virtualization.info Editors

Citrix announced that the next generation of its desktop and application virtualization platform, XenApp 5.0 (formerly Presentation Server), will be released September 10, 2008.

Customers can see an online event on Sep. 9 with keynotes and live Q&A sessions.

The new product includes over 50 enhancements, detailed in a 13-pages comparative document.
Some of the new features are:

• Application streaming via HTTP/S
• Load-balancing defined by groups/users or applications
• Support for Windows Server 2008
• Support for IPv6
• Support for Microsoft XPS Universal Printer
• Support for Radius and Kerberors authentication (web interface)

The retail price per concurrent user is defined as follow:

• Advanced Edition – US $350
• Enterprise Edition – US $450
• Platinum Edition – US $600

Anyway customers can just buy the application virtualization and streaming components at the price of $60 per concurrent user.

Download a trial here (starting Sep. 10).

By reading the first page of the feature matrix above it seems that the Citrix marketing department worked much to redefine the concept of application virtualization so that our familiar terminology is turned upside-down:

• What we call today Desktop virtualization becomes Server-side Application Virtualization
• What we call today Application Virtualization becomes Client-side Application Virtualization

This redefinition, that will create a lot of confusion, was probably necessary because many vendors (including Citrix itself) are now using the term Desktop Virtualization referring to Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs).

Following the Citrix approach both Desktop Virtualization and VDI seems wrong. The correct term should be Server-side Hardware Virtualization for Desktop OS hosting, or something like that.

The discussion could go on as the vendors currently use other overlapping terms like OS Virtualization, Server Virtualization and many more.

An attempt to define a firm glossary seems as challenging as designing a virtual machine standard format, so Citrix can’t be blamed for this attempt.

The capability to overcommit memory is something that VMware offers on its hypervisor ESX since a long time. It’s achieved by several techniques (ballooning, contend-based page sharing, demand paging) and the company uses it as a great selling point.

At the moment only one of the approaches used by VMware is also implemented by several competitors: the memory ballooning.
This feature comes as part of Xen (only for Linux guest OS at the moment) so any commercial hypervisor powered by Xen can offer it, including Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron, Oracle VM and the operating systems from Novell and Red Hat.

Oracle is a contributor of the open source hypervisor and just before the release of Xen 3.3 decided to clarify that there’s no need to implement all the techniques that VMware: some improvements to the current Xen ballooning can grant a just fine memory overcommitment.

At the XenSummit 2008 Dan Magenheimer, Consulting Developer at Oracle (and once Principal Scientist of Virtualization Research at HP), presented a lecture and a whitepaper clarifying the point:

…While content-based page-sharing, VMM-based demand paging, and hotplug memory are all glamorous mechanisms that can be used to improve memory efficiency, the simple existing balloon driver provided by Xen, when combined with gray-box data collected by a few scripts, is sufficient to implement reasonable memory overcommit. More measurement and testing is ongoing in Oracle’s OnDemand group, but we believe that this very simple solution delivers the vast majority of the value of memory overcommit with a much smaller cost…

As expected, Xen.org announced the availability of Xen 3.3.

This new version of the open source hypervisor includes important features, including:

• Power management (P & C states) in the hypervisor
• Shadow3: optimizations to make this the best shadow pagetable algorithm yet, making Hardware Virtual Machines performance better than ever
• CPUID feature levelling: allows safe domain migration across systems with different CPU models
• PVSCSI drivers for SCSI access direct into PV guests
• Full x86 real-mode emulation for HVM guests on Intel VT: supports a much wider range of legacy guest OSes

As Xen powers a number of commercial hypervisors (Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron, Oracle VM and by some degrees Sun xVM Server) as well as notable enterprise operating systems (Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux), it’s assured that all these products will start to integrate the new features over the next few months.

Download it here.

In June Microsoft finally released its long awaited hypervisor: Hyper-V 1.0.

The first release of this bare-metal VMM supports one flavor of Linux as guest OS: Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 10. But to work properly inside the virtual machine Linux needs additional components that Microsoft releases under the name of Linux Integration Components.

This package includes the Linux implementation of the Hyper-V VMBus (the same high performance interface that Windows 2003/2008 guest OSes use), the pass-through drivers for network and storage, and some other things.

Microsoft developed this software separately from Hyper-V and while the latter is already available, the Linux Integration Components are not.
They were expected last month but the company postponed its release without adding details.

