Year: 2010

In a recent interview with Datamation, Chris Wright, Linux Kernel Developer at Red Hat, provided an interesting metric about KVM:

…KVM can now achieve 85 percent of bare-metal performance for its virtual guest operating systems, while adding that high-performance I/O is not coming at the expense of additional CPU overhead…

About the platform roadmap he adds:

…KVM is set to get support for what’s called “transparent huge pages,” enabling multi-megabyte memory pages that can be dynamically allocated from 4 kilobyte memory chunks. The addition, he said, will help improve the performance of virtual machines with memory-intensive workloads.

At the end of last week VMware updated its desktop virtualization platform Workstation and Player, as well as its platform wrapper ACE.

Workstation 7.1.1 (build 282343) only introduce support for ESX 4.1 as guest operating system. VMware introduced the capability to run its bare-metal hypervisor as a guest OS inside its hosted virtualization platform in Workstation 7.0, after the community requested the capability for a long, long time.

Player 3.1.1 and ACE 2.7.1 (build 282343) are for bug fixing only.

In October 2009 VMware released a fully featured capacity management solution called CapacityIQ.
Before this launch, VMware used to offer a hosted capacity planning solution called Capacity Planner (acquired from AOG in October 2005) and a scaled down version of the service available as part of VI 3.5, Guided Consolidation (formerly Server Consolidation Advisor).
While Capacity Planner is still available for free to VMware partners, the Guided Consolidation module is going to disappear from vSphere in the next release.

After almost one year VMware updated CapacityIQ last week.
The new 1.0.4 version (build 276824) only introduces support for vSphere 4.1.

The release notes document also clarifies that this version doesn’t enforce yet the new pay-per-VM licensing model that should take place starting September 1st. VMware already said that this product will be the last one to have this pricing, some time in Q4.

Last time we heard about Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) was in April, when the company release version 1.0 Service Pack 1.

Microsoft got MED-V (formerly Workspaces) from the acquisition of Kidaro, happened in March 2008.
The product was rebranded just a couple of months after the acquisition but Microsoft took an entire year to re-release it.
MED-V 1.0, released as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) in April 2009, didn’t introduce any new feature compared to the Kidaro original solution. So it’s safe to say that the product got only a minor .1 update in more than two years.

This translates in an enterprise platform that could remarkably change the way virtual desktops are deployed and secured inside the corporate environment, but that is still featuring Virtual PC 2007 SP1 as its underlying engine, a platform originally released in Q1 2007 and updated in Q2 2008.
Microsoft has been so slow and non-committed on this product that there are serious doubts about its plans for it.

Indeed there are, as the company finally unveiled something about MED-V 2.0 and it’s not very promising.

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Yesterday Vizioncore announced the upcoming availability of a new feature for its disaster recovery solution vRanger Pro: FlashRestore.

The technology will allow administrators to boot a virtual machine from its backup image without the need to transfer it back from the backup repository to the production hypervisor.
What actually happens behind the scenes is that vRanger Pro leverages the VMware Storage vMotion technology to relocate the virtual hard drives (VMDK) without downtime.

FlashRestore sounds pretty interesting but there’s a potential problem: the approach may be already patent protected.
In March in fact Veeam announced something that sounds pretty similar as part of their SureBackup strategy: to perform its new Recovery Verification, Backup & Replication 5.0 powers the VMs on directly from their backup archives and puts them into isolated virtual networks where the guest OS and its applications are safely executed.

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In June Oracle released version 3.1.1 of the VDI solution inherited from Sun along with several other virtualization products.
At that time the company introduced support for Microsoft Hyper-V as back-end hypervisor but not yet support for its own hypervisor: Oracle VM.

Version 3.2, released yesterday, doesn’t change things: Oracle VM remains unsupported and the company continues to recommend its other virtualization platform, VirtualBox, as replacement.
Oracle believes so much that its type-2 (aka hosted) virtual machine monitor (VMM) can work for virtual desktop infrastructures that it’s bundling it with Oracle VDI.
Interestingly, the only version bundled is the 32bit one for Solaris 10.

It’s striking that, after more than one year since day Oracle moved to acquire Sun, and the release of Sun xVM VDI 3.0, there’s still no support for Oracle VM.

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In January 2008 the hardware vendor ClearCube decided to spin off its software division and started offering a VDI solution that could work with 3rd party hypervisors and physical servers.

Called VDIworks, the startup largely remained under the radar, while trying to differentiate itself with a proprietary remote desktop protocol called VideoOverIP (VOIP) that launched in June 2009.

It’s unclear how much VDI market share the company gained in a world ruled by Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and Quest, but at least VDIworks is trying to win some niches.
It just released in fact a VDI client for the Apple iPad that supports its VOIP protocol: Fast Remote Desktop.

VDIworks released a video of the app:

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Hyper9, which recently lost his founder and CTO, just announced a new add-on for its management product Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) 2.5

The product continues to evolve: it started as a search engine for virtual infrastructure and then morphed into what seems an articulated management framework with a pluggable architecture.
According to the public documentation, Hyper9 has the ambitious project to release a plug-in for pretty much every need a virtualization administrator may have: from capacity planning to change management, from performance monitoring to chargeback.

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In the new vSphere 4.1 VMware introduced several enhancements to its Host Profile feature, like the capability to roll out administrator password changes.

For the occasion, yesterday VMware published a new 29-pages paper about it: Host Profiles: Technical Overview. 
The document covers several use cases, including the ones that involve advanced profile editing and customization, like when an administrator needs exceptions in host configuration variability.

Interestingly, the paper introduces the new marketing pitch for vSphere (emphasis added):

VMware vSphere 4.1 (“vSphere”) is the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified environments to enable the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services…

In 2008 the company used to refer to vSphere as a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS). The company still thinks in this way. What slightly changed is the definition: from VDC-OS to C-OS.

While VMware has planned to drop the guest operating systems patching capability from Update Manager (VUM), it seems to continue investing in the product. 
The company just released a very handy tool for VUM capacity planning called Sizing Estimator.

Sizing Estimator can forecast VUM 4.1 database size, patch store disk space, and temporary disk space by checking a number of parameters.
Its output includes:

• VUM database and server deployment model recommendations
• Initial disk space utilization in MB for database, patch store, and temporary space
• Monthly disk space utilization growth in MB for database and patch store
• The upper and lower bounds on the estimation, assuming a 20% variance

Definitively recommended.