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Network World published an article providing some interesting values on server consolidation trends:

…When companies first apply virtualization, the average ratio is around 15:1. After one year it drops to 8:1 and after three years stabilizes at an average of 3:1. In order to fit 15 to 20 virtual machines on a single server, the average CPU utilization of these virtual machines must be 5% to 8%. These represent servers with permanently low demand on CPU resources or with intermittent demand: testing and development servers, small Web servers with many static pages, rarely used applications, and so forth….

Read the whole article at source.

I would say this values could be misinterpreted.
One thing it’s true: when a company embraces server virtualization starts loading the virtual infrastructure with low resources-demanding services, typically web servers, DNS, DHCP and others. This approach easily leads to achieve 15:1 or 20:1 ratios. After that 2 kind of things can happen:

• the company grows and virtualized services start demanding more host resources. In this case, with the same physical hardware available, less virtual machines can be allowed to run concurrently.
• the company is convinced virtualization is cost-effective and reliable enough and start moving in the virtual infrastructure also more critical services like mail servers, databases, and other hungry-resources services. Also in this case the amount of virtual machines allowed per host has to decrease.

In both cases the initial VMs / host ratio decreases, even reaching bottom values of 3:1. But what is unsaid, and Network World is missing to report, is that companies experiencing such scenarios 99% of times buy more physical servers to redistribute all virtual machines running. So the final server consolidation ratio should be calculated among all available hosts.

Quoting from the Softricity official announcement:

Softricity, the on-demand application virtualization company, today announced that its SoftGrid Platform has been honored as one of the best Virtual PC products in Redmond Magazine’s 2006 “Best of the Best” Readers’ Choice Awards. Chosen by 2,000 enterprise IT professionals, the awards recognize the network and systems management solutions that are used in real-world enterprise environments…

It really seems Softricity continues to live its own live even after Microsoft acquisition.

Quoting from the CommVault official announcement:

Building upon CommVault’s strong support of the .NET platform and existing applications, the integration of CommVault QiNetix 6.1 software with Virtual Server 2005 R2 offers Microsoft users ease of administration while reducing the costs associated with managing and protecting data. Users are able to:

• Consolidate multiple workloads from disparate sources — including data from remote offices — onto a physical server, making more efficient use of hardware resources
• Simplify management of hardware resources
• Automate deployment and configuration of connected virtual machines, administering those virtual machines with CommVault QiNetix management tools
• Use Volume Shadow Copy Services to help protect individual virtual machines as well as Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2

Tom’s Hardware just published a very long 11-pages review of Win4Lin Pro Desktop providing this conclusion:

Whether Win4Lin can completely replace a native Windows installation remains to be seen. For low-intensity exercises like Microsoft Office interaction it does pretty well, but propagation delays owing to operating Windows within Linux may be problematic for professional graphics designers.
…
This does not mean Win4Lin is unsuitable for ordinary usage requirements, however. But considering that gaming functionality differs vastly from the majority of desktop applications, which explains the specialized capability of TransGaming’s Cedega framework, Win4Lin does a fine job of meeting its target objective. Ostensibly, this is to enable Windows applications to operate while Linux is live, and Win4Lin delivers exactly that for many productivity and content creation suites.

Read the whole review at source.

Note that reviewers conclusion, inability to run intensive graphic applications, is a current limit of all kind of virtualization products, included ones from market leader VMware.
So I won’t put the focus on this aspect but on the comparison between any commercial grade product, Win4Lin Pro included, and the high quality, free VMware Player, which substantially changed the way vendors have to present themselves to the market.

This article was moved to the new section virtualization.info TechTalk.

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Steve Herrod, Vice President of Technology Development at VMware, from its blog details how much ESX Server 3.0 is more performant than its predecessor:

…
First, we’ve sped up memory management unit (MMU) operations inside virtual machines. In particular, we’ve decreased latencies of key operations such as page faults and context switches. This benefits almost every workload, and in particular process-heavy ones such as Terminal Services, Databases, and many enterprise applications. Such applications often require large amounts of memory, and virtual machines can now use up to 16 GB of memory by enabling Physical Address Extensions (PAE) within the guest operating system.

In ESX 3.0 we improved PAE performance so that there is negligible overhead when running with PAE enabled. We’ve also added a number of optimizations to improve the performance of applications on Linux guests. In particular, we’ve optimized our handling of the Linux Native Posix Thread Library (NPTL).
…
While the single VM performance improvements focused on CPU and memory, we have also made a number of improvements to I/O performance. We’ve optimized our guest virtual Ethernet adapter (vmxnet), improved VM to VM networking and re-architected our networking layer for ESX 3.0. This helps workloads such as multi-tiered applications and web servers. On the storage side, we’ve introduced VMFS3: a new, more scalable, distributed file system that includes enhanced file locking and improved caching to support large numbers of VMs. For the new storage options (NFS and iSCSI) we worked to ensure that the performance is up to the standard that our customers have come to expect…

It’s worth to read the whole article.

The german blog VMachine.de has published few details about the upcoming major release of vizioncore esxRanger:

• Differential Backups
• Intelligent Differential Backup Rules
• Differential Restores
• Enhanced Database Tracking and Searching
• Enhanced Enterprise Management Features
• Batch Restores with Flexible Option

Read the whole article at source (german language).

IT World Canada is reporting one Canadian research firm predicts server sales will fall by the end of 2007.

I’m not so sure massive virtualization adoption will drive a signficant loss of revenue.

Virtualization adoption focused customers attention to the single point of failure concept, imposing 3 mandatory requirements:

• high quality servers (reundant components) purchase
• redundant servers purchase
• additional hardware components (mostly SANs) purchase

Even a small company embracing virtualization has to invest in this direction, which translates in relatively lower quantities but higher profits.

This trend is probably doomed to invert itself again, when grid computing will become mainstream and a buying high volume of cheap servers will be a viable strategy (the one Google is adopting since beginning).

Quoting from the Altiris official announcement:

Altiris a pioneer of service-oriented management solutions, today announced Altiris® Software Virtualization Solution™ was named Best New Product at Microsoft* TechEd 2006. Altiris SVS™ was judged by editors from Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine.
…
SVS won Best New Product from a field of approximately 30 finalists and dozens more applicants…

Quoting from the Mobile Agent Technologies official announcement:

Mobile Agent Technologies announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has given final approval to their industry changing invention for relocating a running software process from one machine to another, completely intact, without any disruption in execution.

The technology, called Automatic Thread Migration (ATM), provides for a system in which environmental monitoring facilities sense a lack of available computing resources, such as memory, network bandwidth, or CPU cycles, and then autonomously trigger the migration of the software process to a secondary host. At the same time components located on a tertiary machine, either in the same data center, or across the globe, maintain the execution stack trace and state of the program, and facilitate restarting the process exactly at the point at which it left off, prior to it’s relocation to the secondary host.

The migration is seamless and transparent to the application. This fault tolerant technology when fully implemented will eliminate an organization’s need for backup data centers.

Mobile Agent Technologies has also announced the availability of an early access version of AgentOS, an agent based operating system. AgentOS represents the convergence of three current trends in the computing industry. The first being application virtualization, the second grid computing, and the last, service oriented architecture (SOA)…