virtualization.info Editors

On July 2006 VMware released its first free virtualization product aimed to business use: Server.

Born from the former GSX Server 3.2.1, this product offers enterprise-class features, reliability and flexibility, becoming a desirable choice for companies and high-level professionals.

VMware Server features are similar to ones provided by another famous product from VMware, Workstation, which during the years became the symbol of innovation in virtualization market.

Despite similarities in performances and feature set, Workstation is available only as commercial offering, while Server is available free of charge.
This difference leads customers to confusion and uncertainty when choosing the best product fitting their needs.

Adopted naming policy and company marketing message clearly imply Workstation is a product targeting a single user or small teams’ needs while Server is most suitable for companies needs, but at the moment VMware didn’t release any guide detailing products differences.

To bridge this gap virtualization.info compiled a comparison chart for last releases of these products, underlining existing differences in features set and reporting a small subset of notable similarities.

Download it here.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera, Inc., a global leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today announced that it has raised $26 million in a Series E round of funding. Led by Pharos Capital Group and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the round was completed at a significantly increased valuation over Egenera’s previous financing round. Along with new investors Pharos and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Egenera’s core major investors also participated in the round.

The Series E financing will be used to further accelerate the company’s global growth and to fuel technology innovations in virtualization and utility computing. With today’s announcement, Egenera has raised more than $150 million in private funding…

The SWsoft open source project OpenVZ today launched patched kernel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and an updated version of its main management component, vzctl, now able to assign multiple CPUs to virtual partions (at the moment available only for RHEL 4 partitions).

Download RHEL 4 patched kernel and vzctl here. .

Quoting from the SteelEye official announcement:

…
SteelEye Technology today reached another milestone in Linux application and data protection as it announced two new products.

The first is LifeKeeper™ for Linux v6, an update to its award-winning high availability clustering solution.
…
In addition to protecting VMware ESX Server 2.5, now LifeKeeper for Linux v6 adds management for applications and data residing in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell and VMware Infrastructure 3 systems…

After changing in its benchmarking policy, and while waiting the launch of VMmark, a complete benchmarking system for virtualization platforms, after years VMware starts to disclose some performance measurements on its products:

…
For this set of experiments, we compared a baseline running multiple WebSphere Application Servers on a single server to running each application server on a VMware virtual machine (VM) in a single server. This allowed for the simplest comparison configurations. Each server was separately administered, and each application executed independently, with no load balancing performed across the applications. A shared, non-virtualized, database was used by all applications.

For the baseline measurements in this paper, we chose to run multiple applications using separate application server instances. Running multiple application servers works well when a single server does not use the maximum performance of the server, that is, it cannot maximally utilize the CPU, memory, and other resources.

Another approach is to use virtualization to run multiple guests machines, each with a single instance of the application server. This approach was used for the VMware measurements in this paper. This approach provides greater isolation between the applications. For performance comparison purposes, these experiments ran WebSphere Application Server instances in each guest machine, however, virtualization also provides an opportunity to consolidate different types of applications…

Read the whole whitepaper at source.

Thanks to Run-Virtual for the news.

SearchServerVirtualization published an interview with VMware Vice President of Technology Development, Steve Herrod, which offered some hint for upgrading an ESX Server 2.x to the new VMware Infrastructure 3. Plus he provided some hints about future involvment of VMware in grid computing.

Read the whole interview at source.

At the same time of Workstation 5.5.2 VMware also released Player 1.0.2 (build 29634), with identical improvements.

Download it here.

VMware released a minor update for Workstation, now reaching version 5.5.2 (build 29772), bringing in a broader support for host and guest OSes.

Host operating systems:

• Windows Server 2003 R2, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Mandriva Linux 2006, 32-bit, 64-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 32-bit, 64-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3, 32-bit, 64-bit
• SUSE Linux 10.1, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 update 7, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Update 8, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 3, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 4, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
• Ubuntu Linux 6.06, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Ubuntu Linux 5.10, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Ubuntu Linux 5.04, 32-bit, 64-bit

Guest operating systems:

• Windows Server 2003 R2, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Mandriva Linux 2006, 32-bit, 64-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 32-bit, 64-bit
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3, 32-bit, 64-bit
• SUSE Linux 10.1, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 update 7, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Update 8, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 3, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 4, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
• Novell NetWare 6.5 SP5, 32-bit
• FreeBSD 6.1, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
• FreeBSD 6.0, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
• Solaris x86 10, 10 Update 1, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Ubuntu Linux 6.06, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Ubuntu Linux 5.10, 32-bit, 64-bit
• Ubuntu Linux 5.04, 32-bit, 64-bit

Download it here.

A very interesting whitepaper about differences between software-assisted and hardware-assisted virtualization has been published by VMware:

Until recently, the x86 architecture has not permitted classical trap-and-emulate virtualization. Virtual Machine Monitors for x86, such as VMware Workstation and Virtual PC, have instead used binary translation of the guest kernel code. However, both Intel and AMD have now introduced architectural extensions to support classical virtualization.

We compare an existing software VMM with a new VMM designed for the emerging hardware support. Surprisingly, the hardware VMM often suffers lower performance than the pure software VMM.
To determine why, we study architecture-level events such as page table updates, context switches and I/O, and find their costs vastly different among native, software VMM and hardware VMM execution.

We find that the hardware support fails to provide an unambiguous performance advantage for two primary reasons: first, it offers no support for MMU virtualization; second, it fails to co-exist with existing software techniques for MMU virtualization.We look ahead to emerging techniques for addressing this MMU virtualization problem in the context of hardware-assisted virtualization.

Read the whitepaper at source. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Keith Adams, co-author of this paper, for the news.

Quoting from the ZDNet:

…
“If you look at the Xen open source project, we have been the number two contributor during the past 10 months or so to that project. So we’ve kind of contributed most of the enterprise readiness for the Xen platform,” Rex said.
…
“We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualisation hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said ‘Yes, this technology’s ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10’.”…

Read the whole article at source.

But if Novell is so sure Xen is ready for production deployment why is supporting it just when its own operating system is running on virtual machines?