virtualization.info Editors

On April 1st, thinking it was a good idea, the guys at virtualization.com published a fool’s joke about the Sun acquisition of Parallels for $205 million.

The news was eventually picked up by Google News and so, despite it was an evident fake (the claimed price is well below any possible estimate) somebody republished the article while others asked for more details to Parallels.

The fake news didn’t impact the stock market luckily, with JAVA shares started at $15.68 and closed at $16.00, but virtualization.com guys may have risked a lawsuit.

What makes this story interesting anyway is the public answer that Parallels took care to publish on the corporate blog.

Despite the article is titled Parallels is not for sale it seems quite the opposite: Ilya Baimetov, Directory of Technology, explains how the claimed price would be too low (which means that Parallels is for sale, it’s just a matter of money as usual), and how Sun is not the best buyer.

Baimetov mentions a couple of obvious virtualization players which could buy Parallels, Microsoft and VMware, along with an unexpected third one: HP.

Besides providing virtualization-ready hardware for VMware and for Citrix, so far HP never showed a clear interest to become a virtualization player.
So why mentioning HP? Why Baimetov didn’t also mention other OEMs like Dell and IBM?

Maybe HP is actively pursuing an acquisition in the hardware virtualization market and Parallels took this opportunity to manifest its availability, or the company is just suggesting HP that its acquisition may be a good idea.

He who has ears to hear…

Update: To discourage the speculation published in this post Baimetov updated his original post and included IBM to the list of meaningful buyers for Parallels.

Second update: It seems that virtualization.com didn’t like much the reactions generated by their own joke. Here it is a follow-up.

The Register published an interesting article last week about the security risks that the upcoming VMsafe APIs may introduce in VMware ESX.

The critical part anyway is a revelation from Mike Poor, Senior Security Analyst at IntelGuardians, claiming to have broken hypervisor’s security layer:

…Poor said his firm received $1.2m from the Department of Homeland Security to look for ways attackers can penetrate hypervisors and ways security researchers can detect and prevent such escapes. Because the two years worth of research is under lock and key, Poor could only say: “We were successful in all three.”…

Obviously this sentence may mean everything, but it seems to imply that IntelGuardians was able to escape the guest OS isolation and jump directly onto the hypervisor, which is the biggest risk in virtualization environments.

Since there is no way to validate the Poor’s claim we’ll have to wait for another security firm to publicly disclose the breach.

Almost silently the US startup Qumranet, famous for supporting the KVM development, accomplished a remarkable achievement: releasing para-virtualization network drivers for Windows guest OSes.

The drivers are available for Windows 2000 and XP (signed versions) as well as for Windows 2003 (unsigned version), are for 32bit systems only, and can be used with KVM-61 or later.

Using dedicated para-virtualization drivers, guest OSes can often improve performance as also VMware confirmed.

Haydn Solomon, the Qumranet developer who published the news, provides a step-by-step installation guide just in case it’s needed.

Download the drivers here.

A new startup launches today in the already crowded application virtualization market: InstallFree.

InstallFree is an Israeli company (with the official HQ in US) founded in 2006 by Yori Gabay, CEO, and Netzer Shlomai, CTO, both previously at Gteko which was acquired by Microsoft.
Other key members of the management team are David Karofsky, Vice President of Marketing, which comes from EMC, and Yuval Neeman, Board Advisor, which is a former Vice President at Microsoft (16 years at the company) who completed a couple of successful acquisitions (Secured Dimensions and M-System) in the last years.

The company is funded with $1.7 million from several angel investors and VC firms.

Despite the incredible number of competitors, including Microsoft with Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) and VMware with Thinstall, InstallFree has some interesting capabilities to market.

The first company product, Bridge, is able to create autonomous (agent-less) virtual applications which can be updated or incrementally patched without the need to re-virtualize them.
The customizations that users may decide to apply to a virtualized app are saved in dedicated encrypted files, which can be saved and redistributed, and which are not impacted when the application is updated.

Additionally, InstallFree offers a centralized management console, which fully integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, and uses it to distribute the virtual apps to corporate users.
From there the administrators can pack applications and patches, apply them to users and groups for delivery, and even manage the available software licenses accordingly.

The virtual applications can be prepared to run on multiple versions of Windows (both 32bit and 64bit) with a single package and InstallFree supports out-of-the-box VDI and Terminal Services environments.

The company doesn’t just virtualize the access to Windows file system and registry anyway.
It creates a complete virtual environment for the application where most OS components are emulated. This includes the security access system, which allows to distribute the virtual apps on OSes where the user has no high-level permissions (like Internet kiosks).
Additionally, different virtualized applications can communicate with each other, even if they are not in the same package.

InstallFree technology also includes streaming capabilities: the applications (and the users data files) are seamlessly streamed in a bi-directional way between the app repository and the client machine. Anyway, to avoid the network dependency Bridge allows to locally cache the apps.

InstallFree is also working on an additional product called Desktop, which will allow the company to compete on the corporate virtual desktop market against Microsoft (with Kidaro Workspaces), VMware (with ACE), Sentillion (with vThere) and MokaFive (with the new Virtual Desktop Solution), despite the solution is the only one not using hardware virtualization technologies.

