virtualization.info Editors

At its PDC 2008 conference last month Microsoft unveiled its effort to become a cloud computing provider through a new version of Windows called Azure.

In a couple of days some early details about the new operating system started to emerge, and we discovered that Azure will certainly leverage hardware virtualization but not through the Hyper-V 2.0 engine that Microsoft hinted about.

Now the video footage of a PDC presentation details how Windows Azure actually use the hypervisor. The guys at vinternals made a good summary of it:

Rather than put that base VHD onto local USB devices ala ESXi, Microsoft PXE boot a Windows PE “maintenance os”, drop a common base image onto the endpoint, dynamically build a personality (offline) as a differencing disk (ie linked clone), drop that down to the endpoint, and then boot straight off the differencing disk VHD (booting directly off VHD’s is a _very_ cool feature of Win7 / Server 2008 R2). I’m glad even Microsoft recognize the massive benefits of this approach – no installation, rapid rollback, etc.

Just one after the launch of Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0, VMware feels the need to remind everybody that there’s a competing product in town: its Fusion. 
To do so the company releases a minor update that fixes and enhances a series of aspects.

It doesn’t matter if the new build (128865) doesn’t introduce any new feature: the wildly popular Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware, is happy to clarify why there’s no need to compete with the new Parallels product (comments in that post are very interesting as well).

Download a trial  of VMware Fusion 2.0.1 here.

The Hyper-V Senior Program Manager John Howards recently released a small program to simplify the configuration of the Microsoft new hypervisor: HVRemote.

The tool allows to complete the configuration of Windows Server 2008 (both Full Installation and Server Core edition), enable the Hyper-V role and configure the hypervisor with just two commands in place of the many steps required.

Note that while Howards works at Microsoft, this tool is a personal work and the company doesn’t provide any support for it.

Download it here (source code is included).

After the September launch, the US startup Virtual Computer (formerly known as Old Road Computing), co-founded by the Virtual Iron founder and former CTO, seems ready to build its leadership team.

The first one joining the two co-founders on the Board of Directors is Rick Faulk, President and CEO of Mzinga, a startup that launched in November 2007 that is focused on social networks.

Certainly Faulk has a vision about the so called Web 2.0 universe, but it’s not clear how his experience will benefit an emerging virtualization company like Virtual Computer.

Fifteen days ago virtualization.info launched a web survey to try to understand the state of the union for hardware virtualization.

We invited our readers to answer the survey at the very end of a post about Gartner and IDC, questioning the marketshare numbers that the two recently published.

Despite this very unofficial launch, in just three days we collected over 500 responses, and now we surpassed 750. 
Of course our questionnaire is not comparable with the studies of the tier-1 analysis firms, but it certainly collected one of the biggest number of answers so far in a virtualization survey. And the emerging picture is surprisingly interesting.

We’d like to wait another 15 days or 1000 responses before stopping the survey. After that we’ll publish the results on virtualization.info for free.

If you didn’t participate yet please do: https://virtualization.info/surveys

It’s more than one year that the virtualization community waits to puts its hands on the first 3rd party virtual switch for VMware Infrastructure. At that time Cisco was reported as the networking provider but the company never confirmed.

Finally, at VMworld 2008, Cisco and VMware unveiled such piece of software, called Nexus 1000V, but so far nobody gave a precise release schedule.

Now trusted sources informs us that Cisco will start the Nexus 1000V beta program in December.
VMware Infrastructure 4.0 beta testers will be able to join even but it’s not clear if this will be a public beta or not (probably not considering that VI 4 beta itself is private).

In September, just before VMworld 2008, virtualization.info broke the news about the upcoming VMware Infrastructure 4.0 and its beta 1 feature set.

Immediately after the conference moved in beta 2 phase where it stayed for a while now.
At this point VMware may be near the release time so while waiting for this major upgrade here a meaningful screenshot that was leaked online:

More at source.

VMware just announced its intention to join the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council.

The virtualization leader hopes to influence the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) so that virtualization doesn’t represent an obstacle to security compliance.
At today in fact, as Christopher Hoff, Chief Security Architect at Unisys, noted on his personal blog, the PCI Council didn’t do anything to put virtualization on top of its priority.

Additionally, VMware is now fully busy pushing its cloud computing vision, and if the company wants to convince large corporations to move their data into the cloud better have some security standards supporting the scenario. Otherwise this is what is likely to happen.

VMware is not the first virtualization firm interested in the PCI standards. In March Fortisphere joined the PCI Security Vendor Alliance demonstrating its commitment to comply with DSS standards.

The Canadian startup Lanamark (see virtualization.info coverage here) is taking serious steps to promote its capacity planning service after just one month after the launch.

The company now offers a free, one-time capacity planning assessment for up to 500 desktops and servers, for a maximum of 10 days.

As expected, customers signing for this service will receive a performance trend report containing information about physical machines and workloads inventory, as well as CPU and memory usage.

This is a smart move from Lanamark: capacity planning is one of the fundamental steps that every company embracing virtualization should take but its cost is often too high to justify the investment.
With a one-time free assessment the startup may demonstrate the value of its service.

Nonetheless the company may have other reasons behind this promotion: the competition with VMware on is harsh as the virtualization leader is offering its hosted Capacity Planner for free since July and it includes a basic capacity planning tool in VI 3.5 at no additional cost.

Egenera is mostly known as a hardware vendor offering its own blade system, BladeFrame, but the most interesting proposition of the company is its management console: PAN Manager.
This software layer is able to aggregate the hardware resources of each blade and abstract them in a sort of computing cloud in a box.

For a long time Egenera tightened PAN Manager to the BladeFrame, making it almost unknown for the wide audience. But more than one year ago, Egenera finally allowed to use the software on other hardware provided by a number of OEM partners.

The resource pool provided by PAN Manager is a perfect companion for a virtualization engine so the company developed a special module called vBlade, which allows a hypervisor to manage the abstracted hardware.
Rather than develop (or acquire) its own virtual machine monitor, Egenera preferred to sign an agreement with XenSource to adopt its XenEnterprise.

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