Year: 2009

A couple of weeks ago Diskeeper released a new disk defragmenter specifically designed to work with Microsoft Hyper-V: V-Locity.

Diskeeper has been one of the first companies to support virtualization (already in 2006) and its flagship product, can be already executed inside a Microsoft and VMware virtual machine or but the new V-locity has some new features that are worth a check:

• a new architecture that synchronize the defragementation process across all the virtual machines and the host (this requires to install a component on the host and one inside each VM)
• a shrinking capability that is automatically invoked as soon as the defragmentation inside the VM is finished

The first version of V-locity supports Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V only (so no Hyper-V 2008 Server) and Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 as guest OSes..

The Register just broke the news about the price of some Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) prices.

The details about the blade system that will turn the networking giant into a x86 server vendor, and potentially into a virtualization vendor as well, are very limited and pricing has been barely mentioned so far.

The Register is now reporting that:

…the UCS B200 M1 blade server, the base two-socket box without the memory extension technology that Cisco hopes will give it differentiation against other providers of blade servers using Intel’s “Nehalem EP” Xeon 5500 processors, has a list price of $2,954…

The original article has additional prices about different components. Unfortunately none of them is related to the software side of the thing, like the UCS Manager (that a company slide seems to list at $0), the BMC automation layer or the VMware vSphere 4.0 platform.

Earlier this month Veeam announced the decision to remove support for the free version of VMware ESXi from its Backup & Replicator (formerly Backup). The company CEO revealed that VMware specifically asked to do so:

…Recently, VMware requested that Veeam discontinue support for ESXi Free in Veeam Backup and Replication in order to comply with VMware’s updated licensing policy.

…

In light of VMware’s request, and our close technical partnership, Veeam Backup and Replication will no longer support ESXi Free. We will still continue to offer support for ESXi Free to existing Veeam customers who purchased Backup & Replication prior to version 3.1…

After the controversial decision to limit the competitors at the upcoming VMworld, with this move VMware took a further step to compromise its image of beloved innovator as the community reactions demonstrate here, here and here.

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When we look at the competition in the IT industry there’s nothing that beats the marketing guerrilla we are experiencing in the virtualization space.

This is perfectly understandable considering that the vendor in control of the hypervisor is able to influence and in many ways able to control all the other companies that provide other pieces of the computing stack.
For the first time ever the absolute domain of the OS vendor is threatened by the hypervisor vendor so that the former tries to turn virtualization into a platform feature while the latter tries to impose the technology as absolutely independent.

It’s also true that compared to ten years ago the vendors have new tools to spread fear, uncertainty and doubts (FUD) against their competitors: paid bloggers, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so much more are available to influence the prospects and build armies of fanboys that are ready to overreact and defend their beloved products no matter what.

Nowadays is becoming increasingly common that marketing departments cross the line.
It’s much more uncommon to see a company that publicly apologies for a bad marketing action.

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In the last two weeks Veeam updated two key products of its portfolio: Monitor and Backup & Replicator (formerly Backup).

Both releases introduce support for VMware vSphere 4.0. On top of that Veeam included the following new features in Monitor 4.0:

• Storage monitoring
• Hardware monitoring (it uses the CIM/SMASH APIs provided by VMware)
• Process monitoring (both Windows and Linux guest operating systems)
• Scheduled reporting

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In the last months the security vendor Tripwire took several steps to shift its business focus on the virtualization market, where its configuration management and compliance technology is badly needed.

At the beginning the company extended the capabilities of its flagship product, Tripwire Enterprise, to support VMware virtual infrastructures, but this approach is rarely the best option to enter a new market.

So the company developed and launched a new solution, just for virtualization, called vWire.
This new product extends the capabilities of two free tools that Tripwire released so far, OpsCheck and ConfigCheck, to offer something that goes beyond the configuration management.

In this first version in fact vWire is able to track changes and critical events in the virtual infrastructure, allowing the user to automate a reaction (like restoring a previous configuration), but in a future release the product will be able to correlate the configuration changes with the performance measurement of the virtual infrastructure, which is much more insightful way to troubleshoot the environment.

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When Citrix announced for the first time its plan to deliver an open source virtual switch for Xen and KVM, virtualization.info wrote that it could be the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Vyatta to compete against Cisco and slam it.

That virtual switch is about to be unveiled now but the two companies didn’t reveal if there’s a collaboration on this project.
Even if there’s not one, there may be in the near future as Vyatta just secured $10 million in its Round C funding, and Citrix is one of the investors.

The highly respectable Om Malik at GigaOM wrote that Citrix did so because it is losing ground to the VMware-Cisco Systems colossus.

Quite the opposite.

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In March the startup Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave) hired a well-known virtualization professional: Andrew Kutz.
At that time Kutz, who is now a Senior R&D Scientist at the company, was developing a management solution for multiple hypervisors that could be used on mobile devices that support Java: the Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM).

Easy to guess, Hyper9 didn’t just hire Kutz, but also acquired the intellectual property of VMM, and it’s now ready to launch the first release.

VMM 1.0 offers the following features:

• Monitor virtual machines, hosts or data centers’ CPU and memory consumption
• Manage virtual machines power and network state
• Support for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and vSphere 4.0, VMware Server 2.0, Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 and Citrix XenServer 5.0.
• Interface customization

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It doesn’t matter if we are talking about SaaS, PaaS or IaaS architectures. Customers have many reasons to not trust the cloud computing solutions that the market offers today and one of them is the lack of security.

Amazon has the oldest, most popular and very likely the largest cloud infrastructure existing today, and thus it must under continuous fire when enterprise customers evaluate its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

The company recently announced a series of initiatives to make EC2, S3 and the other Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities more secure, and to clarify the level of security currently in place:

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One of the oldest (and hottest) topic in the history of modern virtualization is if the Xen open source hypervisor can be integrated into the Linux kernel or not.

XenSource tried to achieve the goal for years (while VMware did its best to avoid it), but in December 2006 Linus Torvalds announced the decision to include another virtualization platform in place of Xen: KVM.

KVM was developed and maintained by the startup Qumranet, acquired by Red Hat in September 2008, and at that time was just 6 months old, much less mature than Xen.
Despite that and because of its architecture (at least this is the official reason), KVM has been included in the kernel since version 2.6.20 and Xen is not.

After this and after the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, the idea of Xen inside Linux seemed definitively archived. But the community is still debating about the topic.

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