It’s yet to be seen if Bridge features and Desktop in roadmap will be enough to give InstallFree a good chance to emerge.

No trial of InstallFree Bridge 1.0 is available at the moment.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.

Moka5 is a US startup launched two years ago with the ambitious mission to revolutionize the desktop virtualization market.

The company product, LivePC, targeted the consumer market with some interesting features like an online library for virtual machines downloading and the capability to update the VMs without redistributing them entirely.

But in two years LivePC, which is a feature-rich wrapper around VMware Player, could never reach the 1.0 milestone and its diffusion remained limited.
Additionally, the company radically changed its management team over time, replacing the CEO, the VP of Engineering and the VP of Marketing.

Now the company also replaces its go to market strategy, changing the name (from moka5 to MokaFive), the corporate image (including both the logo and the website) and the target audience: the priority is now the SMB market.

The new offering is based on the Virtual Desktop Solution, which basically is a console to centralize the management of multiple LivePCs.

While the underlying engine didn’t change, this new product introduces some security capabilities (virtual machines encryption, expiration, signing) that companies like VMware (with ACE), Sentillion (with vThere) and Kidaro (with Workspaces, now acquired by Microsoft) use to offer since some years.

And even if the company is now fully committed to the corporate market, the consumer one wasn’t left behind: the original LivePC solution, now called MokaFive Express Solution, is now a free of charge product with the same popular capabilities offered in the last two years.

Both products aren’t ready anyway: customers will have to wait somewhere in this Q2 2008 to have them. Meanwhile a preview is available here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.

A couple of weeks after the release of Hyper-V 1.0 Release Candidate 0, Microsoft is ready to distribute the drivers needed to optimize the Linux guest OSes.

This drivers allow supported Linux guests (only Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 at today) to access the Hyper-V VMbus, as detailed in this architecture diagram provided by Microsoft in July 2007.

Called Integration Component for Linux, they can be downloaded from the beta site Microsoft Connect.

While worldwide OEMs like HP, IBM and Dell are pushing hard to release virtualization-ready servers, Lenovo seems to prefer the desktop virtualization market.

The Chinese OEM in fact announced its Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).

Such platform will use the Intel VT technology but it’s totally unclear how: nor the press release neither the official website provide any detail about which hypervisor or hosted VMM will be used and how it will be integrated in the hardware.

The incredibly vague description provided seems to suggest an approach similar to the one that Phoenix Technologies is adopting with its PC 3.0 and the HyperCore hypervisor, but there is no way to confirm at the moment.

More news about this story as soon as possible.

EE Times Asia is reporting that Freescale is adopting virtualization in upcoming dual-core CPUs:

…

Freescale is now sampling the first dual-core versions of its PowerQuicc processors, aimed at telecom OEMs. The chips are part of a family that will eventually scale to 32-core devices, said Dan Cronin, VP of R&D for Freescale’s networking division.

The processors will use a new on-chip interconnect fabric. They will also embed in hardware a hypervisor, a kind of low-level scheduling unit, co-developed with IBM according to specs set in the Power.org group. Freescale will release an open source reference design for companies that want to build virtualization software that taps into the hypervisor, Cronin said…

The VMware hypervisor ESX Server is no more called in this way.

Even without a formal announcement the company dropped the term Server from its product name so that now we have two product: VMware ESX and VMware ESXi (in place of formerly ESX Server 3i).

Most of the online documentation still reports the former “ESX Server” label so customers may be confused for a while. Probably VMware will complete the name make-over in time for the release of VI 3.5 Update 1, scheduled for April 10.

It’s interesting to consider why the company renamed its most popular, flagship product.

The first, most likely reason is that the large majority of customers usually refers to the hypervisor with just ESX, which is shorter and easier to say. But there may be other reasons behind the change.

The Server word inside ESX Server implied that the hypervisor is for back-end implementation, which may be limitating for VMware on the long run.
What if the company is preparing to port its hypervisor to other platforms, like embedded devices for example? Running a server product on a mobile device sounds confusing and prevents the marketing department from creating an edition called ESX Mobile or ESXm.

VMware also performed another substantial change in its naming convention: it dropped the sentence an EMC company from the corporate logo.

The company is still an EMC subsidiary but the tagline was probably disturbing EMC competitors like HP and IBM which are top VMware partners.

Finally VMware opens to a wide audience Workstation 6.5 and ACE 2.5 beta (build 84113) bits.

As virtualization.info readers know since a couple of weeks, the feature list of Workstation 6.5 introduces some interesting things like the seamless window technology that VMware calls Unity (a detailed list of its capabilities is available here) and the low level debugging engine VProbe.

ACE 2.5 instead doesn’t introduce any major feature besides the higher integration level with Workstation: as already reported, now every Workstation 6.5 copy can produce ACE VMs and customers only require a dedicate license for the Management Server or the ACE VMs installed where there is no Workstation available.

Enroll for the Workstation 6.5 beta program or the ACE 2.5 beta program.