virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the Win4Lin official announcement:

Win4Lin, the leading purveyor of desktop and enterprise Windows-on-Linux solutions for business, announced today the immediate availability of their new Enterprise and SMB product, Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server (VDS). The product provides the ability to consolidate and serve multiple Windows Desktops from Linux server infrastructure.
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The features of Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server include:

• Integrated Virtual Machine hosting of Windows XP/2000 desktop sessions on Linux servers
• Centralized management and provisioning of users
• “Renewable” windows (recover from any malware corrupted session by re-launching the original master copy of Windows with your individual “Documents and Settings”)
• Display either a single application or an entire Windows desktop
• Automatic local printing from the server to the local attached printer
• Consistent user access to personal desktop environment from home, office and other network connected locations
• Support for multiple remote display choices (Win4Lin client, Sun Ray, NoMachine, LTSP, VNC, X, and others)

…

Download it here.

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

Computer Measurement Group (CMG) 2006 conference, scheduled for 3-8th December at Reno, Nevada, could be the most interesting year’s event for virtualization.

CMG is famous for providing a very focused technology event about performances and quality of services and this year the central day, Wednesday 6th, will be completely dedicated to server virtualization.

In a moment of virtualization history when benchmarks are becoming a compelling need, what will emerge in this event could be a critical factor in technology adoption.

At the moment the agenda is not available but you can already register.

Quoting from the Route1 official announcement:

At the VDI Alliance industry panel discussion taking place today, Route1, Inc. (TSX-V:ROI), a trusted provider of secure, identity-managed computing solutions, will unveil its technology roadmap in bringing virtual computing access capabilities to the enterprise market.
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Route1’s MobiKEY-based VCA strategy, when combined with virtual desktop platforms and Route1’s SAFE (Simplified Access for Emergency) Response solution, will enable organizations to simply and cost-effectively deploy a completely virtualized computing environment…

Note that at time of writing mentioned roadmap is not available anywhere on the company site.

Another book from IBM Redbooks department, this time on grid computing designing issues:

Patterns are great vehicles to capture components with a high degree of commonality among engagements and to express their interrelationships. Although most enterprise grid engagements are typically deployed with solutions that could be categorized as “one-of-a-kind”, there is enough information gathered today to allow us to devise a set of common components among them and to derive enterprise grid patterns. The proposed patterns are based on grid solutions designed for enterprise clients over the past couple of years and are therefore representative of the current use of grid technologies in the enterprise today. They may not address all emerging grid technologies or be representative of research grids.

You can use this redbook as a helping guide for your grid solution design.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction
• Chapter 2 – Execution patterns for grid applications
• Chapter 3 – Enterprise Grid Composite pattern
• Chapter 4 – Patterns for grid access
• Chapter 5 – Patterns for workload virtualization
• Chapter 6 – Patterns for platform virtualization
• Chapter 7 – Patterns for information virtualization
• Chapter 8 – Use cases

Download it here.

Quoting from IT World Canada:

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“Participants in our round table discussions said they were [unsure] about the hardware savings they would achieve in the short run, but really liked the flexibility virtual machines provide,”
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The Forrester survey findings are echoed by a Canadian survey of 500 large and mid-sized firms conducted by research firm IDC Canada Ltd. in Toronto.

Twenty per cent of the companies polled had some form of virtualization already in place, while another 20 per cent intended to deploy the technology within the next 12 months.
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The survey showed 60 per cent of North American companies have adopted virtualization.
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Eighty-four per cent of the companies said they ran between two to six virtual machines (VMs) per server box. The remainder ran 15 or more VMs per box.
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68 per cent chose VMware while only nine per cent sided with Microsoft…

Read the whole article at source.

On the nth question about how to redistribute the Windows operating system inside a virtual machine, something actual Microsoft licensing prevents, Ben Armstrong, Virtual Machine Program Manager, answered that the company is looking how to do the thing.

A good sign meaning Microsoft is sensible to the problem and knows how many issues the Windows Product Activation (WPA) raises in the scenario.

Brian Madden published a 1-hour podcast where him and 4 distinguished guests evaluate recent Microsoft acquisition of Softricity.

During the podcast speakers touched several aspects, with an high focus on Citrix as usual:

• What this means for Citrix in the short term
• How the Softricity technology can help Microsoft sell copies of Office
• That Citrix needs to acquire a WAN optimization provider
• How Microsoft can use Softricity to facilitate Windows grid computing
• What Citrix should do with Project Tarpon
• How Citrix is competing with companies like Cisco and Juniper, and how Citrix could be better positioned then them
• What this means for Microsoft SMS and Altiris
• How desktop application deployment and server-based computing technologies are converging

The most interesting thing is that among guests there is Steig Westerberg, CEO of Stream Theory, which filed a lawsuit against Softricity, immediately after the Microsoft acquisition news.

Listen to it here.

As soon as Windows PowerShell (formerly codename Monad) is approaching final release (at TechEd 2006 Microsoft showed the release candidate build), people start looking for using it in several environments.

One of them is obvliously virtualization where the powerful new shell could automate a lot of tasks (and will eventually do with Windows Server Virtualization and Virtual Machine Manger). The problem is Virtual Server 2005 R2 offers COM interfaces which PowerShell (a .NET application) can’t access.

Luckily Ben Armstrong, helped by the PowerShell team, wrote a precious article on how to handle the whole thing, changing the COM security level.

