History

Ten days after the much awaited launch of VI3.5 (aka ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5), VMware is ready to release the special version of ESX Server called 3i.

ESX Server 3i completely drops the so called Console Operating System (COS), based on a customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux distro, and appears as a lightweight 32MB liveCD (no need for hard disk installation).

The new architecture is offered today as a parallel version, but VMware clarified in several occasions that this is the future of ESX Server.

The product was originally planned for OEM distribution only, pre-installed inside Solid State Drives (SSD) by Dell, IBM, HP and others popular vendors, but VMware is now offering it as stand-alone download.

Unfortunately the only two servers which are supported in this first release (build 67921) are Dell 2950 and HP DL380 G5 (experimental support).

The amount of features included in stand-alone ESX Server 3i is limited (just the vSMP and the VMFS support, you’ll need VirtualCenter bundles to get more) but the starting price is very interesting: $459 (without support). Any VirtualCenter 2.5 is able to support and manage it.

Download it here.

An unexpected bad news closes the year: from its corporate blog Anthony F. Voellm, Principal Software Development Lead of Hyper-V at Microsoft, reveals that the upcoming hypervisor will not boot from virtual SCSI hard drives.

There are two types of disk controllers that Hyper-V supports: SCSI and IDE. There are two IDE controllers and four SCSI controllers available.

Each IDE controller can have two devices. You can not boot from a SCSI controller. This means an IDE disk will be required. The boot disk will be IDE controller 0 Device 0. If you want a CDROM it will consume an IDE device slot…

It wouldn’t be a problem if only virtual SCSI would provide no benefits over virtual IDE. But it’s quite the opposite:

…The IDE controller implements a well-known IDE controller and this means there is extra processing before the I/O is sent to the disk. This processing occurs in vmwp.exe (a user mode process that exists for each started VM. More on this in a later post). Once the IDE emulation is complete the I/O is sent into the Root Partition’s I/O Stack. I/O completion requires a trip back to vmwp.exe.

The SCSI controller is not emulated. The SCSI controller uses VMBUS (Virtual Machine BUS. More on this in a later post). The I/O’s pass from the Child (aka Guest) Partition to the root over VMBUS and enter the I/O stack. You can already see one less process/machine context switch is required because vmwp.exe does not get invoked. Once and I/O completes its completion is sent over VMBUS…

So performance bottleneck of virtual IDE and technical limitations of virtual SCSI will oblige customers to have two virtual disks for each VM. A configuration hard to setup in P2V migration scenarios, and hard to manage on large scale deployments.

Quoting from SearchServerVirtualization:

…

For one thing, “they act like Oracle did in the 1990s — like they’re the only ones,” adding that “they’re still totally predatory on their pricing.”

His company has spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars with VMware and recently inked an enterprise license agreement (ELA) without seeing any savings from buying ESX licenses individually. “You’d think that if you sign a deal to spend a couple million bucks over the next two years, you’d get a discount,” he grumbled. But that hasn’t been the case. In fact, he continues to receive better price quotes from value-added resellers (VARs) than he does by going directly to VMware.

…

With the lack of mature virtualization alternatives on the market, the source said he is comfortable signing a two-year ELA, but no longer. In the next three or four years, other players may emerge with credible enterprise stories. “As soon as the critical point hits, people are going to switch [to other virtualization vendors] if they continue treating people this way.” …

Read the whole article at the source.

Just before the end of the year PlateSpin releases a relevant minore update to its flagship product PowerConvert.

The new version 6.8 introduces some remarkable updates which clearly expose how the company is looking at Microsoft like never in the past:

• Enhanced migration (P2V Server Sync via Take Control) for Windows source OS (through live snapshot plus incremental copy of modified data during P2V conversion)

• Support for Microsoft Virtual Server R2 Service Pack 1 as destination virtualization platform
• Support for Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS) as snapshot method
• Support for Windows 2000 Update Rollup 1 as source OS
• Support for encrypted (FIPS) virtual hard drives and partitions in Windows source OS
• Support for logical volumes (through LVM) in Linux source OS
• Bandwidth compression and throttling for block-based transfer

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Just before the end of the year Veeam releases a minor update for its Reporter.

The new 2.5.1 version doesn’t introduce any new feature but some improvements in setup and diagrams layout.

