virtualization.info Editors

The first mention of Nested Page Tables (NPT) can be tracked back to the end of 2006, when both Intel and AMD disclosed their plans to introduce the technology in future versions of their CPUs.

Processors makers and virtualization vendors promised a remarkable performance boost thanks to this technology, at the point that VMware even stated that the virtualization overhead could be completely eliminated by 2010.
Until few months ago there was no chance to verify the claims.

The first CPU to offer a NPT implementation was AMD in September 2007 with its new Quad-Core Opteron (formerly Barcellona) and the Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) extension.
Intel will not follow until Q3 2009, with its upcoming codename Nehalem CPU and the Extended Page Tables (EPT) technology.

The hypervisors that support AMD RVI at the moment are VMware ESX 3.5, any commercial product based on Xen 3.2.0, and KVM.

AnandTech just published a short but very interesting preview of their analysis, showing the performance improvements obtained by Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 (which implements Xen 3.2.0) running on a 2-way system with AMD Quad-Core Opteron CPUs at 2.3 GHz.

They configured 4 virtual machines with 2 vCPUs and 4GB RAM each to run Windows Server 2003 R2 and the following workloads: 2 IIS web servers serving PHP, 1 Oracle OLTP and 1 MySQL databases.

The benchmark highlighted a performance boost going from 7% (Oracle) to 31% (IIS with PHP).

Almost one year ago several virtualization vendors and key OEMs agreed to work with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) on a standard format to define virtual machines.
The list of companies involved at that time included Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource.

In September 2007, the DMTF was already announcing the first draft of the Open Virtual Format (OVF) and in the following months a lot happened:

• VMware included support for the OVF in its VI 3.5
• VMware hired the DMFT President, Winston Bumpus, as Director of Standards Architecture (and note that Bumpus both roles at the same time)
• The list of vendors working to support OVF grew and included companies like Enomalism and ManageIQ

At the Burton Group’s Catalyst 08 conference, Bumpus revealed that OVF may be ready by the end of this month and linked to the current draft.

XenSource was acquired by Citrix but never formalized the commitment to adopt the standard until today: the company just announced the project codename Kensho to include OVF support into XenServer.

The press announcement also unveil the upcoming support of Microsoft Hyper-V for the the new standard.
So far Microsoft never released any specific statement about its new hypervisor and OVF.

A technical preview of the Citrix implementation of OVF is expected by the Q3 2008.

After raising its first round of investments in May, Leostream started its market repositioning by dropping its P2V migration tool P > V Direct.

The reconstruction didn’t stop there as the company has just hired Jack Hembrough as EVP of Sales and Marketing:

Hembrough comes to Leostream from Application Security, Inc. of New York City, a venture-financed software security company, where he served from its inception as President, CEO, and later as Chairman of the Board, growing the company to over $20 million in annual sales.

Prior to joining Application Security, Hembrough was Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales for Authentica, Inc., a venture-financed IT security software company. And as the fourteenth employee at Raptor systems, Hembrough was part of a highly successful initial public offering, subsequently leading Raptor’s expansion as Vice President and General Manager of the European operation, based in Amsterdam.

Additionally, he has held senior executive positions in sales and management at Information Resource Engineering (now SafeNet), and Motorola Corporation.

It’s very likely that Leostream will futher proceed in the process hiring other executives and relaunching the corporate image.

The Cisco involvement in the hardware virtualization has always been very unclear:

• the company invested $150 million in VMware before its IPO last year ($78 millions of those 150 were retired just last week, after the VMware CEO was removed)
• the CEO claimed an entire keynote at VMworld 2007 (despite he talked about everything but virtualization)
• the latest high-end router, ASR 1000, may embed the Linux virtualization platform KVM to offer cheap fault-tolerance (Cisco never confirmed this news)

While these certainly are some signs of concrete interest, so far Cisco never clarified if it wants to become or not a virtualization vendors a la VMware. But something is changing in the last months.

First of all a rumor started spreading in April saying that Cisco may be interested in acquiring Citrix.
No less than two months after that, John Chambers felt the need to highlight that Cisco is not interested in buying VMware (which doesn’t mean that Cisco is not interested in buying someone else).

And now, during an interview with NetworkWorld, John McCool, the new company’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center, Switching and Services Group, gave a surprising answer:

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.

McCool didn’t say “no” but “no announcements to date”.
Despite we try to not read too much into such short sentence the selection of words is rather interesting.

