virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the Qlusters official announcement:

Qlusters, Inc., the leading provider of open source data center management and automation software for physical and virtualized environments, today announced openQRM plug-in support for the Xen™, VMWare™, QEMU and Linux VServer projects. Each plug-in takes advantage of openQRM’s advanced virtualization layer and provides a proven method for IT administrators to start applications either on a physical server or virtual environment without having to reconfigure file system images.
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To support each virtualization technology, the openQRM platform comes pre-configured with a generic, logical layer called the “partition engine.” This partition engine provides a virtualized server resource that is used the same way as a physical system with no configuration changes required on the application’s file system-images. Plug-ins for each specific virtualization solution can then be added into the partition-engine making it easy to support the creation, management and administration of any type of server under management…

Quoting from the EqualLogic official announcement:

EqualLogic, the leading provider of enterprise-class iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions, today announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliances Program as part of an ongoing effort to fully integrate EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN solutions with VMware’s suite of virtual infrastructure software-including the new iSCSI-enabled VMware ESX Server, which is part of VMware Infrastructure 3.
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In addition to participation in the VMware Technology Alliances Program, EqualLogic and VMware have signed a cooperative support agreement to ensure that customers experience seamless support for their deployment of the two companies’ combined product sets. The agreement provides VMware and EqualLogic direct access to each other’s support engineering resources to jointly support customers who have deployed VMware virtual environments with a PS Series SAN.

Despite company efforts in reaching a standardization in hypervisors and its presence at the conference, VMware has not even been mentioned at Ottawa Linux Symposium keynote, presented by Jonathan Corbet, co-founder of Linux Weekly News.

Colbert talked touched several topics including virtualization, referring to Xen and User Mode Linux (UML) as the big players in his slides, and mentioning Linux-VServer, OpenVZ and BSD Jail as other efforts.
VMware fallen in the various proprietary offerings entry.

It’s a bad result considering last week VMware attack against controverse Microsoft-XenSource agreement.

IBM released a very interesting whitepaper about VMware technologies:

This paper discusses a performance optimization in the VMware ESX Server 2.5.3 and ESX Server 3.0 scheduler that can benefit Intel® processor-based IBM® NUMA-class servers with hyperthreading enabled. This paper describes the test environment and presents the results obtained with and without the performance optimization.

The information presented is based on our experience with setting up and running VMware ESX Server configurations in the IBM System x™ Performance Laboratory.

Read the it at source.

The new vizioncore product called esxMigrator, discovered two weeks ago by virtualization.info, has now reached beta 2 and is expected to be available within 2nd August.

The product promise to simplify and speed up upgrading task when moving from a VMware ESX Server 2.x to the new Infrastructure 3.

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

Lastest version of acclaimed PlateSpin phisical to virtual (P2V) migration tool, PowerConvert, is expected to be released in the second week of August as an official email from the company states.

The new release will permit to do live (no virtual machine shutdown) virtual to virtual (V2V) from a VMware ESX Server 2.x to the new Infrastructure 3 and will support the new VMware Server 1.0

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

The Rational Guide to Scripting Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is a great broadening of topics covered in The Rational Guide to Managing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 from the unique perspective of scripting.

Written by the same author, its biggest win is approaching automation problems following topics arrangement of its twin book.

Chapters 1 and 2 cover basic concepts of server virtualization and product architecture itself, listing available languages for manipulating Virtual Server 2005 COM interfaces among VBScript, VB.NET or C#, VB 6.0.

Chapter 3 and 4 approaches scripting rules respectively with VBScript and .NET (with examples both in VB.NET and C#), detailing COM objects model and suggesting configuration of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 as development environment.

Chapter 5 teaches how to obtain most informations from virtual machines accessing Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface, exploring VirtualMachines and VirtualNetwork classes, and how to monitor performances accessing Windows Performance Monitor counters.

Chapters from 6 to 8 are the heart of the book, detailing automated management of virtual machines (Chapter 6), virtual disks (Chapter 7) and virtual networks (Chapter 8).
Frequent recaps to Virtual Server architecture are disseminated in these chapters, to refresh product knowledge.

Chapter 9 and 10 are dedicated to advanced concept like triggering scripts by specific virtual infrastructure events and automating Virtual Management Remote Console (VMRC) server and client operations.

Source code of book scripts is available only online for registered readers and it’s really worth to download to avoid rewriting all the code and speedup learning.

Conclusion
In a young virtualization world where out-of-the-box datacenter automation is still a big missing but a most wanted capability this book helps you approaching Virtual Server 2005 scripting fundamentals to fill the gap.

While inappropriate for programming novices, this book, unique in its kind, is highly suggested as starting point for automating complex tasks and streamlining virtual infrastructure management. And considering both Virtual Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 are free, it’s a cheap one to become more productive in small time.

GRIDtoday published an interesting interview with Kevin Haar, CEO at Appistry, about the complimentary nature of grid computing and virtualization, and how these two technologies — along with some others — play a key role in creating an application fabric.

Read the whole interview at source.

I wrote a piece about grid computing some months ago: Virtualization is the first step of a long walk called Grid Computing.

While the full agenda still has to be published VMware provided some hints about hot topics of this year VMworld conference.

Apart obvious massive presence of sessions about just released VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3), the company will show a preview of Assured Computing Environment (ACE) 2.0 and will possibly release Workstation 6.0, anticipating what customers will see in subsequent releases.

Customers expect the release of Workstation 6.0 hoping VMware will broaden host OS support finally including the much acclaimed Apple Mac OS X for Intel architectures, where Parallels Desktop is now the only virtualization solution available.

Also around ACE 2.0 there are some expectations, considering the product has not been updated since one year and now VMware is talking about virtual appliance authoring.

At the moment the are no mentions to other two very interesting products expected from the company: a virtual machines provisioning solution, coming from the acquisition of Akimbi, and a much more misterious security tool dubbed Integrity which virtualization.info discovered last month.

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

IBM today announced the company’s mainframe and POWER-based virtualization technologies have achieved one of the computer industry’s most stringent security certifications, illustrating IBM’s virtualization leadership.

In the security certification — known as the Common Criteria’s Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) — IBM achieved one of the highest levels of certification for logical partitioning, IBM’s premier virtualization technology used by its servers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously.

IBM’s mainframe logical partitioning technology received a Level 5 rating, IBM’s POWER-based virtualization received a 4+ rating.

Before IBM only VMware submitted its products to Common Criteria evaluation, obtaining the EAL 2 certification for ESX Server 2.5.0 and Virtual Center 1.2.0.

The value of Common Criteria is concrete, even if a great security expert like Bruce Schneier have a different opinion.
As Richard Bejtlich correctly noted everything depends on Protection Profile, which can be declared in a sharp way to easily obtain the certification.