virtualization.info Editors

Significant improvements forecasted for virtualization

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iReach Research published a report, Virtualisation as an Enabler of Knowledge Management, claiming a quarter of European firms are currently using server virtualization and 67% of them plan to increase their usage over the next year.

This report seems to totally disagree with the 1 week ago news Techworld reported: Users fail to grasp virtualization benefits.

Based on my personal experience and after collecting several feedbacks from virtualization professionals around Europe, I find rather difficult to believe iReach report.
I would believe a whole quarter of them is evaluating virtualization technologies and testing them in limited environments. I absolutely don’t believe they are using virtualization in production.

Since the report doesn’t explain how firms are working with virtualization, and which kind of industries are involved (it would be easier to believe a quarter of all european IT companies statement) I don’t find it very useful.

Thanks to VMblog for the news.

RoudyBob’s impressions on Akimbi Slingshot

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Bob Roudebush tested Akimbin Slingshot and blogged about it:

…
I spent some time with the product this afternoon using the company’s 30-day trial and an installation of VMware GSX server. I must say I was pretty impressed – though I am sure I wasn’t able to properly put the thing through its paces with my single-server environment. The installation was pretty straightforward and the online documentation was informative. I did run into a small issue, though, which prevented me from “deploying” (more Slingshot terminology) a template once I had created it. I sent off a quick email to their support alias and received a response (and a fix) in less than an hour. On a Saturday afternoon, no less. And for software that I was just evaluating. I appreciate software companies that still try hard to exceed their clients’ or prospects’ expectations. You don’t see that very often these days….

Read the whole article at source.

OpenVZ project surpasses million web hits

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Quoting from the OpenVZ official announcement:

The OpenVZ project today announced that its website attracted more than one million hits in January – just one month after full production – as more businesses and individuals explore and contribute to the leading open source operating system virtualization project. Also, with more than 1,000 message posts, the OpenVZ support Forum has been very active with the user community.
…
“Clearly virtualization is technology whose time has arrived,” said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. “We are immensely gratified that OpenVZ has quickly gained traction not only in the community, but with users who derive value by deploying their applications on virtual private servers. We will continue to add features to OpenVZ software and expect that over time virtualization will become part of the mainstream Linux distributions.”

OpenVZ is an open source spin-off of SWsoft Virtuozzo, which I extensively covered in this 8-pages review.

Webinar: Designs for Disaster Recovery and High Availability with VMware ESX Server

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Symantec is preparing a webinar about VMware ESX Server high availability to put in light acquired Veritas products:

Companies are moving their business critical applications to virtual environments to reduce costs, increase utilization, and gain flexibility. The latest research from IDC suggests that 22% of server workloads are virtualized today with 45% of all planned server deployments seen as potential virtualization candidates. However, the move to virtual environments increases the risk that human, software, or machine error will cause these important applications to fail.
To mitigate this risk, firms require robust availability and disaster recovery solutions. Symantec is working with VMware, the leader in virtualization, to build a complete Data Center Availability Solution that meets the needs of firms leading the charge to virtual data centers.

This webcast will be an overview and technical discussion of how the Veritas Data Center Availability Solution enables VMware ESX to achieve higher levels of availability and be configured for a remote disaster recovery environment.

The event is scheduled for 2nd March. Register for it here.

Tech: Tracking VMs CPU utilization history in Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

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Ben Armstrong wrote a new script. This time it calls the Virtual Server COM interface for CPU history tracking:

Set objVS = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
set objVM = objVS.FindVirtualMachine(WScript.Arguments(0))
Set colAccountants = objVM.Accountant

i = 1
For Each intCPUUtilization in colAccountants.CPUUtilizationHistory
Wscript.Echo i & “: ” & intCPUUtilization
i = i + 1
Next

Read the original post for updated and comments.

VMware could focus on security in a near future

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As a security professional I’m particularly sensible to this topic so I’m very happy to report the news:

In November 2005 VMware issued a call for presentations about virtualization serving for security purposes to be presented in Cambridge.

Three presentations were selected:

The first one is particularly interesting not just because it refers to some upcoming ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0 features, but also cause it underlines where VMware could concentrate forces in the near future:

  • Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) embedded in the virtualization layer
  • Real-time hardware modification on attack detection
    (e.g.: virtual switch unbinding)
  • Automated virtual-machines revert to safe snapshots

A real pity to not have the whole voice recording for them.

VMware challenges the world for $200,000

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Since several months VMware started adopting a very untraditional marketing strategy.

In December 2005 the company released for free a stripped down version of their worldwide awarded Workstation product, called Player, able to run single virtual machine at a time on any Windows and Linux computer around.

In February 2006 they transformed one of their 2 enterprise products, GSX Server, in a free solution too, ready to be released free as in beer as soon as it gets out of beta with the name of Server. It will provide a hosted environment able to run several virtual machines at a time, blowing away any competition on the virtualization market.

This a la Google way of doing business climaxes today, when VMware launches the greatest challenge an Internet citizen could ever receive: the VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge is a 3-months open challenge to everybody around able to create the most useful, creative and smallest virtual machine ever.

The company uses the Virtual Appliance term meaning an open source distribution (no matter if Linux, BSD or Solaris based) with a pre-installed application onboard, able to run within the VMware Player without further intervention.

Why an Internet citizen should get excited of this very glamorous way of doing viral marketing? Cause VMware is giving away 3 prized for a total amount of $200,000, half of them for the first prize.

And who will choose what is the most revolutionary virtual machine ever? A judging panel formed by very special members:

  • Mendel Rosenblum (VMware Chief Scientist)
  • Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media Founder)
  • Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu Linux Founder)
  • Dave Parsons (ALG Software Vice President)
  • Stephen Elliott (IDC Research Manager)
  • Roger Howorth (IT Week Enterprise Editor)
  • Jason Brooks (eWeek Senior Analyst)

These men will have the final word choosing winners (which will be announced 14th August) but will be influenced by the whole VMNT Forums community, called in action to try and comment submitted Virtual Appliances, in a massive committment to create and release something real impressive.

Good luck to everybody!

Review: SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows 3.5.1 – Conclusion

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SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows 3.5.1 is deadly simple to install and manage, with extended virtual servers’ centralized management features, and enhanced provisioning capabilities.

Anyway you should consider that OS partitioning is different from virtualization.
Virtuozzo is less flexible than any VMware or Microsoft virtualization software and you won’t be able to consolidate different platforms, or migrate some of them when the new Microsoft codename Longhorn Server will come.

If you’re going to approach Virtuozzo and work on Linux platforms you should really check the Virtuozzo open source project called OpenVZ.

And just in case you are asking yourself: yes, it can be installed inside a virtual machine provided by virtualization platforms like VMware o Microsoft.

SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows 3.5.1 is licensed per processor with a price of 1000 Euros per CPU, while the Management Console costs 1000 Euros per seat with an unlimited servers management capability.

SWsoft offers an online Return on Investment (ROI) calculator to better evaluate impact of Virtuozzo adoption on company budget.

Download this review in PDF format.

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