Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
4sysops published an extensive, 9-parts article on different application virtualization products available on the market.
The piece covers the common features of all products listed in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar (plus the OEM’d LANDesk Application Virtualization), also reviewing a couple of them (Symantec/Altiris SVS and Xenocode Virtual Application Studio) in details.
If you are looking for an overview of this technology this article is a good start.
Over the last few months the speculations around Cisco entering the server virtualization market were supported just by rumors. Below a list of news related to the topic:
Rumors or not, today something concrete happened: Cisco signed as member of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program.
The program simplifies the relationship between Microsoft and the other members so that the software giant can easily support its products on participants’ hypervisors:
The Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) is open to any vendor who delivers a virtualization machine solution that hosts Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and subsequent service packs. The virtualization solution can either be hypervisor-based or a hosted solution.
Cisco doesn’t have any hypervisor so there’s no reason to adhere this program.
At this point it’s hard to believe that the company will stay away of the server virtualization market for much more.
In June 2008 Microsoft formally launched its Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) to extend the support on its products when they run as virtual machines on 3rd party virtualization platforms.
Today the company announces that 31 back-end servers are now supported on Citrix XenServer, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron thanks to this program.
The effort that Microsoft put on this operation is remarkable and has been noted by many like Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at the Burton Group:
Other vendors should take note of Microsoft’s support model, as Microsoft supports more virtualization platforms than any other vendor by a hefty margin.
But this is not the most important part of the news: Microsoft has announced that two new vendors are participating this program: VMware and Cisco.
(note: VMware doesn’t appear nor in the press announcement neither in the official SVVP page because of a late confirmation)
While a notable achievement, the fact that VMware signed for the SVVP shouldn’t surprise anyone but the presence of Cisco is something truly unexpected.
Update: VMware officially confirmed its participation to the SVVP.
In the last two years Microsoft worked to release more virtualization-friendly license agreements.
The process has been slow but the results are remarkable: unlimited virtual servers paying one Windows 2008 Datacenter Edition, unlimited virtual databases paying one SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, up to unlimited virtual desktops paying a Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop license.
Now the company is taking further steps as its new hypervisor Hyper-V is out.
As anticipated last week, Microsoft has just announced that its licensing policy will change on September 1, 2008 to simplify the movement of virtual machines between physical hosts:
…
Microsoft is updating its software licensing terms for 41 server applications, including Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Standard and Enterprise editions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise and Professional editions, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft System Center products. With the new terms, the company is waiving its previous 90-day reassignment rule, allowing customers to reassign licenses from one server to another within a server farm as frequently as needed…
SearchStorage.com published a short blog article saying that Paul Maritz, the CEO that replaced Diane Greene on July 8, called the NetApp CEO, Dan Warmenhoven, on the phone the same day he was appointed.
During the call Maritz reaffirmed the relationship with NetApp and took some steps to further strengthen it.
Maybe this is a typical procedure for the new CEO of a key company like VMware, but this call was specially important: while VMware continues to operate as a totally independent company from its parent EMC, it’s clear that the storage competitors see the VMware-EMC relationship as a growing menace.
Because she founded and managed the company much before the EMC acquisition (and because her relationship with Joe Tucci was not exactly idyllic), the former CEO Diane Greene was a sort of guarantee that VMware would not facilitate its parent company.
Without Greene the risk that EMC competitors are penalized seems more concrete.
Maritz wanted to clarify as soon as possible that this is not the case and certainly he called also all the other vendors around VMware.
In 2006 VMware pioneered the idea of a modular data center by offering pre-configured virtual machines to its customers. The company called them virtual appliances.
For several reasons (security, manageability, performance tuning, portability, etc.) the approach didn’t take much traction among customers so far and only few vendors followed VMware in delivering virtual appliances.
It’s important to clarify that offering an evaluation or demo version of any product through a virtual appliance isn’t the same thing of supporting the technology in production environments.
In the last two years many vendors used the virtual appliances as a new distribution media for their trials, but just a bunch of them are really recognizing a VA like a physical installation.
