virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that Saba Centra 7.6 will be fully integrated with the Surgient Virtual Training Lab Management System (VTMS), enabling Saba Centra training administrators to schedule, create, launch and tear-down virtual labs for hands-on application training and exercises. The combined solution is designed to reduce training costs by minimizing travel to physical training locations and increase operational efficiency by accelerating time-to-delivery of new courses.

Saba Centra is a complete online learning and collaboration solution that provides a highly interactive, real-time learning environment. The integration with Surgient VTMS will empower Saba Centra users with the ability to automate the set-up, deployment, configuration and tear-down of complex software environments used to provide real-world software training labs…

virtualization.info broke the news two weeks ago and now Phoenix Technology finally confirms:

Phoenix Technologies Ltd., the global leader in core systems firmware, today announced Phoenix HyperSpace, an innovative platform that promises to ignite a PC revolution by transforming the mobile personal computing experience.

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The HyperSpace platform provides a unique computing environment that PC designers, security innovators and content providers can use to create instant-on applications that are available before, during, and after Windows boot up and shut down. Operating like self-contained appliances, these purpose-built applications will be embedded into new computers by PC system vendors. Next-generation PC users will benefit from one-click remote system maintenance, repair, lower battery consumption and embedded security providing stronger protection than is currently available, along with a host of possible applications and content such as instant-on multi-media players, IP soft phones, email, instant messaging, Web 2.0 browsing, safe shopping and more. Phoenix has already demonstrated prototype, proof-of-concept applications that show the possibilities of the new HyperSpace platform.

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The HyperSpace platform is enabled by an efficient hypervisor from Phoenix called HyperCore, which is embedded within the core system firmware, or BIOS. HyperCore is a lightweight Zoned Virtual Machine Monitor (ZVMM) that runs specialized core services side-by-side with Windows…

Phoenix didn’t provide any timeframe for the release of HyperCore but got anyway a positive answer from Wall Street with a growth of 7.61%:

Quoting from the Private Equitiy Hub:

Virtual Iron Software Inc., a Lowell, Mass.-based provider of enterprise software for creating and managing virtual infrastructure, has raised $13 million in Series D funding. The Brookside Group was joined by return backers Highland Capital Partners, SAP Ventures, GS Capital Partners, Intel Capital and Matrix Partners. Virtual Iron has raised over $44 million in total VC funding since 2003.

Quoting from the Byte and Switch:

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Now back in the storage fold, Walsh says that a sizeable chunk of his time at Virtual Iron will be spent forging deals with other software vendors. “We’re going to partner with the ecosystem,” he says, highlighting in particular systems management specialists such as IBM, CA, HP, and Symantec.

“How do you leverage things like Tivoli, OpenView, and Symantec for backup? That’s where I would like to go and have these conversations.”

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The exec was less forthcoming on the issue of Virtual Iron’s customer list, confirming only that it amounts to less than 1,000 organizations, but somewhere in “the high hundreds.”…

Read the whole article at the source.

Quoting from The Register:

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This is all a long way of saying that VMware tolerates nonsense in its offices but not in its code. Greene flat out dismissed our proposal that the company fly the freak flag by open sourcing its flagship code.

“There is still a lot of innovation going into our hypervisor,” Greene told us. “As long as there is a lot of innovation going in, (open source) is not the right model.

“What we want to do is fund ourselves to be able to build new stuff. If you’re purely open source, there is no way you can do new stuff.”…

Read the whole article at the source.

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

SWsoft, maker of Parallels award-winning virtualization software, announced today that Route1 Inc., the trusted provider of security and identity management network solutions, has joined its Parallels ISV Initiative, part of the Parallels Partner Program. Leveraging Parallels technology as their Mac solution will help extend the Route1 secure, remote access solution to Mac users for the first time.

Route1 is the maker of the award-winning MobiKEY, a patent-pending, smart-card enabled, cryptographic USB device. Combined with TruOFFICE, Route1’s secure, remote access service, MobiKEY enables users to connect to their desktop data, applications, network resources and web content from any Internet-enabled Windows-based PC.

Through the ISV Initiative, MobiKEY is now available to the Mac community through the use of SWsoft desktop virtualization software, Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac. MobiKEY will also be available for the Linux community via a future release of Parallels Workstation…

Despite EqualLogic doesn’t provide products specifically for virtualization, Dell acquired the company right because of its virtualization focus:

Dell has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire EqualLogic, a leading provider of high-performance iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions uniquely optimized for virtualization. The acquisition will strengthen Dell’s product and channel leadership in simplifying and virtualizing IT for customers globally.

