virtualization.info Editors

IBM Redbooks department published this time a special Redbook about the IBM Virtualization Engine:

This IBM Redbook is a student workbook for IBM Virtualization Engine V2.1 on Linux for IBM System z9. It is based on classes given to IBM students in a classroom. The book guides you in installing, configuring, and using the suite of products available for the IBM System z mainframe. IBM Director 5.10, IBM Director z/VM Center extensions, Enterprise Workload Manager V2.1 (EWLM), Virtualization Engine Console, Resource Dependency Service V2.1, the Director and EWLM bridges to the Virtualization Engine Console are all installed on four separate Linux images (z/VM guests). This book also provides exercises for exploring the IBM Director system management functions, such as monitoring and event action planning.

In this book, you go through a lab on step-by-step provisioning of new Linux images under z/VM using the Director z/VM Center extensions. The EWLM exercises explores Application Response Measurement (ARM) enabling a Web-based application to trace and analyze the performance of a Web transaction from a Web page to a Web server to IBM WebSphere and its return. You have Resource Dependency Service exercises executed to develop and explore cross-system topologies. The book explores Virtualization Engine console interface with the above products, along with IBM Tivoli Directory Server and IBM DB2.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Overview of the products
• Chapter 2 – Virtualization Engine V2.1: Class infrastructure and tools
• Chapter 3 – Installing Virtualization Engine V2.1
• Chapter 4 – Configuring Virtualization Engine V2.1

Download it here.

Virtualization key players have been busy during the whole 2006 summer arguing about value of para-virtualization as well as the best approach to integrate a standard hypervisor interface in the Linux kernel.

On this last point VMware hoped since last year its standardization implementation, Virtual Machine Interface or VMI, could be widely accepted in the community and find its way in the Linux kernel.
But XenSource, providing a large part of the development team behind Xen, the open source para-virtualization platform, and others are pushing for adoption of other interfaces.

Different positions of two main contenders slowed down progress for hypervisor standardization and received complains from big names like Oracle.

At the last USENIX both companies finally agreed to work on a joint project, coordinated by Rusty Russell, Linux kernel hacker working for IBM Linux Technology Center, and called paravirt-ops.

But while paravirt-ops specifications are in the work, VMware today released by surprise a working version of its Player able to run para-virtualized Linux distributions over a VMI compliant engine.

The Technology Preview build is available for free on the VMware site and the company invites Linux community to verify some performance improvement on high CPU workload scenarios, downloading para-virtualized Fedora Core 5 and SUSE OpenLinux 10.1 distributions as well.

At this point any other hypervisor deveveloped with VMI specifications would be already able to run same Linux distributions without further intervention.
So with this move VMware wants to demonstrate that, despite its support to the paravirt-ops effort, a standard hypervisor is already available and benefits are already quantifiable.

Download the new VMware Player for Linux with para-virtualization support and para-virtualized Linux distributions here.

Quoting from the Affentranger Associates official announcement:

Dunes Technologies SA, the market leader in process automation and system management software for virtual environments, announced today that it has raised new equity capital led by Affentranger Associates along with private investors and employees.

The company will use the funds raised to ramp-up its sales activity and expand its operations in the US under the leadership of Dr. Robert Laurie, the newly appointed CEO of Dunes.
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As result of this investment, Nicolas Fulpius from Affentranger Associates will be joining the Board of the company as Chairman. Ernst Messmer will remain actively involved with the company as a technology advisor to the Board.

Former CEO and Co-Funder, Stephane Broquere, stepped down and is now covering the role of Vice President of Business Development.

Quoting from the Opsware official announcement:

Opsware Inc., the leading provider of Data Center Automation software, today announced the company’s strategy for managing complex virtual server environments at the company’s annual user conference, OPSWorld, held this week in San Jose, CA.
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Horowitz’s keynote discussed and demonstrated the value that automation can deliver for environments virtualized with technologies such as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Sun Solaris 10, XenSource and others, both in terms of setting up these environments as well as in the ongoing management of them.
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Opsware has developed a comprehensive solution available in the near future and today unveiled the longer-term roadmap for automating the management of virtualized IT environments.
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Opsware will automate the process of creating virtual servers through a simple point-and-click interface that enables rapid creation of virtual machines for all virtual server platforms, including VMware, Sun Solaris, Microsoft Virtual Server and XenSource. Without this level of automation, IT organizations would have to use separate, disparate point tools, each requiring administrators to have specialized knowledge and expertise.
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Opsware enables IT to manage across all virtualization platforms from a single solution, minimizing platform specific training and saving significant time and resources.
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Opsware’s solution allows enterprises to automate the full lifecycle of virtual servers including provisioning, patching, and compliance, providing the deepest level of visibility and control across the IT environment from a single console…

No informations are given about the availability timeframe of these features.

