Year: 2008

In June Microsoft finally released its long awaited hypervisor: Hyper-V 1.0.

The first release of this bare-metal VMM supports one flavor of Linux as guest OS: Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 10. But to work properly inside the virtual machine Linux needs additional components that Microsoft releases under the name of Linux Integration Components.

This package includes the Linux implementation of the Hyper-V VMBus (the same high performance interface that Windows 2003/2008 guest OSes use), the pass-through drivers for network and storage, and some other things.

Microsoft developed this software separately from Hyper-V and while the latter is already available, the Linux Integration Components are not.
They were expected last month but the company postponed its release without adding details.

Customers can still install Novell Linux as Hyper-V guest OS but it lacks all the enhancements that makes SUSE the best companion for Windows on the new hypervisor.
Without Integration Components the distribution performs just any other, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Ubuntu.

For unknown reasons Microsoft also removed the previous version, frozen at Release Candidate 2 milestone since July 11.
This implies that at the moment there’s no way to run a Linux guest OS at its best.

As virtualization.info didn’t run yet extended benchmark on Hyper-V, we are unable to say how much the lack of this package impacts on the guest OS performance.

There could be several reasons for this move, from a last-minute decision to support additional Linux distributions to an issue with open source licensing, up to a critical bug.

As the product is brand new, it’s not easy to track how many Microsoft customers are currently running Linux virtual machines impacted by this delay.
Hopefully the Linux Integration Components will be RTM’ed in time for the Hyper-V official launch scheduled for September 8.

The Finnish security vendor Stonesoft announced that will work with VMware to support its upcoming VMsafe API.

Stonesoft is mainly focus on the enterprise firewall market and follows the competitors Check Point and Fortinet in supporting VMware.

As for many other security segments, VMsafe has a chance to lead a new generation of products.
In this specific case the opportunity for Stonesoft and the others is to deliver intrusion detection systems that really integrate with firewalls, featuring adaptive rulebases and finally matching the overly-abused term IPS (Intrusion Prevention System).  

VMware announced VMsafe in February. Hopefully the company is ready to show something more concrete for the imminent VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

Announced more than one year ago by Intel, Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) is a new technology powering 10GB Ethernet cards (Intel 82575 and Intel 82598) specifically designed for virtualization.

VMDq is part of the Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (VT-c) along with I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV).
More generically, it’s defined as a I/O Virtualization technology.

VMDq handles parallel queues of packets, routing them to the correct virtual machines at chipset level and offloading the hypervisor.
This reduces the network latency and frees up the CPU.

The technology is being supported in several hypervisors. VMware ESX 3.5 already has it since Update 1.
Shefali Chinni, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Intel, describes how it boosts the ESX network performance:

Thanks to VMTN for the news.

After Mark Pileski, who left the company last month to join VMLogix, PlateSpin loses Brett Johnson, Director of Sales for Eastern North America.

Johnson just moved to the US startup DynamicOps, where he now covers the role of Vice President of Sales.

DynamicOps is a Credit Suisse spinout focused on the VM Lifecycle Management market that launched in May (see virtualization.info coverage).
Their first product, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) is available since June and Johnson certainly has a notable pool of prospects to contact.

As PlateSpin was recently acquired by Novell, we wonder how many other executives more inclined to work in small and dynamic startups may leave in the coming months.

At the Virtualization Congress, that event that virtualization.info will held in London in mid October, there will be all stars on stage.

VPs, CTOs, Technical Fellows and Lead Architects will cover all aspects of virtualization, from the hypervisor high-availability to the virtual application delivery, from the virtual machines performance tracking to virtual desktop optimization.

In each scenario mentioned above one component is specially important: the storage.

Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance at EMC, will have a lot to say on stage about the storage consumption and performance when running virtualized desktops and servers, when performing virtual machines backup and restore, and much more:

The Virtualization Congress 2008 is around the corner: October 14-16, 2008 (the first day is dedicated just to distributors and resellers and the entrance is free) at London ExCeL.

Register now!

VMware is really near the release of three of its platforms: Server 2.0, Workstation 6.5 and ACE 2.5.

Last week the company released the Release Candidate 2 (build 110949) for Server 2.0 and the Release Candidate 1 (build 110068) for Workstation 6.5 and ACE 2.5.

In all cases there are no new features.

Download Server 2.0 RC2 here, Workstation 6.5 RC1 here, ACE 2.5 RC1 here.

The guys at vinternals launched a very interesting tool called Statelesx (clearly meaning Stateless ESX).

This tool allows the VMware administrators to define a configuration file on a web interface (including details about the virtual networking, the DRS, the HA, etc.) and associate it to a certain ESX by the host name.

To spread the configuration file to the proper ESX host, statelesx uses a Python script and a Java listener available as virtual appliance.

The whole thing, working with VMware Infrastructure 3.5 only, cuts away the need to configure a new ESX on deployment and backup its configuration over time. But most of all it avoids inconsistencies across the virtual infrastructure:

The tool already hit the 1.1 version. Download it here.

By now it’s well-known that Phoenix Technologies, the historical BIOS manufacturer, is entering the virtualization market with its own hypervisor.

Despite that, so far the company didn’t provide many details about the virtualization platform internals.

Now the LinuxWorld keynote given by Simon Crosby, CTO of Management and Virtualization department at Citrix, unveils that the engine behind HyperCore is Xen:

The slide also reveals that other major vendors are using Xen for their upcoming desktop hypervisors.

One is Lenovo, which announced a generic hypervisor for its notebook in March. Other remarkable ones are Intel, HP and Dell.
As virtualization.info didn’t attend the presentation we can’t say if these companies are building their own Xen-based hypervisors like Phoenix or if Crosby included them in the slide for other reasons.

This post will be updated with more details as soon as possible.

Techcrunch published a new chart released by Gartner in July 2008 about the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.

Cloud computing is reported in the diagram, rapidly approaching the highest point of hype and expected to reach the mainstream adoption in 2-5 years.

Interestingly enough, virtualization technologies are not included. 
Hardware virtualization can be safely considered a mainstream technology at this point but OS virtualization is still confined in the hosting niche, application virtualization is in early adoption phase, and storage virtualization is so vague that the industry can’t agree on its definition yet.

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

In January PHD Technologies, a US startup focused on virtual machines backup and replication, surpassed 1000 customers.

The extended user base, and an increasingly competitive segment, probably required a more articulated leadership as the company just appointed a CEO: Sridhar Murthy.

Murthy has over 18 years of leadership in high growth technology companies. For the past two years he served as chief operating officer and chief financial officer at TicketsNow.com. During his tenure, the company doubled its revenues. Prior to this, Murthy was chief financial officer and vice president of operations at Collabnet, a provider of hosted enterprise solutions for distributed and outsourced software development. Earlier in his career, Murthy held finance and operations leadership positions at Get2Chip, Ariba Inc. and Remedy Corporation.

The press announcement also mentions a recent equity investment but doesn’t reveal the venture capital firm behind it or the funding amount.