Year: 2008

ComputerWorld just published an interview with the Executive Vice President of Product and Technologies at Red Hat, Paul Cormier, where some interesting details about the company strategy emerge.

First of all Red Hat predicts that within 2 years 90% of the existing servers will run a virtualization platform.

Second, the company sees virtualization as the first step towards a cloud computing world, following VMware which started to spread the idea earlier this year (virtualization.info wrote about this at the beginning of 2006).

Third and most important, Red Hat sees the VDI as the next big thing.

Why this point is specially interesting? Red Hat is only the last of a long series of vendors that demonstrated interest for hosted desktops. But compared to the others the Red Hat vision deserves a little more attention because this is the only company that so far is dropping Xen in favor of KVM.

While open source, KVM is maintained and supported by Qumranet, a US startup (see the virtualization.info coverage here) that offers a commercial VDI solution.

Now let’s consider the equation:

• KVM is now embedded into the Linux kernel
• Red Hat will offer KVM as the virtualization platform of choice
• Red Hat sees VDI as the next big thing
• Qumranet offers the only VDI solution based on KVM
• Qumranet maintains KVM

The question is: how important will become Qumranet for Red Hat in the near future?

Last month Citrix announced its commitment to adhere the almost ready new standard for virtual machines: the Open Virtual Machine Format or OVF.

Citrix is working on a set of tools (project Kensho) to grant the OVF interoperability and said that a technical preview of its toolbox will be available in Q3 2008 (probably September).

Last week at the LinuxWorld conference the company CTO Simon Crosby added another key information: the core of those tools will be available free of charge as open source technology.

This implies that other Xen-based products (like the ones from Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat and Oracle) will be able to implement the OVF support much faster.

Crosby also said that the project Kensho will support a number of virtual disk formats including the one that Amazon is using in its Xen-based cloud computing infrastructure EC2: the AMI (Amazon Machine Image).

Maybe, by the end of next year customers will not have to worry about virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations anymore (with much disappointment from companies like PlateSpin).

By the end of this month Virtual Iron will be ready to roll out the version 4.4 of its platform.

Despite the numbering this update comes a major new feature called LivePower:

LivePower optimizes data center power consumption by monitoring resource utilization in the virtual data center. When there is excess CPU capacity, LivePower consolidates virtual machines onto fewer physical servers and shuts down the remaining devices based on pre-defined policies. When the virtual machine load increases beyond pre-defined thresholds, LivePower turns physical servers back on and live migrates virtual machines to rebalance the virtual data center and ensure that resource requirements and service levels are met.

LivePower sounds pretty similar to the Distributed Power Management (DPM) that VMware introduced in version 2.5 of its VirtualCenter.
And exactly like the VMware feature, also LivePower currently has an experimental support.

With LivePower, Virtual Iron announced the upcoming support for a new feature that Intel Core i7 (formerly codename Nehalem) will introduce: the Dynamic Power Node Manager.

Node Manager is an out-of-band (OOB) power management policy engine that is embedded in Intel server chipset. It works with BIOS and OS power management (OSPM) to dynamically adjust platform power to achieve maximum performance/power at node (server) level. Node Manager has the following features:

• Dynamic Power Monitoring: Measures actual power consumption of a server platform within acceptable error margin of +/- 10%. Node Manager gathers information from PSMI instrumented power supply, provides real-time power consumption data (point in time, or average over an interval), and reports through IPMI interface.
• Platform Power Capping: Sets platform power to a targeted power budget while maintaining maximum performance for the given power level. Node Manager receives power policy from an external management console through IPMI interface and maintains power at targeted level by dynamically adjusting CPU p-states.
• Power Threshold Alerting: Node Manager monitors platform power against targeted power budget. When the target power budget cannot be maintained, Node Manager sends out alerts to the management console

Sun published a minor update for its free desktop virtualization solution VirtualBox (acquired by innotek in February).

The 1.6.4 release introduces a number of bug fixes and enhancements but no new features.

Download it here.

In just four months the Israeli startup InstallFree, which launched with $1.7 million, raised a second round of funding surpassing $10 million.

