Year: 2008

Parallels and DataCore joined forces last month and are working now build a cost-effective solution which include virtualization and storage.

The press announcement doesn’t mention any product merge at the moment so this may start as just a bundle effort at the beginning.

It will be interesting to see how the Virtuozzo audience, which includes a lot of hosting providers, will welcome the new storage partner.

Parallels is clearly working to build a complete virtualization platform through exclusive partnerships and OEM agreements. 
The company already secured the VDI tier thanks to a deal with Provision Networks.
In the future Parallels may build more partnerships like this in new segments of the virtualization market to match the 360-degrees offering the VMware is preparing to launch with VI 4.0. 

Glasshouse Technologies, the IT solution provider that acquired RapidApp, another consulting firm solely focused on virtualization, in July 2007 has lost its Director of Virtualization and Architecture Services, Ron Oglesby, after just one year.

Oglesby is very popular in the virtualization industry because he co-authored two best seller books about VMware Infrastructure: VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide.

Oglesby formally left the company last week and the most solid rumor say that he’s moving to Dell, one of the vendors that is most aggressive at the moment in hiring virtualization professionals.

Immediately after the last VMware VMworld conference something very strange happened: as a single, concerted effort worldwide online magazines started writing articles about the complexity behind virtualization, about its lack of tools, about the real costs of technology adoption.

Nothing wrong with it but still surprising: so far the press coverage has always been enthusiastic, giving so much space to any company using (and abusing) the term virtualization.
Now, altogether, every journalist raises concerns and offers warning. Few examples:

• The Dark Side of Data Center Virtualization
• Virtualisation ahead of predictions, but failing to reach potential
• The heartburn and happiness of virtualization
• Virtualization – Hot Tech or Hot Air
• Virtualization: silicon and software salvation or technological tower of Babel?
• Mix-and-Match Trouble with Virtualization, Cloud Computing
• Lowdown on virtualization hype
• Virtualization — Problem Solver and Problem

What happened? Over 14,000 delegates reaching Las Vegas for VMworld 2008 should have demonstrated that there is a real interest for virtualization and that, financial crisis or not, companies are committed to invest on it.

Despite that, a winding pessimism seems the main theme of the last two weeks’ articles. 
It’s unlikely that everybody, at the same time, realized that virtualization introduces new challenges, so what’s real reason behind this new wave of prudence?

The Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), officially launched in June, continues to raise a lot of interest because of the members that currently adheres it.

Cisco appeared in the list in August but so far nor the company neither Microsoft clarified the reason as Cisco doesn’t seem to have a hypervisor. But last week Cisco and Microsoft made a joint announcement unveiling Windows Server on WAAS.

WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) is a network appliance that Cisco offers since a while.
It’s designed to run at branch offices, offering optimization for most protocols (including mail, file transfer, web, backup, video streaming, etc.).

The newest version, 4.1, of WAAS, also introduces a hardware virtualization engine labeled WAVE (Wide Area Virtualization Engine), which places several instances of Windows Server 2008 Server Core into virtual machines (called Virtual Blades here).

The adhesion to the SVVP program allowed Cisco to run Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and Print Services roles as validated virtual machines on WAVE, but the company stay mum about what virtualization engine is really powering the solution.

In March Information Week suggested that Cisco was using the open source KVM (now indirectly controlled by Red Hat through the acquisition of Qumranet) to virtualize two redundant instances of the IOS inside the new ASR 1000 routers, but this rumor was denied by Cisco in the following weeks.

Maybe this time (even if it’s very hard to believe that Microsoft validated a Windows Server 2008 guest hosted by Linux and KVM)?

After the VMworld 2008 announcements (see virtualization.info summary here) VMware published some videos about key new features coming with VMware Infrastructure 4.0:

• Fault Tolerance
• vNetwork Distributed Switch
• Host profiles

They also offer a glimpse at the new vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 4.0 interface.
They are definitively worth a look.

After a process lasted more than one year, last month the DMTF finally ratified the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

Despite the announcement, the 1.0 document of specifications available here doesn’t seem to be definitive (document status: Preliminary Standard).

Definitive or not, a lot of companies are already supporting the standard:

• VMware (which supports it since Infrastructure 3.0 and even released a free authoring tool called Studio)
• Citrix (which will support it next year)
• IBM (which is maintaining open source authoring tools)
• Microsoft (even if there’s no official statement at the moment)
• Enomaly (supporting it since the earliest draft)
• ManageIQ (which supported it in its new EVM Suite 2.0)
• Fortisphere (which just announced the upcoming support)

All other virtualization vendors offering cross-platform management tools are expected to support it in the coming months. Hopefully the format of our virtual machines will be a problem that we don’t have to care of anymore.

