Year: 2008

VMware just published a new benchmark on its VMmark results page.

The tested hardware this time is a HP ProLiant DL585 G5 powered by four Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8360 CPUs (16 cores total) @ 2.5GHz with 64GB RAM.
The tested platform is VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 (build 82663) with no additional software.

This quad-core system is currently the fastest among the ones listed by VMware, winning over Dell, IBM and Sun machines in the same range. But to be fair we have to note that while the HP machine scores 14.74 serving 10 tiles (60 virtual machines), the Dell PowerEdge M905 scores a slightly lower result, 14.28, serving 11 tiles (66 virtual machines).

There’s a major difference between the two systems: the former runs a VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 while the latter runs the Update 2. It would be interesting to know if (and how much) the update level impacts on the overall performance.

Read the whole analysis here.

In the final rush to deliver its new desktop virtualization platform for Apple users, Fusion 2.0, VMware introduces a new, unexpected feature in the latest build: the antivirus.

The company has an agreement with McAfee to include VirusScan Plus, offered as trial feature, and a complimentary 12-months subscription.

There is no special integration anyway: the users will just be able to install the security product inside Windows guest OSes as they do with the VMware Tools.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Two weeks ago Microsoft released an update for Windows Server 2008 to improve the failover capabilities when the OS is configured to work as Hyper-V parent partition.

The package includes a long list of enhancements:

• Changes to the virtual machine view
• Changes to virtual machine actions
• Allow for more than one virtual machine in a “Services or Applications” group
• Add support for mount points or volumes without a drive letter
• Changes to the virtual machine refresh action
• Behavior changes if any node of the failover cluster has a disconnected virtual machine
• Behavior change when you add a pass-through disk to a virtual machine
• Behavior change when the parent differencing disk is not on shared storage
• Volume path copy

Microsoft anyway doesn’t seem 100% confident on the reliability of its own fix as it warns:

Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing this specific problem. This hotfix might receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, we recommend that you wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix.

Download it here.

Thanks to HyperVoria.com for the news.

VMware just released a minor update for a number of products:

• Server 1.0.7 (build 108231) – Free Download
• Workstation 6.0.5 (build 109488) – Trial
• Player 2.0.5 (build 109488) – Free download
• ACE 2.0.5 (build 109488) – Trial

The reason behind this update is fixing four security vulnerabilities.
Three of them allow attackers to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges.

Update the products as soon as possible.

Update: It seems that also the new Server 1.0.7 build is still vulnerable to CVE-2008-3697.
This flaw in the VMware ISAPI extension for Microsoft IIS allows remote denial of service, so avoid to expose the Server web console outside the corporate LAN until a new fix is available.

Veeam just released a couple of minor updates for two product: FastSCP and Backup.

FastSCP 2.0.1 introduces the mail reporting capability while Backup 2.0.1 introduces support for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) 1.6 and VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2.

Download FastSCP trial here, Backup trial here.

At the end of February 2008, virtualization.info launched its first localized version in Japan.

Providing a daily, quality translation of all contents appearing on this website have been possible only thanks to the outstanding work of our exclusive partner for Japan: Networld.

Translating virtualization.info in Japanese implies a big effort for a notable number of people and a big bet, but the results we gotten so far are impressive.

In just 6 months virtualization.info JP became a leading news source in Japan, achieving over 1,000 page views and almost 500 feed subscribers per day.

More than that, and amazingly enough, the total number of unique visitors scored in July surpassed the ones that virtualization.info has from UK.

virtualization.info recognizes Japan as a key emerging market and we are proud to evangelize the country about the many vendors, products and technologies that we have covered here since 2003.

We are working hard to put online a few additional localized versions.
If you distribute virtualization products in non-English countries and are interested in a business partnership let us know.

At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2008, Intel showed on stage its upcoming new quad-core CPU codename Nehalem, much expected by the virtualization professionals because of the included Extended Page Tables (EPT) technology.

On top of that now there’s another reason to wait for Nehalem: the processor will support a new technology developed by VMware and called VMDirectPath.

