Year: 2007

Quoting from LinuxDevices:

VirtualLogix (formerly Jaluna) is prepping an evaluation version of its platform virtualization software for mobile handsets. VLX-MX (“Mobile Experimentation”) will be freely available this quarter, and will help qualified prospective customers explore, benchmark, and otherwise evaluate the company’s virtualization technology for mobile handsets, it says.

VLX-MX is based on the company’s VLX-MH (“Mobile Handsets”) product. VLX-MH was designed to enable legacy phone RTOSes to share application processor resources with Linux and/or another rich phone OS, enabling multimedia functionality and modern connection options to be grafted onto existing mobile phone designs…

Read the whole article at source.

Register to know when VLX-MX eXperimentation Edition will be available here.

vanbragt.net published a brief but interesting review of Ardence 4.0, providing this conclusion:

Streaming your Operating System has lot of advantages. It the perfect way to guarantee that all your servers are 100% identical (after a restart the system will be going back to the default of the images). Also getting a new client in production is just a task of a few minutes and a rollback to a previous state is as easy as a restart of the clients). Of course there are also some limitations like more network traffic, more dependency of the network and all disadvantages of using cloning techniques.

Looking at Ardence specific the product is pretty easy to use, supplied with a good manual and the delta approach is wonderful to update your virtual disk with the possibility to rollback very easy. The installation of the product could be made better and the administrator console can be improved for bigger environments looking at the configuration of the clients…

Read the whole article at source.

Few weeks before a funny and unofficial demo of the product appeared online.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

The IBM secure hypervisor architecture, or “sHype,” is a Research technology designed to run in conjunction with commercial and open source hypervisors that control servers and data in a shared environment. sHype aims to provide a security “wrapper” around distributed workloads in the data center, extending mainframe-like security to pooled data and resources across multiple IBM and non-IBM systems.

sHype is designed to bring stronger security guarantees to popular x86 and blade servers. As is increasingly common, IBM Research developed the sHype technology not just in its own labs, but implementing early versions of sHype with customers to test and evaluate the code. Additionally, portions of sHype have been contributed to the Open Source community and are being used, for example, as part of the open source Xen hypervisor kernel.

…

sHype works in conjunction with hypervisors by establishing a virtual machine to act as a data center “security foreman.” The foreman uses preset configurations, business policies and exceptions set by the customer to lock down all content of the data center. It then automatically sets policies that evaluate, rank and code workloads as well as the physical and virtual resources needed to run each workload. Once workloads and resources are locked together, the integrity of the data and resources is assured and can be better managed by hypervisors accordingly…

Pete Zerger, already popular for its free VMware Server Management Pack, published a list of commercial Management Packs for monitoring VMware ESX Server 3.0 on Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) 2005, including:

• eXc VMware Management Pack
• Quest Management eXtensions
• nWorks VMware Events MP

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for automating software demo, test and training labs, today announced that it achieved record company results in 2006, closing more than five million dollars in sales in the fourth quarter alone. New customer wins, growth with current customers, technological advances, expanded partnership agreements, and new venture funding aided in making 2006 an overwhelming success…

VMware is approaching the final release of its most popular virtualization tool, Workstation, and includes another bunch of interesting features in the new beta 3 (build 39849):

• Record/Replay of Virtual Machine Activity (Experimental)
  This feature lets you record all of a Workstation 6 virtual machine’s activity over a period of time. Unlike Workstation’s movie-capture feature, the record/replay feature lets you exactly duplicate the operations and state of the virtual machine throughout the time of the recording.
• CrossTalk Communication Infrastructure (Experimental)
  CrossTalk provides a faster means of communication among applications running on the host and in virtual machines. The CrossTalk infrastructure comprises a CrossTalk SDK and CrossTalk drivers for host and guest. This experimental feature is especially suited for users who want to write client-server applications.
• Eclipse plug-in for Integrated Virtual Debuggers
  With the new Workstation IDE (integrated development environment) plug-ins, software developers are provided with menu items and toolbar buttons in Visual Studio (Windows only) or Eclipse (Windows or Linux) to easily develop and debug programs in virtual machines.

