Year: 2008

With a surprising move in November 2007 Oracle announced its own Xen-based hypervisor based: Oracle VM.

Along with it Oracle also clarified its support policy about virtualization, completely compromising the relation with VMware (despite the latter attempts to save all salvable).

The move wasn’t not exactly welcome by some analysts and customers.

Months after the announcement a security firm focused on continuous data protection (CDP) backup, InMage, is the first announcing its support for Oracle VM.

InMage is part of the Oracle PartnerNetwork since a while, so it’s easy to understand how easily they recognized the opportunity that Oracle lock-in offers.

Quoting from the ExaGrid official announcement:

ExaGrid Systems, Inc., the leader in cost-effective and scalable disk-based backup solutions with byte-level data de-duplication, today announced that it has become a VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) and has validated its product’s use within VMware virtualized environments.

…

ExaGrid is uniquely suited for VMware environment backups for the following reasons:

• ExaGrid combines compression and byte-level data de-duplication to minimize the amount of data stored in each subsequent backup.
• Depending on the customer’s data, ExaGrid customers are achieving data de-duplication of redundant VMware virtual machine instances by a factor of 100s or even 10,000s to 1.
• Backup windows are also cut by as much as 80%.
• Restores do not require a SAN, are fast and highly reliable.
• The customer no longer needs to rely on tape for VMware environment backups and can eliminate tape management, handling and transportation costs.
• Entire VMware environments can also be replicated to an off-site ExaGrid via a WAN ensuring synchronized backups for Disaster Recovery purposes.

…

Not even six months ago Sun was entering the crowded VDI market with its own connection broker: VDI 1.0.

Today the company already launches the version 2.0.

The most important feature offered in this new version is the support for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and the availability of template-based pools for specified groups of users.

Sun stays mum about when it will introduce support for its upcoming hypervisor xVM Server.

Sun VDI 2.0 starts at US$149 per concurrent user with basic support. A trial is available here.

At this point the Sun strategy on VDI is puzzling: instead of waiting for the release of xVM Server and deliver a VDI 2.0 that supports it, the company prefers to go to the market early supporting its future competitor VMware. (which already offers its own connection broker).

While the Sun connection broker may have valueble capabilities it seems very unlikely that an existing VMware customer snoob the recently released Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) 2.0 to adopt VDI 2.0.

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

It’s not a secret that IT automation is going to play a fundamental role in tomorrow’s virtual data centers.
The VMware’s investments in this space (the acquisition of Akimbi in 2006 and Dunes Technologies in 2007, the launch of LabManager, Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager) are a confirmation of this.

Therefore the BMC acquisition of BladeLogic for $800 million is particularly important, considering that both companies have a main role in the IT automation market.

At this point BMC, never been a major player in the virtualization scene so far, has the unique possiblity to become a leader for next generation virtual infrastructures. It will depends on how tightly the company will be able to integrate the automation framework with existing hypervisors.

Depeding on the long-term strategy, it’s not even excluded that BMC may want to further invest in the virtualization market and buy a hypervisor or a cross-hypervisor management platform.

In the Q4 2008 Intell will introduce its first six-core CPU based on Penryn architecture: codename Dunnington. After that step, in 2009/2010, Intel will begin the production of the Nehalem CPU based on a brand new architecture.

Nehalem will introduces major benefits for virtualization environments like the replacement of the bottlenecking Front-Side Bus (FSB) with the new QuickPath Interconnect, which integrates the memory controller onto the processor die, and the capability to run two threads at the same time for each core.

On top of that Nehalem CPU will also bring new virtualization extensions to further enhance hypervisors capabilities. One of them is the Extended Page Tables (EPT), part of the VT-x technology, which reduces the overhead caused by the page-table virtualization.

All major virtualization vendors (VMware, Microsoft, the Xen community and all the related commercial entities) are working to support Intel EPT in upcoming versions of their hypervisors since the performance benefits are expected to be remarkable.

At its conference BrainShare 2008 Novell revealed an unexpected evolution for its virtualization strategy: besides including the Xen hypervisor onto the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, the company also plans to release a stand-alone hypervisor.

Certainly based on Xen, this new platform will address several challenges: competing against VMware, Citrix and Virtual Iron which are offering their hypervisors through OEM agreements, replacing VMware ESX Server inside the just acquired PlateSpin Forge appliance, positioning the company as a more agnostic virtualization provider.

The company didn’t provide details about which operating system will be loaded into the Xen dom0 virtual machine. Probably it will be a special version of SUSE Linux with minimal OS footprint.

Update: PlateSpin contacted virtualization.info and stated that has no current plans to replace VMware ESX Server with the upcoming Novell platform inside Forge.

