History

At the beginning of last week Citrix announced that both its hypervisor, XenServer 5.6, and its VDI platform XenDesktop 4.0 achieved the Common Criteria certification Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2.

While this is good start, Citrix has to work harder to match the level achieved by other virtualization platforms:

• VMware VI 3.5 (ESX 3.5 + VirtualCenter 2.5) is rated EAL4+ since February 2010 (with vSphere 4.0 certification underway for EAL4+ level too)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is rated EAL4+ since August 2009
• VMware VI 3 (ESX 2.5 + VirtualCenter 1.2) is rated EAL4+ since June 2008
• IBM POWER Virtualization Engine is rated EAL4+ since July 2006

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Between 2008 and 2009 VMware announced two ambitious projects: the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) and the Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).

The former is a client hypervisor that should be part of the VDI product View. It has been postponed multiple times to the point that rumors suggest it is indefinitely postponed.

The latter is a hypervisor for mobile phones, powered by the technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors. 
Differently from CVP, the status of MVP has been completely unknown so far: VMware suggested that it wont’ appear before the second half of 2010 but it didn’t talk about it at all in the last few months.

During the VMworld 2010 conference (read live coverage) virtualization.info had the opportunity to receive an update about both projects, which are still actively developed.

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In March Elliott Associates made an unsolicited offer to buy Novell for $2B. The $16B hedge fund already held 8.5% of Novell’s stock.
Expecting a better offer, the board rejected the takeover and put the company up for sale.

Nobody acquired the company so far, but today the New York Post reports that Novell has reached a deal to divide and sell its assets in two parts: the first one, the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) business, will go to a strategic buyer, while the other, that includes everything else, will go to a private equity firm.
Assuming this rumor is true, it will be interesting to see exactly which parts go to who.

VMware just closed a deal with Novell to OEM SLES and distribute it as part of vSphere 4.1, and to leverage the Linux operating system as the platform of choice for all its virtual appliances. 
The new owner of the SLES assets may be turn this deal into an uncomfortable partnership (unless VMware is the “strategy buyer” mentioned by the New York Post). Imagine what happens, for example, if the buyer is Oracle.

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As Citrix announced a couple of weeks ago, the first version of its client hypervisor XenClient (read virtualization.info report about it) will be available at the end of September.

In the Release Candidate 2 published at the end of August the company added a boatload of additional features:

• support for Microsoft Windows 7 64bit virtual machines
• USB support for Apple iPod/iPhone/iPad, Google Android phones, Microsoft Windows Mobile phones, fingerprint readers, webcams, smart card readers, 3G data modems, etc
• support for Bluetooh devices
• support for mouse pointer trails
• automatic slipstream of Intel Graphics drivers in Windows virtual machines
• support for Intel MT KVM Remote Control (a VNC server embedded in the vPro chipset in Core i5 and i7 CPUs)
• support for Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT)
• support for manual and automatic locking of the environment
• new alerting system

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NTPRO.NL reports about a new application that VMware previewed during the VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage) called Storage Tester:

VMware Storage Tester automates the traditional storage performance analysis cycle to reduce the diagnosis time from days to hours. It provides an automated framework for configuring and launching storage diagnostic test in large-scale virtual deployments. In future releases it will feature a rule-based diagnostic engine running a decision tree algorithm to provide diagnostic information based on a knowledge base and the stored performance database.

There are some screenshots too. Here’s one:

During the recent VMworld 2010 conference (read virtualization.info live coverage) VMware previewed a new vCenter Client for vSphere. This one is not for Windows or Linux but for the Apple iOS operating system, specifically tailored for the iPad tablet.

The product has been demonstrated on a YouTube video recorded by the VMworld TV staff:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5aAYOy2RPE[/youtube]

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Officially announced in September 2007, the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is a format to package one or more virtual machines together with a with a standards-based XML wrapper that contains the metadata necessary to correctly install and configure the virtual hard drives of each VM. 
OVF reached 1.0 status in March 2009, and 1.1 status in March 2010.

A number of leading industry players contributed to it, including: Citrix, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, Sun, Symantec and VMware.
The format is currently supported by Citrix, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware virtual infrastructures, plus by a number of infrastructure management vendors.

At the of August the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) announced that the OVF specification 1.1 has been ratified as by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standard.

The ANSI code for OVF 1.1 is ANSI INCITS 469 2010.

The next step for the DMTF will be turning OVF into an international standard by submitting it to the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC).

In May virtualization.info reported about the impressive activity of Parallels in contributing to the Linux kernel: at that time the company ranked #9 in the list of top updated for Linux kernel 2.6.32, just behind much bigger players like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Intel and Oracle.
Parallels even joined The Linux Foundation, in the hope to embed its OS virtualization technology (OpenVZ, and the commercial counterpart Virtuozzo Containers) in the kernel, turning the platform into a de facto standard in the hosting industry.

But there are another two virtualization vendors that are contributing a lot to the Linux kernel development: Citrix and VMware.
At the end of August interesting statistics were published by LWN.net: Citrix is ranked #12 and VMware is ranked #20 among top updaters for the new 2.6.34 kernel.

What’s interesting is that VMware is intensifying its activity for the new kernel. Maybe this is related to the planned effort to standardize the guest operating system in its virtual appliances with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

Thanks to Apple, and a weak competitive effort from Intel, ARM is gaining a lot of attention and momentum. Not only the ARM processors power millions of iPods, iPhones, iPads, countless of headsets from all other phone manufacturers, Digital TV set top boxes, wireless routers and more. Rumors even suggest that Facebook may be replacing its x86 servers, powered by Intel and AMD CPUs, with brand new ARM-powered machines.
The Facebook infrastructure has to manage over 500M users worldwide, representing a leading example in how to deal with massive amount of data. If the rumors are true, the rest of the industry may start following the Facebook experiment, granting to ARM an unprecedented position.

So it’s with much interest that the industry followed the announcement of the new Cortex-A15 CPU, launched last week.

The processor is especially interesting as it introduces support for hardware virtualization platforms: the ARM Architecture Virtualization Extension standardizes the architecture for implementation of the hardware acceleration in ARM application processor cores while the Large Physical Address Extensions (LPAE) technology provides a second level of MMU translation table so that each 32-bit virtual memory address can be mapped within a 40-bit physical memory range.

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Last week Red Bend Software, a mobile software management company, announced the acquisition of the virtualization startup VirtualLogix (formerly Jaluna) for an undisclosed sum.

VirtualLogix is a US company founded in 2002 and focused on hardware virtualization for embedded devices. It offers a hypervisor, VLX, that can run real-time operating systems side by side with Windows and Linux flavors as guest OSes on Intel, Texas Instruments, Freescale and ARM and Power architectures.
Leading venture capital firms like Intel Capital, Index Ventures, Atlas Ventures and Esprit Capital Partners invested in the company so far.

VirtualLogix has very few competitors, including Trango Virtual Processors, which has been acquired by VMware in November 2008, and Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), which received a major investment from Citrix in January 2009.

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