virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the IDC official announcement:

Virtual servers translate to real dollars as spending around virtualization activities will balloon to nearly $15 billion worldwide by 2009. According to new research from IDC, a disruptive change is at hand as customers rapidly adopt virtualized servers – partitioning of smaller 2-4 way x86 systems using software developed specifically for the volume server space – in an attempt to contain costs, leverage existing IT resources, and seamlessly handle growing workloads.

“IT professionals are embracing virtualization across all segments of the server market, but growth is particularly strong in the volume server space,” said Matt Eastwood, vice president of IDC’s Worldwide Server research. “The risky, higher value IT projects, once reserved for more scalable servers, are now being addressed by lower-cost alternatives.”
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IDC’s multiclient study, Server Virtualization 2005: Understanding the Adoption of Virtualized Server Resources, identifies the partitioning opportunity for enterprise system vendors and assists them in aligning their business models with customer requirements. This study also identifies the impact of network and software vendors’ willingness to partner with systems vendors in order to achieve a common goal of support scale-out and scale-up server partitioning strategies in increasingly heterogeneous environments.

To purchase this multiclient study, please contact IDC Sales at 508-988-7988 or [email protected].

Read more at source.

Quoting from CNET News:

Intel is expected to launch new processors on Monday starting with its Pentium line that have the ability to subdivide tasks in a hardware feature called Virtualization Technology–or VT.

While VT is currently found in some of Intel’s Xeon processors, this is the first time that the chipmaking giant has extended the technology to the desktop.
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Intel is currently offering two chips with VT enabled. The 672 and 662 are currently shipping in desktops being offered by Asian PC makers Acer, Founder, Lenovo and TongFang. The Intel processors are priced at $605 and $401 respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities.

Beyond the single-core Pentium 4, Intel is expected to enable its dual-core Pentium D to run VT in the first quarter of 2006. By the first half of next year, Intel expects to fill out the rest of its product line including its next-generation Xeon and Itanium server processors as well as its Pentium M for laptops, Taggard said.
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Read more at source.

HowToForge published a cool 6-parts step-by-step installation and configuration guide for Xen 2.0.7 on Debian 3.1 (Sarge) and Ubuntu:
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_xen_setup_debian_ubuntu

Thanks to OSNews for the news.

Tarry Singh published for Database Journal two step-by-step articles on how to configure a VMware Workstation (and GSX Server) environment to install and configure Oracle 10g Release 2 Real Application Clusters (RAC):

I will be starting a little Oracle RAC series with VMware and will be fondly calling it “RACing ahead with Oracle on VMware.” This first part is intended to give you a brief introduction to setting up VMware and the importance of other tools such as VNC, freeNX or NoMachine, PuTTY, etc. I hope that you will enjoy reading these articles (and hopefully start playing with it) as much as I will enjoy writing them (while playing with them).

You want to run Oracle on multiple platforms? You want to be able to install once and then go ahead and play with the database after having set it up once and not need to reinstall the software (especially on various distro’s of Linux where OS installations could take a toll on your motivation?) With the introduction of OPS and from Oracle 9i onwards RAC (Real Application Clusters), you are very curious to learn these newer technologies, you want to watch and learn how RAC works but unfortunately you just have one computer at home. Even at work it’s not just that easy to get a couple of machines , if not servers, to hook them up, build clusters and have them all shared Cooked or RAW via a SCSI let alone JBOD, SAN or NAS.

Fortunately there is an answer to your (our) prayers. Thanks to VMware, you have a technology that offers virtualization. I began using VMware a couple of years back. It started with a mere curiosity to experiment on other Operating Systems and soon enough I had Oracle 8.1.7 installed on Redhat 8.0. It was fun to see Oracle run and behave differently on a totally different OS and without damaging my current Windows installation. I also tried my hand a dual boot (using PartitionMagic 8.0) but it was way too complicated. There are however other products like Microsoft Virtual Server but we will stick to VMware as it supports various OS’s such as Fedora, RHEL, SuSe, Solaris (still experimental though), Windows. Check out this comparison of several Virtual machines if you are further interested.

