Year: 2007

After launching its own virtual appliances delivery facility and bundling for the first time an appliance with its plaftorm, Virtual Iron (in collaboration with rPath and the Barton Group) is arranging a new webcast about the topic for February 21th:

The growing acceptance of virtualization technology is about to revolutionize the way IT consumers deploy applications. A major part of this shift is being driven by software vendors who provide “virtual appliances.”

Virtual appliances represent a new opportunity to streamline and simplify software distribution for virtual environments. With a virtual appliance, software vendors can ship thoroughly tested, standard configurations that require minimal installation effort. Users are spared the complication of installing multiple supporting systems, since everything is contained in the virtual appliance package — the operating system, services and applications. This dramatically decreases potential support issues related to incorrectly configured software or hardware. Users can simply download the virtual appliance and run it with virtualization software.

In this online panel discussion, industry experts from the Burton Group, rPath and Virtual Iron will discuss best practices in virtualization and the use of virtual appliances.

Attendees will learn:

• Best use and deployment of virtual appliances
• Leveraging ready to run virtual appliances that you can take advantage of today
• Using virtual appliances to enable maximum operational efficiency and the smallest hardware footprint possible

Register for it here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

After 4 years since Virtual PC 2004 and 4 months since first public beta Microsoft finally release Virtual PC 2007, probably the last virtualization platform based on Connectix technology before the launch of brand new Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian).

This new version is released free of charge like Virtual Server 2005 and introduces some notable improvements like:

• 64bit host OS support
• AMD SVM and Intel VT support
• Vista support (both host and guest OS)
• PXE booting support

but continues to lack on some critical aspects like 64bit guest OSes support.

Anyway the biggest change in this release is dropping of support for Windows 95 (while support for OS/2 Warp is still there).

This may seem a contraddiction: one of the first purposes of virtualization was supporting legacy applications and environments, and Microsoft more than anybody else on the IT industry could benefit from it to grant extended support to its customers. Instead it’s the market leader and competitor VMware which provides such support.

Download Virtual PC 2007 here (both 32 and 64bit).

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

Microsoft takes another step towards licensing restyling for virtualization scenarios with release of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Microsoft Corp. today released Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2, an update to its award-winning data management and analysis platform. Customers can now take advantage of enhancements in the familiar and easy-to-use Windows Vista operating system and 2007 Microsoft Office system to easily connect and integrate with the power, security and reliability of SQL Server 2005.

In addition, Microsoft announced that it is expanding virtualization use rights to allow unlimited virtual instances on servers that are fully licensed for SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition. For customers who want maximum flexibility in their use of virtualization technology, now or in the future, SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition is the ideal choice.

This is an impressive move from Microsoft: at this point buying a Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition and a single SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition means having limitless databases in your infrastructure.

Previous evaluations of company strategy about virtualization are now to be reconsidered: when Microsoft released for free its Virtual Server 2005 R2 and subsequently unlocked its licensing model in virtualization scenarios for Windows Server 2003 R2, several analysts highlighted those moves as part of a sharp tactic to sell more back-end servers licenses (mainly for SQL Server and Exchange Server).

But looking at this announcement and remembering the new Exchange Server 2007 isn’t supported in virtual machines at the moment, such reading is far to be confirmed.

Please note this new licensing model applies to any virtualization platforms, not only Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

Quoting from ZDNet:

Red Hat, the dominant Linux seller, will include KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) in the next version of its hobbyist Linux version, Fedora, Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens said Tuesday. “We’re packaging it for Fedora 7,” Stevens said.

…

However, Stevens said, KVM lags another open-source virtualization technology, Xen, which is the single biggest new feature in the company’s upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. “There’s a year of work, I’d guess, to really make it at parity where Xen is today,” Stevens said…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the StorageCraft official announcement:

…

StorageCraft has licensed its Volume Snapshot Manager (VSM) to VMware for use in VMware Converter 3.0, which allows for easy migration of systems to a virtual environment. VMware Converter 3.0 uses StorageCraft technology to speed up the time it takes to migrate to virtual systems. StorageCraft VSM is used in VMware Image Converter 3.0 to complete hot migrations of Windows systems.

…

StorageCraft Volume Snapshot Manager captures a hot snapshot of a system, allowing administrators to avoid the need to shut down a system when migrating to a VMware virtual machine. This saves time and simplifies the migration process…

Quoting from the Trigence official announcement:

Trigence, the application virtualization leader, today announced that Janet Strackhouse has joined the company’s management team as Vice President of U.S. Sales. Strackhouse comes to Trigence with extensive experience in sales and business development and a strong track record for increasing revenue and market share for several prominent application software providers.

Before joining Trigence, Strackhouse was responsible for North American Sales at Softricity, where she was instrumental in the early formation and growth of the sales organization, resulting in the successful acquisition of Softricity by Microsoft.

Prior to joining Softricity, Strackhouse was part of the initial team responsible for the strategic development and implementation of the enterprise sales organization at Citrix Systems, a leader in application delivery infrastructure…

Quoting from ZDNet:

According to the latest information from Forrester Research, there has been a growth in the number of European companies that are aware of virtualisation, from 62 percent in 2005 to 78 percent last year. There is also a significant growth in disinterest, with 27 percent of European organisations saying they are not interested in virtualisation compared to 16 percent in 2005.

The percentage of European companies interviewed that are using virtualisation has dropped slightly, from 24 percent in 2005 to 23 percent in 2006. Conversely, the number of organisations piloting virtual systems has doubled, from 6 to 12 percent, year on year…

Read the whole article at source.

Is probably right Europe has a much lower adoption rate for the technology but it seems unlikely european companies are implementing virtualization less than previous year.

As reported in Virtualization Trends 2006 summary, virtualization.info observed a huge interest from U.K, Germany and Netherlands, with an impressive growth from 2005:

• U.K. – +993%
• Germany – +668%
• Netherlands – +900%

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software solutions, and Reflex Security, Inc. (www.reflexsecurity.com), an innovator in network intrusion prevention, today announced a partnership to deliver Reflex Security’s Reflex Virtual Security Appliance (VSA) specifically designed for Virtual Iron’s virtual infrastructure environment.

…

General availability of the joint Virtual Iron/Reflex Security virtual appliance is planned for Q2, 2007. It will be available for free via download on Virtual Iron’s Virtual Appliance Exchange and at Reflex Security’s website…

This is the first time a virtual appliance is bundled directly with a virtualization platform. In a near future, just like today is a common practice with Linux distribution, virtualization vendors may push several virtual appliances in their installation media, to provide customers a quick startup for their infrastructures.

Massimo Re Ferrè, Systems Group IT/Architect at IBM, published on his new personal blog a notable comparison of today’s competitors in VDI desktop brokering space.

The list, updated continuously actually includes solutions from:

• 2X
• Citrix
• Dunes
• Leostream
• Propero
• Provision Networks
• Synchron
• Sun

Check it at source.

Recent improvements in OpenVZ project brought in some notable features in the development branch, including:

• Delivery of checkpointing and live migration support for IA64 processors
• Network file system (NFS) support
• VLAN (IEEE802.1Q) network standard support in virtual environments
• Filesystem in userspace (FUSE) support
• I/O accounting for each virtual environment to be followed with a new per-VE I/O scheduling feature added soon

Download last OpenVZ patches for Linux kernel here.