Year: 2010

As Brian Madden correctly noted, Parallels has recently updated its OS virtualization platform, Virtuozzo Containers (PVC), to version 4.6 in September 2010.

The company didn’t announce the release, not even with a single press announcement, despite Containers remains the only OS virtualization platform for server consolidation on Windows environments on the market.
This is the reason why, most publications, including virtualization.info, didn’t report the news.

Virtuozzo Containers has been updated to version 4.5 more than one year ago, introducing significant new features like resource pooling, containers cloning and startup priority.
Version 4.6 is a mix bag: the Windows version doesn’t introduce any major new feature except the support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, support for Parallels Virtual Automation (PVA) 4.6.1, and support for a number of 3rd anti-virus and backup solutions:

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Bryan Semple, who is Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel wrote a paper titled: 3 Ways Storage & Server Admins Unite to Enhance VMware Performance (Or – how to keep the peace between teams)

The paper which contains 4 pages and explores three steps to unify storage and virtualization teams within organizations, based on experiences which VKernel acquired from the field. He states that the friction is caused by the fact that storage administrators are no longer involved in understanding specific application loads.

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VMware has released a paper titled: Performance of Virtualizaed SQL Server-Based VMware vCenter Database. The paper which contains 17 pages contains a performance study on the impact of a virtualized SQL Server-based vCenter database which is virtualized on vSphere 4.1.

In order to test the performance both a physical and a virtual installation of Windows was used but running SQL Server 2008 R2. Using a script the database was populated with data equally to a full year of inventory, alarms events and tasks and performance statistics, representing a large vCenter implementation.

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In October, VMware updated its virtualization platform Workstation and Player and its platform wrapper ACE to build 301548. Now VMware has updated the products to build 324285 which is a maintenance release for the three products.

Workstation version 7.1.3 is a so called maintenance which only contains bug fixing, detailed in the release notes.

VMware player version 3.1.2 also contains bug fixes as detailed in the release notes and VMware ACE 2.7.2 only contains bug fixes as detailed in the release notes as well.

During Microsoft’s educational event Teched Europe in Berlin beginning this month, Bernard Tritsch, CTO of Immidio presented a session called: RDP, RemoteFX, ICA/HDX, EOP and PCoIP – VDI Remoting Protocols Turned Inside Out. The session presents the outcome of unbiased testing of different remoting protocols in LAN and WAN situations. These testings and findings were performed together with Shawn Bass an independant consultant, who is very active in the server based computing community.

The session starts with explaining the desktop composition, which consists of different ways to present graphics and multimedia, namely GDI, DirectX, PDF, OpenGL, Windows Presentation Foundation, Flash, Silverlight, videos and animations, and what makes up the desktop remoting architecture.

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Ben Armstrong, Virtualization Program Manager at Microsoft posted an interesting article about how time synchronization works in Hyper-V.

Concerning time synchronization there are a couple of problems, the first one is related to virtual machines which lose track of time. This problem is related to the fact that most operating systems use the hardware clock (RTC) at boot to determine time, and once booted based on that time have a mechanism which calculates time. Problem is that this calculation is based on assumptions which aren’t valid for virtual machines, this can cause a drift in time calculations.

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Pancetera, the company which provides management and optimization for virtual storage in VMware has released Pancetera Unite version 2.0.2. This version is the follow up of version 1.2.1. which was released in September this year.

The main new features in this release are integration with change block tracking from vSphere and SmartRead 2.0. Besides that an option is now provided to install an IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) client in the Pancetera Unite virtual appliance in order to backup VMware environments.

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Yesterday Novell finally announced a deal to sell its assets to Attachmate Corporation and another entity, CPTN Holdings LLC, created in early November and controlled by Microsoft for $2.2B. 
In September, virtualization.info tried to picture a scenario where VMware was the new Novell’s owner, according to rumors about a talk between the two. But just a few days later the company’s CEO ruled out the possibility while Reuters reported that potential buyers were not keen to own the NetWare business unit.

The closed deal involves no less than 882 patents, apparently assigned to CPTN Holdings for $450M, and a remarkable number of virtualization and cloud computing products.

The PlateSpin virtualization portfolio
First of all there is the whole PlateSpin product portfolio, which Novell acquired in February 2008.
Such portfolio includes physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tools, capacity planning tools and disaster recovery tools.
Despite Novell did a poor job in retaining the value of the brand, and the talents behind it, these products were once considered leading solutions by customers.

Unless Attachmate plans to become a virtualization vendor soon, these products are not appealing to them, while they may be extremely valuable to Microsoft.

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Besides releasing the OpenXenManager tool the XenseMaking project also provides the XenWebManager tool.

XenWebManager is a web-based open source clone of Citrix Xencenter. With XenWebManager you only need a browser for manage your server and virtual machines. With full packages you only need have installed python (2.4+). For console access you only need a browser with java plug-in or a browser with html5 websockets.

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OpenXenManager , which is part of the XenseMaking project is a Open Source clone of Citrix XenCenter which works on Linux, BSD, Windows and MacOSX. While Citrix XenCenter only runs on Windows, OpenXenManager basically runs on every platform which is capable of running python. The product is currently in alpha stage.

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