Customers can still install Novell Linux as Hyper-V guest OS but it lacks all the enhancements that makes SUSE the best companion for Windows on the new hypervisor.
Without Integration Components the distribution performs just any other, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Ubuntu.

For unknown reasons Microsoft also removed the previous version, frozen at Release Candidate 2 milestone since July 11.
This implies that at the moment there’s no way to run a Linux guest OS at its best.

As virtualization.info didn’t run yet extended benchmark on Hyper-V, we are unable to say how much the lack of this package impacts on the guest OS performance.

There could be several reasons for this move, from a last-minute decision to support additional Linux distributions to an issue with open source licensing, up to a critical bug.

As the product is brand new, it’s not easy to track how many Microsoft customers are currently running Linux virtual machines impacted by this delay.
Hopefully the Linux Integration Components will be RTM’ed in time for the Hyper-V official launch scheduled for September 8.

The Finnish security vendor Stonesoft announced that will work with VMware to support its upcoming VMsafe API.

Stonesoft is mainly focus on the enterprise firewall market and follows the competitors Check Point and Fortinet in supporting VMware.

As for many other security segments, VMsafe has a chance to lead a new generation of products.
In this specific case the opportunity for Stonesoft and the others is to deliver intrusion detection systems that really integrate with firewalls, featuring adaptive rulebases and finally matching the overly-abused term IPS (Intrusion Prevention System).  

VMware announced VMsafe in February. Hopefully the company is ready to show something more concrete for the imminent VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

Announced more than one year ago by Intel, Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) is a new technology powering 10GB Ethernet cards (Intel 82575 and Intel 82598) specifically designed for virtualization.

VMDq is part of the Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (VT-c) along with I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV).
More generically, it’s defined as a I/O Virtualization technology.

VMDq handles parallel queues of packets, routing them to the correct virtual machines at chipset level and offloading the hypervisor.
This reduces the network latency and frees up the CPU.

The technology is being supported in several hypervisors. VMware ESX 3.5 already has it since Update 1.
Shefali Chinni, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Intel, describes how it boosts the ESX network performance:

Thanks to VMTN for the news.

After Mark Pileski, who left the company last month to join VMLogix, PlateSpin loses Brett Johnson, Director of Sales for Eastern North America.

Johnson just moved to the US startup DynamicOps, where he now covers the role of Vice President of Sales.

DynamicOps is a Credit Suisse spinout focused on the VM Lifecycle Management market that launched in May (see virtualization.info coverage).
Their first product, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) is available since June and Johnson certainly has a notable pool of prospects to contact.

As PlateSpin was recently acquired by Novell, we wonder how many other executives more inclined to work in small and dynamic startups may leave in the coming months.

At the Virtualization Congress, that event that virtualization.info will held in London in mid October, there will be all stars on stage.

VPs, CTOs, Technical Fellows and Lead Architects will cover all aspects of virtualization, from the hypervisor high-availability to the virtual application delivery, from the virtual machines performance tracking to virtual desktop optimization.

In each scenario mentioned above one component is specially important: the storage.

Chad Sakac, Senior Director of VMware Strategic Alliance at EMC, will have a lot to say on stage about the storage consumption and performance when running virtualized desktops and servers, when performing virtual machines backup and restore, and much more:

The Virtualization Congress 2008 is around the corner: October 14-16, 2008 (the first day is dedicated just to distributors and resellers and the entrance is free) at London ExCeL.

Register now!

VMware is really near the release of three of its platforms: Server 2.0, Workstation 6.5 and ACE 2.5.

Last week the company released the Release Candidate 2 (build 110949) for Server 2.0 and the Release Candidate 1 (build 110068) for Workstation 6.5 and ACE 2.5.

In all cases there are no new features.

Download Server 2.0 RC2 here, Workstation 6.5 RC1 here, ACE 2.5 RC1 here.

The guys at vinternals launched a very interesting tool called Statelesx (clearly meaning Stateless ESX).

This tool allows the VMware administrators to define a configuration file on a web interface (including details about the virtual networking, the DRS, the HA, etc.) and associate it to a certain ESX by the host name.

To spread the configuration file to the proper ESX host, statelesx uses a Python script and a Java listener available as virtual appliance.

The whole thing, working with VMware Infrastructure 3.5 only, cuts away the need to configure a new ESX on deployment and backup its configuration over time. But most of all it avoids inconsistencies across the virtual infrastructure:

The tool already hit the 1.1 version. Download it here.