Year: 2009

At the end of July virtualization.info highlighted how Sony intentionally disabled the Intel VT capability in all its VAIO laptops, making its expensive hardware useless for virtualization professionals and highly undesirable for every Microsoft customer that wants to upgrade to Windows 7.
Now this short-sighted strategy is causing the company a major image damage.

A week after virtualization.info published that article the story was republished by The Register (too bad they forgot to mention our post as the original news source), and immediately after by pretty much every major news outlet including:

• Engadget: Sony laptops can’t use Windows 7’s XP mode due to disabled hardware virtualization
• ZDNet: Sony kills virtualization on Vaio notebooks
• CNET: Sony nixes Windows 7’s XP virtualization mode for current Vaio laptops
• Tom’s Hardware: Sony Vaio Have VT Disable; No Win 7 XP Mode
• Gizmodo: Sony Laptops Have Hardware Virtualization Disabled, Can’t Run Windows 7’s XP Mode
• Neowin: Sony laptops disable Windows 7’s XP Mode
• Slashdot: No Windows 7 XP Mode For Sony Vaio Z Owners

To calm down the users Microsoft probably asked a Sony VAIO product manager, Xavier Lauwaert, to address the issue on the Windows Partner blog. His post says nothing but his answer to a specific comment about the lack of VT capability provides an astonishing explanation and fix roadmap (our emphasis):

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Last week virtualization.info reported that both VMware VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.0 are being tested by a Common Criteria lab to earn the EAL4+ rating.

VMware already has the EAL4+ certification for VI 3.0.2 but ESX is not they only hypervisor that was rated that high.

Microsoft in fact just announced that Hyper-V 2008 (the first release and not the just launched R2)  achieved the EAL4+ certification as well.

It is worth to note that Microsoft earned that certification for the release candidate version of Hyper-V that is embedded in the full version of Windows Server 2008, plus the KB950050 hotfix, which upgrades the hypervisor to 1.0 RTM.

Microsoft didn’t even need to certify Hyper-V using editions that have a reduced attack surface, like the version that is embedded in Windows Server 2008 Server Core or the stand-alone Hyper-V Server 2008.

This should clarify how the typical argument that Hyper-V is less secure than ESX, because the former comes with a full copy of Windows while the latter has a very small footprint, doesn’t work at all. Unless we accept to dispute the absolute value of the Common Criteria rating, as virtualization.info suggested several times.

Disclosure: virtualization.info runs its own independent conference about virtualization technologies called Virtualization Congress.
The first edition was arranged in US in May 2009 and was co-hosted with the Citrix Synergy 2009 conference. Even if the Citrix event sponsorship didn’t influence by any mean the agenda of the Virtualization Congress, the sessions’ contents or the speakers line-up, it is still true that Citrix is a competitor of VMware and that the Virtualization Congress may be mistakenly perceived as a very humble attempt to compete with VMworld.

At the end of May Brian Madden highlighted how the imminent edition of VMware’s main conference, VMworld 2009, has some unprecedented, severe restrictions for exhibitors (as many of them are direct competitors).

Specifically, the VMworld exhibitors are not allowed to market or demonstrate products that overlap with or replace VMware offering.
Additionally, all non-VMware partners (read “competitors”) can’t have a booth larger than 10x10ft (virtualization.info received a confirmation about this from one of the event sponsors). 
Last but not least, the exhibitor employees must remain in the boundaries of their booths.

Now Citrix is unveiling an additional limitation:

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Five months after launching its flagship product, Hyper9 has completely left behind its previous life as InovaWave: its product now has an actual name, Virtualization Optimization Suite or VOS, and already hits version 1.4.

The upgrade introduces a number of new capabilities that extend the core search engine:

• Dashboard
• Scheduled searches
• Inclusion of new predefined searches (unused VMs, orphaned VMDKs and files, etc.)
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0

The company also renamed its capability to track and compare performance and history of different virtual machines as VMDNA.

The rumors that circulated for months are now officially confirmed: VMware postpones the VMworld Europe from Q1 to Q4, just one month after the North America main conference.

This means at least three things:

• The Europeans that planned to go to the VMworld 2010 instead of the imminent VMworld 2009 in San Francisco to limit the travel expenses will have to wait an entire year instead of just few months.
• All the exhibiting vendors will have to build two conference teams to manage the two VMworld logistics with just one month of delay from each other.
  The biggest companies are perfectly ready to do so but the smallest VMware partners may have issues.
• Some customers that plan to attend both events won’t be able to do so because the quarter budget probably doesn’t allow to do so.

The early feedbacks expressed by well-known members of the virtualization community are not exactly positive: here, here and here.
Anyway VMware may have a few reasons to do so:

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By now most virtualization.info readers should know that Red Hat plans to (finally) unveil its KVM-based virtualization offering on Sep. 1, at the Red Hat Summit 2009 in Chicago (and maybe at VMware VMworld 2009 as well).

The new product portfolio will include not one but two management solutions:

• Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting.
• Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (the connection broker and management console SolidICE acquired from Qumranet in September 2008)

While the public knows how SolidICE looks like, nobody really saw the first management solution above, except the few lucky beta testers that Red Hat secretly selected before June.

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As virtualization.info reported in April, Microsoft is working on a new version of Virtual PC simply called Windows Virtual PC(WVPC), which supports Windows 7 as host OS and can launch a special virtual machine called Windows XP Mode.

Windows XP Mode is just a pre-configured VM with Windows XP SP3 as guest OS, but it seems especially integrated with Windows 7 because the new Virtual PC engine introduces seamless application publishing, USB virtualization and multi-monitor support.

The Windows XP Mode VM is available at no additional cost for Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise SKUs but requires a CPU with AMD-V or Intel VT enabled (so all the Sony customers worldwide will be unable to use it).

Windows 7 was released yesterday to Microsoft partners through MSDN and TechNet facilities,  so the company made available the release candidate of this new Virtual PC to grant compatibility.

Microsoft has included a few refinements to this new build:

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While the virtualization community waits to see how Microsoft will be able to apply application virtualization to multi-tier back-end services with App-V for Servers, the company officially opens the App-V 4.6 beta program.

This version is still oriented to client applications but introduces a major new feature: the support for 64bit platforms (including the just released Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2).
For the first time customers will be able to sequence a 64bit application, something that nobody else on the market can do at the moment according to Microsoft.

Microsoft expects to finalize App-V 4.6 during H1 2010. Meanwhile you can enroll for the beta program here.

As usual VKernel continues to release updates for its products at a very fast pace. Two months after version 4.0, the startup is ready to launch the first minor upgrade for its flagship product: Capacity Analyzer 4.1.

The new build introduces a number of enhancements and some interesting new automated reporting capabilities:

• Automatic generation of alerts upon detection of ”abnormal” system behavior in capacity utilizations.
• Automatic reporting of key environment capacity trends.
• Automatic generation of utilization alerts upon detection of virtual machines’ drives activity

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VMware achieved the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ for VI3 last year. Even before that the company submitted VI3.5 to the EWA Canada test lab to obtain the same level.

Now that vSphere 4.0 is out, VMware is of course trying to get a third EAL4+ rating for its new platform.

As virtualization.info already wrote in the past the certification is valuable as long as the submitted Protection Profile is a meaningful reference model.
This is the PP that VMware submitted to earn the VI3 EAL4+ certification.

The company expects that vSphere 4.0 earns the EAL4+ rating by H2 2010.