Year: 2009

The new relationship between VMLogix and Citrix (which is OEM’in LabManager in its Citrix Essentials for XenServer) is generating some interesting developments.

VMLogix announced yesterday the upcoming support for Amazon EC2, the on-demand virtual infrastructure powered by Xen that makes Citrix so proud.

The idea that a virtual lab automation product can create testing and QA virtual machines inside the cloud without wasting money and resources on the on-premises virtual infrastructure is fascinating but not new: Skytap, a younger competitor of VMLogix, is focused on this since day one.

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Last week virtualization.info wrote about the private beta program of VMware Workstation 7.0.
It seems that the company is also working on the next version of Fusion (2.5? 3.0?) as MacNN reports:

…The private beta, released to a select group of beta testers, offers simpler access to common tasks in the Virtual Machine Library, added support for DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3 functions, experimental OpenGL 2.1 support, and a new “migration assistant” for moving from Windows XP or Vista to the Mac.

Other modifications in the preview provide an “always-on” application menu where users can start Windows applications directly, and changes to the automatic updates to help with checking, downloading and installing updates. Additional support is also included for the Mac OS X 10.6 (32-bit only), along with experimental guest support for Windows 7…

In May 2008 Credit Suisse launched a very interesting spinoff company called DynamicOps, which is competing in the VM lifecycle management space with Embotics, Fortisphere, ManageIQ and very soon with VMware too.

The first release of their product, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), was available in July but this didn’t stop the marketing department from numbering the version as 3.0.

Almost one year later VRM 3.2 hits the market and the company announces that it can go beyond tracking the physical resources wasted by the so called VM sprawl phenomenon. It can now automate the reclaim and recycle process of the abandoned virtual machines.
The company forgot to update the website in time for the press announcement release so there’s no way to see some documentation about how this works exactly.

Another new feature that can’t be investigated at the moment is the Software Developer’s Toolkit that can be used to integrate with 3rd party management solutions.

At today the company counts 25 employees according to the Company Profile that DynamicOps manages on LinkedIn. Some of them may want to focus on producing technical and marketing literature to support the announcements.

A little more than three years ago a new US startup called Moka5 joined the virtualization industry with a simple plan: to change the market by streaming secure virtual machines in every possible consumer device.

The plan didn’t work well so far.
After a little more than one year the company decided to replace its CEO, its Vice President of Engineering and its Vice President of Marketing.
After two years the company also decided to change the brand and the business model, focusing on the enterprises.
After two years and a half the company, now called MokaFive, decided to replace its CEO again.

At the end of all of this, the startup is now in the middle of a risky competition with VMware ACE, Sentillion vThere and most of all Microsoft, which acquired Kidaro in March 2008, rebranded its Workspace product as MED-V and distributed it as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP).

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At the end of the last week VMware published a new minor update for its application virtualization technology ThinApp, acquired from Thinstall at the beginning of 2008.

The new build (3313 if you follow the Thinstall numbering, 169725 if you follow the VMware one) is introducing a very minor change in a configuration file and a number of bug fixes.
Most of all it seems that this version was released to grant compatibility with the VMware vSphere 4.0 client.

As virtualization.info highlighted in March for the ThinApp 4.0.2 release, VMware didn’t deliver a major upgrade for this product for over a year now, and it doesn’t seem ready to clarify the strategy behind the acquisition as also others have recognized.

Oracle doesn’t seem interested in clarifying what will happen to its hypervisor in the near future, or how it will integrate with the virtualization technologies acquired by Sun and Virtual Iron.
The only thing we know for sure is that the merge is going to be painful for somebody.

In a way or another Oracle believes that its current customers will continue to upgrade their existing Oracle VM implementation instead of freezing any activity before the strategy is clear, and so it releases a minor update.

Oracle VM 2.1.5 is mainly for bugfixes but it also introduces a brand new Command Line Interface (CLI)  (soon to be released through the Unbreakable Linux Network update site) and a Web Services API, both for Oracle VM Manager.

Five weeks ago Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron for an undisclosed sum. So far the company didn’t reveal if and how it plans to to merge the Virtual Iron hypervisor with the Sun xVM hypervisor and with its own Oracle VM Server.
Now finally the database giant starts to unveil its strategy.

The Register has just broken the news about an official communication released by Oracle to the Virtual Iron partners:

…In a letter to Virtual Iron’s sales partners, Oracle says it “will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.” And in a second letter to a partner speaking with The Reg, the company says it will not allow partners to sell new licenses to anyone – including existing customers – after the end of this month (i.e. in 11 days). Before then, partners can only sell licenses to existing customers under certain conditions.

…

When the integrated product becomes generally available, Virtual Iron customers will be able to move to the new, integrated product and benefit from a more feature rich-solution than is available today…

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Last week the Russian website OpenNET leaked the news about the existence of VMware Workstation 7 and revealed all the new features of this first private beta build (translated with Google):

• Improvements in the support of 3D
  OpenGL 2.1 and Shader Model 3.0 are supported in virtual machines, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
• Support for new model drivers Windows Display Driver Model for Windows 7
  is still only 2D acceleration and support only one monitor, the driver is using 32MB RAM. If you want to run a 3d application in Windows 7, you must configure it to use the old SVGAII driver from VMware.
• Support vSphere 4.0 and ESX support
  Professionals can now run these technologies as a guest system to verify the manner in which they are suited to your organization. ESX at this point is supported only on processors that support hardware-accelerated virtualization (all Intel Core 2 and above, AMD Athlon 64 X2 AM2/Phenom and above).

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A security researcher near virtualization.info, Claudio Criscione, informs us that VMware Converter 4.0.1 Stand Alone includes a web interface that is currently hidden or unfinished.

It’s a well-known thing that the product uses a web service to interact with the ESX hosts, but it seems that VMware is developing a complete web user interface around it.

At the moment the product only exposes a login form if you connect to the address: https://ipaddress/converter/
but several other functions are partially implemented, like for example the file upload facility that is handled by the FileInput.js component.

It’s unclear way VMware is shipping this partially finished interface inside the product or if there’s a concrete plan to finish it.

Nor Oracle neither Sun announced yet what will happen to the xVM virtualization offering after the acquisition completes.

While waiting for the big news, Sun gives us the first beta of VirtualBox 3.0 which includes major improvements in the graphic area and the support for an insane number of vCPUs:

• Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (Intel VT-x and AMD-V only)
• Support for OpenGL 2.0 in Windows, Linux and Solaris guest OSes
• Ability to use Direct3D 8/9 applications and games in Windows guest OSes (experimental)

The beta program can be enrolled here.