History

From its corporate blog James O’Neill, IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft, reveals that Virtual Server 2005 support will end in 2014 and that the company will not release a new version of the product, betting on upcoming Hyper-V success.

O’Neill also briefly wrote about Virtual PC’s future, a very hot topic which has been carefully avoided so far.

First release of Hyper-V is only aimed at server virtualization and it’s unsure what Microsoft will offer for desktop virtualization in the future: a version of Hyper-V for Vista, a new release of Virtual PC or just a new version of Application Virtualization (former SoftGrid)?

The new virtualization startup Fortisphere just launched and it’s already grabbing away a key figure from a main player: SWsoft.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise virtual machine lifecycle management software, today announced that Dan Harding has joined the Fortisphere management team as vice president of sales.

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Armed with significant experience in the burgeoning virtualization market, Harding comes to Fortisphere from SWsoft, a leader in server virtualization and automation. As vice president of enterprise sales for SWsoft, he developed and grew virtualization revenue by more than 200 percent annually for the U.S. enterprise markets.

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Prior to joining SWsoft, Harding was regional vice president of sales for Cable and Wireless, a leader in IP network and enterprise hosting solutions. Before joining Cable and Wireless, he was employed by dynamicsoft (purchased by Cisco), a leading provider of infrastructure software. Prior to dynamicsoft, Harding spent six years at UUNet where he completed his tenure as regional vice president of carrier sales, managing a sales team that focused on key accounts including Dell, AOL, Bellsouth, Earthlink, Savvis, Qwest, and Gateway. Dan holds a B.S. in business administration from Marymount University…

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft, a fast-growing virtualization and automation solutions company, was named “European Entrepreneur of the Year 2007”. The prestigious Audemars Piguet “Changing Times Award” rewards the European entrepreneur whose company has made the greatest impact on the greatest number of people over the past three years.

The award is sponsored by Audemars Piguet, one of the world’s premier watchmakers in cooperation with the European Tech Tour Association, an independent organization composed of key contributors to the high-technology industry. The association was founded in Geneva in 1998 in response to growing interest in emerging technology companies in various European regions…

In one day the company once famous for VMware disaster recovery solutions, Vizioncore, enriched its corporate image and broadened its portfolio to cover markets.

It happened this summer, when Quest acquired Invirtus, a company focused on virtual machines optimization and P2V migration, and integrated its offering into the Vizioncore one.

Vizioncore is not wasting time and after few months since the merge it’s already working to gain a significant visibility in the new segments: next week the US company based in Chicago will announce the Technology Preview of a major updated of the most popular product from Invirtus portfolio: vConverter 3.0.

The new version is aimed at serious competition, mostly with PlateSpin which is a leader in P2V migration space, reaching impressive results in performances: a physical server with 4GB hard drive (half of which is filled) can be live migrated in less than three minutes thanks to patented features vzBoost and Hyperfill (this time includes vConverter installation inside the target server. The migration itself takes less than two minutes).

Both new features increase conversion speed, reaching up to 10x speed with data preallocation techniques (Hyperfill) and kernel level drivers (vzBoost) specific for VMware ESX Server.

Besides VMware hypervisor, vConverter 3.0 will also support Microsoft and Virtual Iron virtualization platforms.

The pre-release product is already available here.

CNR is reporting an interesting news about the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) which is discussing implications of virtualization in software licensing:

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The group consists of FAST members Centennial Software, Computacenter, CSC Computer Sciences, HP, Hitachi Europe, ManageSoft, SMS Services, Rocela, Salans and Symantec/Altiris.

John Lovelock, chief executive of FAST, said: “Virtualisation is one of the hottest topics on everyone’s mind right now but there is a big gap in understanding what it really means for organisations looking to adapt the technology – both in terms of the impact it has on the day to day running of the business, the possibility of cost savings as well as the potential for ambiguity over licensing agreements with the software publishers.”

