Year: 2008

That’s right: virtualization.info launches its first independent conference about virtualization technologies.

VMware VMworld, Microsoft WinHEC (or TechEd), Citrix App Delivery Conference certainly are great technical events, so was not easy to think about a conference that could add value on top of these ones. But at virtualization.info we had the feeling that the industry needed something more, something new.

We wanted to create an event that doesn’t compete with the conferences above, but complements them with unique features. Today, for this first announcement, we just want to highlight a couple of them:

• First of all, we wanted Virtualization Congress to be truly independent.
  Virtualization Congress is an event open to every company in the space, even the newest one. For this reason we invitated almost every firm in the virtualization market and each one can have the same opportunities.
  The answer we got was amazing: the three biggest players in the space, VMware, Citrix and Microsoft promptly answered and will be with us as top sponsors. Besides them we’ll have some distinguished emerging stars like ManageIQ, Quest, Marathon Technologies, Veeam and VMLogix.
• Secondarily we wanted it to be truly useful for every attendee.

  At Virtualization Congress these vendors will not present boring, endless, introductory PowerPoint slides.
  On stage these guys have one hour of time to describe a concrete, realistic case study with real-world, circumstantiated challenges, and to show how to address those challenges with one or more features of their products.
  No marketing sessions, no solutions overviews, no wasting time.

Such event must be held at the right time, in the right place, and it’s not an easy decision to make.

In the end we decided to place it towards the end of the year, as the ideal climax of all virtualization efforts spent during the previous months, as the best moment to think about the future ahead.
And we decided to place in a continent that more than others is sensitive to competition, because its companies have to compete every day for energy, space and money.

And to follow this path, Virtualization Congress 2008 will take place October 14-16, 2008 in London, UK.

There is so much more to say about this event, but we’ll save something for the upcoming weeks.

virtualization.info invites all its readers to visit http://www.virtualizationcongress.com to learn more and register for the industry-wide event of the year.

In February 26-28 VMware hosted the first European edition of its VMworld conference and immediately collected an impressive success with 4,500 attendees.

The event replaced another technical conference, the Technical Solution Exchange (TSX), which originally was open only to VMware partners.

virtualization.info was there to provide a live coverage of the keynotes (day 1 and day 2) and to publish our traditional sum up the Monday after.

The explicit message of this first European edition of VMworld has been: VMware sponsors are worth much more than VMware itself.

Despite the unique opportunity to talk to so many European companies for the first time, VMware co-founders Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum didn’t dedicate much space to the company vision.
The two preferred to give a more than remarkable part of their time to some prestigious partners (IBM, HP, Dell and Fujitsu Siemens) which didn’t add any value to the discussion.

Customers and prospects looking for guidance from two of the brightest minds of the last decade, found themselves looking at a sort of prime time showcase for OEMs.

An unacceptable debut considering the incredible amount of topics that VMware executives could cover on stage.
Some critical products, unveiled through brief press announcements, like Lifecycle Manager, Project North Star (formerly Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite) or VMsafe couldn’t find more than five minutes in two one-hour-and-a-half keynotes. And it seemed a paradox that the time dedicated to the sponsors was more than double the time dedicated to these technologies that are marking in a radical way the company’s direction for the future.

Obviously VMware founders could have even more topics to cover: the evolution of ESX Server security capabilities with the integration of Determina technologies, the company strategy for the SMB market with the launch of VMware Server 2.0, the progresses in the standardized benchmarking with SPEC collaboration, the progresses in the para-virtualization adoption through the VMI interface, and many more.

The implicit message of this first European edition of VMworld has been: the European market is yet at the dawn of the virtualization era.

What remained of the keynotes, after all the space taken by the VMware sponsors, was spent in a long recap about what the company is doing and how many customers and partners it collected so far.

The history of VMware, the evolution of virtualization, and all the other academic stuff left few minutes available for topics like where the company is going and how.

Additionally, the entire tune of the conference sounded much like pioneering the wild European market: virtualization.info collected tens of negative feedbacks about the introductory level of most sessions.

The overall theme has been: nothing more than hype for Europe.

The fact that VMware dedicated so much space to its sponsors during the keynotes is not something bad in absolute. Part of the McAfee intervention about the VMsafe integration was welcome because part of a new technology.

What really disturbed was that VMware sponsors were granted time to speak about more than well-known topics, ESX Server 3i first and VDI later, which were announced and covered by worldwide press several times since September 2007.

The off-stage announcements didn’t enrich the overall message at all: each technology or product or alliance bulletin was about something already released (Lab Manager), already announced (Stage Manager, Site Recovery Manager, ESX Server 3i embedded in OEMs servers), or not yet available (Lifecycle Manager, Scalable Virtual Image, VMsafe).

Not a single new product was released, and even the upcoming ones seemed all the same to more than one attendee.

As result the VMware stock market performance didn’t improve at all, keeping the same $60 value maintained the whole February:

Conclusion

The value of VMworld Europe is not in discussion: any virtualization professional should consider to attend for the immense value of networking and the chance to see multiple new products in a full immersion week.

Despite that VMware customers should carefully evaluate how much they expect to learn, until at least VMware reconsiders its message for the European audience.

This market takes competition very very seriously and doesn’t concede the leader position so easily.