Go on with part 1 and part 2.

Quoting from The Register:

Analysis EMC shareholders concerned about the stagnant nature of the company’s shares should open up a new document file right now. They should address it to CEO Joe Tucci, and they should title it “Spinoff VMware and unlock precious shareholder value.”
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Reasons to stay at home
Without question, VMware has benefitted by becoming part of EMC.

VMware’s management has always been engineer rich. CEO Diane Greene is an incredibly successful businesswoman holding, with her husband, more than a 50 per cent stake in VMware, but she’s a geek at heart. Before the EMC buy, VMware spent little on marketing and depended on word of mouth.

In addition, the nature of the server partitioning market demands that customers trust that their software supplier will be around for a long time. You’re not going to slice up hundreds of systems and pray that VMware stays in business or has the support you need when something goes wrong. You have to know that for certain.

EMC helps on both fronts by putting its full marketing weight behind VMware, adding muscle to its support staff and slapping a big, trusted name on the VMware products. EMC gives VMware a more mature, solid presence.

Reasons to fly
There’s, however, little reason to believe that VMware can’t instill the same level of trust in customers and apply the same marketing savvy given its current size and the state of the partitioning market.
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The whole article at source.

The second whitepaper Microsoft released about Virtual Server 2005 R2 (the first one here) it’s even more interesting since talks about a killer feature still missing in VMware server producs: Virtual Server Host Clustering Step-by-Step Guide for Virtual Server 2005 R2:

This document provides an introduction to the methods and concepts of Virtual Server host clustering.

With Virtual Server host clustering, you can provide a wide variety of services through a small number of physical servers and, at the same time, maintain availability of the services you provide. If one server requires scheduled or unscheduled downtime, another server is ready to quickly begin supporting services. Users experience minimal disruptions in service.

Virtual Server host clustering is a way of combining Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 with the server cluster feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. This document describes a simple configuration in which you use Microsoft

Virtual Server 2005 R2 to configure one guest operating system, and configure a server cluster that has two servers (nodes), either of which can support the guest if the other server is down. You can create this configuration and then, by carefully following the pattern of the configuration, develop a host cluster with additional guests or additional nodes.

Get it here.

Microsoft is preparing to launch Virtual Server 2005 R2 (that just left beta) and produces a couple of very interesting whitepapers.

The first one is Using iSCSI with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2:

This paper provides brief background information about iSCSI and describes ways to use iSCSI with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2.

The iSCSI protocol, which unifies the TCP/IP networking protocol with the SCSI storage protocol, defines the rules and processes for transmitting and receiving block storage data over TCP/IP networks. Support for iSCSI is provided with Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows 2000, and Microsoft Windows XP, and in Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2.

With iSCSI, the hardware needed for connecting servers to storage is less expensive and less complex than with the common alternative, Fibre Channel.

Get it here.

Quoting from Architosh:

Yesterday an interesting news item on the Net aligned with a previously published statement about Apple’s ultimate intentions behind the Intel switch. A reliable source had told Architosh prior to the highly anticipated Apple WWDC event earlier this Steve Jobs would make an announcement that would be ultimately about expanding Macintosh market share.

Jobs himself never said anything about expanding market share in regards to the reason for choosing Intel. In fact, the company has been saying for about a year or two now — in the wake of a failed “Switch” advertising campaign — that market share isn’t that important.

However, the company is exhibiting a new face when it comes to saying and doing, as evidenced by the new video capable iPod. Jobs for years said there was no real market for video on such small devices, yet it released a video iPod with major content wins on the iTunes music store.

Clearly what one says and what one does are starting to appear as divergent things when it comes to Apple. And that’s okay. All is fair in love and war.

