Year: 2007

After the VMware launch of Virtual Appliances Marketplace (VAM) and Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program in November 2006, also Virtual Iron started to embrace the virtual appliance concept.

From the corporate blog, founder Alex Vasilevsky launches the Virtual Appliance Exchange, where a Cent OS 4.4 image can already be found.

Concurrently rPath extended its rBuilder support to Virtual Iron virtual machines images, simplifying creation and spread of new Virtual Iron virtual appliances.

Despite this current trend, which is more an indirect marketing effort than a real production offering, I strongly criticized virtual appliances approach, introducing too many risks to be seriously considered in an enterprise environment.

rPath continues to extend rBuilder capability to deliver customized Linux distributions in every virtual format available.

After introducing support for Xen 3.0.3 format in November 2006, rBuilder now is able to create VHD images (used by Microsoft Virtual Server and Virtual PC platforms) as well as Virtual Iron ones:

When Parallels virtual machines will be officially supported too?

Neville Franks published a bried review of recently released XenSource XenExpress, the free edition limited to 4 concurrent virtual machines, providing this conclusion:

Overall XenServer worked very well indeed. I did run into a problem where the Administration Console kept disconnecting from the server and restarting the Console program didn’t resolve this. In the end I had to hit the reset button on the server as I couldn’t restart it from the console. This resolved the console disconnection problem, but was a drastic measure in the extreme.

I also had problems with the XEN Servers CD-ROM drive where I wasn’t able to eject the drive so I could put in the next CD for a Windows 2003 Server installation. The only way I found to do this was to shut-down the XenVM. Same thing with Windows XP. The CD-ROM drive also couldn’t be written to, even though it is a burner. The Administration Console is a bit annoying in places as it continually interupts your work flow with confirmation prompts. It would be far better if these “Are you sure?” prompts included a “Do not ask again” option like I use in Surfulater.

XenServer has only recently been released, so you might want to sit back for a little while before using it in a production environment…

Read the whole review at source.

SWsoft and its Virtuozzo start to collect some serious acknowledgement from industry.

From the SWsoft official announcement:

SWsoft has been chosen as one of the Top 50 Technology Innovators of 2006 by IT Week magazine.
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This is the second year in a row that SWsoft has appeared on IT Week’s annual Technology Innovator list. Last June, the company was also named to IT Week’s Top 100 IT Vendors of 2006.
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The IT Week issue can be found at http://itweekmagazine.com/issues/issue251.pdf. SWsoft’s listing is on page 98…

SWsoft also received accolates from InfoWorld for Virtuozzo for Linux, awarded as Best Server Virtualization solution.

vmToolkit published a tool to extend MIcrosoft Virtual Server 2005 virtual machines disk size: VHD Expander.

Download it here.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Ricky El-Qasem published a tool to perform snapshot reverting on multiple VMware virtual machines at a time, connecting to a VirtualCenter: VPsnaper.

Download it here.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera Inc., a global leader in datacenter virtualization, today announced the appointment of Al Lanzetta to senior vice president of Operations and Worldwide Services. With more than 30 years’ experience in operations, finance, manufacturing and customer service, Mr. Lanzetta has an outstanding record of improving efficiency, increasing productivity and customer satisfaction, and of operational excellence. A senior executive with Egenera for over four years, Mr. Lanzetta formerly served as Egenera’s vice president of Worldwide Enterprise Services.

Prior to joining Egenera, Mr. Lanzetta served as vice president of Global Field Operations and Field Support for EMC Global Services, where he guided a worldwide staff of 3,000 professionals responsible for customer service field operations, field support, logistics and contracts administration….

Virtual Iron and IDC arranged a new webcast for January 25th

Attendees will learn about:

• New advanced virtualization tools priced for mainstream adoption
• Expanding use cases such as rapid provisioning and business continuity that not only reduce costs, but also increase flexibility and better align IT with the business
• The impact of virtual infrastructure management and mobility
• Centrally managing virtual computers and physical servers
• How companies are implementing Virtualization 2.0 today

As I already said I strongly disagree on the IDC idea of Virtualization 2.0, but the webcast may be interesting for ones never saw Virtual Iron in action.

Register for it here.

Quoting from the InnoTek official announcement:

InnoTek today made VirtualBox generally available — a new contender in the premier league of x86 full virtualization software, and the only one that is also Open Source. Marking an important milestone in the history of PC virtualization, VirtualBox is designed for server, desktop and embedded use – in enterprises and for home use.

After years of development as a special-purpose solution, VirtualBox is now generally available to companies of any size as well as home users and developers who have so far been unable to find a professional, yet flexible and open virtualizer.
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In addition, on InnoTek’s brand-new community website www.virtualbox.org, VirtualBox is now available in two versions: You can download the full binary releases free of charge for personal and educational use as well as evaluation. In addition, InnoTek has unleashed the VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE), containing nearly all of the source code of VirtualBox. Everyone is invited to test the product, check out the source code, join the community and contribute to further development of the product…

VirtualBox, which reached version 1.3.3, is available for Windows and Linux host OSes and has some interesting features:

• allows recursive virtualization (a VirtualBox instance can run a guest OS), never allowed before by other virtualization vendors
• allows full control through command-line (including snapshots management)
• allows alternative front-ends, including ones not showing virtual machine desktops locally (something VMware is introducing right now with new Workstation 6 beta)
• allows automatic logon of Windows virtual machines
• includes a Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server (to see virtual machines through RPD without enabling it inside all of them) and allows remote USB mapping
• includes an iSCSI initiator (to map remote iSCSI targers as local virtual disks)
• includes full support for Intel VT and experimenta support for AMD SVM
• exposes Microsoft COM and Mozilla XPCOM programmable interfaces (this part seems still under development)
• has a work in progress version for Apple Mac OS X

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

InnoTek has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

The canadian CiRBA, recently entered in the virtualization market, just released version 4.0 of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI), covering an almost empty market segment: large-scale capacity planning for server consolidation.

New features of this release includes:

• Interactive Server Consolidation and Virtualization Analysis
  Capability to perform what-if analysis to compare different server consolidation scenarios.
• Enhanced VM Reporting Capabilities
  A new VMware Configuration report provides detailed configuration on a VMware ESX host server and its guest VMs.
• New licensing options
  Departmental edition targets organizations that want to analyze for virtualization specifically and want to examine workload personalities only. The Enterprise edition suits those who want to analyze heterogeneous data centers and use multiple consolidation strategies considering configuration, workload and business constraints

CiRBA DCI 4.0 is available immediately, licensed on a monthly basis with pricing based on the number of server operating systems being audited and term of commitment.

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

CiRBA has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.