Ben Armstrong posted a new VBscript to verify real consumption of memory for every Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 virtual machine:

When you create a virtual machine under Virtual Server, you configure the amount of memory that you want that virtual machine to believe that it has (say 512mb of RAM).
However, Virtual Server needs to use more than that amount of memory to actually run the virtual machine. Virtual Server also needs memory for itself to run emulated devices and store various information about the virtual machine in.

Unfortunately, because Virtual Server uses a driver (VMM.SYS) to allocate the memory this information is not easily to determine (i.e. it does not show up in task manager)…

Read the whole article at source.

Altiris arranged a live panel for September 20th, to answer questions about application virtualization and its Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) in particular.

Some of the point being addressed:

• How software virtualization is different from what is being seen in the server realm
• How IT organizations can get value from software virtualization
• Why companies have selected SVS and how SVS has been implemented in these organizations
• Altiris’ future vision for SVS and upcoming features

It’s a good opportunity to receive clarifications about this new virtualization approach.

Register for it here.

VMware continues its introductory campaign for the benchmarking tool they are going to launch at VMware 2006: VMmark.

This time a long essay appeared on the company management blog, The Console, detailing challenges of performance measurements in virtual environments:

Plenty of benchmarks exist to measure the performance of physical systems, but they fail to capture essential aspects of virtual infrastructure performance. We need a common workload and methodology for virtualized systems so that benchmark results can be compared across different platforms.

There are a number of unique challenges in creating sound and meaningful benchmarks for virtualized systems:

• Capture the key performance characteristics of virtual systems
• Ensure that the benchmark is representative of end user environments
• Make the benchmark specification platform neutral
• Define a single, easy to understand metric
• Provide a methodical way to measure scalability so that the same benchmark can be used for small servers as well as larger servers

Let’s take a look at these in turn…

Read the whole post at source.

Documenting a project is always complex and time-consuming.
Documenting a virtualization adoption is even more complex, considering amount of different disciplines, technologies and products you have to handle at the same time.

A well-done documentation about a complex project is precious and for this reason it’s rarely shared with the whole community.
But there is at least an exception.

Martijn Lohmeijer created a blog just for documenting it’s company progress towards VMware Infrastructure 3 adoption and opened it to the public.
He talks about technical issues, hardware and software products they are trying and possibily discarding, design choices they had to take.

It’s an invaluable source of knowledge and is worth a full read.

The community would need more blogs like this one.

Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, actually in beta and expected for Q1 2007, will introduce the highly expected capability of backup running virtual machines without stopping and restarting them.

The update in fact provides a so-called Volume Shadow Service (VSS) Writer, offering a way to achieve the live backup, which can be used by backup products to seamless copy the virtual disk (.vhd) files of virtual machines.

But the capabilitiy will not be available for the native Windows backup product: NTBackup.

A Microsoft employee reported so in the beta support newsgroup.
No technical details were provided to justify this limitation.

This is a real pity, detracting value from the feature and obliging customers to buy a 3rd party backup product which will be certified to perform VMs live backup.

BrandZ is Sun project aimed to run unmodified binaries developed for other operating systems on the Solaris 10 operating system.

Originally called Project Janus and expected at beginning of 2006 , the company delayed the project and enhanced it, allowing integration with the OS partitioning technology Solaris Containers (aka Zones).

After more than 10 months, today BrandZ is finally integrated in the OpenSolaris (the open source edition of Sun Solaris 10) codebase and its available in the new 20060911 build.

The first available Branded Zone is the lx brand, which allows to run applications made for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS without further intervention.

Sun could officially release BrandZ in the upcoming Solaris 10 Update 3, where the technology will be called Solaris Containers for Linux Applications.