virtualization.info Editors

Five weeks ago Oracle announced the acquisition of Virtual Iron for an undisclosed sum. So far the company didn’t reveal if and how it plans to to merge the Virtual Iron hypervisor with the Sun xVM hypervisor and with its own Oracle VM Server.
Now finally the database giant starts to unveil its strategy.

The Register has just broken the news about an official communication released by Oracle to the Virtual Iron partners:

…In a letter to Virtual Iron’s sales partners, Oracle says it “will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.” And in a second letter to a partner speaking with The Reg, the company says it will not allow partners to sell new licenses to anyone – including existing customers – after the end of this month (i.e. in 11 days). Before then, partners can only sell licenses to existing customers under certain conditions.

…

When the integrated product becomes generally available, Virtual Iron customers will be able to move to the new, integrated product and benefit from a more feature rich-solution than is available today…

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Last week the Russian website OpenNET leaked the news about the existence of VMware Workstation 7 and revealed all the new features of this first private beta build (translated with Google):

• Improvements in the support of 3D
  OpenGL 2.1 and Shader Model 3.0 are supported in virtual machines, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
• Support for new model drivers Windows Display Driver Model for Windows 7
  is still only 2D acceleration and support only one monitor, the driver is using 32MB RAM. If you want to run a 3d application in Windows 7, you must configure it to use the old SVGAII driver from VMware.
• Support vSphere 4.0 and ESX support
  Professionals can now run these technologies as a guest system to verify the manner in which they are suited to your organization. ESX at this point is supported only on processors that support hardware-accelerated virtualization (all Intel Core 2 and above, AMD Athlon 64 X2 AM2/Phenom and above).

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A security researcher near virtualization.info, Claudio Criscione, informs us that VMware Converter 4.0.1 Stand Alone includes a web interface that is currently hidden or unfinished.

It’s a well-known thing that the product uses a web service to interact with the ESX hosts, but it seems that VMware is developing a complete web user interface around it.

At the moment the product only exposes a login form if you connect to the address: https://ipaddress/converter/
but several other functions are partially implemented, like for example the file upload facility that is handled by the FileInput.js component.

It’s unclear way VMware is shipping this partially finished interface inside the product or if there’s a concrete plan to finish it.

Nor Oracle neither Sun announced yet what will happen to the xVM virtualization offering after the acquisition completes.

While waiting for the big news, Sun gives us the first beta of VirtualBox 3.0 which includes major improvements in the graphic area and the support for an insane number of vCPUs:

• Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (Intel VT-x and AMD-V only)
• Support for OpenGL 2.0 in Windows, Linux and Solaris guest OSes
• Ability to use Direct3D 8/9 applications and games in Windows guest OSes (experimental)

The beta program can be enrolled here.

Now that Nexus 1000V, the first virtual switch for VMware vSphere is out for sale (and we know everything about it), Cisco is free to publish detailed demos of the product in action.

The company just uploaded two new HD videos on Facebook that cover how vEthernet interfaces relate to VMware vNICs, what are port-profiles, how to create them with a SSH console and how to apply them with the vSphere client, how to monitor the network statistics of a virtual machine despite its migration from a host to another with vMotion.

Both are worth a check:

• Nexus 1000V Demo – Part 1 (10:59 min)
• Nexus 1000V Demo – Part 2 (10:43 min)

With much irony, now that Microsoft is about to release Hyper-V R2, its Press department finally releases the Resource Kit for Hyper-V 1.0 (or better Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V).

The 750-pages book was written by Robert Larson and Janique Carbone, who already authored the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit.
The former comes from Microsoft Consulting Services, the latter is a former Microsoft Premier Support Engineer.

The book has been included in the virtualization.info Bookstore (which is powered by Amazon).

Today virtualization.info is happy to announce the launch of a new initiative called OneHourOn.

OneHourOn is a live webcast that virtualization.info will host from its cutting-edge Rent-A-Lab facility in Zurich.
We’ll use our on-demand datacenter to show the configuration and management of products provided by the many virtualization vendors that we daily track in the news.

So no slides at all.

This is a great opportunity to see in action a product that you may be interested in purchasing and by the way this also is a great opportunity to see how powerful, flexible and fast Rent-A-Lab can be.

Of course we’ll take full advantage of the enterprise equipment we have (currently 28 servers, each with 2 x Quad Core Intel E5420 2.5GHz, plus 35TB of storage served by SANs from several vendors).
This is why the first OneHourOn webcast will show a fairly complex installation to reproduce in a lab without expensive test equipment: the installation and configuration of VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 with EMC Celerra NS20 storage arrays.

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After 5 weeks of public beta program, Citrix released today XenServer and Essentials 5.5 (codename project George).

The list of new features is well known since a while but so far Citrix did a poor job in detailing what is included with the free XenServer and what is instead only available in Essentials Enterprise and Platinum editions (the release notes are identical for both packages).
While waiting for an official clarification virtualization.info guesses the breakdown as follows:

XenServer

• Active Directory integration
  Specify the AD domain to use for authentication by the pool and use your AD credentials to connect to the pool via XenCenter and ssh. You control which AD users/groups are allowed access.
• Expanded guest OS support
  RHEL 5.3, Debian Lenny, and SLES 11 Linux guests.
• Snapshot support in XenCenter and CLI
  Create and manage virtual machines live snapshots from within XenCenter or the xe CLI.

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Over one year ago one of the biggest phone carrier in US, Verizon, raised a lot of interest because of the rumors about its technology partnership with the startup Desktone and its plan to develop a VDI in the cloud, something that the industry is calling today Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

After 14 months the Verizon offering is is finally here (at least in US and Europe for now) but it doesn’t seem anymore oriented to the consumer market as the early rumors originally reported.

Called Verizon Computing as a Service (Caas), the platform is powered by several vendors including VMware, HP and Red Hat.
virtualization.info didn’t have the chance to try the service yet, but the press release talks about a fully featured virtual datacenter rather than a virtual desktop on demand:

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Yesterday, with a single step, a new startup called 5nine entered two crowded and market segments: the P2V migration and the capacity planning ones.

P2V migration tools have been progressively included into every major virtualization platform: VMware, Microsoft and Citrix for sure have their own, and Oracle has three R&D departments now to produce a cool one as well.
The fact that all of the are available for free negatively impacted the business of the other vendors in this segment, which are struggling to survive.

So far none of the competitors in this space had the farsightedness to merge the migration tools with a capacity planning platform, so to accelerate the virtualization adoption and justify the existence of stand-alone P2V tools. 
5nine seems to have exactly this strategy.

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