virtualization.info Editors

Linux.com published a very brief review of SWsoft Virtuozzo for Linux 3.0, providing this conclusion:

Any business or organization that’s looking at virtualization should put Virtuozzo at the top of the list. It’s a really powerful solution that’s relatively simple to administer and use.

Virtuozzo is not the same type of solution as VMware Server or ESX. Since Virtuozzo approaches virtualization differently, you don’t have the same operating system flexibility that you’d have with VMware Server — want to run FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows on the same machines? Then Virtuozzo isn’t the offering for your organization. Want to use a virtualization solution that helps partition servers into multiple Linux VPSes, and makes things much easier to manage? Then I’d recommend checking out Virtuozzo when you evaluate solutions.

If you’re an “open source at all costs” type of person, take a look at SWsoft’s OpenVZ instead. OpenVZ has a subset of the features included with Virtuozzo — you can still run multiple guests on a single host, and it offers much of the same functionality in terms of QoS features, but it lacks the GUI tools and utilities that make it really easy to manage Virtuozzo.

Read the whole review at source.

You may also be interested in reading the virtualization.info review of SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows 3.5.1.

Mike Laverick published another very useful guide, this time about command-line environment of VMware Infrastructure 3:

This guide is designed for people who already know ESX 3.x and VC 2.x quite well. Although it starts as a beginners guide initially, it pretty rapidly starts to assume very good knowledge of the system. I would recommend you get to grips with the GUI first, and feel comfortable with Vi-3 before attempting this guide.
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It is not a comprehensive guide to ALL the commands – just the primary ones. I hope to make this guide gradually more comprehensive, and cover all new commands that useful. I’ve deliberately not covered every single esxcfg command – because not all of them are terrifically useful…

There are some big topics that I have yet to add to this guide – this includes setting NTP and Active Directory authentication for the Service Console…

Read it here.

Quoting from Macworld:

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Needham and Company analyst Charles Wolf recently predicted that Apple’s market share could triple in the home, yet he says that the same thing is not true of the corporate space.
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“I am so pleased to see [Apple promoting Parallels],” said Wolf. “I had a talk with Phil Schiller at the opening of the 5th Avenue Apple Store, and I asked him the question, ‘will Apple include a virtualization solution in [the next version of Mac OS X] Leopard.’ He said ‘absolutely not, the R&D would be prohibitive and we’re not going to do it. Our solution is dual boot.’…

Read the whole article at source.

It really seems Apple’s fans will be severely disappointed since Phillip W. Schiller is the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple, and his words, if true, should be considered an official statement.

The Rational Guide to Managing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is an ideal book for who has to start fast.
It permits the reader to explore the large majority of product’s features but it’s not overwhelming.

Chapters 1 and 2 cover basic concepts of server virtualization and product itself, listing benefits of the technology and scenarios where it’s useful.
These chapters also mention competiting products like VMware solutions and Xen, but also alternative approaches like application virtualization.
The biggest bonus of Chapter 2 is a comparison between Virtual PC and Virtual Server, something newcomers always ask, and a clarification on virtual machines compatibility between the 2 products.

Chapter 3 briefly covers planification phase, detailing minimal requirements for host OS and suggesting how to size it depending on virtual machines you plan to run.
It also mention hot topics like licensing and products support inside virtual machines.

Chapter 4 details product installation and configuration steps, clarifying some process issues reader could encounter with several real-world tips.

Chapter from 5 to 8 are dedicated to virtual machines management, with a particular focus on virtual hardware.
Virtual storage (Chapter 7) and virtual networking (Chapter 8) architectures are extensively covered, with comparison between concurrent options.

Chapter 9 is all about security and help readers to understand and correctly configure several aspect of the product, from access to virtual machines to access to web management interface.
File systems permissions, running services for Virtual Server components, web server permissions are covered in an understandable way.

The last chapter, 10, is dedicated to advanced concepts and includes critical tasks like performance monitoring and resource allocations for virtual machines. Both critical in the fine tuning phase.

Three more chapters are available only online for registered readers and are highly recommended to further improve fine tuning capabilities when using Virtual Server in serious implementations:

• Bonus Chapter A: Optimizing disk performances
• Bonus Chapter B: Optimizing network performances
• Bonus Chapter C: Virtualization best practices

Conclusion
At the moment of writing this one is the only book entirely focused on Virtual Server 2005, covering the R2 version and being assured in quality by Mike Sterling, Product Manager for Windows Virtualization at Microsoft.

If you are looking for a starting point to become operative in no time and without efforts for a small project or personal use this book is a good choice.
And since it provides a wide coverage of topics you’ll always have starting points to futher deepen your knowledge.