Could the same be done with upcoming VMware Server, exposing the old GSX Server VmCOM API and a brand new C API?

Update: Ben posted some more details to further simplify the whole thing.

virtualization.info just discovered details about new technologies VMware is working on.

Available informations suggests VMware is preparing a new offering under the umbrella name of VirtualCenter System Image (or Systems Image), which should includes revamped P2V capabilities, and new features for VMs live backup and patching, acting at host OS level (possibly packed in a product called Integrity).

Both names and project details have been leaked from job open positions descriptions VMware published on a recruiment site, as following screenshot demonstrates (URL has been masked):

More news as soon as possible!

WinHEC 2006 has been a decisive conference for Microsoft in its effort to relaunch a solid virtualization strategy.

To recap the whole list of announcements take a look at following posts:

• Microsoft extends virtualization strategy and outlines roadmap
• Microsoft shows Windows Hypervisor
• Windows Server Virtualizatino Q&A with Mike Neil

Now slides of all WinHEC sessions about virtualization have been made available online:

• Device Virtualization Architecture
  This session discusses I/O virtualization techniques, focusing on those that will be used in Windows virtualization. It explains how devices can be shared between multiple partitions and provides the background necessary for understanding the following session.
• How to Use the WMI Interfaces with Windows Virtualization
  This session provides attendees all of the information that they need to take advantage of the Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI) interfaces that allow remote and local management of a server that is running with Windows virtualization enabled. This knowledge will enable attendees to build software management solutions on top of the Windows virtualization architecture.
• HyperCall APIs Explained
  This session provides attendees a robust understanding of Windows hypervisor application programming interfaces (APIs) that are used to configure and communicate with the Windows hypervisor. Makers of third-party operating systems can use this knowledge to build solutions on the Windows virtualization infrastructure.
• Hypervisor, Virtualization Stack, and Device Virtualization Architectures
  The powerful new Windows virtualization infrastructure will be a core capability in Windows Server Longhorn and in subsequent client releases. This session provides an architectural overview of the three pillars of Windows virtualization: the hypervisor, the virtualization stack, and device virtualization. Other Windows virtualization sessions build on the groundwork that will be laid during this session.
• I/O Memory Management Hardware goes Mainstream
  I/O memory management hardware has been an essential component of mainframe and high-end server platforms for decades. Just as other technology components that were once confined to the high end of the computing space have moved into the mainstream PC, I/O memory management hardware is now poised to make its mainstream debut. This presentation introduces the AMD I/O memory management architecture, including details of the software interface, page table formats, and table walking algorithms. The potential usage and benefits of the AMD I/O memory management architecture are also discussed.
• Inside Microsoft’s Network and Storage VSP/VSC
  This session provides independent software vendors (ISVs) and independent hardware vendors (IHVs) an in-depth understanding of the architecture that is used in Microsoft’s network and storage virtual device drivers and familiarity with the built-in capabilities of these drivers.
• Intel Virtualization Technology: Strategy and Evolution
  This session presents the vision and strategy for virtualization in enterprise computing, for both client and server usage models. It then discusses how system virtualization is implemented today and describes the role and value of the first-generation Intel Virtualization Technology (VT). Finally, the session provides a deep discussion of future VT architecture directions and ends with a description of the Intel virtualization roadmap.
• Microsoft Server Virtualization Strategy and Virtual Hard Disk Directions
  This session provides attendees with insight into the direction that Microsoft is taking with its operating system virtualization technologies. It covers virtual server, virtual PC, Windows virtualization, and Microsoft’s virtual hard disk (VHD) direction. The session includes a brief history of product releases to date, the current work, and the future direction for each of these products.
• PCIe Address Translation Services and I/O Virtualization
  This session presents some of the evolutions from the PCI I/O Virtualization working group in the two key areas of PCIe Address Translation Service (ATS) and protocols to support multiple operating system instances. The PCIe ATS specification defines a new protocol to enable I/O endpoints to efficiently work with chipsets that implement address translation and protection table technology. This session provides a functional overview of the address translation and protection table, ATS terminology, ATS wire protocol operation, critical areas of attention, and what lies ahead.

  The PCIe I/O Virtualization specifications define new protocols to enable I/O endpoints to be efficiently shared by multiple operating system instances and to break through the performance barriers that are currently gating virtualization solutions within the industry. This session covers the I/O virtualization terminology, a functional overview, I/O virtualization usage models, single-root and multi-root topologies, configuration, management, error handling, quality of service (QoS), and what lies ahead.

• Windows Virtualization Best Practices and Future Hardware Directions
  This future-looking session gives attendees an understanding of the directions that Microsoft is taking with Windows virtualization and what independent hardware vendors (IHVs) can do to ensure interoperability between their hardware and Windows virtualization. Example topics include IOMMUs and direct memory access (DMA) remapping.
• Windows Virtualization: Scenarios and Features
  This session discusses the scenarios and features that were used to define Windows virtualization. It looks in depth at the server consolidation, business continuity, development and test, and dynamic datacenter scenarios.
• Windows Virtualization: Strategy and Roadmap
  This session outlines the short-term to mid-term business planning strategy and roadmap for Microsoft’s virtualization technologies. The primary focus is the expected enhancements to virtualization in the Windows Server Longhorn timeframe. The target audience is the senior business or marketing professional who wants to capitalize on the opportunity.