virtualization.info Editors

Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) project

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Today I discovered for the first time a very old (but still active) project about virtualization called Parallel Virtual Machine.

Quoting from website:

PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or Windows computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers. The software is very portable. The source, which is available free thru netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to CRAYs.

PVM enables users to exploit their existing computer hardware to solve much larger problems at minimal additional cost. Hundreds of sites around the world are using PVM to solve important scientific, industrial, and medical problems in addition to PVM’s use as an educational tool to teach parallel programming. With tens of thousands of users, PVM has become the de facto standard for distributed computing world-wide.

Thanks to Raffaele for pick up on this.

OS/2 community reacts to SVISTA beta program launch

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previously reported about the new Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA) beta program. Competing with EMC/VMware and Microsoft, Serenity can still count on a quite notable base of interested users: whole OS/2 community see in this virtualization product the only, at today, occasion to consolidate and integrate their OS/2 applications with Windows, Linux, FreeBSD environments.

So on OS/2 World web forum you can read first comments (and a couple of small screenshots) about this story.

Thanks Friedrich for pointing my attention to this.

Microsoft released Virtual Server 2005 Information Resource Kit during TechEd 2004

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During San Diego TechEd 2004, Microsoft release an interesting Information Resource Kit containing new informations on this long awaited product.

CD contains:

-) 2 White Papers (Virtual Server 2005 Product White Paper and Virtual Server 2005 Technical White Paper)
-) 2 Presentations (Virtual Server 2005 Product Overview Presentation and Virtual Server 2005 Technical Overview Presentation)
-) 1 Product Information flayer (Virtual Server 2005 Data Sheet)

VMware Announces Disaster Recovery Seminar Series

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Quoting from original VMware announcement:

How Virtual Hardware Enables Real Recovery!

Virtual Infrastructure as a Foundation for Business Continuity

Attend this live seminar and learn how to improve your existing backup and disaster recovery strategy, eliminating hardware issues and repetitive tasks through VMware virtual infrastructure.

***************************************************
Learn how VMware virtual infrastructure can improve your disaster recovery solution at a live seminar near you.
Go to: http://www.vmware.com/seminars
***************************************************

If any of the following sounds familiar, you need to come to this seminar:

* You’ve never had a disaster, you run on hope:
You simply run backup processes every week and hope that you’d be able to recover systems if disaster struck.

* You’ve never tested recovery due to hardware limitations:
You would love to test your systems, but coming up with that many servers is impossible.

* Testing your recovery plans is a painful, manual process:
Your backup software has great intelligence, but to utilize it you need to first spend hours installing the operating system and backup agents on the systems to be recovered.

* Any hardware failure is synonymous with ‘days of downtime’:
Ordering the replacement hardware and getting it shipped takes days, and there is still only limited assurance of a 100% successful recovery.

VMware and partners will draw examples from leading companies who have implemented virtual infrastructure in their Disaster Recovery & Backup environments.

***************************************************
Learn how VMware virtual infrastructure can improve your disaster recovery solution at a live seminar near you.
Go to: http://www.vmware.com/seminars
***************************************************

We will show you how to:

* Make your existing backup and recovery strategy faster and more foolproof by using Virtual Machines

* Make your recovery process faster, more reliable and easier to test by using templates and other advanced features of virtualization

We will explain:

– How virtualization software integrates with market leading backup packages
– How the return on investment of your disaster recovery solution improves with the addition of virtual infrastructure

We will give you:

* Examples of successful deployments in both large and smaller enterprises
* Step-by-step blueprints of how to deploy in your environment

Together, we will demonstrate virtualized target recovery environments and show you how virtualization plays into backup and recovery solution.

DATES: July 20 to 22, 2004
LOCATION: click here for a list of locations
AGENDA: 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. – Presentation, Q&A
Continental breakfast will be served
REGISTRATION:
http://www.vmware.com/seminars

Sign up today, space is limited!
Attendees will be entered into a drawing to win one of three copies of
VMware Workstation.

Only USA locations are available. I really hope VMware arrange something in Europe or ever record event on a webinar.

If someone of blog reader will attend this seminar can send me a detailed feedback: I’ll publish it here for sure. Thanks.

Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA) goes Beta

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Quoting from Yahoo Finance:

Serenity Systems International (SSI) has announced an open (public) beta program for its Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA) product, a virtual machine application for Intel based PCs. The software being tested runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and IBM’s OS/2. A FreeBSD version is planned for later this year.
SVISTA supports running of different operating systems, or multiple instances of the same operating system, as “guest desktops” inside the virtual machine. This provides the user with the ability to access multiple desktops on the same computer at the same time.

“We learned a great deal from our recently completed Early Support Program”, said Bob St.John of SSI. “And now it is time to take the program to the next level. An Open Beta, available to the public, will teach us more about our products. And we expect to learn a great deal more about our users and customers and their product requirements through this program, as well.”

Though the beta program is structured to support individual users, SSI will also support evaluation programs with qualified Channel Partners and enterprise commercial accounts. According to St.John, “We believe there is significant value in our terminal services product. Applications which deploy and provide access to the SVISTA virtual machine to users across a network. However, we see these products, and the Titan management product family, as services offerings, not as ‘shrink-wrap’ products. So, we are interested in testing with in-house IT groups and fee service consultants.”

The terminal services products deploy SVISTA to a local workstation or provide users with remote access to a desktop running on the terminal services system. This can be accomplished on Linux, providing access to Microsoft Windows, OS/2, or even Linux desktops. It can even be used to extend the functionality of Citrix implementations.