If instead you are looking for the definitive guide to virtualization and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, planning a hardcore use in your company, then you should look somewhere else.

It is possible VMware launched Player and now Server for free to counteract the upcoming menace of Xen, the open source hypervisor?

Bernard Golden thinks so, and wrote it in a CIO India article:

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Today, VMWare has completely restructured its product line and its go-to-market strategy. VMWare offers a significant part of its product line available for immediate download at no cost. That’s right: EMC paid Rs 2,700 crore to buy a company that doesn’t charge for its products.

Why the big change in strategy? In one word: Xen. This is an open source virtualization product emanating from Cambridge University, with a commercial arm called Xensource. The entrance of an open source product into the market has caused the effective price of virtualization to head toward zero…

Read the whole article at source.

I would say it’s not the case at all.
VMware is giving away a large part of its technology following a precise evangelization strategy. And the objective is to have a position as solid as possible when Microsoft will invade the segment.
Even now that Xen can count on AMD and Intel virtualization aid, offering Windows virtual machines (the big missing feature of the project since beginning), it doesn’t represent a real threat.

I already covered the VMware ongoing strategy in The long chess game of VMware.

Manuel Bouyer, the current maintainer of Xen on NetBSD announced on the Xen development mailing list:

I’m proud to announce that, with today’s commit NetBSD has finally usable Xen3 domain0 support.
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I added a XEN3_DOM0 kernel config file to i386, which will be build as part of release (the next build should have a netbsd-XEN3_DOM0.gz in pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/… on the ftp server).

Installing a Xen3+NetBSD system is much like a Xen2+NetBSD, you just need to install xentools30 instead of xentools20 from pkgsrc 🙂
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For now, Xen3+NetBSD won’t run (at last it doesn’t on my system) on SMP system, you have to disable SMP on the Xen command line…

A lot of interest exists around a special Virtual PC edition, called Express, which will be embedded in upcoming Microsoft desktop operating system Windows Vista. But worldwide press rarely talks about the product. Why?
Because Microsoft decided to offer it just for Enteprise Customers with Software Assurance.
The product will be also severely limitated, allowing just 1 virtual machines and missing support for Linux guest OSes.

In his post Brandon LeBlanc suggests to offer this edition for all Microsoft customers at a small add-on price but I disagree: comparing Microsoft offering to VMware one Virtual Server 2005 R2 can address competition with upcoming VMware Server, but there’s nothing to compete against the ubiquitous VMware Player.

I would rather consider a better move bundling Virtual PC Express with all Vista editions, as optional installation package, for free.

A new tool for free physical to virtual (P2V) migrations born: EZP2V.

As the Mike Laverick’s well known Ultimate-P2V, also this one is based on BartPE Windows liveCD.

In my opinion while free P2V is highly desirable to accelerate virtualization adoption, these tools are still too complex in initial assembling to gain mass popularity.
Abandoning BartPE (which is a great tool) in favor of Linux LiveCD solutions, would workaround Windows redistributable limitations, permitting to offer a ready-to-go solution.

At today the market still left space to offer a P2V tool which perform offline migrations for free, and requires a commercial license to achieve live migrations (like PlateSpin PowerConvert and Leostream P > V Direct now do).
Why nobody is catching the opportunity?

Quoting from official press release:

The poll of 1,700 managers and executives worldwide revealed that three out of four businesses, regardless of size, already have or plan to deploy server virtualisation over the next 12 months.

Of the 76% of organisations that affirmed they will deploy virtualisation, +nearly two-thirds, 62%, already have a virtualisation solution in place or are in the process of migrating, while another 21% indicated they will install server virtualisation within the next 12 months. Only 4% of respondents, ranging from the smallest SMBs with under 50 users to the largest multinational enterprises with 100,000+ end users, said they had no plans to install a virtualisation solution.
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VMWare is the clear and convincing market leader. 45% are deploying or plan to use VMWare’s ESX, while another 10% will install VMWare’s GSX. According to the survey results, VMWare has a total market share of 55%,
which it should easily maintain over the next 12 to 15 months.

Microsoft’s Virtual Server is second with 29% market share.

All of the other server virtualisation solution providers including the open source XenSource, XenOptimizer built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SuSE are very small niche market solutions which each have only about 1% market share…

The whole press release is interesting and worth to read.

ComputerWeekly reported Citrix announced a limited beta of its Project Tarpon product at its iForum user conference in Edinburgh this week.

At the moment of writing no news on the official site or beta enrollment pages.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.