virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the AMD official announcement:

AMD today announced that leading x86 operating system (OS) and virtual infrastructure (VI) vendors are embracing support for AMD’s native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, code-named “Barcelona.” Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and VMware are optimizing their operating systems, virtual infrastructures and supporting tools and middleware to take full advantage of the increased efficiencies, performance and decreased power consumption enabled by AMD quad-core technology.

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Microsoft Windows Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Operating System and VMware Infrastructure are expected to offer versions of their industry-leading operating systems and virtual infrastructures that work out-of-the-box with “Barcelona”, the industry’s first native x86 quad-core processors, providing improved performance across a range of applications. “Barcelona’s” enhancements, which will offer increased application performance within the same platform and power envelope as existing dual-core processors, include native quad-core capabilities, Enhanced AMD PowerNow! technology and Rapid Virtualization Indexing (formally “Nested Paging”), which is a new feature of AMD Virtualization technology.

VMware will support new AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing since upcoming ESX Server 3.1, now in private beta.

Massimo Re Ferrè, Architect at IBM, posted a long and interesting comment on how this technology will impact virtualization. Read it here.

Quoting from ZDNet:

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At the San Francisco, Calif. conference this week, Qumranet, a Santa Clara, Calif-based commercial startup that funds KVM, told ZDNet that the company’s first product will be unveiled in late September and will ship in the fourth quarter.

It won’t be a knock off of rival XenSource’s XenEnterprise. Because it leverages the KVM support in the Linux kernel, the new offering can focus on advanced services such as storage virtualization, hinted Qumranet co-founder, president and vice president of R&D, Rami Tamir.

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Tamir offered up some fightin0 words. “Being latecomer is an advantage,” Tamir claimed, then lowered the volume of his voice. “Xen is going away.”

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Following a conference session detailing the merits of Xen and KVM, Qumranet’s Tamir acknowledged that several efforts are underway to enable interoperability. He noted that while one IBM programmer is working on code to add para virtualization features to KVM, and thus make it more competitive with Xen, still others at IBM are developing a CIM-based module that will ensure both engines will be supported and managed according to industry accepted management standards.

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By his estimation, it’s inevitable that Xen and KVM are headed for war but he was skeptical about interoperability promises, Rosenblum told ZDNet.

“There will be a battle of open source virtualization engines,” he said. “I think one of the issue for both [Xen and KVM] is that current hardware support for virtualization doesn’t recurse very well so if you try to run KVM inside Xen virtual machine it doesn’t work and I don’t think it’ll work soon with any kind of acceptable performance. Obviously, on the same box you probably are not deploying both technologies.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from Enterprise IT Planet:

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The founders of Veeam, Timashev and his partner, CTO and co-founder Andrei Baronov, are betting that’s leaving them room to replicate the success they both had with the previous company they founded, Aelita Software. Aelita provided Windows NT and Microsoft infrastructure systems management tools, managing about 5 million Windows NT to Active Directory users before it was sold to Quest Software for $150 million in 2004. As it did with Microsoft, Veeam says it is working with VMware as a partner rather than a competitor.

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It’s planning to also shortly release a product designed for backing up virtual environments. After server consolidation, back up ranks high on organizations’ reasons for going virtual, but, says Timashev, it has to get much better for people to start using virtualization for the purposes of high availability and quick recovery…

Read the whole article at source.

Like other vendors Veeam may have problems marketing such solution, now that VMware leaked is working on its own disaster recovery solution.

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

Driven by growing acceptance of its Parallels virtual machine software and Virtuozzo operating system (OS) virtualization software, SWsoft today announced that its revenues grew by 127 percent for the first half of the year versus the first half of the previous year.

SWsoft, currently the world’s second-largest overall virtualization software company, leading desktop virtualization vendor and the only company to offer both virtual machine and OS virtualization technologies, reported revenues from its virtualization products surged 312 percent, as compared with the first half of last year.

The company’s revenues related to consumers, SMBs and enterprises (excluding hosting providers) grew by a remarkable 487 percent over the same period and now represent 56 percent of the company’s total revenues (based on the past three months)…

Quoting from the Veeam official announcement:

Veeam Software, an innovative provider of software for managing virtual servers, has added Carrie Reber to its executive team as vice president, worldwide marketing.

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Most recently, she was director of product public relations and analyst relations for Quest Software. Reber joined Quest through its 2004 acquisition of Aelita Software. During her tenure at Aelita, the company was ranked in the top 100 of the Inc. 500 list, won numerous awards, and became well known for Windows Server management solutions. Earlier, she gained targeted visibility for companies including NetMap Analytics, Macola Software, Optimum Technology, Legent Corp. and CompuServe. Reber’s experience also includes work for the technology division of a Dallas-based advertising and public relations agency…

Ms. Reber is not the first executive leaving Quest for Veeam: before her George Sidoris, which was appointed as Vice President of Sales.

Even before Andrei Baronow, which co-founded Veeam with Ratmir Timashev.

Last minute before its IPO, VMware extends for the second time its exchange offer, now expiring August 13 at 11am (PST).

Previous extension set expiration time to August 9.

Meanwhile stock initial price has been raised from $23-25 to $27-29.

