Year: 2010

There’s a lot of interest around the just announced Dynamic Memory feature that will be included in Hyper-V as soon as Microsoft release the Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 (rumored to arrive no earlier than Q4 2010).

For a lot of time Microsoft downplayed the VMware’s memory overcommitment techniques, suggesting that they are the solution for every problem and that even the competitor recommends to not use them. Now this Dynamic Memory, which was originally planned for a 2009 release, seems exactly a memory overcommitment feature.

James O’Neill, IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft, shares some concrete details about the feature for the first time, trying to explain why Dynamic Memory is not about overcommit memory: 

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After teasing the customers for weeks, Veeam introduces today SureBackup, a set of technologies that greatly improves its backup/restore product for VMware vSphere.

First of all, SureBackup is not the name of a single new capability. It’s an umbrella for existing and upcoming features of Veeam Backup & Replication. And while this may sound like a typical marketing operation to turn old things into something new, the reality is that SureBackup includes at least a brand new, remarkable technology.

Dubbed Recovery Verification, this is the Veeam attempt to solve one of the most challenging problems when dealing with virtual machines live backups: testing that each guest operating system and its application will work properly after recovery.

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Last week Microsoft announced some remarkable changes in its VDI strategy, including new licensing options and the upcoming integration of Calista technology in Remote Desktop Services (RDS) under the name of RemoteFX.

The announcement, and the fact that Microsoft highlighted a stronger-than-ever partnership with Citrix in this effort, will impact the VDI ecosystem and, by some degrees, the customers adoption of desktop virtualization technologies.
The first reactions already came in: VMware, Quest and WYSE already published some comments on RemoteFX.

VMware, threatened by the “Rescue for VMware VDI” promotion, has a lot to say of course and lists the downsides of the offering:

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Last week the startup VKernel, which just replaced its CEO, released a minor update for its capacity planning tool.

Capacity Analyzer includes a number of bug fixes but it also introduces a major addition: support for Microsoft Hyper-V, introduced in the December public beta.

As previously discussed, this is the immediate reaction to the VMware entrance in the capacity planning market with vCenter Capacity IQ.

While the Microsoft market share is still consistently smaller than the VMware one, it’s true that the Hyper-V ecosystem lacks of many tools in several areas that are critical to complete the virtual data center. So this move may bring to VKernel more success than what it could ever obtain just sticking with VMware.
On its side, Microsoft will probably be very happy to promote its new partner as a sign of the growing interest for its hypervisor.

Yesterday, while busy partying with Microsoft around the new VDI licensing and the additional revenue opportunity that RemoteFX will introduce, Citrix also announced the upcoming Feature Pack 1 for XenDesktop 4.0 (expected before the end of March).

In a corporate blog post, the company detailed the planned features:

• Streamed user profiles
  XenDesktop 4.0 FP1 will be able to stream user profiles in the same way it does for applications. Citrix reports that access to virtual desktops is 5x faster thanks to this.

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Yesterday Cisco published the first VMware VMmark benchmark obtained with its Unified Computing System blade platform B250 M2 and VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

The B250 M2 machine, powered by the just released Intel Xeon quad-core X5680 CPUs (codename Westmere) at 3.33GHz and 192GB RAM, scored 35.83 with 26 tiles, a 42% increase over the previous best result obtained by Fujitsu with the RX300 S5 and VMware vSphere 4.0: 25.16 with 17 tiles.

The full configuration of this B250 M2 is described here.

CRN reports that new UCS systems with the impressive Intel Xeon 5600 CPUs, used for this benchmark, will be available in April. 

Cisco also announced that it has over 400 customers for UCS, and that “most of them” are using it in production.

Yesterday Microsoft announced a number of new technologies and initiatives around desktop/server virtualization and VDI.

The company also announced a new paper titled Virtual Hard Disk Performance.

The 35-pages document describes a benchmark executed by Microsoft to compare I/O performance of files inside its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format (both fixed size and dynamically created) against files inside raw disks and files inside the NTFS file system.

Tests were executed on systems running a number of different workloads, including SQL and Exchange.
Microsoft explains that compared to previous implementations, VHD support is native inside Windows Server 2008 R2 and thus is not depending on the presence of Hyper-V:

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William Lam, a UNIX Systems Administrator at Salesforce.com, popular in the virtualization community, develops a Perl script which scans VMware ESX/ESXi hosts and vSphere vCenter servers and reports the status of number of aspects.

Called VMware Health Check Report, it reached version 4.0 yesterday, offering very welcome new capabilities:

• Report is now completely modular in which categories to display via a configuration file
• Ability to specify specific ESX/ESXi host to query
• Ability to specify specific Virtual Mchines to query
• vCenter HA Advanced Runtime information
• vCenter HA Configuration (primary/secondary and node states)
• vCenter HA Advanced Configurations
• vCenter DRS Advanced Runtime information
• ESX/ESXi IP/HOSTNAME of vCenter Management IP
• ESX/ESXi Newly improved Hardware and System Health Stuats information
• ESX/ESXi Advanced Configurations
• ESX/ESXi NUMA information
• VM UUID,Bootime,Resource Statistics, Fault Tolerance, Thin provisioned and NPIV information

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Less than two weeks ago VMware launched a new online facility simply called Labs.
It hosts a number of R&D project developed by VMware engineers and not yet included in the official product portfolio (thus not supported).

The facility opened with 10 open source, downloadable tools. Yesterday a new one surfaced: Weasel.

Weasel is an Operating System installer similar to Redhat’s Anaconda.

When you insert the ESX Installation DVD, this program guides you through the steps of network configuration, disk selection, etc. Or it can perform an automated install based on a script similar to Redhat kickstart scripts.

VMware published a video of it in action:

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Earlier this week, the startup VKernel announced that it has appointed a new President and CEO: Doug McNary.

McNary comes from Atlas Venture, where he spent less than one year as Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR). Before that he was President and CEO of Onaro, the storage startup acquired by NetApp in January 2008.

McNary replaces Alex Bakman, the Vkernel founder that will continue to work as CTO.