Year: 2007

Quoting from the Tehuti official announcement:

Tehuti Networks, a semiconductor company providing 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) single-chip, low-power TCP/IP acceleration controllers, today announced it has joined the VMware Community Source program. The co-development effort as a VMware Community Source program member allows Tehuti Networks to create and validate enhancements to VMware ESX Server to maximize the performance and functionality of Tehuti Networks’ series of Ethernet controllers and adapters in the VMware Infrastructure environment.

…

As a VMware Community Source program member, Tehuti is planning on working closely with VMware on optimizing Tehuti 10GbE dual-port controllers for VMware Infrastructure 3, enabling unique adapter capabilities, and collaborating with the partner community on future I/O virtualization techniques…

In November 2006 Tehuti already became a XenSource IHV Partner as Charter Member, meaning the semiconductors company is seriously investing in virtualization.

Virtual Iron and PlateSpin arranged a new webcast for March 7th about integration of PowerConvert with Virtual Iron platform:

Attend this webinar to learn how PlateSpin and Virtual Iron help organizations reduce data center costs and complexity by quickly migrating physical servers into the Virtual Iron virtual infrastructure. The combination of PlateSpin and Virtual Iron enables organizations to rapidly achieve the benefits of large-scale server consolidation, rapid provisioning, high availability and capacity management. That’s why Virtual Iron bundles one free migration of PlateSpin PowerConvert with every Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition license.

Register for the event here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

After releasing a paper about best practices and one about Virtual I/O Server Deployment Examples, IBM Redbook department now releases a foundation book (488 pages) about System p5 POWER virtualization configuration:

This IBM Redbook provides an introduction to Advanced POWER Virtualization on IBM System p5 servers.The Advanced POWER Virtualization feature is a combination of hardware and software that supports and manages the virtual I/O environment on POWER5 and POWER5+ systems.

…

Though the discussion in this IBM Redbook is focused on System p5 hardware and the AIX 5L operating system, the basic concepts extend themselves to the i5/OS and Linux operating systems, as well as the IBM System i5 platform…

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction
• Chapter 2 – Virtualization technologies on System p servers
• Chapter 3 – Setting up the Virtual I/O Server: the basics
• Chapter 4 – Setting up virtual I/O: advanced
• Chapter 5 – System management
• Chapter 6 – Partition Load Manager

Read the whole book at source.

Microsoft answer on recent VMware whitepaper attacking licensing strategy about virtualization arrived quickly, brief and allusive.

Mike Neil, General Manager of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft, commented the paper to virtualization.info this way:

Microsoft believes the claims made in VMware’s whitepaper contain several inaccuracies and misunderstandings of our current license and use policies, our support policy and our commitment to technology collaboration.

We believe it’s better to resolve VMware’s claims between our two companies so that we can better serve customers and the industry. EMC is a long-time partner of Microsoft. We’ve extended this courtesy to VMware due to our mutual customers and partnership with EMC. We are committed to continuing to collaborate with VMware as we have been doing on regular basis. Consistent with this, Microsoft believes that we will be able to accommodate a mutually agreeable solution between our two companies and clear up any existing misunderstanding with regard to the points raised in the whitepaper.

While suggesting a pacific resolution of this case (which would require a public rectification from VMware), Microsoft is clearly recalling its partner EMC for the unprecedented attack of its virtualization subsidiary.

EMC announced launch of VMware Initial Public Offering (IPO) for this summer and a compromising of Microsoft partnership could lead to a remarkable damage for stock performance. An undesired risk for EMC which is not obtaining Wall Street’s benevolence since a long time.

Update: SWsoft Director of Technology, Ilya Baimetov, decided to take part in this odd competition, extending the endless competition with VMware and indirectly remarking the new partnership with Microsoft.

On his corporate blog he commented the paper defending Microsoft efforts in changing its licensing model, and remembering how VMware itself is very closed on its standards.

