virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the Jaluna official announcement:

Jaluna Inc., the Real-Time Virtualization™ company demonstrates advanced technology for real-time embedded devices on Intel® Core™ microarchitecture at GLOBALCOMM 2006 in Chicago.

Jaluna is working with Intel to introduce the multi-core virtualization solution by tightly integrating Jaluna OSware™ Real-Time Virtualization™ software with Intel® Virtualization Technology hardware.

The demonstration shows how customers can migrate seamlessly to multi-core CPUs and allow the RTOS and Linux operating systems (OS’s) to run unmodified on the Intel Core microarchitecture, which is an industry first.
…
This demonstration consolidates numerous single processor RTOS’s and Linux on two Dual Core Intel® Xeon® processors LV 2.0 GHz, each executing mobile phone infrastructure applications on a shared database. This establishes that legacy software stacks do not need to be re-architected in order to take advantage of Intel multi-core CPUs, while maintaining real-time performance bounds.

As already anticipated in a previous post Sun is heavily working on several virtualization aspects in Solaris 10 (and related OpenSolaris). Among them an interesting one is the network virtualization, driven by the codename Crossbow project:

Crossbow provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource control by virtualizing the stack and NIC around any service (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS, etc.), protocol or Virtual machine.

Each virtual stack can be assigned its own priority and bandwidth on a shared NIC without causing any performance degradation. The architecture dynamically manages priority and bandwidth resources, and can provide better defense against denial-of-service attacks directed at a particular service or virtual machine by isolating the impact just to that entity. The virtual stacks are separated by means of H/W classification engine such that traffic for one stack does not impact other virtual stacks.

Project Crossbow is next step in the evolution of Solaris networking stack and brings bandwidth resource control and virtualization as part of the architecture itself instead of the usual add-on layers which have heavy overheads and complexity…

Read more on the project homepage.

Windows Vista beta 2 has been publicly released.
As a long time, experienced beta tester I know the only way to seriously test something is to use it in production. It’s the only way to really understand limits and improvemens of a new technology.

Anyway the beta tester role can be very risky, mostly when you are working with a new operating system, so I highly suggest you first P2V migrate your existing environment in a virtual machine. It’s not just because you’ll have a chance to revert back with a V2P migration (something you could probably do much easier with a hard disk clone operation), but mostly because the previous system will be always available side by side with Vista, and you’ll be able to do meaningful comparisons.

The free Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 could be the solution but it actually doesn’t install on a Windows Vista host OS.
It depends on the missing components in IIS and the privileges limitations enforced by UAC.

Luckily Ben Armstrong published a great article helping everybody to workaround problems and go for a flawless installation.

Read it here.

Quoting from the Akimbi official announcement:

Akimbi Systems, a global leader in Virtual Lab Automation software, today announced its support for IBM Rational Release 7, Team products including out-of-the-box integration of Akimbi Slingshot with IBM Rational ClearQuestTM and Rational test automation products.

Through Akimbi Slingshot, which has achieved Ready for IBM Rational software validation, users are able to reduce test setup time by 40% or more, as well as instantly capture and reproduce software defects – all of which substantially streamlines processes across globally distributed application development and test organizations.
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The integrated solution announced today creates a closed loop system that automatically launches the correct test configuration for an IBM Rational ClearQuest test case. Once a virtual test configuration is deployed – which takes less than a minute – users may execute tests against it using Rational test products. When tests fail, users can capture a snapshot of the test environment at the time of failure, and embed an Akimbi LiveLinkTM URL in the ClearQuest defect report.
When the developer reads the report, he simply clicks on the URL to view the defect in its “live” failed state, bypassing the multi-hour exercise of reproducing it…

Akimbi released the new release of its flagship product: Slingshot.

In the new 2.3 version a major feature has been introduced: VMware ESX Server 2.5 support (which enlarge company offering with the Slingshot Enterprise Edition).

Download it here.

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

Virtual Strategy Magazine interviewed Cadman Chui, Vice President Marketing at PlateSpin, about their new product PowerRecon 2.0.

Read all here.

Quoting from CRN:

VMware CEO Diane Greene said Monday that the virtualization software company isn’t worried about battling Microsoft and Linux distributors but will fight to ensure that the interfaces between the operating system and hypervisor are open.

At VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3 launch in Cambridge, Mass., Greene said VMware won’t fall victim to Microsoft or Linux distributors that incorporate the Xen hypervisor because VMware’s platform is far too mature and advanced for rivals to catch up and because customers value virtualization’s independence from the operating system.
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Microsoft’s planned hypervisor won’t be available for another two years, but Greene said VMware vows that Microsoft will not be permitted to use its integration strategy with the operating system to lock customers into its proprietary virtualization API or technology…

Read the whole article at source.

VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge submissions are finally available on the Virtual Appliances Directory.

At the moment the whole number amount to around 150 virtual appliances (it’s not clear if VMware finished publishing them), going from less than 1 MB to more than 2 GB.

Some of entries are complete operating systems with preconfigured applications on top. Some others are liveCD distributions inside the virtual machine.
Both categories are uninteresting in my opinion because, while providing sometimes priceless tools, they are not hard-to-do-from-yourself implementations.

I personally find much more interesting virtual appliances featuring an extreme stripped down operating system (something not every customer is able to do) with only components needed to run the intended application.

Also some virtual appliances seems to be much complex in initialization and are not reflecting the ultimate concept of virtual appliance: something you switch on and it’s ready to use (or require a minimal amount of work).

Based on this preliminary evaluation criteria I would like to underline some of them:

• Internet Connection Sharing Appliance
• JanusVM
• splunk – log files make sense
• OpenLDAP
• SugarCRM Appliance
• Internet Content Filter
• NAGIOS Appliance
• Spam Vigilante – Mail Filter Virtual Appliance
• VMOSSIM

The whole list is available here.

With the announcement of ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0 (aka Virtual Infrastructure 3.0) VMware launched a series of whitepapers to clarify technical and marketing aspects of the new offering.

Foedus parner contributed with 4 papers.

The forth one of the series:

This paper provides information regarding the configuration and best practices of iSCSI with VMware Infrastructure 3 (ESX Server). This paper assumes that the audience has an understanding of the basic concepts surrounding virtualization and a VMware ESX configuration.

Read it here.

With the announcement of ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0 (aka Virtual Infrastructure 3.0) VMware launched a series of whitepapers to clarify technical and marketing aspects of the new offering.

Foedus parner contributed with 4 papers.

The third one of the series:

This document will focus on the use of virtual machine templates in VMware Infrastructure 3. Virtual machine template functionality was redesigned in VMware Infrstructure 3 which includes VirtualCenter 2. In this context, a virtual machine template (usually referred to as simply ?a template?) is a reusable image created from a virtual machine.
The template, as a derivative of the source virtual machine,typically includes virtual hardware components, an installed guest operating system (with any applicable patches) and software application(s). New to VirtualCenter 2 is the ability to keep templates current with OS and application updates.

Read it here.