Year: 2007

After launching its hyperVM product in summer 2006 with support for OpenVZ and Xen, Lxlabs is ready to push out the new 1.4, which introduce interesting features:

• Industrial Strength centralized backup for the entire cluster
  HyperVM backup uses linux hardlinks and rsync protocol to greatly reduce the space and the network overhead needed for backup management
• IP pool
  Allows the Administrator to keep track of all the ipaddresses from a single location, and also automates the process of assigning ipaddresses to a VPS
• VPS Plans
  Create vpses with a single click utilizing pre-built hosting plans
• A commercial grade port monitoring system incorporated directly into the software allowing the users to monitor specific ports on their vpses themselves
• A cluster wide reverse dns system, allowing the adminstrators to delegate creation directly to the customers
• Graphs that provide health statistics and resource usage patterns of the virtual machines
• Centralized Ostemplate management
  The ostemplates need to be maintained only on the master, and the slave nodes will automatically download them if they don’t have it
• Fine grained client control
  HyperVM 1.4 provides the ability to control every aspects of your customer by limiting each feature individually

Check an online demo here.

Lxlabs is also expected to extend hyperVM management capabilities to VMware and Microsoft virtualization platforms.

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

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

IBM today announced expanded scalability enhancements to the industry’s most powerful virtualization technology z/VM. With this new release, z/VM version 5.3 can now host the industry’s largest number of virtual images on a single hypervisor — virtualization technology that makes one computer look like multiple computers — allowing customers to further optimize and consolidate their infrastructures.

Internal testing conducted by IBM reveals that the new virtualization product release can host more than 1,000 virtual images on a single copy of z/VM.

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In addition to enhancing memory utilization, the new software plans to deliver increased CPU capacity with support for up to 32 Processor Units — raising the limit from 24 to 32 processors — a 33 percent increase over the previous release of z/VM.

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z/VM V5.3 runs on IBM System z9 (z9 EC and z9 BC) and IBM eServer zSeries (z800, z900, z890, z990) servers.

IBM z/VM version 5.3 will be available for purchase on June 29, 2007 through IBM and IBM Business Partners.

SecuriTeam reports an interesting advice about last version of VMware Workstation:

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Each VM has its own settings. one settings category is “Guest Isolation”, which includes a checkbox named “Enable copy and paste to and from this virtual machine”. This feature can work only if the “VMware tools” component is installed on the guest OS. The clipboard copy operation can transfer only text, not files or streams. Eitan has discovered the following issues regarding this component:

1. Changing the value of this feature (in either way enabling or disabling) becomes actually active only if a global operation is made towards the guest OS, like suspend and resume, reset, restart (from within the guest OS), shutdown (either from within the guest OS of by performing a “power off” from the VMware workstation application) and then turning it back on. Simply changing the check box value and pressing OK will not change current functionality of this feature.
2. When this feature is turned on and working The direction of the clipboard content transfer is the same as the direction of the focus change between guest and host operating systems and vice versa. But, when the host OS clipboard is empty and the focus is moved to the guest OS clipboard the guest clipboard is not cleared and left with its current content. Now, when focusing back to the host’s, empty, source clipboard it is now filled with the content of the guest’s clipboard thus the host clipboard is failing to keep itself erased and its previously cleared content is re-filled from the guest OS. This behavior may re-fill the host’s clipboard with data that was intentionally erased (like password or credit card number). Strangely, this behavior does not happen when the process is started from the guest OS clipboard, and if it is the first to be erased, and then the focus moves to the host, the host’s clipboard is erased. So, the issue here is only when the process starts from the host side.

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Read the whole security advice at source.

VMware has arranged a new series of webcasts for February and March about the new Lab Manager 2.4:

• Overview of Virtual Lab Automation (02.14.07)
  Find out how you can:
  – Reduce the capital and operating expense of maintaining disparate systems in the test lab
  – Shorten the time you spend provisioning configurations by up to 50%
  – Give development and test teams self-service access to multi-machine configurations
• Market Snapshot: Virtual Lab Automation (02.28.07)
  Join us and learn how your peers are:
  – Tackling infrastructure and process challenges associated with supporting the development and testing of complex applications and systems
  – Making the decision to adopt Virtual Lab Automation
  – Benefiting from the results of virtualizing and automating the test lab
• Real-world experiences in the virtual lab (02.19.07)
  Through a presentation and live Q&A, you will hear about:
  – How Virtual Lab Automation eliminates repetitive provisioning of complex test environments
  – Successes, quantifiable results and savings from the VMware Lab Manager implementation
  – Lessons learned in adopting Virtual Lab Automation

Register for any event here.

