back up Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2003, SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePpoint Server 2007, in addition to Windows Server 2003 and Longhorn Server file servers and Windows Vista and Windows X-based file shares. But the big news is that Data Protection Manager 2.0 will also back up Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2-based virtual servers as well. Beta 2 is expected publicly in April with the final release expected in late summer…

Read the whole article at source.

Bink.nu provides more details:

• No downtime
• VSS consistant inside VM
• VSS outside (VHD vss writer)
• For non win2k3 VHDs: Offline backups: pause VM, VSS shadow copy of VHD, unpause, copy blocks to VM replica

This capability depends on new Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1, which provides a Volume Shadow Service (VSS) Writer. The interface is not usable by Windows native NTBackup but can be fully exploited by third party backup solutions, including Microsoft DPM 2007 itself.

After detailing what to expect from System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) beta 2 and when, at MMS2007 Microsoft took time to provide scattered but interesting informations about SoftGrid integration in its software offering, after one year since Softricity acquisition.

A MMS2007 blogger is reporting:

• Availability of pre-sequenced applications for the Softgrid application virtualisation platform next to the current installation methodes and engines
• Softgrid full integration in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 (formerly Systems Management Server or SMS)

Update: The Micosoft SoftGrid development team also published some details about upcoming versions of server, client and sequencer:

SoftGrid 4.1 SP1 is mostly a hotfix and critical updates release, improving overall system stability and compatibility. A noteworthy improvement is the ability to sequence applications using Side by Side assemblies (aka WinSxS), including Visual Studio Express and Office 2007, among many other applications from both third party ISV’s and Microsoft. Expected availability is in the second quarter of this year and the release will be made available for download as soon as test is completed. We will release the Sequencer, Desktop Client, Terminal Server Client and Server at the same time.

SoftGrid 4.2 builds on the 4.1 improvements by adding Windows Vista compatibility, both on the sequencer and client. There is not going to be a 4.2 version of the Server or the Terminal Server client as the moniker 4.2 is reserved for the components adding Windows Vista compatibility. We expect a final release some time around Q3 of this year…

First fruit of Microsoft unprecedented partnership with Novell is a new version of Virtual Server 2005 R2 Virtual Machines Additions for Linux, which includes support for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.

Download it here.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Before VMware is able to release second version of its Assured Computing Environment (ACE) as part of Workstation 6.0 (so to reach a much wider audience than first one), Kidaro promotes its alternative with the new To-Go offering.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Kidaro, provider of desktop virtualization solutions for the enterprise without boundaries, has announced the availability of the Kidaro Corporate “To-Go” for a USB flash drive. Using this new offering, organizations can hand out a USB drive with a fully operable, encrypted corporate-managed desktop to any user – work-at-home employees, road warriors, and subcontractors – instead of giving them a corporate laptop or
building a server infrastructure for remote desktops. End-users just plug the USB drive in to their workstation, regardless of hardware or setup, authenticate and gain immediate access to policy-based corporate applications and resources, right from their Start menu or web browser, without any “virtual machine” training required….

Similarly to VMware ACE, Kidaro Managed Workspace provides a security wrapper with centralized policies for virtual machines, and now, just like ACE 2.0 will do, allows users to run them from a USB drive. The biggest difference is Kidaro it’s not stick on a specific virtualization platform, supporting both VMware and Microsoft virtual machines.

Quoting from the Intel official announcement:

…Intel Corporation will begin producing its next-generation Penryn family of processors in the second half of this year. These new processors benefit from enhancements to the Intel Core microarchitecture and also Intel’s industry-leading 45nm Hi-k process technology with its hafnium-based high-K + metal gate transistor design, which results in higher performance and more energy-efficient processors.

…

Penryn speeds up virtual machine transition (entry/exit) times by an average of 25 to 75 percent. This is all done through microarchitecture improvements and requires no virtual machine software changes…

As already happened for first generation of virtualization extensions, it has to be seen when and how virtualization vendors will adapt their products to take the most out of new technology.

The new Linux kernel 2.6.20, already featuring the new KVM virtualization module, can now count also on OpenVZ.

New patches include:

• Support for read-only bind mounts, which allows a read-only view into a read-write file system
• Namespaces technology, resulting from on-going work on Linux kernel containers virtualization
• A new I/O prioritization feature that makes it possible to set priorities for each virtual environment so that some can be set as high priority for disk access, and others as lower priority

Download OpenVZ for Linux kernel 2.6.20 here..

After less than a month, the russian startup Veeam already updated its Reporter.

The new 1.5 version extends support to VMware Infrastructrure 3.0.

The pricing starts at $120 per CPU including the first year maintenance plan.

Check a sample report here. Download a trial here.

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