virtualization.info Editors

Xen.org just published the tentative Xen 3.3 datasheet which contains the full list of new features included in the new version of the open source hypervisor:

Performance and Scalability

• CPUID Levelling
• Shadow 3 Page Table Optimizations
• EPT/NPT 2MB Page Support
• Virtual Framebuffer Support for HVM Guests
• PVSCSI — SCSI Support for PV Guests
• Full 16-bit Emulation on Intel VT

Security

• PVGRUB Secure Replacement for PYGRUB
• IO Emulation “stub domains” for HVM IO

Green Computing

• Enhanced C & P State Power Management
• Graphics Support
• VT-d Device Pass-Through Support

Miscellaneous

• Upgrade QEMU Version
• Multi-Queue Support for Modern NICs
• Removal of Domain Lock for PV Guests
• Message Signalled Interrupts

The datasheet is also interesting because it provides an updated list of the major Xen contributors: Intel, AMD, HP, Dell, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, Fujitsu, Samsung, and Oracle.

While most of the companies listed above are well-known names, finding a telco giant like Samsung is pretty uncommon.
In November 2007 Samsung was working to bring Xen on PDAs. In June 2008 virtualization.info reported that the company was porting Xen on the ARM architecture.

Virtualization may reach mobile devices soon.

As you may know by now, we asked our keynote speakers to introduce themselves and talk a bit about their sessions at the Virtualization Congress 2008, the independent conference about virtualization technologies arranged by virtualization.info.

In the past months we had the pleasure to host Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, and Scott Farrand, Vice President of Business Enablement at HP.

Today we’d like to introduce another key figure of the virtualization industry that will be on our stage: Paul Ghostine, General Manager and Vice President of Provision Networks, a subsidiary of Quest.
 

Along with Simon Crosby, Scott Farrand and Paul Ghostine there will be a number of other top performers (and this is just a partial list: stay tuned as we may have some big surprises).

This amazing set of speakers will provide different perspectives, approaches and solutions to the many challenges that virtualization implies.
Most of the agenda is finally online so you check what will be discussed on stage.

We can’t wait to see you all at the London ExCeL this October 14-16, 2008.
The Virtualization Congress is just two months away, sign up now!

In November 2007 virtualization.info launched a tool to simplify the networking between virtualization professionals across the globe.
We adopted LinkedIn as back-end infrastructure (and we couldn’t be happier) and called it virtualization.info Vanguards.

In May 2008 the network reached 1000 members. Just three months later it grew by another 50% as we now reach 1520 members.

There’s a number of reasons to be part of this independent directory. Some of them are listed on the Vanguards home page. Others are less evident:

• We operate a strict selection on the members, accepting (at the moment) only those professionals involved in the plan, design, implementation and management of virtual infrastructures.

  This means that, in most cases, the virtualization.info Vanguards are CIOs/CTOs, IT Managers, System Architects and Engineers.
  This means that you will not be contacted by sales and marketing managers, PR, head hunters as these professionals are not accepted in the group.

  Because of this policy so far we rejected 200 submissions.
  Of course our filtering is not always perfect: sometimes one of those above can accidentally be accepted but we review our member list frequently to maintain the network as much in topic as possible.

• We are actively working to provide the existing members some special benefits.
  Last week, finally, we started to send out the first round of emails to announce the first benefit (if you didn’t receive it check your SPAM cartel or wait some more days as you may be in the queue).

  While we don’t reveal what the benefits are outside the network, it’s easy to guess what we could offer in this specific period of the year…

So thank you!
We hope that the virtualization.info Vanguards network is a valuable resource for your business and that in the near future you’ll have even more reasons to be a member.

We also hope to reach 2000 members by the end of the year. If you feel like it sounds interesting sign up now.

NetworkWorld is reporting an interesting news, still unconfirmed: on August 19 Microsoft will reduce the license demand to perform virtual machines migration.

At today any customer that wants to migrate a Windows guest operating system from one physical host to another (for example through the VMware VMotion technology) has to have two licenses of the operating system, one for each location.

The current policy in fact says that a customer needs to wait 90 days before migrating its licensing from one physical server to another.

The article sounds unreasonable and it seems to have the only effect to make more expensive the advent of a truly dynamic data center.
Now, after customers complains, Microsoft maybe will replace it with a license that is related to the guest OS instead of the host.

Despite the name, VM Orchestrator (VMO) is not a virtual data center automation framework like the now defunct Dunes VS-O or the upcoming Citrix Workflow.
The Platform’s product is more complex, with a core high-availability feature (currently available only for Citrix XenCenter) and additional capabilities in VM lifecycle management and distributed resource management.

The new version 4.0 introduces a number of new elements to work with:

• Resource Groups The ability to group physical resources as a group (with Citrix XenServer a VMO Resource Group is equal to the XenServer Resource Pool)
• Consumers A security boundary where VMs are assigned, examples: departments, projects, external companies. Consumers can have delegated administrators and can control there own VMs.
  The product also has chargeback capabilities as the Consumers are tracked by allocation and usage.
• Resource Plans – Allocating (quotaing) the resources from the Resource Group to the Consumer.  For example, the marketing department might get 2 GHz of CPU and 2 GB of memory from which to run VMs.  This creates a resource boundary in which the Consumers can operate.

