virtualization.info Editors

Warning: the following post is not related to any product release, vendors alliances, or any other industry news that we normally cover on virtualization.info.
It’s just a commentary on the (bad) public relation and marketing practices that are so common before the big trade show that VMworld is.

Last year VMworld 2008 broke any attendance record in the history of VMware, surpassing 14,000 attendees and over 200 vendors sponsoring and exhibiting at the event.

It was a huge exposure opportunity even for the smallest startup in the market and so all the PR firms that were involved literally overflooded with news the influencers (analysts, journalists, bloggers, independent technical evangelists, etc.) that were supposed to attend the conference or at least cover the event on their websites.

Of course this activity also implied firing the PR announcements online, bombarding every poor customer that subscribes Google News or other news alert systems for specific keywords about virtualization.

This is a common practice before a big trade show, but it doesn’t mean that it is a good one.

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In May, during its main conference Synergy, Citrix announced the existence of an open source virtual switch that may compete with the Nexus 1000V that Cisco made available for VMware vSphere.

In early June, the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby shared a very few details about it, but so far most of the virtualization community doesn’t know much about it. But the official website about the project quietly appeared online now: the product is called Open vSwitch and is released under the Apache 2 open source license.

The first release (which is almost complete and available online as well) is designed to support distributed networking (like the Cisco Nexus 1000V) and includes the following features:

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In June Xen reached version 3.4 introducing out-of-the-box support for Hyper-V and a series of enhancements that will make the platform a good client hypervisor.

At the beginning of this month Xen further progressed to version 3.4.1, which is just a maintenance release, but the truly interesting things are in the Xen 4.0 roadmap (with our emphasis):

• RDMA Live Migration Support
• Dom0 kernel in Linux 2.6.30 or later
• Dom0 support for Marvell 6480 disk driver
• Pass through USB-Controllers/Devices for PV Guests
• Fault Tolerance – Project Remus and/or Kemari
• Monitor, Limit, Control network traffic coming at DomUs

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The conference VMworld is just one week away and this year VMware’s competitors seem to have additional reasons to start a controversy and disturb the event.

The topic of the day is the size of the hypervisor footprint, which equals to a certain attack surface and has a relevance when you try to estimate the overall security level of a platform.

This is an area where VMware always claimed a neat superiority over Microsoft because the primary version of Hyper-V comes with a full copy of Windows Server 2008 as its parent partition.
VMware believes this is a major selling point at the point that it is highlighted on the corporate website.

Microsoft never addressed the critique before a couple of weeks ago, when it published an interesting analysis (part 1, part 2 and part 3) of what happens to the hypervisors footprint after a round of patches.

On its website, VMware compares its lightweight ESXi, the hypervisor version without the Console Operating System (COS), against the full version of Hyper-V. For Microsoft a more fair comparison should be between ESXi and its lightweight Hyper-V Server.
Nonetheless the company prepared three different analysis (only including critical and security patches):

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A few hours ago the Microsoft virtualization management solution System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 hit the RTM.

As expected the RTM arrives just a few weeks after Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 were released to the Microsoft partners.

The most important new capability included in this release is the long awaited virtual machines live migration.
Anyway Microsoft surprised its audience in early June by adding other welcome features to the SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Candidate, like the Quick Storage Motion and the support for VMware port groups.

The Release Candidate should be considered feature complete but the company managed to squeeze a last unexpected thing to the RTM: the (partial) support for VMware vSphere 4.0.
Basically Microsoft supports the new VMware platform only for the same features that were available in VI3.5. Some of the new capabilities that VMware offers will be supported in a future update of SCVMM.

virtualization.info detailed the entire feature-set here.

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For a long time a number of contributors sponsored by Red Hat worked on a virtualization interface that could standardize the way hypervisors are managed, getting rid of the differences between vendors’ implementations.

The API is called libvirt and it’s around since early 2006.

Red Hat has a strong commitment on it, at the point that its imminent KVM-based virtualization offering is based on its, as announced in June 2008.
This is why the API is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) which allows the inclusion in any commercial product.

Through libvirt, a management platform running on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS or even Windows can already control both Xen, KVM, Sun VirtualBox, Parallels OpenVZ, QEMU, LXC and User Mode Linux (UML). But the best has yet to come.

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Red Hat is definitively preparing for the imminent launch of its new enterprise virtualization offering based on KVM and the Qumranet technologies acquired in September 2008.

A very important piece of the puzzle is how Windows guest operating systems will perform on the Red Hat implementation of KVM.
Most virtual machines on the planet runs Windows, so if Red Hat doesn’t shine here it will have nothing concrete to compete against VMware, Citrix and Microsoft hypervisors.

In mid-July the company gave a hint on how it plans to manage this aspect of its strategy: it released version 1.0 of its KVM para-virtualization drivers for Windows guest OSes under the open source GPLv2 license.

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In April Vizioncore launched a free extension for the PowerShell GUI that its parent company Quest offers since a long time: PowerGUI.

Dubbed Virtualization EcoShell, the Vizioncore tool is a powerful environment to develop and execute complex scripts, and leverage the PowerShell support that VMware offers in VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.0.

Vizioncore is keen to facilitate the growth of a PowerShell community around virtualization because of its new interest in automation: awesome scripts and smart developers may end up working around its new vControl product.

Just last week the company released the beta of Virtualization EcoShell 1.1 which includes a number of new features:

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In April 2009 a new company called HyTrust entered the virtualization market with primary focus on access control and configuration management.

Earlier this month the startup released the first consistent update for its flagship product: Appliance 1.5.

This new version introduces:

• label-based policy enforcement 
  (each object inside the virtual infrastructure can receive one or more labels, labels are embedded to virtual machines even if they are migrated across multiple hosts, only the objects with same labels can interact with each other)
• two-factor authentication using RSA SecureID
  (for direct-to-host and vCenter management)
• support for VMware vSphere 4.0 (including ESXi 4.0)
• support for Cisco Nexus 1000V

Like for version 1.0, HyTrust offers a free version of its Appliance 1.5 which is capped to 3 ESX hosts.

During this August VMware released a round of minor updates for many products:

• vCenter Server 4.0 Patch 1
  This critical patch has been released for those customers that implemented VMware HA and their Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) utilize Class A addresses (see the related KnowledgeBase article).
• Workstation 6.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing but VMware also introduced support for Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as guest operating system.
• ACE 2.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing and security patching: the version of Apache for Windows used by the ACE Management Server has been upgraded to 2.0.63.
• Player 2.5.3 (build 185404)
  This update is primarily for bug fixing but VMware also introduced support for Ubuntu Linux 9.04 as guest operating system.