virtualization.info Editors

Scott Herold reports on VMTN Forums about a new product in development from Vizioncore called esxReplicator:

Vizioncore is working on a product called esxReplicator which is capable of doing VMDK level replication across the network. There is a rules engine that can synch your data based on 2 criteria…the amount of time passed (every hour), or after a certain amount of change (32MB). As soon as the threshold is hit, the difference is sent over the wire to a remote location. Because you have full control over size or time incriments, it is a very fast replication once the initial sync is done. Because the differentials are so small, there is no performance impact to the guests in the configuration.

I have no ETA on release or timeframes of the product, it was something that they introduced and demod at the VMUG (VMware User Groug) meeting.

Microsoft opened the MMS 2006 conference registration.

Till now just few sessions on virtualization are published on the draft agenda but this year the topic could become a key argument:

• Management of Virtual Server using the COM api and integration with MOM
• Managing backups in Virtual Server 2005 R2 through MOM
• Platform Management Futures

VMware released an updated version of ESX Server 2.5.2 VMware Tools just for RHEL 4.0 Update 2.

Download them here.

Andrew Dugdell produced a nice webcast on how to build a 2 nodes custer with Windows Server 2003 R2 and WinTarget iSCSI, since Microsoft Virtual PC hasn’t SCSI support.

If you’re in need of some tests and cannot work with Virtual Server 2005 this is a valuable resource for you.

Watch it here.

The Microsoft Virtualization Team released a 1 hour movie about virtualization basics and deep technical details on Channel 9 Going Deep show series.

They focused on upcoming Windows Hypervisor architecture, virtualization security model, Apple MacOS x86 guest OS, virtual networking, Singulary research OS, programming language used for virtualization technologies.

A great insight for newbies and virtualization experts. View it here.

Are you already thinking to run the upcoming (well…2 years expected) Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian) on your brand new 32bit server? Think again.

Ben Armstrong remembered us that since the WinHEC 2005 conference, Microsoft stated that upcoming virtualization hypervisor, based on codename Longhorn Server, will run just on 64bit processors, and just if they have virtualization support.

So better reconsider your orders and go for Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) or AMD with I/O Virtualization Technology CPUs.

Quoting from the Sun OpenSolaris official annoncement:

Today, we’re making the first source code snapshot of our OpenSolaris on Xen project available to the OpenSolaris developer community.

There are many bugs still in waiting, many puzzles to be solved, many things left to do. A true work in progress. Why are we doing this now? Because we don’t believe the developer community only wants finished projects to test. We believe that some developers want to participate during the core development process, not after, and now this project opens its doors to that kind of participation.

We have a snapshot of our development tree for OpenSolaris on Xen, synced up with Nevada build 31. That code snapshot should be able to boot and run on all the hardware that build 31 can today, plus it can boot as a diskless unprivileged domain on Xen 3.0.

Running on Xen, OpenSolaris is reasonably stable, but it’s still very much “pre-alpha” compared with our usual finished code quality.

The planned goals of this project are (from Robert Milkowski’s blog):

• x86 and x64 paravirtualized guest kernels supporting dom0, domU, and driver domains
• All reasonable combinations of Solaris, Linux, *BSD, and other paravirtualized OSes should interoperate
• Live migration, whole OS checkpoint/resume
• MP limits and scale to match Xen’s capabilities
• Maximal portability to enable Solaris-on-Xen ports to other architectures
• Observability and debugging to enable performance work, RAS, system management, and sustaining
• Support fully virtualized guests (though this is mostly a Xen capability, rather than an OpenSolaris capability per se)
• Explore trusted platform capabilities

Read the How-To guide here.

Ben Armstrong explains what Code Cache is:

…
When we can’t execute code directly on the processor (aka ‘virtualization’) we have to fall back to a binary translation engine (aka ’emulation’) in order to provide the best performance possible this translation engine keeps a ‘code cache’ of recently translated code so that it can be reused (this essentially serves the same purpose as a physical cache on a processor)…

Read the article at source.

As reported in the previous post, Microsoft is starting to evangelize about virtualization for maximum exposure of its upcoming Windows Hypervisor technology (codename Viridian).

This is a truly interesting webcast to follow to better understand where Microsoft is going to provide around virtualization itself:

Self-managing dynamic systems are information technology (IT) infrastructures that abstract, or virtualize, computing resources to help IT professionals deploy business services more nimbly and respond quickly to business requirements. Self-managing dynamic systems can have a powerful effect on how you approach your business. This webcast provides an in-depth analysis of self-managing dynamic systems. Learn how to create highly available, highly reliable server operations by combining key management technologies with virtualization and coupling them with the Microsoft Windows Server operating system.

View the webcast here.

Ryan Rand, from Microsoft Windows Server division, offered on the corporate blog a 3-parts insight on what Microsoft has achieved and is going to achieve with virtualization technologies:

…
Working in partnership with Intel and AMD, Microsoft is building a platform-layer virtualization solution, based on the virtualization extensions being developed by both partners and put into chips starting this year. This new virtualization solution will be available in the Longhorn Server timeframe and provide tremendous improvements to virtualization performance. A platform layer virtualization solution makes it possible to deploy virtual servers as the default installation option, which means it’s time to party like it’s 1974!

Providing a common set of management tools that manage OS and application and the virtualization layer itself is a key area where Microsoft is investing today. Microsoft has a vision for Self-Managing Dynamic Systems, which is a marriage of the flexibility inherent in virtualization and the automation of powerful management tools across the stack…

Read the whole article here: part 1, part 2 and part 3.