Year: 2007

In the same way it did with new Windows Vista Business Edition, Microsoft released a TechNet Virtual Lab (remotely accessible for 90 minutes) already configured to work with last year acquired Softricity technologies: SoftGrid and ZeroTouch.

Access the virtual lab here.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

Quoting from the Unisys official announcement:

…
The Unisys Enterprise Virtualization solution leverages Unisys advanced technologies to enhance industry-standard virtualization offerings, such as VMware.
…
Two new technologies give the Unisys Enterprise Virtualization solution a distinct advantage. Unisys Real-Time Consolidation Accelerator provides secure, anywhere-to-anywhere automated conversions of applications and operating systems between physical servers, virtual machines, and image archives. Unisys Real-Time Chargeback provides visibility and insight into the IT costs associated with business processes across heterogeneous environments, both virtualized and non-virtualized.

The Enterprise Virtualization solution delivers key benefits, including rapid discovery of critical infrastructure components, identification of optimal virtualization candidates based on utilization data, automated physical-to-virtual implementation on Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers using VMware Infrastructure 3.0 Virtualization Server, and ongoing capture of resource utilization metrics to create visibility into IT usage and costs…

The open source management console for Xen, Enomalism, continues its progression towards 1.0 status.

The new 0.6 version introduces, among others, following improvements:

• Ability to change CPU and MEMORY allocation on virtual machines (live memory allocation)
• sHype/ACM Support on Fedora Core 6
• Windows XP / Vista Support using XenSource XenEnterprise
• Tentative support for Ubuntu 6.x series, as well as Fedora core 4 & 6

The commercial edition of Enomalism, planned for early February, will also introduce capability to manage multiple hosts.

Download it here.

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, whose Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE) software is leading the next generation of data center virtualization, today announced its C round of equity funding. This round was led by new investor Credit Suisse and includes participation by all existing investors, Hummer Winblad, JK&B Capital, and Pequot Capital. The funding round will provide $15 million in venture capital, which will be used for continued expansion of sales operations…

Quoting from the InovaWave official announcement:

InovaWave, Inc., which develops the industry’s first software solution proven to more than double the performance of server and desktop virtual machines and the applications that run on them, today announced it has secured $2 million in Series A financing from Silverton Partners. As part of the funding round, Bill Wood, general partner for Silverton Partners, joined the InovaWave board of directors.

InovaWave also announced the appointment of John Kellar to the position of vice president of research and engineering. In his new role, Mr. Kellar will direct and oversee all product development activities as the company continues to support growing demand for its virtualization performance boosting software. A distinguished and recognized leader in research and engineering, Mr. Kellar’s career spans more than 22 years in the fields of operating systems, cryptography and algorithms…

Virtual Iron add another remarkable partnership to its list, adhering the Citrix Dynamic Desktop Initiative (DDI) and becoming a Citrix Alliance Partner.

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software solutions, today announced that it has completed integration between Version 3.1 of its enterprise-class virtualization and management platform with both the Citrix Desktop Broker for Citrix Presentation Server and the Citrix Password Manager, creating an advanced desktop virtualization solution. The joint solution, available immediately, is ideally suited to the IT requirements of providing support for branch office, back office and front office workers. It will be co-marketed under the Citrix Dynamic Desktop Initiative.

Virtual Iron also announced that it has officially become a Technology Partner under the Citrix Alliance Partner program…

Through this key partnership Virtual Iron can position itself as a concrete alternative to VMware, which is the monopolistic platform a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) infrastructure.

Considering VMware and Citrix efforts are pretty similar you may want to read VMware VDI vs Citrix DDI to discover slight differences.

As announced in November 2006, Symantec released fifth version of Veritas Cluster Server, which includes a version specifically supporting VMware ESX Server.

This release offers following features:

• Availability across any distance for VMware ESX environments
  Builds both local and remote clusters for local availability and disaster recovery
• Application and resource monitoring
  Provides a more granular level of visibility and management by monitoring the application as well as virtual resources
• Multicluster management and reporting
  Manages multiple local and remote clusters in physical and virtual environments from a single console, regardless of the operating system
• Leverages VMware ESX advanced features
  Recognizes and works seamlessly with VMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
• Automated disaster recovery testing
  Tests both failover and replication configurations without affecting the primary environment

Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX is available at $1,995 per server.

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

Techworld published a very good essay from Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder and CTO at CiRBA, about mistakes virtualization newcomers can do during capacity planning phase:

1. Equating consolidation with new hardware purchases
2. Looking at simple workload patterns
3. Failing to consider non-technical constraints
4. Acting on dated information
5. Broadcasting your intent prior to gathering data
6. Using virtualisation as the only strategy for consolidation
7. Leaving database servers out of scope
8. Leaving application servers out of scope
9. Leaving test/development environments out of scope
10. Failure to look into financial benefits and the variables that affect ROI

The article is supporting the recent release of CiRBA Data Center Intelligence (DCI) 4.0, but it’s definitively worth to read.

Quoting from CNN Fortune Magazine:

…

VMware’s CEO Diane Greene told me yesterday that her company’s existing x86 desktop product is already being used by some to run Mac OS on computers from Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others, though this is not intentional on VMware’s part.

SWsoft’s Beloussov says that this spring, Parallels will upgrade its software further, in a way that by coincidence will make it easier to run Mac OS on a non-Apple computer. He also insists that is not deliberate, but just a consequence of the nature of the technology, especially now that Intel builds virtualization technology into its chips.

Greene says one reason VMware’s Mac product is delayed is that it was so time-consuming to get Apple’s cooperation and blessing. “We were trying to do it the way they wanted to, but in hindsight we should have just gone ahead,” she says. “I wonder what Steve Jobs is going to do, because there is so much pressure to run Mac OS on non-Macs. There’s no technical reason not to do it. He’s so proprietary about everything, yet it could be a very strategic move for him to make.” Beloussov, for his part, agrees…

Read the whole article at source.

The article also mentions SWsoft acquired Paralles, making it a subsidiary without any announcement (in the corporate blog, Ilya Baimetov reveals companies are working to integrate respective products).

virtualization.info discovered relationship between SWsoft, Parallels and Acronis in summer 2006.

Few days ago IT Week hinted VMware could allow Mac OS running in virtual machines, but only when hosted on Apple hardware.

While VMware is readying VMmark and IBM/Intel are preparing vConsolidate, two proprietary benchmarking approaches.
But VMware, IBM and Intel are also SPEC members, which is working on a longer-term, standardized measurement model for server virtualization platforms.

In the past SWsoft claimed superior performances over VMware products, which cannot be confirmed for VMware EULA restrictions.
While respective approaches are very different, customers often ask for speed comparisons and server consolidation ratios, more focused on results than what’s under the hood.

Considering how an advers benchmarking approach could damage any virtualization company, it’s understandable SWsoft decided to join SPEC virtualization group, as anticipated in July 2006.