Download a trial here.

ComputerWorld reports that:

Springboard Research has identified Citrix, Virtual Iron and SWSoft as prime candidates for acquisition in 2008 as part of its list of hot predictions for the new year.

The article doesn’t reveal much more than that but it’s a good excuses to consider who may want to buy Citrix, Virtual Iron or SWsoft.

First of all both Citrix and Virtual Iron base their hypervisor on Xen, so a buyer looking for a virtualization vendor would consider one or another probably because of other factors, like the financial situation, the sales channel size, the partners programs, and obviously the acquisition budget.

From a strategical point of view, Citrix based its dominance on the terminal services market so far, which is too reliant on Microsoft technologies to be interesting for any other company but Microsoft.

But at the same time Citrix made several key acquisitions in the application streaming and virtualization domains buying Ardence and XenSource: Microsoft may want to acquire those technologies only in case its own, coming from Connectix and Softricity acquisitions, demonstrated to be too weak.

It’s unlikely Microsoft may want to acquire Citrix to remove an uncomfortable competitor, considering the two act as good partners even if they will actually compete in the virtualization market as soon as Microsoft will release Hyper-V next year.

Virtual Iron surely is less expensive than Citrix, and may be the preferred choice for those companies which want to enter just the virtualization market without facing a huge investment.

The company may be an acquisition target for those vendors like IBM, Novell or Red Hat, which base a part or the entire business on Linux.

Despite the good success obtained by its subsidiary Parallels, SWsoft is mostly interesting because of its OS virtualization technology Virtuozzo, which conquered a large portion of web hosting market.

Also this technology may be interesting for Microsoft which stated one year and a half ago that OS virtualization is another area where to invest.

After acquiring most web hosting automation companies in mid 2006, SWsoft (to be Parallels) isn’t happy enough and closes the 2007 shopping year with WebHost Automation.

Quoting from the official announcement:

SWsoft today announced it has acquired WebHost Automation Ltd., maker of the Helm control panel and billing software for Windows with nearly 1.5 million end users worldwide. WebHost Automation is based in Bristol, U.K.

…

For SWsoft, the acquisition adds a significant worldwide customer base, including strong positions in the U.K. and South America. It also extends the reach of independent software vendors (ISVs) who package their software using the Application Packaging Standard (APS) to more end users who can take advantage of their software solutions. Helm customers benefit from an increased range of automation solutions from SWsoft.

…

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Both companies are privately held…

The 1st of November virtualization.info officially launched its own community: the virtualization.info Vanguards network.

This community has slightly different purposes than traditional ones where members can discuss in forums all together: virtualization world is already full of these good efforts, from vendors like VMware, Xen, KVM, Microsoft, Citrix, and many others.

The Vanguards network wants to be a different tool, able to simplify one to one connections between highly skilled virtualization professionals.

Work together in international projects, share experiences about products and technologies, reach virtualization vendors in a more effective way, are all goals of this community since day one.

But something unexpected happened right after the launch: the initiative not only attracted top IT architects from popular system integrators and biggest multinationals, fully busy every day on large scale virtual infrastructures, but also key figures in the industry at management level.

So in just few days we reached and surpassed 450 members, which now surprisingly include representatives from well-known virtualization vendors, like CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, Vice Presidents, Directors, GMs, along with Venture Capitalists and Industry Analysts.

They come from US and Europe for sure, but also from India, China, Japan. All together to reach a new level of interaction with those people which use virtualization at maximum levels.

And we didn’t even start to provide benefits for our members! During 2008 virtualization.info Vanguards will find additional reasons to be members of this community and influence the industry.

Sign up for free and stay tuned!

From its private blog, Christian Hammond, Senior Software Engineer at VMware, reveals that the next version of popular Workstation will be 6.5 and it already reached the private beta (Friend & Family) status. But the most important information is that Workstation 6.5 will have Unity, the user interface feature that is usually called seamless window in the Terminal Services world, and that both Parallels and VMware introduced earlier this year in their virtualization products for the Apple market.

Right after the release of VMware Infrastructure 3.5, Mike Laverick publishes a 88-pages guide describing all changes introduced in this major update.

While it was written during VI 3.5 beta and RC phases, it’s a great start to understand the product’s evolution at a very technical level.

Download the guide, free of charge, here.