virtualization.info Editors

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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Just in case you missed it, XenServer is now open source.
It’s confirmed by the Citrix CTO of Virtualization and Management division Simon Crosby, who answered a question about this topic on virtualization.info.

Citrix XenServer is a commercial implementation of the Xen open source hypervisor, as much as Oracle VM Server and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Xen.
XenSource, the company which sponsored the Xen project in its early days and that developed XenServer, has been acquired by Citrix in August 2007 for $500M.

Citrix first decided to give away XenServer for free (February 2009) and then announced its plan to release it as open source (October 2009).

The source code is now part of the XenServer 5.5 Update 2 download package that is available online.
To see the source code ISOs you have to log on:

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As soon as it received the green light to complete the Sun acquisition, Oracle moved on and acquired AmberPoint.

AmberPoint is a US company that offers application management and application performance measurement solutions.
It provides a real-time view into performance and runtime behavior of distributed applications, and raises alerts when SLA limits are approaching or when transactions fail to complete, or when certain business parameters are violated.

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In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors voted to remove the founder Diane Greene as CEO of the company. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPO in the IT history.

Two months after her departure, his husband Mendel Rosenblum, left too.

Rosenblum co-founded VMware and was the Chief Scientist declining the company vision.

The board immediately replaced her with Paul Maritz, a long-time Microsoft executive that joined the EMC ecosystem after his startup Pi was acquired in February 2008.

Under the Maritz leadership VMware took an unexpected direction, extending beyond virtualization and cloud computing, to the realm of development frameworks and software-as-a-service applications.

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