virtualization.info Editors

vizioncore is working good to gain momentum in the virtualization market, first with the highly successful launch of free entry-level package esxBasics, then with the first release of esxReplicator.

They are now aggressively pushing all products with the launch of esxEssentials, a convenient bundle of esxRanger Professional, esxCharter and esxReplicator (all available as full releases).

The esxEssentials bundle is offered at an introductory price of $899 per CPU, instead of $1,250 per standalone products.

Technical Solutions eXchange is the VMware technical conference for VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) and Partners tooking place in Europe (to fill the empty space of a missing VMworld for EMEA…) every year since 4 years.

VMware has now chosen to replicate the event in the US for the first time: the TSX 2006 for US will take place in Orlando, FL, on 23th and 24th May.

Look at the agenda here and register for the event here.

I attended the TSX 2006 in Paris as guest this year and you could be interested in reading some sparse feedbacks I collected.

The first attempt to arrange a Nordic Symposium for Europe, the open of this year TSX for public, and this replication of TSX in US suggest there is a small chance VMware is planning a VMworld for EMEA too, offering 2 events in both regions per year.
This possibility seems to be also supported by some numbers: my sources says Nordic Symposium scored around 450 attendes while TSX scored more than 500.

In case of a VMworld event for EMEA the big problem would be providing original content in both events which is absolutely mandatory to attract 1000+ attendees at a 4 o 5 days event.

The feed of original contents is a problem VMware already had with Nordic Symposium and TSX (mainly replicating VMworld sessions) and which other big vendors face as well: Microsoft for example is suffering this with european TechEd and IT Forum conferences since ever.

Another related problem would be choosing at which event officially launch a new product.
The quite obvious choice is choosing the US market, but a product launch drives much more attendees than just a great agenda about already familiar technologies, and it would be a big help in boosting an EMEA VMworld conference.

A possible strategy for this could be announcing datacenters, commercial products (ESX, VC, ACE) at the US VMworld , and desktop/SMB products (Player, Server) at the EMEA VMworld, trying to maintain an high hype during a large part of the year.

Anyway I would not expect anything new on this front until 2007.

Thanks to Run-Virtual for the news about TSX 2006 for US.

SWsoft launches its own conference from May 30th to June 1st, in Herndon, Virginia.

The event is reserved for partners and even if it’s mainly focused on the web hosting business, on the second day SWsoft will present one session about Virtuozzo.
This could be an opportunity for the company to announce new plans about its OS partitioning product.

Check out the agenda and register for it here.

The much expected VMware Server has now reached beta 3 status (build 23869) and brings in two important features:

• support for background snapshots
• experimental support for Solairs 10 (including Update 1 and Update 2 beta) x86 / x64 guest OS

Read the official Release Notes and download the beta 3 here.

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

Note that Solaris 10 Update 2 is expected for June, and VMware could want to wait until that moment to finally release VMware Tools for Solairs, after 2 years of experimental support without them on Workstation.

Ben Armstrong is still working on the use of SetConfigValue and GetConfigValue, this time to teach how to embed in VMC files further informations, useful for third party management tools or custom scripts:

Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
set vm1 = vs.FindVirtualMachine(WScript.Arguments(0))

key = “Bens_Test_Key/Some_Value”

Result = vm1.SetConfigurationValue(key, “Hello World”)

Wscript.echo “Fetching custom key: ” & key & ” value: ” & vm1.GetConfigurationValue(key)

Be sure to read the original post for comments and updates.

Steve Herrod, Vice President of Technology Development at VMware, just remarked from its blog the company commitment in providing a standard virtualization interface for Linux kernel.

His intervention is timely: recently the online press underlined VMware and Xen developers contrasts on how to approach the hypervisor standardization, and how this is slowing down progress since more than one year.

In his post Mr. Herrod also announced more details about VMware vision for standardization, called Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), will be disclosed at upcoming Linux Symposium 2006, where Pratap Subrahmanyam, Principal Engineer at the company, will present a session title Transparent Paravirtualization for Linux.

David Bieneman, CEO at vizioncore, will present esxRanger for disaster recovery on VMware infrastructures on the World Business Review TV program, presented by Alexander Haig on CNBC.

The show will be on air on 7th May 2006, following usual this broadcasting schedule.

Update: the recording of the show is here.

Another book for the much appreciated IBM Redbooks department:

Virtualization is becoming more and more a key technology enabler to streamline and better operate data centers. In it’s simplest form, virtualization refers to the capability of being able to run multiple OS instances, such as Linux and Windows, on a physical server.

Usually the concept of virtualization is usually associated with high-end servers, such as the IBM System x3950 that are able being able to support and consolidate multiple heterogeneous software environments. The System x3950 is a highly scalable x86 platform capable of supporting up to 32 processors and 512 GB of memory and is aimed at customers that wish to consolidating data centers.

Between the server hardware and the operating systems that will run the applications is a virtualization layer of software that manages the entire system. The two main products in this field are VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.

This Redbook discusses the the technology behind virtualization, the x3950 technology, and the two virtualization software products. We also discuss how to properly manage the solution as if they all were a pool of resources with Virtual Machine Manager, a unique and consistent management interface.

Table of contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction to virtualization
• Chapter 2 – The IBM System x3950 Server
• Chapter 3 – VMware ESX Server
• Chapter 4 – Microsoft Virtual Server
• Chapter 5 – Management with IBM Director

Download it here.

InfoWorld published a brief review of Akimbi Slingshot 2.2, scoring it 7.9/10 and providing this bottom line:

Akimbi Slingshot makes it easy to set up, deploy, copy, and tear down complex multi-server configurations of virtual machines. Its capability to capture snapshots of configurations and play them simultaneously is impressive.
Rough edges, incomplete documentation, and the lack of a reporting module hamper the product, however.

Read it at source.

The new version of QEMU is now available bringing in some notable features like VNC support (as anticipated last week):

• USB tablet support (Brad Campbell, Anthony Liguori)
• win32 host serial support (Kazu)
• PC speaker support (Joachim Henke)
• IDE LBA48 support (Jens Axboe)
• SSE3 support
• Solaris port (Ben Taylor)
• Preliminary SH4 target (Samuel Tardieu)
• VNC server (Anthony Liguori)
• slirp fixes (Ed Swierk et al.)
• USB fixes
• ARM Versatile Platform Baseboard emulation (Paul Brook)

Download it here.