Year: 2008

Two months after leaving the stealth mode, Fortisphere is ready to release its first product, also the first release of 2008.

Fortisphere is one of the newest startup included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar, entering the so-called VM Lifecycle Management market.

Virtual Insight is the first module of an entire suite called Virtual Essentials, which introduces monitoring and inventory capabilities for virtual machines, from the virtual hardware to the guest OS applications.

As most VM lifecycle management solutions, this product offers virtual machines tagging and family tree tracking, along with a complete reporting system.

The next module, called Virtual Foresight, will instead bring in a complete policy management system as Fortisphere preannounced:

• Migratory Policy Enforcement
  Embedded policy management ensures enforcement travels with the VM throughout the lifecycle, regardless of origin, organization, location, owner or state.
• Centralized Policy Store
  Provides organizations with a central repository of operations, security, network, performance and management best practices.
• Policy Inheritance
  Ensures parent policies are automatically applied to clones and copies.
• Manual and Automated Response
  With built-in and extensible best practice policies, users can define a wide range of responses, from informational notifications to automated actions.
• Correlative Policy Engine
  Provides correlative analysis of virtual machine and hypervisor data to evaluate risks and compliance violations in a business relevant context. The powerful engine leverages real-time application, configuration, and network information for policy application, evaluation and enforcement.

Unfortunately there no release date has been announced for Virtual Foresight.

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

Sun recently published a very interesting 120-pages whitepaper which introduces to hardware virtualization and describes in details the architecture design of its existing and upcoming hypervisors: LDoms (for SPARC systems) and xVM Server (for x86 and x64 systems). It also includes an analysis of VMware ESX Server and a comparison with its architecture.

…”Virtual Machine Monitor Basics” on page 9 discusses the core of hardware virtualization, the VMM, as well as requirements for the VMM and several types of VMM implementations.
“The x86 Processor Architecture” on page 21 describes features of the x86 processor architecture that are pertinent to virtualization.
“SPARC Processor Architecture” on page 29 describes features of the SPARC processor that affect virtualization implementations….
“Sun xVM Server” on page 39 discusses a paravirtualized Solaris OS that is based on an open source VMM implementation for x86[6] processors and is planned for inclusion in a future Solaris release.
“Sun xVM Server with Hardware VM (HVM)” on page 63 continues the discussion of Sun xVM Server for the x86 processors that support hardware virtual machines: Intel-VT and AMD-V.
“Logical Domains” on page 79 discusses Logical Domains (LDoms), supported on Sun servers that utilize UltraSPARC T1 or T2 processors, and describes Solaris OS support for this feature.
“VMware” on page 97 discusses the VMware implementation for the VMM…

xVM Server is expected in beta before the end of this month, so this is recommended reading.

Read it here.

The upcoming VMworld Europe is not just the new edition of Technical Solution Exchange (TSX) with a different name. VMware has granted that is working hard to provide as much new contents as possible, including the keynotes, which will be performed by Diane Greene, VMware President, and Mendel Rosenblum, VMware Chief Scientist.

While some things will be completely new, others are being greatly improved, like the Hands-on Labs. This year attendees will be able to play with all companies products, each one in a dedicated lab:

• VMware Update Manager
• VMware Site Recovery Manager
• VMware Dunes Lifecycle Management
• VMware Stage Manager
• VMware Guide Consolidation
• VMware Consolidated Backup Integration
• Automating VMware with PowerShell
• VMware Lab Manager

Note that two new products appear: one comes from the Dunes Technology acquisition, the Dunes Lifecycle Management, while another is brand new: the Stage Manager.

virtualization.info will be in Cannes to cover the event, live blogging during the keynotes and reporting about these new products (check previous coverage of TSX 2007 in Nice and VMworld 2007 in San Francisco).

At the event several US product managers will perform the sessions. Last week virtualization.info published a video of Carter Shanklin, Product Manager for End-User Enablement. This week instead our guest is Ashwin Kotian:

QT_OnloadWriteOBJECT_XHTML(‘http://www.vi3demo.com/vmworld/Ashwin1_3.mov’, ‘400’, ‘240’, ”,
‘autoplay’, ‘false’,
’emb#bgcolor’, ‘black’,
‘align’, ‘middle’);

Register for VMworld Europe 2008 here.

After mastering OS virtualization with Solaris Containers (aka Zones) in Solaris 10, Sun is now approaching the hardware virtualization market, with its own implementation of Xen hypervisor called xVM Server.

Officially announced in November 2007, xVM Server will feature a Solaris kernel instead of a Linux one, and will be offered as stand-alone product.

Besides this hypervisor Sun will also provide an enterprise management solution called Ops Center, which will be able to handle large-scale deployments of physical and virtual machines.

On longer terms Sun may want to integrate these two products with another one: a connection broker for virtual desktop environments (VDI) called Sun VDI 1.0.

