virtualization.info Editors

Today VMware sent out a number of invitations to promote an upcoming announcement planned for April 27.
The online webcast will be jointly presented with Salesforce, one of the leading companies in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market since years, and it’s dubbed VMforce.

Because it’s highly unlikely that VMware and Salesforce would disclose a merge in such a way, the expectations to have a groundbreaking announcement are set rather low. Nonetheless, a new evidence discovered just a few hours ago, may suggest something really big between the two.

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During the weekend Xen.org finally released Xen 4.0.

It includes a number of very interesting features, even if they are definitively less than the ones listed in the proposed roadmap appeared in August 2009:

• Fault Tolerance (live transactional synchronization of VM state between hosts)
• Memory Overcommit (page sharing through the Transcendent Memory feature)
• Support for live snapshots and clones through the new VHD implementation called Blktap2
• Support for new Smart NICs with multi-queue and SR-IOV functionality through the network channel implementation called Netchannel2
• Support for Para-virtualized USB and VGA pass-through
• Support for Paravirt-ops in the Dom0 (with Linux kernel 2.6.31)
• Support for up to 64 vCPUs per virtual machine
• Support for up to 1TB RAM per host
• Support for Intel Xeon 5600 Series CPUs (codename Westmere)

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xvp (aka Xen VNC Proxy) is a suite of open source programs for managing Citrix XenServer or Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) virtual machines developed by Colin Dean.

The console allows to operate and access virtual machines through a browser (no matter if it runs on Linux, Mac OS or Windows), and to migrate VMs across hosts in the same pool.

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These days Citrix seems more and more interested in turning its attention to the SMB market. Last week virtualization.info covered the investment in Kaviza and its VDI-in-a-box solution that lowers the infrastructure cost down below $500 per virtual desktop.

Last week Citrix also published an interesting technical article about how to configure XenDesktop in an environment that  doesn’t have a SAN:

…
For small and medium businesses that want to reap the benefits of XenDesktop, but that don’t have significant capital to invest in a high-end SAN, the use of local storage to host the write-cache drive would remove a significant implementation barrier. In most situations, the IOPS supported by the local storage system is the primary constraint limiting the number of virtual machines that could run on a single host. For a small or medium business that does not require high density, local drive caching would be a viable alternative.

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A few days ago Oracle updated its desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox to version 3.1.6.

The minor update is primarily for bug fixing but it also includes a new, multi-threaded architecutre for the vboxowebsrv web service.

Intel just released a blueprint on how to build an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing architecture.

Titled Intel Cloud Builder Guide to Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel Xeon Processor-based Platforms, the 18-pages paper promotes the use of Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) Service Provider Edition as the management console of choice for IaaS clouds based on Xen, KVM or VMware ESX/ESXi.

The document includes both design principles and step-by-step implementation:

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There’s a lot of interest around the US startup Unidesk, primarily because Ron Oglesby recently left Dell to join it as Chief Solution Architect.

Oglesby is one of the most popular names in the virtualization industry, author of the bestsellers VMware ESX Server 2.5 Advanced Technical Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3 Advanced Technical Design Guide.
He was one of the premiere speakers at our Virtualization Congress 2009 and he appears on virtualization.info from time to time as guest columnist (see his last article here: Is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization?).

Unidesk is a US startup founded in December 2007, funded by Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture with a Round A investment of $8.1M and a Round B of $12M.

The company’s management team includes Don Bulens (President and CEO), who was the President and CEO of EqualLogic until Dell’s acquisition.
With Bulens there are: Chris Midgley (founder and CTO), the former Vice President of Digital Strategy at Iron Mountain, Jeannie Vineyard (Vice President of Engineering), who comes from Egenera (almost 6 years there) and Liquid Machines (3 years), Brian McDonough (Vice President of Sales), former sales executive at IBM in charge for the Watchfire product line, and Tom Rose (Chief Marketing Officer), the former Director of Worldwide Product Marketing at HP.

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In mid March Microsoft officially announced the upcoming introduction of Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V, a feature for memory overcommit that will arrive as part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

Early information about how Dynamic Memory works were published a couple of weeks ago by a company evangelist but promptly removed.

Microsoft is receiving heavy criticism from VMware supporters about Dynamic Memory after downplaying the value of VMware overcommit techniques for years. So it is trying to be as careful and detailed as possible in explaining its approach to memory management in virtualization.

To do so Jeff Woolsey, Lead Program Manager, Windows Virtualization, is publishing on the corporate blog a series of very long posts that aims at explaining the different approach between Microsoft and VMware to memory overcommit.
The most relevant piece to date is the one appeared yesterday, where he talks about page sharing, one of the techniques used by VMware.

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Do you remember Joanna Rutkowska, the security researcher behind the controversial BluePill attack against hypervisors?

The company she founded and currently controls, Invisible Things Lab, just launched an open source project dubbed Qubes.

Pitched as a new operating system, Qubes really is a client hypervisor based on Xen, which isolates multiple environment in dedicated Linux-based virtual machines.

The architecture has some interesting characteristics. For example the networking subsystem has been moved from the dom0 to a a dedicated, unprivileged VM that leverages the most modern I/O virtualization techniques (AMD IOMMU and Intel VT-d). The same thing is planned for the storage subsystem in a future release.

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When Cisco announced the first 3rd party virtual switch for VMware ESX, it raised a lot of interest. Not just because the product was (and still is) an interesting attempt to address the limitations of native dvSwitch shipped with vSphere, but also because it was the first time that Cisco didn’t sell a physical box. 

Almost one year after the general availability of Nexus 1000V, the company seems to have slightly changed its mind about being all virtual.

At the beginning of this week in fact Cisco introduced a new 1U physical appliance dubbed Nexus 1010V Virtual Services Appliance. Its purpose is to host up to four Nexus 1000V Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) outside the VMware vSphere environment, which means that a single device can handle up to 256 ESX hosts.

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