virtualization.info Editors

Mr Koh added that Singapore provides a promising market opportunity for VMware solution adoption and also serves as a springboard for it into Asean, India and the greater China region due to its excellent infrastructure and proliferation of local talent.

The technology will be adopted and deployed by an undisclosed computer OEM in the fourth quarter, company executives said, and five more manufacturers are expected to announce support for the technology next year.

Transitive’s new QuickTransit technology is reminiscent of Transmeta Corp.’s “code-morphing” technology, which can translate and recompile code written for an x86 processor, for example, onto its own internal microarchitecture. The techniques that Transitive have developed, however, could allow an application written for the AIX operating system on IBM’s Power architecture to run alongside an application written for Sun’s Solaris OS on an UltraSPARC processor?all on top of an Itanium chip produced by Intel Corp.

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Transitive is pitching the technology as one that can bring applications written on legacy hardware, such as IRS software that was written in the 1970s, onto up-to-date platforms, according to Bob Wiederhold, the company’s CEO and president.

“All of them are orphaned on very old hardware,” he said.

The QuickTransit technology uses a core kernel, with a modular back end that plugs into the target hardware. Likewise, a series of modular front ends provide a limited number of architectures that the technology can virtualize, with more on the way.

For now, the company is offering four target modules?that is, the physical processors the technology will run on: Itanium, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Opteron, the Pentium 4 x86 architecture and the PowerPC.

The QuickTransit technology can virtualize any mainframe operating system on all four processor architecture back ends, according to the company. In addition, the Itanium, Opteron and x86 back ends will virtualize the MIPS architecture. Both the Opteron and x86 products will also allow a virtualized Power or PowerPC architecture to run on top of them; likewise, a PowerPC chip can also run an x86-designed operating system, such as Windows, on top of it.

Company executives said the technology could be used to run Apple Computer Inc.’s Mac OS on top of an x86 processor. However, the technology will most likely not be sold to individual users, so a company such as Hewlett-Packard Co. would have to decide to license the technology and include it with their PCs.

On average, translating the various instructions will require about an 80 percent computational performance hit, said Frank Weidel, lead solutions engineer at Transitive. The QuickTransit kernel also requires a memory penalty of about 25 percent per application, Weidel said. The amount of memory an application uses for data is not affected. However, the multiple instances of the technology will run side by side; for example, the company has been unable to break the QuickTransit application running 200 instances of the technology alongside one another, he said.

QuickTransit has been tested on 64-bit applications, as well as for compatibility between 32-bit applications written on a 64-bit architecture, Weidel said.

The technology maintains compatibility by translating blocks of instructions into an intermediate representation, then optimizing the code. If the software discovers loops of frequently used code, that code is stored in the cache. According to Weidel, the technology can handle operating-system and graphics calls to specific registers through a “call mapper” that intercepts and passes on the request to the target hardware to maintain compatibility.

– Support for Blade Servers
ESX Server 2.1.2 includes support for the Intel® Server Compute Blade SBX44 server.

– Support for Dell PercRAID Controllers
ESX Server 2.1.2 includes support for the following RAID controllers:
PERC 4/SI
PERC 4/DI

– Expanded Support for Opteron-based Systems
ESX Server version 2.1.2 includes support for the following Opteron-based systems:
IBM eServer 325
HP ProLiant DL585

Berg said Microsoft evaluates customers’ needs based on workloads, focusing on three areas: software testing and development, legacy application rehosting and targeted production workloads, such as Active Directory domain controllers, networking and departmental applications.

“We have a lot of tools that will help them,” he said. “Virtual Server is just one tool.”

Berg said Microsoft has a Component Object Model application programming interface that can be used to create scripts to automatically deploy new server builds and “great integration” with its server management tools, so customers don’t have to buy a specific tool to manage both virtual machines and physical servers.

Tom Bittman, an analyst at Gartner Inc., predicted that VMware will keep 80% market share for the consolidation of servers to run production-ready applications. But he added that Gartner expects Virtual Server to command at least 50% of the market for test and development workloads by the end of 2005.

“The price differential is going to kill [VMware] unless they change it,” Bittman said.

Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing at VMware, which was acquired earlier this year by EMC Corp., said only that the company “always listens” to customers on pricing.

Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, said the underpinnings of what Microsoft is doing are different than what VMware is doing. He said Microsoft is using its Virtual Server technology to help customers running older stacks of applications on Windows NT 4 migrate to new hardware rather than continue to run them on separate machines.

“Using the system running on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, Surgient allows us to reach more customers, with a more compelling user experience, at a lower cost per user trial,” said Anthony Tsim, program manager, Microsoft US E-Marketing. “In just one month since our launch, Microsoft has delivered over 10,000 TechNet Virtual Lab experiences using the Surgient VDMS system. Surgient allows our customers to experience, learn, and evaluate Microsoft products and technologies through self-guided, hands-on tutorials and labs using the actual software. Because customers can access the labs with just a web browser, we eliminate the excessive amount of time customers would spend setting up and installing trial software on one or more test systems in order to evaluate our solutions.”

Surgient’s Virtual Demo Management System enables live, full-featured software evaluations to be delivered to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Surgient’s centralized control of virtual resources and applications, brought together through automated scheduling and workflow, enables the delivery of cost- effective evaluations regardless of product complexity or the number of users. With Surgient VDMS, hands-on software evaluations can be developed, managed, and deployed to customers in an automated fashion, without the need for manual set-up and tear-down of physical hardware and software environments. In addition, for customers that don’t have IT resources available, Surgient offers a hosted solution enabling rapid deployment and faster time-to-results.

