virtualization.info Editors

In March, virtualization.info announced its first independent conference about virtualization technologies: the Virtualization Congress 2008.

After many months we are finally able to announce the agenda:
http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/agenda.htm

Shaping it has been (and still is) one of the most challenging tasks ever done at virtualization.info:

• We have to grant equal exposure to all the first-class speakers that will present on stage
• We have to balance the contents in a way that every attendee will have a great show, no matter what technology he’s most interested in
• We have to ignite that competition that is healthy for the customers and the entire market

Of course the best part of this agenda is that every session will not contain any marketing slide decks.

Every speaker listed here will show one or more products in action, addressing the challenges of real-world, complex use cases.

The agenda published today is not complete yet. Unfortunately we can’t announce yet few great speakers and their sessions, but a large majority of the contents are online.

Read it online or download the event program below (with the Speakers, the Agenda and the Sponsors):

The usual amount of rumors about EMC and its subsidiary VMware reached an unprecedented level when a suspect number of stock options were traded over the last week.

The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and others are reporting at least a couple of rumors:

• EMC may be acquired by Cisco
• EMC may finally spin-off VMware 

The first scenario is particularly interesting: Cisco dreams a liquid computing future but at the moment the company has a firm leadership only in the networking area; EMC and VMware could fill the holes in the storage and platforms area to complete the vision.

As further confirmation that something is about to happen, in July the company’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center, Switching and Services Group answered the question:

Q: Do you plan to invest in another hypervisor vendor, similar to your relationship with VMware?

A: No announcements to date. We’re continuing to work with all the hypervisor vendors. We are interested in virtualized data centers and to the extent that hypervisor and virtualized servers exist in the data center we think that’s a very powerful construct for customers and one that’s going to take network support.

Nonetheless in June the company’s CEO, John Chambers, explicitly said that Cisco is not interested in buying VMware.  Maybe that was an attempt to clarify that EMC has to sell all or nothing.

Some financial analysts expect the news to be announced later today, at the Pacific Crest Technology Conference, where both EMC and VMW are present.

Update: The EMC calendar for investors now includes an announcement set for tomorrow August 5 @ 10am EST.
The speaker will be Dave Donatelli, President of Storage Division.

Second Update: virtualization.info has received an anonymous tip suggesting that tomorrow EMC will unveil its CLARiiON CX4.

This is more than enough to justify the announcement planned for tomorrow, but it seems not enough to explain the abnormal trade of options of last week.

Just two weeks ago virtualization.info reported about the suspension of the Endeavors Technologies share from the London Stock Exchange.

In this timeframe nothing happened so the company management announced the intention to enter into administration:

Notice of intention to appoint administrators

Further to the announcements of 15 and 18 July 2008, the directors of Endeavors plc have concluded that it is necessary for the Company to enter into administration and accordingly have instructed lawyers to file a notice of intention to appoint administrators.

If no potential buyer or venture capital firm will show up, the company will go into administration in five days.

At that point the 25 patents in application virtualization and streaming that Endeavors still hold will become target for expensive bids, the last hope for the company’s investors.

Almost silently VMware just released the third major release of its virtual lab automation solution: Lab Manager.

The new version (build 2056) offers some interesting features like:

• Full integration with VirtualCenter (LabManager can handle DRS, VMotion and HA / VirtualCenter can deploy LabManager agents)
• Availability of new user groups (Organizations) to share resources
• Availability of custom user roles
• Capability to move virtual machines between datastores
• Support for OpenLDAP
• Support for virtual machines with multiple virtual NICs attached to multiple physical/virtual networks

Lab Manager 3.0 already supports and integrates with the new VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2.

Download a trial here.

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

In just one month VMLogix upgrades its virtual lab management product, LabManager, from version 3.5 to version 3.6.

As promised last month, this new version will introduce the support for Hyper-V 1.0.

It’s a major achievement for VMLogix as the company is the first in its segment to offer the new Microsoft hypervisor.

The company published a demo of LabManager 3.6 beta working with Hyper-V hosts (warning: the audio is awful).

At the moment there’s no public beta program to enroll.

The product is expected to be available by September 2008.

Earlier this month virtualization.info reported about an upcoming 10% price increase from VMware.

Easy to imagine, the news generated a number of negative comments.

Now the customers will have a chance to complain with Citrix as well, as both CIO.co.uk and ThinComputing.net are reporting the same 10% price increase, starting September 1, 2008.

Today Citrix opens the public beta of the upcoming XenServer 4.2 (codename Orlando).

The first beta introduces very interesting features like:

• Xen 3.2
• Automated high availability
• VM grouping, searching and tagging
• Real-time and persistent performance monitoring
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, XP SP3, Vista SP1 guest OSes
• Support for Novell SLES 9 SP4 / 10 SP2, Red Hat RHEL 4.7 / 5.2 guest OSes
• Support for Fibre Channel / iSCSI multipath (configurable through XenCenter)
• Support for alerts as email

From this version the product will also include a P2V migration tool called XenConvert, which is part of the beta as well.
The tool, currently supporting only 32 an 64bit version of Windows, is able to migrate the physical server image directly into a XenServer host, or it can just output it as VHD or XVA (XenServer Virtual Appliance) on a given location. 

Enroll the beta program here (login required to see the actual link).

Update: Citrix also published a series of screencasts to demonstrate some of the new features coming with XenServer 4.2.

• Back up and restore virtual machine metadata for disaster recovery
• High-Availability
• GUI walktrough

The second version of VMware’s product for Apple market is near completion as the company release the beta 2 build (107508).

This new beta has a load of new features like:

• Unity 2.0 (guest OS files, URLs and folders can be opened by the applications on the host)
• AutoProtect (automated backup for the virtual machine through recursive snapshots)
• VMrun (command line for VMs scripting)
• Support for multiple snapshots
• Experimental support for up to 4 virtual CPUs per VM
• Experimental support for Mac OS X 10.5 Server as guest OS

To show these new features VMware published a series of videos here.

Enroll for the beta program here.

As any other vendor entering the market with a brand new product, Microsoft needs to build a solid credibility for Hyper-V 1.0. To achieve the task the company decided to starting from the hosting providers.

On Monday a couple of testimonials appeared on the Microsoft Virtualization Team corporate blog: one is from myhosting.com and the other is from hostbasket.com. 
Both providers are offering their customers dedicated or shared physical servers powered by Windows 2008 with Hyper-V.

On top of these ones, a third firm, Layered Technologies, announced the entrance of Hyper-V in its hosting platforms portfolio (despite still in beta).

Last but not least, Microsoft published an interview with John Zanni, General Manager of Worldwide Hosting, where he discloses how Hyper-V will be included in September in the Hosting Deployment Accelerator (HDA), a free blueprint for hosting projects.

Zanni also unveils that 256 hosting providers wordwide (including huge ones like GoDaddy and Rackspace) are currently adopting Windows Server 2008, implying that most of them may decide to offer Hyper-V as well.

The whole thing is interesting because in general the hosting industry seems to prefer OS virtualization (and in particular the product Virtuozzo Containers offered by Parallels) rather than hardware virtualization.

It’s strange that Microsoft decided to start from here to promote its bare-metal hypervisor, invading the realm of a business partner like Parallels.

Update: After myhosting.com and hostbasket.com, Microsoft adds MaximumASP to the list of hosting providers working with Hyper-V.

VMware just published a new, very interesting 19-pages paper about its Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) technology.

To demonstrate the value of this VirtualCenter feature, VMware measured the performance of a couple of virtualization hosts while their virtual machines (with different workloads) are redistributed through DRS algorithm.

The paper also contains a long list of valuable tips to improve the DRS efficiency.

Highly recommended.