virtualization.info Editors

SearchServerVirtualization published a nice article providing some suggestions for choosing between Linux and Windows as host OS for VMware Server.

It’s just a big short and the analysis could be much more complex, involving aspects as easiness in virtual machines files backup strategy or in performances optimization strategies, but it’s a good beginning.

Read it at source.

Meanwhile many (including me) are waiting VMware will support Sun Solaris 10 as host OS as well. At that point a deep comparison will be even more interesting.

Gartner released a new report, Predicts 2007: Brace Yourself for the Next Wave of Server Technology, detailing how OS partitioning technologies like SWsoft Virtuozzo and Sun Solaris Containers will become mainstream within 2010.

Some press sites misread the news originally appeared on SWsoft site, thinking this prediction refers to all virtualization technologies. Instead Gartner analysts are stating OS partitioning will reach a comparable popularity of actual server virtualization products.

Read the whole report here (registration required).

It’s worth to remember that also Microsoft considers this approach valuable and announced at WinHEC 2006 is doing some long-term investments in this area.

After recent IBM, Opsware, Computer Associates and Symantec moves also Novell enters the virtualization multi-platforms management segment:

Four new solutions from the Novell ZENworks systems and resource management family provide a complete set of integrated ITIL**-based services that automate management across diverse server and client platforms for both physical and virtual environments. These systems management solutions from Novell now manage and schedule heterogeneous virtual machine deployments, including Xen virtualization on Linux, and automate the load balancing of these machines.
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Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management gives organizations the ability to confidently employ virtualization in their data centers, whether running on Linux, UNIX or Windows machines. From VMware to Microsoft to Xen virtualization environments, this policy-based solution automates the process of deploying and managing virtual data center assets, as well as dynamically provisioning workloads and ensuring business continuity. This solution also manages virtualized environments in Novell Open Enterprise Server…

A more detailed list of features includes:

• Supports VMware, Xen and Microsoft
• Discovers servers for virtual machine commissioning
• Discovers off-line and online virtual machines
• Provides deployment, re-deployment and rollback of virtual machines
• Manages physical, virtual and storage compute nodes
• Provides the assurances of redundancy, high availability and disaster recovery
• Features constraint-based job assignment and rules execution
• Deploys and moves workloads dynamically to more fully utilize available resources

The product will be available on early December with an undisclosed price.

Quite every major IT firm is announcing or deliverying management tools for multiple virtualization platoforms. In most cases this means just extending official support to VMware, Microsoft and Xen-based hypervisors. Other times it means providing new agents. In more rare cases this means launching brand new products, with innovative features focused on datacenter automation.
In any case such big interest from IT industry and not just customers means server virtualization is definitively accepted as a mainstream technology.

Symantec is the last new entry in this hot segment with an updated version of its Veritas Application Director. Quoting from the official announcement:

Symantec Corp. today announced major new capabilities within its Veritas Server Foundation product family to transform the emerging field of Data Center Automation (DCA).
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Application Director enables customers to define an application?s run-time requirements, such as its CPU and memory needs, network and storage connectivity, dependencies across internal application components and tiers, and its business priority. Users can then create and enforce policies based on those requirements to control when and where applications run across heterogeneous physical and virtual environments enabling them to maximize server utilization, increase application availability and flexibly respond to changes in application workloads.
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Application Director also provides a more granular level of visibility and control for virtualized environments by monitoring the applications within the virtual server, the virtual server itself, and the underlying hardware, as well as enabling the user to start, stop, and migrate the applications and the virtual servers across hosts.

Application Director currently supports Solaris Zones from Sun, VMware ESX server from EMC, and AIX Micro-partitions from IBM. Symantec plans to aggressively extend this coverage to support all major virtual machine platforms across all major operating systems…

It’s very interesting the choice of Symantec to start with support for Solaris and VMware but not for Xen and Microsoft.

Quoting from the United Devices official announcement:

United Devices (UD) officially enters the mainstream virtualization market today by announcing general availability of solutions focused on virtualizing mission-critical business applications for enterprise data centers and outsourced IT service providers.

