virtualization.info Editors

While waiting for the official launch of the newest Sun hypervisor based on Xen, early adopters have the very first chance to see it in action.

The new hypervisor in fact appears in the first 2008 build of Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE), labeled 1/08, (which correspond to the Solaris Express Community Edition Build 79b).

Note that while xVM Server is present since a while inside the Solaris Express Community Edition, the SXDE is tested more scrupulously and comes with official support.

Sun also exposed some initial documentation for xVM Server, including details on how to boot the SXDE build to run in xVM mode, how to configure ZFS to expose storage for the virtual machines, how to remotely control guest OSes through the embedded VNC server (Xvnc).

The SXDE 1/08 build is available here free of charge.

The ones which prefer to wait for the official release may want to read the virtualization.info Q&A with Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, about the Sun virtualization strategy and roadmap for 2008.

Thanks to Phoronix for the news.

From his corporate blog Jose Barreto, System Architect at Microsoft, details all the storage options that will be available with upcoming Hyper-V: DAS (SAS, SATA), Fibre Channel and iSCSI. Unfortunately:

…Hyper-V’s virtual BIOS does not support booting to iSCSI directly, so you will still need to have at least one disk available to the guest as an IDE disk so you can boot to it…

Barreto’s post includes some valuable matrix to compare virtual machines limitations for each scenario and it’s a recommended reading.

All the storage options should be already available in the current beta 1, included in the just released Windows Server 2008 RTM.

Update: Ben Armstrong, Program Manager on Core Virtualization at Microsoft, provides additional details about the Hyper-V iSCSI capabilities and reveals that the goal can be accomplished in a way:

…

Hyper-V virtual machines do not emulate an iSCSI HBA or allow you to pass a physical iSCSI HBA through to the virtual machine. However, as Hyper-V supports booting virtual machines directly off of physical hard disks, you can attach an iSCSI LUN to the parent partition and then boot the virtual machine off of it.

In order to do this you would need to:

• Attach the iSCSI LUN to the parent partition.
• Create a new virtual machine and opt to configure the hard disk later.
• Open the settings for the new virtual machine and select the first IDE controller.
• Select to add a disk drive.
• On the disk drive configuration page select to use a physical hard disk, and select the iSCSI LUN.
• Apply changes and close the virtual machine settings.

Now you can boot the virtual machine directly off the iSCSI LUN by just starting it up…

Quoting from the ZANTAZ official announcement:

Autonomy ZANTAZ, a leader in the archiving, eDiscovery and policy management markets, today announced its unique ability to discover electronically stored information (ESI) in all virtual environments, including those powered by VMWare, further extending its lead in eDiscovery. In order for companies to be compliant with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), eDiscovery software must be able to find and hold all information relevant to litigation, including more complex file types such as virtual images, multimedia attachments, voice, video, IM and blackberry messages.

…

Autonomy ZANTAZ’s Introspect software enables customers to quickly and accurately survey, assess and discover all information in virtual environments, without the manual and complicated process of logging into each virtual server environment to search the contents. Introspect’s Collector module can simultaneously search multiple virtual file servers running multiple operating systems, enabling native file ingestion of content relevant to litigation. This provides substantial savings in time and effort to organizations’ eDiscovery initiatives and increases their ability to be FRCP compliant…

While the fact that forensic suites starts to be virtualization-aware, it’s worth to note that this ZANTAZ announcement is misleading: both VMware and Microsoft (along with all the others virtualization vendors supporting the Microsoft VHD format) allow customers to mount any virtual machine image at host level, without the need to start the virtual machine and logging inside the guest OS.

This allows a manual or automatic inventory of the guest OS exactly like the host one. For free.

Quoting from DesktopLinux.com

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will announce on Feb. 6 that it’s making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the Ubuntu Partner Repository.

…

buntu users must add the Ubuntu Partner Repository to their software channel by Navigating to “System” > “Administration” > “Software Properties.” Then, once they have added the ‘Multiverse’ channel, they can launch the Package Manager and click the “Preferences” button. Next, by clicking on the “Third-Party Software” tab, users can check on the Ubuntu Partner Repository software libraries. That done, the Ubuntu user can then add Parallels Workstation for Linux.

…

Trial versions of the Parallels Workstation for Linux software are available through the Add/Remove function in Ubuntu and keys for permanent use can be purchased directly through the Canonical online store or at the Parallels Web shop. The program costs $49.99.

Read the original article at the source.

This is a great achievement for Parallels: Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distribution (DistroWatch ranked it 1st in 2007) and reaching its userbase through an online download service will greatly improve the chances to widespread Parallels Workstation.

Quoting from the VKernel official announcement:

VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments, announced today the
company has raised $4.6 million in its initial institutional round of funding. The round was co-led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners.

