virtualization.info Editors

A little more than two years ago, virtualization.info covered an emerging project called OpenNEbula (formerly GridHypervisor) which was one of the earliest open source solutions to manage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing architecture built on Xen.

The project, based on a research started in 2005 by Ignacio M. Llorente and Rubén S. Montero, matured a lot in these years. It now offers cloud management capabilities for most virtualization platforms, including Xen, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, VMware Server and any other virtual machine monitor that supports the libvirt libraries.
Plus, it offers capability to manage hybrid clouds, through the support for public clouds like Amazon EC2 and ElasticHosts.

Version 1.4 of OpenNebula was released in December 2009, and an upcoming 1.4.2 is expected to introduce support for Oracle VM VirtualBox.

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A new interesting paper recently appeared online: The Impact of virtualization on Network Performance of Amazon EC2 Data Center.

The 9-pages document, produced by the Department of Computer Science at the Rice University, analyzes how hardware virtualization (EC2 is based on the Xen implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) impacts on network behavior and performance, specifically focusing on processor sharing, packet delay, TCP/UDP throughput and packet loss.

The conclusions are surprising:

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The time has finally come: more than two years after Quest completed the acquisition of Vizioncore, it’s about to drop the brand.

Starting end of August (exactly in time for the VMware VMworld 2010 in US) Vizioncore will become Quest Software Server Virtualization Management Group.
In a similar fashion, after the acquisition of Provision Networks, Quest renamed it Quest Software Desktop Virtualization Group.

Finally the company recognized the complexity and the confusion that carrying on two brands implies. Mostly when the two brands have separated sales channels that often overlap and compete for the same account to sell each other solution.

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At today most public cloud infrastructures are sort of black boxes. There’s not too much that cloud providers are happy to disclose about, including their architecture internals, internal and 3rd parties software layers, or security defenses.
Customers have to blindly trust the provider as there’s no way yet to plug-in monitoring agents or on-demand assessments without a major pain (assuming a provider would permit them).

So the idea of measuring the performance of these public clouds is rather interesting. CloudHarmony, a new project focused on cloud benchmarking and taxonomy of public clouds, is providing some insight and early reports that are worth a check.

Benchmarking is a challenging discipline. In this scenario seems almost impossible, as the cloud platforms are distributed across worldwide datacenters and the abstractive nature of the cloud implies that the underlying hypervisor or even the underlying physical hardware may change without notice, in any moment.

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While waiting for VMware to release its much awaited vCloud Service Director (formerly project Redwood), and possibly to invest much more resources in its existing vCenter Orchestrators, customers are coming out with their own solutions to bridge the gap between a virtual infrastructure and a private cloud through automation.

It’s the case of Peter Rudolf, at Mightycare Solutions, who just released an interesting plug-in for VMware vCenter called vCOPlugIN.

The idea is to define a number of actions workflows, called Services, that can be executed against one or more virtual machines in the vCenter inventory with a single click.
These services include things like the creation of new VMs following predefined templates configurations (virtual servers, virtual desktop, development workstation, etc.), the VMs deployment using different techniques (cloning, PXE delivery, etc.), the deployment of certain application packages, the VMs backup, and more.

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Starting today Parallels has begun selling a special version of its desktop virtualization platform for Windows, Desktop for Windows, that addresses Windows XP/Vista users migrating to Windows 7.

Simply, the guest operating system has to be Windows XP or Vista while the host operating system has to be Windows 7. The presence of seamless window technology dubbed Coherence helps the application of the two platforms to coexist in a nice way.

CNet is highlighting how this offers may be not compliant with legal terms of Windows 7 EULA. Actually, it’s a no news.
Since ever, a customer that wants to run one or more guest operating systems on top of a certain host operating system has to own the license of all OSes. This applies to any hardware virtualization platform (both type-2 and type-1) which includes Parallels Workstation and its competitors, like VMware Workstation or Oracle VM VirtualBox.
There’s no reason why it should be different in this specific case.

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XenoCode, the application virtualization vendor that launched its platform and application packaging tool, Virtual Application Studio, in July 2008, is no more.
The company mysteriously decided to rename itself in Spoon, despite a growing awareness of the original brand (mostly thanks to the OEM agreement with Novell).

Accordingly, Virtual Application Studio becomes Spoon Studio, which is part of the product portfolio along with a brand new Spoon Server, which allows to distribute virtualized applications in a streamed fashion, just like it already happens over the Internet for Spoon.net pre-packaged software.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Last week Microsoft released the second beta of its offline patching solution for virtual infrastructures, dubbed Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) 3.0.

Less than a month ago the first beta came out. What’s changed since that release is just a fixed issue in the Template VHD update feature.

Earlier this week Gartner published a new version of its its first Magic Quadrant for x86 virtualization. It’s extremely interesting for a number of reasons.

First of all, VMware is the only major player considered a leader in the market, with the best capability to execute and the best completeness of vision. Its position seems unreachable no matter how you look at the graph.

More interesting than that, because unexpected, is that Gartner considers both Citrix and Oracle having the same capability to execute, despite the former is well ahead in terms of vision and alone in the Visionaries category.

Microsoft is the only “challenger”, and yet it has nor the capability to execute of VMware, which is surprising considering that VMware is now led by two former top Microsoft executives, neither the vision of Citrix.

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In Febrary Citrix published a 21-pages paper titled XenServer Performance Monitoring for Scalability Testing that may be useful for some customers and researchers.

It provides an overview of the different ways to retrieve performance metrics, including XenCenter and the CLI (through specific scripts that are provided as examples).