UD’s data center virtualization solution, Data Center One, enables automatic provisioning of business applications across a shared pool of physical and virtual IT assets within an enterprise data center.
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Data Center One applies UD’s award-winning grid technology to automatically provision applications on bare metal, manage virtual machines and third-party provisioning tools, and to deploy and manage large-scale enterprise software implementations such as SAP, Siebel or Oracle…

While the product has been declared available right now, at the moment of writing there is no trace in UD website, so no further details about the technological approach are available.

PlateSpin and Cassatt arranged a new webcast for December 5th about joint use of PowerConvert and XVM to push their new partnership:

What you will learn:

• How to intelligently plan for your server consolidation efforts
• How to quickly and cost effectively be able to move physical resources to become virtual ones instead
• What you can do today to move toward a more dynamic data center that can automatically deliver the application service levels you require

Register for it here.

The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.

Start-up Invirtus, already known for its effective virtual machines compressor VM Optimizer, now expands its business entering the P2V market with Enterprise VM Converter.

The product just launched in beta offers interesting features:

• Manual single conversions
• Automated multiple conversions
• Migrations scheduling
• Live Migration
• Support for VMware (Workstation, Server, ACE, GSX Server, ESX Server) and Microsoft (Virtual PC 2004/2007, Virtual Server 2005 R2)

Download Enteprise VM Converter beta here. The final release is expected to be available during Q1 2007.

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

The P2V market is getting crowded. We’ll see how newcomers like Invirtus and Acronis will front competition against segment leader PlateSpin and market leader VMware, which is coming with a free product.

Mark Clalron wrote a handy tool for Mac OS users working with Parallels Desktop: VM2Go.

It aims to simplify management of virtual machines files, providing following features:

• list all of the virtual machines on your Mac
• show the actual disk space used per machine
• transfer virtual machine and the associated virtual hard disks to an iPod or other removable media
• adjust the hard drive references during a transfer so that the VM will load and run regardless of location
• delete a virtual machine and its referenced virtual hard drives
• backup to DVD-R or CD-R your virtual machine and the related virtual hard disks
• restore from DVD to a folder of your choosing

Download it here.

At the end happened: Jess Coburn tried to benchmark SWsoft Virtuozzo 3.5.1, VMware Server 1.01 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (all for Windows platform) in a web hosting scenario.

Unfortunately Jess wasn’t aware of strict policy VMware applies to customers publishing benchmarks about its products, so removed actual numbers from his report.
But limitation in providing results doesn’t change final response: not much surprisingly Virtuozzo is the fastest.

Before going on and reading please note virtualization platforms benchmarking is a complex task, with multiple issues which VMware and SPEC are currently trying to address. Jess’ comparison has been made without a standard or widely recognized benchmarking approach.
It also compares an OS partitioning platform (SWsoft Virtuozzo) with two server virtualization platforms (VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server), which is pretty risky.
Last but not least used hardware is different for each plaftorm, which totally undermines comparison accuracy.

It may worth to read but evaluate results very carefully.

Quoting from the Hitachi official announcement:

Hitachi America, Ltd., a subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced BladeSymphony with Virtage, the first blade server to provide users with enterprise-class data center functionality. The new product, the latest member of Hitachi BladeSymphony series, includes Virtage, a breakthrough embedded virtualization feature.
The feature, which builds virtualization right into a blade server?s hardware for the first time, provides customers an alternative to third-party software solutions and thus can enable them to decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance.
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BladeSymphony with Virtage is a 10U chassis, supporting hot-swappable blades capable of running both Windows and Linux. Built on standards-based multi-core Intel processors with Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel VT), the product allows users to combine, scale, and virtualize BladeSymphony blades based on Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 9000 Series processors…

BladeSymphony with Virtage will be generally available in January 2007 and will have a starting cost of $25,000.

Check the announcement webcast here (registration required).

At the moment there are no documents describing how Virtuage works or compares with VMware, Microsoft or Xen hypervisors, so wait before considering this system a valid alternative to existing solutions.