History

Last week virtualization.info reported that Opalis 3.6 was expected for November 25, apparently Microsoft already announced the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of the product which will serve as the automation layer for Hyper-V virtualization and Azure cloud computing.

Opalis is Run Book Automation (RBA) software, which can be used to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows. The workflows are defined in the Opalis workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers. Microsoft acquired the product from Opalis Software in December last year and eventually integrate the software with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 for which more and more details are starting to emerge as well.

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In September this year, Oracle announced the release of Oracle VM Server for SPARC version 2.0.The version initially supported only the T3 processor range, but now Oracle announced that also the T2 processors are supported as well.

The product used to be known as Sun Logical Domains (LDoms), but was rebranded after Sun merged into Oracle. The product allows creation of up to 128 virtual machines per physical server, and each can boot a restricted selection of guest operating systems, including Solaris 10 and 11, OpenSolaris , Ubuntu Linux Server Edition and OpenBSD.

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Thomas Bittman, analyst at Gartner published an article in CIO UK Magazine covering six misconceptions about server virtualization.

He states that there will be more virtual machines deployed on servers during 2011 than in 2001 through 2009 combined and that by next year, the penetration of server virtualization in midsize companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees will exceed that of the Global 500.

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Earlier this week, virtualization.info quoted an article published by Marcel van den Berg about the some of the new capabilities that System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 will provide. Microsoft publicly discussed them during its TechEd Europe 2010 conference a few weeks ago.

Now van den Berg has published a valuable follow-up post, focusing on what is new in SCVMM 2012 about storage and networking. Here’s a few key points:

• SCVMM 2012 will have two main roles: Service Management (lifecycle management of virtual machines and applications inside them) and Fabric Management (configuration management of computing, networking and storage)
• Communication with the storage layer will happen through SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) providers. SCVMM 2010 will be able to provision LUNs at the cluster level
• Capability to create logical networks (abstracting IP subnetting, VLANs, and DNS domains) for private cloud computing
• Capability to define and assign IP pools to logical networks, as well as MAC address pools to host groups
• Capability to copy a VM template from SAN to SAN on provisioning
• Support for Citrix NetScaler as load balancer to create Virtual Private Addresses (VIPs) and assign them to services

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Citrix has made available a new tool which supports moving xend based Virtual Machines to Citrix XenServer and the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP). The tool is written in Python and can work either through using command line options, or by parsing a Xen guest configuration file. The tool is capable of outputting to an xva file, or when connected to a remote XenServer/XCP host stream the VM directly. It supports both paravirtualized and Hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) based VMs.

The Xen Cloud Platform which was announced in August last year is a set of tools, of course distributed as open source, which extends the capability of the hypervisor as a cloud computing platform. It is supported by all the members of the Xen.org advisory board, including Citrix, HP, Intel, Novell and Oracle and now at version 0.5 and was released in July this year, to be available as a stable release suitable for long-term use.

In September this year, PHD Virtual released the first version of its Backup for Citrix XenServer product. Apparently they decided later to release this first version as version 5.0. Yesterday PHD Virtual announced the start of the beta for PHD Virtual Backup 5.1 for Citrix XenServer. PHD Virtual expects to make the product generally available this month as well.

The product is delivered as a virtual appliance, and integrates directly into XenCenter offering a "single pane of glass". It can backup running and powered down VMs and VM Templates, without compromising hypervisor performance or impact Dom0.

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VKernel has announced the general availability of Chargeback version 2.5. This version is the follow up of version 2.0 which was released in July this year. Chargeback, which is part of the VKernel Capacity Management Suite and supplied as a virtual appliance provides chargeback capabilities for VMware and Hyper-V environments.

This new version was developed in collaberation with Microsoft to support the private IaaS cloud environment Hyper-V Cloud which Microsoft announced beginning this month. The product integrates with Microsofts monitoring tool System Center Operations Manager and with the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal which was released earlier this month.

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Last week Citrix made available the paper: XenDesktop 4.0 Planning Guide – Hosted VM-Based Resource Allocation. The paper which contains 5 pages covers resource allocation recommendations for users running Windows 7 or Windows XP virtual desktops.

First the paper recommends to classify between Light, Normal, Power and Heavy Users, and based on this classification and OS used provide guidelines for vCPU and Memory allocation per Virtual Desktop. Also estimated IOPS for each Virtual Desktop during steady state (which doesn’t include boot, logon and logoff) are provided. The paper makes this estimates based on peak usage and not average users, so that maximum performance for end-users is guaranteed.

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The Canadian startup CiRBA has released version 6.0 of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software. This version is the follow up of version 5.3 which was released in May this year.

DCI is a capacity planning tool which supports VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, IBM pSeries and zSeries and Oracle/Sun Zones and LDOMs. The products provides pre-defined analysis templates tailored for the mentioned platforms, in order simplify use of the product.

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With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware made available the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). The VAAI can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware, which results in less CPU, memory and storage fabric bandwidth consumption, for which the technical details ware covered by virtualization.info before.

NetApp has released a paper titled: Understanding and Using vStorage APIs for Array Integration and NetApp Storage. The paper which contains 22 pages covers the following topics:

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