virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced the availability of a set of focused server consolidation assessment services that assess the capacity utilization of an organization’s IT infrastructure, identify opportunities for consolidation and help deliver a virtualization roadmap for effective server containment and consolidation.

“For organizations looking to increase productivity, reduce complexity and improve the predictability of their IT infrastructure, server consolidation through virtualization is a compelling solution that is rapidly becoming mainstream,” said Jason Martin, vice president of VMware Professional Services. “The VMware server consolidation assessment services encapsulate best practices developed during thousands of successful enterprise customer virtual infrastructure deployments.”

VMware server consolidation assessment services leverage VMware Capacity Planner, a hosted IT capacity analysis and planning tool that enables the delivery of accelerated, more accurate and benchmarked capacity planning and server consolidation assessments. These services are based on the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Methodology, a methodology for producing, validating and improving a common approach for the successful adoption, operation and management of VMware virtual infrastructure products.

AccessFlow, a VAC Partner, recently conducted a VMware server consolidation assessment service for Mechanics Bank, one of the largest banks headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with more than $2.5 billion in assets, in which AccessFlow thoroughly evaluated Mechanics Bank’s current server infrastructure in order to create a successful virtualization strategy.

“VMware Capacity Planner aided us in our deployment strategy for Mechanics Bank,” said Steve Kaplan, president of AccessFlow. “It helped us with ‘if/then’ modeling so we could come up with the optimal solution for Mechanics Bank. It gave us information on capacity planning, performance metrics during peak hours and other key utilization statistics. Further, VMware Capacity Planner’s agent-less feature and Web-based analysis capabilities helped us significantly reduce the time taken to complete the assessment.”

“AccessFlow was able to provide us with a clear picture of our server environment,” said Richard Lewis, vice president of IT for Mechanics Bank.
“We found that some applications were performing differently than we thought. Some were more memory intensive, some were CPU-bound. Having this information
allowed AccessFlow to create a strategic, comprehensive virtualization solution to meet our needs.”

The VMware server consolidation assessment services include an introductory capacity assessment and a more detailed virtualization assessment. Custom assessments tailored for more complex customer environments are also available. These assessment services are conducted by VMware Professional Services or VAC Partners, part of the rapidly growing global network of virtual infrastructure experts skilled in deploying VMware solutions.

For more information on VMware assessment services, visit http://www.vmware.com/services/consulting.html.

Thanks to Steven Bink for submitting the news.

Three days ago a VMware employee answered a user in the VMTN discussion forums mentioning an upcoming RC2 release for Workstation 5.5.

If so it’s obvious the RTM will not be presented at VMworld 2005 as I was guessing. I’m starting to suspect VMware is waiting for Microsoft Vista beta 2, expected for December 7th, to be sure users can install it flawless as guest OS.

Meanwhile there are issues around the highly expected VMware Player. More datails to come.

Microsoft decided to make its VHD format available to third parties under a royalty-free license.

We already saw PlateSpin, in this post, and Acronis, in this post, moving to gain benefits from this choice.

More vendors will surely adapt their products to interact with the VHD format. The first category doing so will probably be antivirus, now eventually able to scan virtual machines HDs from the host OS.

The specifications disclosed, which are going to be discussed at Microsoft ITforum 05 conference, include:

• Hard Disk Foot Format
• Dynamic Disk Header Format
• Block Allocation Table and Data Blocks
• Implementing a Dynamic Disk
• Mapping a Disk Sector to a Sector in the Block
• Splitting Hard Disk Images
• Implementing a Differencing Hard Disk
• CHS Calculation

You can apply to see details by signing the Virtual Hard Disk Image Format Specification License Agreement here.

Update: The license agreement states that any product developed with VHD manipulation capability needs to be distributed in binary form only.

Thanks to Robert Aitchison for the insight.

Did you miss the PDC 05 U.S.A. conference this year? No problem: Microsoft is going to have multiple sessions about its upcoming virtualization technologies at ITforum 05 european conference.

Actual agenda includes the following sessions:

• CHT013 Automating a Dev/Test Lab with Virtual Server
  Virtualization can significantly reduce the cost of developing and testing complex multi-tier applications. Multiple servers can easily be provisioned and manipulated ‘virtually’ without requiring large amounts of physical hardware. In this Chalk-&-Talk we will discuss how virtualization is changing dev/test and provide some real world examples.
• CHT014 Architectural Best-Practices for Virtual Server
  Virtualization can provide an effective means for consolidating production servers. In this Chalk-&-Talk we will discuss real-world usage of Virtual Server and how it could best be applied in your IT organization.
• INF304 Virtual Server – Advanced Scripting and Other Secrets
  Virtual Server provides a powerful selection of COM interfaces for manipulating all facets of a virtual machine. This can support everything from provisioning to day-to-day management operations. In this session we will showcase the COM API and demonstrate a range of scripting examples. We will also demonstrate how partner offerings are using the API to productize key provisioning and management functionality.
• INF307 Understanding and Working with the Virtual Server Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Disk Format
  Microsoft has standardized on the VHD file format for the running and management of virtual machines. This file format provides for a range of disk types, including dynamically expanding, linked, undo and differencing disks. In this session we will take a deep dive into the file format, and discuss best practices and partner offerings for disk image management and migration.
• INF308 Clustering and High Availability with Virtual Server
  Virtual Server 2005 R2 provides new high-availability features such as guest clustering and host-based clustering. These provide the basis of a very robust production server consolidation solution. In this session we will explore these new Virtual Server capabilities in detail, and look at key partner offerings that add additional high-availability functionality.
• INF318 Windows Hypervisor and Virtualization Futures
  This session provides a technical overview of the Windows Hypervisor. The Windows Hypervisor will provide the foundation for Microsoft’s Windows virtualization solutions in the Longhorn Server timeframe. This session discusses the Hypervisor and related I/O virtualization layers.

