Year: 2010

Just five days after the release of VirtualBox 3.2.2, Oracle publishes another minor update.

Like the previous one, VirtualBox 3.2.4 is a maintenance release introducing just bug fixes.

Today virtualization.info is in New Orleans for our first live coverage of the Microsoft TechEd conference.
Microsoft has hinted that the opening keynote, performed by Bob Muglia, President of Server and Tools Business division, will be focused on cloud computing.

Microsoft has already showed a glimpse of its technology roadmap at the MMS 2010 conference (see virtualization.info coverage), demonstrating the upcoming version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and the recently acquired Opalis orchestration framework, but the company still has to clarify if it really plans to compete against Amazon and others on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market.

Hopefully today we’ll have an answer to this.

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James Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, continues to offer interesting details about his company’s strategy around cloud computing.

He recently said that clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins and now he’s openly saying that Red Hat is looking for acquisitions in the virtualization and cloud computing space.

What companies may be interesting for Red Hat?

The vendor is working to deliver a commercial implementation of the Deltacloud open source meta-APIs, but it seems that the product won’t be ready before 2011.

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After unveiling the list of features that will appear in the next major release of the VMware vSphere platform (currently numbered 4.1, but likely to change in 4.5 to align with the upcoming release of View 4.5), virtualization.info can now share full details about the performance improvements introduced by some of them, like Scalable vMotion, Wide VM Numa, Memory Compression and others.

Let’s start with the new configuration limits that can vSphere 4.1 can reach:

• 3,000 virtual machines per cluster (compared to 1,280 in vSphere 4.0)
• 1,000 hosts per vCenter Server (compared to 300)
• 15,000 registered VMs per vCenter Server (compared to 4,500)
• 10,000 concurrently powered-on VMs per vCenter Server (compared to 3,000)
• 120 concurrent Virtual Infrastructure Clients per vCenter Server (compared to 30)
• 500 hosts per virtual Datacenter object (compared to 100)
• 5,000 virtual machines per virtual Datacenter object (compared to 2,500)

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At a point in time between May and June Microsoft has released the first version of a new specification called Application Virtualization (App-V) Volume Format.

The 31-pages still-unreleased document, published by Ruben Spruijt of Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) fame, describes in details the file based file-system used by App-V containers, giving enough details to support it in 3rd party commercial and free applications.

Microsoft already published another App-V specification dedicated to the file format in February.

Now that Citrix is getting more serious market traction, with increased market share for its hypervisor, renewed recognition from analysis firms and additional capability to beat the market leader on time, its aggressiveness is increasing too.

Last week the company focused on the VMware | Cisco | EMC alliance dubbed VCE Coalition.

Scott Swanburg, Director of Service Provider and Cloud Computing, writes on the corporate blog:

…They call it VSphere for Cloud implementations and now VBlock for Enterprise.  Take a datacenter and virtualize the servers.  Take the storage arrays and provide management utilities.  Drop some routers and VoIP controllers into the mix and there you have it… a complete virtualization system… or a completely backwards way of providing a usable architecture for client side virtualization.  Oh yeah… after you do all of this, then all you have to do is bolt on a few thousand Virtual Machines for the users and everybody will be happy.  How preposterous!

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Bernd Harzog, founder and CEO of APMExperts.com, recently published an interesting article about the role of Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) in a world of virtualization and cloud computing. Or better: on the role that the four big infrastructure management vendors (BMC, CA, HP and IBM) may have in that world because of their CMDB solutions.

His point is that the use of CMDBs in virtual and cloud infrastructures has a number of challenges that can’t be addressed by existing solutions:

1. A whole new class of data gets created by the virtualization platform – specifically how the virtualization platform itself is configured in support of the guests and the applications that run on the guest.
2. A whole new set of relationships between the elements in this data get created – specifically new relationships between hosts, hypervisors, guests, virtual networks and virtual storage get created that existing CMDB’s were not built to handle.

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Kevin Goodman, Senior Systems Engineer at Odyssey Logistics, is running an interesting technical blog titled Colocation to Virtualization where he’s reporting about the experience with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade platform, EMC storage and VMware vSphere 4.0.

He recently shared some interesting numbers about the consolidation ratio he’s achieving with such system (a UCS B200-M1):

…There are a total of 7 blades in our VMware environment, but only 5 of those are dedicated to our main HA/DRS cluster. That gives us ~240 gigs of RAM for the main cluster. Currently, I am seeing a VM consolidation ratio of about 24 VMs (virtual machines) per B200-M1 blade. The limitation here is definitely the RAM. The CPU itself is less than 25% utilized per blade…

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Just a couple of weeks after the release of VirtualBox 3.2, Oracle publishes an update, moving its hosted virtualization platform to version 3.2.2.

This is a maintenance release, introducing just bug fixes.

In July 2009 VKernel released the betas of three new monitoring tools called Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory.

Wastefinder is able to recognize the resources (storage, memory and CPU) wasted by inactive virtual machines, Rightsizer can recommend how to change the VMs virtual hardware according to their usage over time, and Inventory tracks the provision of new VMs, generating a report about the status of the inventory.

The three tools are being sold since then as a single package called Optimization Pack.

Over time VKernel released three minor updates for it, introducing valuable features like a monetary evaluation of the resource recovered after the Wastefinder analysis.

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