virtualization.info Editors

In a thread about Linux, Itaniun and POWER architectures appeared on Real World Technologies forums, father of Linux Linus Torvalds stated:

…
So why do Linux/POWER at all then?

I suspect (but hey, don’t take this as gospel: I may have some visibility into Linux technical issues, but I have absolutely zero visibility into IBM strategic or any marketing plans) that’s a totally separate market, and that IBM does it for two different reasons:

– it makes sense in the virtualized environment, where you may want one box, but take advantage of the IBM superiority in virtualization (others are clearly working on it, but I don’t think anybody will dispute that IBM is the leader in that area)…

Read the whole thread at source.

Quoting from MetroWest Daily News:

…
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization software company moved its 50-person Massachusetts unit from a 17,000-square-foot Cambridge facility, where “we were overflowing,” into a 50,000-square-foot office earlier this month, said Julia Austin, senior director of research and development and site director for VMware’s Cambridge office.
…
VMware employs about 2,000 people worldwide.

The Cambridge office, where VMware is shifting some product development operations, employs 60 people now and will be adding up to 115 by the end of next year, for a total of up to 175, Austin said…

Read the whole article at source.

vizioncore launched the second release of its highly popular live backup solution for VMware ESX Server, esxRanger Professional, just 1 month after the 1.78 release.

In 2.0 release, supporting the new VMware Infrastructure 3, vizioncore introduces the most wanted differential backup, able to save only parts of the virtual machine which are really changed, improving backup speed and storage use.

It also introduces an Archive Retention Policy system, able to remove old backup images following adminstrator’s directives.

esxRanger Professional 2.0 adopts a licensing model per processor and its price starts at $499.

Download it here

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

With an unexpected move Microsoft changed agreement terms of its virtualization products and allows anybody to freely redistribute them within proprietary applications.

In particular Virtual Server 2005 R2 (both x86 and x64 editions) requires to sign a Redistrbution Rights licensing agreement, while Virtual PC 2004 automatically grants this right in the EULA.

The upcoming Virtual PC 2007 will be redistributable as well.

Microsoft made available on its beta center Connect the second milestone of highly expected Service Pack 1 for Virtual Server 2005 R2.

This new beta reveals, among others, the feature which makes SP1 so desirable: the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) support.

Supporting VSS substantially means Virtual Server is now able to do backup of running virtual machines without stopping them or interrupting the service.

Virtual machines live backup is one of the most wanted capability virtualization professionals ask for and its availability raises further competition with VMware, which at the moment is offering something similar, the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), only on the most expensive edition of ESX Server 3.0 and only when a SAN storage is used.

Other features introduced in this version are:

• support for hardware-assisted virtualization (both AMD SVM and Intel VT)
• capability to publish informations on Active Directory
• capability to mound virtual harddisks (.vhd) offline through the VHDmount utility

Enroll for the beta here.

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

What Acronis, Parallels and SWsoft have in common?

The three companies fund part or the whole business in virtualization market:

• Acronis recently launched a new version of its backup tool, TrueImage, able to act as a physical to virtual (P2V) tool, and is expected, like many other disaster recovery firms, to launch in the near future tools to backup virtual machines from the host OS level
• Parallels offers server virtualization products for end-user audience on all major operating systems, including Apple Mac OS X, and is expected to launch solutions for enterprise and datacenter audience next year, fully competing with VMware and Microsoft
• SWsoft offers OS partitioning products providing a valid alternatives to traditional virtualization, mostly in vertical markets like web hosting, and is expected to launch centralized management solution to control also competing virtualization platforms within this year

But this is not the only thing they have in common: while at the moment all firms are separated entities, are all financed by the S&W Group, an holding founded by Serguei Beloussov.

The russian entrepreneur is the CEO of SWsoft, covering the same role for Acronis until October 2005, while his name doesn’t appear in direct relationship with Parallels.

This tight connection, mostly for the Parallels part, has never been advertised even if Acronis and SWsoft already arranged a partnership in 2004 (note that in the annoucement Mr. Beloussov didn’t figure as the CEO of both companies).

The question is if and when Acronis, Parallels and SWsoft will merge together to launch a multi-form virtualization offering like the one Microsoft is building.

The popular security organization CERT released a new forensic analysis tool for Windows: Live View.

As I said in many occasions virtualization is one of the best tool security professionals could ever have.

In particular forensic analysis is greatly helped by the virtualization capability to copy a whole physical server and deploy the image on a virtual machine, without altering its content. A process we use to call physical to virtual (P2V) migration.

So by chance, Live View is great acquisition tool for forensic analysis professionals and at the same time a great P2V tool for all virtualization professionals.

It’s able to work on any image grabbed with the unix tool dd or directly attached disk (if you decided to remove it from the physical machine) and convert it in a virtual disk, to be used with VMware Server, Workstation or Player.

It automatically creates a virtual machine with disconnected ethernet (which is for security reasons but it’s highly useful fto avoid network conflicts also) and a snapshot, to avoid compromising the original image.

As I said Live View needs an existing disk image. So the problem for some virtualization professionals is how to generate it.

Among many available tools I suggest one which satisfy following requirements:

• works as liveCD (avoiding to install anything on the source machine and possibly working with the large majority of existing hardware)
• is small and fast (to reduce hardware requirements and boot time)
• supports a wide amount of disk technologies (IDE, SATA, SCSI), disk controllers (ISA, PCI) and disk configurations (RAID)
• automatically mounts physical disks on the source machine (to simplify the task and reduce migration time)
• is able to send the generated image by network (acquiring an IP address by DHCP or with manual configuration)
• is able to send the generated image on a directly attached USB disk or on a remote FTP server
• is easy enough to not get lost with complex configuration and command strings

These requirements are all satisfied by the valuable g4u (ghost for unix) project, which is a customized NetBSD liveCD.

Both g4u and Live View are free of charge.

Quoting from ComputerWorld:

…
Moreover, other results of the survey, which involved 265 IT decision-makers at companies with 500 or more employees, show that organizations that are already using server virtualization or that are interested in the technology are doing so mostly to increase efficiency and utilization of their servers (84%) and lower data center costs (72%) — the basic and successful marketing mantra espoused by current market leader VMware Inc.
…
Eighteeen percent of respondents said they were “very familiar” with chip-assisted virtualization technology, such as Intel Corp.’s VT or Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s AMD-V. Meanwhile, a third of respondents claimed to be “very familiar” with either hardware-assisted virtualization, which promises to offer faster performance than VMware’s more software-heavy approach, or open-source virtualization software such as Xen, Open VZ or Virtual Iron…

Read the whole article at source.

It’s notable so much familiarity with hardware-assisted virtualization when VMware just reported they don’t improve performances at all. Au contraire.

Quoting from the Stream Theory official announcement:

Stream Theory, Inc., a leading developer of patented virtualized software delivery and digital rights management solutions, today announced it has been awarded U.S. Patent number 7,096,253 for “Method and Apparatus for Streaming Software.” The patent, which covers core technology related to streaming remotely located software programs and data to a local computer, underpins the Company’s worldwide leadership role in virtualized software delivery…

Stream Theory is the company which filed a lawsuit against Softricity (and AppStream and Exent) immediately after its acquisition by Microsoft, for infringment of its patent number 6,453,334.

This new patent could further enforce its position against Microsoft and other vendors working on streaming technologies.

Benjamin Rudolph, Marketing Manager at Parallels, informs all customers and Apple fans that Parallels Desktop will be soon updated to support Apple Mac Pro machines.

Check the post here.