virtualization.info Editors

As multiple sources are reporting, Alex Vasilevski, the co-founder of Virtual Iron, is about to launch a new startup temporary called Old Road Computing.

Vasilevsky left Virtual Iron in December 2007 to immediately found this new firm with Dan McCall.
McCall comes from Reflex Security, one of the first security firm approaching the virtualization market in early 2006, and Verisign.

The new company is currently funded by Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly IDG Ventures) for an undisclosed amount.

Mass High Tech reports that Old Road Computing will be renamed as Virtual Computer Inc. as soon as the team is ready to leave the stealth mode.

Old Road Computing (until there will be a confirmation of the new name) has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Update: Old Road Computing officially confirmed its new name: Virtual Computer.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Today a new European startup leaves the stealth mode: Icomasoft.

The company is based in Switzerland and managed by the CEO Diego Boscardin, coming from Veritas and EMC where he was CEO and General Manager for Switzerland.
Along with him there’s a well-known name in the virtualization market, Dennis Zimmer, working as CTO. Dennis comes from the storage vendor Pillar Data Systems and is the founder of the German community at vmachine.de.

Leveraging the recent VMware PowerShell Tookit, Icomasoft announces today its first product: VI PowerScripter.

This is a plug-in for VMware VirtualCenter Client 2.5 able to run a Microsoft PowerShell script against any guest OS or against ESX 3.5 / ESXi hosts.

The company just launched the beta program and the users can apply for PowerScripter beta 1 here.

As the product can be used to perform any kind of task, to demonstrate its capabilities Icomasoft will provide a number of sample scripts in the final version of the product:

• Check Cluster Settings
• Rescan All HBAs Host or Cluster
• Update VMware Tools
• Config Export of Host or VM
• Mass provisioning of VMs
• Mass configuration VM
• Disconnect all removable Medias
• Evacuate host for Maintenance
• Create resource graphs

Icomasoft has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

So far a really small number of companies worked to deliver a management console for multiple hypervisors. And at the moment just one of them offer the product with an open source license: Enomaly.

Now there’s a new competitor in town: BlueBear.

BlueBear is a new US startup that is developing its own management console, planning to support VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. And just like Enomaly, it will offer its product with an open source license.

The first version of the product, called Kodiak, is currently in private beta and at the moment only supports ESX, but it’s available for a wide number of systems, including Linux and Mac OS (to achieve the goal BlueBear used the new runtime environment Adobe AIR).

The interface is really interesting and while there’s no way at the moment to figure out how well it works in large-scale deployments, it certainly deserves a better look. 

BlueBear has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Thanks to Scott Lowe for the news.

VMware just published a new benchmark on its VMmark results page.

The tested hardware this time is a HP ProLiant DL585 G5 powered by four Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8360 CPUs (16 cores total) @ 2.5GHz with 64GB RAM.
The tested platform is VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 (build 82663) with no additional software.

This quad-core system is currently the fastest among the ones listed by VMware, winning over Dell, IBM and Sun machines in the same range. But to be fair we have to note that while the HP machine scores 14.74 serving 10 tiles (60 virtual machines), the Dell PowerEdge M905 scores a slightly lower result, 14.28, serving 11 tiles (66 virtual machines).

There’s a major difference between the two systems: the former runs a VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 while the latter runs the Update 2. It would be interesting to know if (and how much) the update level impacts on the overall performance.

Read the whole analysis here.

In the final rush to deliver its new desktop virtualization platform for Apple users, Fusion 2.0, VMware introduces a new, unexpected feature in the latest build: the antivirus.

The company has an agreement with McAfee to include VirusScan Plus, offered as trial feature, and a complimentary 12-months subscription.

There is no special integration anyway: the users will just be able to install the security product inside Windows guest OSes as they do with the VMware Tools.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Two weeks ago Microsoft released an update for Windows Server 2008 to improve the failover capabilities when the OS is configured to work as Hyper-V parent partition.

The package includes a long list of enhancements:

• Changes to the virtual machine view
• Changes to virtual machine actions
• Allow for more than one virtual machine in a “Services or Applications” group
• Add support for mount points or volumes without a drive letter
• Changes to the virtual machine refresh action
• Behavior changes if any node of the failover cluster has a disconnected virtual machine
• Behavior change when you add a pass-through disk to a virtual machine
• Behavior change when the parent differencing disk is not on shared storage
• Volume path copy

Microsoft anyway doesn’t seem 100% confident on the reliability of its own fix as it warns:

Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing this specific problem. This hotfix might receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, we recommend that you wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix.

Download it here.

Thanks to HyperVoria.com for the news.

VMware just released a minor update for a number of products:

• Server 1.0.7 (build 108231) – Free Download
• Workstation 6.0.5 (build 109488) – Trial
• Player 2.0.5 (build 109488) – Free download
• ACE 2.0.5 (build 109488) – Trial

The reason behind this update is fixing four security vulnerabilities.
Three of them allow attackers to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges.

Update the products as soon as possible.

Update: It seems that also the new Server 1.0.7 build is still vulnerable to CVE-2008-3697.
This flaw in the VMware ISAPI extension for Microsoft IIS allows remote denial of service, so avoid to expose the Server web console outside the corporate LAN until a new fix is available.

Veeam just released a couple of minor updates for two product: FastSCP and Backup.

FastSCP 2.0.1 introduces the mail reporting capability while Backup 2.0.1 introduces support for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) 1.6 and VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2.

Download FastSCP trial here, Backup trial here.

At the end of February 2008, virtualization.info launched its first localized version in Japan.

Providing a daily, quality translation of all contents appearing on this website have been possible only thanks to the outstanding work of our exclusive partner for Japan: Networld.

Translating virtualization.info in Japanese implies a big effort for a notable number of people and a big bet, but the results we gotten so far are impressive.

In just 6 months virtualization.info JP became a leading news source in Japan, achieving over 1,000 page views and almost 500 feed subscribers per day.

More than that, and amazingly enough, the total number of unique visitors scored in July surpassed the ones that virtualization.info has from UK.

virtualization.info recognizes Japan as a key emerging market and we are proud to evangelize the country about the many vendors, products and technologies that we have covered here since 2003.

We are working hard to put online a few additional localized versions.
If you distribute virtualization products in non-English countries and are interested in a business partnership let us know.

At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2008, Intel showed on stage its upcoming new quad-core CPU codename Nehalem, much expected by the virtualization professionals because of the included Extended Page Tables (EPT) technology.

On top of that now there’s another reason to wait for Nehalem: the processor will support a new technology developed by VMware and called VMDirectPath.

VMDirectPath will allow ESX to avoid the emulation of network interface cards and map the physical NICs directly to the virtual machines:

Intel delivered a very interesting presentation about its effort to boost the hypervisor performance with VT-x, VT-d and VT-c technologies and slides from 27 to 32 are about VMDirectPath:

Nehalem CPUs for server use will be released no earlier than H2 2009.

VMware predicted that around that date the technology would completely cancel the performance degrade that virtualization introduces. 
It seems that to go there customers will have to bring with them a lot of hardware (and possibly drop a lot of flexibility).