Year: 2010

Like any other virtualization vendor, of course Microsoft is actively researching to develop more efficient and secure architectures for its hypervisor.

While most of this work remains undisclosed in the Research labs, a few things are being shown in public events.
It’s the case of Bunker-V, the codename for a new architectural approach that Microsoft is evaluating to reduce the Hyper-V trusted computing base (TCB), which today includes the virtual machine monitor (VMM) and the parent partition, equal to over 50 million of lines of code.

The research appeared in a speech titled Improving the Security of Commodity Hypervisors for Cloud Computing presented this year at the Seventh Annual Microsoft Research Networking Summit.

The slide deck describes Microsoft is redesigning its hypervisor to be faster and with a smaller TBC for cloud computing scenarios.

Read more

As a few readers may know, Google is fervently working to launch its own operating system. Called Chrome OS and released as an open source project, it uses the Chrome browser as its core engine.

Announced in July 2009, Chrome OS is expected to reach version 1.0 within the 2010 holiday season, and to be deployable on x86 and ARM architectures (including upcoming tablet PC devices that will compete with the recently released Apple iPad).

The brave ones that want to test the alpha versions of the OS can do that using most hardware virtualization platforms on the market. Parallels even offer support for it.

The more we get near the planned release timeframe the more details are shared about how it will work.
Fresh information appeared a few days ago about a new feature tentatively dubbed Chromoting.

Read more

At virtualization.info we usually don’t cover when a hosting provider adopts one virtualization or cloud platform rather than another, but of course there are a few exceptions.

Today we have one, with the announcement of Softlayer offering Parallels Server 4.5 Bare Metal as part of its virtualization portfolio.
The hosting provider already offers Virtuozzo Containers, the Parallels OS virtualization technology, since some time.

Parallels launched its hypervisor in October 2009 after several delays. So far the company didn’t spend much effort in promoting it and just a few customers are really aware that it’s an alternative to Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM Server and VMware ESX/ESXi.
The fact that Parallels Server Bare Metal is the only product in its category that doesn’t offer a free version doesn’t help much.

Read more

In November 2009 VMware released version 1.1 of its disk & file backup/restore solution for guest operating system dubbed Data Recovery. The company released last week a new minor update.

Data Recovery 1.2 (build 260251) introduces a major new feature: the File Level Restore (FLR) support for Linux guest OSes.

The new build also introduces a few enhancements to the vSphere Client plug-in but the most important one probably is that now each vCenter Server can support up to 10 Data Recovery virtual appliances.
And of course the build solves a long list of bugs.

While the product is slowly improving from a technology standpoint, VMware continues to avoid promoting it, maybe because it’s not mature enough to compete with the well established solutions from PHD Virtual, Veeam and Vizioncore, or maybe because it doesn’t want to disturb too much these partners and push them into the arms of Microsoft and Citrix.

At the beginning of this month the open source project OpenNebula, maintained by C12G Labs, announced the support for the VMware vCloud APIs.
Then, just a couple of day after, the Red Hat CEO said that he’s actively looking to acquire companies in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

And now OpenNebula rushes to announce support to the Deltacloud APIs, the meta-APIs open source project maintained by Red Hat, that the Linux vendor is working to turn into a commercial solution for 2011.

This means that OpenNebula can now connect, through Deltacloud, to additional public and private cloud platforms, including ones that implement RHEV-M:

The Xen.org effort to deliver a Xen-based cloud computing platform, dubbed Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), was formally announced in early September 2009.

The first release, 0.1, only appeared in November 2009, with a very minor update (0.1.1) issued in January 2010.
And one of its key components, the Open vSwitch, didn’t hit the 1.0 GA status before last May.

In this timeframe XCP jumped from version 0.1.1 to 0.5 and it’s available as a Release Candidate, as announced on the official mailing list.
Even if not market as 1.0, the Xen.org team informs that “XCP-0.5 is intended to be a *stable* release, suitable for long-term production use.”

The bits don’t seem to come with up-to-date release notes so we are unable to report on the new features included in this version at the moment.

At some time during the TechEd 2010 conference Microsoft made a significant change in its configuration limits for Hyper-V.

While the previous supported limited for a a single Hyper-V host in a fail-over cluster was of 64 virtual machines, this number has been increased to  384 virtual machines per host.

The total number of hosts allowed per cluster remains equal to 16, with a maximum of 1,000 virtual machines across all nodes.

As the support article confirms, the change applies to the existing version of Hyper-V R2 shipping with Windows Server 2008 R2 and not to the upcoming Service Pack 1 that will be released later this year

Thanks to ServerTalk for the news.

A couple of weeks ago, at its TechEd 2010 conference (see virtualization.info live coverage of the opening keynote) Microsoft hosted a 80-minutes breakout session about the much discussed memory over-commitment technique that will be introduces in Hyper-V as part of the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

The presentation, performed by Ben Armstrong, Senior Program Manager Lead at Microsoft, covers Dynamic Memory in depth and it’s the first concrete analysis of how the product will work.

Before this presentation Microsoft only published a few details, suddenly removed by the original poster.

The presentation is available for on-demand streaming here (you’ll need Silverlight) and for download (both WMV and MP4 formats). Microsoft also published the slidedeck:

Read more

At the end of May Microsoft recently expanded its support for the on-premises Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and off-premises Microsoft Update facilities to a new virtualization product: App-V.

WSUS, formerly Software Update Services or SUS, is a free patch management platform offered since 2003 and quite frankly one of the best back-end product ever produced by the company.

At the moment the support only includes App-V 4.5 as reported on the WSUS corporate blog.

Eric Sloof, of NTPRO.nl fame, recently published an interesting rumor about an upcoming name change for the VMware vCenter ConfigControl product.

ConfigControl has been announced in January 2009 with a bunch of other products but VMware never delivered it.
And now, before reaching the general availability, it seems that the product will be rebranded as vCenter Change Insight.

Like other change management products, this one offers a number of highly desirable features for enterprise customers that are working with large-scale virtual infrastructures and soon cloud computing platforms:

• Auto-documents environment, all entities, relationships, dependencies
• Tracks and alerts on configuration and relationship changes real time
• Assesses configurations against past, peers and best practices
• Takes corrective actions via policies (e.g. call out to Orchestrator)

Read more