Year: 2007

Quoting from InternetNews:

RHEL 4.5 is the first update for RHEL 4 to include Xen paravitualized kernels. Xen is the open source virtualization effort that Red Hat has already included in its Fedora community Linux releases and is part of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 release as well.

…

“The virtualization in 4.5 is to let it be a paravirtualized guest on RHEL 5,” Joel Berman, product management director for RHEL explained to internetnews.com. “That means that RHEL 4.5 will allow any RHEL 4 customers to quickly run on RHEL 5.0 with the high performance that comes from paravirtualization and without requiring any special hardware.”

…

The final release of update 4.5 is expected sometime after March 21, 2007…

Read the whole article at source.

Personal Computer World published a very brief review, possibly the first one, of new XenServer for Windows, providing an overall rating of 2/5 and the following conclusion:

An interesting alternative to more established server virtualisation tools but needs more work.

Considering kind of magazine and review approach it would be easy thinking author tried to compare XenServer with a desktop product like VMware Workstation or Parallels Workstation. Instead there’s a clear reference to VMware Server as term of comparison. Which makes the poor overall rating even more severe.

Read the whole review at source.

After just three months Virtual Iron is ready to launch 3.5 version of its Xen-based virtualization platform.

In this new release appears three major improvements:

• iSCSI Storage Support
• LDAP support (Microsoft Active Directory and OpenLDAP)
• Single Server Installation (Virtualization Manager and Virtualization Services on the same server that is running the virtual servers)

Download the free single-server edition or the trial multiple-servers edition here.

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

As said many times while virtual appliances are an interesting approach to software delivery which surely highlights great benefits of server virtualization, they hide some remarkable security risks.

VMware is already caring to address some of them assuring customers a reliable set of providers through its Virtual Appliance Marketplace, but updating process still remains solution’s weakest part.

Now the company could strengthen its effort by releasing a minimal OS image as suggested base for virtual appliances.

Hints about this move come from the new ACE 2.0 Management Server, available as installable binary application but also as self-contained virtual appliance, which sports a mechanism for image update. The appliance user manual exposes the new name of VMware Virtual Appliances Framework, which is described as:

• The basic appliance operating system
• The management interface and back-end services for the appliance-specific functionality: network, updates

Such initiative if commonly agreed by all vendors, along with similar initiatives like VMcasting, could simplify virtual appliances maintainance and greatly reduce exposure times during new exploit diffusion periods.

VMware Assured Computing Environment (ACE) 1.0 has been launched in December 2004. Since that time the company never provided major updates to the product, which surely is almost unknown among users.

Now VMware comes back and, as expected since VMworld 2006, opens ACE 2.0 public beta.

In this second release ACE is not a stand-alone product but a superset of VMware Workstation 6.0 features, which customers can unlock with a special license.

Another new and very welcomed feature is introduction of a stand-alone Management Server, available as binary application for Windows and Linux (both Red Hat and SUSE) or as virtual appliance (with administration through web interface), which allows centralized control of distributed ACE players:

But ACE 2.0 has other notable features including capability to execute a secured virtual machine from a USB device (like a flash drive or a portable media player), which is a good opportunity to drastically reduce success of newest virtualization companies offering a security/portability wrapper for VMware Player or Parallels Workstation, like Sentillion or moka5.

This first beta is based on Workstation 6.0 beta 3 (build 39849), made available in early February, but ACE beta testers have to download bits and reissue an installation to see new ACE license form appearing.

Enroll the beta here.

VMware is also expected to release more than one version of ACE, since current beta is exposing the Enterprise Edition label.

VMware just released a minor update for its free server virtualization product Server (formerly GSX Server).

In this 1.0.2 version (Build 39867) only appears blinking text support for VGA display mode and several bug fixes.

Download it here.

After an intensive beta program Parallels releases a stable update for its Desktop, actually the only available virtualization solution for Mac OS among commercial products.

In this new release (build 3186) officially appear:

• Coherence display mode inclusion
• P2V migration tool Transporter inclusion
• USB 2.0 support
• Boot Camp support
• Host-Guest Drag&Drop support
• Windows Vista support

Download a trial here.

Without a clear reason, and despite what several sites reported, Parallels didn’t assign a version number to this build release, so it will not be included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap.

Coherence has been really appreciated by users and some are wondering how to use same technique for other products.

Anthony Liguori, Xen hacker popular after critics to Blue Pill, is considering to port the feature in QEMU:

VMware is slowly approaching final release of its first product for Apple Mac OS, codenamed Fusion at the moment. Beta program has been publicly opened in Summer 2006 and company probably plan to go RTM for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) launch later this year.

This new beta (build 41385) introduces following features

• Experimental 3-D graphics support (DirectX 8.1)
• Snapshot features
• Experimental support for Mac OS X Leopard

Enroll the beta program here.

Ulrich Drepper, lead maintainer of Linux C library since 1996 and employed at Red Hat, worte an interesting post about KVM on his personal blog:

With KVM proving more and more that it is viable Xensource and VMWare start sandbagging. They call KVM immature and the wrong approach.

Calling KVM is immature is, well, premature and misleading. Xen has a headstart of several years. KVM is today not supposed to be in the state Xen is. Nevertheless, KVM already has hardware virt support, SMP support, support for 64-bit host and guests (despite what the article says), live migration, and more.

But immature is not the worst complain. Claiming the hypervisor approach is the only viable option is what should get people worked up.

…

These are bogus claims. And you have realize where they come from. VMWare’s ESX is a kernel on itself, one which only few people work on (compared to something like Linux). Device drivers will always be a nightmare unless/until devices get their own PCI devices (once DMA can be virtualized). Nevertheless, ESX is a full OS by itself. Plus, ESX has the service console a Linux OS. The service console of course has to have some control over the hypervisor.

For Xen the situation is similar. Here the hypervisor, after the mistakes of the 1.x series, don’t have device drivers included and use a privileged domain, a complete OS.

This means, both Xen and VMWare do not have less code. I’d say they even have more code that is part of the privileged code base. Certainly a Linux installation hosting KVM domains can be scaled down to only have the kernel, kqemu, and the service console…

Read the whole post at source.

Thanks to Fraser Campbell for the news.

After releasing a capacity planning tool for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 in November 2005, HP finally releases a parallel version for VMware ESX Server 3.x:

This is an automated tool that assists the user with the size and scope of their server environment. This sizer will calculate the best way to consolidate old servers onto new machines running multiple virtualized environments. The sizing information and algorithms have been developed using testing and performance data on HP Servers running VMware ESX Server.

HP servers supported in this version are:

• ProLiant BL20p G4 Quad Core
• ProLiant BL25p G2 Dual Core
• ProLiant BL45p G2 Dual Core
• ProLiant BL460c Quad Core
• ProLiant BL465c Dual Core
• ProLiant BL480c Quad Core
• ProLiant BL685c Dual Core
• ProLiant DL360 G5 Quad Core
• ProLiant DL365 Dual Core
• ProLiant DL380 G5 Quad Core
• ProLiant DL385 G2 Dual Core
• ProLiant DL580 G4 Dual Core
• ProLiant DL585 G2 Dual Core
• ProLiant ML370 G5 Quad Core
• ProLiant ML570 G4 Dual Core

Access the tool for free here.

After using it you may want to verify suggested capacity plan in virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab, the first rentable online infrastructure for virtualization testing.