virtualization.info Editors

After the unexpected launch of Hyper-V beta 1 in December, Microsoft is starting to produce massive amount of documentation to introduce its new hypervisor, with a peek expected in time for the Windows Server 2008 RTM launch in February.

An interesting resource is a free 2-hours online course, unfortunately still updated to the Hyper-V version included with Windows Server 2008 RC0.

The course includes following lessons:

• Introduction to Virtualization and Server Consolidation in Windows Server 2008
• Overview of Virtualization in Windows Server 2008
• Introduction to Server Consolidation on Windows Server 2008
• Virtualization Architecture and Management in Windows Server 2008
• Virtualization Architecture in Windows Server 2008
• Computer Migration with Windows Server Virtualization
• Managing the Virtual Environment
• Continuity and Availability Enhancements with Windows Server 2008
• Building Dynamic IT Environments
• Clustering and Backup in Virtual Environments

Enroll it here.

From the corporate blog Benjamin Rudolph, Director of Corporate Communications at SWsoft, announces that the long awaited Parallels Server finally entered beta 1 stage.

SWsoft provided few informations about this product in the last few months, showing the first, very early Alpha at Apple WWDC 2007 conference last June, and publishing a short tentative features list:

• Enhanced virtual SMP (multi-core virtual machines)
• Binary and web-based management tools (with capability to manage physical and virtual machines at the same time)
• Open APIs
• Support for SWsoft management console (Virtuozzo and Parallels Server can be managed by the same tool)

The product was originally supposed to be a so called type-1 VMM (aka hypervisor), comparable with VMware ESX Server, Xen and upcoming Microsoft Hyper-V, but virtualization.info retrieved different informations at VMworld 2007 conference.

Another expected feature of Parallels Server is a Mac OS X 10.5 Server version, which raised high interest because of Apple recent changs to its licensing policy for virtualization environments.

Unfortunately this first phase is private so the large majority of users will have to wait for a second, public beta, before discovering the real feature-set and supported platforms.

Parallels Server will be a part of the new virtualization strategy unveiled last month by SWsoft, that will soon change name in Parallels.

Quoting from Chennai Online IT:

IT research firm IDC (India) Limited has predicted that the domestic IT/ITeS market revenue will touch Rs. 1,10,000 crore in 2008 while sustaining the growth of 27 per cent recorded in 2007.

This would result into the market growing at 24 per cent in 2008 over 2007. The year 2008 is set to mark the beginning of Growth Phase 2.0 to be characterised by opportunities arising out of the leveraging of the IT infrastructure built up so far.

…

IDC India expects India revenues to grow the fastest during 2006-2011 amongst all BRIC nations even if the focus moves beyond the BRIC countries. India, currently contributes to about one fifth of the total BRIC revenues.

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IDC India estimated the share of virtualized servers to double from the present 22 per cent to 45 per cent by 2008-end. Riding on the success of server virtualization, storage virtualization is also coming of age in India…

Read the whole article at the source.

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

After Parallels and VMware, Moka5 is the last company looking with interest at the Apple market. So the US startup launched an early preview of its upcoming LivePC for Mac OS X, a wrapper for VMware Fusion which features some special capabilities like virtual machine streaming and subscription, as well as a shared library of preinstalled VMs.

Considering the company approach, trying to simplify at maximum the usage of desktop virtualization technologies, Apple market seems the best ground where to get new consensus.

After looking at mass distribution of its engines through USB keys (thanks to a partnership with IronKey), it’s easy to imagine Moka5 may want to do the same with worldwide famous iPods and iPhones.

Download the LivePC for Mac OS preview here.

Quoting from the Fortisphere official announcement:

Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise virtual machine lifecycle management software, today announced that it has appointed Jeff Puffenberger as vice president of business development.

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Most recently, Jeff was the vice president of strategic alliances and business development at Configuresoft, a leader in systems management technology. At Configuresoft, Jeff established formal partnerships with Microsoft, Electronic Data Systems, EMC, Deloitte, and Siemens IT Solutions and Services…

The NetBSD Project released NetBSD 4.0 introducing full support for Xen 3.0 in domU and dom0. Previous version (3.1) of the operating system only supported the open source hypervisor in domU.

Not every architecture is included anyway: AMD64 support is planned no earlier than NetBSD 5.0.

Download it here.

Quoting from the Chelsio Communications official announcement:

Chelsio Communications Inc., a provider of 10-Gigabit Ethernet unified wire solutions, today announced full support of VMware ESX Server 3.5 across its 3rd generation 10GbE T3 adapter product line. This effort as a VMware Community Source program member allows Chelsio to deliver the next level of high-performance Ethernet solutions to VMware Infrastructure users.

As a VMware Community Source program member, Chelsio has expanded its VMware relationship by validating enhancements to VMware ESX Server 3.5 and optimizing Chelsio T3 Adapters for VMware Infrastructure environments. Chelsio is also collaborating with VMware to certify its drivers.

