virtualization.info Editors

In a single day VMware released minor updates for all its platform products but ESX Server.

The new VMware Player, Workstation and Server builds are just fixing bugs and security vulnerabilities (including the long expected one about Shared Folders), but ACE 2.0.3 also introduces some new features:

• Power-off scripts inclusion
  ACE now allows defining a power-off script for Windows and Linux guest OSes
• Windows logon customization
  ACE now allows pre-definining the username and password to be used for new guest OSes
• MAC address pools support
  ACE now allows defining a set of MAC addresses to be assigned from the ACE management server

Trials or free versions are available for all product:

• VMware Player 2.0.3 (build 80004)
• VMware Workstation 6.0.3 (build 80004)
• VMware ACE 2.0.3 (build 80004)
• VMware Server 1.0.5 (build 79847)

Besides these updates all these products are expected to receive a major upgrade in the near future. In fact VMware is working on Server 2.0 and Workstation 6.5.

The next version of worldwide popular VMware Workstation is already expected for one feature that Apple customers can already enjoy with Fusion: the seamless window capability that VMware calls Unity.

But Workstation 6.5 has other big features to expose and virtualization.info is able to detail the complete list for beta 1 (build 74679):

• Inclusion of ACE authoring capabilities
  VMware is integrating into Workstation the corporate desktop security capabilities once only available in the ACE product. But differently from 6.0 version where customers had to buy an additional serial number to have a Workstation ACE Edition, these features are now available as standard capabilities of the basic product.
  This means virtual disks encryption, quarantined access to unauthorized networks, access control to physical hardware devices, etc.
• Introduction of analysis and debugging engine VProbe
  VProbe acts at hypervisor level and it’s able to provide informations about any aspect of the interaction between the virtual machine and the physical hardware.
  It goes well beyond traditional analysis tools that can be run at guest OS level, giving informations about virtual CPU registers, hardware virtualization state, guest OS page faults, interrupts use and much more.
  It comes with its own scripting language but not a GUI or any reporting capabilities, and it’s inspired to the DTrace tool created by Sun for its OS Solaris 10.
• Introduction of checkpoints for Record/Replay feature
  Users can now mark with checkpoints a virtual machine recorded or replayed with Record/Replay feature.
  
• Support for guest OS unattended installation
  Just like with the customization wizard offered by VirtualCenter, users can now predefine some values (administrator’s password, installation key, network settings, etc.) before installing a Windows guest OS for the first time.
• Support for smart cards at guest OS level
  A smart card reader available at host level can be used inside a virtual machines.

The first two features are specially important.

The inclusion of ACE capabilities into the basic version of Workstation means several things: first of all that VMware isn’t able to successfully sell ACE as is today, secondarily that the future strategy will probably imply selling only the management component that VMware introduced with ACE 2.0.
Now that Microsoft acquired Kidaro VMware has one more reason to completely reposition this product on the hostile security market.

The introduction of VProbe in Workstation 6.5 is just the first step for the inclusion in ESX Server, where the technology will allow VMware to introduce a new class of performance analysis and troubleshooting products.
All the vendors that offer today reporting tools for the guest OS level should pay much attention to the development of this feature because it could easily drive them out of business.

As expected VMware opens the beta program for its Powershell-based VMware Infrastructure Toolkit.

VMware already has a programming toolkit for VI 3.x based on Perl language since September 2007 for Linux and Windows, but the company still wanted to offer a parallel version based on the Microsoft PowerShell scripting.

Obviously Microsoft guys couldn’t be happier, also because their System Center Virtual Machines Manager (SCVMM), which will soon compete against VirtualCenter, is completely built on PowerShell and VMware choice is providing a great unhoped validation.

The decision to use the new scripting language may depend on the greater simplicity of PowerShell over Perl, as the TechProsaic guys demonstrate with an enlightening example. The official documentation currently available confirms this reporting that:

The learning curve for the VI Toolkit (for Windows) is much shorter than for the Perl toolkit, or for the C# and Java SDKs, and it is possible to become productive in a matter of days, or even hours, as opposed to weeks with other VI SDKs and toolkits.