Last month Microsoft announced the upcoming release of a third version of Hyper-V, specifically developed to address customers need for a lightweight hypervisor (and to compete with VMware ESXi).

The product, called Hyper-V Server 2008, has the smallest footprint because its parent partition it’s powered by a small subset of Windows Server 2008, even smaller than the Server Core edition.

Unfortunately the hypervisor didn’t lose just the weight.

Hyper-V Server 2008 doesn’t come with any OS license so customers must pay each guest OS they want to use (making the product interesting only for those companies that want to consolidate existing Windows Server 2003 boxes).

More than that, the new product has the same technical limitations that the Hyper-V edition included with Windows Server 2008 Standard has: it only supports 4 physical CPUs, 32GB of RAM and 128 virtual machines, plus there’s no support for clustering or quick migration.
This version doesn’t even have a local web management console, so each host must be initialized locally at the command prompt and then remotely managed with Hyper-V Manager (for Windows Server 2008 and Vista) or the upcoming System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.

The product is available free of charge here.
Microsoft also published a Configuration Guide to describe basic management tasks that must be executed at the command prompt for host initialization.

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

In June a new startup focused on capacity planning came out of the stealth mode: Lanamark.
Last week the company finally launched its first product: Suite 2008.

As virtualization.info detailed in its early coverage, Lanamark Suite is made by an information collector that must be deployed at the customer’s site (Explorer), an online site where the collected data can be accessed (Portal) and a Windows application where data can be analyzed (Studio).

This 3-tiers architecture is specifically designed to target solution providers: a single Explorer machine can be deployed to each customer, all customers can be centrally managed through the Portal, each customer environment can be studied and carefully planned in-office thanks to the Studio without wasting time at the customer’s site.

The Suite is available as Professional and Team editions, starting at $40 per workload, but at the moment the company also offers a free trial to asses up to 200 servers.  

It’s impressive how Lanamark designed the product strictly following Microsoft design principles, from the version numbering and the edition naming to the UI featuring the Office 2007 ribbon.
The company even offers a Microsoft World 2007 plug-in to automatically generate reports so it’s easy to guess what buyer is specially welcome to discuss an early acquisition.

As already said, Lanamark will have a hard time to conquer market shares now that VMware offers its Capacity Planner for free to all its partners.

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

On September 23 VMware finally released the second version of its free server virtualization product: Server 2.0 (build 116503).

Despite the enormous time needed to reach this second milestone, the product doesn’t groundbreaking new features:

• New management console as web interface
• New Remote Console as web browser plug-in
• Virtual hardware hot-plug (SCSI virtual hard drives only)
• Support for 64bit host OS
• Support for USB 2.0 devices on guest OS
• Support for 8GB virtual RAM per virtual machine

There’s one exception: the support for transparent virtual machines backups on Windows host OS through the Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) and the VMware snapshot feature.
This feature alone justifies the adoption of Server 2.0, granting the reliable and cheap backups that every SMB should have.

Download it here.

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

On September 23 VMware released the much awaited Workstation 6.5 (which includes Player 2.5 and ACE 2.5 products).

This new version (build 118166) is specially interesting because it introduce the seamless window capability (known as Unity) that Mac OS customers already enjoy with Fusion.
With Unity any program running inside a Windows or Linux guest OS can be seen as part of the underlying host OS (Windows only).
This could greatly simplify the adoption in those environments where less technical users still confuse the physical and virtual desktops.

Besides Unity, Workstation 6.5 is specially interesting because it further blends the security wrapper capabilities of ACE.
Now Workstation can create and edit secure virtual machines without any special edition of ACE but note that a separate license is still required if customers want to manage multiple secured VMs through the ACE Management Server.

With ACE 2.5 VMware introduces a couple of interesting security features:

• Kiosk mode (disable any access to the host OS)
• detection of (some) malicious keystroke loggers inside the guest OS

Workstation 6.5 has many more new features than just Unity and ACE authoring. For example:

• Virtual hardware hot-plug (virtual memory and virtual CPUs can be added while a VM is running if the guest OS supports this feature)
• Virtual machine streaming (a VM can be downloaded from a Web Server and run immediately)
• Integration with VMware Converter 3.0.3
• Support for accelerated 3D graphics on Windows XP guest OS (only when DirectX 9 physical GPUs are available)
• Experimental support for smart cards readers on guest OS

Workstation 6.5 also includes a bunch of features specifically for software developers:

• Integrated Virtual Debugger for Microsoft Visual Studio (an application running inside the guest OS can be recorded through the Record/Replay feature and the replay can be debugged at a later time)
• Availability of VProbe scripting language for debugging
• Experimental support for VAssert APIs (allowing to write debug code that runs only during VMs replay)

Download a trial here.

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