virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from TechWorld:

…
The upshot is, though, that enterprises could end up buying many fewer discrete systems, and that could be a problem for many vendors. If your company is running its business on that vendor’s products, you might care about this. Will it survive?

What about Dell, for instance? Not only is the Texas-based company responsible for some 50 per cent or so of the UK’s PC sales, it’s taking an increasing chunk of the country’s server sales too.

Hugh Jenkins, enterprise product manager at Dell UK, said Dell is well aware of the virtualisation trend. He agrees that virtualisation could well affect Dell’s hardware sales figures. “As a result of virtualisation, Gartner is predicting a big drop in server sales from 2007”, he says. “We’re alive to this.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Ben Armstrong provided a nice script to read how much time virtual machines are powered on on a Virtual Server 2005 environment:

Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
set vms = vs.VirtualMachines

For Each vm in vms
Wscript.Echo “Virtual machine: ” & vm.Name
Wscript.Echo “Uptime: ” & vm.Accountant.Uptime
Wscript.Echo
Next

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

Even if Parallels was the first one to launch a desktop virtualization solution for the new Apple Mac OS X for Intel architecture, VMware, leader in this market segment, is ready to take over.

MacosXrumors yesterday was already reporting from reliable sources an internal development of one or more products for the new operating system.

Today Richard Garsthagen, a VMware employee running the Run-Virtual blog, mentioning a VMware President, interview, confirmed the whole thing:

Well I can confirm to you that VMware already has its software running in house on Mac Machines, so we only have to wait for a first public beta version…

Quoting from the LinuxWorld official announcement:

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Divided into 12 product categories, including a “Best of Show” award, the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards recognize product and service innovations by LinuxWorld exhibitors. The judges were comprised from an independent panel of technical professionals, business professionals and journalists from the Linux and open source industry.
…

• Best Grid Computing Solution
  Themis – DCRM
• Best Virtualization Solution
  SWsoft Inc. – Virtuozzo for Linux

The Tao of Mac published an how-to permitting VMware customers to run the (GSX) Server remote console on a MacOS X:

One of the biggest issues with managing VMware Server for me has always been not having a native Mac OS X remote administration client (or a Mac OS X anything, but that’s another story).

So, with every release, I kept trying to find a way to both see and control my virtual machine consoles by running vmware-console on the server and forwarding the X display to my Mac – which never seemed to work due to various X11 quirks – either the application bombed instantly, or there were masses of debug logging – but never a working remote console.

However, after months of virtual head-banging, Chris Dagdigian e-mailed me a note saying that he had got his vmware-console running by using trusted X forwarding, and after a while I had the rest figured out – keyboard mappings and all.

The following notes assume you have a Linux-based VMware Server host (running build 22088) and that you can access it over SSH from a Mac with X11 installed…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the Platform official announcement:

Platform Computing, the global leader in enterprise grid computing, today announced that it has launched the Platform Alliance Network, an innovative partnership program designed to build a broad ecosystem to deliver virtualization solutions for the Datacenter. Platform also announced new partner additions to the network: CSC, Novell, Red Hat, VMware, Wipro, and Dell China.
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The Platform Alliance Network provides the framework within which partners can take advantage of these industry-leading solutions to virtualize and grid enable their offerings for the enterprise IT market. Unifying Platform’s existing partner offerings, the Platform Alliance Network supports new and existing partners in the categories of Independent Software Vendors, System Integrators, Resellers, Hardware Vendors and Service Providers…

Note that VMware is a new partner. Now consider re-reading my insights about virtualization future (Virtualization is the first step of a long walk called Grid Computing) and about the company strategy (The long chess game of VMware).

