Year: 2008

NetworkWorld is reporting an interesting news, still unconfirmed: on August 19 Microsoft will reduce the license demand to perform virtual machines migration.

At today any customer that wants to migrate a Windows guest operating system from one physical host to another (for example through the VMware VMotion technology) has to have two licenses of the operating system, one for each location.

The current policy in fact says that a customer needs to wait 90 days before migrating its licensing from one physical server to another.

The article sounds unreasonable and it seems to have the only effect to make more expensive the advent of a truly dynamic data center.
Now, after customers complains, Microsoft maybe will replace it with a license that is related to the guest OS instead of the host.

Despite the name, VM Orchestrator (VMO) is not a virtual data center automation framework like the now defunct Dunes VS-O or the upcoming Citrix Workflow.
The Platform’s product is more complex, with a core high-availability feature (currently available only for Citrix XenCenter) and additional capabilities in VM lifecycle management and distributed resource management.

The new version 4.0 introduces a number of new elements to work with:

• Resource Groups The ability to group physical resources as a group (with Citrix XenServer a VMO Resource Group is equal to the XenServer Resource Pool)
• Consumers A security boundary where VMs are assigned, examples: departments, projects, external companies. Consumers can have delegated administrators and can control there own VMs.
  The product also has chargeback capabilities as the Consumers are tracked by allocation and usage.
• Resource Plans – Allocating (quotaing) the resources from the Resource Group to the Consumer.  For example, the marketing department might get 2 GHz of CPU and 2 GB of memory from which to run VMs.  This creates a resource boundary in which the Consumers can operate.

The Platform Computing reference material also unveils that VMO will support VMware and Microsoft in the future.

Download a trial here.

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

Sun is one of the latest big vendor entering the x86 hardware virtualization market (but one of the first in other areas with Solaris Containers and LDOMs) but it’s working hard to recover the time lost so far.

In February 2008 the company acquired the German innotek, and included their desktop virtualization product, VirtualBox, in its portfolio, offering it free of charge and open source.

The first rebranded version of VirtualBox was released just three monts later, and Sun claimed over 5 million downloads just one month after.

Now the company announces a series of OEM agreements, Avanquest Software, Q-layer and Zenith InfoTech Ltd., to further spread the product all over the place.

It will be interesting to see the long-term strategy that Sun has to make this product more interesting than its more popular competitors like VMware Workstation and Parallels Workstation.

In the last period the VDI firm Ericom got an unprecedented visibility thanks to a remarkable effort: giving away for free its connection broker, PowerTerm WebConnect, to the Oracle customers working with the new Oracle VM. 
As the Oracle hypervisor is free as well, the two companies are basically offering a free of charge VDI solution.

After that move the company signed a number of OEM agreements to embed its connection broker into a number of thin clients and other devices:

• With BOSaNOVA (May 12)
  Ericom Software, a leading global provider of application access and virtualization solutions, and BOSaNOVA, Inc., the market leader in development of Security Solutions, Thin Clients and Network Appliances, today announce a new partnership in which all BOSaNOVA Linux, CE and XPe thin clients will include Ericom’s PowerTerm®WebConnect clients for Desktop Virtualization and Server Based Computing.
• With IMPACT Technologies (June 5)
  Ericom Software, a leading global provider of application access and virtualization solutions, and IMPACT Technologies, a leading provider of next generation thin clients, today announced a new alliance in which IMPACT thin clients will be pre-packaged with Ericom’s PowerTerm® WebConnect client for Desktop Virtualization and Server Based Computing. IMPACT will also make available Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect Server as a bundled offering – for more comprehensive management of these varied environments.
• With Rangee (August 6) 
  Rangee GmbH, a leading European producer of thin clients, and Ericom Software, a leading global provider of application access and virtualization solutions, today announced the expansion of their longstanding alliance in which Rangee Linux and Windows XPe thin clients will be pre-packaged with Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect client for Desktop Virtualization and Presentation Virtualization.
• With Symbio Technologies (August 12)
  Symbio Technologies an award-winning leader in “green” stateless computing, said today that it has added Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect client to its Symbiont Boot Appliance and Symbiont Boot Stick after signing technology licensing and reseller agreements with Ericom Software, a global leader in application access and virtualization solutions.
• With NetVoyager (August 13)
  Netvoyager, a leading producer of thin clients, and Ericom Software, a leading global provider of application access and virtualization solutions, today announced a new alliance in which Netvoyager’s Linux thin clients will be pre-packaged with Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect client for Presentation Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization.

