Year: 2007

Virtual appliances concept launched by VMware and quickly embraced by several virtualization vendors (including Microsoft and Virtual Iron) and partners in the industry, brings in notable benefits but currently implies several risks.

One of them is allow virtual appliances to become threat vectors because of slow and complex delivery methods for updated images.

Part of the problem can be addressed developing an industry standardized technology able to simplify and possibly automate distribution of virtual machines from providers public sites to customers infrastructures, in a secure and reliable way.

Enomaly, the virtualization startup developing the open source management console for Xen called Enomalism, is already working on such standard proposal and launched the VMcasting technology:

VMcasting is an automatic virtual machine deployment mechanism based on RSS2.0 whereby virtual machine images are transferred from a server to a client securely delivering files containing a technical specification and virtual disk image.

The concept of VMcasting is based on the similar concept of Podcasting, the popular trend of audio content delivered via an RSS feed presenting a downloadable or streaming file (often an MP3). With VMcasting, a developer publishes an RSS 2.0 feed where each item describes a release of a particular Virtual Machine Image or Virtual Appliance. The items descriptions may contain release notes or other information about what’s new in a particular release. Therefore developers can be easily upgrade or install using a virtual server management system such as Enomalism.

VMcasting has been designed with scalability in mind (it supports single virtual machines definition as well as group of virtual machines) and broad compatibility, supporting virtual images from VMware, Xen (including XenSource and Virtual Iron then), Microsoft, Parallels and QEMU.

Discover details of the technology on the official VMcasting site.

Enomaly has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Blue Lane, the security provider famous for its innovative inline patching technology, become VMware Technology Alliance Partner and is now preparing to release a security product (probably a special version of its PatchPoint) for VMware ESX Server, as anticipated on the official site.

While Blue Lane interest and focus on virtualization is evident, VMware is expected to unveil security solutions (backup, patching, firewalling, intrusion detection, etc.) at host level for protecting virtual machines since long time, when first papers about the topic have been published (February 2006) and virtualization.info discovered a new product in the work codenamed Integrity (June 2006).

A host-level patching solution is probably the first and most important side benefit customers may obtain from virtualization adoption, which greatly extends its return on investment this way.

A further hint to upcoming BlueLane solution is provided by the company introductory whitepaper Server Security, Patching and Virtualization, which ends with following statement:

PatchPoint is capable of creating a completely trusted domain in which virtual machines can be protected regardless of their state.

Quoting from the Egenra official announcement:

Egenera Inc., a global leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 7,174,390 entitled, “Address resolution protocol system and method in a virtual network.”

…

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) within conventional Ethernet networks associates server and application IP addresses with their Ethernet addresses. In systems such as the Egenera BladeFrame system that emulate Ethernet semantics on a high-bandwidth, low-latency, point-to-point fabric, virtual circuits in the fabric direct traffic flow. Typically, it is necessary to further convert Ethernet addresses into virtual circuit numbers whenever traffic is sent—adding an extra table look-up for each transmission. Egenera’s invention obviates the extra step by combining the virtual circuit table with the ARP table, lowering latency and processing overhead…

ComputerWorld published a brief but interesting comparison between Apple Mac OS most popular virtualization solution, Parallels Desktop, and the upcoming solution from virtualization market leader, VMware codename Fusion, providing following conclusion:

Both Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion are good products. However, it is clear that Fusion still needs some work in terms of its performance and to fully implement its feature set. It also isn’t quite as stable and reliable as Parallels.

…

It is also worth noting that the next release of Parallels is slated to offer at least two of those features — drag and drop and USB 2.0. It is also slated for several more advances including the ability to use a Boot Camp partition as a Windows boot disk instead of a hard drive image file, greatly enhanced network options and full support for CD/DVD drives (including burn capabilities and access to copy-protected discs). There will also be a new mode called “coherence” that will allow Windows applications to run alongside Mac applications without the need for a separate Windows interface…

As a result, it seems that for the foreseeable future, VMware will remain a generation behind Parallels.

