Year: 2009

With an unprecedented move, today Microsoft releases the Hyper-V paravirtualization drivers for Linux guest OSes, called Linux Integration Components, as GPLv2 open source software.

When EMC, the VMware parent company, signed a 3-years alliance on virtualization with Microsoft virtualization.info wondered if the hell was frozen (not the case as the two companies seem to call this co-opetition), but this goes much beyond that.

To be credible in the enterprise Microsoft has to support Linux inside its virtual machines. And Linux has to deliver enterprise-grade performance.

To achieve the goal the company releases the Linux Integration Components as a free stand-alone package since September 2008.
Through them Microsoft supports Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise as guest OS, which is a first step in the right direction but certainly not enough to satisfy the many customers that have more than one Linux distribution to consolidate.

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Last month virtualization.info announced a new initiative called OneHourOn.

OneHourOn is a live webcast that virtualization.info will host from its cutting-edge Rent-A-Lab facility in Zurich.
The webcast shows a live configuration and/or management of a popular virtualization product among the ones that we daily track in the news.

There are no slides at all. Everything is performed live and directly on product consoles.

Our first show featured the configuration of VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 with EMC Celerra NS20 storage arrays, something that is not exactly easy to test without the proper lab equipment.

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For months now HP had to tolerate the coverage that press, blogs, forum and newsgroups dedicated to the Unified Computing System (UCS) that Cisco officially launched in March.
Even virtualization.info, which never considered the blade technology as strongly related to virtualization, has closely followed the UCS announcements, believing to see a new paradigm of integration between a virtual infrastructure (VMware vSphere in this case) and the physical layer below it (but this is something that Cisco still has to demonstrate).

Cisco just entered the x86 server market, and while it already appears in a very strong position thanks to its partnership with VMware and EMC, it still is a newcomer,
No customers would easily jump on the new bandwagon without a careful evaluation of the Cisco strategy, capability to execute, technology value and ROI.

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Oracle continues to stay mum about its integration plan for Oracle VM, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron hypervisors, but don’t hold anything when it’s time to talk about the new competitors.

Just two months ago the company dismissed the VMware virtual appliance initiative and its Marketplace, saying that it doesn’t contain anything but toy appliances.
One month later Oracle decided to clarify how the word co-opetition is not in its vocabulary, modifying the support policy to exclude every virtualization vendor that offer a hypervisor for x86/x64 architectures.

Today it’s time to hit Red Hat (and by some degrees Novell).
On its corporate blog last week Oracle highlighted its commitment to Xen and the open source:

…Oracle’s Linux commitment began in 1998 with the first commercial database on Linux. Not only does Oracle run the whole business on Linux, but also run the base development on Linux for all our products. Today Oracle has over 9,000 developers working on Linux and provides Global Linux Support in over 100 countries…

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Yes, Oracle is slowly increasing the frequency of its incursions in the virtualization world.
Now that the company controls three hypervisors (its own Oracle VM, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron) it’s expected that a master plan comes out sooner or later.

For now Oracle just shows a little piece of it, by announcing its paravirtualized (PV) drivers for Windows guest OSes.

Oracle offers them for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as for Windows XP and Vista. For each one there’s a 32bit and a 64bit version. Of course they are only available for the Oracle VM hypervisor.

The paravirtualized drivers improves the performance of virtual machines when there’s no chance to leverage the capabilities of hardware-assisted virtualization technologies like AMD-V RVI (available in the Quad-Core Opteron CPUs since September 2007) and Intel EPT (available in the new Xeon 5500 CPUs).

While enhancing the performance of Windows guest OSes, the PV drivers that Oracle is shipping also imply some limitations: once installed them, the virtual machines state can’t be saved and restore anymore and live migration is no more available.

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After a short public beta program, Vizioncore released the fourth major release of its vRanger Pro.

As detailed in the previous post, the product is evolving into something articulated, a Data Protection Platform (DPP) as Vizioncore calls it, that will be released in three phases.

During this first phase the company delivers the new pluggable architecture called Direct-To-Target.
Direct-To-Target allows to extend the product with additional components that provide support for multiple protocols and storage targets.
It’s likely that the company will release these components in the second or third phase, and that will offer them as a-la-carte options. For now vRanger Pro 4.0 supports SFTP and CIFS repositories.

The virtual machines backup and restore now happens without the need to plug into VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), going straight from the virtualization host to the backup repository and vice versa.
vRanger is also able to perform multiple ESX backups in parallel.

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After the acquisition of PlateSpin, Novell made several changes inside its subsidiary.
virtualization.info already published some of them, like the migration of the development team in India and the replacement of several members that left after the acquisition.

Novell also split the original PlateSpin PowerConvert in two products: Migrate and Protect.

Migrate gets a new update this week, reaching version 8.1.
The product now supports Windows Server 2008 (it’s not clear if this includes the imminent R2 edition but probably not), Windows Vista and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. But the major new feature of this release is the support Sun Solaris 10.

This support is very specific: the P2V migration can be performed only from a physical Solaris box with SPARC architecture to a Sun Solaris 10 Container (aka Zone).
The other way around is not available at the moment, and it’s not possible to perform a live migration.

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Just a few weeks after the launch of Connection Broker 6.0, Leostream is back with the first minor update.

Connection Broker 6.1 introduces enhancements to its policy management and reporting layers, plus the following new features:

• Web Access to Citrix XenApp
  End-users can launch Citrix XenApp desktops and applications via the Connection Broker web browser.
• Wake-on-LAN for Physical Machines
  Connection Broker can interact with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) power up physical machines through Wake-on-LAN.

Just yesterday virtualization.info reported how Citrix is reorganizing its application virtualization division by appointing a new CTO.

VMware is doing exactly the same: virtualization.info has learned from trusted sources that the company is looking for a new CTO just for the desktop division, to take care of View, ThinApp, the new remote desktop in co-development with Teradici, and probably the client hypervisor as well.
This new CTO won’t replace the well-known Steve Herrod but rather work side by side with him to lead the VDI and application virtualization effort.

By a coincidence, this morning TechCrunch reports that Mark Lucovsky, Director of Engineering at Google, left the search engine to take a job at VMware.

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Just last month virtualization.info highlighted how Microsoft may be working under the radar to to hit VMware where the vendor is betting the most: on the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiative.

Part of this silent effort involves the improvement of the RDP protocol to efficiently handle the heavy multimedia protocols that every VDI client has to render.

Anyway this is just one piece of the VDI story that Microsoft may be shaping.
Another one is the so called client hypervisor, needed to break free the mobile VDI clients from the corporate network dependency. 
On this front Microsoft is deadly silent but it’s evident that the company could push the button at any moment: nobody in the market has the capability to distribute a client hypervisor on million devices like Microsoft.
They could write a dedicated version of Hyper-V and embed it in Windows 7 (or its successor), or just wait for Citrix and Intel to do the dirty work, and then use their upcoming XenClient (which will be free of charge) with an OEM license.

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