IGEL Technology, a popular thin client vendor, just achieved the certification to work with VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM):

Igel Technology today announced certification for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager, VMware’s next-generation connection broker, on IGEL’s Microsoft® Windows® XP Embedded range of Universal Desktops. The software is available today as a partial update for IGEL’s Windows XP Embedded models, and allows customers deploying VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to deliver an enhanced user experience.

Last week Simon Crosby, CTO at Citrix, announced that the core part of Project Kensho, the Citrix OVF toolkit, will be available for free and with an open source license.
Who will maintain that code? IBM, as announced on the Citrix corporate blog.

The code is available now as Project Open-OVF with the Eclipse Public License.
Scott Moser, Software Engineer at IBM, will maintain the code.

One week ago VMware started a new, very welcome initiative: the publishing of long books, called VMbooks, about specific topics.

The first one, 232 pages, is titled: A Practical Guide to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with VMware Infrastructure 3.

This VMware VMbook focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and is intended to guide the reader through the step-by-step process to set-up a multisite VMware Infrastructure that is capable of supporting BCDR services for designated virtual machines at time of test or during an actual event that necessitated the declaration of a disaster, resulting in the activation of services in a designated BCDR site.

Index of contents

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Understanding and Planning for BCDR
• Chapter 3: Virtualization and BCDR
• Chapter 4: High-Level Design Considerations
• Chapter 5: Implementing a VMware BCDR Solution
• Chapter 6: Advanced and Alternative Solutions
• Chapter 7: Service Failover and Failback Planning
• Chapter 8: Service Failover Testing
• Chapter 9: Network Infrastructure Details
• Chapter 10: Storage Connectivity
• Chapter 11: Storage Platform Details
• Chapter 12: Server Platform Details
• Appendix A: BCDR Failover Script
• Appendix B: VMware Tools Script

Of course the book is free of charge. Highly recommended.

Veeam just published an interesting paper describing how its product, Veeam Backup, uses the Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) feature to perform a live backup and restore of Windows guest operating systems.

The paper also compare the Veeam implementation of VSS with the ones from Vizioncore and VMware (both the new VSS-friendly snapshot and the Consolidated Backup approach).

Of course this is not an independent comparison so it should be carefully verified before accepting the matrix above, but it’s an interesting aspect to evaluate and discuss with your pre-sales representatives.

Update: Veeam promptly answered forwarding the video testimonial that supports this paper. It’s available at their corporate blog here.

One of the oldest startup in the virtual lab automation segment, Surgient, is now profitable as reported by the Austin Business Journal.

The key for this revenue boost was the decision to change the go-to-market strategy.
Surgient used to host the lab infrastructures of its customers and this approach may raise security and availability concerns.

Last year the company started to sell software licenses for in-site installations and won big customers like SAP and Siemens.

The story is interesting as other just-born startups in this and other segments are trying the hosting model right now: Skytap (virtual lab automation) and Lanamark (capacity planning) are two good examples.

This morning the VMware’s customers that upgraded their virtual data centers with the new Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2 (build 103908) had an awful surprise: any virtual machine that is turned off cannot be powered on again, and any attempt to execute a VMotion (the live migration of a VM from one host to another) fails.

The reason behind this huge and unprecedented issue is an error in the license expiration time.