Virtual Server 2005 receives its countless review, this time by BentUser portal.

You could find it interesting since there are some performance comparisons with real hardware in various scenarios.
The test’s results anyway should be taken very carefully since no documentation is provided about how the host OS was configured and the hardware used isn’t the one anybody should use for a virtualization server.

Read it here.

VMware just restyled the whole website. I’ve found this new layout much more rational, clearer and simpler to interact with.

An interesting thing is a new comparison between GSX and ESX Server products. In this comparison VMware clearly states something not so evident among customers: GSX Server achieves a best performances rate of 4 VMs/CPU while ESX Server perform a 8 VMs/CPU rate.

It seems VMware is preparing to launch Workstation 5.5 in great style for VMworld 2005 timeframe.

virtualization.info Microsoft Windows Live Alerts (formerly MSN Alerts) sign-in has been moved.

Check it at the new virtualization.info Subscriptions site.

The keyword of the last period is surely virtualization. Every vendor I see these months is trying to adapt old and new products description to fit the virtualization concept.

Citrix shouldn’t have the need to but Brian Madden reports that Citrix iForum conference brought a more explicit description for its flagship product, Presentation Server, now detailed as a application virtualization solution.

This points me to a 6 months-ago post where I suggested IT industry to adopt a standard naming convention for the various virtualization technologies. Something we probably still need.

Microsoft is informing that the upcoming November issue of TechNet Plus! subscription will bring an unlimited trial of Virtual Server 2005.
Is unclear what version will be offered: the mailing list reports Standard Edition while the official web site reports Enteprise Edition.

Quoting from the PremiTech official announcement:

PremiTech today announced the latest version of its proven software for managing end-user quality of IT service, Performance Guard™ 4.1. This new version offers Citrix Presentation Server™ customers enhanced usability and notification features, as well as support for applications virtualized on VMware servers. PremiTech will showcase Performance Guard, developed in close cooperation with Citrix and its customers, in Booth #604 at Citrix® iForum™ 2005, October 9-12, in Las Vegas, Nev.

Performance Guard is utilized by more than 200 global companies including an impressive array of some of the largest Citrix customers in the world, such as Ingersoll-Rand, Maersk Sealand, General Electric, Verizon Wireless, State Street Bank and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The product is supported and distributed by leading Citrix platinum partners, such as Bell Business Solutions, IBM Global Services, RapidApp, DynTek, Vector-MTM and IPM. PremiTech also recently received the DABCC Seal of Approval for its ability to solve customers’ problems and achieve the highest standards of excellence.

With Performance Guard, IT organizations are able to monitor end-user performance and network latency, as well as the service on Presentation Server and supporting back-end servers to obtain consistent, accurate measurement of Citrix application performance in real time. The new release makes it even easier for IT staff to proactively ensure optimal service delivery for their business users while reducing operational costs through early resolution of problems.

New features of Performance Guard 4.1 include:

• Added performance metrics: Especially important for Presentation Server users, Performance Guard now monitors additional key performance indicators, such as context switches.
• Improved network analysis: Performance Guard monitors the entire network to pinpoint and document the exact cause of poor response times and broken sessions.
• Improved distribution of scheduled reporting: Performance alarms and reports can be sent automatically to appropriate personnel inside and outside of IT.
• Enhanced alarms and auto-baselining: Performance Guard intuitively configures itself to recognize baseline performance and notify IT at any point when the system deviates from normal conditions.
• Strengthened correlation engine: Performance Guard now maintains server metrics for an extended period of time, providing the ability to correlate application and system performance for improved root cause identification.
• Active Citrix login measurement: The Performance Guard agent now makes repeated login measurements in order to ensure the Citrix server is up and running and to identify differences in login times.
• VMware support: For firms consolidating servers and using virtualized applications in their production environments, Performance Guard now performs baseline measurements and provides pre- and post-migration metrics for the VMware virtual infrastructure.
• “This latest release shows that PremiTech is dedicated to making our jobs easier and helping us reduce support costs through improved efficiencies,” said Dean Matvey, Network Services Division of Ingersoll-Rand’s Infrastructure Sector. “With Performance Guard, we are able to provide a precise explanation on the cause of system issues and an exact account of how we’re going to fix them. You couldn’t get that from any other systems management product.”

About Performance Guard
Performance Guard is an off-the-shelf, standard solution that provides the ability to monitor end-user quality of IT service in Desktop, Citrix and VMware environments. It delivers consistent, accurate measurement of application performance from the end-user perspective in real time. This data is essential for the rapidly growing number of companies using access infrastructure solutions from Citrix to measure mission-critical application performance, identify performance bottlenecks and resolve issues. Using one centralized server with Performance Guard, companies are able to improve system performance, increase user productivity, reduce expenses in infrastructure and help-desk resources, and ensure compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLA).