virtualization.info Editors

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, announces on his corporate blog a new major feature that the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is about to offer: support for persistent raw block storage devices stored in the Amazon S3 storage cloud.

At today the EC2 virtual machines have a non-persistent virtual hard drive (from 160GB to 1.7TB) which is destroyed as soon as the VM is powered off. The access to persistent volumes on S3 is limited and complex to manage.

But before the end of this year (the feature is currently in beta testing) each EC2 virtual machine will be able to mount persistent volumes (from 1GB to 1TB of space) stored on S3.
These volumes, just like SAN’s LUNs, can be formatted with any file system and support snapshots, saved into S3 as well.
Additionally, the snapshots will be clonable, allowing for example the re-spawn of a crashed virtual machine starting from its last snapshot.

As expected each operation on the volumes will be controlled by a set of APIs, allowing to reach high levels of automation.

Enroll for the beta program here.

Thanks to Tim Freeman for the news.

VMware just released a new SDK specifically for virtual hard disks manipulation.
The Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) includes:

• The Virtual Disk library, a set of C function calls to manipulate virtual disk (VMDK) files.
• C++ code samples that you can build with either Visual Studio or the GNU C compiler.
• Virtual Disk Manager utility to manipulate offline VMDK files on Windows or Linux (clone, create, relocate, rename, grow, shrink, or defragment).
• DiskMount utility to access files and file systems in virtual disks on Windows or Linux.
• Documentation about the Virtual Disk library and the command-line utilities.

The move seems part of an effort began with the announcement of VMsafe: VMware is opening its infrastructure to 3rd party security vendors, which can access the virtual machines without the direct interaction.

VMware itself suggests to consider the use of this VDDK to achieve goals like:

• Creation of virtual machine disk files to store backup of physical images
• Read access to virtual disk, enabling off-line centralized anti-virus scanning of virtual machines
• Write access to virtual disk, enabling off-line centralized patching of virtual machines
• Read access to virtual disk, enabling off-line software package analysis of virtual machines

Download it here.

Trigence, an application virtualization startup based in US, seems pretty busy reshuffling its management team since few months.

In the whole 2007 were hired a new Vice President of Sales, a new COO, a new Director of Product Management and Marketing and a new Director of Consulting Services.

Anyway the COO, John Hamilton, already left, after just one year to join another startup: xkoto.

Quoting from the Sigma Resources & Technologies official announcement:

Sigma Resources & Technologies, a leading supplier of testing technologies for networking, security, telecom and wireless, today announced it has integrated its test automation solution with the award-winning VMware Lab Manager and has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The new relationship will enable end-user customers to leverage the integrated power of Sigma’s SigmationTF testing framework and VMware’s lab automation and other virtualization products to accelerate the development and deployment of bug-free applications and make the transitions between physical and virtual aspects of IT smoother…

Google is one of the few big IT vendors that didn’t embrace hardware virtualization so far. They have their good reasons.
But this doesn’t imply that the company doesn’t track the trend, doesn’t acquire an application virtualization startup, or doesn’t have insights about the technology to share.

On the corporate blog dedicated to security Tavis Ormandy, Information Security Engineer at Google, expressed his skepticism about the fact that a virtualization platform can be bug-free:

…

As with any complex application, it would be naive to think such a large codebase could be written without some serious bugs creeping in. If any of those bugs are exploitable, attackers restricted to the guest could potentially break out onto the host machine…

Ormandy also published a 10-pages whitepaper describing his attempts to break the security of popular virtualization platforms, including commercial and open source ones like VMware Workstation and Server, Xen, QEMU-based (KVM, VirtualBox), Bochs and others.
(the analysis also includes other two commercial platforms not mentioned by the name. Reading the paper it’s easy to guess which ones they are)

With a soft launch VMware just opened a couple of online TV channes (one on YouTube and another on Blip.tv) to host a bunch of training videos.

No longer than 10 minutes, each video explains how to complete (very) easy tasks with VMware products (just Server 1.0 at the moment).

Update: VMware just published a downloadable version of the videos above. Download the whole package here.

