Year: 2010

While Hyper9 continues to build features on top of its search engine for virtual infrastructures, it also keeps R&D resources busy on parallel projects.

The last one, released a few days ago, is SimDK, an open source tool able to simulate the vSphere behavior.
Users can connect to the SimDK service with VMware clients, like the PowerCLI or the standard vSphere Client.
It’s primarily aimed at developers that want to do QA and testing, verify APIs compatibility or perform load and scalability testing, but it can be used to test, for example, 3rd party scripting tools like the Quest/Vizioncore Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI).

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A new US startup entered the virtualization market in mid-February: Virsto.

Founded in 2007 and sustained by a $8.5M investment led by August Capital and Canaan Partners, the company is managed by Mark Davis, former CEO of Creekpath Systems (acquired by Opsware, which was then acquired by HP). Davis also served as Vice President of Marketing at Monosphere, acquired by Quest.

Davis is leading an interesting team of managers and advisors, which includes the co-founder and CTO Alex Miroshnichenko (former CTO at Acronis), the co-founder and Vice President of Engineering Serge Pashenkov (former Senior Director of Software Development at PowerFile and Veritas – acquired by Symantec), the Vice President of Sales Rafael Santini (former VP of Worldwide OEM Sales at XenSource – acquired by Citrix), and the advisors Frank Artale (current Vice President of Business Development at Citrix), James Phillips (co-founder and former CEO of Akimbi – acquired by VMware) and Shaw Chuang (former R&D Executive at VMware).

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At the beginning of 2010 the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) published the first revision of the OVF standard, released for the first time in February 2009.

OVF 1.1 includes some clarification and new components:

• Capability for file system-based images to increase flexibility at deployment time
• A property attribute to hide password values at the user interface
• Joliet extensions for ISO transport image

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Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year.

The list includes:

• Transparent Memory Compression
  This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region. VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks. 
• IO-Resource Manager (IO-RM)
  This will allow the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to assign shares based on disk performance. The more shares a virtual machine will have, the higher priority it will get in accessing a shared VMFS volume.

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The imminent launch of Intel octal-core CPUs (codename Nehalem-EX) and servers with up to 48 cores (powered by AMD codename Magny-cours CPUs) will dramatically increase the virtualization hosts density but will highlight how the network layer is becoming one of the weakest point of high-capacity virtual infrastructures.

Anandtech just published a very interesting article on this topic, testing the performance of a couple of copper cable 10GBase-CX4 network interface cards against the popular quad-port gigabit NICs we use today in most virtualization hosts.

The benchmark measured dual-port Intel PRO/1000 PT Server adapter (82571EB) against a Supermicro AOC-STG-I2 dual-port 10Gbit/s Intel 82598EB and a Neterion Xframe-E 10Gbit/s.
Both NICs were tested with VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and CentOS 5.4 guest OSes with appropriate drivers.

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The well-know virtualization professional (and blogger) Eric Sloof just released a tool called vmClient.

vmClient is a minimal management console that appears as an empty window frame.
It features a menu bar where the virtual machines hosted by any VMware vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi host are listed.
Each virtual machine in the list can be powered on/off, suspended and restarted. When the user tries to connect to them, the empty vmClient frame gets populated by the VMware MKS console (VNC) session with the guest operating system.

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Archipel is a new open source virtual infrastructure management system based on the libvirt libraries and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber).

Still in early stage, the tool supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ and VirtualBox and it’s currently able to operate single virtual machines and VM groups, displaying performance statistics about them.

The interesting twist is that, thanks to the XMPP engine, this console provides instant notification about VMs status to any chat client that supports the (almost) standard protocol.
This means that virtual infrastructure administrators can query virtual machine status through their IM program of choice (like Google Talk or Gmail Chat for example).

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Microsoft just published the beta version of a new Infrastructure Planning and Design guide.
Titled Dynamic Data Center, this 43-pages blueprint on what Microsoft defines “a combination of automation, control, and resource management software with a well-defined topology of virtualization, servers, storage, and networking hardware”.

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While Intel prepares to launch its first octal-core CPU (codename Nehalem-EX) , which will potentially trigger a price increase in vSphere licensing, VMware publishes a new benchmark on current Xeon 5500 servers.

This time the company focuses on high throughput web performance, running the SPECweb2005 benchmark against a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 machine equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 CPUs @ 2.933GHz and 96GB memory.

The system above, powered by vSphere 4.0, run four virtual machines with 4 vCPUs and 21GB vRAM each, hosting a copy of paravirtualized 64bit Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 plus Rock Webserver and Rock JSP server.

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At the beginning of January virtualization.info published a long overview about the VMware’s approach to cloud computing, covering the vCloud APIs, the vCloud Express implementation and the five partners that are currently offering it.

One of them, BlueLock, just sent an email to its customers announcing that its vCloud Express offering will (tentatively) move from beta to general availability (GA) on March 25.

As far as we know none of the other providers is out of beta yet (this article will be updated if necessary).
So, while it’s entirely possible that BlueLock wants to be the first to announce vCloud Express GA, it’s much more likely that all the early adopters will make GA announcements in the same timeframe.
And this may mean that VMware is about to release some additional information or bits about its cloud computing platform. Like for example a version 1.0 of the APIs, or the public version of project Redwood, the software that will allow customers to migrate their virtual machines from their private virtual infrastructure to public clouds like the BlueLock one.