virtualization.info Editors

This week Xen.org opened a new section of its website dedicated to research papers. One of the first two published there is especially interesting: Post-copy live migration of virtual machines

From the abstract:

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of post-copy based live migration for virtual machines (VMs) across a Gigabit LAN. Post-copy migration defers the transfer of a VM’s memory contents until after its processor state has been sent to the target host. This deferral is in contrast to the traditional pre-copy approach, which first copies the memory state over multiple iterations followed by a final transfer of the processor state. The post-copy strategy can provide a "win-win" by reducing total migration time while maintaining the liveness of the VM during migration.

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In mid March VMware launched the public beta of Workstation 7.1 / Player 3.1 / ACE 2.7 and Fusion 3.1.
The products now reached the Release Candidate status, introducing some new features in all products.

Workstation / Player / ACE 7.1 RC (build 254807):

• OVF Tool 2.0
• New user interface for memory management
• Support for Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 guest operating systems

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Just one month ago Microsoft finally released the first beta of a new Linux Integration Services package for Hyper-V which introduced the highly desired support for multiple vCPUs in Novell and Red Hat guest operating systems.

Linux Integration Services 2.1 has now reached the Release Candidate status and includes two additional features:

• Heartbeat
  This provides a way for the host to detect if the guest is still running and responsive.
• Pluggable Time Source
  A pluggable clock source module is included for a more accurate time source to the guest.

A few days ago Microsoft released a new certification exam focused on virtualization as part of its training path for IT professionals.
The exam is called TS: Widows Server 2008 R2, Desktop Virtualization [70-669] and covers multiple products, including Virtual PC (the one part of Windows 7) and Windows XP Mode, App-V, MED-V, Remote Desktop Services (RDS), the VDI Connection Broker, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Configuration Manager (SCCM), Powershell 2.0 and of course Hyper-V 2008 R2.

The exam 70-669, optionally paired with the 5-days training class 10324A: Implementing and Managing Microsoft Desktop Virtualization provides credits to achieve the certification called Microsoft Certified IT Professional: Virtualization Administrator.

In the last few weeks VMware confirmed multiple times that a major new release of vSphere is due this year.
virtualization.info has a detailed list of features that will appear in the next vSphere release, tentatively named 4.1, but it’s unclear if this is the major update that the VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz mentioned during the last earnings call.

It’s important to clarify that while the features below, partially unveiled in March, are already part of the current beta builds, there’s no guarantee that VMware will keep all of them before reaching the GA status.

Additionally it’s important to note that the list below may be incomplete:

• Storage I/O can be shaped by I/O shares and limits through the new Storage I/O Control quality of service (QoS) feature
• Network I/O can be partitioned through a new QoS engine that distinguish between virtual machines, vMotion, Fault Tolerance (FT) and IP storage traffic.

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Over the last few weeks Citrix published a growing number of hints about the public appearance of its free client hypervisor XenClient (formerly Project Independence) next week at its Synergy Conference in San Francisco.

Despite the availability of breakout sessions and hands-on-lab about XenClient anyway, it wasn’t clear if the client hypervisor would be available to the general public.

The final confirmation about this comes from Simon Crosby, CTO of Datacenter & Cloud division, who just wrote on his corporate blog:

…Now that XenClient "Stewie" is getting ready for exposure to a larger set of users, the power management is excellent – there is some secret sauce at work that I can’t disclose yet – and the only limitation for multi-VM use is the boot time. There are still quite a few user experience quirks such as limited multi-monitor support and knowing how to get printing to work, but the system is very usable. My initial user experience issues, such as scheduler interaction that messed up Microsoft OCS and Skype performance, and having to figure out how to get my 3G USB device supported and manually insert the driver, have mostly been addressed. Support for sleep states, power management, and feedback on useability have helped enormously. Along the way, we have learned painfully just how hard a job it is to build a client-side type 1 hypervisor, and reminded that we still have a way to go.

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Brian Madden just published an interesting article revealing that VMware was expected to announce the upcoming release of View 4.5, scheduled for July, and that the product may include the client hypervisor called Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) originally announced in 2008.

At the last minute, despite multiple press pre-briefings, VMware decided to postpone the announcement.
It’s not clear if the news is going to be postponed just by one week, to better disturb imminent Citrix Synergy conference, or more.

But the most interesting part of the rumor is that, apparently, View 4.5 was supposed to include the CVP component that has been already postponed a couple of times.
That this is not going to happen as far as virtualization.info sources report. In fact View 4.5 will feature a no-more-experimental View Client with Local Mode, which leverages VMware Workstation (with ACE components) for offline VDI scenarios.

In February, Citrix published the results of an internal benchmark about virtual machines density of a single XenServer 5.5 physical server part of a XenDesktop 4.0 environment.
The measurement was performed using the independent workload simulator Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) and Citrix reported up to 130 concurrent Windows XP virtual desktops served by a a 72GB, dual socket, quad-core Intel Xeon x5570 (codename Nehalem) host.

A few months later VMware published its own result after running the same simulator with a slightly different configuration on a similar hardware (so no identical scenario) hosting ESX in a View 4.01 environment.

The machine with more RAM and same CPU scored 170 concurrent virtual desktops, while the machine with less RAM and less powerful CPU scored 142 concurrent virtual desktops:

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tuCloud is a UK startup that entered the cloud computing market in September 2009.
While the world was waiting for top players like Verizon and IBM to launch their desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) cloud computing offerings, this little company came out of nowhere and started offering Windows Vista and 7 virtual desktops (with VMware/Teradici PCoIP remote protocol, preloaded Windows applications and 100% uptime SLA) before anybody else on the market.

While it’s not exactly clear how tuCloud is able to do so without breaking current Microsoft licensing, the company seems to have made interesting progress in the last six months.

So far in fact tuCloud closed deals with Virtual Computer and Kaviza, two promising startup in the virtual desktop management space.
Thanks to the deal with Virtual Computer, on-premises virtual desktops across multiple continents will be centrally manageable by NxTop on tuCloud servers.
Kaviza VDI-in-a-box instead is used as the primary VDI architecture to keep the offerings costs as low as possible.

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In November 2009 Cisco, EMC and VMware announced a massive alliance dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition that shook the server market and impacted on the strategy of top players like HP, Oracle, Dell, HDS and others.

Just a few months later, while the three are still busy forming the consulting arm Acadia, Cisco and VMware already intensify their already tight partnership, announcing a new joint channel program.

The initiative of course targets partners of both companies and encourage them to sell the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and the Nexus 1000V with VMware vSphere through a number of benefits like free online training, reduction in the number of VMware certifications required, cheap bundles, discounted physical demo equipment and free online demo equipment, and financial help to purchase hardware.

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