The big news yesterday was the discovery of an Apple patent that allows the computer maker to protect the installation of Mac OS X. In this case, really limit it to just Apple-produced hardware. However, the patent describes a process whereby users would be able to load one of three operating systems as their primary OS and then load a secondary operating system as their secondary OS. In the patent application, titled, System and method for creating tamper-resistant code, they describe the process as thus:

• 22. The method of claim 20, wherein the first operating system is selected from the set consisting of Mac OS X, Linux, and Microsoft Windows.
• 23. The method of claim 20, wherein the second operating system is selected from the set consisting of Mac OS X, Linux, and Microsoft Windows.

Preliminary Comments

Feel free to read the patent yourself. There is a link to the patent in this article here. For some reason the same link doesn’t appear to work from our site. (US patent number: 20050246554). There are several interesting aspects to it, including the discussion of hardware serial numbers, virtual machines and the all important discussion of “tamper-resistant techniques” including the use of obfuscating a first object code block that determines a secondary code block. There is the discussion of operating systems being able to access core service calls based on a tamper-resistance policy.

Apple itself has said they will not prevent other operating systems from being installed on future MacTels. However, this patent seems to indicate a way the company will prevent Mac OS X from being installed on other hardware, while simultaneously dealing with multi-OS startup and the use of Virtual Machines on future Mac OS X systems.

VMware released a great 16-pages whitepaper every CIO/CTO or IT professional should read before buying any virtualization product:

Of the many approaches to x86 system virtualization available in the market today, the hypervisor architecture-in which virtual machines are managed by a software layer installed on server hardware-has gained the greatest market acceptance. This fact has translated into rapid growth and a large and expanding customer base for VMware, which pioneered the development of x86 hypervisors in 2001 with the launch of VMware ESX Server. It is no wonder then, that the hypervisor market has attracted attention recently from leading software firms as well as venture-funded startups.

Some of the key reasons for VMware’s success in the virtualization market are:

• The VMware product architecture is based on broad experience solving real-world customer problems. The choices VMware has made in its hypervisor-based ESX Server reflect the practical focus on offering the highest levels of performance, reliability and compatibility. In contrast, competitors have primarily chosen architectural paths that allow them to get products to market most quickly. These products may satisfy a limited set of use cases, but have yet to grapple with all the architectural issues of building an enterprise-class hypervisor. As they attempt to broaden their applicability, they are likely to encounter the same real-world issues that VMware did when it first entered the market. The difference, of course, is that VMware solved these problems long ago.
• VMware offers a wide range of production-tested solutions, and provides a comprehensive set of innovative technologies to augment the basic partitioning functions of its hypervisor. While an architectural comparison is of interest to those trying to predict the long-term direction of virtualization technology, what ultimately matters to users are the solutions that are available today that they can actually deploy. VMware offers products that customers are actively using in production deployments to meet their business demands.
• VMware is the only x86 enterprise-ready hypervisor available. Product features aside, customers must answer questions such as: How well will the products work with what we already have? How easy is it to manage? And how well is it supported? Users rightfully demand a certain level of enterprise readiness before they broadly deploy a technology in production environments. As with most solutions, enterprise readiness is often a function of product maturity. VMware has a long list of customer references that attest to both the robustness and maturity of VMware-based solutions.

This paper describes the basic operation of virtualization designs and examines the major issues of their implementation and deploymentdeployment—architecture, solution support, and enterprise readiness—in greater detail.

Read it here:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/virtualization_considerations.pdf

Microsoft announced today to its beta testers Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now out of beta program.

The R2 release as we already know will introduce the following changes:

• Clustering virtual machines across hosts
• Host clustering support
• 64-bit (x64) host support
• Up to 50% drop in CPU utilization
• PXE network boot support
• Linux guest support

As a much appreciated plus Microsoft accorded to every beta tester a complimentary licensed copy of Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition (both x86 and x64 editions)!