Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
As expected VMware released a new version of its flagship product dubbed VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 1.
The new build introduces few critical enhancements:
Additionally the new Update 1 extends support to several servers and hardware equipment, 3rd party backup products, guest OSes, and enterprise management solutions.
A new open source project with ambitious aims is growing online: OpenNEbula (formerly GridHypervisor).
The tool consists in a management layer that interconnects multiple Xen hypervisors to offer a general purpose grid.
The cloud created by OpenNEbula has some interesting capabilities like:
Such infrastructure seems similar to the one currently offered by Amazon with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, except for the on-demand provisioning capabilities (that the new project Scalr could provide soon).
OpenNEbula features a rich roadmap which includes support for VMware ESX and KVM.
The product is currently available only as Technology Preview and can be downloaded here.
No matter how much VMware is extending its HCL, a large number of users is still looking for ways to install the company flagship hypervisor ESX (formerly ESX Server) inside Workstation virtual machines.
Being one of the most wanted feature ever, hacks to achieve the goal proliferated, and our post about how to run ESX Server 3 inside a Workstation 6 virtual machine is one of the most article ever read.
Said do the community disappointment in discovering that the new Workstation 6.5 beta 1 prevents the hack mentioned above doesn’t come by surprise.
One of the VMware employees that addressed the complains anyway is mentioning (but not promising) the possibility to run again ESX inside a VM since the Workstation 6.5 feature list is not finalized yet.
The virtual lab automation market starts to become packed. It doesn’t reach yet the levels of the VDI market, but the number of startups in this space is growing at a good pace.
Today the US company once known as Illumita leaves the stealth mode as Skytap and announces Virtual Lab.
Skytap is based in Seattle and funded with $6 million from four VC firms: Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Washington Research Foundation and Bezos Expeditions.
The company, around 20 employees, is managed by several execs coming from companies owned by HP: Scott Roza as CEO (was in Opsware), Steve Brodie as CMO (was in Mercury Interactive) and John Janakiraman as CTO (was in HP Labs).
Additionally, there are a couple of other execs from Microsoft (Ian Knox and Jed Stafford) and from EMC (Matt Perrine).
Skytap has to compete with veterans in the space like VMware, Surgient and VMLogix, as well as with new entries like StackSafe.
Virtual Lab has the traditional features that a customer expects in a product in this category: a web-based console for hassle-free access, a virtual machine library, the capability to tie together multiple virtual machines in multi-tier configurations, instant sharing capabilities through URLs, granulary access permission and quota assignment system, etc.
There’s a difference anyway from products like VMware Lab Manager and VMLogix LabManager: Skytap hosts the backend virtual infrastructure on its own.
The only other company doing that at today is Surgient, which also offer an installable version of its VQMS.
This implies that customers don’t have to care about the backend configuration but just to create the virtual machine they need or upload the ones they already have: the product currently supports VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer but the company also plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V.
This model also implies that customers have to trust Skytap in uploading their software on the cloud.
Additionally, since they don’t have control on the hardware itself, it’s impossible to do performance or compatibility tests.
Skytap has published a pretty extended screencast (divided in four parts) to show how the actual product works in different tasks. It deserves a look.
Customers are and are billed per use (actually by paying a monthly subscription) and while the pricing doesn’t seem set in stone yet, the current amount is $100/month plus $1/hour per virtual machine usage.
The product can be tried immediately despite Skytap is starting with a small infrastructure probably and can only serve a limited amount of customers. Sign up here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.
Today Avi Kivity, the KVM lead developer, published a pretty bold statement on his personal blog: para-virtualization is dead.
While he’s saving the I/O para-virtualization drivers (Qumranet, which supports KVM, just released its first para-virtualized network drivers), he also thinks that upcoming nested paging technologies from AMD (the Rapid Virtualization Indexing or RVI) and Intel (the Extended Page Tables or EPT) will provide such performance boost that modifying the guest OS kernel to make it virtualization-aware will become a useless practice.
KVM support for AMD RVI is expected along with Linux kernel 2.6.26, while the support for Intel EPT will not come earlier than 2009-2010, when the CPU vendor will release its next generation processor Nehalem.
