virtualization.info Editors

At this point it’s well known that Sun is about to enter the virtualization market with a massive offering: a hypervisor based on Xen (xVM Server), a management platform for physical and virtual machines (xVM Ops Center), a connection broker (Sun VDI) and even a hosted virtualization platform for desktops (VirtualBox).
On top of that it’s easy to guess that the company will release virtualization friendly servers and storage arrays.

As said many times before, Sun has a unique opportunity at the moment, being the only big company that can offer a complete computing stack for virtualization, from the hardware to the software, without bothering its customers with multi-vendor license and support agreements (and issues).

In such position one would think that Sun is focusing all its effort in integrating the components above in a well concerted offering, leaving few things to desire outside the company’s portfolio. But it’s not the case.

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Last month at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, VMware formally introduced the upcoming high availability feature simply called Fault Tolerance or FT.

Previewed for the first time in late 2007 with the tentative name of continuous availability, VMware finally shared more details about this groundbreaking capability and promised that it will be part of the upcoming VMware Infrastructure 4, currently in private beta.

Most information were disclosed during a conference session (BC2621: Fault-Tolerant VMs in VI: Operations and Best Practices) which Scott Lowe live blogged here.

Besides a clear description of how FT works, some interesting limitations and requirements emerge from his report:

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By now the whole virtualization world should be aware that VMware took the big step of releasing its flagship hypervisor as a free product: ESXi 3.5.

Despite that, maybe not everybody knows that this free platform has some limitations compared to the fully-featured ESX 3.5.
To clarify the things VMware published a new knowledge base article with a valuable comparison matrix.

Please note that this table is only focused on the virtualization host capabilities and doesn’t consider all the features that VirtualCenter can bring in. This avoid any confusion that previous comparison (for example ESXi stand-alone vs ESX+VC) could imply.

This June Microsoft launched a new initiative called Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) to simplify customers’ life when they need support for company’s software running on virtual machines.

The program already generated a lot of buzz for two good reasons:

• some vendors which didn’t have a hypervisor to validate surprisingly appear as members (good example are Cisco and Unisys).
• the most combative competitor VMware was the first to achieve validation for its hypervisor ESX

After this LeMagIT took the disturb to dig more into this last achievement and discovered something interesting.

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In May Citrix released the second major version of its VDI solution XenDesktop.

The product is much more than a connection broker for virtual infrastructures as it includes a plethora of other Citrix products, from the Provisioning Server to the Access Gateway, passing through the GoToAssist.

The result is a feature-rich and powerful product but the side effect is that newcomers can be very confused trying to understand how the platform works.

To address the issue Citrix just released a lengthy slide deck detailing XenDesktop 2.0 architecture, exploring all the tiers used in different business cases.

The document is certainly not enough to fully get the potentials of this product but it’s good starting point.

By now many corporations in the world approaching virtualization have discovered that finding proper ISV support for their virtual machines of choice is still one of the biggest challenges.
At this point the situation is probably good enough for VMware customers, but when a firm decides to adopt a new platform like Microsoft Hyper-V things may become more complex.
Of course, with the proper incentives, Microsoft will have no problems in persuading the whole ecosystem to support its hypervisor, but it will require some time in any case.

So it’s very good news to know that SAP has officially extended its support for virtual infrastructures to Microsoft Hyper-V.
Besides VMware no other virtualization vendors are currently supported (which means issues for Citrix, Virtual Iron, Novell and Red Hat customers).

To reflect this new policy SAP also updated a small paper which describes the exact guest environments supported for VMware and Microsoft platforms.

Note that at the moment SAP only supports the Hyper-V edition included with Windows Server 2008 and not the new Hyper-V Server 2008.

Update: As several Novell representatives point out, SAP should have at least another hypervisor mentioned in the document above: the Xen platform included in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.

Novell and SAP in fact announced the support for that virtualization engine in March 2007 and as far as we can see the policy is still in place.

We wait a formal answer from the two companies on the incongruence.

On Sep. 1 Microsoft application virtualization platform App-V 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) finally reached RTM status but wasn’t available to customers until Oct. 1, when the new Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2008 R2, still available only for Volume License customers with Software Assurance.

(the App-V 4.5 version for Terminal Services instead will be released Nov. 1 as Microsoft confirms on its corporate blog)

The new version 4.5 brings in a deeper  integration in the System Center family (the management tier for example is now called Microsoft System Center Application Virtualization Management Server) and several improvements including:

• HTTP streaming from IIS 6 and 7 as well as from Windows shares
• New application sequencer
• Support for Volume Shadow Service (VSS) writer

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virtualization.info is happy to announce the launch of an iPhone version of the website.

To see it please navigate with your iPhone Safari to:

https://virtualization.info/i

If you like you can the page to your Home clicking on the “Plus” icon. 
At that point virtualization.info should appear on your iPhone dock like any other application.

Enjoy!

Current limitations:

• comments can be read but cannot be written
• search is unavailable

virtualization.info has just learned that VMware acquired the security vendor Blue Lane Technologies.

The company, popular for its inline patching technology, entered the virtualization market at the beginning of 2007 and completely refocused its effort around the VMware Infrastructure over the last two years.

Like all its competitors, their VirtualShield, is still unable to provide a special integration with the ESX hypervisor and requires a traditional VM-to-VM interaction: the product must be installed inside a virtual machine that acts as a proxy and the virtual networking must be reconfigured to point all protected virtual machines to it.

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Amazon launched a virtual infrastructure available on demand and powered by the Xen hypervisor, the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), in August 2006.

As far as we know the number of customers that are currently using it is not public, but, despite early security issues and multiple outages, reliable sources reported to virtualization.info that such number is remarkable.
Nonetheless Amazon may have many more customers if it would start offering Windows virtual machines.

So far in fact the company only offers Linux instances. It’s unclear if this depends on technical issues (like the version of Xen that it’s currently in use), on policy issues (like the feeling that EC2 is not robust enough to support million of customers hosting Windows) or licensing issues (Microsoft has to give its blessing for such a massive infrastructure).

It seems that the things are finally changing: with a brief note online Amazon announced that EC2 will have Windows instances this fall.

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