Read the whole comparison at source.

Despite the unfair competition (VMware codename Fusion is still in beta), which has been admitted by reviewer, conclusion is relevant: Fusion has been annouced since August 2006 and still has to reach Release Candidate status. Before such milestone Parallels is expected to release Desktop 2.5 and to already start working on 3.0 beta.

The VMware Performance Team posted on its corporate blog some results obtained comparing ESX Server performances in NUMA and non-NUMA architectures:

recently performed some NUMA characterizations using VMmark on an older HP DL585 with 4 2.2 GHz dual-core Opterons. In the DL585, each dual-core processor is in its own NUMA node. I wanted to measure how heavily we stress the NUMA interconnect links, known as HyperTransport (HT) on the Opteron. I ran tests with one VMmark tile (6 VMs), two VMmark tiles (12 VMs), three VMmark tiles (18VMs), and four VMmark tiles (24 VMs). The tests consumed 27%, 58%, 90%, and 100% of the system CPU resources, respectively.

…

The most important result is that the HT utilization remains below 20% in all cases. This implies that we have a large amount of headroom in the memory subsystem, which can be used as processor speeds increase. More importantly, the transition to quad-core systems should also be smooth, especially since newer versions of the HT links should provide even better performance.

…

I then repeated the experiment with the DL 585 configured in memory-interleave (non-NUMA) mode in order to quantify the benefits of using NUMA on this system…The tests also consumed slightly more CPU resources than the NUMA configuration at each load level due to the higher average memory latencies caused by the high proportion of remote accesses. The average CPU utilization was 30%, 62%, 95%, and 100% with 6 VMs, 12 VMs, 18 VMs, and 24 VMs, respectively…

Read the whole article at source.

VMware continues to collect successes with ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 powerful combination.

In January 2007 products has been named Disaster Recovery solution of 2006 by SearchWinComputing.

In February 2007 the bundle has been named first product for building the New Data Center by Network World.

Is this the best moment to use IT 2.0 hype for virtualization marketing?

Quoting from the Double-Take official announcement:

Further broadening its offerings for VMware environments, Double-Take® Software today announced Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure, a solution that protects entire VMware virtual machines.

…

Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure runs on a single Windows® server in a virtualized environment, and allows administrators to centrally manage and monitor multiple virtual machine protection jobs from any Windows desktop using the client management console. Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure captures changes regularly, keeping the target virtual disks up to date and ready for failover, recovery and backup at any time. During an outage, the replicated virtual machine can be started on the target server with the latest replicated data available.

…

Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure is compatible with VMware ESX Server versions 3 and later, and VirtualCenter version 2 or later.

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

SWsoft, Inc. has signed an agreement with Microsoft Corp. that helps SWsoft enhance its customers’ experience. The agreement is for a three-year period and benefits SWsoft enterprise and hosting customers running Virtuozzo for Windows Server virtualization software.

…

As part of the agreement, SWsoft will receive 24-hour, 7-day support from Microsoft for its enterprise and hosting customers operating Windows-based applications within Virtuozzo virtual environments…

The russian startup Veeam continues to release free tools to simplify VMware power users’ life.

After Veeam Monitor (which is free when used with VMware Workstation) and Veeam FastSCP, the company launches Veeam RootAccess:

By default ESX Server 3 does not allow remote shell access (ssh) for the root account. Veeam RootAccess Wizard helps you to enable or disable remote root access, or create a regular non-root user account. The newly created non-root user will belong to the default ‘users’ group and will be automatically granted remote ssh access. Su or sudo commands can then be used to elevate to the root account for privileged operations.

Download it here.

Microsoft just released a refreshed build (05.0.4000.0000) of its Virtual Server 2005 Management Pack for Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM).

The new version just includes an updated report which will import successfully on SQL Server Reporting Services 2005.

Download it here.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.