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He said there is not currently an easy way to measure usage on virtual environments and that technically it is possible but a discovery agent has to be deployed there to identify the software’s presence…

It really seems that virtualization represents an opportunity to refresh the business for everybody, no matter what.

Software licensing tracking inside virtual machines presents today identical difficulties than in physical infrastructures. There is no difference at all.

On the contrary virtualization will allow, on the long run, to more effectly enforce software licensing in at least two ways:

• transparently tracking installed software, monitoring activity inside virtual machines from the host level
• enforcing licensing limits and expirations through virtual machines security wrappers like VMware ACE or Sentillion vThere

Members of FAST should care of two classes of different problems instead:

• facilitating the first phase of the software licensing reform for those vendors who are not yet virtualization-friendly (Oracle is a very good example, despite the launch of its own hypervisor)
• start considering a second phase of this reform, to fairly handle software cost in application streaming scenarios, where a customer doesn’t use a specific application all the time.

Unfortunately virtualization represents more an economical and political revolution, rather than a technological one, so this will take a lot of time.

For the first time OpenVZ released these days a new class of patches for Linux kernel.

The new patches available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (both x86 and x64 versions), has been developed in a way it’s compatible with Xen patches, which RHEL already offers out of the box. In this way users can decide which virtualization approach they prefer, or even run both of them in parallel.

In any other case OpenVZ and Xen patches would have been incompatible with each other obliging users to choose one.

The new patches are available here.

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, provider of infrastructure virtualization software for large data centers, today announced that Scalent V/OE software will be available through HP in December 2007 as part of the HP BladeSystem c-Class Solution Builder Program.

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Making Scalent V/OE software available through the HP BladeSystem Solution Builder Program will enable customers to use their existing HP relationships, contracts and purchasing agreements to obtain Scalent software. Implemented in an HP environment, the software lets customers seamlessly add, swap, and failover between blade servers, while transparently maintaining the consistency and integrity of their business systems. This extends the functionality of HP’s BladeSystem Insight Control and the recently announced enhancements to BladeSystem virtualization and power management features…

Starting from a misleading CRN article, Brian Madden shares some thoughts about the future of server-based computing. Are Terminal Services farms doomed to be replaced by more complex but at the same time more flexible virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI)?

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First, recent changes in hardware have allowed VDI to “narrow the gap” in terms of number of users per server. Now that most servers are dual and quad core (and moving higher), VMware/Xen/Hyper-V can / might scale up on those boxes as good as (or better even?) than Terminal Server.

Some people say “well sure, you can manage the images as one if they are stateless, but stateless won’t work in our environment.” I agree 100%. If stateless doesn’t work, then VDI image management will be a nightmare. But the point that I’m making is not comparing VDI to the traditional method. I’m comparing VDI to Terminal Server, and all Terminal Server sessions are (by definition) stateless since all users on the server share the same disk image…

Read the whole article at the source.

Quoting from the Distributed Management Task Force official announcement:

The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today announced the release of a new standard for managing virtualized environments. Five preliminary profiles, all based on DMTF’s Common Information Model, are now publicly available and are ready for implementation. Driven by the efforts of DMTF’s System Virtualization, Partitioning and Clustering (SVPC) work group, the organization is turning standardized virtualization management into reality.

With the first set of virtualization management profiles now available, a number of DMTF member companies and Alliance Partners have already begun implementation. The next step for the SVPC work group is to begin efforts to foster interoperability.

The new standard also recognizes supported virtualization management capabilities, including the ability to:

• discover inventory virtual computer systems
• manage lifecycle of virtual computer systems
• create/modify/delete virtual resources
• monitor virtual systems for health and performance

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This is a major announcement for the virtualization industry.

VMware, Citrix, Novell, Sun and IBM, all involved in virtual infrastructures management, along with many other partners are supporting this effort.