VMware included over 100 cmdlets in this first beta (build 81531) but only supports 32bit platforms to run (despite the RTM will support 64bit as well).

This new VI Toolkit is expected to be released in H2 2008. Meanwhile enroll for the program here.

Surgient releases today the newest version of its virtual lab management platform.

VQMS 5.4 introduces a set of APIs for integration through SOAP, support for VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VMFS shared LUNs, as well as support for Apple Mac OS X client.

The price begins at $15,000.

Download a trial here.

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

Citrix already signed several OEM agrements with top hardware manifacturer in US and EMEA (with Dell, with HP, with Fujitsu) to distribute XenServer as much as possible and counter the VMware ESX Server 3i diffusion.

Now, to reach markets where VMware may not be yet a strong competitor, Citrix signs a new agreement with Lenovo to bring its hypervisor in China.

To further exploit the opportunity the two companies are working to integrate XenServer with Lenovo server management suite and bring an out-of-the-box experience for Chinese customers.

The first products reaching the market will be R515 (2way) and R525 (4way) Intel Quad-Core Xeon servers, starting from April 2008.

Not only Dell is going to sell virtualization-ready solutions (hardware + VMware ESX Server 3i) in one click, but it seems that the OEM vendor is going to give ESX Server 3i for free.

As last article of the week The Inquirer reports the words of Martin Niemer, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware, which says that Dell will not charge anything for the hypervisor.

If confirmed this decision will have a serious impact on the sales channel.

On one side other OEMs that have a distribution agreement with VMware (HP, IBM, Fujitsu and other) will be almost obliged to do the same to not give Dell any competitive advantage.

On the other side the VMware distributors and resellers will see their chances to sell ESX Server in the SMB market fall down near to zero.

It was expected that over the next few years VMware would lower the price of its hypervisor to compete with Microsoft aggressive strategy (the upcoming Hyper-V will cost $28) but it certainly wasn’t expected so early.

Is this the beginning of the free hypervisors era?

VMworld Europe 2008 attendees that spent some time at the Vizioncore booth already saw it: the Quest subsidiary is about to launch a completely overhauled version of its performance monitoring tool vCharter.

The new Pro edition is designed to track virtualization hosts and virtual machines activities in large scale deployments, and will feature a new system of customizable rules and reports. But most of all the new vCharter Pro will introduce a brand new GUI which exposes collected statistics in a more effective way:

The product is currently in private beta but customers should expect the RTM version soon.

While VMware develops secure virtual machines for the NSA, the NSA develop secure virtual machines for everybody. Or at least this is what InfoWorld is reporting.

The National Security Agency believes that certain hardware components like display cards or network cards, which are shared between all virtual machines, could be used to cross the software limits imposed by the hypervisors.

To prevent such threat the NSA worked with CPU vendors AMD and Intel on the next generation of virtualization extensions so they can prevent a certain virtual machine from accessing certain hardware components.

AMD calls this technology device exclusion vector and plans to announce it this year.

It will interesting to see how this new feature (assuming that virtualization vendors will support it in their hypervisors) will impact the migration processes like VMware VMotion.

Update: The InfoWorld article mentioned in this post contains some inaccuracies: the device exclusion vector (DEV) technology is available in AMD CPUs since at least 18 months.

The virtualization phenomenon changed (and it’s still changing) a lot of things in the IT world. Some of them, anyway, have nothing to do with technology.

One is the new level of competition that the vendors can reach when pitching their products, probably the highest ever seen in the computer industry.
Such fierce conflict is made of claims and refusals and accusations going back and forth from one corporate blog to another.
Who benefits the most from this modern media fight is the end-user which has a surprisingly efficient tool to spot some obscure statements in this or that vendor’s offering.

This long and unusal premise was needed to introduce a concrete example.

Recently VMware opened a new corporate blog to debate on those press articles or competitors statements which are not considered fair enough.

The last post published on this blog, Virtual Reality, covers the frequent complains about the VMware Infrastructure price (complains that actually exist since much before Microsoft announced the price for its upcoming Hyper-V).
To justify the cost difference between its hypervisor and the competing ones, VMware focus on the so called cost per virtual machine and invokes the memory overcommit feature, something that nor Citrix XenServer neither Microsoft Hyper-V can offer today.

