Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors Quoting from ITP Technology:
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“I would classify it as an emerging technology in the region,” agrees Ryan D’Souza, product manager, industry standard servers, HP Middle East. “However, in most of Western Europe and the US, it is being adopted to a much greater extent. In terms of adoption, customers in the region are not yet comfortable with virtualisation. A lot of concentration in the market is still resting in the maturity as far as going for virtualisation technology is concerned,” D’Souze said.
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“The industry, as a whole, has a lot of technologies out there, which offers virtualisation solutions, but they were very expensive in terms of acquisition. It’s also partly because there were not a lot of very in-depth technical skills to get these products deployed and used in their environment,” Nair says…
Read the whole article at source.
The Computerworld Horizon Awards were established last year to alert readers to especially cutting-edge technologies from research labs and companies that are on the horizon.
This year judges assigned awards to notable virtualization technologies:
and recognized others on Honorable Mentions:
Read the whole list of winners and honorable mentions at source.
After releasing minor updated for Workstation 5.5.1 and Player 1.0.1, VMware is now updating the brand new Server 1.0 moving to 1.0.1 (build 29996).
The new build has the only objective to introduce a very welcomed performance improvement for Microsoft Windows 64bit virtual machines on Intel EM64T architectures.
Download it here.
A thread appeared on VMware VMTN online forums revealed the company is working to ESX Server 3.0.1 and VirtualCenter 2.0.1 minor updates while aiming to introduce a major feature.
The quoted company announcement reports:
The upgrade path in the ESX 3.0.1 release will significantly reduce the upgrade downtime in going from an ESX 2.x to ESX 3.x environment for customers using VirtualCenter. Using VMotion and Relocate, customers will be able to migrate their ESX 2 / VMFS 2 virtual machines to the new ESX 3 / VMFS 3 environment one at a time without any downtime.
This seems to be a move to directly compete with just released esxMigrator, from the VMware Partner vizioncore.
But Scott Herold, Director of Research and Development at vizioncore, partecipating in the discussion seemed very supportative of the coming update and hinted about a big change in the near future:
I can’t say too much, but the future of data streaming will likely change in the VI3.X lifecycle.
Rumors are already rising: is VMware going to buy vizioncore?
Read the whole thread at source.
Update: VMware customer who leaked the news is now reporting the 3.0.1 update will require a fresh installation, preventing the in-place upgrade for ESX 3.0 installations.
Quoting from the CRN:
Virtualisation vendor VMware has created two channel incentive programmes designed to increase end-user adoption of the technology.
The VMware Purchasing Program (VPP) is aimed at supporting end-user investments in virtualisation technologies. The VMware Opportunity Registration (VOR) programme is designed to support channel partners pushing end-user investment in VMware virtual infrastructures.
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VPP provides VMware distributors with banded discounts on VMware software licence purchases and subsequent orders, when end-users place orders through VMware Authorised VIP resellers.
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For successful deals, VMware claimed it will pass a discount of up to six per cent onto the participating distributor. Resellers may then be eligible for discounts from the participating distributor.VMware added that the VOR programme also aims to support its most proactive partners, that show well developed skills around the vendor’s virtual infrastructure…
Read the whole article at source.
Is this the beginning of a channel restyling due to the free virtualization strategy as I suggested in March?
Quoting from the CNet News:
“It’s going to be generally available next week,” Levine said in a speech here at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. The major goal of the software is to make the Xen open-source virtualization software easy to use, an idea reflected in the company’s “10 minutes to Xen” tagline.
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And later, the company plans to sell more software called “extension packs” that will let other operating systems do more with Xen, Levine said. “We will build extension packs to extend Xen in Red Hat, Novell and Solaris,” he said.XenSource Chief Technology Officer Simon Crosby said two ideas for extension packs include storage virtualization to help virtual machines connect to storage systems, and high availability to help computer fire up a replacement virtual machine if another crashes…
Read the whole article at source.
Quoting from the eWeek:
Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens has escalated to new heights the debate over whether the open-source Xen virtualization technology is ready for prime time, saying Novell was being irresponsible and risked damaging enterprises’ first experiences with Xen.
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“What makes us most nervous is putting a bad taste in someone’s mouth around the Xen technology, which we think is business-transforming. We should not screw this thing up and put a cloud around Xen,”
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For his part, Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe told eWEEK in an interview at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco that the company had done an enormous amount of testing and firmly believed the Xen technology was ready.“Could it be that Red Hat is embarrassed about the fact that they are six months late? This is the most transparent ploy and contradicts their own press release in March where they said Xen was ready. It’s totally a joke,” he said…
Read the whole article at source.
Clive Watson, Architectural Product Technical Specialist at Microsoft, published a 6-parts walk thourgh for the just released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 beta 1.
If you want a quick idea of the product without enrolling for the beta it’s a good method:
Clive also disclosee PowerShell will be fully supported within beta 2 of VMM2007.
Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.
From its corporate blog the Microsoft Windows Server Division leaks some details about ongoing Windows Server 2003 SP2 beta program and reveals:
Service Pack 2 improves the performance under high APIC access rate for Windows Server 2003 running as a multiprocessor guest operating system under Windows Virtualization.
Read the whole post at source.
The improvement depends on how Microsoft is now handling interrupts with Service Pack 2: they will be put on hold to collect as much as possible before asking hardware to serve them.
This way hypervisor will not have to do translations for every interrupt.
While Virtual Server 2005 will not receive any benefit from this change, performances improvement will appear when Windows Server 2003 SP2 will be used in the Windows Server Virtualization (WSV) as guest OS, or in any other virtualization platform supporting virtual SMP (including VMware products).