The ISVs have good reasons to not do so: in a virtual infrastructure multiple virtual machines concur to have physical resources access, the more VMs are running at the same time, the more heavy workloads are being executed inside them, the more unpredictable is the performance of every guest OS.
In such scenario the 3rd party vendors can’t really grant the proper operation of their virtual appliance.
Of course, the most sophisticated hypervisors offer some resource management capabilities that can be used to grant a certain performance to a certain virtual appliance. But at the moment there’s no way for the ISVs to define any SLA into the VAs (the upcoming OVF standard will provide a way to do so).
Despite this issue (and others), some new vendors are now moving forward and began to offer production-ready virtual appliances:
Diskeeper just announced that its deframenter is now certified for Microsoft Hyper-V.
Defragmentation is one of the first and most basic tasks in the computer maintenance routine, but when applied to virtual infrastructures it requires some extra effort.
Any virtual machine can be defragmented at the guest OS level, as any other physical operating system, but its container, the virtual hard disk, is just another monolithic file sitting at the hypervisor / host OS level, and it may be not defragmented as well.
So while the guest OS may be fully optimized, the underlying virtual HD could be not and the resulting disk I/O performance can be poor.
It seems that Diskeeper is the first company to support defragmentation at the host and guest level for Hyper-V, addressing the challenge.
Xen.org just published the tentative Xen 3.3 datasheet which contains the full list of new features included in the new version of the open source hypervisor:
Performance and Scalability
Security
Green Computing
Miscellaneous
The datasheet is also interesting because it provides an updated list of the major Xen contributors: Intel, AMD, HP, Dell, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, Fujitsu, Samsung, and Oracle.
While most of the companies listed above are well-known names, finding a telco giant like Samsung is pretty uncommon.
In November 2007 Samsung was working to bring Xen on PDAs. In June 2008 virtualization.info reported that the company was porting Xen on the ARM architecture.
As you may know by now, we asked our keynote speakers to introduce themselves and talk a bit about their sessions at the Virtualization Congress 2008, the independent conference about virtualization technologies arranged by virtualization.info.
In the past months we had the pleasure to host Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, and Scott Farrand, Vice President of Business Enablement at HP.
Today we’d like to introduce another key figure of the virtualization industry that will be on our stage: Paul Ghostine, General Manager and Vice President of Provision Networks, a subsidiary of Quest.
Along with Simon Crosby, Scott Farrand and Paul Ghostine there will be a number of other top performers (and this is just a partial list: stay tuned as we may have some big surprises).
This amazing set of speakers will provide different perspectives, approaches and solutions to the many challenges that virtualization implies.
Most of the agenda is finally online so you check what will be discussed on stage.
We can’t wait to see you all at the London ExCeL this October 14-16, 2008.
The Virtualization Congress is just two months away, sign up now!
In November 2007 virtualization.info launched a tool to simplify the networking between virtualization professionals across the globe.
We adopted LinkedIn as back-end infrastructure (and we couldn’t be happier) and called it virtualization.info Vanguards.
In May 2008 the network reached 1000 members. Just three months later it grew by another 50% as we now reach 1520 members.
There’s a number of reasons to be part of this independent directory. Some of them are listed on the Vanguards home page. Others are less evident:
This means that, in most cases, the virtualization.info Vanguards are CIOs/CTOs, IT Managers, System Architects and Engineers.
This means that you will not be contacted by sales and marketing managers, PR, head hunters as these professionals are not accepted in the group.
Because of this policy so far we rejected 200 submissions.
Of course our filtering is not always perfect: sometimes one of those above can accidentally be accepted but we review our member list frequently to maintain the network as much in topic as possible.
While we don’t reveal what the benefits are outside the network, it’s easy to guess what we could offer in this specific period of the year…
So thank you!
We hope that the virtualization.info Vanguards network is a valuable resource for your business and that in the near future you’ll have even more reasons to be a member.
We also hope to reach 2000 members by the end of the year. If you feel like it sounds interesting sign up now.