So far Sun only revealed a pretty general release date for xVM Server and xVM Ops Center, both planned for Q2 2008, but virtualization.info just received a detailed roadmap which unveils beta milestones for the hypervisor and its management solutions:

virtualization.info also learned that Sun is working on Solaris Containers 2.0.

All these components added to its hardware offering (servers, storage and thin clients) allow Sun to enter the hardware virtualization market as a major player, possibly the only one able to provide (and support) the entire computing stack for virtualization purposes.

Despite Xen powers several offerings today (Citrix, Virtual Iron, Novell and Red Hat), the Sun one may have additional chances to get adopted.

CNN Money just predicted an upcoming IPO from SWsoft (soon to be renamed Parallels).

While this is just a speculation, virtualization.info heard several rumors during the entire 2007 about a SWsoft/Parallels IPO which was postponed several times.

The stellar IPO performance of VMware, last summer, may lead to think 2008 is the right year to go.

After the GlassHouse Technologies acquisition of RapidApp, this is the second time a consulting company gets acquired, confirming that virtualization services market is experiencing a healthy growth.

Despite the acquisition is uncommon for VMware, usually buying software development firms (Akimbi, Propero, Determina, Dunes Technologies) it may highlight the need for experienced workforce in a small amount of time, like emerged with Sciant acquisition.

Quoting from Reuters:

VMware Inc. has acquired assets of privately held information technology services provider Foedus, a spokesman for the business software maker said.

VMware spokesman Greg Eden said late on Wednesday that the deal had closed earlier this month, and 30 Foedus employees would move over to his company.

Eden declined to discuss financial terms…

After announcing the beginning of private beta phase, SWsoft (soon to be renamed Parallels) finally unveils a detailed feature list for its upcoming Server product:

• Dual architecture (hosted virtualization platform / hypervisor)
• Support for x86 and x64 architectures (only with Intel VT-x)
• Support for up to 64Gb of RAM at host level
• Support for Mac OS X Server as host and guest OS
• Support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux and Sun Solaris as guest OSes
• Support for 4-way virtual SMP
• Support for ACPI at guest level
• Experimental support for Intel VT-d
• Open APIs
• Remote management console

Despite the obvious interest in Mac OS X Server virtualization, a first in the virtualization industry, the most compelling capability is the dual architecture: Parallels Server will act as a hosted virtualization platform (like VMware Server or Microsoft Virtual Server) or as hypervisor (like VMware ESX Server or Citrix XenServer) depending on which configuration the customer choose.

So far the company didn’t provide much details about this unique characteristic so that virtualization.info reported the inability of Parallels Server to run a hypervisor. As soon as possible we’ll provide a deep analysis of the platform internals.

Even if the current beta is private SWsoft is now accepting new candidates for the program. Enroll it here.

After the New and Improved Features in VMware VI 3.5, Mike Laverick, now publishes another useful document: the VMware ESX Server 3i Guide.

Like the previous guide, also this one is based on the beta version of ESX Server.

Get it here free of charge.

Sun and VMware just published benchmarks of ESX Server 3.0.2 running on a Sun Blade X8440 with 4 x dual core AMD Opteron CPUs (3GHz).

It’s interesting to report that the system achieved slightly worse performances than ESX Server 3.0.1 on Dell PowerEdge 6950 with a very similar configuration.

With this analysis Sun joined Dell and HP in VMwark adoption, the VMware benchmarking system launched in July 2007.

Read the detailed report here.

Thanks to the VROOM! blog for the news.

Update: VMware published a second version of this benchmark, performed with same equipment and VMware ESX Server 3.5 instead of 3.0.2.

Numbers demonstrate a performance increase of 5%.

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

FalconStor Software, Inc., the market leader in disk-based data protection solutions, and Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class software solutions for server virtualization, today announced a global strategic alliance to offer integrated storage and server virtualization solutions to maximize IT productivity and business continuity for organizations of all sizes. The combined solutions improve data center resource management by increasing utilization of existing physical resources, optimizing virtual infrastructure performance through real-time data migration, and delivering more cost-effective and reliable high availability and disaster recovery. The companies will collaborate on marketing, sales, product integration and cross-support to OEM and reseller partners worldwide.

…

The FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) and FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) support both iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage and have been certified on the latest release of Virtual Iron, Version 4.2. The FalconStor solutions provide a number of unique capabilities for the Virtual Iron platform including:

• Storage Migration for Virtual Machines – Virtualization combined with built-in mirroring allows seamless migration between storage arrays without downtime.
• Extended support for a wide range of SMB and enterprise-class storage arrays already certified by FalconStor.
• Application-aware snapshot agents that provide transactionally-consistent snapshots of data for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, SAP, and Oracle running in virtual machines.
• Thin provisioning for virtual machines maximizes disk space to optimize storage management within virtualized environments.

…

FalconStor and Virtual Iron will host a joint webcast on February 7th, 2008, featuring the combined capabilities. Register here.