VMDirectPath will allow ESX to avoid the emulation of network interface cards and map the physical NICs directly to the virtual machines:

Intel delivered a very interesting presentation about its effort to boost the hypervisor performance with VT-x, VT-d and VT-c technologies and slides from 27 to 32 are about VMDirectPath:

Nehalem CPUs for server use will be released no earlier than H2 2009.

VMware predicted that around that date the technology would completely cancel the performance degrade that virtualization introduces. 
It seems that to go there customers will have to bring with them a lot of hardware (and possibly drop a lot of flexibility).

Citrix announced that the next generation of its desktop and application virtualization platform, XenApp 5.0 (formerly Presentation Server), will be released September 10, 2008.

Customers can see an online event on Sep. 9 with keynotes and live Q&A sessions.

The new product includes over 50 enhancements, detailed in a 13-pages comparative document.
Some of the new features are:

• Application streaming via HTTP/S
• Load-balancing defined by groups/users or applications
• Support for Windows Server 2008
• Support for IPv6
• Support for Microsoft XPS Universal Printer
• Support for Radius and Kerberors authentication (web interface)

The retail price per concurrent user is defined as follow:

• Advanced Edition – US $350
• Enterprise Edition – US $450
• Platinum Edition – US $600

Anyway customers can just buy the application virtualization and streaming components at the price of $60 per concurrent user.

Download a trial here (starting Sep. 10).

By reading the first page of the feature matrix above it seems that the Citrix marketing department worked much to redefine the concept of application virtualization so that our familiar terminology is turned upside-down:

• What we call today Desktop virtualization becomes Server-side Application Virtualization
• What we call today Application Virtualization becomes Client-side Application Virtualization

This redefinition, that will create a lot of confusion, was probably necessary because many vendors (including Citrix itself) are now using the term Desktop Virtualization referring to Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs).

Following the Citrix approach both Desktop Virtualization and VDI seems wrong. The correct term should be Server-side Hardware Virtualization for Desktop OS hosting, or something like that.

The discussion could go on as the vendors currently use other overlapping terms like OS Virtualization, Server Virtualization and many more.

An attempt to define a firm glossary seems as challenging as designing a virtual machine standard format, so Citrix can’t be blamed for this attempt.

The capability to overcommit memory is something that VMware offers on its hypervisor ESX since a long time. It’s achieved by several techniques (ballooning, contend-based page sharing, demand paging) and the company uses it as a great selling point.

At the moment only one of the approaches used by VMware is also implemented by several competitors: the memory ballooning.
This feature comes as part of Xen (only for Linux guest OS at the moment) so any commercial hypervisor powered by Xen can offer it, including Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron, Oracle VM and the operating systems from Novell and Red Hat.

Oracle is a contributor of the open source hypervisor and just before the release of Xen 3.3 decided to clarify that there’s no need to implement all the techniques that VMware: some improvements to the current Xen ballooning can grant a just fine memory overcommitment.

At the XenSummit 2008 Dan Magenheimer, Consulting Developer at Oracle (and once Principal Scientist of Virtualization Research at HP), presented a lecture and a whitepaper clarifying the point:

…While content-based page-sharing, VMM-based demand paging, and hotplug memory are all glamorous mechanisms that can be used to improve memory efficiency, the simple existing balloon driver provided by Xen, when combined with gray-box data collected by a few scripts, is sufficient to implement reasonable memory overcommit. More measurement and testing is ongoing in Oracle’s OnDemand group, but we believe that this very simple solution delivers the vast majority of the value of memory overcommit with a much smaller cost…

As expected, Xen.org announced the availability of Xen 3.3.

This new version of the open source hypervisor includes important features, including:

• Power management (P & C states) in the hypervisor
• Shadow3: optimizations to make this the best shadow pagetable algorithm yet, making Hardware Virtual Machines performance better than ever
• CPUID feature levelling: allows safe domain migration across systems with different CPU models
• PVSCSI drivers for SCSI access direct into PV guests
• Full x86 real-mode emulation for HVM guests on Intel VT: supports a much wider range of legacy guest OSes

As Xen powers a number of commercial hypervisors (Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron, Oracle VM and by some degrees Sun xVM Server) as well as notable enterprise operating systems (Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux), it’s assured that all these products will start to integrate the new features over the next few months.

Download it here.