With a long paper VMware launches a direct attack against Microsoft on several aspects of its current licensing model for virtualization scenarios.

The paper, available in HTML format for maximum exposure, highlights 7 critical points picturing the Redmond giant as an unfair competitor, trying to oblige customers adopting its virtualization products through limitations to Windows licensing:

• Support for customers
• Prohibitions on running Microsoft virtual machines on 3rd party virtualization software
• De-activation of Microsoft virtual machines on 3rd party virtualization software
• Prohibition of translation or manipulation of Microsoft VMs into other formats
• Licensing restrictions on server virtual machine mobility
• Prohibitions on desktop virtualization
• Closed Windows Virtualization APIs

Some limitations detailed in ths paper are almost unknown, while others have to be verified (for example Microsoft is reporting Windows Virtualization APIs will be publicly disclosed at beta timeframe), and surely is a recommended reading.

VMware is becoming more aggressive on the market and this is the second direct attack launched against Microsoft in few months (first one was about company interoperability deal with XenSource).

These critics comes just few days after Microsoft allowed unlimited SQL Server 2005 virtual instances for customers buying its Enterprise Edition.

VMware published a basic but interesting 19-pages security guide for ESX Server 3.x and VirtualCenter 2.x. It covers hardening of virtual machine, service console, ESX host and VirtualCenter machine:

By introducing a layer of abstraction between the physical hardware and virtualized systems running IT services, virtualization technology provides a powerful means to deliver cost savings via server consolidation as well as increased operational efficiency and flexibility. However, the added functionality introduces a virtualization layer that itself becomes a potential avenue of attack for the virtual services being hosted. Because a single host system can house multiple virtual machines, the security of that host becomes even more important. Any security breach on that system can have a far greater effect on your environment.

Because it is based on a light-weight, kernel optimized for virtualization, VMware ESX Server is less susceptible to viruses and other problems that affect general-purpose operating systems. However, ESX Server is not impervious to attack, and you should take proper measures to harden it, as well as the VMware VirtualCenter management server, against malicious activity or unintended damage. This paper provides recommendations for steps you can take to ensure that your VMware Infrastructure 3 environment is properly secured.

Read the whole paper at source.

One of most requested Microsoft product to be supported in virtual infrastructures is the firewall/proxy ISA Server.

So far the company refused to extend its support policy to it as declared in Knowledge Base article 897614.

Now Microsoft unexpectedly updates another article, 987613, officially declaring support for ISA Server 2006, despite release candidate release notes warning:

ISA Server 2006 has been tested on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and is expected to be fully functional. However, deployment of ISA Server on a Virtual Server 2005 R2 environment should be limited to testing purposes only. Specifically, we do not recommend a Virtual Server 2005 R2 production environment where ISA Server 2006 is expected to serve as the network firewall.

While two different support articles are in contradiction, the most updated one (January 30, 2007) is confirming support and should be considered as most reliable.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Since Workstation 5.0 VMware introduces capability to record a virtual machine activitity in an AVI video. Unfortunately recording codec is proprietary and playback is impossible with common media players on machines where Workstation is not installed.

Now Philip Langdale, a VMware engineer, reveals the video codec used in Workstation is a customized VNC session record and informs MPlayer developers found a way to reverse it.

So now to play a virtual machine movie on a computer without VMware Workstation you’ll just need last version of Mplayer and this codec.

Dell published on its VMware Alliance Center site a 3-minutes video showing how a Microsoft SQL Server virtual machine can be live migrated with VMotion from a blade to another, without service interruption, in a Dell PowerEdge blade server.

The video is very low quality but if you never saw VMotion in action it’s worth to check it.

Thanks to VMTN for the news.

The russian startup Veeam releases second generation of its free graphical file manager for VMware ESX Server: FastSCP 2.0.

This new release introduces:

• Multiple ESX management from a single console
• ESX to ESX direct copy
• Complete File Management & Windows Integration

Download it here.