virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from CRN:

The Utility Company, an Ottawa-based IT franchising company, will begin beta-testing a new VMware-based virtualized desktop service in November and plans to release the first version of the service in early 2008.

As part of the franchisor’s ConnectedOffice remote management service, the first iteration of the virtualized desktop environment will place VMware virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) inside the firewall at a client site, according to The Utility Company president Mark Scott. Around mid-2008, the company will release a version of ConnectedOffice that hosts the VDI at The Utility Company’s own service center…

Read the whole article at the source.

Obviously the interesting part of the offering will be the rentable, on-demand VDI part.

The Utility Company is not the first one trying to lease virtual infrastructures, Amazon is one of the pioneers in this area with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) since one year already, but it’s the first company trying to do this for large deployments like ones required for hosted desktop scenarios.

Besides technical difficulties, The Utility Company will have to face tough privacy issues since it’s basically asking its customers to process sensitive corporate informations through a 3rd party, remote infrastructure.

In a very informal way James O’Neil, IT Professional Evangelist at Microsoft, announces that the company is now accepting nominations for Windows Server Virtualization (WSV, aka codename Viridian) Rapid Deployment Program (RDP):

We are getting ready to take nominations for this programme: It’s not an open beta program (it is expected to have only about 40 places) so most people will be turned away. There is a second programme called the Momentum programme which provides a lower level of support.

Our Goals

• Build closer relationship with customers to get deployment feedback
• Understand and document best practices
• Develop Case study evidence and customer references for the product launch

We will provide

• Early Access to Pre-Release Code and information
• Technical Support – providing an escalation contact and access to Premier support
• Access to application compatibility and test teams
• Part payment of consulting costs associated with the project

Customer Requirements

• Commit to deploying Windows Server Virtualization and / or System Center Virtual Machine Manager (we expect to see Executive sponsoring participation, a project manager and other staff allocated to the programme)
• Participate in regular status conference calls and training, and provide Provide ongoing status updates and surveys
• Pay part of consulting costs (Yes. You have to spend money to be on this programme)
• Install pre-release code into a production environment (unlike most beta programmes, we will support RDP participants running pre-release code in production)

If you want to enroll in this program, which is parallel to traditional beta programs, send an email to James.

Thanks to Steven Bink for the news.

Quoting from the ORSYP official announcement:

ORSYP, worldwide provider of enterprise job scheduling solutions and services, today announced the availability of its solutions on the platforms of VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems.

With this certification, ORSYP’s flagship enterprise IT automation solution is confirmed compliant for the VMware virtualization infrastructures. ORSYP is also listed as a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program…

Quoting from the 4Blox official announcement:

4Blox, Inc., dedicated to improving iSCSI SAN performance, today announced that it has teamed with two leading technology vendors, Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and VMware, in its efforts to build a strong network of industry partners to ensure delivery of high-performance storage solutions that meet market requirements.

…

The company has also joined VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. Virtualization is driving a data center infrastructure refresh, but with virtualization comes increased host CPU resource constraints associated with storage protocol processing. 4Blox’s software approach to iSCSI acceleration can be dynamically enabled in one or more Guest OSes offering storage system vendors a more flexible and lower-cost alternative to hardware-based offload processing solutions.

iSCSI-based Storage Area Networks (SANs) experience severe system performance degradation when used on standalone servers with large numbers of users or with bandwidth intensive applications – like backup and video, and on virtualized servers where CPU resources are constrained by multiple Guest OSes. The CPUs deployed in typical storage subsystems are quickly overloaded with iSCSI processing and 10GbE connections can exhaust host CPU processing with even a small number of users…

4Blox produces high performances iSCSI target and initiator called 4Mezzo. The company will probably work with VMware to certify and include 4Mezzo in upcoming versions of ESX Server.

At the end of his speech at LinuxWorld 2007, Andrew Morton, lead developer of Linux kernel, revealed that maintainers efforts will focus, among other things, on OS virtualization technologies.

And this despite Linux already implements a hardware virtualization solution (KVM) and has several 3rd party OS virtualization solutions available (OpenVZ, FreeVPS, Linux-VServer).

Thanks to Kir Kolyshkin for the news.

