Year: 2009

At the end of July VMware announced the financial results for Q2 2009.
The company is handling well the financial crisis, keeping a flat growth rate, but the profit dropped significantly and it’s evident that the new licenses revenue trend is not positive. In details:

The VMware revenue remain substantially flat compared to the Q2 2008, with a 3% loss in US and a 3% growth abroad.
In particular VMware experienced a double-digit year-over-year booking increase in China, Japan, Canada, Brazil and UK.

The positive balance depends more and more on the software maintenance and professional services (+32% revenue) as the new licenses revenue significantly drops by 20%.

VMware is also suffering a 38% loss in profit, moving from $52.3M in Q2 2008 to $32.5M.

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In December 2008 Virtual Bridges closed a major deal with IBM to bundle a Linux-friendly version of its Win4VDI connection broker (called VERDE) with Canonical Ubuntu Linux and the IBM Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS), which includes Lotus Symphony, Notes and other IBM products.

The deal was especially relevant because this bundle was designed to deliver a VDI solution based on the KVM virtualization platform that Ubuntu embeds. And IBM was the first major ISV to support its enterprise products inside KVM virtual machines.

Eight months later Virtual Bridges, IBM and Canonical are back with VERDE 2.0.

The first new thing in this release is the product strategy: Virtual Bridges completely replaces Win4VDI with VERDE, avoiding to market and sell two different versions of the same connection broker.

The second and most important news is related to a new key component of the package: a client-side virtualization platform.

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On July 22 Microsoft released the long awaited Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2. The same day anyway Microsoft also released the stand-alone version of hypervisor, called Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

Compared to the first release, which had a subset of the features available in the Windows Server 2008 edition, this new stand-alone Hyper-V seems to match the capabilities of its Windows-embedded counterpart (this post will be updated if we’ll receive different information). And this includes the most-wanted Live Migration capability.

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After what appeared to be an endless timeframe, Symantec finally updates its application virtualization platform acquired from Altris in January 2007 and once called Software Virtualization Solution (SVS).

The product name changed from SVS to Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV) and jumped from version 2.1 to version 6.1.

This first public build of the platform (6.1.4108, dubbed as Maintenance Pack 1) introduces a number of interesting features:

• Layer isolation granularity
  The administrator can define what portion of the real OS can be seen inside each virtual layer
• Reset Point
  Like in hardware virtualization with virtual machines snapshots, the administrator can define checkpoints and revert to them if something goes wrong inside the virtual layer. The changes made after a reset point can be integrated back into the persistent part of the virtual layer.
• Cloned layers and dependent layers
  Both the persistent part and the customizations of a virtual layer can be cloned on demand.
  Like in hardware virtualization with clones and linked clones, the cloned virtual layer can depend on its parent.
• Layer Patch
  Updates for applications inside a virtual layer can be delivered without repackaging and reshipping the virtual layer.
  The update happens through a Layer Patch which is the delta between the original virtual layer and the updated virtual layer.
• Autorun from Layer and Deactivate on Last Processes Exit
  Any real application can be obliged to run inside a virtual layer every time it starts.
  The changes that are produced by the user during its use can stay inside the virtual layer or can be destroyed by resetting the virtual layer as soon as the real application is terminated.

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After the release of Migrate 8.1, Novell releases Protect 8.1.

Both Migrate and Protect come from the original PlateSpin PowerConvert. Novell split it in these two products after completing the acquisition of its subsidiary.
The idea behind this move is that customers may want to use the P2V migration engine for disaster recovery (something that PlateSpin evangelized for years) and so they want to have specific features for this task.

The new Protect 8.1 introduces the following features:

• Live incremental replication with block-based transfers
• File-level restore
• Support for live incremental replications in V2P migrations
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista

Richard Garsthagen, the popular VMware Senior Evangelist behind the organization of VMworld Europe, released a new free tool called vAudit.

This tool allows to track a VMware View 3.x environment is being used by the users, auditing their activity on the virtual desktops (logon and logon failures, working hours, logoff and disconnection) and showing it on a timeline.

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vSphere 4.0 is out and the virtualization.info Bookstore is getting filled with fresh new books about it, but the large majority of VMware customers are still on VI 3.x, so they should be happy to know that one of the bestseller about this platform is now available for free.

The book is VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide, written by Scott Herold (Lead Architect, Virtualization, Quest), Ron Oglesby (Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, Dell) and Mike Laverick (the man behind RTMF Education).

On his popular blog Mike announces the availability of the book for free and offers a couple of additional chapters for free as well.

Download everything here:

• VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide
• Quick Start Guide to ESX3i
• Upgrade Guide to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5

The Sony customers that bought a VAIO laptop in the last couple of years and are interested in virtualization should know by now that their machines are not worth the money spent.
The company in fact completely locked down the computers’ BIOS, preventing the capability to enable the Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) extension.

For the newcomers, the Intel VT technology was introduced in November 2005, featured by Pentium 4 662 and 672 CPUs.
Today VT is included in almost every Intel CPU, from the Atom mobile processor to the Xeon 5500 server processors, up to the upcoming new generations Core i3, i5 and i7.

This extension is used by the virtualization vendors to perform some virtual machines stunts, like running a 64bit guest operating system on top of a 32bit host OS, without much overhead.
Every virtualization platform uses it, commercial and open source ones, hosted ones and bare-metal ones (aka hypervisors). And this list includes products like VMware ESX and Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual PC, Citrix XenServer, Oracle VM and Sun VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, Red Hat KVM and others.

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As expected, Microsoft announces today the sign off of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, which includes Hyper-V R2.

The finalized feature list is known since June, when Microsoft released the Release Candidate:

• support for virtual machines live migration (expect Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition)
• support for virtual disks hot plug
• support for up to 64 logical processors (8 cores for up to 8 physical processors) 
• support for up to 1TB physical RAM (Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition only supports 32GB)
• support for up to 384 1-way virtual machines (8 vCPUs per logical processor)
• support for Processor Compatibility Mode (migrate the virtual machines across different generations of the same CPU vendor)

  

• support for Core Parking and CPU power consumption control
• support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT, formerly called nested page tables or NPT – specifically AMD RVI and Intel EPT)
• support for TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs)
• support for Jumbo Frames
• support for Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq)

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Just a couple of days ago Microsoft released the source code of its Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V under the GPLv2 license.
Only time will tell if the integration of these paravirtualization drivers into the Linux kernel (something that is under evaluation) will translate into a concrete benefit for the Microsoft customers.

For now the priority remains to have the two most popular enterprise distributions, Red Hat and Novell, inside the Hyper-V virtual machines. And Microsoft didn’t help much about the former so far.

Things are changing anyway : the new R2 version of the Linux Integration Components will finally support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3.
Unfortunately they still lack the support for mouse integration, that must be provided by the Linux distributor, and they still only support virtual machines with a single vCPU.

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