The complex story of the virtualization firm Virtugo seems to have reached an end.

The company surfaced in April 2006 with a suite of utilities to enhance VMware ESX.
Just one year later another US firm, uXcomm, decided to acquire Virtugo for an unknown amount and after two months to take its name.

The uXcomm President and CEO, Patrick Burns, kept its role in the new entity while the Virtugo co-founder, Chris Dickson, left after 11 months for a position as Vice President in CA.

Besides a major release in September 2007, the company has been deadly silent in these months. Even too silent: two weeks ago virtualization.com reported a fault in the Virtugo and uXcomm websites and so far the situation has not changed.

uXcomm raised a notable amount of money in three rounds at least: $13.6 Million (Series B) and $4 Million (Series C). The amount of the first round of investments is unknown.
One of the venture capital firms behind the company, Foundation Capital, still lists the firm in its portfolio while the other two, Intel Capital and OVP Venture Partners, don’t.

Additionally, a number of Virtugo employees (including key executives) recently left the company:

• the former Vice President of Development, Gary Klimowicz, left in March
• the former CEO and Board member of uXcomm, Mark Sigal, left in March

Isn’t clear if the company still exists and this is just a technical issue but it’s very unlikely that a silly website problem can last more than two weeks.

Today FastScale releases a minor update for its flagship product: Composer Suite 2.1.
Despite the version numbering anyway this build introduce a major and long awaited feature: the support for Windows.

The support of Microsoft operating system is so important because it raises technical and licensing issues.

FastScale Composer Suite is able to track how an application interact with the environment, recognizing the OS components (like libraries, services) that it needs and isolating them in a special, redistributable package called DAB.

In this way deploying a Windows application doesn’t require anymore the entire operating system, but just a small footprint environment able to execute the autonomous DABs..

This approach represents the maximum expression of that data center modularization that some virtualization vendors hope to achieve through the Virtual Appliance concept. And there is no other company on the market today offering something similar.
So it doesn’t surprise much that FastScale developed and tested its products at VMware headquarters even before leaving the stealth mode in April 2007.

Composer Suite may work well when manipulating an extremely flexible OS like Linux (and in fact FastScale launched this version as the first one), but it has to face a number of challenges when trying to slim down Windows.

FastScale claims a size reduction in deployments of 95% on average but we find hard to believe that such percentage can be reached with Windows DABs.

Ignoring the technical issues of squeezing a monolithic kernel like the Windows one, there are the licensing and support issues: is the Microsoft EULA allowing such kind of manipulation? Will the ISVs support their applications in such heavily manipulated environment?

FastScale has always been silent about its strategy to solve these challenges and it’s doesn’t currently address any of the questions above in the official announcement. 
Anyway it’s sure that the company is raising much attention: two weeks ago virtualization.info published a rumor about a possible acquisition bid in progress, where one of the potential buyers was Sun. We won’t exclude VMware as well.

Composer Suite 2.1 is available at the starting price of $30,000.

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

Update: The Fast Scale CEO, Lynn LeBlanc, answered the concerns about the support and licensing issues raised in this article.

We republish her email integrally:

Unlike an appliance model where O/S components or other files are ‘stripped away,’ FastScale Composer Suite virtualizes the full software stack without modification. FastScale Application Blueprinting provides the intelligence of what files to initially provision, but FastScale Automatic Runtime Extensions retrieve any subsequent files that are required by the running application (such as a dynamically loaded library) from the FastScale Repository.   Application file requests are agnostic to the physical location of these components.  The combination of FastScale Application Blueprinting and FastScale Automatic Runtime Extensions enables lightweight provisioning without modifying either applications or operating systems.

For troubleshooting or ISV support escalation, the application ‘sees’ the entire operating system.  The test suite used to test the full stack will also be used to test the FastScale lightweight DAB (Dynamic Application Bundle).  The difference is that when DABs are deployed, only the required components are provisioned to the target server, and the rest of the components are in the repository – accessible to the running application, if needed.  In the most conservative case, customers have the option to provision the entire O/S, either in test-mode or production.  This allows customers to conduct troubleshooting in an incremental fashion, eliminating any need to individually qualify or certify ISV applications.