Quoting from the XenSource official announcement:

XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced XenEnterprise™, its first commercially-packaged virtualization solution, based on Xen 3.0, to virtualize servers running mainstream operating systems. XenEnterprise brings the performance, security and openness of the Xen hypervisor to the market in a product that emphasizes ease of use, simple deployment and management of Xen-based virtual infrastructure.
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To facilitate multiple operating systems support and ensure interoperability with Windows virtualization environments, XenSource has licensed Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format to offer the ability to import virtual machines created with Microsoft Virtual Server, and provide management and recovery of virtual machine IT infrastructures.
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XenEnterprise includes the following key features:

• Easy to use
  XenEnterprise offers Xen and guest operating system installers P2V tools and a comprehensive management toolkit into a single package to enable customers to quickly build and manage a running virtualization infrastructure
• Superior performance
  XenEnterprise offers near-native performance and fine-grained resource control for guest virtual servers, and virtualizes all x86 operating systems, leveraging the hardware virtualization capabilities of Intel® VT and AMD SVM enabled processors
• Lowest Total Cost of Ownership: XenEnterprise delivers dramatic improvements in server utilization, reducing capital expenditures and infrastructure management costs

XenEnterprise is currently available in beta form, with product availability scheduled for 2H06.

Parallels is doing a good job in launching its virtualization offering while competing against giants like VMware and Microsoft.
This time the company beaten on time both of them launching the Parallels Workstion 2.1 for Intel Mac OS X beta program.

Quoting from the Parallels official announcement:

Parallels announced today that it is beginning beta testing for Parallels Workstation 2.1 for Mac OS X, the first virtualization software that gives Apple users the ability to simultaneously run Windows, Linux or any other operating system and their applications alongside Mac OS X on an Intel-powered Apple computer.
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New and existing Parallels users are welcome to download and evaluate a free, fully-functional 30-day trial of Parallels Workstation 2.1 for Mac OS X at www.parallels.com/download/mac.
Beta users can submit comments, suggestions and feedback by visiting http://www.parallels.com/en/mac, or by sending an email to [email protected].
…
The solution takes advantage of Apple’s inclusion of Intel Core Duo architected chips into all new Macintosh computer models. Because the Intel Core Duo chipset is x86-compatible, the Parallels virtualization engine can easily virtualize the hardware, thus enabling Macintosh users to build virtual machines running nearly any x86-compatible OS, including Windows 3.1-XP/2003, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, eComStation, and MS-DOS.
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The GA (general availability) release of the product is expected in the next several weeks. Apple users should be aware that the Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X works with any Intel-powered Apple computer running Mac OS 10.4.4 or higher. The product is not compatible with PowerPC-powered Apple computers…

virtualization.info is in contact with all main virtualization players in the market and several recruiment agencies asking every day for interesting professional profiles.

Among requested professional profiles there are:

• software engineers
• infrastructure engineers
• sales managers
• marketing managers

Candidates are requested for fixed and consultancy positions worldwide, with particular interest in North America and Europe areas.

If you are interested send your resume in english language!

Note: Be sure to specify in your email the country where you live and the country where you are looking for a new virtualization job (even if you already wrote it inside the resume). Thanks!

The upcoming WinHEC 2006 conference, taking place 23-25th in Seattle, will be critical for Microsoft virtualization strategy and its partners.

Mike Neil, Product Unit Manager for Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, revealed ZDNet an updated roadmap about Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian) will be presented.

The amount of sessions about virtualization is impressive and their name are quite meaningful:

• How to Use the VMBus Interfaces
• How to Use the WMI Interfaces with Windows Virtualization
• HyperCall APIs Explained
• Hypervisor, Virtualization Stack and Device Virtualization Architectures
• I/O Memory Management Hardware Goes Mainstream
• Inside Microsoft’s Network and Storage VSP/VSC
• Intel Virtualization Technology: Strategy and Evolution
• Microsoft Operating System Virtualization Strategy and Virtual Hard Disk Directions
• PCIe Address Translation Services and I/O Virtualization
• Windows Server Scalability and Virtualized I/O Fabric for Blade Server
• Windows Virtualization Best Practices and Future Hardware Directions
• Windows Virtualization: Scenarios and Features
• Windows Virtualization: Strategy and Roadmap

Look at the whole draft agenda.