Contrary to what every news magazine reported (including virtualization.info) the upcoming server virtualization product called Parallels Server will not be a true bare-metal hypervisor (aka type-1 VMM).

virtualization.info met a Parallels engineer at past VMworld 2007 which confirmed that first edition of this product will be able to install on bare metal, but will not use an architecture comparable with one used in VMware ESX Server, Xen-based products or upcoming Microsoft codename Viridian.

virtualization.info received few details but it seems that when installed on bare-metal, Parallels will first deploy a custom Linux distribution with Parallels Server on top of it. So we are talking about a hosted VMM solution, nearer to VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.

Parallels plans to move to a true hypervisor architecture in following versions of the product but didn’t disclose any specific timeframe.

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

IBM today announced that its flagship storage virtualization solution — IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) — has been certified by VMware for use in conjunction with VMware Infrastructure.

…

In independent benchmarks designed and audited by the Storage Performance Council, IBM’s SVC is the highest performing benchmarked storage virtualization solution in the world today — with speeds over 75 percent above its predecessor. Through working with IBM directly or with its strategic business partners, implementing SAN Volume Controller unlocks proprietary holds vendors have had on customers for years, having the capabilities to virtualize across disparate hardware vendors systems…

Microsoft published an interesting 90-minutes virtual lab on its TechNet facility about SoftGrid:

In this lab, you will walk-through performing a Virtual File System (VFS) installation of an application as well as a sequencing of a web-based plug-in. Before working on this lab, you should be familiar with the basic concepts of the SoftGrid environment.

Setting up a lab for SoftGrid may be time consuming and resources demanding, so this online facility is highly recommended for ones that never had a chance to try the product.

Register for it here.

After VMware, also Microsoft detailed a list of limits that Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 cannot exceed in complex configurations.

Despite the informantions are released in an informal way, through a blog post, they are really valueble for any serious project.

Read them here.

While waiting for new hypervisor codename Viridian, Microsoft is pushing more on Virtual Server 2005, and published a set of 10 whitepaper to provide guidance in several integration scenarios:

• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager
  The goal of this cookbook is to provide the steps and guidance necessary for you to successfully install and configure Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager. You may then create and manage virtual machines, and perform P2V migration.
• Backup and Recovery using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 and Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Edition
  The goal of this cookbook is to guide you through installing Acronis server imaging solutions for workgroups and installing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. The cookbook covers creating a virtual machine (to serve as a standby for recovery) and restoring the contents of a server representing your production workload to the waiting virtual machine.
• Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager
  The scenario presented in this cookbook will take you through the steps necessary to install Virtual Server and SCVMM, and then convert a workload to a virtual machine. This cookbook also includes the steps necessary to install DPM and to back up a running virtual machine, as well as information about monitoring and reporting using DPM.
• Quick Migration with Virtual Server Host Clustering Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition & Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1
  This cookbook describes a simple configuration in which you use Virtual Server 2005 R2 to configure one guest operating system, and configure a server cluster that has two servers (nodes). With this configuration, you can migrate workloads easily from one node to the other.
• Mobile User Access of Applications. Terminal Server running on virtual machines using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1
  In this cookbook we will install Terminal Server on a virtual machine and access the terminal server remotely. We will also show how to install Remote Desktop Web Connection and how to configure Windows® Firewall to allow remote clients to access the terminal server.
• Hosted Backup and Recovery Solutions for Service Providers using Data Protection Manager (DPM) and Virtual Server (VS)
  This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience providing data backup and recovery to customers as a hosted solution using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.
• Simple Offsite Backup and Recovery of virtual machines using DPM and VS
  This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for backing up and restoring virtual machines running in an offsite location using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.
• Simple Onsite Backup and Recovery of virtual machines using DPM and VS
  This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for backing up and restoring running virtual machines using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.
• High Availability with VS and WS03R2 Enterprise Server Clustering
  This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for implementing high availability of server workloads using Windows Server 2003 Server Clustering and Virtual Server using Intel-based hardware.
• Application Isolation and Operation in BO Using VS
  This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for isolating and operating applications on separate virtual machines in branch offices using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, in an Intel-based hardware environment for regulatory compliance and improved legacy workload performance.

Thanks to Tony Bailey for the news.