The Platform Computing reference material also unveils that VMO will support VMware and Microsoft in the future.

Download a trial here.

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

Sun is one of the latest big vendor entering the x86 hardware virtualization market (but one of the first in other areas with Solaris Containers and LDOMs) but it’s working hard to recover the time lost so far.

In February 2008 the company acquired the German innotek, and included their desktop virtualization product, VirtualBox, in its portfolio, offering it free of charge and open source.

The first rebranded version of VirtualBox was released just three monts later, and Sun claimed over 5 million downloads just one month after.

Now the company announces a series of OEM agreements, Avanquest Software, Q-layer and Zenith InfoTech Ltd., to further spread the product all over the place.

It will be interesting to see the long-term strategy that Sun has to make this product more interesting than its more popular competitors like VMware Workstation and Parallels Workstation.

In the last period the VDI firm Ericom got an unprecedented visibility thanks to a remarkable effort: giving away for free its connection broker, PowerTerm WebConnect, to the Oracle customers working with the new Oracle VM. 
As the Oracle hypervisor is free as well, the two companies are basically offering a free of charge VDI solution.

After that move the company signed a number of OEM agreements to embed its connection broker into a number of thin clients and other devices:

• With BOSaNOVA (May 12)
  Ericom Software, a leading global provider of application access and virtualization solutions, and BOSaNOVA, Inc., the market leader in development of Security Solutions, Thin Clients and Network Appliances, today announce a new partnership in which all BOSaNOVA Linux, CE and XPe thin clients will include Ericom’s PowerTerm®WebConnect clients for Desktop Virtualization and Server Based Computing.
• With IMPACT Technologies (June 5)
  Ericom Software, a leading global provider of application access and virtualization solutions, and IMPACT Technologies, a leading provider of next generation thin clients, today announced a new alliance in which IMPACT thin clients will be pre-packaged with Ericom’s PowerTerm® WebConnect client for Desktop Virtualization and Server Based Computing. IMPACT will also make available Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect Server as a bundled offering – for more comprehensive management of these varied environments.
• With Rangee (August 6) 
  Rangee GmbH, a leading European producer of thin clients, and Ericom Software, a leading global provider of application access and virtualization solutions, today announced the expansion of their longstanding alliance in which Rangee Linux and Windows XPe thin clients will be pre-packaged with Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect client for Desktop Virtualization and Presentation Virtualization.
• With Symbio Technologies (August 12)
  Symbio Technologies an award-winning leader in “green” stateless computing, said today that it has added Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect client to its Symbiont Boot Appliance and Symbiont Boot Stick after signing technology licensing and reseller agreements with Ericom Software, a global leader in application access and virtualization solutions.
• With NetVoyager (August 13)
  Netvoyager, a leading producer of thin clients, and Ericom Software, a leading global provider of application access and virtualization solutions, today announced a new alliance in which Netvoyager’s Linux thin clients will be pre-packaged with Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect client for Presentation Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization.

IGEL Technology, a popular thin client vendor, just achieved the certification to work with VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM):

Igel Technology today announced certification for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager, VMware’s next-generation connection broker, on IGEL’s Microsoft® Windows® XP Embedded range of Universal Desktops. The software is available today as a partial update for IGEL’s Windows XP Embedded models, and allows customers deploying VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to deliver an enhanced user experience.

Last week Simon Crosby, CTO at Citrix, announced that the core part of Project Kensho, the Citrix OVF toolkit, will be available for free and with an open source license.
Who will maintain that code? IBM, as announced on the Citrix corporate blog.

The code is available now as Project Open-OVF with the Eclipse Public License.
Scott Moser, Software Engineer at IBM, will maintain the code.

One week ago VMware started a new, very welcome initiative: the publishing of long books, called VMbooks, about specific topics.

The first one, 232 pages, is titled: A Practical Guide to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with VMware Infrastructure 3.

This VMware VMbook focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and is intended to guide the reader through the step-by-step process to set-up a multisite VMware Infrastructure that is capable of supporting BCDR services for designated virtual machines at time of test or during an actual event that necessitated the declaration of a disaster, resulting in the activation of services in a designated BCDR site.

Index of contents

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Understanding and Planning for BCDR
• Chapter 3: Virtualization and BCDR
• Chapter 4: High-Level Design Considerations
• Chapter 5: Implementing a VMware BCDR Solution
• Chapter 6: Advanced and Alternative Solutions
• Chapter 7: Service Failover and Failback Planning
• Chapter 8: Service Failover Testing
• Chapter 9: Network Infrastructure Details
• Chapter 10: Storage Connectivity
• Chapter 11: Storage Platform Details
• Chapter 12: Server Platform Details
• Appendix A: BCDR Failover Script
• Appendix B: VMware Tools Script

Of course the book is free of charge. Highly recommended.