virtualization.info Editors

Technical Architecture Solutions, a VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC), released a very interesting free tool for perform virtual machines hot backup on VMware ESX Server 3.0 platform:

Vi3Backup is a wrapper that we?ve written to put around vcb at the console level to make it easier for people to perform full machine snapshots. It?s trying to do some of the things that VMBK did within Vi3.

It?s been designed to be run at Host level rather than VirtualCenter and by default will export all running machines to a directory of your choice. Optionally it will also compress the file, store multiple copies and allow you to set exclusion lists for VMs that you don?t want backed up.

Whilst it?s ready to go as a cron job for scheduled snapshotting it?s also got an interactive mode so that it can be used to quickly enumerate the running machines on an individual host.

Download it at source.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

We know that you’ve been making the most of virtualization to create innovative environments and applications for improving IT performance, minimizing system downtime, and reducing the cost and complexity of delivering enterprise services. Now it’s our turn to celebrate your creative and innovative efforts.

To honor customers who are taking full advantage of virtualization technology, VMware is proud to announce the Virtual Vanguard Awards Program. This annual awards program will highlight customers who are using VMware software to solve mission-critical enterprise issues and build leading-edge IT infrastructure.

Get the recognition you and your team deserve for solving your company’s business-critical needs with virtualization: send us your story today!

We’re looking for nominations in the following four categories:

• Best Overall Return on Investment (ROI) and Operational Benefits
• Most Comprehensive VMware Infrastructure
• Most Mission-Critical Application in Production
• The Vanguard Award for Innovation

The official awards ceremony will be held on November 7, 2006 at VMworld 2006 in Los Angeles , California.

After a hot summer of statements against Novell rival and critiques from the community for delays, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 finally appeared as public beta.

This 5th generation introduces a new packaging structure, organized in 3 roles for Server Edition and 3 roles for Client Edition.
In both of them has been introduced the much awaited Xen integration with the Virtualization role.

For this integration, available for all architectures (x86, x64 and IA64), Red Hat introduced a new Gnome application called Virtual Machine Manager, able to configure, monitor and remotely view Xen virtual machines.

Read the official announcement to understand how to download RHEL 5 beta 1 and unlock packaging roles.
Download Virtual Machine Manager here.

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

The Inquirer published an article and a slide about the curret AMD roadmap.

The slide reveals AMD plans to launch I/O Virtualization in 2008.

Its competior Intel plans to offer a similar feature in H2 2007 with the chipset Bearlake, implementing the new extension Virtualization for Directed I/O (VT-d).

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

Intel codename LaGrande Technology (LT) is the Intel implementation of the Trusted Computing (TC) concept and is expected for the H2 2007 within the Intel Bearlake chipset (which will used with quad-core Intel Kentsfield CPU, expected Q1 2007).

Joseph Cihula, Linux Software Security Architect at Intel, posted on the Xen-devel mailing list a preliminary patch for the open source hypervisor introducing support for it:

…
The LT functionality this code adds is:

• Measured Launch
  If the processor is detected as being LT-capable and enabled then the code will attempt to perform a measured launch. If the processor is (not capable) or (capable but not enabled) or (capable and enabled but the launch process fails (missing SINIT, corrupted data, etc.)) then it will fall-through to a non-LT boot
• Teardown of measured environment
  When Xen exits the LT environment will be torn down properly
• Reset data protection
  LT HW prevents access to secrets if the system is reset without clearing them from memory (as part of a LT teardown).
  This code will support this by setting the flag indicating that memory should be so protected during the measured launch and clearing the flag just before teardown
• Protection of LT memory ranges
  LT reserves certain regions of RAM for its use and also defines several MMIO regions. These regions are protected from use by any domains (including dom0).
  Note that there a sub-regions of the MMIO space that are left accessible to dom0 (LT public configuration space, TPM localities 0,1)

Read the whole thread and download the patch at source.

