virtualization.info Editors

OSx86 Project reports the hacker already broken Apple security this summer on preliminary MacOS x86 edition, released a new patch, this time working with official MacOS 10.4.4 for Intel x86:

This is a preliminary release of my Patch Solution for the official Mac OS X on the Intel platform. Consider it a work-in-progess for now. Ultimately, it would allow you to run this Mac OS X release on a generic x86 computer (SSE2 required).

There’s still a lot of work to do, like support for SSE2-only CPUs, a proper installation procedure and a PPF patch. However, if you like to play around, this will get you started.

Read the full patch announcement here.

ComputerWorld’s journalist Robert Mitchell interviewed Raghu Raghuram, Vice President Datacenter and Desktop Platform Products, VMWare, about the new Virtual Server free product and upcoming ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0 products.

Read it here.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera Inc., a leader in utility computing, today announced that it has been granted a patent for server failover technology by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Egenera has received U.S. patent number 6,971,044 for software that enables high availability of Egenera servers in a virtualized environment. This technology has been a key contributor to the Egenera BladeFrame system’s value proposition since the product was launched in 2001.

Egenera’s failover approach offers customers quantifiable benefits over traditional schemes, which generally require a one-to-one ratio of production to backup machines. By enabling primary-to-failover ratios as high as 23 to one, the Egenera BladeFrame system consolidates servers, lowers datacenter costs, increases utilization and provides unprecedented flexibility in the allocation of processing resources…

Ben Armstrong published a new script example, this time for automatically adding users to Virtual Server:

Dim ace

set objVs = wscript.CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
Set objSecurity = WScript.CreateObject(“VirtualServer.VMSecurity”)

set objSecurity = ObjVs.Security

Set ace = objSecurity.AddEntry(“DOMAIN\Username”,vmAccessRights_Allowed)
ace.WriteAccess = True
ace.ReadAccess = True
ace.ExecuteAccess = True
ace.DeleteAccess = True
ace.ReadPermissions = True
ace.ChangePermissions = True

ObjVs.Security = objSecurity

Read the original post for updates and comments from Ben.

Steven Bink reports the news that upcoming Virtual Server update, codename vNext, will not be able to run x64 guest OSes. Microsoft directly confirmed this on January, after several direct requests of the famous Windows blogger.
The good news is that vNext is instead going to support Intel Virtualization Technology and AMD I/O Virtualization Technology.

The product shipment is expected somewhere in the 2H 2006. At today no beta program is available.

Quoting from CNET News:

VMware will begin broadly testing a new version of its premium ESX Server product next week, a move that comes shortly after the EMC subsidiary began offering its basic server software package for free. Product delivery, however, could occur several months later than planned.
…
The new ESX Server 3.0 beta continues this higher-end trend. It includes features for balancing computing loads within a group of virtual machines, as well as data backup and cluster management, VMware President Diane Greene said Thursday in a meeting with reporters. The company also said earlier that the version will support virtual machines that span four processors, double that of the current Virtual SMP feature.

However, the final version of the product could arrive later than expected. In 2005, VMware said ESX Server 3.0 would arrive in the first quarter of 2006, but the company now is giving itself until the end of the second quarter, a company representative said.

VMware began a limited beta last year, but starting next week, 2,700 will begin the ESX Server 3.0 trial version, the company said…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from George Ou ZDNet blog:

…
Both VMWare and Microsoft are promising Intel optimized virtualization software that will run any version of Windows, Linux, or BSD with minimal overhead. The down side to this approach is that a licensed copy of Windows is still needed and things like I/O and video graphics are still emulated which severely impact performance and eliminates the possibility of running games. Then there’s the option of running Wine or CrossOver with limited application support but without the need for a licensed copy of windows. But ultimately, perhaps the final goal of Apple is to support true hardware partitioning through paravirtualization.
…
The implication of all this is that Apple will be the only companies licensed to run Mac OS X, Windows, and other common x86 operating systems in the world since no one else is licensed to run Mac OS X…

Read the whole article at source.

Thanks to David Marshall for the news.

Quoting from ByteandSwitch:

ToutVirtual unwrapped the beta version of its ShieldIQ Standard Edition middleware, which monitors VMware’s Player, Workstation, and GSX Server offerings. ShieldIQ gives users a bird’s eye view of complex virtual environments that often share CPU, memory, and disk resources across a slew of applications.
…
The exec plans to extend support to Microsoft’s Virtual Server in the next couple of quarters, followed by VMware’s other rival, Virtual Iron, and possibly Xen.

But ToutVirtual’s largesse only extends so far. Although the beta version of ShieldIQ Standard Edition can be downloaded for free, users upgrading to the full version, ShieldIQ, will have to pay support and software licenses. Pabari, however, will not reveal pricing prior to ShieldIQ’s March launch…

Read the whole article at source.

Andrew Dugdell did a great job summarizing all Support articles describing Microsoft policy about virtualization:

• Microsoft Virtual Server support policy
• Supported operating systems in Virtual Server 2005
• Support policy for Exchange Server 2003 running on hardware virtualization software
• Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software
• Windows Server System software not supported within a Microsoft Virtual Server environment
• Virtual machines support in Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) 2005

New article about virtualization support from me:

• Third-party guest operating systems that are supported for use with Virtual Server 2005 R2

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official annoncement:

Novell and Virtual Iron Software today announced that Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 now supports Virtual Iron’s data center virtualization and management platform. Novell is shipping a pre-configured kernel with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to allow businesses to leverage the Virtual Iron technology for rapid deployment and configuration of enterprise-class computing workloads in the data center.
…
Virtual Iron is the first paravirtualized solution to be supported on commercial Linux. The software offers enterprise-class data center virtualization and policy-based management solutions that deliver maximum flexibility to production-level applications such as J2EE* application servers, databases and high-performance computing. The Virtual Iron solution increases resource utilization through pooling and sharing of data center resources, and it improves IT agility via dynamic and flexible infrastructure, rapid provisioning, rapid reconfiguration and capacity-on-demand capabilities…