We’ll see if and when top players as Microsoft, Virtual Iron, SWsoft, Red Hat, and smaller companies busy in virtual lab management, like Surgient and VMLogix, and in virtual machines lifecycle management, like Embotics and ManageIQ, will adhere these new standards.

Standards are available here:

• System Virtualization Profile (DSP1042)
• Virtual System Profile (DSP1057)
• Generic Device Resource Virtualization Profile (DSP1059)
• Resource Allocation Profile (DSP1041)
• Allocation Capabilities Profile (DSP1043)

Update: ManageIQ is the first company in the VM lifecycle management segment to adhere the new standards.

Announcing its own Xen-based hypervisor, Oracle has been pretty clear about its support policy for 3rd party virtualization platforms: Oracle VM is the only x86-based server virtualization environment on which Oracle products are supported.

Since that day, trying to avoid panic from thousands of customers, VMware sales force spent endless efforts trying to reassure that previous support agreements with Oracle would be still in place.

But which kind of unformal support agreement Oracle may grant to VMware customers?

The enlightening answer comes from Oracle itself which replies an inquiry from ComputerWorld this way:

Oracle has not certified any Oracle software on VMware virtualized environments.

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Oracle support will assist customers running Oracle software on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS without virtualization, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running VMware. If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS without virtualization. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware for support.

Which basically means no support for virtualization at all.

That part of VMware sales force stating that this is a support agreement are implictly asking customers to be ready to reinstall their entire Oracle environment on a physical server, which raises several questions:

• Where the customer is going to install the environment?
• On a new server? If so how much time it would take to order, purchase, deliver, reinstall and configure? Weeks, months?
• And once on the new server, how the customer can grant the new hardware will not influence in some way the reproduction of the issue?
• On an existing server? If so how much time it would take to recognize the right hardware, free it from current platform, reinstall and configure?
• And one on the recycled server, how the customer can grant the old hardware will not influence in some way the reproduction of the issue?
• How much time the entire operation will take just to reach the point where the support request can be opened?
• And how much money the entire troubleshooting will take in terms of man/hours?

All these questions should be answered considering that on most cases Oracle products are used in production environment, for mission critical roles. So such form of support agreement would cost the company probably much more than just installing Oracle on a physical server, ignoring virtualization completely.

Such consideration appear evident to those professionals dealing with business continuity plan and related disaster recovery scenarios, but may be less clear for anybody else.

Update: virtualization.info is now in possess of the official transcript for the Oracle Analyst Meeting of Nov. 14 (the day Oracle VM was made avaiable online, and several days before the above company answer provided to ComputerWorld).

In this transcript Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, answers John DiFucci, analyst at Bear Stearns, about support policy for VMware customers:

John DiFucci: Okay. And, the second question one. Your one stack message, although it does resonate well, I think. But, some of the exclusivity
that it implies or, not only implies, but with the Oracle VM message that you only support Oracle products on Oracle VM and not on VMware.

Larry Ellison: Oh, no, no, we aren’t — we clearly support — we only support –. Lots of people are running Oracle products on VMware.

JDF: Exactly. So…

LE: That’s cool. And, it’s great. Our strategy is to be as… is to be open, and to support as many different product as we have… and platforms as we can.

JFD: So, if a customer has a problem running on VMware and — with the Oracle database, then call for support, the support will be
given in that kind of configuration?

LE: Yes, essentially, yes.

Now, while the essentially word introduces some vagueness in the confirmation, it still represents a statement of support.

Now considering that Oracle CEO provided this answer two days after the publishing of Oracle VM FAQs, which state exactly the opposite, and days before ComputerWorld answer, this basically means two possible things: first one is that Oracle strategy about 3rd party virtualization support is a complete mess and the company is unable to take a decision and stick with it, the other is that Oracle CEO provided an incomplete answer on purpose.

In both cases VMware customers should start asking very clearly and loudly an official support statement to Oracle before being trapped in endless support issues.

virtualization.info will provide updated reports if any reader will decide to share any answer or document Oracle will provide.