Year: 2010

This week virtualization.info is following – for the first time – the Parallels annual Summit that takes place at the lovely Fontainebleau in Miami Beach.

Easy to guess, the leitmotif of this edition is cloud computing, pretty much like everywhere else in the Industry.
Parallels doesn’t specifically use the term to mean virtualization-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), even if it’s a virtualization vendor, but rather as an umbrella that has a major focus on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Serguei Beloussov, Parallels Chairman and CEO, is on stage.

Parallels Summit primarily is a conference for partners, and Beloussov doesn’t waste any time to say that cloud computing is an opportunity for profit when you address SMBs.
To Parallels a typical Small Business is a firm that only has part-time employees or a very small number (like 50), without IT staff or capability to plan, deploy and administer a computer infrastructure.

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Just in case the entrance in the server market and the alliance with EMC and VMware were not clear enough, Cisco decided to clarify even better that taking over HP market share is the primary goal:

And it’s not a secret that EMC and HP compete in the enterprise storage space.
The only problem is that HP is one of the strongest VMware partners today.
The two could move from partnership to fair “co-opetition”, as the Industry likes to call it today, but for how much time?

TechTarget just published an article about the upcoming VMware View 4.5, expected later this year (virtualization.info heard unconfirmed rumors about this summer).

The most interesting part of that piece is that ThinApp will be released as part of it, and that it will support server-side applications.

So far no company except the US startup AppZero (formerly Trigence) has claimed capability to virtualize multi-tier, mission critical server workloads through application virtualization technologies.
Besides AppZero, the only other company that is known for working in this area is Microsoft, which disclosed its plan for a server-side version of App-V in January 2008 and showed a first demo in May 2009 at its MMS conference.
So far Microsoft didn’t disclose any release date for such version of App-V.

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Exactly one year ago two well-known virtualization experts Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants) released an independent, non-sponsored performance analysis comparing ESX 3.5, XenServer 5.0 and Hyper-V 2008.

The benchmark, specifically designed to measure desktop virtualization workloads (served by Terminal Services and VDI platforms), was so valid that Citrix decided to embrace the Virtual Reality Check methodology to measure XenDesktop 4 performance.

Twelve months later the two are back with a new comparison. This time they put side by side Citrix XenServer 5.5, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1, comparing them against their new workload simulator Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) 2.0.

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When Red Hat announced its decision to switch virtualization technology, moving from Xen to KVM, in June 2008, it generated a lot of buzz.

It was a dangerous move, considering that the platform was pretty new, that its creator and maintainer was a young startup, Qumranet, and that no ISV was actually supporting its applications inside it.
On the other side KVM was integrated in the Linux kernel after just six months of development, and Red Hat eventually acquired Qumranet to get the knowledge, the people and the influence to return the most on its risky investment.
Nobody followed Red Hat: Citrix, Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun and of course its primary competitor Novell continued to work on Xen.

Fast forward to late 2009: Red Hat is finally ready to unveil its commercial implementation of KVM, introducing Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH) and Virtualization Manager for Servers (REVMS).
Red Hat continues to be the only virtualization player to offer a commercial implementation of KVM, but but things may change soon.

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Maybe the Dell strategy for fabric computing isn’t clear yet, but its approach to virtualization definitively is: so far the company closed a number of OEM agreements with vendors in different areas to build a rich product portfolio without having to own one, and directly compete against VMware or other major players.

The list includes Reflex Systems (March 2009), Quest/Vizioncore and Novell/Platespin (both September 2008),

Dell may no interest in playing a major role in the hardware virtualization space, but it may have some in other, emerging markets.
The company in fact just announced the acquisition of KACE, the US firm focused on system management that launched an application virtualization platform in 2009.

KACE acquired it in September 2008 from a startup called Computers in Motion, and relaunched it in March 2009 as Virtual Kontainers.

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Red Hat recently launched the public beta of its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 which introduces the memory ballooning overcommitment technique for KVM.

The beta build finally includes the virtio balloon driver that was missing in RHEL 5.4. This means that KVM virtual machines will be able to change allocated memory at run-time.

KVM got memory ballooning in September 2008 but only now it appears in an enterprise Linux distribution.
Some may argue that this technique alone is not enough to achieve efficient memory overcommitment (VMware for example also uses contend-based page sharing and demand paging) but Red Hat also has content-based page sharing since RHEL 5.4 thanks to the KVM integration with Kernel SamePage (KSP).

This Tuesday Microsoft released its first security bulletin for Hyper-V.

The vulnerability, which could lead to a Denial of Service (DoS), consists in a malformed sequence of instructions that a locally authenticated user has execute on a guest operating system. 
It applies to all versions of Hyper-V, including Windows Server Hyper-V (2008, 2008 R2 and Server Core editions) and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server (2008, 2008 SP2 and 2008 R2 editions).

The vulnerability doesn’t affect the guest operating systems, it cannot be remotely exploited, it cannot be exploited by anonymous users inside the guest OS and it can’t be used for privileges escalation inside the hypervisor layer.

Additional information about affected files available here.

Veeam just released the third major version of its popular file manager for VMware ESX hosts: FastSCP.

Version 3.0.2 introduces support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Interestingly, the company reports that FastSCP now has a user base of over 120,000 virtualization professionals.
This audience was conquered after a little more than three years: FastSCP 1.0 was released in October 2006 while version 2.0 arrived in February 2007.

Just one week after the release of Stratosphere 4.5.3, the US startup Liquidware Labs announces version 4.5.4.

In this build the company included an Application Virtualization Assessment feature clarifying that its interest goes beyond hardware virtualization and VDI.

With the new capability, Stratusphere 4.5.4 can build an application inventory by assessing physical desktops and laptops.
The inventory includes the following information:

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