History

The Microsoft Research labs seem extremely busy on virtualization these days. Just one week ago virtualization.info reported about a new, interesting project codenamed Bunker-V, which aims at reducing the Hyper-V trusted computing base (TCB) with a new boot and optimization methodology.

Today we report about another research called LiteGreen, which leverages hardware virtualization to reduce power consumption of unused physical desktop machines in a new way:

To reduce energy wastage by idle desktop computers in enterprise environments, the typical approach is to put a computer to sleep during long idle periods (e.g., overnight), with a proxy employed to reduce user disruption by maintaining the computer’s network presence at some minimal level. However, the Achilles’ heel of the proxy-based approach is the inherent trade-off between the functionality of maintaining network presence and the complexity of application-specific customization.
We present LiteGreen, a system to save desktop energy by virtualizing the user’s desktop computing environment as a virtual machine (VM) and then migrating it between the user’s physical desktop machine and a VM server, depending on whether the desktop computing environment is being actively used or is idle.

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In April VMware appointed a new Vice President and Federal Chief Cloud Executive: Doug Bourgeois.

Bourgeois has been the Director of National Business Center in US for more than four years, responsible for more than $400M inside the government administration. 
Before that he was the CIO of the US Patent and Trademark Office.

At VMware Bourgeois he’s in charge of the strategy and business development of the cloud computing effort for the Federal market.
Interviewed by CRN, he offered an interesting comment on the confusion in the public sector about cloud computing:

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Could the week end without a new marketing skirmish between Microsoft and VMware? Of course not, or at least not when a long time Microsoft partner is involved.

Just last week VMware announced a new, rather surprising OEM deal with Novell, which allows the virtualization vendor to distribute SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as part of the upcoming vSphere 4.1.
Additionally, VMware announced a plan to adopt SLES as the guest operating system of choice for all its virtual appliances.

Microsoft didn’t react too well (you can say it by the way they misspelled the name of the competitor, something that didn’t happen in a long time), and published its own interpretation of the deal, suggesting that customers may be locked into an inflexible offering:

…looks like VMWare finally determined that virtualization is a server OS feature. I’m sure we’ve said that once or twice over the years ;-). The vFolks now plan to ship a full version of a server OS with vSphere, and support it, to fulfill their application development and application deployment plans.

Fourth, this is a bad deal for customers as they’re getting locked into an inflexible offer. Check out the terms and conditions.

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virtualization.info has stressed about the importance of capacity planning for years now, but the number of vendors that are actively working to educate the market is extremely low, as low is the number of products available in this space.

Even VMware, despite its leadership position and remarkable product portfolio, didn’t spent too much effort in evangelizing capacity planning (and management).
The company has a hosted solution, Capacity Planner, available since October 2005 for its solution providers, a scaled down version of the service available as part of VI 3.5, Server Consolidation Advisor, since December 2007, and a brand new product called CapacityIQ, that was launched in October 2009.

Things seem changing finally as the company has begun publishing insightful articles on the topic on its recently launched Virtualization Management Blog.

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VMware just published a video demonstrating how the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) feature, part of the upcoming vSphere 4.1, works.

SIOC provides the capability to define quality of service prioritization for the I/O activity on a single host or a cluster of hosts.
The prioritization, which can be enable or disable on specific datastores, is enforced through shares and limits.
The ESX/ESXi hosts monitors the latency in communication with the datastore of choice. As soon such latency exceeds a defined threshold the datastore is considered congested.
At that point all VMs accessing that datastore are prioritized according to their defined shares.
The administrator can even define the amount of I/O operations per second (IOPS) that each virtual machine can reach.

The video shows SIOC in action and it’s really worth watching:

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At virtualization.info we usually don’t pay much attention to the various sales promotion that vendors launch to win the hyper-competitive virtualization market. Sometimes we make exceptions. And today is one of those days.

Stratus Technologies is a well-known company for its 99.999% fault-tolerant hardware, ftServer, which is made by a couple of identical machines that act as one, providing out-of-the-box HA capability.

ftServer is certified by Citrix and VMware virtual infrastructures but Stratus doesn’t seem happy enough to tell its customers that its platform is guaranteed to work.

The company has just launched a new promotion called Zero Downtime Guarantee:

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At the end of May virtualization.info reported that the application virtualization firm XenoCode changed its corporate identity and name in Spoon.

Yesterday the company officially confirmed the change and launched a new product simply called Server.

Server is a web server that allows customers to stream over HTTP application virtualization packages in the same way Spoon does on its online portal with popular open source and free 3rd party virtualized applications.
The web service can be customized of course to create any sort of branded portals.

The product supports 32 and 64bit applications and clients (only Windows is supported) can start running its applications after 5-10% of the payload has been cached locally thanks a technology that the company calls adaptive streaming.
Spoon claims that the product can scale up to 10,000 concurrent users per Server.

Spoon Server is offered in a per-seat license model for enterprises and a per-app license model for software publishers. Price starts at $1,395 for the Standard Edition with 5 End User Licenses.

In March Dell greatly boosted the popularity of the open source management console for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform based on KVM: Eucalyptus.
The product, part of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) Linux distribution maintained by Canonical, has been included in the OEM’s PowerEdge C Servers.

Now Eucalyptus Systems, the company that maintains the console, is leveraging the exposure window and releases the second version of the product, available in open source and commercial editions.

The major new feature is the support for Windows guest operating systems (2003, 2008 and 7) along with new accounting and user group management capabilities. All features that are only available in the Enterprise Edition of Eucalyptus.

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Some of our readers may have noted that the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been expanded recently, with the addition of several new companies in multiple areas, like Kaviza in the Hardware Virtualization | Connection Broker category, Unidesk in the Application Virtualization | Platforms category, C12G Labs and Eucalyptus Systems in the Hardware Virtualization | Platform Management category.

Today we add another market player: the Canadian startup VM6 Software.

The company was co-founded in 2004 by Claude Goudreault, CEO, and Eric Courville, COO.
Goudreault has a past as Senior IT Architect for large companies like General Electrics and Rogers, while Courville has been the Vice President of Sales & Business Development for PlateSpin first (from 2004 to 2007) and for Embotics then (from 2007 to 2009).
With them there’s at least another former member of the original PlateSpin team: Kirsten Foon, Director of Marketing. Foon was the Online Marketing Program Manager before Novell acquired PlateSpin.
On top of that, VM6 Software appointed Stephen Pollack, the founder and former CEO of PlateSpin, as a board advisor in November 2009.

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The open source virtualization platform KVM has been included in the Linux kernel since version 2.6.20, in February 2007, and slowly made its way into many popular Linux distributions, including Knoppix, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora, and very soon Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES).

Despite that, smaller ISVs have been shy so far to build on top of KVM and offer low cost virtual infrastructures that could rival with the only significant player in this space at the moment: Red Hat.

Things may be changing in the near future: now that Red Hat is investing in promoting its RHEV virtual infrastructure and there’s a growing awareness around KVM, new platforms may start to appear.

The first example is KaOS, a lightweight, open source KVM-based virtual machine monitor developed by Carbon Mountain.

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