Year: 2008

This Monday, opening the PDC 2008 conference in Las Vegas, the Microsoft Chief Architect Ray Ozzie introduced Windows Azure, a new flavor of Windows made for cloud computing.

During his keynote Ozzie briefly mentioned that Azure is built on top of a hypervisor, without adding further details. It was easy to support that such hypervisor is the upcoming Hyper-V 2.0.

Wrong.

In an interview with InfoWorld today, the Microsoft Corporate Vice President Amitabh Srivistava unveiled a surprising detail:

InfoWorld: So that’s all dynamic provisioning? It’s all using Hyper-V?

Srivistava: No, we have our own hypervisor, which we have designed specifically for the design point. We just call it Windows Azure hypervisor, but a lot of the advancements we are making are moving into Hyper-V, [so] the same thing will be available to the on-premises customer. The virtualization support that you get in hardware like NPT and EPT, the nested page tables that are there. We are taking a lot of advantage of that, so that’s what [Microsoft engineer] Dave Cutler has done in really optimizing the thing out, so the overhead of the hypervisor is extremely low. And when the hypervisor overhead is low, then we can get maximum utilization by dividing the machine.

It’s very interesting that Microsoft develops two hypervisors at the same time, and that the Azure one is more efficient than Hyper-V at the point that the former’s features are incorporated to the latter and not vice versa.

Very silently this week VMware released another free product: the VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant (VIMA) 1.0 (build 124830).

VIMA is a 64-bit virtual machine where VMware administrators can execute scripts and install agents that they would normally try to run on the console operating system (COS).

The VM includes a logging component, an authentication module (vi-fastpass) that supports non-interactive logins, the Remote CLI and the VI Perl Toolkit.
It basically acts as a execution proxy for programs that interact with the virtual infrastructure, saving the COS (where available, think about ESXi) from dangerous installations.

The product is free of charge and available here.

The Swiss startup icomasoft (see virtualization.info coverage here) is finally ready to RTM its first product: the VI PoweScripter Professional 1.0.

The product basically integrates a Microsoft PowerShell runtime into the VMware Infrastructure Client so that any .ps script can be executed against a host or a virtual machine in the VirtualCenter database.

The features that version 1.0 includes make the product very interesting:

• Integrated Scheduler for automation of management tasks in VMware
• SSH CmdLet for file copy and command execution on SSH Servers, such as VMware ESX, Linux, Solaris, Network and Storage Systems
• Support for network shares scripts
• Activity log files
• Includes icomasoft script templates for the most common VI management tasks, such as “setup and delete virtual switches and port groups”, “change of root passwords on ESX hosts”, “restart of host-based VirtualCenter agents”, “disconnect virtual drives”, search and display of VMware log files, automate or control VMware Consolidated Backup, various statistics, etc.

Download a trial here.

Starting November 2007, we had signs that multiple entities (virtualization vendors, phone vendors, embedded CPU vendors) are working to bring hardware virtualization to mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs.

The fact that Samsung is porting Xen on the ARM processor should be more than enough. If not here another confirmation.

The CTO of Xen and Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix and Chairman of Xen.org, Ian Pratt, gave an interview to CNET yesterday and said:

Q: As vice president for advanced products, what are you looking at?
A: Client virtualization is an area I’m spending time on. It’s an area where Xen leads–despite some bluster from VMware. It’s an area where we can make a difference, and it will be driven by application delivery.

There will be virtualized smartphones on the market in the not-too-distant future. ARM has built virtualization into its processors; they didn’t put that in for fun.

Virtualization in the embedded market will follow a similar playbook to virtualization in the x86 market. Client virtualization is going to happen quite quickly. It won’t go through the phase where users have to choose their virtualization solution, because virtualization won’t exist as a category. It will be part of the device when you buy it…

After the launch of its first Parallels Server for Mac OS (a hosted virtualization solution), Parallels has been pretty silent, working hard to release its first bare-metal (aka hypervisor) virtualization platform.

The company stays mum on the launch date but its founder and CEO, Serguei Beloussov, gives a precious hint about the product potential in an interview with On-Demand Enterprise:

…

The goal is to have the right technology for the job, he says, and toward that ideal Parallels is planning to combine the two approaches into one product. “You’ll be able to integrate containers or full hypervisor virtual machines on a server,” Beloussov says. This “integrated virtualization offering” is slated to be available next year…

If properly executed the idea is pretty good.
One day we may have three virtualization approaches (hardware, OS and application) nested all together on the same physical platform and, depending on the task required by the user, the best of them may be transparently selected and used to serve the proper workload.
It’s what we liked to call liquid computing in the last couple of years.

Maybe Parallels doesn’t have all the three virtualization layers, but if it can build a great orchestration framework and apply it to the layers it own today, the company may achieve the goal before its competitors with a similar opportunity: VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Sun.

At the just closed Citrix Partners Summit a number of companies announced their support for  XenServer. Among them:

• DynamicOps VRM Verified Citrix Ready for Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop
• SteelEye Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer now supports Citrix XenServer 5
• Stratus Avance Software verified Citrix Ready

Almost one year ago PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February) had the brilliant idea of using its popular P2V migration technology, PowerConvert, for disaster recovery tasks.
So they licensed VMware Infrastructure 3, put it into a physical appliance, and built the missing components to automate a continuous P2V migration of the protected physical servers into the virtual infrastructure. Such thing was called Forge.

PlateSpin didn’t say how many units has sold so far (it may be very complex for a virtualization firm to talk to the security department), but at least another company thinks its a good idea: Plan B DR.

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Propalms, a US-based firm focused on the thin client market, is interested in virtualization, specifically VDI, since a long time: in April 2007 it joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner program and in January 2008 it announced that the newest version of its flagship product, TSE 6.0, would include a connection broker.

The product entered in beta phase in June and, without many details, Propalms announced a no better clarified compatibility with VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual Server.

Now TSE 6.0 is finally out but, with much surprise, the VDI connection broker can only work with VMware Server.
Something serious has happened: after all the announcements made Propalms doesn’t spend a single word about the new VDI capabilities on its official press release, and even the website barely mentions it.

Last week a Gartner chart comparing virtualization vendors market shares and their hypervisors’ features generated a lot of buzz as, for example, Oracle VM was reported as more used than Microsoft Hyper-V.

The chart was included in a recent article from Datamation, but Gartner said that it was part of November 2007 report.
The analysis firm has requested the news magazine to update its article with the newest version of that chart, based on projections made on March 2008. Let’s compare the two diagrams:

	November 2007
	March 2008

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While Sun puts the final touches to its first hypervisor xVM Server 1.0 and to xVM Ops Center 2.0 (which could be released in November), some more details about the products emerge from a corporate blogs.

In a list of FAQs published there an interesting (yet confusing) indication about the free vs paid strategy about the xVM family:

Q: Within the Sun xVM Portfolio, what’s going to be open-source, and what will cost money?
A: Sun xVM VirtualBox and Sun xVM Server will be open-sourced. Some features, though, such as guest migration, are part of Sun xVM Ops Center. Also, service contracts can be purchased for any part of the Sun xVM Portfolio.

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