virtualization.info Editors

Ruben Spruijt published a bunch of screencast about different application virtualization technologies. Among them appear 6 demo of upcoming Citrix Streaming Server (codename Tarpon)

Watch them at source.

Brian Madden published an interesting 27-minutes podcast where he interviews Aaron Cockerill, Director of Product Management, Manu Chauhan, Principle Product Manager, and Tim Graf, Product Marketing Manager, of Citrix about upcoming company’s answer to Microsoft SoftGrid application streaming: Streaming Server (codename Tarpoon).

Listen the whole interview at source.

Brian Madden published a very interesting 38-minutes podcast where he interviews Brian Nason, Product Line Executive ofr Emerging Products, and Sumit Dhawan, Director of Product Management for Presentation Server, of Citrix about upcoming company approach to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): Project Trinity.

Among questions addressed during the interview:

• What is trinity specifically?
• How does Citrix’s DDI (dynamic desktop initiative) differ from the more standard term VDI?
• What are the VDI/DDI benefits and how does Trinity deliver these?
• What technologies make trinity happen?
• How will trinity fit it to other solutions from other vendors?
• What is Citrix’s overall application strategy, and how does trinity fit in?
• How Citrix will handle standard problems like printing, monitoring, management, etc.
• What is the trinity architecture? How does it tie in the other backend Citrix architectures?
• How will Citrix connect to an XP Workstation via ICA?

Listen the whole interview at source.

On the official Citrix architects blog an interesting article has been published trying to explain differences between original VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) approach to virtualization and recently announced Citrix Dynamic Desktop Initiative (DDI):

The major difference between DDI and VDI should be clear from the choice of terms and acronyms: while “virtualization” clearly plays a big role in VDI, the more generic term “dynamic” is used for DDI. This highlights that we envisage Trinity to be a generic desktop brokering solution that is not intimately tied to a particular virtualization solution with desktops executing as virtual machines.
More specifically, VDI is of course VMware’s term, hence in a strict sense a VDI solution would require desktops to execute on top of VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure. However, it is straightforward to generalise the concept for other virtualization vendors such as Microsoft or XenSource…

Read the whole article at source.

Patrick Rouse wrote a good article describing elements of the emerging use of virtualization called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), originally launched by VMware:

VDI is VMware’s designation for the hosting and virtualization of a individual Client OS like Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista or Linux on VMware ESX. The intent is to be able to deploy, secure and manage enterprise desktops in the data center.

For those used to managing server based computing environments, consisting of Windows Terminal Servers and Citrix, managing VDI is definitely similar task. The difference is that instead of managing numerous centralized, multi-user server operating systems, one would be managing potentially hundreds, or thousands of centralized, virtualized single user operating systems.

VDI is not one product, but rather a technology consisting of five separate components:..

Read the whole article at source.

Because of a vulnerability in Apache web server, VMware ESX Server (from 2.0.2 to 3.0.1 version) is prone to a cross-site scripting attack:

A bug was found in Apache where an invalid Expect header sent to the server was returned to the user in an unescaped error message. This could allow an attacker to perform a cross-site scripting attack if a victim was tricked into connecting to a site and sending a carefully crafted Expect header.

While a web browser cannot be forced to send an arbitrary Expect header by a third-party attacker, it was recently discovered that certain versions of the Flash plugin can manipulate request headers. If users running such versions can be persuaded to load a web page with a malicious Flash applet, a cross-site scripting attack against the server may be possible.

Read the whole security advisor at source.

At the moment of writing there is no patch available from VMware to address this vulnerability.

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, the leading provider of server infrastructure repurposing software for large enterprise data centers, today announced that it has joined the HP BladeSystem Solution Builder Program. Through its membership, Scalent can more tightly integrate its Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE™) software product with the HP BladeSystem c-Class architecture, extending Scalent’s management of the HP platform to increased out-of-the-box functionality.
…
The Scalent solution encompasses support for Linux, Solaris and Windows, and hypervisors like VMware and Xen, as well as supporting and extending the capabilities of the HP BladeSystem “best-run” solutions…

Even this year virtualization.info has been a big success thanks to you.

In my last post, Virtualization Trends in 2006, I underlined how pageviews jumped from over 200,000 in 2005 to over 1 million.
But growth of virtualization.info has not only been about visits.

