virtualization.info Editors

As virtualization.info reported in April, Microsoft is working on a new version of Virtual PC simply called Windows Virtual PC(WVPC), which supports Windows 7 as host OS and can launch a special virtual machine called Windows XP Mode.

Windows XP Mode is just a pre-configured VM with Windows XP SP3 as guest OS, but it seems especially integrated with Windows 7 because the new Virtual PC engine introduces seamless application publishing, USB virtualization and multi-monitor support.

The Windows XP Mode VM is available at no additional cost for Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise SKUs but requires a CPU with AMD-V or Intel VT enabled (so all the Sony customers worldwide will be unable to use it).

Windows 7 was released yesterday to Microsoft partners through MSDN and TechNet facilities,  so the company made available the release candidate of this new Virtual PC to grant compatibility.

Microsoft has included a few refinements to this new build:

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While the virtualization community waits to see how Microsoft will be able to apply application virtualization to multi-tier back-end services with App-V for Servers, the company officially opens the App-V 4.6 beta program.

This version is still oriented to client applications but introduces a major new feature: the support for 64bit platforms (including the just released Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2).
For the first time customers will be able to sequence a 64bit application, something that nobody else on the market can do at the moment according to Microsoft.

Microsoft expects to finalize App-V 4.6 during H1 2010. Meanwhile you can enroll for the beta program here.

As usual VKernel continues to release updates for its products at a very fast pace. Two months after version 4.0, the startup is ready to launch the first minor upgrade for its flagship product: Capacity Analyzer 4.1.

The new build introduces a number of enhancements and some interesting new automated reporting capabilities:

• Automatic generation of alerts upon detection of ”abnormal” system behavior in capacity utilizations.
• Automatic reporting of key environment capacity trends.
• Automatic generation of utilization alerts upon detection of virtual machines’ drives activity

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VMware achieved the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ for VI3 last year. Even before that the company submitted VI3.5 to the EWA Canada test lab to obtain the same level.

Now that vSphere 4.0 is out, VMware is of course trying to get a third EAL4+ rating for its new platform.

As virtualization.info already wrote in the past the certification is valuable as long as the submitted Protection Profile is a meaningful reference model.
This is the PP that VMware submitted to earn the VI3 EAL4+ certification.

The company expects that vSphere 4.0 earns the EAL4+ rating by H2 2010.

A couple of weeks ago the VMware Performance Team released a new interesting paper about a virtual deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on vSphere 4.0 Release Candidate (build 140815).

The 16,000 mailboxes environment was distributed across 8 virtual machines (Windows Server 2003 R2, 14GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 20GB vHD and 2000 users each) served by a HP ProLiant DL 580 G5 server with 4 Quad-Core Intel Xeon X7350 @ 2.93GHz and 128GB RAM.

The backend storage was served by a NetApp FAS6030 array with 114 disks split into four aggregates (the data on was made of 40 disks).

VMware tested the same environment with Microsoft Exchange Load Generator (8-hours workday simulation) using a 4GB Fibre Channel connection, a 1GbE iSCSI connection and a 1GbE NFS connection.
Despite this major difference in the available bandwidth the three protocols performance are very similar:

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Exactly two years ago Citrix announced the acquisition of XenSource, officially entering the server virtualization (with XenServer) and desktop virtualization (with XenDesktop) markets, in direct competition with the former partner VMware.

Citrix invested $500 million in this operation but spent the minimum possible effort to spread the word about its existence in the hardware virtualization universe.
Of course the relevance of XenSource in the open source world, the implications on the Xen project and the price paid for the startup, engaged the community for a while, but beyond that the company did almost nothing to change its image of terminal services / application delivery company into something different, that could attract a large number of competitors’ customers.

It is safe to say that for the first 18 months after the acquisition, the Citrix marketing didn’t take any major step in reposition the company as a real player in a market that was completely new before the arrival of XenSource folks.
So it doesn’t surprise much that most customers didn’t perceive (and still do not) XenServer as a serious alternative to VMware ESX.

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After Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0, VMware launched yesterday another private beta, this time for its VDI solution View.

The new View 4.0 finally introduces the software-only implementation of the Teradici PC over IP (PCoIP) remoting protocol.

VMware is working on a way to replace Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) since late 2007, when it joined the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) to work on a new standard called Net2Display that never came out.

Once clear that Net2Display couldn’t replace RDP anytime soon, VMware developed a two-phases plan to deliver a more efficient protocol for its VDI platform.
In phase one, the company signed an OEM agreement with the thin client vendor WYSE Technology, to use its TCX-MMR (for multimedia) and TCX-MDS (for multi-display) technologies.
In phase two, VMware started a co-development program with Teradici, to create a software-only version of its high-performance PCoIP protocol.

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VMware is preparing to release a new version of its Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

When the company announced the product for the first time in September 2007, it was immediately clear how virtualization technologies have the potential to revolutionize the disaster recovery industry.
Then, after the SRM 1.0 release more than one year ago, the product raised a lot of interest among the customers and a strong support from the storage vendors.

At the beginning of July VMware started the private beta of the second release, dubbed Site Recovery Manager 4.0, as Mike Laverick revealed on the VMTN forums.
The new version was originally numbered 1.5 but VMware recently decided to rename it as 4.0, probably to sync with the vSphere version (and to gain some extra maturity points).

A public beta may be announced in time for VMworld 2009, or VMware may decide to keep it private until General Availability.
We’ll try to provide additional information about the new features that are included in SRM 4.0.

The biggest challenge when a customer embraces any form of virtualization is verifying that the ISVs support their products inside the virtual machines, the OS containers or the virtual layers of choice.
Without an official support statement, the ISVs may require to reproduce any technical issue experienced inside the virtualization platform also on a physical machine. And this is a costly and time-consuming process that is often impossible to complete.

The lack of ISVs support is pretty common when dealing with virtualization platform that are brand new or not widely adopted, like Oracle VM or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (which is based on KVM).
Compared to VMware ESX, Hyper-V still has a limited diffusion and the ISVs that official support the Microsoft hypervisor are not so many. But things may dramatically change very soon.

With a move that almost passed under the radar, Microsoft just reshaped its Windows Logo specifications in a way that ISVs are now obliged to support Hyper-V:

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A couple of weeks ago Microsoft did something unique in its history: released some of its technology as open source, under the GPLv2 license.
Specifically, the company released as open source the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components, a set of para-virtualization drivers that improves the Linux guest OSes performance.

The official reason that Microsoft provided to justify this unprecedented behavior was the desire to improve the interoperability and the performance of Linux virtual machines. But immediately after the launch some behind-the-scene details emerged and revealed a completely different story.

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