Year: 2008

Quoting from the Sigma Resources & Technologies official announcement:

Sigma Resources & Technologies, a leading supplier of testing technologies for networking, security, telecom and wireless, today announced it has integrated its test automation solution with the award-winning VMware Lab Manager and has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The new relationship will enable end-user customers to leverage the integrated power of Sigma’s SigmationTF testing framework and VMware’s lab automation and other virtualization products to accelerate the development and deployment of bug-free applications and make the transitions between physical and virtual aspects of IT smoother…

Google is one of the few big IT vendors that didn’t embrace hardware virtualization so far. They have their good reasons.
But this doesn’t imply that the company doesn’t track the trend, doesn’t acquire an application virtualization startup, or doesn’t have insights about the technology to share.

On the corporate blog dedicated to security Tavis Ormandy, Information Security Engineer at Google, expressed his skepticism about the fact that a virtualization platform can be bug-free:

…

As with any complex application, it would be naive to think such a large codebase could be written without some serious bugs creeping in. If any of those bugs are exploitable, attackers restricted to the guest could potentially break out onto the host machine…

Ormandy also published a 10-pages whitepaper describing his attempts to break the security of popular virtualization platforms, including commercial and open source ones like VMware Workstation and Server, Xen, QEMU-based (KVM, VirtualBox), Bochs and others.
(the analysis also includes other two commercial platforms not mentioned by the name. Reading the paper it’s easy to guess which ones they are)

With a soft launch VMware just opened a couple of online TV channes (one on YouTube and another on Blip.tv) to host a bunch of training videos.

No longer than 10 minutes, each video explains how to complete (very) easy tasks with VMware products (just Server 1.0 at the moment).

Update: VMware just published a downloadable version of the videos above. Download the whole package here.

So far the Xen hypervisor offered a unique opportunity to enter the virtualization market as a major player.
Top industry vendors invested (Citrix, through the XenSource acquisition, Novell, Red Hat) or are investing (Sun) million of dollars to bring it inside the enterprise business.

One the first companies embracing Xen is Virtual Iron which achieved some notable goals in the last few years:

• it accumulated the impressive capital of $65 million in five investment rounds
• it closed major OEM agreements (with HP and IBM, with Dell, with Provision Networks, with Arrow Electronics) and partnerships (with Microsoft, with PlateSpin, with FalconStor, with Reflex Security, with Fabric7)
• it provided a broad range of certified storage (NetApp, IBM, EqualLogic, Data Core) to its customers
• it launched its own channel partner program since more than one year already

and yet the company has to face major compeitition for all the other big players mentioned above.

virtualization.info met Ed Walsh, the new CEO of Virtual Iron and asked questions about the competition, the go to market and acquisition strategies, the technology roadmap, the relationship with Microsoft, and more.

Read the whole interview with Ed Walsh here.

This morning press release from HP unveils that the upcoming next-generation connection broker from Citrix, XenDesktop, will be available starting May 2008.

The product, currently in beta, will merge together the XenServer hypervisor, the Provisioning Server streaming server and the Desktop Server connection broker.

HP will support the whole solution on its ProLiant servers and Compaq thin clients.

Before XenDesktop, HP already announced support for XenServer, which is now tightly integrated with the ProLiant management GUI.

Update: Citrix released an official press release confirming that XenDesktop (starting from version 2.0) will be released May 20 with a suggested price of $75 per concurrent user.

April 10 VMware released the first minor update for its flagship product: VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 1.

As expected many customers took advantage of the weekend to download the new build and install it.
Unfortunately the early adopters are not reporting a smooth upgrading experience.

The biggest problem is that the bits available are not the ones of Update 1, according to the build numbers: while the website declares a final build number of 84782, the downloaded bits install a version with the build 84767 (a discrepancy confirmed by the MD5 signature mismatch).

The wrong build provided any sort of technical issues to the unlucky early adopters which tried to perform an upgrade: disabled plug-ins, VirtualCenter Client crashes, guest OS templates disappearance and inability to customize then, etc.

Besides a lot of time wasted, the build mismatch also impacted the productivity in some cases: some customers in fact installed the VI 3.5 Update 1 in labs while others put it directly into production environments.

