Year: 2008

VMware just published a very interesting study about how many I/O Operations per Second (IOPS) an ESX 3.5 Update 1 can perform.

To perform the measurement they used a unnamed server with 4 Intel quad-core CPUs and 32GB RAM, plus 2 dual-port QLogic 4GB HBAs and 2 single-port QLogic 4GB HBAs.
The backend storage was made of 3 EMC-CLARiiON CX3-80 (a Fibre Channel SAN) with a remarkable number of 495 disks, serving more than 77TB data.

After fine tuning the system with the following three settings, the IOMeter test returned a result of over 100,000 IOPS:

• We increased the VMFS3 max heap size from 16MB to 64MB (KB article # 1004424).
• We changed the storage processor’s cache high/low watermark from 80/60 to 40/20. This was done to write the dirty pages in storage cache more often so that Iometer write operations do not wait for free memory buffers.
• We increased the guest queue length to 100 to make sure that the guest was capable of queuing all the I/O accesses generated by IOMeter to the test disks.

Brian Madden, reporting from Citrix Synergy conference, speculates that the next version of XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) has been postponed from its original planned release date.

Citrix was supposed to ship XenApp 5.0 90 days after the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 launch, but first beta code appeared just at the end of last month and the 90 days milestone is at the end of May.

It’s likely that Citrix redefined it’s priorities to boost the recent release of XenDesktop.

Update: A Senior System Engineer at Citrix, Sridhar Mullapudi, just published a new post on the corporate blog revealing that XenApp 5.0 is targeted for H2 2008.

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

Last week VMware published a beta refresh jumping from the build 84113 (labeled Beta 1) to the build 91182 (not labeled Beta 2).

The new code adds a couple of important enhancements to the beta 1 features:

• Unity (the VMware seamless window technology) is now supported for Linux guest OSes too
• The Guest OS unattended installation is now supported for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mandriva and Ubuntu

But much more than that the beta testers will be happy to know that this build re-introduces the unofficial support for VMware ESX as a guest OS.

Most VMware customers know that ESX can be run inside a Workstation VM if some conditions are satisfied. For some reasons this hidden capability was removed in Workstation 6.5 beta 1.

Now the new code allows the hack again, despite it requires a slightly different configuration.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Just in December 2007 the online career board Dice published an article about the new job opportunities that virtualization can offer (the article mentions a post published by virtualization.info in October 2006 about the new skills to look for in virtualization professionals).

Now, in the May issue of its monthly report about the job market trends, Dice reveals how the demand for virtualization jobs increased by 40% over just six months.

Not surprisingly most of the announcements (more than 1,500 reported) look for VMware skills, with only a few ones about Xen or Hyper-V skills.

virtualization.info offers a job board as well, powered by SimplyHired, and the results confirm such proportion: over 7,500 jobs related to VMware, over 290 to Xen, and just 57 to Hyper-V.
How many related to the general keyword virtualization? Over 5,300.

Today Parallels launches its own Software Certification Program: pretty similarly to what VMware did with its Certified Virtual Appliance, the company lists the applications that are supported by their 3rd party ISVs and by Parallels itself.

As always having such list is very useful for customers, which still find themselves fighting with support challenges in virtualization adoption projects.

Unfortunately the list of products supported inside Parallels containers (in case of Virtuozzo) or virtual machines (in case of Workstation and Desktop) is very limited: the only major enterprise application listed seems the IBM DB2.

Hopefully, this list will be greatly enriched for the launch of Parallels Server, the company’s hypervisor which we all hope to see unveiled at the upcoming Apple WWDC conference next month.

Update: The list doesn’t publish a couple of enterprise products, Office and Visual Studio, among the certified applications, despite Parallels recently closed a major OEM agreement with Microsoft to deliver these applications to the Apple community by Parallels Desktop.
This should imply that Microsoft officially supports both products on Parallels virtual machines.

The timeless development of MokaFive Player 1.0 (formerly LivePC) has finally come to an end: today MokaFive (formerly Moka5) launches the RTM version of its product.

Before reaching this point the company worked exactly three years (one in stealth mode), changed several executives (including the CEO), changed the company and the product name, and re-focused its go-to-market strategy.

The result of this almost complete transformation is a wrapper for desktop virtualization products (VMware Player is the only one currently supported) which is available in two editions: MokaFive Professional and MokaFive Express, grouped by the name Virtual Desktop Solution.

While the former offers enterprise features and it’s available by an annual subscription, the latter targets the consumer market and it’s free of charge.

The common engine can be considered as a VMware Player enhancer, offering additional features like:

• the capability to create and receive virtual machine updates from an online location (the MokaFive Lab website only for the Express edition)
• the capability to run a virtual machine before it’s completely downloaded (through a caching technology called Predictive Fetch)
• the capability to use the snapshots to revert the virtual machine to a clean state without losing user’s data
• the capability to run from a USB device (like a key or an iPod)

On top of this, the new MokaFive professional introduces additional features which allow to centrally control several virtual machines, sign and encrypt their virtual hard drives, and define an expiration time.