So far the Xen hypervisor offered a unique opportunity to enter the virtualization market as a major player.
Top industry vendors invested (Citrix, through the XenSource acquisition, Novell, Red Hat) or are investing (Sun) million of dollars to bring it inside the enterprise business.

One the first companies embracing Xen is Virtual Iron which achieved some notable goals in the last few years:

• it accumulated the impressive capital of $65 million in five investment rounds
• it closed major OEM agreements (with HP and IBM, with Dell, with Provision Networks, with Arrow Electronics) and partnerships (with Microsoft, with PlateSpin, with FalconStor, with Reflex Security, with Fabric7)
• it provided a broad range of certified storage (NetApp, IBM, EqualLogic, Data Core) to its customers
• it launched its own channel partner program since more than one year already

and yet the company has to face major compeitition for all the other big players mentioned above.

virtualization.info met Ed Walsh, the new CEO of Virtual Iron and asked questions about the competition, the go to market and acquisition strategies, the technology roadmap, the relationship with Microsoft, and more.

Read the whole interview with Ed Walsh here.

This morning press release from HP unveils that the upcoming next-generation connection broker from Citrix, XenDesktop, will be available starting May 2008.

The product, currently in beta, will merge together the XenServer hypervisor, the Provisioning Server streaming server and the Desktop Server connection broker.

HP will support the whole solution on its ProLiant servers and Compaq thin clients.

Before XenDesktop, HP already announced support for XenServer, which is now tightly integrated with the ProLiant management GUI.

Update: Citrix released an official press release confirming that XenDesktop (starting from version 2.0) will be released May 20 with a suggested price of $75 per concurrent user.

April 10 VMware released the first minor update for its flagship product: VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 1.

As expected many customers took advantage of the weekend to download the new build and install it.
Unfortunately the early adopters are not reporting a smooth upgrading experience.

The biggest problem is that the bits available are not the ones of Update 1, according to the build numbers: while the website declares a final build number of 84782, the downloaded bits install a version with the build 84767 (a discrepancy confirmed by the MD5 signature mismatch).

The wrong build provided any sort of technical issues to the unlucky early adopters which tried to perform an upgrade: disabled plug-ins, VirtualCenter Client crashes, guest OS templates disappearance and inability to customize then, etc.

Besides a lot of time wasted, the build mismatch also impacted the productivity in some cases: some customers in fact installed the VI 3.5 Update 1 in labs while others put it directly into production environments.

VMware was informed of the problem immediately and invited to download the bits again the day after. Unfortunately the re-downloaded ISOs were still providing the build 84767, causing chaos among users.

The second answer VMware provided clarified that, despite the MD5 mismatch, the available bits were the correct ones. Despite that customers continued to experience crashes and were forced to downgrade to 3.5.0 (which caused a painful mess of different builds for different tiers of the virtual infrastructure).

After the entire weekend VMware has yet to solve the problem while the number of users afftected by the issue grew exponentially: so far the VMTN thread about the topic got 989 visits with 79 replies.

This is already the second time that VMware publishes the wrong build for a production release: before April it already happened in December 2007, when the company released VI 3.5.0. The correct build wasn’t posted online untile February 2008.

Now customers, already complaining for the plethora of different build numbers on any GA release, are afraid that VMware will correct this second error after another two months.

Update: VMware sent us a note to specify that the build numbers mentioned above are not incorrect.
The VI 3.5 Update 1 comes with different build numbers for each component and while the Virtual Infrastructure Management Installer has the GA build 84782, the VirtualCenter itself has the GA build of 84767.

At today VMware is still investigating the issue and thinks it may depend on its content distribution service: Akamai.

Second update: At the end of Tuesday, 5 days after the first incident, VMware finally solved the problem, confirming its error in uploading the wrong bits on the Akamai content delivery system. And with the promise to not offer a third similar experience.

Few months after the release of vReplicator 2.1 (formerly esxReplicator) Vizioncore is finalizing the new version 2.5 and opens the beta program.

This first beta introduces few major new features like:

• Support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) inside the guest OS
• Hybrid replication (instead of full replication the product does snapshot replication through the Differential Engine)
• Replication to multiple destinations

Enroll for the beta here.