Year: 2009

Dilip Naik, a former Microsoft employee, awarded as Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the File Systems and Storage category, recently released a couple of interesting tools for Hyper-V: VMProv and VHDCopy.

VHDCopy is a patent-pending command line utility that significantly reduce the time required to copy large virtual hard drives files by skipping unnecessary portions of data (like the hibernation file) inside the VHD itself.
It only works with offline VMs and fixed VHD files up to 148GB that are formatted with NTFS.

Naik claims it performs 2x-10x faster than other copy operations, like the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) check-in/check-out operation or the manual copy command performed by an admin, by reducing the disk I/O operations from 20% to 90%.

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Sun releases today refreshes its hosted desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox, introducing a major new feature.

Believe or not VirtualBox 3.1 is now capable to perform a virtual machine live migration, called Teleportation, between remote hosts over a standard TCP/IP network link.

Of course, because the virtualization layer sits above the host operating system, VirtualBox has limited compatibility issues with different CPU families, and no problems with different operating systems.

To work, Teleportation requires that both copies of VirtualBox have two identical VMs with same virtual hardware. These two VMs must access the same shared storage (NFS/CIFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel).
Despite what the press release claims, the user manual highlights that teleporting a VM between an AMD and an Intel CPU may fail, despite VirtualBox is able to simulate the each other differences to a degree.

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No matter how hard Microsoft and Citrix try to convince customers.
The whole idea that the two companies can recreate the Terminal Services-MetaFrame synergy on server virtualization doesn’t sound good. And it doesn’t sound good for a simple reason: in the first case, MetaFrame (or Presentation Server or XenApp) is a sophisticated add-on that enriches Terminal Services but can’t exist without it; in the second case, Microsoft and Citrix have completely overlapping virtualization platform which can fully replace each other.

The two companies may be totally aligned in terms of marketing effort to jointly attack the VMware leadership, but what happens when the Microsoft and Citrix sales guys actually visit the customers?
Aren’t they obliged to compete for the same account? If not, how exactly they suggest to the customer to choose between Hyper-V plus System Center versus XenServer plus Essentials? And even if there’s no friction there, which hypervisor do they recommend between Hyper-V and XenServer when the customer wants a XenDesktop-powered VDI environment?

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So far virtualization.info highlighted how the Cisco entrance in the server and virtualization markets is influencing the strategy of HP.

A couple of weeks ago we suggested that HP may want to acquire a series of companies (where 3Com is just the first one) to enrich its portfolio and be able to better compete, in the long run, against the VMware/Cisco/EMC merge-non-merge (the so called VCE coalition). 

Specifically, if Cisco, leveraging its investment in VMware and its new partnership with EMC, starts to erode the HP market share, a possible scenario is that HP decides to offer its own virtualization layer, by acquiring an existing vendor.

On top of that, there’s the never abandoned feeling that VMware is morphing into an infrastructure management company, that one day may compete with HP (and CA, BMC and IBM) to rule the physical layer as much as the virtual one.
If HP considers this as a concrete scenario, it may want to act now to limit the VMware actions in the future.

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Last week the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) released its security risk assessment on cloud computing infrastructures.

The 123-pages report analyzes the new risks that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architectures may imply, evaluating three different scenarios: the SME migration to cloud computing services, the impact of cloud computing on service resilience, and the adoption of cloud computing in e-Government.

virtualization.info was directly involved in the project, primarily contributing for the part about IaaS clouds.

The document doesn’t just cover the business and technical risks of adopting cloud computing. It also includes valuable legal recommendations that any company may want to check.

Here’s the list of contributors that worked on this paper:

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At the beginning of the week the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore released vFoglight 6.0, further consolidating its presence in the performance monitoring segment.
It seems that the company is investing a lot of resources in this product, which becomes increasingly important and on pair with the flagship vRanger.

The new release includes the following features:

• Several graphical improvements (a new dashboard, a task-based UI, new wizards, etc.)
• Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008 as backend database
• Support for Apple Safari as web client
• Support for Microsoft Excel to export the reports

At the beginning of the week, the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore released a major update for its vReplicator (formerly esxReplicator).

Version 3.0 introduces the following new features:

• Active Block Mapping (ABM) technology
  ABM filters deleted data blocks so that only active blocks are
  scanned and streamed to the target. White space detection eliminates the need to
  compress, stream, and write zero blocks during the replication process.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology
  CBT tracks the disk block changes made by the source VM. vReplicator 3.0 can take advantage of CBT, once enabled on the source host, to record the blocks that have changed since the last
  replication pass and transfer them to the target host without scanning the VMDK.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 virtual machines with thin disks
  When replicating a VM containing thin discs from an ESX 4 host to an ESX 4 host,
  vReplicator 3.0 will create a replica VM with thin discs. In addition, when configuring
  jobs for VMs with thin disks, vReplicator will only show targets that support thin disks.
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Storage vMotion
  It ensures that previously scheduled replication jobs continue to run successfully after one or more of the source disks are SVMotioned.
  In addition, the disks on the SVMotion target datastores are replicated instead of the ones originally configured in the replication jobs.

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Leostream is one of the oldest firm in the x86 virtualization market. The startup survived many years without seeking venture capitals, changing its business focus and product line a couple of times, and facing increasing competition from VMware and others in the VDI market where it is positioned today.

In May 2008, Leostream finally accepted financial help, raising $3 million from Meakem Becker.
Last week the same firm fueled Leostream with another $2 million, as confirmed by Xconomy.

The article mentions that Leostream is not yet profitable, and that Meakem Becker hopes tha this additional cash infusion will be enough to cover operational costs until profitability.

The founder and former CEO of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February 2008), Stephen Pollack, has just joined the Canadian firm VM6 Software as Board Advisor.

Pollack already sits in the Advisory Board of Embotics since November 2008 and Enomaly since December 2008, and recently joined the board of Kaviza too.

Microsoft has finally launched the public beta of its App-V-powered Office 2010 edition called Click-To-Run (CTR).

Microsoft unveiled its plan to virtualize and stream an edition of its productivity suite this summer, but so far Office 2010 CTR was available only as part of a private beta program.

Last week Microsoft released a new Deployment Kit for App-V beta, for those customers that want to stream Office 2010 using their own App-V infrastructure, and now CTR is in public beta:

Thanks to Bink.nu for the news.