Microsoft has arranged a new series of webcasts for February and March about Virtual Server 2005 R2 and SoftGrid:

• Microsoft’s Server Virtualization – Licensing Changes (02.12.07)
  This session will outline the key customer scenarios for Microsoft’s server virtualization products. Attendees will learn the how Virtualization licensing changes affect previous licensing and how virtualization affects licensing of other products such as SQL or Exchange. The primary focus will be on how to help customers achieve higher savings and build better utilization of combined products by educating everyone on the licensing benefits.
• Automating a Dev/Test Lab with Virtual Server (02.15.07)
  Join this webcast to learn how virtualization can significantly reduce the cost of developing and testing complex, multi-tier applications. We show how multiple servers can easily be provisioned and manipulated ‘virtually,’ without requiring large amounts of physical hardware. In this chalk talk, we discuss Microsoft Virtual Server and provide real-world examples of how virtualization is changing the future of development processes.
• Architectural Best-Practices for Virtual Server (02.19.07)
  Virtualization can provide an effective means for consolidating production servers. In this chalk talk we will discuss real-world usage of Virtual Server and how it could best be applied in your IT organization.
• Virtualized Branch Office Servers – Road to a dynamic branch (02.22.07)
  If you want to optimize the performance of your branch office infrastructure and simplify management, this session is for you. Join us to learn what you should consider before, during, and after server consolidation in a branch office. This webcast provides a comprehensive view of where virtualization is appropriate to use in a branch office and how virtualization can help simplify administration. We also cover the application virtualization recommendations in the Microsoft Branch Office Infrastructure Solution and some of the advanced capabilities a virtualized environment offers that can help you create a dynamic, self-managing branch infrastructure.
• Automating a Dev/Test Lab with Virtual Server (02.26.07)
  For the past 2 years, Microsoft IT has been using virtualization to help increase utilization and reduce overall TCO. Join this webcast to learn about the best practices, processes, and challenges of using virtualization for server consolidation and potential new opportunities enabled by virtualization. Topics we cover in this discussion include operational process, service definitions, and lessons learned from Microsoft IT’s experiences in using Virtual Server in a large-scale deployment scenario.
• Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (03.01.07)
  Many IT professionals understand virtualization technology, yet are slow to adopt it because they consider managing a virtualized environment a complex task that requires specialized skills. Join this webcast to learn how Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables increased physical server utilization, centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure, and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by the administrator and users. Discover how Virtual Machine Manager provides unification with the physical world and is fully integrated with the System Center product family. If you have never seen this enterprise management application in action, you should not miss this session.
• Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (03.05.07)
• Application Virtualization and Software Streaming within the Microsoft Systems Management Platform (03.12.07)
  It has been said that desktop virtualization is the future of the corporate personal computer. In this webcast, learn how application virtualization and software streaming within Microsoft Systems Management Server can:
  – Accelerate application and operating system deployments
  – Elminate application conflicts by enabling you to run any application on any system without extensive compatibility testing
  – Enable users to access applications from any computer, whether it is on or off the corporate network
  – Speed application and operating system migrations from months to days.
• Virtualization and SQL server: Technologies, best practices and pricing/licensing (03.19.07)

Register for any event here.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

With an unexpected move, just few weeks after receiving critics about value of acquisition, EMC just announced it will sell 10% of VMware with an Initial Public Offering.

Quoting from the official announcement:

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced its intention to sell approximately 10% of VMware via an initial public offering (IPO) of newly issued VMware stock. EMC will retain ownership of the remaining shares of VMware, and has no intention of spinning out or otherwise divesting this ownership interest.

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VMware had record sales in 2006, growing revenues 83% during the year to $709 million. It finished the fourth quarter of 2006 with year-over-year revenue growth of 101%, delivering accelerating year-over-year growth for the fifth consecutive quarter.

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EMC believes the IPO, which is expected to occur this summer, will provide both EMC and VMware with a number of significant advantages including:

• Improved visibility into VMware’s performance and growth relative to the market
• Strengthened VMware employee retention and recruitment through a broad-based equity award pool
• Reinforced commitment to VMware’s open platform strategy

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The IPO is not expected to have a material impact on EMC’s 2007 business outlook. VMware will be a publicly traded entity upon completion of the transaction. Tucci and Greene are expected to be named to VMware’s Board of Directors…

The VMware IPO is a remarkable event.

Excluding Google, the Palo Alto company is one of the few IT companies which showing an impressive growth for several years in a row, and which is expected to further grow in the near future thanks to massive virtualization adoption trends research firms like Gartners, IDC and Forrester are reporting since 2003.

Nontheless the operation can hide some risks: current VMware owner, EMC Corporation, is not collecting notable successes in Wall Street since a long time, despite impressive results of VMware and prestigious acquisitions of RSA, NetForensics.

Google Finance helps understanding EMC trends since December 2003, when VMware acquisition boosted stock price to $15.59 in January 2004:

So there is a chance VMware stock could face same kind of acceptance because of EMC ownership. On the other side VMware IPO could improve EMC stock value itself.