If you tried to install last Microsoft Windows Vista build (5600 aka RC1) on VMware Workstation 5.5.2 instead of Server 1.0.1 you sadly discovered the setup process hungs on Windows is loading files.

It’s nothing unexpected since Vista is still not supported on Workstation 5.5.x.

Anyway a VMware user posted a simple solution on VMTN Forums: just edit the virtual machine configuration file (.vmx) to include:

svga.maxWidth = “640”
svga.maxHeight = “480”

Other users already reported the trick works.

Joel Spolsky finds odd Microsoft didn’t verify compatibility with a so popular application like VMware Workstation.

I don’t have enough elements at the moment to further comment on this, but there are two important points I would like to underline:

• it’s univerally clear Microsoft is not considering this Release Candidate as a test-for-shipment product. So everybody should behave accordingly, accepting Vista is still breaking compatibility with major applications at this point.
• if Microsoft is trying to distrurb VMware work (which I sincerely don’t believe) would have planned such joke for RTM build timeframe

Sometimes an error is just an error.

Ben Armstrong published a great tip for checking availability and use of Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) enhancement by Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 beta 2:

Enable hardware virtualization on a virtual machine (under General properties), start the virtual machine, open PerfMon and select to look at the HVM-VP is in HVM mode counter under the Virtual Processors object.

If this is reporting 0 – then Virtual Server is not able to use hardware virtualization on your computer. If this is reporting 1 – then Virtual Server is able to use hardware virtualization on your computer…

Be sure to check the original article for updates and comments.

Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:

PlateSpin today announced the availability of PowerStore, an online initiative which will give SMB/SME and department-level users of large organizations easier access to PlateSpin’s server consolidation and virtualization software products. PowerStore gives data center users the convenience to rent PlateSpin PowerRecon and PowerConvert directly from the PlateSpin website or through participating PlateSpin partner websites via any major credit card.
…
PlateSpin PowerRecon comes in three packages: inventory, monitoring, and planning. The inventory version agentlessly gathers software and hardware inventory from x86 machines running Windows and Linux free of charge. The monitoring option adds workload utilization collection for $1 per server per day (until November 30, 2006), and the planning option automatically creates consolidation plans based on collected data for $2 per server per day.

PlateSpin PowerConvert is also available for rent in the PlateSpin PowerStore for $280 per conversion. When used in conjunction with PowerRecon, users can create complete consolidation plans and automatically load jobs into PowerConvert for the migration phase of their consolidation project…

I consider this one a big opportunity. Not mainly for PowerConvert, but mostly for PowerRecon which is an fundamental tool for candidate recognition in virtualization adoption projects.

Also, having it free of charge for virtual machines discovery and inventory is a huge plus.

Quoting from the HP official announcement:

…
Later this year, HP plans to add support for Windows to HP Integrity Virtual Machines and allow multiple operating system instances to share a single processor. At that time, HP plans to extend support for HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor and Virtualization Manager to Windows and Linux. In addition to current support for HP-UX 11i, this extends the industry’s first integrated software family for planning, managing and automating virtual servers.
…
Integrity servers running the HP Virtual Server Environment and a choice of operating systems enable customers to dynamically optimize IT investments across business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, J2EE application services, transactional database, and high-performance technical workloads…

After Akimbi acquisition in June (which has been worth $59 million), VMware is working hard to integrate Slingshot, now relabelled Virtual Lab Manager, in its product line.

Testers candidates have just received an invitation which details reaveals beta is expected to start on October 5th and final release is planned for end of this year.

Surprisingly versioning will continue Akimbi ones, considering the upcoming release as 2.4 instead of 1.0.

Another surprise is the fact this first rebranded release will not able to manage VMware Server 1.0 and will not be integrated with VirtualCenter 2.0.

A third suprise is support for Microsoft Virtual Server, as virtualization.info discovered in an interview with Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Platform Products at VMware.

If you never approached Akimbi Slingshot you could take a look at Virtual Lab Manager features, watch an old demo and enroll for the beta.

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