The new infusion of cash comes from Ignition Partners and Trilogy Equity Partners.
As result Richard Fade and John Connors of Ignition Partners and Peter van Oppen and Chuck Stonecipher of Trilogy Equity Partners will join the company’s Board of Directors.

The company raised remarkable interest because of its application virtualization solution for the enterprise, Bridge, and for a new dynamic environment, simply called Desktop, that will be launched later this year.

The application virtualization startup Ceedo last week announced the support for the Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) ICA client.

The news is interesting because so far the preferred solution to virtualize the ICA client was offered by Thinstall. But Thinstall was acquired by VMware (which now sells its products under the name ThinApp) so Citrix is more than welcome to switch its partner.

While the Ceedo platform is flexible enough to virtualize most applications, the company markets this specific application with a dedicated package, priced $89 per seat (perpetual license).

Download a trial here.

Veeam is preparing to roll out the third generation of its products.
Last week the startup launched the beta program of Reporter 3.0 and now it does the same with Monitor 3.0.

The new version will introduce some really interesting features, including:

• Data aggregation from multiple VMware VirtualCenters
• Alarm simulation (test the effect of your new alarm filter against the events history)
• Trend analyzer (forecast the virtual center growth and the most-consumed resources per host to simplify the capacity planning)
• Data correlation between registered events and virtual machines performance
• Analysis of the historical data available inside VirtualCenter

Some of these features are killer independently of the current level of implementation.
For example the data correlation is critical to finally see the virtual infrastructure as a complex, tightly connected entity rather than as a bunch of isolated guest operating systems.

Enroll for the beta program here.

The interest raised by the upcoming security interface that VMware calls VMsafe is notable.

Besides the company’s partners that work to use the new APIs, there are other entities that try to replicate the capabilities in other hypervisors.

One of them is Bryan D. Payne, Research Scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, that is maintaining with some fellows a very interesting project on the Google Code repository: XenAccess.

The team is developing a library to allow the analysis of multiple Xen virtual machines from a special domain (from where 3rd party security products can observe):

When running multiple domains (or virtual machines) using the Xen hypervisor, this library will allow a privileged domain to view the runtime state of another domain. This technique is known as virtual machine introspection.

The current software focuses on memory access, but also provides proof-of-concept code for disk monitoring.

A paper describing the solution in details is available here.

It’s interesting that one of main reference for this work is a paper from Mendel Rosenblum, the VMware Chief Scientist, that developed the idea behind VMsafe in 2002.

XenAccess is in the work since 2007 and seems to proceed very slow.
Maybe the arrival of VMsafe will boost the development.

The much awaited hypervisor that Sun is developing since over one year, xVM Server, is a step closer today.

The company’s Vice President, Steve Wilson, announces the opening of the Early Access program and unveils one product’s features: the web management console.

The additional screenshots that Wilson posted on his corporate blog also reveal that the hypervisor will be able to create virtual machines with multiple vCPUs:

You can require access to the EA program by sending an email here.
(attention: telling Sun that you come from virtualization.info doesn’t necessarily provide you a priority pass)

When Symantec made its first acquisition in the virtualization space, buying Altiris in 2007, the strategy of the company wasn’t exactly clear.

Altiris was mostly known for its management suite so the Software Virtualization Suite (SVS) product could easily be put in end of life.
But when Symantec also acquired the application streaming startup AppStream in 2008, an already tested and appreciated addition to Altiris SVS, it was clear the company focus on the virtualization market.

While the customers were waiting for an application virtualization and streaming solution resulting from the merge of two above, Symantec surprises buying a third firm, nSuite, for an undisclosed sum.

nSuite offers several products including a VDI connection broker called DBC.
With its acquisition Symantec clarifies that it doesn’t just want to deliver the applications but also the virtual desktops.

The approach is interesting but seems still incomplete.
If the company really wants to dynamically provision the whole computing stack it still misses the control of the virtual machines.
It wouldn’t surprise too much if Symantec would announce the acquisition of a hypervisor (and there are not many still available on the market at this point).