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Under the terms of the agreement, Dell will purchase EqualLogic for approximately $1.4 billion in cash. The acquisition of EqualLogic is expected to close late in the fourth quarter of Dell’s fiscal year 2008 or early in the first quarter of fiscal 2009. The company expects the acquisition to be dilutive to earnings per share, excluding the amortization of intangibles, by $0.02 to $0.05 in aggregate for Fiscal 2009 and Fiscal 2010. The acquisition has been approved by the board of directors of each company and is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions…

Competitors like HP and IBM may move in the same direction with acquisitions which strengthen their position as virtualization hardware providers.

Today virtualization.info officially announces a new project: the virtualization.info Vanguards network.

virtualization.info Vanguards is a community which aims at simplifying connection between all bright minds leading the IT revolution worldwide, no matter which virtualization technology or vendor they work with.

In just one month since the opening, and without any announcement, we already count 90 members, including top architects from most popular OEM vendors, R&D engineers from well-known virtualization players, CTOs from biggest corporations and government entities, and security professionals from prestigious universities and consulting firms.

They come from US, EMEA and APAC and are ready to exchange knowledge about critical topics like operational framework in large scale multi-vendors deployments, new security threats for hypervisors, cutting-edge features in upcoming products and more.

Each member of the virtualization.info Vanguards network can see professional profiles of other members and connect with them at any time for different reasons, like sharing best practices, giving or receiving feedbacks about products and implementations, build project teams, plan business trips, etc.

Besides that virtualization.info is actively working to offer some unique opportunities to the whole community like: capability to impact on upcoming products development, exclusive technology previews, discounts for products and conferences, and more.

Update: The Vanguards network got an overwhelming answer from virtualization.info readers and we closed the first day passing from 90 members to 150 24 hours passing from 90 members to 180 weekend passing from 90 members to 280. Thanks everybody!

Join now or read more

A message appeared in the MacEnterprise mailing list is reporting an unexpected change in the licensing agreement for new Apple Mac OS X Server 10.5 (codename Leopard):

2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions.

A. Mac OS X Server Software. This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Mac OS X Server software (the “Mac OS X Server Software”) on a single Apple-labeled computer. You may also install and use other copies of Mac OS X Server Software on the same Apple-labeled computer, provided that you acquire an individual and valid license from Apple for each of these other copies of Mac OS X Server Software.

While this is not enough to confirm that Apple is finally allowing its Mac OS to act as a guest OS, it’s the biggest hint so far. A final confirmation may come in January 2008, when Parallels is expected to unveil first beta of its new Server at Apple WWDC conference.

Update: Paralles’ Director of Corporate Communication, Benjamin Rudolph, now confirms that this change will lead to Mac OS X Server virtualization and that Parallels is already working with Apple on this.

A new patch on the work could drastically improve performances of Windows guest operating systems for KVM hypervisor, included in Linux kernel since version 2.6.20. This is what Anthony Liguori, IBM software engineer and long time Xen hacker, reports in his personal blog:

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At this past KVM Forum, Ben Serebin , from AMD, shared an interesting observation. Windows guests only access the TPR with instructions that are at least 5 bytes. The significance of 5 bytes is that that happens to be the size of an absolute call on the x86. This means that you can replace any of the TPR access instructions with an absolute call without the need to do fancy dynamic translation. If you’re very clever about hiding routines within the BIOS (it turns out, Windows always has a valid virtual mapping to the BIOS), you can actually rewrite TPR access instruction to instead be calls to functions, that you provide, that access the TPR in a more efficient way.

Avi Kivity posted an implementation of this to KVM recently. The results are quite dramatic. Windows XP installs are at least twice as fast–perhaps even faster. The very latest Intel processors have a hardware feature that ends up with the same result but the nice thing about a purely software approach is that it will work with older processors.

This code hasn’t made it’s way into a KVM release yet as it needs a bit more testing and clean-up. I suspect we won’t see it in a release for a couple more weeks but once it’s there, you can reenable ACPI in your Windows guests and enjoy good performance…

Read the whole post at the source.

Symantec just published results from a survey conducted by Ziff Davis in September 2007 among 800 data center managers of Global 2000.

Numbers about virtualization are interesting:

• 90 percent of respondents are at least discussing server virtualization; 50 percent are implementing virtualization strategies
• 91 percent are at least discussing server consolidation; 58 percent are implementing consolidation strategies
• 75 percent of respondents are considering storage virtualization as a potential solution
• 59 percent of respondents indicate Web applications are the most likely to be moved into a virtual environment, followed by database management applications, selected by 42 percent of respondents

as well as numbers about skill shortage (not directly related to virtualization adoption at today, but soon to happen):

• 86 percent of respondents have difficulty finding qualified applicants
• 68 percent report staffing is challenging because data centers are too complex to manage
• 60 percent believe staff skill sets are too narrow
• 57 percent indicate that employees’ skills do not match their current needs

Read the whole report at the source.