The blog now publishes around 2,000 posts, carefully chosen among tents and tents of news, press releases, technical articles, tools announcements, newsgroups and forum messages, etc. appearing every day.
As already said in other occasions virtualization.info slightly changed its role during these years, stopping aggregating every single bit about virtualization (which nobody would have time to read) and starting a selection of really useful informations.

A lot of new features has been implemented too:

• the Bookstore, which collects books released so far about virtualization and simplifies purchase through Amazon
• the Job Board which can help worldwide companies finding their VCPs, or other virtualization professionals
• the Industry Observer which remark notable move from consolidated and new market players
• the Events Calendar which helps remember live webcasts and most important virtualization conferences

And, probably the best improvement so far, a much more polished web layout, without invasive advertising and with a much more useful sidebar (if you don’t see it check your browser cache, your permission to execute javascript code and your ad blocking tools).
This change in particular would never be possible without the help of virtualization.info sponsors (vizioncore, SWsoft and PlateSpin), which deserve special thanks.

I also want to thank Daniele Perilli for endless help on web designing and coding, Pialorsi Sistemi for providing the reliable hosting facility virtualization.info is using since years, and Google for continuously providing amazing tools for web authoring, sponsorships and almost everything someone could ever need.

The last one is for every single person who contributed in any way, including readers for submitting interesting articles, virtualization professionals for offering help and suggestions to improve this site and vendors for arranging great interviews, product demos and events partecipation.

Even more will come. Stay tuned and happy new year!
Alessandro Perilli

As usual the last day of the year I like to stop for a moment and think over numbers virtualization.info is able to generate.

The first, impressive, point is general growth of interest in virtualization: we passed from an already notable 200,000 pageviews per year (compared to just 5,000 in 2004) to over 1 million.

With such numbers looking at how virtualization interest is distributed around the world:

This tiny map surely confirms North America and Western Europe as most active areas, but also spreads lights on new potential markets in:

• Asia (Australia, Japan, India, Singapore, Thailand)
• South America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia)
• Eastern Europe (Russia, Czech Republic, Romania, Turkey, Greece)

In highly interested areas there is a little surprise, with Switzerland entering among Top 10 countries, and Germany which surpassed Canada and Netherlands:

These results are interesting but become amazing when compared with Google Trends ones:

Asian countries and Russia among top searchers (topping US) confirms these are emerging markets.

It’s also notable from this analysis VMware, as market leader, is never among most visited news about virtualization, letting space to AMD, Microsoft and Xen.
But adding the keyword VMware completely changes perspective, confirming the company name more popular than the technology itself:

Continuing this path I cannot avoid underlining how technical terms around same topic are differently popular, which may help understanding how users perceive the technology:

This reading is further confirmed by what is being searched on virtualization.info, where basic technical tips are most requested:

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 and VMX Builder for VMware Player)
2. How to install Sun Solaris 10 inside VMware Workstation 5.5
3. How to improve disk I/O performances with VMware Workstation
4. Debunking Blue Pill myth
5. Virtualization Industry Roadmap
6. How to stress test virtual machines
7. virtualization.info interviews Raghu Raghuram of VMware
8. Microsoft to release Virtual Server 2005 R2 for free
9. What is Virtualization?
10. Guide to Apple MacOS x86 Tiger on VMware

What to expect for 2007? I expect a linear growth, in terms of interest and technology evolution, until Microsoft will release its Windows Server Virtualization (formerly codename Viridian).

At that time VMware will have to defend its leadership with an innovative ESX Server 4.0 and a much bigger effort in SMB segment, XenSource and Virtual Iron will have to gain SMBs trust justifying why Xen is better than free VMware Server and Microsoft hypervisor, Parallels will have to quickly consolidate its position on Apple market providing reliable server products, SWsoft will have to consolidate its position as well clarifying once and forever if OS partitioning really can be more performant, scalable and secure than server virtualization.

All other ISVs in this industry will have to figure out how to survive in a market where Microsoft decided to enter seriously and to offer a big part of tools for free.

Vincent Vlieghe published a brief but useful help for configuring manual multipathing to preferred storage in VMware ESX Server 3:

ESX does not support dynamic multipathing. Therefore, manual multipathing must be configured on each ESX host. This is necessary, because if all datastores use the same path, I/O contention can appear…

Read the whole article at source.