Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
virtualization.info Editors VMware will announce to its Partner Channel the release of Workstation 5.5 later today, detailing that the product will be available for ordering from December.
Isn’t clear if this means Workstation 5.5 is RTM, but if so my guesses about released date linked to Microsoft Vista beta 2 release could be founded: since Microsoft delayed Vista beta 2 to early 2006, there’s no need to wait for Workstation 5.5 release. So it popped out.
Quoting from the NetIQ official announcement:
NetIQ Corp., a leading provider of integrated systems and security management solutions, today announced it has entered the server virtualization management market with the availability of the NetIQ AppManager for VMware module. NetIQ AppManager for VMware is licensed to NetIQ on an exclusive basis by AK Computer Services Limited, a NetIQ channel and development partner and a technology partner of VMware, Inc.
NetIQ AppManager for VMware allows VMware customers to integrate the management and monitoring of their VMware infrastructure with NetIQ AppManager systems management solutions. Customers using both NetIQ AppManager and VMware ESX Server or GSX Server can monitor multiple elements of their virtual and physical IT infrastructures simultaneously using the same tools, services, procedures and personnel by installing a single agent on the VMware VirtualCenter Server. By incorporating the management of VMware environments into the NetIQ AppManager Suite, NetIQ continues to deliver on its Knowledge-Based Service Assurance strategy of providing management solutions that help its customers decrease the cost and complexity of assuring IT services across their organizations.
…
The standard suggested list price for the VMware module is $4000 per managed host. NetIQ is offering a special introductory suggested list price of $2,500 per virtual host monitored through December 31, 2005.
This is a cool news since NetIQ AppManager is really a great management solution. I also need to underline that Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) is based on that technology so we eventually we’ll see this module on MOM 2005 too.
Quoting from ZDNet:
IBM on Monday launched a new service for harried banking managers eager to streamline their PC and server operations at a branch level. The program, called IBM Systems Solutions for Branch Banking, is an extension of IBM’s Hosted Client Infrastructure, launched in October.
The new program uses IBM BladeCenter and xSeries servers, and software from VMware and ClearCube, to connect multiple PCs to one blade server instead of a “one blade server per PC” approach.
…
Read the whole article at source.
Quoting from the VMware official announcement:
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that VMware Workstation 5, the fifth generation of its powerful desktop virtualization software, has received the Redmond Magazine Editors’ Choice award in the Desktop Virtualization category. This is the fourth major industry award that Workstation 5 has won since becoming generally available in April of this year. Workstation 5 has also won the eWEEK Labs Analyst’s Choice, PC Magazine Editors’ Choice and Redmond Magazine Most Valuable Product awards.
…
This is funny: a well-known magazine about Microsoft technologies and professionals chooses VMware Workstation instead of Microsof Virtual PC as preferred product.
This shouldn’t surprise myself that much: I still see today Microsoft official demos produced with VMware workstation 🙂
Quoting from the Intel official announcement:
Delivering the industry’s first hardware virtualization support for desktop PCs, Intel Corporation debuted new processors today that offer businesses improved manageability and bolstered security.
Virtualization allows a platform to run multiple operating systems or applications in independent partitions or “containers” that can be tailored for specific needs such as IT management services and protecting networked assets.
…
Intel Pentium 4 processor-based desktop PCs are being offered by Acer, Founder, Lenovo and TongFang. Lenovo is now offering Intel Virtualization Technology-based pilot systems to select customers, and broad support for desktop PC solutions from several other system manufacturers is expected in the first quarter of 2006. In addition, leading industry virtualization solution providers including VMware, Microsoft and Xen have joined Intel in support of Intel Virtualization Technology on future Intel processor-based PCs and servers.Further evolving “built-in” world-class IT security and manageability capabilities for businesses, Intel will deliver the second phase of another premier platform innovation – Intel Active Management Technology – together with virtualization support on its dual-core Intel Professional Business Platform, codenamed Averill, later in 2006. Virtualization capabilities will also be extended to notebook PCs, and the company will first support this through Intel Centrino mobile technology-based platforms in 2006.
