virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from TechWorld:

VMware’s flagship product ESX Server and the infrastructure around it aren’t quite good enough for the data centre, according to David Turner, vendor marketing and business development manager at IT consultancy IQ-SYS, formerly Interquad.
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The consultancy and networking specialist, whose revenues reached over £35 million in its last financial year, sells only SWsoft’s Virtuozzo, rather than market leader VMware’s product.
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He said that Virtuozzo’s value “is in the server farm and data centre, where hardware virtualisation [such as that provided by VMware’s ESX Server] doesn’t add much value to I/O-intensive applications. People couldn’t put multiple ESX Servers in a high throughput application,” he said. Referring to applications such as Citrix server farms and databases such as Oracle, he said that “we get greater scalability with Virtuozzo.”…

Read the whole article at source.

I know some readers that have much to say on this topic. If you have experience of large implementations with both VMware ESX Server and SWsoft Virtuozzo please write a comment.

The change in Virtual Hard Disk (.VHD) format licensing Microsoft announced last week couldn’t stay unaddressed by market leader VMware.

In the corporate blog Dan Chu, Senior Director Developer and ISV Products and Technology Alliances at VMware, underlined:

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Last week Microsoft announced that it too is moving to make its virtual machine disk format, VHD, more open. Previously VHD had been covered by a much more restrictive license. We are glad that Microsoft is making VHD more freely usable by third parties. The ecosystem has invested broadly in VMDK, but it is good that VHD now has the same accessibility.

One highly related area we are concerned about is that we?ve seen Microsoft beginning to put restrictive terms on the use of published VHDs. Specifically, it seems that Microsoft is starting to restrict use of their VHDs to MS Virtual Server and Virtual PC only.
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If Microsoft constrains software licensing of the content within VHDs so that the VHDs can only be run on Microsoft products, then there won?t be any real openness or interoperability for VHDs. We hope that Microsoft is committed to interoperability and open implementations for VHDs, and that the chokepoint isn?t simply moving from one prohibitive licensing constraint (VHD format licensing) to another (VHD software licensing)…

Read the whole article at source.

Xen reached the minor release 3.0.3 as planned in September, after being delayed from initial release date in July.

New features included are:

• a new easy-to-use CPU scheduler which includes weights, caps, and automatic SMP load-balancing
• support for Xen-oprofile to allow measurement and optimization of code paths
• greatly enhanced support for unmodified (“hvm”) guests including Windows and legacy Linux operating systems
• support for dynamic-allocation and copy-on-write disks
• packet segmentation offload in guests to improve network performance
• enhanced support for IA64 (IPF) systems and initial support for Power

Packages for Red Hat and Novell distros are available here.
A demo liveCD has been released accordingly and The Coding Studio published a screenshot walkthrough of it:

After this release both XenSource and Virtual Iron are expected to launch new betas of their products, introducing support for Windows virtual machines on AMD SVM or Intel VT CPUs.

Another Xen update, 3.0.4, is expected before Christmas.

Microsoft silently released the new 1.1 version of its Virtual Machine Additions, actually in beta on the Connect website.

The new version introduces support for following operating systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
• Red Hat Linux 9.0
• Red Hat Linux 7.3
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
• SuSE Linux 10.0
• SuSE Linux 9.3
• SuSE Linux 9.2

Enroll the beta here.

Thanks to Virtualserver.tv for the news.

Virtual Iron arranged a new 30 minutes webcast for November 1st to evangelize on its new platform.

Covered topics:

• Physical environment setup
• Virtual Iron installation
• Partitioning and management of a single virtualized node to achieve the benefits of consolidation
• Tips, tricks and cool features
• Introduction to the Virtual Iron Forums

Register for it here (limited seats).

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera Inc., a global leader in datacenter virtualization, today announced the appointment of Peter J. Manca to chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering. Mr. Manca formerly served as Egenera’s senior vice president of engineering, having spent the past five years guiding all aspects of product development, product management and program management. He has more than 20 years’ experience in enterprise computing.

Mr. Manca’s expertise spans a wide range of critical enterprise datacenter technologies including virtualization, operating systems, large-scale architectures and open standards. In particular, his leadership and experience in virtualization technologies has led to the continued progression of Egenera’s advanced PAN (Processing Area Network) architecture. As CTO, Mr. Manca will lead product planning by working directly with customers to understand their most difficult challenges and guide Egenera’s architecture, hardware, and software engineering teams to translate those requirements into solutions. Vern Brownell, the company’s founder, has assumed the role of chief strategy officer, where he will continue to drive Egenera’s strategic technology direction and counsel customers…

Quoting from the Virtensys official announcement:

VirtenSys Ltd., a leading developer in the emerging and fast growing PCI Express? IO virtualization market, today announced the closing of a US$12 million first round of financing from a syndicate including Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), Celtic House Venture Partners (CHVP) and GIMV. SEP led the deal with SEP, CHVP and GIMV co-investing equally. The investment enables the Company to add to its team, complete its product development and generate initial revenues.
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VirtenSys, a fabless semiconductor company, provides critical IO virtualization solutions to the data centers, storage and networking infrastructure markets.
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VirtenSys was founded in December 2005, and has assembled an exceptional team of experts in semiconductor and system development across a wide range of protocols and technologies with background at ICL, Fujitsu, Power X and Xyratex. The majority of the team was most recently with the Integrated System Division of Xyratex…

Forrester, XenSource and Cassatt arranged a new webcast for November 13th:

Your enterprise is making the move toward a more dynamic and organic IT infrastructure. How will this affect your data center architecture? What benefits can companies see in both business agility and economics as they implement virtualization and data center automation?
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What you will learn:

• What are the trends impacting today?s data center?
• How can you use virtualization to impact your IT systems and your bottom line?
• Which steps toward automating data center management can you take today?

Register for it here.

The new virtualization startup moka5 arranged its first webcast for 26 October:

Here is your chance to learn about LivePC creation for both the Windows and Linux environment including packaging, subscribing and updating LivePCs. They will show you how the technology works and you can publish your LivePC on the moka5 portal for the world to see. You can also publish a private LivePC for only you or select people if you choose. So you can create a LivePC for an organization and share only within the organization.

The show will be presented by LivePC creators: John Whaley, principal engineer and founder, and Gerald Cheong, lead engineer.

Register for it here.

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

Operating system virtualization software Virtuozzo from SWsoft is growing fastest among all vendors — 98 percent — in the hot overall market for virtualization technology, according to industry analyst firm IDC. The worldwide industry sales of virtualization software experienced a 67 percent growth rate from 2004 to 2005 ?- with revenues topping $560 million.
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According to IDC, the virtualization market is expected to grow to $15 billion worldwide by 2009.
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The IDC report also showed virtualization implementations on Linux experienced the fastest growth from 2004 to 2005 continuing the trend from the previous year. That trend is expected to continue through 2009…

Check the original IDC report: Worldwide Virtual Machine Software 2005 Vendor Shares, September 2006.