virtualization.info Editors

In October 2008 Amazon finally declared its Xen-based Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) ready for production, introducing a Service Level Agreement, the availability for 32 and 64bit Windows Server 2003 virtual machines, and the support for IIS and SQL Server inside each guest OS.

At that time the company also hinted at a new management console that customers could use to manage their virtual infrastructure in the cloud, but the product remained unveiled until last week.

Simply dubbed Web-based AWS Management Console, the product is a feature-rich control panel that allows to create, launch, find and manage virtual machines (called Amazon Machine Images or AMIs), create and manage volumes and snapshots (called Elastic Block Store or EBS), and even manage the security permissions and the firewall settings.

The product is still in beta but its AJAX interface seems pretty valid and Amazon seems to have created an interface even better than the popular Elasticfox extension for Firefox:

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Yesterday the open source virtualization KVM reached another milestone: the build 83 now includes support for the AMD Input Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) technology.

An IOMMU makes I/O virtualization more efficient by allowing VMMs to directly assign real devices to guest operating systems. It’s not possible for a VMM to emulate the translation and protection functions of an IOMMU, because the VMM can’t get between kernel-mode drivers running on the guest OS and the underlying hardware. So, in the absence of an IOMMU, VMMs instead present an emulated device to the guest OS. The VMM then translates the guest’s requests, ultimately, into requests to the real driver running down on the host OS or on the hypervisor.

Less than one month ago the version of KVM that is included in the Linux Kernel 2.6.28 introduced the support for Intel IOMMU called VT-d.

Now both implementations are supported and the AMD patch will soon reach the mainstream kernel (probably 2.6.29).

The well-respected SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute, famous for its security training and certification program, launched today a new interesting course: Virtualization Security and Operations.

The description is promising:

Attendees will learn about virtualization security fundamentals, with an in-depth treatment of today’s most pressing virtualization security concerns: known attacks and threats, theoretical attack methods, and numerous real-world examples. Then we’ll turn our attention to today’s most popular enterprise server virtualization product, VMware Infrastructure 3. Attendees will learn about every aspect of locking down ESX Server and VirtualCenter management server, as well as best practices for securing the virtual machine guests that reside on ESX platforms. We’ll also cover virtualization networking techniques in detail, laying out proven strategies for proper segmentation, virtual switching and routing considerations, network access controls and layer 2 policies, as well as how to build virtual DMZs and integrate with existing network infrastructure.

Finally, attendees will learn essential strategies for securing storage interfaces to Virtual Infrastructure 3, as well as best practices for backup, recovery, and redundancy. We’ll then wrap up with extensive information about compliance ramifications from virtualization, strategies to create and maintain compliance-focused controls using VMware, and operations processes and concepts to focus on, such as change and configuration management, separation of duties, and least privilege…

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Microsoft launched its Most Valuable Program (MVP) a long time ago and recently updated it to include a Virtual Machine category.
Citrix has its own Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) program.

These programs are developed to influence the influencers, engaging them as much as possible with gifts, partial involvement with the company development teams, and more.

This kind of approach to reach the masses has several benefits.
First of all it keeps the influencer’s perception of the company as high as possible, in a way that, over time, he can move from an unbiased position to a slightly enthusiastic one.
Secondarily, it encourages the influencer to do a number of activities for free: testing and reviewing beta products, translating knowledgebase articles, maintaining support sites, speaking at conferences, etc.
The ultimate purpose of these programs anyway is to control, or at least influence, the way the influencer delivers a message about the company to his large audience. And most of times it works very well.

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Today we’ve closed the voting session for the Virtualization Congress 2009 US Call for Papers.
As many of you probably read in the past weeks, the initiative was very successful as we collected 98 submissions (and more are coming in these hours).

It’s amazing the time that our readers took to review them and vote.
Unfortunately, somebody tried to abuse the chance to vote anonymously (something we did to not bother people with yet another registration system) and cheated in a shameless way. But we have the proper tools to discover which votes are inflated.
Besides that your feedback has helped us a lot to understand how the agenda should be. Thanks!

Now it’s time for another call: the Call for Startups.
On stage we don’t want just the best speakers talking about the real-world challenges in planning, designing, implementing and maintaining virtual data center.

The Virtualization Congress wants to be also a place where new virtualization firms can launch and show revolutionary new technologies.

This year we’ll offer the stage, at no cost, to maximum six early-stage startups.
Each of them will have at least 10 minutes to demo their product, for the first time, in front of the Virtualization Congress audience.

At the end of the show the attendees will be able to vote for the most interesting company and the winner will get an entire year of advertising on virtualization.info.
That’s correct: the winner will be able to place a banner on virtualization.info for 12 months, completely free.

The list of virtualization vendors that have advertised with us so far speaks by itself, and with the tough economy we have these days we believe that this is a valuable prize.

Read the rules and apply here.

As most virtualization.info readers know, Microsoft offers two flavors of its hypervisor: the first is part of the Windows operating system, no matter if it’s the Server Core version or the fully-featured one, the second is a stand-alone product.

There are some remarkable differences between the two: the former places Windows Server 2008 in its parent partition, using its driver model and licensing terms, while the latter comes with a minimal version of Windows (even smaller than Server Core) and thus can offer just a subset of features. Additionally, this second version can’t use the licensing term of its parent partition OS, so the customers must use it with existing licenses (for example the ones of Windows Server 2003 guests) or buy new ones.

Just one week after releasing Hyper-V 2.0 as part of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 beta 1, Microsoft is also releasing the stand-alone version of the beta.

There is welcome surprise: the two R2 versions are fundamentally the same, and even this stand-alone product ships with both Quick and Live Migration:

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The expansion of Quest in the virtualization space isn’t finished yet: after acquiring Invirtus in June 2007 (which was merged with Vizioncore), Provision Networks in November 2007 (which is now Quest Desktop Virtualization Group) and the remaining part of Vizioncore in January 2008 (which will be Quest Server Virtualization Group sooner or later), the company wants an abstraction layer for the storage and announces today the acquisition of MonoSphere.

MonoSphere is a storage vendor that approached the world of virtualization in early 2008, introducing the idea of dark storage: the storage space wasted by inefficient capacity allocation.

The company states that customers waste on average 30% of storage despite the yearly spending raises of 10% to 15% every year.

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With 2009 it seems that Quest finally decided to leave the shadows and roll out its new go-to-market strategy for the virtualization industry.

The first place where the company is pushing its brand is Provision Networks, the startup focused on VDI and presentation virtualization that Quest acquired in November 2007.

The subsidiary launches today the version 6.0 of its Virtual Access Suite (VAS) but the original brand disappeared (replaced by a Quest Desktop Virtualization Group logo) and the product is now called vWorkspace.

Besides the brand and name, vWorkspace 6.0 introduces some important features:

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The US startup ToutVirtual is slowly trying to reemerge from the oblivion where two years of almost zero progresses put it.

In October 2008 the company announced the support for Microsoft Hyper-V, now it announces the availability of VirtualIQ Pro 3.0.

It’s not exactly clear when the product reached version 2.0, but this new 3.0 at least has some interesting features:

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Sun continues to be terribly in late with the release of its Xen-based hypervisor, xVM Server 1.0, and the related enterprise management platform, xVM Ops Center 2.0.

Nonetheless the company continues to tease with bits of information. Today part of the documentation for the two products appeared online.

The corporate wiki reveals some useful information, like the amount of virtual CPUs supported per virtual machine (two at maximum), the availability of Live Migration and resource pools, or the list of supported guest operating systems:

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