Year: 2007

Quoting from the EMC official announcement:

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today reported all-time record revenue and strong profit growth for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2006. EMC’s 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year revenue growth was highlighted by better-than-expected revenue and profit performance.

Total consolidated revenue for the fourth quarter was a record $3.215 billion, 19% higher than the $2.710 billion for the fourth quarter of 2005 and $55 million more than the fourth-quarter revenue forecast provided by EMC in October 2006.
…
VMware, an EMC subsidiary, had its 31st consecutive record quarter and grew total revenues 101% year-over-year to $232 million. VMware has delivered accelerating year-over-year growth for the past five quarters. VMware’s exceptional performance was fueled by rapid customer adoption of VMware Infrastructure 3, which began shipping in June 2006…

Novell announced a new online service able to create custom Linux distributions, delivering them as Xen virtual machines if required.

Quoting from the Novell official announcement:

Novell today announced the open source availability of the openSUSE? Build Service, an innovative framework that provides an infrastructure for software developers to easily create and compile packages for multiple Linux* distributions. Novell also announced the immediate availability of KIWI, a system imaging tool to create live media, including Xen* virtual images. As a result, open source developers can more quickly build a Linux distribution that meets their particular use case, rigorously test it to ensure product quality, and easily package it for quick installation.

Developers can use the user-friendly, automated process in the openSUSE Build Service to build open source packages and resolve dependencies with other packages. The build service is completely free, offering packages for a variety of Linux distributions, including the openSUSE.org community. Users can easily find and download the latest open source packages for their distributions, including upgrades for older packages. Direct access to code stored in popular source repositories such as Novell® Forge and SourceForge is also possible. The source and documentation for the build service tools are hosted on http://forge.novell.com within the openSUSE project.

The openSUSE Build Service contains a server back-end and a client front-end. The server back-end hosts sources, the build infrastructure, package download and mirroring tools, and communication infrastructures. The client front-end includes the tools and interfaces needed to organize and build packages from source code, including a command line and a Web-based interface…

This move seems the beginning step to enter the virtual appliance market launched by VMware, while the building clearly mimicks the popular rBuilder. But from what is available right now it seems hard Novell can really compete with rPath service.

vizioncore published a new 24-pages whitepaper detailing how the new VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) can be integrated with its esxRanger Professional 3.0 to achieve fast backups in VI3:

VCB and esxRanger Professional are designed specifically for virtualization backup needs.

Backups are most efficiently managed when there are no resources used on the host ESX Server, virtual machines or the network. VCB was designed to allow backup solutions such as esxRanger Professional to provide a complete and cost effective backup and recovery solution. VCB removes the backup process from the host ESX Server altogether by leveraging a proxy server to execute the backup functions performed by esxRanger Professional. This combined solution addresses the challenges outlined previously.

• The entire virtual machine/or individual files can be restored
• Overhead on the host ESX Server with either the Service Console or the virtual machines themselves is eliminated
• Network overhead is eliminated
• Backups are less restricted to backup window constraints
• Scheduling of backups is managed through esxRanger Professional
• The cost of implementing an effective disaster recovery strategy is reduced

Read the whole whitepaper at source.

Steven Bink reports an updated roadmap for upcoming System Center Operation Manager 2007 (formerly Microsoft Operation Manager or MOM) revealing related Virtual Machine Manager, actually in beta 1 phase, is now planned for end of Q3.

The original news source seems to be deleted.

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

In December 2006 IDC published a new research (9-pages only) called Server Virtualization Maturity Index, predicting some expected points:

• While early server virtualization adoption was due to consolidation and migration of projects, new drivers for virtualization includes availability solutions and disaster recovery programs
• Automation is expected to play a strong role in managing virtualization resources in the next 18 months, as customers evaluate more sophisticated management tools
• Industry impacts of virtualization are becoming evident with an increase in the penetration of 4-way systems and customers choosing more richly configured systems

This is not the only prediction IDC published in December 2006: in another document the research firm repeat same things, but also throw in virtual appliances success.

Microsoft published an easy 8-pages document detailing steps to achieve successful migration of Virtual Server 2005 virtual hard disks from IDE to SCSI.
As the document outlines virtual SCSI is always preferred because it can improve performances of up to 20%, but if you have to share a virtual machine between Virtual Server and Virtual PC your only choice is IDE.

Read it here.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Ben Armstrong, Program Manager of Virtual Machine Team at Microsoft, published a script to query Virtual Server 2005 virtual machine details from host OS:

Option Explicit
dim vs, vm
Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
set vm = vs.FindVirtualMachine(“a virtual machine”)
‘Display information about the GuestOS
wscript.echo “Guest OS Information:”
wscript.echo “=====================”
wscript.echo “OSName : ” & vm.GuestOS.OSName
wscript.echo “AdditionsVersion : ” & vm.GuestOS.AdditionsVersion
wscript.echo “CanShutdown : ” & vm.GuestOS.CanShutdown
wscript.echo “IsHeartbeating : ” & vm.GuestOS.IsHeartbeating
wscript.echo “HeartbeatPercentage : ” & vm.GuestOS.HeartbeatPercentage
wscript.echo “IsHostTimeSyncEnabled : ” & vm.GuestOS.IsHostTimeSyncEnabled

Be sure to read the original article for updates and comments.

Update: Ben published a new article describing how to achieve same goal with new Microsoft PowerShell instead of VBS. Read it here.

Linux Magazine declared VMware and XenSource worthwhile to watch in 2007. Welcome!
ComputerWorld already said something similar 10 days ago. Like almost any another news source on the planet.

It’s remarkable SWsoft, with its open source project OpenVZ, didn’t find a place, while less performing (but popular names) are there:

• AMD
• Astaro
• Avocent
• Canonical
• Digium
• HP
• IBM
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Network Appliance
• Novell
• Oracle
• Platform Computing
• The Portland Group
• Red Hat
• Sun
• TopSpin (acquired by Cisco)

This one was too funny to not publish it: vmware.cn site (clearly not owned by VMware Inc.) mimicks official Palo Alto company website, but among available products in homepage you can find not only ESX Server, Player and others, but also SWsoft Virtuozzo and Parallels Workstation!

Isn’t it fair competition?

One of the most complex issues when dealing with virtualization is not technical: current Windows licensing scheme has not been developed with virtualization in mind, so that understanding to what and when license applies in a virtual datacenter is very vague at this point.

In October 2005 Microsoft modified its OS licensing terms so that Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition license allows up to 4 virtual OS instances, while the Datacenter Edition license allows unlimited virtual instances. With any virtualization platform, not just Virtual Server 2005. And announced codename Longhorn (rumored Windows Server 2007) will follow this policy.

This move doesn’t completely clarify things, letting customers confused when handling back-end servers licensing schemes (which are different from Windows one), or different virtualization approaches, like SWsoft Virtuozzo.

To partially address questions Microsoft just released a neat online calculator, showing diffences in price between Windows editions (Standard, Enterprise and DataCenter) in a virtualization scenario, with multiple physical server and different CPUs configurations: the Windows Virtualization Calculator.

Let’s hope this tool can be improved to consider more complex scenarios, where also back-end servers licenses can be calculated.