Year: 2008

Almost silently VMware just released the third major release of its virtual lab automation solution: Lab Manager.

The new version (build 2056) offers some interesting features like:

• Full integration with VirtualCenter (LabManager can handle DRS, VMotion and HA / VirtualCenter can deploy LabManager agents)
• Availability of new user groups (Organizations) to share resources
• Availability of custom user roles
• Capability to move virtual machines between datastores
• Support for OpenLDAP
• Support for virtual machines with multiple virtual NICs attached to multiple physical/virtual networks

Lab Manager 3.0 already supports and integrates with the new VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2.

Download a trial here.

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

In just one month VMLogix upgrades its virtual lab management product, LabManager, from version 3.5 to version 3.6.

As promised last month, this new version will introduce the support for Hyper-V 1.0.

It’s a major achievement for VMLogix as the company is the first in its segment to offer the new Microsoft hypervisor.

The company published a demo of LabManager 3.6 beta working with Hyper-V hosts (warning: the audio is awful).

At the moment there’s no public beta program to enroll.

The product is expected to be available by September 2008.

Earlier this month virtualization.info reported about an upcoming 10% price increase from VMware.

Easy to imagine, the news generated a number of negative comments.

Now the customers will have a chance to complain with Citrix as well, as both CIO.co.uk and ThinComputing.net are reporting the same 10% price increase, starting September 1, 2008.

Today Citrix opens the public beta of the upcoming XenServer 4.2 (codename Orlando).

The first beta introduces very interesting features like:

• Xen 3.2
• Automated high availability
• VM grouping, searching and tagging
• Real-time and persistent performance monitoring
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, XP SP3, Vista SP1 guest OSes
• Support for Novell SLES 9 SP4 / 10 SP2, Red Hat RHEL 4.7 / 5.2 guest OSes
• Support for Fibre Channel / iSCSI multipath (configurable through XenCenter)
• Support for alerts as email

From this version the product will also include a P2V migration tool called XenConvert, which is part of the beta as well.
The tool, currently supporting only 32 an 64bit version of Windows, is able to migrate the physical server image directly into a XenServer host, or it can just output it as VHD or XVA (XenServer Virtual Appliance) on a given location. 

Enroll the beta program here (login required to see the actual link).

Update: Citrix also published a series of screencasts to demonstrate some of the new features coming with XenServer 4.2.

• Back up and restore virtual machine metadata for disaster recovery
• High-Availability
• GUI walktrough

The second version of VMware’s product for Apple market is near completion as the company release the beta 2 build (107508).

This new beta has a load of new features like:

• Unity 2.0 (guest OS files, URLs and folders can be opened by the applications on the host)
• AutoProtect (automated backup for the virtual machine through recursive snapshots)
• VMrun (command line for VMs scripting)
• Support for multiple snapshots
• Experimental support for up to 4 virtual CPUs per VM
• Experimental support for Mac OS X 10.5 Server as guest OS

To show these new features VMware published a series of videos here.

Enroll for the beta program here.

As any other vendor entering the market with a brand new product, Microsoft needs to build a solid credibility for Hyper-V 1.0. To achieve the task the company decided to starting from the hosting providers.

On Monday a couple of testimonials appeared on the Microsoft Virtualization Team corporate blog: one is from myhosting.com and the other is from hostbasket.com. 
Both providers are offering their customers dedicated or shared physical servers powered by Windows 2008 with Hyper-V.

On top of these ones, a third firm, Layered Technologies, announced the entrance of Hyper-V in its hosting platforms portfolio (despite still in beta).

Last but not least, Microsoft published an interview with John Zanni, General Manager of Worldwide Hosting, where he discloses how Hyper-V will be included in September in the Hosting Deployment Accelerator (HDA), a free blueprint for hosting projects.

Zanni also unveils that 256 hosting providers wordwide (including huge ones like GoDaddy and Rackspace) are currently adopting Windows Server 2008, implying that most of them may decide to offer Hyper-V as well.

The whole thing is interesting because in general the hosting industry seems to prefer OS virtualization (and in particular the product Virtuozzo Containers offered by Parallels) rather than hardware virtualization.

It’s strange that Microsoft decided to start from here to promote its bare-metal hypervisor, invading the realm of a business partner like Parallels.

Update: After myhosting.com and hostbasket.com, Microsoft adds MaximumASP to the list of hosting providers working with Hyper-V.

VMware just published a new, very interesting 19-pages paper about its Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) technology.

To demonstrate the value of this VirtualCenter feature, VMware measured the performance of a couple of virtualization hosts while their virtual machines (with different workloads) are redistributed through DRS algorithm.

The paper also contains a long list of valuable tips to improve the DRS efficiency.

Highly recommended.

Earlier this month the US startup Fortisphere announced the plan to support VMware VMsafe.

As part of that plan, or as a separated effort, the company also announced that it joined the VMware Community Source (VMCS) Program, which grants access to the source code of ESX.

A small, selected number of companies joins the program as well. Among them there are Compuware, Double-Take, Emulex, Fujitsu Siemens, Mellanox, QLogic, Voltaire and Wyse.

It will be interesting to see what Fortisphere will do with such level of access on ESX.

As virtualization.info readers know pretty well, Microsoft is working to drastically change the way Office is deployed on millions of desktops worldwide:

• since January the company supports the virtualization and streaming of its productivity suite through Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid)
• the company is secretly working on a new license agreement that will allow business partners to offer Office through 3rd party application virtualization and streaming solutions

but all of this may be just the first step before Microsoft redesigns the architecture of Office to be fully virtualization-aware.

A job offering published in May on the official website of the company seems to hint at such scenario:

Want to revolutionize the way the next generation of Office products makes it into users’ hands? Are you excited by the potential for flash-based devices and internet-based services to change the software distribution paradigm? The Office team is looking for experienced developers to help us leverage emerging technologies like virtualization and application streaming to redefine how our customers obtain and use Office products. Some of the problems we will solve include device integration, portability for settings and data, and creating new “Mobile” Office client products, as well as the infrastructure to support them. Each of these problems has the capacity to significantly impact Microsoft’s bottom line…

Maybe Microsoft plans to compete with Google in the productivity space with a (long awaited) SaaS version of Office that can be seamlessly streamed from the web on any Windows-powered device on the Net.

The startup Veeam continues to release software at an impressive pace.
Less than five months after the first release, Veeam Backup already hits version 2.0.

The new edition includes some interesting features like:

• Real-time statistics and reports
• Support for VMware ESXi (now free of charge)
• Support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) in Windows guest OSes backup
• Support for 3rd party tape backup devices

Additionally, Veeam improved the product engine so that the product now completes backups and restores up to 5 times faster than version 1.0.

A demo of the product in Flash is available here (12MB).
The trial is available  here.

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