Presentations providing more information on this functionality are available on http://www.serenityvirtual.com

What isn’t said in this article is that joining beta program will cost $50 (V.A.T. excluded), cause you need to buy the beta release at online shop. IMHO this is quite absurd: why one person should pay for an instable and young product when he can choose between EMC/VMware and Microsoft products lines?
Isn’t for the 50 dollars, is for the principle.

Hernan Di Pietro reviews series: VMware Workstation 4.5

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Hernán Di Pietro usually write interesting articles about desktop virtualization products on his website.
Often you can also find benchmark tests and comparisons like in this case: Hernán reviewed VMware Workstation 4.5 and compared it with older 4.0 product. Then he also compared WS4.5 GuestOS performance when it runs Windows XP and when it runs Windows Server 2003.

Go on and read whole article here!

Next generation virtualization software? Maybe Xen

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Toens Bueker pointed my attention to a Cambridge University virtualization project called Xen.

Quoting from project homepage:

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. We have a fully functional port of Linux 2.4 running over Xen, and regularly use it for running demanding applications like MySQL, Apache and PostgreSQL. Any Linux distribution (RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake) should run unmodified over the ported OS, but there is a Debian Xen 1.2 package for easy install. Christian Limpach has contributed a NetBSD port and a Linux 2.6 port, and with assistance from Microsoft Research a port of Windows XP is nearly complete. A FreeBSD port is in progress.

Notice that Microsoft Research is contributing in this work. And Xen developers reports about Windows XP porting:

The Windows XP port is nearly finished. It’s running user space applications and is generally in pretty good shape thanks to some hard work by the team over the summer. Of course, there are issues with releasing this code to others. We should be able to release the source and binaries to anyone that has signed the Microsoft academic source license, which these days has very reasonable terms. We are in discussions with Microsoft about the possibility of being able to make binary releases to a larger user community. Obviously, there are issues with product activation in this environment which need to be thought through.

Also notice this project has a lot of roadmapped high-class features like “live migration” (that VMware calls VMotion) and 64bit architecture support.
Wanna try? Go on and download a custom linux (Red Hat 9) live-cd with Xen preinstalled!

Thanks Toens, this was a big one.

SkyOS on VMware

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It really seems many users are interested in the new single-man-developed operating system called SkyOS. For this reason Kelly Rush, GUI team manager, realized a video about how to install new SkyOS 6 beta on a VMware virtual machine.
But pay attention: SkyOS is in beta and VMware Workstation isn’t developed to catch SkyOS hardware calls, so everything will run 3-5 times slower than on a physical machine.

Microsoft will release its own P2V solution for Virtual Server 2005

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In some previous posts I reported Microsoft would eventually provide its own Phisical to Virtual (P2V) migration tool, releasing a modified version of Automated Deployment Services (ADS) free tool.

During a TechEd 2004 session, a Microsoft representative revealed this will happen: a new “Virtual Server Migration Toolkit” will be released in beta (as web download) during Q3 2004, and in RTM during Q4 2004. This toolkit is an add-on to actual ADS 1.0 and will eventually work with Virtual Server 2005 only.
The presentation reports that this Migration Toolkit will be made of some scripts and three executables acting on already captured ADS pc image. Anyway will be a command line tool only.

This could really put a stop to P2V market and grant Microsoft a competitive advantage over VMware and third parties P2V tools companies.

VMware and IBM: competitors or not?

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Quite a month ago IBM annonced will release its own Virtualization Engine (should be official name), competing against Microsoft and EMC/VMware.
Probably this surprising announce, after years of partnership IBM and VMware (just think about xSeries and ESX Server bundle), unleashed some reactions at VMware headquarter.
But after three weeks of silence VMware announce partnership renew for three years with IBM, extending virtualization product line that Big Blue can sell with xSeries and (new entry) BladeCenter.

Quoting an article from Web Hosting Industry News:

Virtualization software developer VMware (vmware.com) announced this week that it has extended its strategic alliance with IBM (ibm.com) for three years. The alliance was first formed in 2002.

Under the agreement, IBM will offer VMware VirtualCenter, VMware VMotion, VMware ESX Server and VMware Virtual SMP software products on the IBM eServer xSeries and BladeCenter systems worldwide. IBM will offer the BladeCenter license pack with VMware integrated solutions designed specifically for eServer BladeCenter systems.

“Being able to virtualize computing and manage systems remotely is a critical aspect of on demand computing,” says Leo Suarez, vice president of IBM eServer xSeries products. “Our partnership with VMware complements the IBM on demand strategy by bringing partitioning to the xSeries and Intel-based BladeCenter product lines. Combined with IBM Virtualization Engine, VMware extends IBM’s virtualization capability across the entire xSeries and Intel-based BladeCenter servers.”

According to VMware, IBM eServer xSeries and BladeCenter systems running VMware virtual infrastructure software help customers lower their total costs by reducing the size and complexity of their IT infrastructures. VMware ESX Server and IBM BladeCenter solutions can host more than 100 virtual machines in a single BladeCenter chassis with 28 CPUs.

“With the signing of our expanded agreement and the inclusion of VMware in IBM’s Virtualization Engine strategy, our relationship with IBM continues to grow,” says Diane Greene, president of VMware. “Most importantly, our shared customers will benefit from efficient and flexible IT resources and increased hardware utilization on the IBM eServer xSeries and BladeCenter systems.”

This is strange (but not too much). IBM moves against VMware, but VMware opens arms renewing and enlarging partnership. Some could think this was the right moment to focus on partnership with Dell (since Dell always had partnership with EMC Corporation), instead VMware prefers to lay in bed with a past-friend / future-enemy.
Strange even more thinking that IBM and EMC compete on storage market…