History

In September 2007 AMD was the first on the market to introduce an implementation of the much awaited nested page tables technology that promises unprecedented performance for virtualization platforms: the Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI).

As every virtualization professional knows, even the most enhanced CPU extension it’s useless without a virtualization vendor that supports it in its hypervisor.
VMware introduced support for AMD-V RVI almost one year ago with the release of VI 3.5.

Today most hypervisors support it (to see which ones you may want to check the brand new virtualization.info Buyer’s Guide) but we still didn’t have much details about the performance boost that this technology provides in a virtual infrastructure.

This week VMware released a very interesting 9-pages whitepaper answering the question:

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In January 2007 Symantec started its slow entrance in the virtualization market acquiring Altiris, a company mostly known for its enterprise management products than for its brand new application virtualization product SVS (Software Virtualization Solution).

After the acquisition Symantec released just a minor update of SVS (that became the acronym of Symantec Virtualization Solution), still using the Altiris brand, in June 2007 and then nothing else.

For a long time the security giant strategy for the application virtualization market has been totally obscure, until March 2008 when a dedicated Endpoint Virtualization Business Unit was created. Then Symantec went silent again.

Now, maybe, the company is ready to move forward and tell the world its plan to compete with Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Novell and the plethora of startups that populate this market segment.

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In February the most popular virtualization company for P2V migrations , PlateSpin, was acquired by Novell for $205 Million.

In October, the founder and CEO Stephen Pollack left his own creature for personal reasons, but he couldn’t stay away of the virtualization market for much time: today the startup Embotics announces that he joined its Advisory Board.

Pollack certainly has the position to facilitate the acquisition of Embotics or at least the introduction to the thousands of PlateSpin customers.
For sure this is a good move from this young company focused on the so called VM lifecycle management market.

As most loyal virtualization.info readers know, this website publishes a report detailing the top 10 challenges in virtualization adoption.
The report didn’t change a single bit from 2007 to 2008: the report still lists ISVs support as the top issue in embracing virtualization.

Of course things change in two years, so we wanted to verify how our readers rate such issue at the end of 2008.
To do so not one but two questions of our Hardware Virtualization Adoption Survey 2008 were dedicated to this very topic.

Surprisingly enough, on over 1000 responses received in less than one month, a very small percent of people indicated the ISVs support as the biggest obstacle in adopting virtualization (just 9%) or as the biggest challenge in implementing a certain virtualization project (just 2%).

(don’t worry: virtualization.info will publish the complete results of this survey in the next few weeks)

We were ready to drastically change the report for 2009, moving support to the last position, when a remarkable issue was highlighted by the guys at vinternals.

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IBM announced today its intention to acquire Transitive, the company that offers an emulation layer (billed as cross-platform virtualization) to run applications on non-native hardware platform.

The company’s engine is behind the Apple Rosetta software that runs Mac OS applications for IBM PowerPC CPUs on Intel x86.
Transitive is also able to translate Sun Solaris applications developed SPARC architecture in a way that they can run on Linux on any x86/x64 or on Intel Itanium architecture.

In January 2008 Transitive also powered a special PowerVM Lx86 software offered by IBM, which allows to run Linux applications developed for any x86 architecture on IBM System p platforms with Power CPUs.

Probably IBM found the solution so interesting that decided to acquire the company.
The entity of the acquisition is unknown.

Just one week ago AMD demonstrated that performing a virtual machine live migration from an Intel CPU to an AMD one is possible.

Today SearchServerVirtualization publishes a very interesting article with VMware and Intel comments on that demonstration:

…”VMware currently provides full support for Enhanced VMotion Compatibility, which allows live migration of enterprise workloads across different processor families within the same CPU vendor. This technology provides customers the flexibility to move these workloads across different processor iterations in a stable and reliable way,” said Richard Brunner, the chief platform architect at VMware and a former Intel CPU architect.

But “attempting to make cross-vendor x86 instruction sets and features compatible in a VM for live migration puts this stability at risk, and so we have not pursued it,” he added…

Probably VMware is right in being so cautious about supporting cross-CPU live migrations, but the author correctly highlights its special relationship with Intel, that invested $218.5 million in the virtualization vendor (and was even rumored to be in bid to acquire it).
Maybe, without such relationship VMware would take some more risks and support the AMD effort.

While waiting for VMware and Intel to change their mind, savvy and well-respected virtualization professionals don’t mind tricking non-production ESX hosts with some CPU masking stunts (see here, here, here and here).

Finally Microsoft has decided to leverage the opportunity that its huge developers community represent for virtualization.
The company announced that the next version of its IDE, Visual Studio 2010, will seamlessly work with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to offer a complete virtual lab automation solution.

Specifically, the VLA feautres should appear in the Team System version of the product, now available as Community Technology Preview (CTP).
And because SCVMM supports 3rd party hypervisors (namely VMware ESX) the developers will be able to use them for VLA environments.

Microsoft published an interview with a couple of VS2010 program managers, talking about the new features and showing them in action.
There’s also a PowerPoint slide deck, presented at the Microsoft PDC 2008 conference, that it’s really worth to check.

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The startup VKernel is definitively full of resources, both in terms of development effort and ideas.

The company just launched an interesting website called CompareMyVM, where it hopes to collect from the community how many virtual resources are allocated for a certain workloads.

Analyzing the (anonymously) submitted data, VKernel aims at benchmarking the typical approach that virtualization professionals take when deploying new virtualized applications.

The website also allows to rate and vote each submitted configuration so that CompareMyVM can easily turn into a recommendation engine for virtualization newcomers.

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The startup Pano Logic releases today version 2.5 of its VDI platform.

Its Virtual Desktop Solution (VDS) is comprised of a connection broker, the Pano Management Server, that currently supports VMware Infrastructure, and a minimal thin client that doesn’t require an operating system or any other software.

This 2.5 release is specially important for the company as it ditches Microsoft RDP as the remote desktop protocol of choice.
Pano Logic developed its own remoting protocol called Console Direct, which delivers audio, video and USB device interfaces on the zero client.

The company published a presentation of this new technology.

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At its PDC 2008 conference last month Microsoft unveiled its effort to become a cloud computing provider through a new version of Windows called Azure.

In a couple of days some early details about the new operating system started to emerge, and we discovered that Azure will certainly leverage hardware virtualization but not through the Hyper-V 2.0 engine that Microsoft hinted about.

Now the video footage of a PDC presentation details how Windows Azure actually use the hypervisor. The guys at vinternals made a good summary of it:

Rather than put that base VHD onto local USB devices ala ESXi, Microsoft PXE boot a Windows PE “maintenance os”, drop a common base image onto the endpoint, dynamically build a personality (offline) as a differencing disk (ie linked clone), drop that down to the endpoint, and then boot straight off the differencing disk VHD (booting directly off VHD’s is a _very_ cool feature of Win7 / Server 2008 R2). I’m glad even Microsoft recognize the massive benefits of this approach – no installation, rapid rollback, etc.