Update: Patrick O’Rourke, Senior Product Manager of Windows Server Division, posted some provocative comments about the IPO on the official Microsoft blog.

It’s a worthy reading.

Is Microsoft further influencing this move from EMC? Is this summer the last good chance to launch the VMware IPO before the biggest competitor seriously enters the space with its Windows Server Virtualization hypervisor (codename Viridian)?

The young startup VMLogix recently entered in the virtual datacenter automation segment with its LabManager, competing with the market leader VMware.

Last week the company released a small minor release to LabManager, reaching the 2.6.1 version, which introduces a great change: support for Linux.

One critic VMware received from customers in these years is that its administration tools, including VirtualCenter and the new Lab Manager acquired from Akimbi, are not available for the open source platform.

VMLogix has now a chance to raise customers’ interest providing an alternative.

LabManager 2.6 is available for download here.

The new Linux kernel 2.6.20 is particularly important for virtualization, officially adopting a virtualization solution, Kernel -based Virtual Machne or KVM (32 and 64bits) as well as support for para-virtualization (only 32bits). (KVM itself is about to support para-virtualization)

Xen project founder and chief architect, Ian Pratt, expressed severe critics about KVM, as reported by DevX News:

Xen is a true hypervisor, whereas KVM is a legacy virtualization solution akin to VMware Workstation, VMserver and Microsoft Virtual PC

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It lacks the benefits of para-virtualization performance enhancements that have been pioneered by Xen and are now being copied by VMware and Microsoft.

After seeking for long time inclusion in Linux kernel, Xen founder now snub the opportunity:

The Xen hypervisor is an operating system independent hypervisor that supports many different operating systems (Windows, Solaris, Netware, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) of which Linux is just one (though an important one)

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Putting Xen into Linux doesn’t make sense: hypervisors are different beasts from operating systems, so they share little code.

VMware released a new 22-pages whitepaper called A Performace Comparison of Hypervisors where ESX Server 3.0.1 is compared with Xen 3.0.3 in running Windows virtual machines.

In this case it’s not just a product comparison report. Here different virtualization techniques are put side by side: binary translation for ESX, para-virtualization for Xen:

This paper provides a quantitative and qualitative comparison of two virtualization hypervisors available for the x86 architecture — VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 and open-source Xen 3.0.3 — to validate their readiness for enterprise datacenters. A series of performance experiments was conducted on the latest shipping versions (at the time of this study in November 2006) for both hypervisors using Microsoft Windows as the guest operating system. This white paper discusses the results of these experiments. The discussion in this white paper should help both IT decision makers and end users to choose the right virtualization hypervisor for their datacenters.

The experimental results show that VMware ESX Server delivers the superior, production-ready performance and scalability needed to implement an efficient and responsive datacenter. Furthermore, while we had no problems exercising enterprise virtualization capabilities such as Virtual SMP and virtual machine scalability using the VMware ESX Server hypervisor, we were not successful in running similar tests with the Xen 3.0.3 hypervisor due to product failures.

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The system used to run all benchmark tests was an IBM X3500 server with two VT-enabled dual-core 3GHz Intel Woodcrest CPUs (total four cores). Although the test system had 5GB of RAM installed, it was booted with only 1GB of RAM for native tests. Additionally, the test system was configured with a dualport 1Gbps Ethernet adapter and two 146GB SAS disk drives. For native operating system tests, all data was captured using Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition R2 32-bit…

While the document is surely interesting, it’s worth to note that:

• benchmarks have not been conducted following that criteria VMware itself is trying to push with its VMmark
• Xen development team, XenSource or Virtual Iron (or anybody else) are prevented to release a similar paper to answer back without explicit VMware permission, to not break their EULA. Which is like saying they have to agree the VMware benchmarking approach to play the game.

Read the whitepaper at source.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced a new bundle designed to provide SMBs using the free VMware Server with an easy and cost-effective way to manage their virtual infrastructure. The bundle includes VirtualCenter for VMware Server with enterprise-class support from VMware for $1,500.

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VMware VirtualCenter for VMware Server is designed and licensed for use exclusively with VMware Server. The new virtualization management bundle, which includes one VirtualCenter management server for VMware Server with three agents and enterprise-class support including unlimited 30-day support from VMware, has a VMware list price of $1,500 and is expected to be available this week from VMware and VMware resellers. Additional agents can be purchased for a VMware list price of $400 per physical server managed…

After releasing VMware Converter 3.0 for free, this is the second step VMware is taking to make its technology more accessible for smaller companies.

It’s a needed and welcomed effort but lacks in effectiveness: the bundled VirtualCenter is still the old 1.4 and not the new VirtualCenter 2.0, which means growing SMBs will not able to seamless upgrade to new VMware Infrastructure 3 when ready to add ESX Server nodes.