The position of Kivity is interesting per se but becomes even more interesting when compared to the recent position of VMware, which is now fully endorsing para-virtualization.
Who knows what Citrix, which acquired the most active para-virtualization promoter XenSource, thinks about this theory.
New month, new drama in the virtualization world. After the hot debate about the VMware ESX memory overcommit capabilities that involved Citrix, Microsoft and obviously VMware, this time is the turn of the virtual machine migration capabilities included in ESX and upcoming Hyper-V.
Once again Mike DiPetrillo, Specialist System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis department at VMware, ignited the fire comparing ESX VMotion with Hyper-V Quick Migration, stating that the latter has an excessive gap (8 seconds at the best) in resuming the virtual machines and causes severe faults in networked applications like database servers or file servers (technical details are covered here and here).
This is just a reprise of an original post appeared on DiPetrillo personal blog where he questioned the reliability of Quick Migration and XenMotion technologies.
Microsoft has yet to answer (and this post will be updated to reflect what they have to say about the comparison) but in general we are safe to say that VMotion and Quick Migration are not technically comparable.
Both approaches address the same business need, providing disaster recovery capabilities, in different ways, with different benefits and shortcomings. But at least another virtualization technology addresses the same challenge, the Physical to Virtual (P2V) migration that companies like PlateSpin (now acquired by Novell) and Vizioncore offer, and it’s not really comparable with VMotion or Quick Migration.
Despite that DiPetrillo compares them for a specific reason: sometimes marketing and sales departments downplay critical technical differences and pretend to put side by side two completely different implementations.
Customers get confused and start looking for further clarifications. And these days there’s nothing better than a blog war to clarify the tech doubts to masses of users.
A Wall Street financial analyst is spreading the rumor, picked up by CRN, by Network World, by Brian Madden and several others, about the possible acquisition of Citrix by Cisco or IBM.
At the moment virtualization.info cannot confirm if any of the two deals is really in discussion, but both of them are realistic.
Cisco heavily invested in VMware just before its IPO, demostrating a strong interest in extending its dominance beyond the networking and security worlds.
A hypervisor would fit the dynamic datacenter strategy that Cisco is already pursuing with its VFrame, and would provide a new space where to place its networking devices (even if in virtual format).
IBM is deeply involved in virtualization technologies since ever, contributing to the Xen and KVM hypervisors code development.
Considering that Big Blue invented virtualization 40 years ago, the company must be uncomfortable in its current marginal role in this industry.
Additionally, IBM would be able to enrich XenServer with several critical components: the enterprise management solution (IBM Director, Tivoli), the high-availability solution (Systems Director Virtual Availability Management), the capacity planning solution (CDAT), the security solution (codename PHANTOM) and others.
During the last few years IBM certified its hardware for the Citrix hypervisor, and integrated its solutions with Xen for different projects (like a VDI platform or a general-purpose grid computing solution).
Acquiring Citrix, IBM would be able to offer (and certify) one of the most complete virtualization stack available on the market, pretty much like Sun is trying to do with the upcoming xVM Server.
(or maybe somebody just took seriously the idea that HP may buy Parallels)
Before its acquisition from Symantec, Altiris used to complete its SVS application virtualization product with streaming capabilities offered by AppStream.
More than one year later Symantec realizes the value of such synergy and proceed with the AppStream acquisition (like virtualization.info supposed in January 2007) for an undisclosed sum.
So far Symantec didn’t publish any press announcement about the deal, limitating to an announcement at his conference ManageFusion 2008.
Now the company has a complete and powerful application virtualization solution able to compete with Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) or the upcoming VMware/Thinstall solution.
It’s yet to be seen how the security giant will go on the market with it. The steps taken so far are not exactly clear.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.
The first enterprise-class hardware virtualization platform from Parallels is nearer: the company just released the beta 3 of its upcoming Parallels Server.
In this new build (1873) beta testers can see new features like the inclusion of Parallels Toos and P2V/V2P solution Parallels Transporter, as well as a command-line CLI with support for scripting languages (Python is the first one).
Enroll for the beta program here.
To celebrate over 30,000 downloads for its free GUI management solution for VMware ESX, FastSCP, Veeam is releasing a new version today.
This update brings in some interesting features:
Download it free of charge here.