History

Virtual Bridges is a company founded at the end of 2006, that always offered commercial flavors of QEMU for Linux, BSD and Solaris platforms.
After KVM made its appearance Virtual Bridges started to implement support for it on its products for Linux. Where KVM is not available KQEUM is automatically used.

In August it significantly extended its scope by releasing its first VDI connection broker for KVM: Win4VDI.

Compared to other products in this space, Win4VDI doesn’t connect the user to the actual guest OS, but rather to the underlying host. From there the user session is started.
In this way Virtual Bridges can leverage the authentication methods and profiles that the host is using.

The choice has been courageous.
Even if KVM is part of the Linux kernel and even if its maintainer, Qumranet, has been acquired by Red Hat, the spread of a new virtualization platform must surpass a huge obstacle: the ISVs support.
And at this point no ISV formally supported its applications inside KVM virtual machines.

Despite that, Virtual Bridges has been rewarded as IBM just closed an agreement with them to resell a bundle made by:

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Last week VMware silently released the first update for its disaster recovery solution: Site Recovery Manager 1.0.

The new build (128004) introduces some important new features like: a more granular permissions scheme that differentiates between users allows to test the recovery plan and users allowed to actually run it, and the support for raw disk mapping (which brings in the support for Microsoft Cluster Server)

The bad news is VMware doesn’t offer backward compatibility for the Update 1, so all SRM 1.0 clients must be updated along with the servers.

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At the recent Xen Summit 2008 in Tokyo a specially interesting project finally reached version 1.0: Kemari.
The project was presented for the first time in April 2007 but only now it reaches a version stable enough to be marked as GA.

Developed by Yoshiaki Tamura, Kemari is a patch for Xen 3.3 that brings host fail-over.
It works with both Linux and Windows guests OSes.

A briefly description tells enough to understand how it works:

Kemari in VMM taps event channel, pauses the guest (not suspend), prepares for transfer, and Kemari in userland transfers the guest. On failover, Kemari on the secondary restores the guest, and the backend drivers in dom0 set up the backend rings from the state of the shared rings in the guest

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Third Brigade is a security company that offers a modular solution including IDS, IPS, firewall, file integrity checker, and more modules under the name of Deep Security.

Today the company enters a dangerous territory by offering a scaled-down version of this platform to protect up to 100 virtual machines for free.
The lightweight edition is called VM Protection, offers IDS, firewall and file integrity monitoring and it’s integrated with VMware vCenter.

The danger lays in the communication, which claims thinks like “deploy cloud-ready security” and “achieve compliance with PCI and other regulations”.

The new security columnist that virtualization.info is proud to host, Christofer Hoff, already described on his personal blog the lack of security regulations in virtualization and cloud computing areas.
And he’s so right that VMware had to join the PCI Security Standards Council to influence the Data Security Standard.

How Third Brigade can promise something that not even the PCI council can?

While customers continue to wait for the Sun virtualization offering that seems never ready, the company continues to tease with short glimpses of its interface and feature-set.

This new (commercial) presentation of xVM Server 1.0 and xVM Ops Center 2.0 is the best demo so far of the two products and includes some precious details about the features that will be included in the new virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide:

• xVM Ops Center 2.0 will offer virtual machines Live Migration
• xVM Server 1.0 will be able to import VMware virtual machines

The startup VKernel continues its fast and furious release schedule. Last week was the turn of its free virtual appliance for virtual data center indexing and search: SearchMyVM.

The product hit 1.0 beta in September and now it’s already promoted to 2.0.
The only new feature included is the capability to export the query results in .CSV format.

The VKernel naming convention is very questionable. It seems that the company is trying to reach a high build number as fast as possible before the arrival of its first competitor in this space: Hyper9.

Unfortunately the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap tracks the release schedule of many companies in the market, highlighting which one makes ambiguous progresses.

There is no doubt that Cisco has seriously reconsidered its strategy in the last few years, taking several steps to extend its brand well beyond the image of a network vendor.

Obviously the most significant move so far has been the massive investment in virtualization: the company first invested $150 million in VMware IPO, then extended by another $13 million (buying 500,000 Intel’s shares), and now it’s preparing to release the first virtual switch for VMware ESX.

But Cisco may go much further than that: virtualization.info is collecting rumors from several sources that the company is preparing to fully enter the x86 server market by producing and selling a blade system  which embeds its new Nexus 5000 switches.

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Yesterday VMware released version 3.0 (build 127642) of its VDI connection broker, once known as Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM). The product is now named VMware View and offers three main new features.

First of all, the new release VMware moves deep into the Citrix and Quest/Provision Networks territory as View 3.0 is now able to coordinate end users access to Microsoft Terminal Server and generic Windows boxes with RDP enabled. VMware calls this Unified Access.

Much more than that the product experimentally introduces the much wanted offline VDI capability, allowing users to check out their virtual desktops and leave the corporate network with its image stored locally in their laptops.

Last but not least, VMware View introduces the capability to update a large-scale VDI through the use of the linked clone feature on a gold master virtual desktop.
Here the capability is called View Composer and VMware says it can cut up to 70% of the storage space (here’s a real-world example but what happens if the gold master image becomes corrupted?).

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In September a new virtualization startup surfaced the crowded market: Virtual Computer.
Founded by the same man that created Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky, the young company didn’t reveal much about its strategy so far.

But this week Virtual Computer moves its first product, NxTop, in private beta and it’s worth a check.

Like a small number of brave companies (for example Phoenix Technologies or Neocleus), Virtual Computer enhanced the open-source Xen hypervisor to fit a client hardware (like a laptop).

At the same time the company took the Microsoft hypervisor, Hyper-V, and put it on a central server.

On server-side, Hyper-V is used to serve a master virtual machine for VDI. 
On client side, the modified Xen is used to serve a branch of the the master virtual machine.

Basically, every time the administrator decides to change the master VM on the server (for example to patch it), the modified bits are saved in a delta disk (like for any snapshot) that is compressed and streamed to the client where NxTop merges it with the main virtual disk.

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Two weeks ago the Red Hat CEO hinted at his upcoming virtualization strategy but was careful enough to not say when KVM would be integrated into the company enterprise distribution.

Now CBR reports that Red Hat may be ready by the first half of 2009.

By that time the company will completely replace Xen with KVM in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but will continue to offer support for the former virtualization plaform for another seven years.

The company Vice President for EMEA, Werner Knoblich, insisted that KVM is better than Xen (or VMware ESX) when talking about large-scale deployments (thousands of virtual machines) because the virtualization engine fully leverages the Linux kernel capabilities while the bare-metal hypervisors cannot.

True or not, such comment highlights how Red Hat is looking at KVM for cloud computing much more than for server consolidation.