VKernel will use the funds to advance product development, increase sales, and expand market awareness. Additionally, Mitchell Kertzman of Hummer Winblad and Dave Barrett of Polaris will join VKernel’s Board of Directors…

In October 2007 virtualization.info broke the news about a historical vendor entering the virtualization market, Phoenix Technologies, with a brand new hypervisor called HyperCore. The company officially confirmed the news one month later, with a further strategy announcement, dubbed PC 3.0.

Waiting for the official announcement, virtualization.info is able to show an interactive presentation realized by Phoenix itself which overviews the PC 3.0 architecture and HyperCore role:

(click to start and touch the arrow inside the movie)

(Copyright © 2008 Phoenix Technologies Ltd.)

It’s evident that Phoenix aims at consumer market, shaping the hypervisor to create one-purpose computers for vertical markets.

Phoenix Technologies has been included in the (just revamped) virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar

function playFlash(mov, width, height, dest)
{
var type = “application/x-shockwave-flash”;
var plugin = “http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer”;
var obj = “\n” +
“\n” +
“\n” +
“”; dest.innerHTML = obj;
}

Yesterday Microsoft finalized Windows Server 2008 (formerly codename Longhorn) code declaring it Ready to Manufacture (RTM).

For this release the company took an unusual step including a beta version of its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-V (formerly codename Viridian) inside the gold image (x64 version only).

For those customers which don’t want the beta hypervisor inside their operating system Microsoft released a version of Windows 2008 without Hyper-V. Here the complete list of available SKUs:

• x64 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter Editions – Hyper-V included (server role and management console)
• x86 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter Editions – Hyper-V partially included (management console only)

• x64 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter Editions – Hyper-V not included
• x86 Standard/Enterprise/Datacenter Editions – Hyper-V not included
• x86/x64 Web Edition – Hyper-V not included

The Hyper-V build included inside the RTM is the same released in December and included inside Windows 2008 Release Candidate 1.

Customers will be able to update the current version through the Windows Update service (and possibly also through the WSUS product), despite it’s unknown how this will impact the virtual machines availability: since Hyper-V features a microkernel architecture lying below the so called parent and child partitions, it’s likely that customers will have to reboot the entire system at least one time to upgrade the hypervisor.

The final version of Hyper-V is expected 180 days from now, accordingly to the current Microsoft roadmap.

In December 2006 Citrix acquired Ardence, a company providing an operating system streaming technology.

For the past year Ardence operated as an independed subsidiary, while its technology was being integrated into Citrix products, but the merge is now complete.

Last Friday Citrix published Provisioning Server for Desktops 4.5, which joins the already released Provisioning Server for Datacenters 4.5.

This new product offers two different streaming approaches: the Standard-Image Mode and the Private-Image Mode.

In the first case a common disk image is streamed to each corporate desktop (no matter which hardware differences they have) and each user modification is recorded inside a delta saved on desktops (either RAM or HD) or on server. In the second case each desktop get streamed a dedicated disk image.

Provisioning Server for Desktops 4.5 will be probably integrated with upcoming Citrix VDI connection broker called XenDesktop.

Watch a demo of Provisioning Server here.

VMware stock market performance suffered a bad hit last Tuesday when the company announced its Q4 2007 financial results. Despite the remarkable growth VMware was unable to match financial analysts forecasts, which led to investors’ panic.

As result VMW lost almost 30 points on NYSE, moving from $83 to $54.87.

One week after the situation doesn’t seem much better, with an opening price set to $58.05, despite the release of its new VDI connection broker VMware Desktop Manager 2.0:

A common opinion is that this bad performance depends on the renewed threat of Microsoft, working to gain market control through its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-V and several major partnerships (with Citrix, with Novell, with Sun).

The more Microsoft unleashes its marketing war machine, the more VMW investors start to feel the competitive pressure, and any financial result under expectations is perceived as a first signal of the VMware failure.

The fact that Oracle CEO compares the company to Netscape or that Burton Group compares it to Novell (when it lost its battle against Microsoft) doesnt’ help.

It’s possible that VMW performance will not get much better until the final release of Microsoft Hyper-V: at that point the market’s answer to the product will clarify if VMware can maintain its market leader position for a while (until Hyper-V 2.0 at least).

Quoting from the Fortisphere official announcement:

Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise virtual machine lifecycle management software, today announced that it has joined the RSA Secured Partner Program to provide organizations with more control of their virtual infrastructures. Fortisphere Virtual Insight has now been certified to meet the stringent standards for technical interoperability with the RSA SecurID two-factor authentication solution from RSA, The Security Division of EMC.

…

The RSA Secured certification is designed to ensure that our virtual machine lifecycle management solutions meet the strict interoperability requirements of RSA SecurID, an industry-leading two-factor authentication solution that can help to positively identify users before they interact with the mission-critical data and applications residing within virtual machines…