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Chelsio’s adapters are powered by its T3 ASIC technology, designed for virtualization at the silicon level and enabling line rate performance for transmit and receive for VMware ESX 3.5. Chelsio’s cut-through T3 architecture delivers a high volume of transactions per second, in excess of 16 million packets per second…

Quoting from the ScienceLogic official announcement:

ScienceLogic, a leading IT service management provider for the midmarket, today announced the expansion of virtualization management capabilities in its EM7 Meta-Appliances Version 5.1

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Additional virtualization management features in Version 5.1 include:

• Event Correlation and Alarm Suppression for virtual machines running on a VMWare ESX server
• Automated Virtual Machine Discovery and Visual Impact Mapping
• Configuration and Change Management for Virtual Machine Migration
• Virtualization Candidate Report to show which servers are likely candidates for virtualization according to user-defined thresholds of system resource usage
• Virtual Machine Health Graphs to show an at-a-glance view of resource utilization across multiple virtual machines running on an ESX server

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As usual at virtualization.info the last post of the year reviews how virtualization grew, which trends emerged and where the industry seems to go through the numbers achieved in the last 12 months.

First of all the look for virtualization contents continues to increase, with a healthy 50% growth from previous year:

Excluding a couple of new entries (which replaced Switzerland and Japan), top countries showing interest in virtualization didn’t change since 2006:

1. US
2. UK
3. Germany
4. Canada
5. Netherlands
6. Italy
7. France
8. Australia
9. Spain [NEW]
10. Sweden [NEW]

Most visited posts during 2007 reveal new interests among readers:

1. How to create a new virtual machine with VMware Player (and related: Guide to create .vmx files for VMware Player, How to launch ISO and use LiveCDs inside VMware Player, Create VMware VMX configuration files easily, VMX Builder for VMware Player)
2. How to install Sun Solaris 10 inside VMware Workstation 5.5
3. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap
4. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar [NEW]
5. VMware ESX Server 3.1.0 / VirtualCenter 2.1.0 features list – Updated with full details (and related: VMware Infrastructure 3.1 renamed 3.5, hits beta 2 – Updated with full details, VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and ESX Server 3i to be available since December 2007 with new prices and editions) [NEW]
6. Microsoft publishes a license calculator for virtualization scenarios [NEW]
7. How to improve disk I/O performances with VMware Workstation
8. virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab [NEW]
9. Choosing between VMware Server and ESX Server [NEW]
10. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions [NEW]

How many forecasts from famous analyst firms really happened in 2007?

This year several things were expected:

• 9 of 10 enterprises will have virtualization by 2007 (August 2007 prediction by Yankee Group)
  Probably false: VMware, which is the most prominent virtualization vendor at the end of 2007, reports only 20,000 enterprise customers worldwide, not even 100% of Fortune 500.
• Automation to play a strong role in managing virtualization resources by next 18 months (January 2007 prediction by IDC)
  To be false: automation didn’t play any significant role in the 2007 and it’s unlikely the situation will suddenly change in the first half of 2008.
• Virtualization 2.0 (continuity, DR, HA) to emerge in 2007 (December 2006 prediction by IDC)
  False: disaster recovery still is one of the most empty segments in the virtualization market. Several innovative solutions (from VMware, PlateSpin, Vizioncore and others) are in the work but they will not get any traction until next year.
• Brazil to widely adopt virtualization in 2007 (August 2006 prediction by Gartner)
  False: Brazil didn’t appear as a key virtualization adopter on any stat during 2007. Google Trends doesn’t report the country among top 10 searcher for virtualization or other relevant keywords, and the search volume in 2007 didn’t grow much compared with 2005 and 2006.
  virtualization.info confirms such trend reporting the country at 16th position among most active sources of visits.
• VMware to maintain 55% market share over next 12-15 months (July 2006 prediction by Yankee Group)
  True: VMware is reported to maintain a market share of around 70% in 2007.

What to expect for next year instead?

• Virtualization 2.0 will come in 2008 (October 2007 prediction by Gartner)
• A mainstream hypervisor will suffer serious vulnerability before the end of 2008 (September 2007 prediction by Gartner)
• New licensing models around virtualization to be launched by the end of 2008 (October 2006 prediction by Forrester)
• Server virtualization will take mainframe-like workload consolidation through 2008 (December 2003 prediction by Gartner)

The unexpected announcement of Hyper-V beta 1 this December brought another major news which passed almost unobserved: besides having 4 licensed virtual machines for Enterprise Edition and unlimited licensed virtual machines for Datacenter Edition, now Microsoft allows 1 licensed VM for Standard Edition.

This change in the licensing scheme is very welcome and will simplify adoption of new hypervisor in small companies where only one service must be isolated (typically the web server).