The only way to workaround the problem at the moment is to disable the Network Time Protocol (NTP) client and set the date back to August 10, as promptly suggested by a customer here.

Of course this countermeasure has an impact on the log consistency and on any tool that analyzes the VirtualCenter events for different purposes (performance monitoring, trend analysis, capacity planning calculation, etc.).

More than that obviously, this issue has an impact on the availability of those infrastructures where the IT administrators are in vacation (and there are many on August 12) and cannot operate any recovery.

The users from all around the world are reporting failures of part of their systems and in some case even the complete knock-down.

VMware has over 200,000 enterprise customers (100% of Fortune 100 and 95% of Fortune 500), and it claimed that 59% of them use VMotion in production.
The company didn’t provide any statistics about how many already deployed the Update 2, but the license fault could have impacted thousands of them.

VMware is aware of the issue but couldn’t provide any immediate solution.
At the moment it seems that the entire VMware Knowledge Base collapsed.
Calling the support line customers can just receive a brief message saying that the problem will be solved within 36 hours.
Additionally, VMware removed the capability to download any affected product.

The existence of such issue is more than enough to undermine the credibility of the company (which already made some mistakes in the past) in a complex moment of its successful history.
A 36 hours timeframe to provide a solution is just an unacceptable answer for all those enterprises that deploy virtualization in production.

The whole thing may severely damage the stock performance of today.

Update: The license of VMware ESXi 3.5 U2 (build 103909) is reported as affected by the same problem.

Second update: To further aggravate the situation, today is the so called Microsoft Patch Tuesday, so a number of guest operating systems are being automatically (or manually for those unaware of the issue) rebooted.

As this is not enough, any customer running a VDI environment certainly allows its end-users to reboot their virtual desktops any time they want.

Third update: as the VMware Knowledge Base is still unavailable probably due to overload, virtualization.info publishes the original KB article about this issue.

Fourth update: The issue also impacts ESX 3.5 Update 1 with certain patches. 
The full details are available in the comment section of this post, thanks to the effort of a virtualization.info reader.

Suddenly the problem is no more a matter of early adoption.

Fifth update: As promptly reported in the comments section, the VMware’s new CEO, Paul Maritz, published on the official blog an apology, informing that a patch has been released:

…I am sure you’re wondering how this could happen.  We failed in two areas:

• Not disabling the code in the final release of Update 2
• Not catching it in our quality assurance process 

We are doing everything in our power to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  VMware prides itself on the quality and reliability of our products, and this incident has prompted a thorough self-examination of how we create and deliver products to our customers.  We have kicked off a comprehensive, in-depth review of our QA and release processes, and will quickly make the needed changes…

Maritz couldn’t desire a worst start for its new role in the company. Nonetheless this is a great opportunity: the co-founder and former VMware CEO, Diane Greene, was often accused of being unable to grow her company as a big enterprise, capable of competing against Microsoft.

Handling this incident Maritz has the first chance to demonstrate that he’s the right person to do better than Greene.

Sixth update: VMware is still unable to republish the ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 images for fresh installations.
Their availability is expected by August 13, 2008 at 6pm PST.

Seventh update: VMware just informed its customers that it cannot deliver a new, patched image of the product for the planned deadline.

The images are now planned for release August 14, between 2am and 8am PDT.

Eighth update: A number of enterprise customers may be unable to apply the first patch released (see Fifth update above) for a number of reasons:

• Unable to schedule a maintenance window
• Internal change control procedures
• No available server to VMotion running VM’s onto

VMware is aware of these constrain and informed its customers that is developing a second procedure, called U2 Alternative Install Process (U2 AIP), to apply the patch, available on demand calling the Support.
At the moment (August 15, 2008) there is no release date for this new patch installation procedure.

Meanwhile the full patched images are finally available online and all the download links have been reactivated.
The new build numbers are:

• ESX 3.5 Update 2 – 110268
• ESXi 3.5 Installable Update 2 – 110271