What has been announced during the conference timeframe:

Products and services from VMware:

• VMsafe
• Project North Star

Products and services from other virtualization vendors:

• Veeam Backup
• BMC extends Tripwire support to ESX Server

Acquisitions, partnerships and alliances:

• McAfee signs OEM agreement with VMware
• VMware signs OEM agreement with Sun
• Fortisphere joins VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program
• Stonesoft joins VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program
• Storwize joins VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program

• Novell acquires PlateSpin

After getting popularity with a series of useful tools for ESX Server administrators, the US/russian startup Veeam seems ready for prime time and launches Veeam Backup.

The new product performs both (incremental) backups and replication for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 virtual machines, allowing file-level restore. Additionally, it supports VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB).

The interface of Veeam Backup has been merged into a popular free utility that Veeam offers since early days: FastSCP. So customers can download the free tool and unlock the backup features inside it just inserting a license file.

Get a trial here.

With this release Veeam basically declares war to Vizioncore, which has been one of the very few players in town since a while to offer disaster recovery solutions for the VMware platform.

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

Announced in October 2007, XenDesktop is the upcoming Citrix VDI solution that will merge together capabilities from Provisioning Server (the OS provisioning platform), XenServer (the hypervisor) and the now defunct Desktop Server (the connection broker).

Citrix finally opens the beta program and reveals its key features:

• Desktop Delivery Controller
  Connects office workers to their personalized desktops with the best performance, ease of use and rich desktop experience.
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
  Enterprise-class virtualization infrastructure that creates the foundation for delivering virtual desktops and offers advanced management features.
• Virtual Desktop Provisioning
  Stream a single desktop image to create many virtual desktops in the data center on demand, enabling simplified management and lower network storage costs.
• XenDesktop Setup Tool
  A simple wizard to enable IT to quickly create and deliver hundreds of virtual desktop.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Core Security discovered a serious bug in Shared Folders implementation available in VMware Workstation, Player and ACE:

…

A vulnerability was found in VMware’s shared folders mechanism that grants users of a Guest system read and write access to any portion of the Host’s file system including the system folder and other security-sensitive files. Exploitation of these vulnerability allows attackers to break out of an isolated Guest system to compromise the underlying Host system that controls it.

Successful exploitation requires that the Shared Folder’s feature to be enabled which is the default on VMware products that have the feature AND at least one folder of the Host system is configured for sharing…

The famous security firm also developed an exploit to prove the risks of this vulnerability which is available here (source code only), along with a long explaination of the flaw.

Core Security initially discovered the bug in October 2007 and, following full disclosure code of ethics, informed VMware before anything else. Despite an immediate answer, VMware delayed the release of the bug fix for months until the security firm decided to publish this advisory to push for a remedy.

At today the only remedy available is to disable the Shared Folders.

In the new VirtualCenter 2.5 VMware introduced a non documented passthrough authentication option. Stuart Radnidge discovered how to enable it:

…

To use it, simply add -passthroughAuth -s vchostname to the end of the shortcut used to launch the VI 2.5 client.

By default it uses the Negotiate SSPI provider, however since they have fully implemented the interface you can change that behaviour to use Kerberos by adding the following within the node in the vpxd.cfg file on the VC server:

Kerberos

Ben Armstrong, Program Manager on Core Virtualization at Microsoft, publishes on his corporate blog a short but interesting insight about Hyper-V internals which explain why Hyper-V performance in installing guest operating systems is worse than Virtual Server 2005 R2 one:

With Virtual Server and Virtual PC we only had emulated devices to use – and as a result we spent a lot of time optimizing and tweaking the performance of these emulated devices. When we implemented the emulated devices under Hyper-V we had to remove many of these optimizations due to the entirely different architecture of Hyper-V. We did not, however, spend much time re-optimizing the emulated devices on Hyper-V because we had the new synthetic device architecture where we have focused our attention for performance tuning.

…

1. Yes – operating system installation on Hyper-V is slower than on Virtual Server / Virtual PC.
2. No – I do not expect this to change much for the first release of Hyper-V.
3. Yes – once you are up and running and have integration services installed performance of Hyper-V virtual machines is much better than Virtual Server / Virtual PC.

Quoting from the BMC official announcement:

BMC Software today extended its leadership in the heated service automation and virtualization management markets, announcing the immediate availability of Tripwire Enterprise for VMWare ESX Server, the industry’s first policy-based solution for ensuring compliance and security in this virtual computing environment.

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The new agentless product for VMware ESX Server provides continuous compliance to operational, regulatory and security standards. Tripwire Enterprise for VMware ESX Server does so through out-of-the-box and custom configuration assessment policies that allow customers to proactively manage their configurations. Tripwire uniquely combines CIS benchmark-based policies with the ability to detect changes to the infrastructure that are not in compliance with security policies to ensure control of all configuration changes across the hypervisor…

Quoting from the Stonesoft official announcement:

…

The VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program will provide Stonesoft the technical and marketing resources needed to fully test, support and market StoneGate products to companies looking to secure their virtual network environments.

With their software-based design and production-proven technology, StoneGate solutions stand out in their ability to adapt to virtual environments. Stonesoft has already used the platform internally for several years and is now offering it for customer use. Stonesoft has also several years of extensive experience in providing security solutions for virtual servers and networks running on IBM System z environment…

Quoting from the Fortisphere official announcement:

Fortisphere, a leading provider of virtual machine lifecycle management software, today announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.

As a VMware Select Level TAP program member, Fortisphere will have access to the technology, integration points and marketing resources that ensure an ongoing collaborative product development strategy. Through this partnership, Fortisphere will continue to develop and integrate its product suite, Virtual Essentials, to positively enhance virtual platforms, providing extended management capabilities within the virtual infrastructure…