Year: 2008

AMD announced that its facility dedicated to fine tuning, the Operating System Research Center (OSRC), has extended its focus to include Sun OpenSolaris and the xVM products.
This may imply that xVM Server may have a performance advantage when used on AMD processors.

It’s unclear if and how this new effort will impact the upcoming release 1.0 of the new Sun hypervisor, but one thing is for sure: with Intel in strong partnership with VMware, AMD has to find another strong virtualization partner to boost the sales of its finally released quad-core CPU (codename Barcellona). Maybe the chip manifacturer is betting on Sun.

Sun releases today the first version of its desktop virtualization product VirtualBox since the acquisition of innotek.

The new VirtualBox 1.6 introduces:

• full support for Solaris (now including Guest Additions) and Mac OS versions (which means tha Sun is now an official competitor of Parallels and VMware)
• seamless window (what Parallels call Coherence and VMware calls Unity) for Solaris and Linux guest OSes
• support for virtual SATA hard drives (for the first time in a virtualization product)
• PAE memory support for guest OSes
• introduction of a web services API

Download it free of charge here.

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

Just one week after version 67, KVM releases version 68.

The new build introduces support for the upcoming Intel nested pages technology dubbed Extended Page Tables (EPT).
The EPT technology should be available only in 2009/2010 when Intel will introduce a completely new architecture in its upcoming Nehalem CPU.

Despite all virtualization vendors are working to support Intel EPT in their hypervisors, KVM is probably the first platform to offer it today.

Download KVM 68 here.

VMware continues at fast pace the beta program of the recently acquired Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite, now temporarily called Project North Star.

Today the company releases beta 2 (build 3.386) and introduces two new features:

• Application Sync
  This feature enables you to deploy Project North Star (Thinstall) application updates. Application Sync automatically checks for and installs updates to your packaged applications. Updates might include changes such as a new version, service pack updates, or configuration changes in the package.ini file
• Application Link
  This feature connects deployed applications. For example, you can establish a relationship between a deployed instance of Microsoft Office 2003 and a new Microsoft Office plug-in. Application Link enables you to establish a link between applications without having to encapsulate them into the same executable package

Enroll the beta program here.

In July 2007 VMware released its first benchmarking tool, VMmark, trying to fill a void still existing today: a commonly accepted measurement system to evaluate performance of different virtualization platforms on different hardware (the SPEC is still mum about its plans).

Since that time all major OEMs, Dell, HP IBM and Sun, adopted VMmark and published on VMware website the results for their 4/8/16 cores systems.

Now VMware is about to release a minor update which introduces support for 64bit workloads.
Three of the six virtual servers which compose each VMmark tile are now 64bits: the Java server (running SPECjbb 2005), the database server (running MySQL) and the web server (running SPECweb 2005).

The new version has been distributed to the VMware OEM partners and may be soon available to all customers.

Parallels publishes the fourth beta of its upcoming hypervisor dubbed Parallels Server.
The new beta re-introduces support for Mac OS X 10.5 Server as guest OS.

The product is now in beta since almost one year (the company demonstrated the first private beta at Apple WWDC event in June 2007) but Parallels is working on it since much more: in January 2006 SWsoft (the company former name) was talking about a Parallels Server and a Parallels Enterprise Server planned for early 2007.

Hopefully the only product survived from that original plan will be released at the upcoming WWDC, set for this June 9-13.

Enroll for the beta program here.

It seems that the Microsoft relationship with Parallels is becoming multi-dimensional.

A number of former Microsoft employees work for Parallels since the early days when the company was known as SWsoft.
Among them, since this January, there is also Mark Zbikowski, former Microsoft Architect who led the development effort in MS-DOS and Windows NT.

And now the two are linked by a major OEM agreement which brings key Microsoft products (Express Studio, Visual Studio, Office 2007 and Windows XP or Vista) to the Mac OS community through Parallels Desktop.

Microsoft had the opportunity to deliver this package, dubbed Expression Professional Subscription, by itself but preferred to dismiss Virtual PC for Mac OS in August 2006.

The new bundle will be available through Microsoft website starting from June at the price of $999.

Desktone is a US startup which left the stealth mode 10 days ago to unveil an innovative hosted VDI architecture.

While waiting to unveil the first major implementation (probably from Verizon) the small company announces its support for the upcoming Microsoft virtualization products: Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.

The Desktone platform supports multiple hypervisors and management consoles despite the first edition is released with support for VMware VI only. So it’s natural to see the upcoming support for Hyper-V as well as for XenServer (since Citrix is one of the four firms that invested in Desktone).

Marathon Technologies, already providing one of the first high availability solutions for XenServer virtual machines (at guest level), managed to further integrate with the Citrix hypervisor.

The two company are now working to include Marathon everRun VM into the XenServer setup, integrate the everRun Availability Center inside XenCenter and transparently synchronize the HA settings into each other console.

It’s not clear if this integration will be provided by a special version of XenServer that only Marathon Technologies can resell (since the company has an OEM agreement in place), or if it will be an out of the box solution for every XenServer solution sold to worldwide customers: the latter case sounds similar to the integration deal that XenSource closed with Symantec for storage management before the Citrix acquisition (a deal still frozen since that time).

Quoting from the NetEffect official announcement:

NetEffect, Inc., a leader in 10Gb Ethernet connectivity solutions, today announced that it has joined the VMware Community Source program. NetEffect joins other industry partners in collaborating with VMware on a source-code level, ultimately enabling NetEffect to maximize the performance and functionality of its power-efficient 1Gb and 10Gb accelerated Ethernet adapters for VMware virtualization.

…

As a VMware Community Source Program member, NetEffect is working closely with VMware to leverage the synergies between the VMware ESX hypervisor and NetEffect’s multi-GbE adapters. Optimizing virtualization efficiencies will further enhance the adapters’ proven hardware-accelerated, multi-NIC performance, increasing application productivity with even fewer server resources…