These last capabilities put MokaFive in competition with other virtualization wrappers exclusively focused on security like Sentillion vThere, VMware ACE and Microsoft/Kidaro Workspaces.
Potential customers may wonder why they should buy a product which uses a VMware platform (Player) to offer some features that VMware offers by itself with another product (ACE, and soon Workstation), so it’s likely that MokaFive will embrace other virtualization platforms sooner or later. Since Parallels Desktop is already adopted by Sentillion, Sun VirtualBox may be a good candidate.

MokaFive may do something with several other virtualization products in the near future, considering the impressive connections it has today: Frank Artale (Vice President at Citrix) Dale Fuller (Chairman at Phoenix) and Urs Hölzle (Senior Vice President of Operations at Google) all sit in the advisory board.
Additionally, the company received a $15 million funding from Highland Capital Partner, where sits Shaw Chuang, the former VMware Director of R&D.
Last but not least Intel just added MokaFive to its Software Partner Program.

The products are available for both Windows and Mac OS. Download the Express edition free of charge here.

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

The long awaited VDI solution from Citrix, XenDesktop, is finally available.
For some reasons the product starts from version 2.0 despite it’s the very first release.

Originally announced in October 2007, XenDesktop is a monumental series of bundles around the new VDI connection broker called Desktop Deliver Controller (or DDC, formerly Desktop Server).

To deliver its out-of-the-box Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Citrix includes with DDC several other products: the back-end virtualization infrastructure (XenServer), the streaming server (Provisioning Server), the application virtualization & streaming server (XenApp), the SSL VPN gateway (Access Gateway), the monitoring suite (EdgeSight), the QoS engine (WANScaler), the remote control (GoToAssist) and the VoIP gateway (EasyCall).

The resulting bundles are:

• the Standard Edition (XenServer + Desktop Delivery Controller + Access Gateway)
• the Advanced Edition (Standard Edition + Provisioning Server)
• the Enterprise Edition (Advanced Edition + XenApp)
• the Platinum Edition (Enterprise Edition +  EdgeSight + WANScaler + GoToAssist + EasyCall)

(it’s not clear if any bundle includes the management console XenCenter)

Along with these editions, surprisingly, Citrix announced a special Express Edition, which is identical to the Standard Edition but capped to ten concurrent users.
This move is particularly interesting considering that last week Ericom, a long-time Citrix competitor, launched a free edition (without any limitation) of its connection broker, PowerTerm WebConnect, for the free Xen-based hypervisor Oracle VM.

On the client tier, XenDesktop only supports Citrix ICA as the remote desktop protocol.
On the broker tier, XenDesktop only supports Windows Server 2003.
On the server tier, XenDesktop supports Windows XP and Vista (32bit only) virtual desktops, and requires the installation of a Virtual Desktop Agent.

It’s worth to note that while Citrix offers its own hypervisor with XenDesktop, the product also supports VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V once available.
XenDesktop will also integrate with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 when available, as announced in January.

The new DDC connection broker offers the typical features available in this class of products, like:

• Active Directory authentication
• Session management
• Session stickiness
• Virtual desktop pools support
• High Availability support

The price depends on the selected bundle and starts at $75 per concurrent user (Standard Edition).

Citrix received support from most key players in the thin computing market, including HP, IGEL, Wyse, Chip PC, Computer Lab International and many others.
More or less the same ones that just yesterday were celebrating with VMware the launch of its new thin client certification program.

Download XenDesktop Express free of charge here.
Download the other XenDesktop editions in trial here.

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

Update: Citrix also published a 1-hour eLearning course about XenDesktop 2.0 (despite it seems still focused on the beta version). Access it here. 

It seems that the new Microsoft hypervisor, Hyper-V (formerly codename Viridian), will not come so early: the Release Candidate made available two months ago was the RC0 and not the RC1 as virtualization.info wrongly reported.

The RC1 code has been released today and is available through the Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update services (starting from May 27).

This new build doesn’t bring new features but substantially changes the virtual machines snapshot format, obliging the beta testers to apply or drop them before upgrading from a previous beta or the RC0.
Additionally, this RC is not compatible with the current System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta.

If Microsoft will take another two months to reach the RTM, the August 2008 release time will be matched.

Fifteen days after the previous release the Qumranet developers finish KVM version 69.
Breaking an impressive series of new architectures supported, this build is only for bug fixing.

Download it here.

In a VDI environment VMware can already control (which implies having a profit) the back-end virtual infrastructure and the connection broker. But since the company doesn’t offer a thin-OS, it cannot control the front-end thin client in any way. Until now.

Today VMware launches a new Certification Program for thin client vendors that will grant compatibility with its hypervisor and management layers.
The number of partners that supports this program from day one is notable: Sun, HP, Fujitsu, NEC, IGEL, Wyse, Pano Logic, Chip PC, and several others.

The next logical step for the company would be requiring these partners to support out of the box the new streaming technology under development, VMware On-Demand, and its free desktop platform, VMware Player:

1. a customer buys a new thin client from one of the manufacturers above
2. a user powers on the device which starts to receive a streamed virtual machine
3. the virtual machine, which includes a copy of ThinApp (formerly Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite), is served by an embedded VMware Player
4. ThinApp receives the streamed virtual applications needed by the user
5. the user is ready to work

How far VMware is from this?