VMware was informed of the problem immediately and invited to download the bits again the day after. Unfortunately the re-downloaded ISOs were still providing the build 84767, causing chaos among users.

The second answer VMware provided clarified that, despite the MD5 mismatch, the available bits were the correct ones. Despite that customers continued to experience crashes and were forced to downgrade to 3.5.0 (which caused a painful mess of different builds for different tiers of the virtual infrastructure).

After the entire weekend VMware has yet to solve the problem while the number of users afftected by the issue grew exponentially: so far the VMTN thread about the topic got 989 visits with 79 replies.

This is already the second time that VMware publishes the wrong build for a production release: before April it already happened in December 2007, when the company released VI 3.5.0. The correct build wasn’t posted online untile February 2008.

Now customers, already complaining for the plethora of different build numbers on any GA release, are afraid that VMware will correct this second error after another two months.

Update: VMware sent us a note to specify that the build numbers mentioned above are not incorrect.
The VI 3.5 Update 1 comes with different build numbers for each component and while the Virtual Infrastructure Management Installer has the GA build 84782, the VirtualCenter itself has the GA build of 84767.

At today VMware is still investigating the issue and thinks it may depend on its content distribution service: Akamai.

Second update: At the end of Tuesday, 5 days after the first incident, VMware finally solved the problem, confirming its error in uploading the wrong bits on the Akamai content delivery system. And with the promise to not offer a third similar experience.

Few months after the release of vReplicator 2.1 (formerly esxReplicator) Vizioncore is finalizing the new version 2.5 and opens the beta program.

This first beta introduces few major new features like:

• Support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) inside the guest OS
• Hybrid replication (instead of full replication the product does snapshot replication through the Differential Engine)
• Replication to multiple destinations

Enroll for the beta here.

The upcoming bare-metal hypervisor that Sun is developing starting from Xen, xVM Server, is expected for this summer (despite some rumors about an earlier release) along with a virtualization-friendly enterprise management solution: Ops Center 2.0.

While waiting for the launch, Sun published today the first image of a xVM Server managed by Ops Center 2.0:

xVM Server 1.0 and Ops Center 2.0 will be just a part of a much wider virtualization effort that Sun is putting in place and which includes an OS virtualization platform, Solaris Containers (now supporting Solaris 8 and 9 binaries), a desktop virtualization solution, VirtualBox (acquired from innotek), a connection broker, Sun VDI, and an interoperability agreement with Microsoft for its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-v.

In late January virtualization.info interviewed Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, who provided some insights about the overall strategy.

Sun is slowly extending its OS virtualization technology, Solaris Containers, to support more than just binaries for Solaris 10.

After launching a version which can run Linux applications, Sun also developed a new version able to run Solaris 8 software which went live in October 2007.
The two share the same virtualization engine called Branded Zone or BrandZ.

Now the product is rebranded as Solaris 8 Containers and it’s available for free (support excluded) instead of as 90-days trial.
Additionally, Sun also releases Solaris 9 Containers, free of charge as well.

Both products come with a physical to virtual migration tool called P2V Archiver which takes care of moving Solaris 8 and 9 physical installations inside the above virtualization platforms hosted on Solaris 10.

It’s interesting to note how the effort put in the Containers technology over the last few years doesn’t seem exhausted despite Sun is investing a lot on hardware virtualization as well: developing its bare-metal hypervisor xVM Server and acquiring the hosted virtualization solution VirtualBox from innotek.
This means that the company aims to offer a broad range of solutions for server consolidation, pretty much like Parallels is about to do with its Virtuozzo and the upcoming Parallels Server.

Solaris 8 and 9 Containers are available here.

In January 2008 VMware did something unexpected as hardware virtualization leader acquiring an application virtualization startup: Thinstall.

The official strategy behind such deal is to enrich the VDI offering that VMware is building since earlier than the Propero acquisition.

Just one month after the deal VMware was already releasing the first beta of the Thinstall product on its website, under the new name of project North Star.

The development team behind the project now started a corporate blog and reveals that the final product, the first Thinstall build rebranded by VMware, may come just 6 months after the acquisition, in early H2 2008.

Until that date customers should expect a second public beta planned for the April-May timeframe.