Regarding licensing, FastScale Composer Suite interoperates with customers’ existing asset management and licensing infrastructure.  Detailed data is maintained in the FastScale Repository for export into custom reporting vehicles and available for license compliance management.  Customers are responsible for tracking payment of, and compliance with, the terms and conditions of their software licenses.  However, FastScale provides very granular data on license usage to support customer compliance. 

A key benefit of FastScale Composer Suite is the ability to dynamically provision bare-metal or virtual servers in seconds, enabling customers to reduce physical servers by increasing utilization.  However, in no way does FastScale attempt an end run around licensing.  FastScale also helps ISVs by enabling customers to deploy lightweight software stacks with reduced memory requirements, improving scalability and performance for virtual server deployment.

In October 2007 virtualization.info broke the news that Phoenix Technologies, the historical BIOS vendor, was working on its own hypervisor, HyperCore, and that the project involved Joanna Rutkwoska, the security researcher of Blue Pill fame.

In the following months Phoenix confirmed the news and provided additional details about the hypervisor architecture and the company strategy.

Rather than competing against VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and all the other vendors in this space to deliver the hypervisor on servers, Phoenix aims at the consumer market through the help of several kind of partners.

For example in February the company announced an agreement with SupportSoft to manage the HyperCore virtual machine that is dedicated to maintenance tasks (the so called ManageSpace).

Today Phoenix announces a major OEM agreement to deliver HyperCore in NEC notebooks.
The hypervisor will be used to deliver in the ManageSpace a transparent antivirus product which will protect Windows virtual machines in an automatic way.
In this way it will be much hardware for any malware to disable the antivirus engine. At the same time the users will not have to care about updating the definition file.

The announcement doesn’t reveal which NEC computers will be Hyper-Core powered, when and where this solution will be delivered and most of all what is the antivirus of choice.

In May the US firm known as ClearCube decided to spin off its software division focused on VDI and found an independent company called VDIworks.

It didn’t take much before VDIworks entered the market with its first product: the company announces today VDIvision for Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007.

The just released Hyper-V 1.0 doesn’t have in fact any connection brokering capability and Microsoft doesn’t seem to have any plan to include such feature into the upcoming System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.
Therefore some VDI vendors like Quest (through its Provision Networks subsidiary), Desktone and obviously Citrix have a new preferred partner to work with (VMware is a risky player after the acquisition of Propero).

VDIworks joins the companies above with an interesting approach: rather than extending the capabilities of SCVMM, the just released plug-in works with SCOM.

The product uses SCOM to discover the entire virtual infrastructure and generate usage and healthy reports.
On top of that it offers a connection broker with load balancing capabilities (CPU, memory or other constrains can be configured) and Active Directory integration for granular permission setting.

The product is available at the price of $29 per concurrent user (of course this doesn’t include the SCOM 2007 licensing).

After a couple of months in beta testing, a new virtualization tool from Microsoft is ready for RTM: the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool.

This product allows the update of large-scale deployments of virtual machines, leveraging PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 and WSUS 3.0 (or Configuration Manager 2007).

The user can configure virtual machine groups and multiple jobs for each one to schedule different updates at pre-defined times.

Exactly like the VMware Update Manager (VUM) included in VI 3.5 does, this tool isn’t able yet to inject a new patch into an offline virtual machine passing through its virtual disk.
It just automates the VM power-on, updates deploying through virtual network access, and VM shutdown.

While it remains a valuable solution to keep the virtual machine library healthy, it may raise a number of technical issues (e.g.: Windows Product Activation triggering in sysprepped VMs) that should be carefully evaluated.  

Download it here free of charge.

The guys at ESXGuide.com just released an interesting tool called ESX Manager.

The software, available only for Windows, is able to act as VirtualCenter replacement offering a fair amount of extended features:

• Keeps track of Virtual Machine Host Registration, Migrations and Status
• Manage Virtual Machine Configuration
• Display and work in the Virtual Machine Console
• Kill Virtual Machine Process (if the VM can’t be powered off)
• Rename Virtual Disks of registered Virtual Machines
• Move Virtual Disks and keep the disk attached to the Virtual Machine
• Virtual Machine Registration, Start , Restart , Reset, Power Off, Suspend
• Extend Virtual Disks
• View-Search-Filter Logfiles on the ESX Host
• Define and save custom SSH commands with Parameter handling
• Publish and share custom SSH commands with other ESX Administrators

The product currently supports ESX 3.5 but not the 3i version.
The only requirement is the VirtualCenter Infrastructure Client.

Download it free of charge here.