History

The Sony customers that bought a VAIO laptop in the last couple of years and are interested in virtualization should know by now that their machines are not worth the money spent.
The company in fact completely locked down the computers’ BIOS, preventing the capability to enable the Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) extension.

For the newcomers, the Intel VT technology was introduced in November 2005, featured by Pentium 4 662 and 672 CPUs.
Today VT is included in almost every Intel CPU, from the Atom mobile processor to the Xeon 5500 server processors, up to the upcoming new generations Core i3, i5 and i7.

This extension is used by the virtualization vendors to perform some virtual machines stunts, like running a 64bit guest operating system on top of a 32bit host OS, without much overhead.
Every virtualization platform uses it, commercial and open source ones, hosted ones and bare-metal ones (aka hypervisors). And this list includes products like VMware ESX and Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual PC, Citrix XenServer, Oracle VM and Sun VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, Red Hat KVM and others.

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As expected, Microsoft announces today the sign off of the Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM, which includes Hyper-V R2.

The finalized feature list is known since June, when Microsoft released the Release Candidate:

• support for virtual machines live migration (expect Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition)
• support for virtual disks hot plug
• support for up to 64 logical processors (8 cores for up to 8 physical processors) 
• support for up to 1TB physical RAM (Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition only supports 32GB)
• support for up to 384 1-way virtual machines (8 vCPUs per logical processor)
• support for Processor Compatibility Mode (migrate the virtual machines across different generations of the same CPU vendor)

  

• support for Core Parking and CPU power consumption control
• support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT, formerly called nested page tables or NPT – specifically AMD RVI and Intel EPT)
• support for TCP/IP Offload Engines (TOEs)
• support for Jumbo Frames
• support for Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq)

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Just a couple of days ago Microsoft released the source code of its Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V under the GPLv2 license.
Only time will tell if the integration of these paravirtualization drivers into the Linux kernel (something that is under evaluation) will translate into a concrete benefit for the Microsoft customers.

For now the priority remains to have the two most popular enterprise distributions, Red Hat and Novell, inside the Hyper-V virtual machines. And Microsoft didn’t help much about the former so far.

Things are changing anyway : the new R2 version of the Linux Integration Components will finally support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3.
Unfortunately they still lack the support for mouse integration, that must be provided by the Linux distributor, and they still only support virtual machines with a single vCPU.

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Intel is about to launch its new consumer processors based on the 45nm Nehalem architecture that we already saw in the new enterprise-class CPUs Xeon 5500  available since March.

This new architecture includes two critical extensions to improve the performance of virtualization platforms: VT-x (nested page tables) and VT-d (I/O virtualization).

The latter may be especially important to grant superior performance in a VDI environment powered by client hypervisors, but Intel is not offering VT-d on all its new CPUs.

The new Nehalem-based processors will be dubbed Core i3, i5 and i7 in place of the well known brand name Core 2. The first ones, that may arrive as soon as early September, will feature the VT-x but not VT-d extension.

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After launching its own remoting protocol and securing a grand total of $18 million in funding, the startup Pano Logic releases an update for its VDI platform Pano System.

The new version 2.7 introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0, some performance enhancements and a couple of new features:

• Policy-based installs and updates
  This allows to perform group policy installs and updates of the Pano Direct Service seamlessly and automatically, and allowing for Pano Manager to also be updated from within the administrator interface
• Remote user logoff and disconnect commands
  This enables the administrators to use the Pano Manager interface to logoff and disconnect users accessing their desktop virtual machines (DVMs) via Pano Devices for one-console management

Just one month after the first major release in years, PHD Virtual is back with a quick minor update for its flagship product esXpress.

The new esXpress 3.6 launched today introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and a significant performance enhancement:

• Improved file level restore speeds are now up to 4x faster
• Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to 4x faster
• Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to 2x as fast
• Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded 2x the previous rates

Despite its startup size VKernel continues to extend its portfolio, releasing new tools and updating the existing ones pretty much every month.
The last creation of the company is the Optimization Pack, just entered the public beta phase.

This new product includes three different tools:

• Wastefinder
  This one is able to recognize the storage, memory and CPU resources wasted by inactive virtual machines (including their snapshots and the templates they come from).
• Rigthsizer
  This one analyzes the virtual machines average utilization and peaks and suggests how to adjust virtual storage, vRAM and vCPUs accordingly.
• Inventory
  Easy to guess this one tracks the provision of virtual machines and generate reports about the inventory.

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VMware just released a very useful, 54-pages free ebook that collects many the principal guidelines to optimize the performance of the new vSphere: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0.

It includes four chapters:

• Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere
• ESX and Virtual Machines
• Guest Operating Systems
• Virtual Infrastructure Management

If you are planning a migration to the new platform this is a highly recommended reading.

Xen.org recently published a revamped edition of its official training slide deck titled Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Unfortunately the 154 slides don’t have footnotes and there’s no audio, but it’s still a welcome effort to simplify the evangelization of the hypervisor that powers half the virtualization platforms available on the market (Citrix XenServer and Oracle VM Server/Virtual Iron).

Last week Vizioncore announced a couple of interesting changes around its executive team.

Jason Mattox is now appointed as Vice President of Support, while Tyler Jewell becomes the Vice President of Products.

Mattox is the co-founder of Vizioncore while Jewell is a long time Quest executive.

The latter joined the Vizioncore parent company in May 2005 and was the Senior Director in charge of  several business units inside Quest in the last four years.
His new position as Vice President of Products, Virtualization sounds like a major Quest take over on the Vizioncore product line and strategy, which operated as a fully independent subsidiary since its acquisition in January 2008.

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