Fortisphere, the US startup launched in November 2007, continues to join strategic alliances: after joining the RSA Secured Partner Program last month and the PCI Security Vendor Alliance last week, the company now joins the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

Several other virtualization firms joined the DMTF, working to embrace the open standards for virtual infrastructure management that the group released in November 2007. Among them Microsoft, Virtual Iron and Fortisphere direct competitor ManageIQ.

True interoperability between virtualization platforms is far away but the Fortisphere effort in this direction is valuable. The company has now to show how these partnerships translate into concrete competitive advantages.

In a single day VMware released minor updates for all its platform products but ESX Server.

The new VMware Player, Workstation and Server builds are just fixing bugs and security vulnerabilities (including the long expected one about Shared Folders), but ACE 2.0.3 also introduces some new features:

• Power-off scripts inclusion
  ACE now allows defining a power-off script for Windows and Linux guest OSes
• Windows logon customization
  ACE now allows pre-definining the username and password to be used for new guest OSes
• MAC address pools support
  ACE now allows defining a set of MAC addresses to be assigned from the ACE management server

Trials or free versions are available for all product:

• VMware Player 2.0.3 (build 80004)
• VMware Workstation 6.0.3 (build 80004)
• VMware ACE 2.0.3 (build 80004)
• VMware Server 1.0.5 (build 79847)

Besides these updates all these products are expected to receive a major upgrade in the near future. In fact VMware is working on Server 2.0 and Workstation 6.5.

The next version of worldwide popular VMware Workstation is already expected for one feature that Apple customers can already enjoy with Fusion: the seamless window capability that VMware calls Unity.

But Workstation 6.5 has other big features to expose and virtualization.info is able to detail the complete list for beta 1 (build 74679):

• Inclusion of ACE authoring capabilities
  VMware is integrating into Workstation the corporate desktop security capabilities once only available in the ACE product. But differently from 6.0 version where customers had to buy an additional serial number to have a Workstation ACE Edition, these features are now available as standard capabilities of the basic product.
  This means virtual disks encryption, quarantined access to unauthorized networks, access control to physical hardware devices, etc.
• Introduction of analysis and debugging engine VProbe
  VProbe acts at hypervisor level and it’s able to provide informations about any aspect of the interaction between the virtual machine and the physical hardware.
  It goes well beyond traditional analysis tools that can be run at guest OS level, giving informations about virtual CPU registers, hardware virtualization state, guest OS page faults, interrupts use and much more.
  It comes with its own scripting language but not a GUI or any reporting capabilities, and it’s inspired to the DTrace tool created by Sun for its OS Solaris 10.
• Introduction of checkpoints for Record/Replay feature
  Users can now mark with checkpoints a virtual machine recorded or replayed with Record/Replay feature.
  
• Support for guest OS unattended installation
  Just like with the customization wizard offered by VirtualCenter, users can now predefine some values (administrator’s password, installation key, network settings, etc.) before installing a Windows guest OS for the first time.
• Support for smart cards at guest OS level
  A smart card reader available at host level can be used inside a virtual machines.

The first two features are specially important.

The inclusion of ACE capabilities into the basic version of Workstation means several things: first of all that VMware isn’t able to successfully sell ACE as is today, secondarily that the future strategy will probably imply selling only the management component that VMware introduced with ACE 2.0.
Now that Microsoft acquired Kidaro VMware has one more reason to completely reposition this product on the hostile security market.

The introduction of VProbe in Workstation 6.5 is just the first step for the inclusion in ESX Server, where the technology will allow VMware to introduce a new class of performance analysis and troubleshooting products.
All the vendors that offer today reporting tools for the guest OS level should pay much attention to the development of this feature because it could easily drive them out of business.

As expected VMware opens the beta program for its Powershell-based VMware Infrastructure Toolkit.

VMware already has a programming toolkit for VI 3.x based on Perl language since September 2007 for Linux and Windows, but the company still wanted to offer a parallel version based on the Microsoft PowerShell scripting.

Obviously Microsoft guys couldn’t be happier, also because their System Center Virtual Machines Manager (SCVMM), which will soon compete against VirtualCenter, is completely built on PowerShell and VMware choice is providing a great unhoped validation.

The decision to use the new scripting language may depend on the greater simplicity of PowerShell over Perl, as the TechProsaic guys demonstrate with an enlightening example. The official documentation currently available confirms this reporting that:

The learning curve for the VI Toolkit (for Windows) is much shorter than for the Perl toolkit, or for the C# and Java SDKs, and it is possible to become productive in a matter of days, or even hours, as opposed to weeks with other VI SDKs and toolkits.

VMware included over 100 cmdlets in this first beta (build 81531) but only supports 32bit platforms to run (despite the RTM will support 64bit as well).

This new VI Toolkit is expected to be released in H2 2008. Meanwhile enroll for the program here.