virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the VirtualLogix official announcement:

VirtualLogix, Inc., the Real-Time Virtualization company, formerly known as Jaluna, Inc., today announced the completion of a revised corporate identity and extensive change to its product strategy. These changes will continue to drive the company’s leadership position in the real-time virtualization market and deliver its new vertical market product solutions.
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VirtualLogix, Inc. is the global leader in Real-Time Virtualization technology for connected devices. VirtualLogix VLX enables multiple operating system environments to run concurrently on shared hardware and provides a range of performance, fault tolerance and security options to address specific market requirements…

LinuxDevices has a very good introduction to the company and its technology.

A new beta enrollment appeared on Microsoft site Connect: Virtual PC 2007 Beta Program.

The program itself will start on October 11th and will end March 30th, and nominations will be accepted during the whole period.
This detail, along with appearence on Connect means Microsoft will open the beta program to general public.

While it’s already known VMware will preview the upcoming Workstation 6.0 at VMworld 2006, it’s unclear if the popular product will reach RTM for the event.

But at beginning of this week VMware advertised a serie on new online webcasts scheduled for the whole fourth quarter of this year, and one of them, scheduled for December 7th, is titled VMware Product Demonstration – Workstation Beta.

This should confirm the new Workstation version will not be ready for VMworld in November.

A new section appeared on the XenSource website inviting visitors to signup for an early access to XenEnteprise for Windows.

According to documentation available at XenEnteprise launch, and still published on the site, support for Windows virtual machines is expected for Q4 2006, so this should the related beta program.

Richard Garsthagen, Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, unofficially announced the company is developing a new Perl library to programmatically control VMware Infrastructure 3.

The work, called VMware Infrastructure Perl Toolkit, still in alpha, is being released as open source and it’s already hosted on SourceForge.

Download it here.

Update: VMware will host a webcast about the new Perl Toolkit on October 11th.

Enroll for it here.

Two months after starting an invitation-based beta program for a new product called LivePC, moka5 extends the program to public.

LivePC brings the rising concept of service virtualization (or Software as a Service, aka SaaS), these days so much hyped thanks to VMware Virtual Appliances, at its maximum.

Being delivered in two versions, for Windows and for bare metal installations (like VMware ESX Server does), LivePC enterely depends on VMware Player.
It’s able to import existing virtual machines or to create new ones with a very basic .vmx generator, but final product are always pure VMware virtual machines.

moka5 wrapper doesn’t add anything to the execution of the virtual machine, so we can’t consider LivePC a real virtualization platform, but introduces the concept of virtual machine subscription:

LivePC technology allows a LivePC creator to deliver new PC content to many users instantly and effortlessly. Users simply subscribe to LivePCs they are interested in, just like updating a music play list or changing a TV channel, and the LivePCs are streamed over the network to them.
Every time a user brings up a LivePC, it has the latest features provided by the LivePC creator: new software, new data, security patches or even a new operating system.

LivePCs can be run on any Windows PC using the free moka5 LivePC Engine. moka5’s streaming technology enables users to start running a LivePC long before it has completely downloaded. LivePCs even work when disconnected from the network.

Download the beta here.

Quoting from the Novell official announcement:

Novell today announced the industry’s first enterprise Linux-based virtualization solution built on Xen, optimized for Intel* Virtualization Technology.
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With the integration of Intel Virtualization Technology within Xen, Novell also announced plans to offer enterprise support for virtualized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat* Enterprise Linux 4 running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, allowing Red Hat customers to migrate to Novell service and support while still running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a virtualized environment.
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Novell will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Intel Virtualization Technology, up through and including Level 3 (or core engineering) support. That means Novell will provide technical support for the Xen hypervisor if a customer uncovers an issue running a virtual instance of Red Hat Linux and that issue is not reproducible in a native, or non-virtualized, environment. If the customer runs a virtual SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 or 10 instance, Novell will offer Level 3 support for the host operating system, the Xen hypervisor and the guest operating system. In addition, Intel and Novell will work together to fix all issues which are related to the hypervisor and Intel VT hardware.
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Novell will begin a pilot program in late October with several large enterprise customers. General availability of this solution is expected by the end of the year…

The fun thing is Novell is supporting virtualized Red Hat Linux before Red Hat itself. It’s even funnier considering how much Red Hat criticized Novel for including Xen in SUSE Linux so early.

Qlusters already offers an open source enteprise management product, OpenQRM, able to support physical machines as well as virtual machines hosted on VMware and Xen platforms.

Now Qlusters extend its support introducing a web-based provisioning system able to interact with these platforms:

Qlusters, Inc. the leading provider of open source data-center provisioning and management software for physical and virtual environments, today announced the availability of openQRM Pro. The offering allows users to request hardware and software resources via a Web portal and then automates the approval process, provisioning and monitoring of the resources maintaining detailed reporting along the way and de-provisioning the resources once they are no longer needed by the user.

openQRM Pro also supports complex network topologies including those with virtual LANs, multiple storage islands and virtualization technologies such as VMWare and Xen.
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openQRM Pro is available immediately under Qlusters’ enterprise subscription program which provides 24/7 support for $750 per server, per year…

Qlusters is also working on another feature called Transparent Application Migration (TAM), actually in beta, which allows migration of processes running inside a Linux environment between different machines (no matter if physical or virtual), without interruption of service, resembling VMware VMotion feature available with ESX Server and VirtualCenter.

The TAM beta program, now closed, is expected to last 4-8 weeks before Qlusters launches the product.

Quoting from the Voltaire official announcement:

Voltaire announced a software solution for the management and automation of dynamic Grid computing environments in the datacenter. The software enables true automation of repetitive IT tasks associated with network, server and storage provisioning. Provisioning tasks that used to take days and involve multiple groups within IT can now be reduced to seconds.
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Employing an innovative abstracted object model, an intuitive graphical user interface and an open Web services API, GridVision Enterprise integrates with server and storage virtualization solutions, as well as provisioning and scheduling tools, creating a single, logical datacenter environment consisting of both physical and virtual resources.
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Voltaire is working with partners such as AMD, FalconStor Software, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Novell, Platform Computing, United Devices, VMware and XenSource to integrate GridVision Enterprise with their Grid computing and virtualization solutions…

Microsoft released an hotfix for customers applied in Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 beta program which are using the product on a AMD powered machine with SVM virtualization enhancement enabled.

Download it from the beta program site.

Thanks to Ben Armstrong for the news.