The new Record/Replay feature, announced at VMworld 2006, has been particularly expected by developers, introducing a new way to approach application debugging.

Unfortunately the new feature is not supported when virtual machine is configured to work any IDE virtual device (including hard disks and CDRoms), making somewhat complex work with it.

VMware Workstation 6.0 also introduces news on VMware Tools, which now include three experimental drivers:

• CrossTalk Driver
  Driver to allow virtual machines to communicate with applications on the host and with other virtual machines using datagrams and shared memory.
  (see above for further details)
• Descheduled Time Accounting
  Experimental driver to improve accuracy of timekeeping by charging time during which the virtual machine was not running the vmdesched service.
• WYSE Multimedia Redirector
  Driver to enhance your remote desktop multimedia experience.

Download the new beta 3 here.

Quoting from SearchServerVirtualization:

VMware is preparing to roll out a new hardware certification program that should result in a greater variety of devices on VMware’s hardware compatibility list (HCL).

…

In an interview at the IDC Virtualization Forum in New York City yesterday, Parag Patel, VMware senior director of ecosystems alliances, told SearchServerVirtualization.com the program will have hardware vendors “self-certify,” instead of having VMware certify the hardware for them.

The self-certification program would rely on a standardized toolset and test routines. Hardware vendors interested in getting on VMware’s support matrix would take their equipment to a VMware-certified test lab, and run VMware virtualization on their hardware devices.

If the vendor passes the test, hardware will be placed on the HCL; if not, VMware will work with the vendor to rectify the problem, Patel said…

Read the whole article at source.

VMware already started to modify approach to hardware certification for ESX Server introducing a community driven Hardware/Software Compatibility List in middle January.

Fabrice Bellard, creator and maintainer of QEMU, announces QEMU Accelerator (KQEMU) has now adopted the open souce GPL licence v2 since version 1.3.0pre11.

Download it here.

Linux.inet.hr published a brief performance comparison of QEMU, QEMU+KQEMU and new KVM, the hypervisor included in the new Linux kernel 2.6.20.

Thanks to Fraser Campbell for the news.

Tim Freeman, Software Developer and Research Assistant at Globus Toolkit, published a wonderful post explaining how to achieve high-availability for Xen hosts, thanks to open source tools DRDB, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and Global Network Block Device (GNBD). And without a shared storage facility like a SAN.

…

I have two cheap computers and so I put some big disks in them and mirrored the disks over the network. Instead of using one file server node and RAID1, this is something like a “whole system RAID”. If anything at all breaks in either computer, hosted services can keep running and data is unharmed except for whatever was unsynced in RAM.

To accomplish the disk mirror I used DRBD. DRBD is a special block device that is designed for highly available clusters, it mirrors activity directly at the block device level across the network to another disk. So like a RAID1 configuration over the network.

…

That is how the disk is setup, now how to access it remotely? You could run a shared filesystem of course, exporting via an NFS server on host A (or B). Instead, having heard good things about Global Network Block Device (GNBD) on the Xen mailing lists, I chose to export the logical block devices (from LVM) directly over the network with GNBD. Another node makes a GNBD import and the block device appears to be a local block device there, ready to mount into the file hierarchy. This is like iSCSI but it is a snap to set up and use.

…

…using GNBD, you can live-migrate the VM to any node that can do a GNBD import. This is nice to have. I only live migrate manually, though. Both DRBD and GNBD have some features that allow for seamless failover but I don’t really need any of this at home…

Read the whole post at source.

How much time before someone adopt this solution with VMware Server for Linux too?

Shuveb Hussain launched EasyVZ, the first GUI management tool for OpenVZ, the open source branch of SWsoft Virtuozzo.

EasyVZ, open source too, is only for Linux and it’s still in alpha but already assolves most common Virtual Private Servers (VPS) management tasks.

Download it here.