The achievements described in that post (a 4GB RAM physical server runs up to 40 concurrent VMs busy with light activity or up to 14 VMs busy with heavy activity) instantly provoked reaction from Microsoft and from Citrix.

The three positions are all interesting and worthwhile of a full analysis but readers should be aware that metrics can be manipulated without limits to support one position or another.

The value of ESX Server memory overcommit exist. Despite that, the scenario described by VMware seems far away from many real-world deployments.

VMware used the identical OS image for all the virtual machine instances but it’s highly unlikely that a virtual infrastructures can host tens of virtual machines with the same identical Windows edition, service pack, patch level and running applications. Thus the chances to have many memory pages to share are probably lower than the ones available in the tested environment.

Surely there are batteries of identical virtual machines (at least at the OS level) deployed out there, for example for web server farms or VDI farms, but to match a realistic average scenario VMware should use a mixed environment made of Windows 2000, 2003 and 2008 VMs, with different SP and patch levels, and with different installed applications.

In such environment the memory overcommit ratio would assume a more concrete value and a cost per VM calculation would be more precise.

Update: VMware posted a new scenario to validate its memory overcommit technology in the real-world.
It’s the case of a VDI farm with 178 virtual machines (512 MB virtual RAM each) which consumes less than 20GB physical RAM instead of 89GB.

Definitively an interesting environment but, as noted in the original post above, we’d like to see the memory overcommit ratio achieved where you cannot have a farm of identical guest OSes with identical applications.

In the last months the Microsoft virtualization strategy became more than aggressive.

Started with Connectix acquisition in 2003 (hardware virtualization), Microsoft slowly extented its investment with SoftGrid acquisition in 2006 (application virtualization) and Calista Technologies in early 2008 (presentation virtualization).

The investment is actually bigger than that, since the company also developed in-house technologies like new capabilities for its Terminal Services, a new management console for virtualization platforms, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), and a new hypervisor, Hyper-V, expected for the Q3 2008.

Microsoft is also building virtualization capabilities and support into a large part of its back-end servers: Operation Manager (SCOM), Configuration Manager (SCCM), Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) are all becoming virtualization-aware, while SQL Server and Windows Server both have virtualization-friendly licenses.

All these technologies are being developed with interoperability in mind, thanks to a series of agreements with Novell, with Citrix, with Sun and with Virtual Iron.

Last but not least the company long-term vision shapes a future where large-scale datacenters are fully virtualized through both hardware virtualization (for OS deployments) and application virtualization (for back-end services deployments), tightened together by a service-oriented distribution model called codename Oslo.

In such scenario Microsoft acquires Kidaro. How this fits the big picture?

Desktop virtualization for consumers is the segment where Microsoft showed less its commitment so far: Virtual PC got few improvements over a large number of years and offers only the very essential features expected in desktop virtualization products. Additionally, Microsoft never pushed the product in a massive way despite it’s free of charge and could easily become the most fundamental piece in the toolbox of every MSDN developer in the world.

One reason behind this lack of commitment is the inability to monetize the effort since these kind of solutions don’t provide impressive revenues (despite they evangelize about the benefits of virtualization more than the most expensive marketing campaign ever).

With Kidaro acquisition Microsoft finds a new, potentially huge revenue stream offering desktop virtualization for consumers inside enterprise environments.

The startup technology wraps any virtual machine in a security layer which enforces corporate policies, making the solution appealing for all those companies that don’t want or cannot embrace the VDI approach for different reasons.

Thus serious enhancements to Virtual PC are now justified because Kidaro can push the engine where the money really is.

Additionally, the combination of Kidaro Managed Workspaces and Application Virtualization, both offering streaming capabilities, has endless potentials and brings the Microsoft long-term vision mentioned above on desktops.

In other words with this acquisition Microsoft gets a critical piece to truly deliver a 360 degrees virtualization offering, addressing many different needs in many different scenarios.

Now it’s time to integrate all these technologies in an organic suite, and this is where the biggest challenge is.