Leostream is a leading developer of virtual machine management and physical to virtual (P2V) conversion software. The Leostream Virtual Machine Controller is a software application that provides centralized management and control of “virtual machine” software available from Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and VMware, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., an EMC company.

Virtual Machine software carves up large multi-processor servers and divides it into individual and multiple computing units, or “virtual” servers, hence allowing multiple copies of Windows(R) operating systems to be run simultaneously, and independently, on the same Intel-powered server.

“Only companies that have demonstrated high levels of customer service, proved their experience and attained advanced certification receive the designation of Microsoft Certified Partner,” said Allison Watson, vice president of the Worldwide Partner Sales and Marketing Group at Microsoft. “Today, Microsoft recognizes Leostream for its skills and expertise in providing customer satisfaction with Microsoft products and technology.”

“We are extremely pleased to have our management agent for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and VMware accorded certified status in the Microsoft Partner Program. This allows us to clearly promote our expertise and relationship with Microsoft to our customers,” said David Crosbie, Leostream’s CEO. “The benefits provided through our certified membership will allow us to enhance our support for server virtualization on the Windows platform.”

“Our customers are looking for ways to cut infrastructure costs and make better use of their IT and development teams. They want to streamline application testing and development, consolidate to fewer servers and move legacy applications to new hardware running on the Windows Server 2003 platform,” said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. “Virtual Server 2005 meets these needs and provides easy, automated deployment and configuration. This improved efficiency and simplicity represents progress toward our Dynamic Systems Initiative vision of reducing IT complexity.”

As part of Windows Server System, Microsoft’s comprehensive family of server software, Virtual Server 2005 helps customers increase operational efficiencies associated with testing and deploying their solutions built on Windows Server 2003. With Virtual Server 2005, early adopter customers have been able to decrease their server provisioning time by 50 percent to 95 percent, while reducing physical server counts by 50 percent to 80 percent through consolidation.

“Virtual Server 2005 will allow us to get out of the one-application, one-server paradigm when dealing with applications with low system requirements,” said Eric Hart, senior network engineer at PING Golf. “We will be able to consolidate 77 percent of these applications in our datacenter. Now we have the ability to provide a scalable, fault-tolerant and hardware-independent solution for deploying single-server applications in a cost-effective manner.”

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 includes simple installation and convenient Web-based management of virtual machines, as well as robust storage and networking features. In addition, physical server management tools from Microsoft and third-party management vendors have been updated to provide administrators with a seamless one-to-many management experience across a combination of physical and virtual servers. For example, a Virtual Server 2005 Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 will enable centralized monitoring and performance management of multiple virtual and physical servers.

Hardware vendors such as AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC and Unisys; systems integrators such as Accenture, Avanade, EDS, HP Services and IBM Global Services; and management software vendors including CA, HP and VERITAS, are offering a broad choice of tools, solutions and guidance to help customers more easily deploy and manage Virtual Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003.

“Gartner predicts that enterprises that don’t leverage virtualization technologies will spend as much as 25 percent more for their x86 servers,” said Tom Bittman, research vice president at Gartner Inc. “Server virtualization software can help enterprises reduce the time, effort and costs associated with the consolidation of servers and applications.”

Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition supports up to four processors, with an estimated retail price of $499 (U.S.). Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition supports up to 32 processors, with an estimated retail price of $999 (U.S.). Both versions will be available within 30 days through retail and volume licensing and will be licensed on a per-physical server basis.

The NEC Express5800/340Hb FT is also one of several manufactures pledging support for the upcoming Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. NEC’s base unit starts at $149,999 and comes standard with four Intel Xeon MP processors running at 2.8 gigahertz apiece with 2 gigabytes of memory, two 18GB HDDs (hard disk drive) and a choice of either Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or Virtual Server.

The expandable mid-range server features a 10U rack-optimized form factor and uses blade server architecture by separating processing/memory and I/O onto separate modules and features hot-swappable functionality. “[We are] providing customers with the industry’s most reliable and secure platform for server virtualization and consolidation available today,” Larry Sheffield, NEC’s senior vice president of the company’s Solutions Platform Group in America, said in a statement.

NEC has got its work cut out for it, because at least a half dozen other server manufacturers are also targeting the need for so-called “fault tolerant” servers. The Rancho Cordova, Calif-based American version of Tokyo-based NEC must go head-to-head with computer-makers like IBM (Quote, Chart), HP (Quote, Chart), Fujitsu, and Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) who are specialists at servers that promise 99.999 percent uptime. The competition has also had the added threat of developing their own versions of virtualization software.

NEC said it has a leg up on its rivals because it has a history (ala the Earth Simulator) of developing computers that just won’t give up. The company said its new Express5800/340Hb FT also has an aversion to the traditional problems associated with traditional server architectures and cluster-based solutions.

“NEC is the only major enterprise manufacturer to offer a four-way high-availability server delivering up to 99.999 percent continuous availability, averaging less than five minutes of unplanned downtime per year,” Sheffield said.

For example, Sheffield said pharmaceutical corporations could use the server’s high-availability functionality to run uninterrupted molecular model tests for the development of new drugs, saving both time and resources. The server could also give retail corporations and e-commerce sites round-the-clock operations with full access to inventory and sales records, he said.

The company is also banking on IT decision-makers that want to plug Microsoft’s server software in their systems.