Year: 2008

virtualization.info Vanguards network surpasses 1000 members

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November 1st, 2007 virtualization.info launched a social network facility for virtualization professionals called virtualization.info Vanguards.
Through the phenomenal business tool LinkedIn, the Vanguards members can see each other business profile and keep in touch more easily for a wide range of purposes: sharing best practices, giving or receiving feedbacks about products and implementations, build project teams, plan business trips, etc.

The community had an overwhelming success and in just 6 months reached over 1000 members.

So far we left our Vanguards free to connect alone, without messaging them in any way, but we feel that it’s time to celebrate this milestone.
In the coming weeks virtualization.info will contact its members to offer the first, special reward for being such loyal and passionate professionals. Stay tuned!

P.s.: Like many good things the Vanguards community started a trend and now LinkedIn is full of tens of social groups for virtualization professionals (including official and unofficial versions of the same group).
Since each member sees others email addresses, somebody thought that it’s a good idea to join the Vanguards network and other groups abov just to harvest new accounts. This includes head hunters, sales managers, marketing managers, PR and some others.

We’d like to clarify once again that the virtualization.info Vanguards is for technical virtualization professionals only (system architects, engineers, researchers, developers, etc.) with some real experience on virtualization technologies.

This is why we had to decline the join request from over 150 persons!

If any current or future member is bothered by others in this community with unsolicited messages is welcome to report the issue.
We work hard to strictly maintain this network a place where to find technical peers.

Quest is the first VDI provider for Microsoft Hyper-V with VAS 5.10

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Quest, through its subsidiary Provision Networks (acquired in November 2007) is the first company providing a VDI solution for the upcoming Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V.

Microsoft is the only big vendor that didn’t shop or developed on its own a connection broker for its hypervisor: VMware acquired Propero, Citrix developed Desktop Server (which now is part of the upcoming XenDesktop), Sun developed Sun VDI (despite it’s surprisingly supporting VMware ESX only), Qumranet developed Solid ICE.
Therefore Quest/Provision Networks speed in supporting Hyper-V will provide the company a notable competitive advantage.

The just released Virtual Access Suite (VAS) 5.10 works with today’s Release Candidate 0 of Hyper-V and will further integrate with the announced System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 as soon as it will be available.

Download a trial here.

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

Microsoft opens SCVMM 2008 beta, manages Hyper-V and VMware ESX

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The Microsoft near-term strategy to win the virtualization market is clear: deliver a low cost hypervisor with basic management capabilities to attract SMBs, deliver a centralized management console which simplifies the migration from VMware ESX to Hyper-V to attract the Enterprises, call for support and interoperability the entire partners ecosystem to attract both.

Today at the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 the company puts on the table another piece of this strategy, opening the much awaited beta program of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.

The product was expected not only because it can finally manage Hyper-V hosts, but mostly because it promises to seamlessly manage VMware ESX hosts as well.

Microsoft hopes that its customers, already implementing the competing hypervisor, stop using VirtualCenter and turn to SCVMM 2008 for any task (including VMotion!). Unfortunately this goal seems hard to achieve considering some limitations that plague this first attempt.
For instance there are no current plans to manage the ESX hosts patching, which is a critical feature demanded for years by VMware customers and finally implemented in VI 3.5 through the new Update Manager (VUM): even if Microsoft WSUS can easily patch the guest OSes, until it will also patch ESX itself customers will still have to open the VirtualCenter console every day.

On top of that, there is the evident “feature-delay” that Microsoft will suffer forever: in any moment VMware can deliver new VirtualCenter capabilities so to maintain its console a mandatory component or at least a highly desirable one.
It would be much different if SCVMM could directly control the ESX hosts: at that point Microsoft could win the customers offering the product at a fraction of the price. But this seems unlikely since VMware offers the ESX management APIs only through VirtualCenter.

Nonetheless SCVMM 2008 is very interesting: besides managing Hyper-V and ESX, it now includes a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) which continuously monitors the virtual infrastructure and suggests how virtual machines should be improved (upgrading the virtual hardware) or moved across the available virtualization host to achieve the best performance.

The PRO engine is influenced by some pre-defined policies and SCVMM administrators can decide to approve/ignore each suggestion or automate the process.
Additionally, PRO is extensible through 3rd party management packs, which can give further indications to SCVMM on how to move workload in the virtual data center.

Other features include the one-click configuration for guest level clustering (which influences the SCVMM intelligent placement capability) and a new granular permission system (with administrative delegation capabilities).

Microsoft is expected to add further functionalities in the second beta of SCVMM 2008.

Enroll for the beta program here.

KVM reaches version 67

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It seems that KVM developers are able to release a new version of their hypervisor every ten days or so, and every time with a new architecture supported.

After the IBM s390 (KVM 65) and the Intel Itanium (KVM 66), it’s now the turn of the AMMC ppc 44x embedded processors (used by companies like QLogic, NetClarity, Accusys, etc. for network devices like fibre channel HBAs).

Download it here.

Novell reveals some more about its virtualization strategy

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In mid-March Novell revealed the plan to launch a new platform just for virtualization purposes.
Its SUSE Enterprise Linux already includes Xen so that customers can use it as the company hypervisor as needed. But that’s probably not enough for Novell.

Now Jeff Jaffe, the company’s CTO, provides (here and here) few additional details about this new platform and the overall strategy:

…Linux is at the core of our virtualization vision. A p-Distro or thin Linux is just enough operating system to get the hardware running and to host virtual machines. Then we put the identity-enabled virtual machines, or v-Distros, on top of the p-Distros. The result? Workloads can be dynamically moved to run on any policy controlled hardware…

…Our vision for virtualization is that the p-Distro becomes the core operating system for the physical machine and hosts the v-Distros. To get here, we have work to do: performance tuning, ISV certification, systems management, security improvements and device drivers…

It seems that the only difference between the current SUSE Enterprise Linux with Xen and the upcoming Linux distribution for Xen (called p-Distro above) is in the OS footprint.

Release: Virtual Iron 4.3

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Virtual Iron reaches two milestones: the version 4.3 and 2000 customers.

This new 4.3 version introduces support for Microsoft Windows 2008 as guest OS, support for Jumbo Frames and experimental support for iSCSI multi-path I/O.
Additionally, the product now supports two concurrent Live Migrations.

Read the whole release notes here. Download the free of charge Single Server Edition here.

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

Release: VMware Fusion 1.1.2

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VMware releases today a small update for its Mac OS product Fusion.

The new 1.1.2 version (build 87978) fixes some bugs (a couple related to the Mac Book Air) and introduces support for Windows XP Service Pack 3 Boot Camp partitions.
Additionally, the Fusion virtual machines can now be saved with the Mac OS X 10.5 Time Machine.

Download a trial here.