virtualization.info Editors

There’s much interest around the new major release of Xen because of the rich roadmap that has been proposed and published this summer.

Now we community has a tentative release schedule: January/February 2010.

The news was given by Keir Fraser, Senior Architect at Citrix, during his speech at the Xen Summit in Asia just a few days ago.

Fraser also told that the Xen.org team plans to maintain two branches (3.4.x and 4.x) until the new one is mature enough for the switchover and that a new major release is planned every six-nine months.

Google didn’t release yet its lightweight operating system for netbooks, Chrome OS, and many people already rushed to customize the early source code to create fully-functional images that can boot inside a virtual machine or on real hardware.

One of these early experiments is particularly interesting for the virtualization community because it modifies the Chromium OS open source code to include Xen.

The one that released this project, called ChromiumOS64, is Teo En Ming, who hacked the code to support 64bit platforms (the Google code only supports 32bit architectures at the moment because it targets Intel Atom CPUs that powers most netbooks) and integrate Xen 3.4.3 RC1.

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IBM and VMware recently released a new performance analysis of SAP NetWeaver 7.01 and ERP 6.0 on Windows Server 2008 on vSphere 4.0 on a System x 3850 M2.

The IBM machine, equipped with four 6-way Intel Xeon X7460 CPUs @ 2.66GHz and 128GB RAM, executed up to 12 virtual machines (each with 2 vCPUs), in different scenarios with different virtual hardware configurations.

The benchmark shows that this system supports 8 times more users than a single 2 vCPUs virtual machine.

In late November the FreeBSD team released FreeBSD 8.0.

It finally introduces the experimental support for the Xen domU. This means that FreeBSD 8.0 can run as a (32bit only) Xen guest operating system.

FreeBDS 8.0 also introduce a new experimental feature called “vimage” as part of its OS virtualization technology “jail”, which partitions the network stack.

The vimage jail has its own loopback interface and a separated network stack that includes routing tables. The vimage network interfaces can be moved between different vimage jails and outside of them.

Dilip Naik, a former Microsoft employee, awarded as Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the File Systems and Storage category, recently released a couple of interesting tools for Hyper-V: VMProv and VHDCopy.

VHDCopy is a patent-pending command line utility that significantly reduce the time required to copy large virtual hard drives files by skipping unnecessary portions of data (like the hibernation file) inside the VHD itself.
It only works with offline VMs and fixed VHD files up to 148GB that are formatted with NTFS.

Naik claims it performs 2x-10x faster than other copy operations, like the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) check-in/check-out operation or the manual copy command performed by an admin, by reducing the disk I/O operations from 20% to 90%.

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Sun releases today refreshes its hosted desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox, introducing a major new feature.

Believe or not VirtualBox 3.1 is now capable to perform a virtual machine live migration, called Teleportation, between remote hosts over a standard TCP/IP network link.

Of course, because the virtualization layer sits above the host operating system, VirtualBox has limited compatibility issues with different CPU families, and no problems with different operating systems.

To work, Teleportation requires that both copies of VirtualBox have two identical VMs with same virtual hardware. These two VMs must access the same shared storage (NFS/CIFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel).
Despite what the press release claims, the user manual highlights that teleporting a VM between an AMD and an Intel CPU may fail, despite VirtualBox is able to simulate the each other differences to a degree.

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No matter how hard Microsoft and Citrix try to convince customers.
The whole idea that the two companies can recreate the Terminal Services-MetaFrame synergy on server virtualization doesn’t sound good. And it doesn’t sound good for a simple reason: in the first case, MetaFrame (or Presentation Server or XenApp) is a sophisticated add-on that enriches Terminal Services but can’t exist without it; in the second case, Microsoft and Citrix have completely overlapping virtualization platform which can fully replace each other.

The two companies may be totally aligned in terms of marketing effort to jointly attack the VMware leadership, but what happens when the Microsoft and Citrix sales guys actually visit the customers?
Aren’t they obliged to compete for the same account? If not, how exactly they suggest to the customer to choose between Hyper-V plus System Center versus XenServer plus Essentials? And even if there’s no friction there, which hypervisor do they recommend between Hyper-V and XenServer when the customer wants a XenDesktop-powered VDI environment?

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So far virtualization.info highlighted how the Cisco entrance in the server and virtualization markets is influencing the strategy of HP.

A couple of weeks ago we suggested that HP may want to acquire a series of companies (where 3Com is just the first one) to enrich its portfolio and be able to better compete, in the long run, against the VMware/Cisco/EMC merge-non-merge (the so called VCE coalition). 

Specifically, if Cisco, leveraging its investment in VMware and its new partnership with EMC, starts to erode the HP market share, a possible scenario is that HP decides to offer its own virtualization layer, by acquiring an existing vendor.

On top of that, there’s the never abandoned feeling that VMware is morphing into an infrastructure management company, that one day may compete with HP (and CA, BMC and IBM) to rule the physical layer as much as the virtual one.
If HP considers this as a concrete scenario, it may want to act now to limit the VMware actions in the future.

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Last week the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) released its security risk assessment on cloud computing infrastructures.

The 123-pages report analyzes the new risks that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architectures may imply, evaluating three different scenarios: the SME migration to cloud computing services, the impact of cloud computing on service resilience, and the adoption of cloud computing in e-Government.

virtualization.info was directly involved in the project, primarily contributing for the part about IaaS clouds.

The document doesn’t just cover the business and technical risks of adopting cloud computing. It also includes valuable legal recommendations that any company may want to check.

Here’s the list of contributors that worked on this paper:

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At the beginning of the week the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore released vFoglight 6.0, further consolidating its presence in the performance monitoring segment.
It seems that the company is investing a lot of resources in this product, which becomes increasingly important and on pair with the flagship vRanger.

The new release includes the following features:

• Several graphical improvements (a new dashboard, a task-based UI, new wizards, etc.)
• Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008 as backend database
• Support for Apple Safari as web client
• Support for Microsoft Excel to export the reports