Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
Preparing for the big CES launch, Microsoft made available the new Windows Vista Business Edition on the Virtual Labs facility, powered by Virtual Server, where customers can connect and test several scenarios.
Each of 18 labs is available for 90 minutes and you can download a related manual. Try them here.
Microsoft has tents of other publicly accessible virtual machines, arranged in facilities dedicated to system engineers (TechNet Virtual Labs) and developers (MSDN Virtual Labs).
Amazon launched the beta of first virtual datacenter on demand, based on Xen, in August 2006, calling it Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
In the effort to put more emphasis on the service (and ride the new hype about virtual appliances), the company now allows EC2 customers to share their Xen virtual machines, called Amazon Machine Images or AMI.
The new EC2 API of October 2006 supports following features:
Already shared AMIs are available at the Public AMIs page, where users can also write a review and assign a rating.
Thanks to GridVM for the news.
Microsoft just made available release candidate build (6.0.142) for Virtual PC 2007 (both 32 and 64bits).
This new version includes several fixes and new features including:
Enroll for the beta here.
Availability of new Microsoft Exchange 2007 raises questions about company support in virtual machines.
The product is only available for 64bits platforms and currently nor Virtual PC (both 2004 and imminent 2007) neither Virtual Server support 64bit guests operating systems, which are expected no earlier than Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian) release.
What about supporting it on other virtualization platforms?
Microsoft policy about 3rd parties virtualization products states support is granted when an error appearing on any virtual installation can be reproduced on a physical one.
This implies Exchange 2007 is supported on all virtualization products (capable of running 64bits VMs), but Microsoft ones.
Luckily SharePoint Server 2007 and scaled down Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are instead supported on Virtual Server 2005 R2.
Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for these news.
These informations has been included in the collection Microsoft support policy about virtualization.
Update: In an official Q&A session about Exchange 2007, Microsoft declared it’s not assured the product will be supported in a virtual environment at all, even inside upcoming Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian) virtual machines.
Ben Armstrong, Program Manager of Virtual Machine Team at Microsoft, published on his blog the information Microsoft Windows 95 will not be supported on imminent Virtual PC 2007 virtual machines.
It will be installable anyway, without Virtual Machine Additions.
One of the first use of server virtualization is supporting legacy applications on legacy operating systems. After this decision customers looking at virtualization for supporting their old applications should better look elsewhere.
After anticipation provided in October, OpenVZ is finally available for UltraSPARC architectures.
Quoting from the OpenVZ official announcement:
The OpenVZ project today announced its open source virtualization software is available for servers using Sun’s breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 CoolThreads processor.
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Kir Kolyshkin said porting OpenVZ software to the the UltraSPARC T1 processor was a simple procedure since 95 percent of the code is platform-independent…
Download OpenVZ for SPARC architectures here.
Note that OpenVZ is still a kernel patch for Linux. The fact it’s able to run on Sun SPARC systems doesn’t mean it can be installed on a Sun Solaris 10 operating system.
The virtualization start-up TrustWare silently worked to improve its BufferZone application virtualization solution, reaching second generation.
The product is still available for free when virtualizing a single application, but TrustWare offers also the Pro and Enteprise edition.
The new 2.20 version introduces in Enterprise edition support for Microsoft Active Directory Group Policy.
BufferZone Free (available here) still stays at 2.10 version.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.
Thincomputing.net published a nice 6-minutes long screencast showing some of new features Workstation 6.0 is introducing:
Watch the screencast at source.
This year InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award looks odd: a new category Platforms appeared with the description of Linux desktops and server and application virtualization.
I don’t understand how these segments could coexist together on a single category.
Anyway it has been almost completely monopolized by virtualization products, where some popular names in the market received the award:
It seems strange to me competitive products (VMware and SWsoft) are receiving same award: it’s true they have different approach to virtualization, but they still are on the same customers target.
Also: why a datacenter automation product (Surgient VTMS) is included in this category? And why server virtualization for desktops products (VMware Workstation/Player, Microsoft Virtual PC and Parallels Workstation/Desktop) don’t appear at all?
Another couple of things are notable:
Last year InfoWorld had a category Virtualization for virtualization products, where VMware ESX Server, VirtualCenter and Workstation won, and a Operating System category for OSes. Definitively less confusing.
P.s.: VMware didn’t achieve only InfoWorld award. Its free Server also won the eWEEK Labs award as Top Product of 2006.
Number of prized VMware collected in these years is overwhelming. So much that they arranged a dedicated page about them.
From his corporate blog, Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC, talks about issues preventing worldwide customers from deploying virtualization immediately and everywhere:
Challenge #1 – Flat Name Space for VMotion
One of the most powerful and sexy features in VMware ESX 3.0 is the advanced capabilities of VMotion, managed by DRS.
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But this presents a new challenge to the storage infrastructure. You’re going to want the ability for every virtual server image to be able to see every storage object from every server.
One way of describing this is a flat name space.
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Challenge #2 – Storage Resource Management
Many larger shops have already set up enterprise SRM for all of their servers and storage. How does VI3 fit in here? Yes, VI3 delivers some capabilities within its own VMware world, but what about everything else?
The starting point for enterprise-class SRM is discovery and visualization. What do I have, how does it connect, and how is it all related?
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Challenge #3 – Backup and Recovery
Backup and recovery – never a pleasant topic in the physical server world – gets even more thorny and problematic in a virtual server world.
Why is this? Well, for one thing, you want the ability to backup individual virtual machines (and their respective virtual file systems) in addition to backing up entire ESX images and their respective files or disks.
Not only that, but there’s a ton of duplicated data sitting around in VMware environments. Lots of replicated copies of binaries, guest OSes and so on.
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Challenge #4 – Managing End-To-End Service Delivery
I’ve made the case before that we don’t live in a world anymore where one user uses one application. What the user sees is a logical combination of application services that run on an increasingly complex IT infrastructure stack. And IT finds it harder and harder to drive back to a root cause when there’s a performance or outage that users are noticing…
He also talks about business relationship between EMC and acquired VMware:
Even though VMware is owned by EMC, you’d never know it. For good reasons, it’s run as a completely separate company.
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This is good because we believe an operating environment like VMware needs to be free-standing and independent to meet customer needs and be successful. This also has a bit of downside for EMC customers that would like to have “one face” to EMC, which we can’t do in this regard.
Specifically, EMC doesn’t sell VMware. VMware sells VMware.
This independence goes both ways. Customers don’t want one choice to dictate another.
So EMC can’t limit itself to one and only one server virtualization technology. We’re actively working with Xen, Sun’s Zones, IBM’s LPARs, Microsoft’s eventual offering, etc. etc. etc…
Read the whole article at source. Highly recommended.
In my opinion the point around EMC-VMware relationship is not if EMC has to embed or not its subsidiary in a single corporate image (drastically reducing or zeroing chances to make deals with competitors).
The point is: why VMware is not taking a serious advantage of EMC owned technologies after two years already from acquisition?
As far as I know the first useful technology among ones EMC owns, Legato NetWorker backup solution, appears in integration with VMware products for the first time with Infrastructure 3 and Consolidated Backup. And it seems a very limited integration.
Will VMware use just acquired Rainfinity load balancing technology or RSA encryption and authentication technologies within another two years?