Businesses are also benefiting from virtualization for their server applications primarily through enhanced functionality and workload support. Intel announced last week that it is shipping Intel Xeon processors MP with hardware-enabled support for Intel Virtualization Technology. The company will begin shipping this same technology on Intel Itanium processor-based platforms in mid-2006.
…
Desktop PCs based on the Intel Pentium 4 processor 672 and 662 processors with Intel Virtualization Technology are available today on systems being offered by Acer, Founder, Lenovo and TongFang. The Intel Pentium 4 processor 672 and 662 are priced at $605 and $401 respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities.
AMD detailed its virtualization technology Pacifica integration in upcoming processor generations at Analyst Day 2005.
In 2006 Pacifica will be integrated in Worstation/Desktop CPUs as well as Blade PCs and Thin Clients.
AMD also reports Pacifica 2006 integration in its whole mobile CPUs line (Turion, Athlon and Sempron).
Take a look at roadmap slides here.
On April Microsoft published a Support article about products it won’t support on Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition:
Please notes that these limitations don’t refer to the just released Virtual Server 2005 R2. So I strongly suggest you to monitor this article for updates.
Credits to Mauro Cardarelli. Thanks to John for notifying me.
Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now RTM. The official website is updated and the Evaluation Kit (aka the download) is coming on the download page.
Microsoft also announced at IT Forum 2005:
As part of its broad strategy to help customers realize the benefits of virtualization and progress toward self-managing dynamic systems, Microsoft has released to manufacturing (RTM) Virtual Server 2005 R2, which will be available in volume licensing and retail the first week of December. Virtual Server 2005 R2 delivers improved performance, availability and scalability for server consolidation, legacy application migration, disaster recovery, and software testing and development. Microsoft will be offering Virtual Server R2 Standard Edition for $99 (U.S.) estimated retail price and Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition for $199 (U.S.) estimated retail price. This new pricing represents Microsoft’s commitment to making server virtualization more accessible to customers at the lowest price point.
I’ll update this page as soon as the bits are available. Meanwhile you can read the two whitepapers Microsoft released for this new product:
With this pricing Microsoft could seriously impact on VMware GSX Server sells, which is not updated since a while.
From today VMware started offering a new products bundle called Virtual Infrastructure Starter Kit.
It’s available in two versions (2 or 4 CPUs) and includes:
The price of the Virtual Infrastructure Starter Kit will provide a large discount from the a la carte prices of its components: the 4 CPUs bundle priced around 44.000 Euros will provide a 17% discount, while the 2 CPUs bundle, priced around 22.000 Euros, will provide a 27% discount for Europe customers.
Kris Buytaert, CTO of X-Tend, the leading Linux and Open Source integrator in Belgium, published a whitepaper about Xen integration with SystemImager, the popular Linux project for automated installation and software distribution:
While consolidating physical to virtual machines using Xen,we want to be able to deploy and manage virtual machines in the same way we manage and deploy physical machines. For operators and support people there should be no difference between virtual and physical installations.
Integrating Virtual Machines with the rest of the infrastructure, should have a low impact on the existing infrastructure. Typically, Virtual machine vendors have their own tools to deploy and manage virtual machines. Apart from the vendor lock-in to that specific virtual machine platform , it requires the administrators to learn yet another platform that they need to understand and manage, something we want to prevent.
This paper discusses how we integrated SystemImager with Xen, hence creating a totally open source deployment framework for the popular open source Virtual Machine monitor. We will document both development of our tools and go more in depth on other infrastructure related issues when using Xen
System Imaging environments in combination with Virtual machines can also be used to ensure safe production deployments. By saving your current production image before updating to your new production image, you have a highly reliable contingency mechanism. If the new production environment is found to be flawed, simply roll-back to the last production image on the virtual machines with a simple update command!
Read the whole paper at source.