virtualization.info Editors

Last week VMware released a minor update for its desktop virtualization product Workstation, introducing the support for the new Intel Xeon 5500 CPU family and a bunch of additional guest operating systems.

A round of new guests are now supported on VMware Server as well, which was upgraded to version 2.0.1 (build 156745) at the end of March:

• Asianux Server 3.0 Service Pack 1
• CentoOS 4.7 / 5.2
• Windows Essential Business Server (EBS) / Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 Service Pack 2 / 2008
• Windows XP Service Pack 3
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Citrix is working to release as much as possible in time for its Synergy conference in May.
While waiting for the beta of XenServer 5.1 (or whatever it will be called) the customers can now download the just announced XenConvert 2.0 technical preview.

XenConvert is the XenServer physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tool.

This new version will import VMware virtual machines in VMDK format and OVF packages (it doesn’t matter which virtualization product generated them). 
Citrix is a member of the DMFT so it implemented the support for the new OVF 1.0 standard as soon as possible.

As most readers know by now Citrix decided to give XenServer away for free so the P2V/V2V migration tool becomes a fundamental part of the strategy to move customers away from VMware.
It’s easy to guess that the final version of XenConvert 2.0 will be free as well and that the company will invest on this product much more in future.

Enroll for the beta here.

In June 2007 a couple of brave virtualization experts published one of the most wanted trick for VMware: how to run VMware ESX 3.x on a VMware Workstation 6.0 virtual machine.

Now Xtravirt, the consulting company that sold its tools to PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies), is back on the topic and releases new paper to run VMware ESX 3.5 or ESXi on a VMware Server 2.0 installation.

The trick is to change some settings in the virtual BIOS of the Server VM along with adding the usual configuration parameters in the VM configuration.

Considering that both Server 2.0 and ESXi are free this is going to be an instant classic.

Despite its low profile (which is maintained on purpose) Veeam is getting bigger and bigger.

In 2008 virtualization.info already reported on its healthy growth in US and its expansion in Europe, all without venture capital money.

Now Veeam just hired a CFO, William H. Largent, who comes from Applied Innvation, a public company that he led as CEO.

This may mean nothing in particular but may also mean that Veeam is getting ready to make some large acquisitions or to get acquired for a big amount of money.

Guest star author: Kevin Lawton, Lead developer of Bochs.

VMs live migration, VMotion in VMware parlance, is a key technology underlying a number of useful features. For example, VMware’s DRS and DPM features use migration to perform load balancing and power management respectively.  These are in essence high level forms of scheduling, though with much coarser granularity of time at which an operating system schedules.

Given a migration within the same storage and networking domains, there is still a considerable amount of VM memory which has to be transferred between source and destination servers, through a finite amount of networking bandwidth. On a 1GbE network for example, a VM with 2GB of RAM might have a best-case migration time on the order of 20 seconds. Or on a 10GbE network, the same VM might have a best-case migration time on the order of 2 seconds. In some cases, live migration takes minutes to complete.

Using relatively slow VM migration as a mechanism for scheduling, has a number of risks and short-comings, which leave its full potential untapped. 
This is necessarily true, because the time within which workloads can ebb and flow (and spike) is much quicker than the response time available to the scheduler to re-schedule VMs on other servers. As a result, the scheduler has to be ultra-conservative, otherwise it may break SLAs and/or create troublesome load-based hot-spots.  By contrast, if the scheduler could expect near instantaneous VM migrations, it could perform much higher fidelity load-balancing or much more efficient power management (packing VMs onto absolutely the fewest number of powered-on servers).  Thus, as live VM migration times decrease, the less conservatism is needed, and the greater the amount of potential performance and power savings can be wrung out of existing resources.

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The release of the much awaited vSphere platform (formerly VMware Infrastructure) is very near now.
VMware is supposed to announce its availability or at least its RTM status next week, in an online and live event scheduled for April 21.

The community is already divided between the early adopters that look forward to implement the new product as soon as possible, and the cautious customers that want to extensively test vSphere to verify its reliability and compatibility.

On this last point there may be some early issues. The blog VMGuru.nl (not associated with the Scott Herold’s VMGuru.com) published an interesting insight:

Yesterday we had a meeting with VMware and they revealed that the next version of VMware ESX, vSphere, has very limited support for the VMware management and automation suite.

vSphere will of course be available with vCenter for basic management and automation tasks but the rest of VMware’s great product suite is not supported in the initial release of vSphere.

So there won’t be support for:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vCenter Lab Manager
• VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
• VMware vCenter Stage Manager
• VMware View

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After the sack of Diane Greene, the VMware co-founder and CEO, in July 2008 many suspected a mass departure of loyal engineers and executives.

As far as we know such exodus never happened but for sure the company lost some key people in the leadership team:

• August 2008 – Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development (on sabbatical)
• September 2008 – Richard Sarwal, Executive Vice President of R&D (back to Oracle)
• September 2008 – Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder and Chief Scientist (back to Stanford University)
• November 2008 – Nand Mulchandani, Senior Director of Security Products (now at OpenDNS)

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At the beginning of March, virtualization.info published an article about the new strategy of Vizioncore, which is about to enter new markets and start new partnerships now that VMware has become an uncomfortable buddy.

One of the two new solutions that will lead the change is the Virtualization EcoShell, a virtualization extension for the Quest PowerGUI tool that has caught the interest of the community.

EcoShell will enter in public beta tomorrow (you’ll be able to download it here).

Meanwhile the Vizioncore marketing was smart enough to release some teasing videos, showing the features and the potentiality of this toolkit:

• Establishing Connections to your VMware Infrastructure using the PowerGUI Console
• Navigate your VMware Infrastructure using the PowerGUI Console
• Execute Links and Actions in the PowerGUI Console
• Create and Save Filters using the PowerGUI Console
• Using the PowerGUI Script Editor

It’s not clear yet how much this free initiative will impact one of the youngest startups in the virtualization market, icomasoft, which decided to develop its first product around PowerShell.

After a long period of silence, in February some new information about the Symantec strategy in the virtualization space emerged.

The company is working on a new platform, called Endpoint Virtualization Suite, which will include the AppStream (Symantec Workspace Streaming), Altiris (Symantec Workspace Virtualization), nSuite (Symantec Workspace Corporate / Remote) and RTO Software (Symantec Workspace Profiles) technologies and which will be released somewhere this spring.

Today we learn that the suite is now in Release Candidate status. The news has been published on a corporate blog along with some screenshots.
The article unveils other interesting details:

• Symantec changed again the name of this platform: from Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite (EVS) to Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV).
  The arbitrary version number set to 6.1 is still there.
• The free version of SVS may still exist
• The platform will have a SDK

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Last week the Canadian startup Lanamark launched a new module for its hosted capacity planning service.

The new component, dubbed Desktop Analysis Pack, is specifically tailored to perform a capacity planning of VDI environment.

It does some very interesting things like recognizing if a target computer is a laptop or a workstation (this way it recognizes the mobile users), recognizing which applications are really used and which ones are just installed, recognizing if there are hardware constrains like monitors, printers, scanners.

The Lanamark competitors (like VMware, PlateSpin and CiRBA) are completely focused on servers, so this may be a first in the industry.

It’s hard to tell if the hosted model that Lanamark is using will pay off but for sure this company has some numbers.