virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that the VMware Technology Network (VMTN) Subscription received CMP’s Software Development Jolt Product Excellence award in the testing tools category for “jolting” the industry by helping to create faster, easier and more efficient software.
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Information on CMP’s Software Development Jolt Product Excellence awards is available at www.sdmagazine.com/jolts/2006index.html.

The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been moved and revamped.

Check the new Virtualization Industry Roadmap!

Microsoft just announced the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise edition available as free of charge. This is great but customers and analysts are asking themselves why the price of this product dramatically dropped over time until today.

Trying to mitigate speculations the company arranged and released an interview with Zane Adam, Director of Product Marketing in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft.

He stated about the cut-price:

PressPass: Why is Microsoft making Virtual Server available at no charge?

Adam:…we want to make virtualization more broadly accessible and affordable so our customers can realize benefits in areas like server consolidation, disaster recovery, application re-hosting, and software test and development.

We believe that Virtual Server is already the best server virtualization technology for the Windows Server System and more than 5,000 customers are using the product today.
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In the Windows Server Longhorn wave, virtualization will become part of the Windows platform via Windows hypervisor technology, and our customers will be able to run an unlimited number of virtual operating systems on one physical server running Windows Server Longhorn Datacenter Edition. In light of this and other market trends, I believe customers will think twice before spending thousands of dollars for other virtualization products that very well could be at no charge in a couple of years.

Talking about the first part of this quote I never heard Microsoft giving away a technology for free when it aims to spread it as much as possible, mostly if the company considers it the best technology on the market.

In the second part Mr. Adam is obviously referring to VMware ESX Server. He fundamentally said customers should not invest in VMware technologies since they now can have Virtual Server 2005 for free and within 2 years will have the Windows Hypervisor for free as well.

Is Microsoft pretending upcoming VMware Server and Xen (now freshened with Virtual Iron 3.0) are not existant? Is Microsoft pretending companies to wait 2 years for a product that could change in any moment and competitors are offering today? Is this the Redmond giant strategy? Really?

Read my insight about Microsoft stragegy to have a better picture of how the company is moving and why had to release Virtual Server 2005 for free.

As already known by all virtualization.info readers since last week, Microsoft has reshaped Virtual Server 2005 R2 offering, providing the Enterprise edition free of charge (not a free 180 days trial) and suppressing the Standard edition.

Quoting from the Microsoft official announcement:

Today Microsoft announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now available as a free download. This also will apply to the forthcoming service pack 1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2.

In addition, Microsoft announced the availability of virtual machine add-ins for Linux and a technical product support model for Linux guest operating systems running on Virtual Server 2005 R2.
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With Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, customers can run up to four virtual operating systems on one physical server at no additional cost. Today’s announcement enables customers to easily and cost-effectively run Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition with Virtual Server 2005 R2 for server consolidation, application re-hosting, disaster recovery, and software test and development…

Users connecting to the Microsoft Connect site, the repository of beta programs replacing the old Betaplace, and checking available programs will see a new beta available for enrollment since end of March: Virtual Machine Additions for Linux.

As reported:

Virtual Machine Additions for Linux can be installed in qualified Linux operating systems when running as guests in Virtual Server 2005 R2.

Supported operating systems actually are:

• Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
• Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.2
• Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.3
• Novell’s SuSE Linux 10.0
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
• Red Hat Linux 7.3
• Red Hat Linux 9.0

Check the related Knowledge Base article for updates.

Microsoft states that customers who report interoperability issues with Linux guests or virtual machine add-ins will be routed to a team that is specially trained to troubleshoot issues related to Linux guests within Virtual Server 2005 R2.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that its virtual machine disk format specification for defining and formatting virtual machine environments is openly available, downloadable and free of charge to encourage use by all developers and software vendors.

In addition, VMware is committed to supporting any other open virtual machine disk formats broadly adopted by customers and working toward converging on open standards in this area.
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Software vendors like Akimbi Systems, Altiris, BMC Software, PlateSpin, rPath, Surgient, Symantec and Trend Micro are leveraging the VMware virtual machine disk format specification to develop value-added products for customer virtual infrastructure environments.
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Additional information on the VMware virtual machine disk format specification is available at www.vmware.com/vmdk.

Following Steve Herrold example, Diane Greene, VMware President, and several other company executives started blogging since today.

On the Greene’s corporate blog there are some interesting thoughts that could help reader understanding where VMware is moving or at least where VMware is looking.
A real interesting sencence from today’s post is related to virtualization standards:

4. Benchmarks.

There are starting to be multiple offerings for virtualization and the customer needs a way to evaluate the performance of the different offerings on apples to apples basis.
There should be a benchmark that can show the performance in real-world relevant ways and also in a way that requires as inexpensive a setup as possible.

The other new blog, The Console, will collect insights on virtualization industry as well from several other VMware executives.

The first post is from Dan Chu, Senior Director Developer and ISV Products and Technology Alliances, which speaks about virtual appliances, referencing virtualization.info for the insight about VMware strategy: The long chess game of VMware (thank you!).