In its IPO roadshow webcast to investors, VMware President Diane Greene doesn’t only expose company vision (suggesting that VMware may want to port its hypervisor on non-x86 architectures), but also reveals a major upcoming product:

…We have not even deployed a solution for disaster recovery yet. We want the best disaster recovery product of the entire world…

Such solution may appear as a stand alone product, or as an additional module for VMware flagship product. In this second case it would be the killer feature to present with next ESX Server 4.0, which may be out in June 2008, accordingly to VMware software lifecycle.

Note that such move would further extend company competition against its own partners, like Vizioncore, which addresses disaster recovery issues in VMware environments since ever, and PlateSpin which is applying its P2V technology for disaster recovery purposes since some time.

A major detail went almost unnotice in roadshow webcast VMware presented to its investors before IPO.

Describing corporate strategy, VMware President Diane Greene talks about bringing the company to a completely new level while related slide about VMware vision discloses a critical statement:

Virtualization for any OS, any hardware, any form factor.

Any hardware, any form factor seems more than a simple reference to upcoming ESX Server 3.1 hardware appliance VMware is developing with Dell, IBM and other vendors.

Is the company working to port its hypervisor to multiple architectures (including mobile ones) to achieve unprecedented software portability?

TheStreet reports VMware just raised starting price of its stock right before next week IPO. Previous price was expected between $23 and $25. It’s now set between $27 and $29 .

With maximum secrecy VMware is preparing next minor version of its flagship platform: VMware Infrastructure 3.1.

Despite numbering this release will bring on the table remarkable features to further increase the gap between virtualization leader and its competitors.

virtualization.info has discovered the whole feature set:

• AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing (formerly Nested Page Tables or NPT) support
  ESX Server 3.1 will be first virtualization product on the market to introduce support for a nested page tables (NPT) technology, which is recognized as second generation CPUs virtualization extensions.
  VMware will start supporting new AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing, included in new quad-core codenamed Barcellona.
• Solid State Drive (SSD) boot support
  As initially discovered last month, VMware will make available a special version of ESX Server (mentioned with terms like ESX Lite and Embedded ESX) for OEM vendors, to be installed into bootable Solid State storage devices (flash drives, etc.). This option will allow creation of ESX Server hardware appliances for easy jumpstart, granting smaller form-factors and improved reliability.
  Dell, IBM and possibly other vendors will offer this option at announcement time in Q3 2007.
• Storage VMotion (formerly DMotion)
  Unofficially introduced with ESX Server 3.0.1, in its first version DMotion is a special VMotion operation only capable of moving running virtual machines from an ESX Server 2.5.x host to a new ESX Server 3.x., without shared SAN LUN mandatory requirement.
  In ESX Server 3.1 this capability will be extended, allowing hot migration of running virtual machines between ESX 3.1 hosts through the Ethernet cable.
• Patch management system for host and virtual machines (Update Manager 1.0)
  ESX Server 3.1 will finally introduce an automated patch management system called Update Manager. This solution will be able to update both host itself and virtual machines (both Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
  Update Manager will look for available updates from Shavlik Technologies website (a possible acquisition after IPO), and will allow VI administrators to decide which patches to deliver to virtual machines.
  Before applying them, Update Manager will take a snapshot and will even rollback automatically if something goes wrong.

  (this product was originally codenamed VM Integrity and its developement started more than one year ago, when virtualization.info discovered it in June 2006)

• VMware Consolidate Backup (VCB) and VMware Converter 4.0 integration
  VirtualCenter 2.1 will now allow restoring VCB images with an integrated version of VMware Converter, which reaches 4.0 release number.
• Server consolidation advisor
  VirtualCenter 2.1 will expose a server consolidation assistant able to analyze which physical machines should be converted in virtual ones, and where to move existing VMs among available hosts.
  (note that with this feature VMware is further extending competition with PlateSpin, covering both features with PowerRecon and PowerConvert)
• Guest OS disaster recovery capability
  VirtualCenter 2.1 will be able to recognize a failure inside a virtual machine and restart it through VMware HA module.
• Support for VMware Server 2.0
  VirtualCenter 2.1 will be finally able to seamless manage both ESX Server and VMware Server 2.0 hosts.
• Lockdown Mode
  ESX Server 3.1 will expose a new security feature to completely disable local administrative account after a VirtualCenter 2.1 takes remote control.
• Power saving capability (Distributed Power Management)
  VirtualCenter 2.1 will introduce a new resources utilization analysis feature, able to verify when a physical host can be powered off, VMotion-ing its virtual machines on other hosts without impacting performances.
• Support for Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
  VirtualCenter 2.1 will be able to recognize and use CDP to discover physical and virtual network topologies.
  It stays unconfirmed if ESX Server 3.1 will already expose new virtual network architecture, allowing 3rd party virtual switches, as it will be announced by Cisco CEO at VMworld 2007.
• Support for InfiniBand network cards
• Support for 10Gbit Ethernet network cards
• Support for TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) network cards
• Support for network load balancing algorithms
• Support for 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines
• Support for 128GB RAM per host and for 64GB RAM per virtual machine
• Support for SATA storage devices
• Support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
• Support for VCB over iSCSI SANs
• Support for IPv6 in virtual networking
• Support for Para-virtualization guest OSes

Beta program is currently private and available only for selected VMware customers. Enrollment form is available here.

With this release VMware will start addressing many problems early virtualization adopters are facing today. Mainly in Capacity Planning and Scalability areas.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Challenges report has been updated accordingly.

Stay tuned for further updates on this post.