virtualization.info Editors

The release of Hyper-V 2.0 (aka Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V) and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is approaching.
The Release Candidate build is available since almost a month now, and Microsoft may release both platforms before 2010 as originally announced.

As the hypervisor hits the RC, the company unveils additional details about it.
In Q4 2008 we discovered the existence of a virtual machine live migration feature, along with the virtual disks hot plug capability and the support for nested page tables (NPT), TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs) and Jumbo Frames.
Now we know that Hyper-V 2.0 will support up to 64 logical processors on the host (8 CPUs each featuring 8 cores) and the so called Processor Compatibility Mode.

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The open source Xen hypervisor reaches version 3.4 after almost one year of development.

This is an important milestone for the project because of the key features introduced:

• Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements
  Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve.
  Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, adds a pretty interesting detail to this point:
  For the first time the Xen project is moving away from providing simply the hypervisor, and leaving it to vendors/users/developers to build their own system.  This release contains the whole enchilada, including Dom0, the management tool stack and Xen.  In other words, everything you need to be up and running with a Xen client system.
• Reliability – Availability – Serviceability (RAS)
  Xen 3.4 delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.
• Power Management
  Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.
• Support for the Hyper-V enlightenment interface

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In early March, the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore finally unveiled its plans to move beyond VMware, launching a management solution that supports multiple hypervisors and applies to them a sophisticated automation layer.

That plan became an actual product in at the beginning of May with the launch of vControl 1.6.

At its first public release, the product features many typical capabilities you’d expect in a platform management tool:

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A few weeks ago VKernel has released version 4.0 of its Capacity Analyzer.

The product is now able to analyze the root cause for any vCPU, vRAM and vHDs problems, and provide resolution recommendations:

VKernel Capacity Analyzer 4.0 is available starting at $199 per socket.

A few days before virtualization.info broke the news about the PlateSpin executives mass exodus and the move of the development in India, Novell released PlateSpin Recon 3.6.

There are no new features. Just a new report (about resource reclamation), the extended support to Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and Oracle/Sun Solaris Containers, and a new licensing scheme (which Novell doesn’t detail in the press release or elsewhere in the website).

PowerRecon doesn’t get a major update since over one year, when PlateSpin (still on its own) released version 3.0.
Version 3.1, released in September 2007, was significant in terms of new features, but after that one it seems that the amount of resources dedicated to this product were severely reduced.

After almost 2 years since the last major release, Leostream finally pushes out Connection Broker 6.0.

The main new feature introduced is the support for Citrix XenServer.
Connection Broker supports Citrix ICA protocol since version 1.0 and the new XenApp 4.5 implementation since version 5.3, released last February, but this is the first time that the product is fully certified to run on the Citrix hypervisor.

It’s clear that Leostream is now joining the ranks of those long-time, loyal VMware partners looking for alternative opportunities now that the VMware world gets smaller and smaller.

Connection Broker 6.0 also introduces support for multiple monitors.

Disclosure: virtualization.info runs its own independent conference about virtualization technologies called Virtualization Congress.
The first edition was arranged in US in May 2009 and was co-hosted with the Citrix Synergy 2009 conference. Even if the Citrix event sponsorship didn’t influence by any mean the agenda of the Virtualization Congress, the sessions’ contents or the speakers line-up, it is still true that Citrix is a competitor of VMware and that the Virtualization Congress may be mistakenly perceived as a very humble attempt to compete with the VMworld.

For the last few years VMware sold its premiere event VMworld as an independent industry conference about virtualization technologies, where even its competitors are welcome to exhibit and speak on stage.

Nobody really knows if and how much VMware really treats its competitors: the company may censor part of the sessions’ contents, it may place their booths on less prominent position on the exhibit floor, it may restrict the access to the highest level of sponsorship, etc.
If VMware does anything of this it doesn’t really matter: VMworld is so successful (last year it scored over 14,000 attendees) that competitors like Microsoft and Citrix simply can’t afford to miss it, and every year are among the first to sign the sponsorship contract.
And the fact that the entire eco-system exhibits at VMworld validates VMware as the industry leader in the virtualization market.

Today Brian Madden suggested that this state of things may change very soon, as VMware is about to transform the VMworld into a much more restricted conference:

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Along with Vizioncore (acquired by Quest in January 2008) and a very few others, PlateSpin was one of the oldest and most successful VMware partner in the history of modern virtualization. But after the Novell acquisition, which took place in February 2008, the company lost much of its popularity.

Novell never really clarified its virtualization strategy and this is severely impacting the PlateSpin brand.
Besides the November 2006 interoperability agreement with Microsoft, the Novell moves in the virtualization space have been very weak: the company announced plans to release a stand-alone virtualization platform in March 2008 but it never came out, and renamed its management solution ZENworks in PlateSpin Orchestrate in December 2008.

This doesn’t seem enough to counter the many challenges that the company is facing in the highly competitive virtualization space:

• Novell has no guarantees on the future of Xen development, which is deeply influenced by Citrix since the acquisition of XenSource in August 2007
• The best alternative to Xen which Novell may want to adopt, KVM, is deeply influenced by its worst competitor, Red Hat, since the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008
• In the near future Novell will have a new dangerous competitor in the Xen virtualization space: Oracle, which now owns three Xen-based hypervisors (Oracle VM Server, Sun xVM Server and Virtual Iron)
• The competitive advantage that PlateSpin accumulated is now matched by the newest products from Vizioncore and VMware, which also gives away for free a lot of technology.

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There’s no doubt that the virtualization industry needs a standard benchmarking platform. The only two alternatives we have today are simply ignored (Intel vConsolidate) or are not recognized by all the vendors (VMware VMmark).

Now even the specialized press is questioning about the value of these platforms, we are talking specifically about Anandtech, suggesting that they may not use real-world workloads to test the hypervisors:

There are only two consolidation benchmarks out there: Intel’s vConsolidate and VMware’s VMmark. Both are cumbersome to set up and both are based on industry benchmarks (SPECJbb2005) that are only somewhat or even hardly representative of real-world applications. The result is that VMmark, despite the fact that it is a valuable benchmark, has turned into yet another OEM benchmark(et)ing tool. The only goal of the OEMs seems to be to produce scores as high as possible; that is understandable from their point of view, but not very useful for the IT professional. Without an analysis of where the extra performance comes from, the scores give a quick first impression but nothing more.

To prove its point Anandtech has developed its own benchmark, vApus Mark I (developed by the academic group Sizing Server Lab), that is useful to compare the of different CPUs in a virtual infrastructure running Windows guest operating systems. This is a fine first step as most of the virtual machines deployed in the world run Windows, but just in case some customers are not satisfied the group is already developing a new version that features Windows and Linux virtual machines.
The beauty of this work, assuming it has no flaws, is that it can be used with any hypervisor, including VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.

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While the customers wonder if Oracle will merge its virtualization platform Oracle VM with the just acquired Sun xVM and the Virtual Iron ones, the company continues to fine tune its support policy for 3rd party hypervisors. That same policy that EMC recently attacked and that is generating a lot of discussion (here

and here) on virtualization.info.

In just one week Oracle changed a new article on the topic (requires login) two times as Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at the Burton Group, carefully tracked.

In the first edition of the document, dated May 6, Oracle finally accepted to provide the best effort support for 3rd party hypervisors:

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