virtualization.info Editors

Exactly one year after the last update, Veeam finally revamps Configurator, its product for configuration and change management.

In this new major release the company re-engineered the engine, which now automatically discovers VMware ESX and ESXi configurations, saving them in so called host profile templates. 
The administrator can apply those saved profiles to multiple new VMware hosts at the same time.

Then Configurator 2.0 can scan the hosts on recurring basis and allow the administrator to reapply the correct profile.

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Trilead, one of the youngest virtualization startups that emerged during the last VMworld 2008, went out of beta phase and released officially launched its product: VM Explorer (VMX) 1.5.

VM Explorer is a virtual machines backup/recovery solution that puts Trilead in competition with well-known companies like Vizioncore and Veeam.

The solution is able to copy VMs between different VMware ESX hosts (ESXi is supported as well), or on Linux and FreeBSD file servers.
VMX also offers an integrated SSH client to administer the servers where users want to copy the VMs, and a snapshot manager, where VMware administrators can create and remove VM snapshots without passing through VirtualCenter.

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Parallels certainly has a lot of challenges these days: in the server space it’s about to introduce its first bare-metal hypervisor, Parallels Server, what will put the company in competition with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Virtual Iron, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle and Sun; in the desktop space, specifically in the Apple market, it has to bank the spread of VMware that is raising much consensus with its Fusion.

On this second front the company is specially combative and demonstrates its capability with the new Desktop for Mac 4.0.

This release introduces some fifty new features. Among the others:

• Command line interface
• API and SDK for 3rd party developers
• Capability to scale Windows virtual machines desktop to fit the Mac OS screen
• Simultaneous access to removable storage devices from guests and host.
• Remote control from Apple iPhone
• Voice control (24 commands available)
• Support for 4 vCPUs per VM
• Support for Apple Mac OS X 10.5 Server as guest OS
• Support for DirectX 9.0, DirectX Pixel Shader 2.0 and OpenGL 2.0 graphical primitives on Windows guest OSes
• Experimental support for Apple Mac OS X codename Snow Leopard

Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Hyper9, the startup born from the ashes of InovaWave, is finally approaching its relaunch day.

The company is developing a search engine for virtual infrastructures that mimics the successful approach of Splunk, indexing any element of the data center and applying analytics on the information collected.

In large scale deployments there’s a big need for enhanced troubleshooting tools and Hyper9 has a unique opportunity to address the challenge through the business intelligence.

After months of work, the Hyper9 product, still unnamed, has finally approached the private beta phase.
The ones that want to try it can send an email to this address (do not forget to mention virtualization.info).

In the last months virtualization.info reported several times that virtualization vendors were moving to attack the mobile and embedded devices market.
We mentioned the Samsung effort to port Xen on ARM processors, the Qumranet plans to distribute KVM as part of any Linux mobile, and even the prediction of the Citrix Vice President of Advanced Products.

Now VMware confirms 100% the trend acquiring one of the very few players in this emerging market: Trango Virtual Processors.

Right now the Trango hypervisor supports an interesting (but very limited) range of real-time OSes, including: Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.

Through Trango, VMware plans to release a Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), probably a scaled-down, optimized version of ESX for embedded devices powered by ARM CPUs (like the new Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9).

Of course VMware doesn’t say when the mobile revolution will happen as there’s a couple of complex issues to solve:

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Today a new startup leaves the stealth mode: Replicate Technologies.

The company was founded in US last year by Rich Pelavin, now covering the role of CTO, and Ken Novak, its Chief Architect.
Pelavin comes from Cisco where he was Director of Engineering while Novak comes from CGNET where he was CTO.
The startup CEO is Rich Miller, coming from Univa UD where he was COO. Miller maintains a really high quality personal blog about virtualization and security.
It’s very important to note that with these three there is a forth key figure, Oren Teich, Vice President of Product Management, who comes from Sun where we was responsible of the upcoming xVM virtualization product line.

Despite the headquarter is in Menlo Park and the company is brand new, Replicate is not yet VC funded.

The first product launched is called Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA), a scanner that analyzes a give virtual infrastructure and recognizes its configuration errors.

RDA 1.0 is a modular platform and each of its modules can discover different types of problems: misconfiguration on the service console firewall, NICs and physical cabling errors, issues that prevent VMotion and/or DRS, etc.

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Almost one month after VirtualCenter, VMware updates also ESX to version 3.5 Update 3.

Pretty much like for VirtualCenter, this new build (123630) is mainly for bugfixes. Nonetheless there are some important improvements:

• Support for 20 vCPUs / core (previous limit was 8 or 11, in case of VDI workloads)
• Support for Solaris 10 Update 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 and Ubuntu 8.04.1
• Support for Broadcom 5771x 10GB NICs (despite the TOE aboard is not supported)
• Support for Broadcom HT1000 and Intel ICH-7 SATA controllers
• Experimental support for Intel MFSYS25 SAS networked controller
• Experimental support for a new VMDK Recovery Tool (a script that recovers deleted VMDK data stores on VMFS volumes)
• and more

Download the trial here.

At the end of last week AMD announced a breakthrough achievement: migrating a running virtual machine from a virtualization platform to another, each running different CPU brands.

Despite many progresses in this area (AMD-V Extended Migration and Intel Flex Migration), so far the only thing possible was to live migrate VMs between different CPU families of the same vendor.
AMD and Intel never cooperated as much to cross such boundary and in one case we are pretty sure that an Intel executive said that the thing would be unlikely to happen.

Now AMD has found a way to mask the CPU information and operate the migration from an Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420 to its own forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core Opteron.
To achieve the goal the company worked together with Red Hat so everybody would expect that the migration happened through Xen hypervisors. It’s not the case.

Red Hat fully embraced KVM as replacement of Xen in June and this is the virtualization platform that was used for the demo:

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After its co-founder and its Chief Marketing Officer, the virtualization vendor Virtual Iron lost another key executive: Tony Asaro.

Asaro joined the company in January 2008 as Chief Strategy Officer and replaced Mike Grandinetti, the former CMO, in the relationship with press and analysts when he left.

Asaro left in September but it seems that the relationship with Virtual Iron will continue in the role of Senior Advisor.

The company direction is now in the hands of Sandeep Bhangi, Vice President of Corporate Development & Strategic Alliances, who comes from Sun and Apple, and the rest of the leadership team.

Reflex Security can be considered the first (or one of the first) company that tried to sell security for virtual infrastructures.
They started in March 2006 with a product called Virtual Security Appliance (VSA), which is a firewall and intrusion prevention system (IPS) supporting VMware and Citrix platforms.

VSA, pretty much like every other competing product in the same segment, has limited capabilities.
Maybe because of this, maybe because VMware just acquired another company in this space called Blue Lane Technologies, maybe because the company simply found out a more profitable source of revenue, Reflex Security has decided to change its go-to-market strategy and even its name.

So Reflex Security now becomes Reflex Systems while the flagship product becomes Virtualization Management Center (VMC), a console that supports the three main hypervisors (ESX, XenServer and Hyper-V) and offers configuration monitoring features.

Until VMware releases its VMsafe APIs the configuration control market may give Reflex Systems much more opportunities than the security one, even if in this space the company will find valuable competitors like ManageIQ.

Reflex Systems has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.