This is a great move to provide customers a deeper insight of what is VMware and what the company is trying to do. But bloggers shoud to be very careful in not sending out posts that are just a reprise of press announcements: readers expect from a corporate blog new and unique contents nobody else could provide, not a remark of what they already read on the press feed.

While server virtualization approaches offered by VMware, Microsoft, Xen, Parallels, Serenity Virtual Station, SWsoft are more or less understandable for potential customers, Virtual Iron, present on the scene since 3 years, has never been completely clear and the just announced Virtual Iron 3.0 for Xen could make things even more confused.

Virtual Iron entered the market 3 years ago, providing a virtualization technology comparable with VMware one.
The company became famous mainly for the additional feature of server aggregation: the capabililty of clustering several physical hosts, to provide a distributed virtualization hypervisor.

Today Virtual Iron is abandoning its proprietary virtualization stack to adopt and enrich the open source Xen hypervisor.

This doesn’t mean Virtual Iron is offering just a set of enterprise management features around Xen, competing against XenSource (at least if they are still on the known mission), Red Hat, Novell and all others trying to add value to the hypervisor.
Virtual Iron has replaced the Xen dom0 with an in-house developed one, called Open Virtual Layer and distributed with GPL license, enhancing it to provide unique features like 64bit and 32bit virtual machines concurrent run capability, unmodified Microsoft Windows guest operation system run capability, and improved performances.
(if you are interested in take a look at Xen 3.0 architecture here)

While it’s true that Virtual Iron 3.0 needs virtualization aid from AMD/Intel modern CPUs (and won’t work at all without them), it’s the first real Xen-based implementation able to compete against VMware and Microsoft with Windows virtualization, featuring para-virtualization performances and something upcoming ESX Server 3.0 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 still cannot provide: 32bit / 64bit VMs mixed environment support. For free in some cases, revaling with upcoming VMware Server and to be repriced today Virtual Server 2005 R2.

What this means for the virtualization market? At least 4 things:

• Xen has now a real chance to demonstrate how good is the para-virtualization approach outside research laboratories and small testing environments
• A serious VMware competitor for enteprises could be finally arrived, obliging them to reduce ESX Server prices
• Several companies, with enough know-how could try to do the same, as soon as new AMD/Intel CPUs become widely deployed
• Microsoft, with the accumulated delay in planned Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian), could have to face an even more competitive market than expected

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

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Virtual Iron Version 3 product suite will include:

• The Xen Open Source Hypervisor, which supports multiple 32 and 64 bit operating systems and takes full advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology. It also supports multiple physical CPUs, large memory and other physical server resource management.
• Virtual Iron Virtualization Services, an open source software stack available under a GPL license, that includes virtual storage and network connectivity, virtual server resource management, server logical partitioning, high performance drivers, and hot-plug CPU and memory.
• Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, which includes a web-based graphical user interface to administer the virtual environment. It uses a built-in policy engine which provides advanced capabilities such as LiveCapacity, LiveMigrate, LiveRecovery and LiveMaintenance, and an event monitor to optimize application performance, ensure high availability and simplify resource management. Virtualization Manager also enables rapid provisioning and reconfiguration through operating system templates and cloning.

The new release will be available in three editions:

• Open Virtual Iron for Xen/ Community Edition
  will be available at no charge via download from www.virtualiron.com/products/Downloads with a GPL license.
  This edition supports the Xen development community and includes the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack.
• Virtual Iron 3 for Xen / Professional Edition
  will also be available at no charge via download from www.virtualiron.com/products/Downloads.
  This edition supports partitioning and management of a single server and is comprised of the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack under a GPL license, and the Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, with a limited use commercial license.
• Virtual Iron 3 for Xen / Enterprise Edition
  for multi-server configuration and support.
  This edition is comprised of the Virtual Iron Open Source Virtualization Services Stack, under a GPL license, and Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager, available via a commercial license, which enables advanced capabilities for high availability, disaster recovery, workload management and policy-based automation.

Virtual Iron 3 for Xen will be available for Beta testing supporting Linux guests in July 2006 and Windows guests in September 2006.
Average pricing for Enterprise Edition will start at $1,500 for a single server, including Virtualization Services and Virtualization Manager…

WindowsITPro is going to offer a webcast on 4th April about Windows Server 2003 R2 and Virtual Server 2005 R2:

Virtualization technology can help you more efficiently utilize existing IT resources, achieve higher levels of application control, and reduce overall IT costs. As business demands on IT change and grow, make the best use of the servers in your arsenal by learning how to effectively leverage virtualization technology. The ability to run up to four virtual instances of Windows Server 2003 EE on only one licensed server reduces your costs dramatically and increase IT’s value to the business.

You will learn:

• How to use Windows Server 2003 R2 EE in conjunction with Virtual Server 2005 R2 to get the most out of your existing hardware
• How virtualization technology can help you address your company’s critical business needs
• How to gain increased application control, and better control over your entire infrastructure while reducing overall IT costs

Register for it here.