History

Despite the company has been acquired by VMware, Dunes had time to release a new product: VS-O Lifecycle 1.0.

The new solution is based on well-known automation framework Dunes offers as VS-O flagship product, and leverages part of its capabilities in following features:

• Automated virtual machines provisioning and decommissioning
• Provisioning moderation and delegation
• Assisted provisioning
• Virtual machines lifecycle tracking
• Self-service web portal

Considering VMware acquisition probably this product will never be released to the general public. For this reason the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap will not be updated as usual.

It’s interesting to note that another Dunes product, the one addressing VDI scenarios called VD-O, seems disappeared immediately after acquisition announcement.

The open source OS virtualization solution OpenVZ, supported by SWsoft, is now available for Linux kernel 2.6.22.

The new version introduces support for two important features:

• PID Namespace
  PID namespace ensures that a set of processes does not see any other processes that do not belong to the same set and is an essential prerequisite for live migration.
• UID Namespace

OpenVZ patch for Linux kernel 2.6.22 is available here.

Popular virtualization company PlateSpin reaches version 3.1 of its capacity planning solution PowerRecon.

Despite the minor update numbering PowerRecon 3.1 introduces some critical features like VMware VirtualCenter integration and chargeback capabilities. In details PowerRecon 3.1 features:

• Virtual Machine Growth Reporting
  The practice of quickly and easily creating a new virtual machine to address almost any requirement can result in rapid proliferation of virtual machines. PlateSpin PowerRecon enables organizations to better monitor and manage the growth of VMware Infrastructure without having to implement restrictive IT policies or lengthy approval procedures. By providing greater visibility into how the dynamic virtual infrastructure is growing and changing, IT directors gain a deeper understanding of how many virtual machines are deployed, who owns them and how they use available resources.
• Flexible Chargeback Reporting
  Virtualization creates a pool of computing resources that can be shared across many different workloads, which need to be tracked and whose costs need to be allocated appropriately. With PowerRecon, IT organizations can track, assign or report on costs and allocate IT charges to different business units based on their actual disk, CPU and network usage per virtual machine. PowerRecon automatically converts IT resource usage data into billable values over set time periods such as monthly or quarterly, allowing IT departments to more easily and accurately charge for shared resources. Chargeback reports can be automatically delivered to business units via email in a variety of formats.
• VMware VirtualCenter Integration
  Integration with VMware VirtualCenter provides visibility into the virtual infrastructure, improving data center management and operations. Familiar virtual infrastructure terms and organizational models accelerate ramp-up time and reduce software learning curves.
• One-click Inventory Collection
  Easily obtain the latest inventory of the virtual hosts in the data center with one-click inventory refresh or schedule inventory collection at regular intervals to keep pace with a rapidly growing and changing virtual infrastructure. Capture a detailed inventory of the contents of a virtual machine to obtain a more thorough and holistic view of the virtual environment.

PowerRecon Virtual Infrastructure Edition pricing is based on a per VMware ESX Server CPU model and starts at $295 per socket.

The Inventory Edition of PowerRecon is still in place and still offered free of charge. It’s available here.

virtualization.info recognizes Accountability as one of top 10 challenges in virtualization adoption. PlateSpin efforts in this area are welcome, so the Virtualization Industry Challenges report has been updated accordingly.

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

Virtualization firm Provision Networks, focused on VDI market, releases newest version of its Virtual Access Suite (VAS).

VAS 5.9 introduces a long list of enhancements including:

• Integration with Virtual Iron (expected after companies signed an OEM agreement in April 2007)
• Integration with Wyse ThinOS
• Integration with HP ThinConnect
• Integration with Neoware Image Manager and its VDI-edition thin clients
• Scheduled virtual machines power operations (power on and suspend)
• Virtual Channel Policies (access policy to local devices for RDP connections)
• Support for Multiple Resource Pools and Data Stores
• New Linux, Solaris and Java clients

Download a trial of new VAS 5.9 here.

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

The canadian firm CiRBA, focused on capacity planning for large-scale infrastructures, released new version of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI) product.

In DCI 4.4 CiRBA introduces enhanced integration with VMware Infrastructure 3 plaftorm, allowing customers to maintain best virtual machines arrangement, and not only planning initial placement:

• VMware DRS Integration
  VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) determines motion paths for virtual machines based on workload balancing criteria, without consideration for the technical and business constraints used to determine virtual machine placement. While DRS supports affinity and anti-affinity rules to identify where systems should or shouldn’t reside, these rules must be developed and entered manually. CiRBA 4.4 enables organizations to analyze environments, factor in technical and business constraints, and automatically populate and synchronize VMware DRS rules.
• Virtualization Overhead Modeling
  The ability to accurately model workloads is critical to virtualization planning. Virtual machines create CPU overhead, and until now VMware customers had to rely on percentage-based estimates of those overhead levels. With Version 4.4, CiRBA enables organizations to accurately model VMware workloads including virtualization overhead by using an algorithm to automatically calculate CPU overhead by converting disk and network IO into projected CPU load.
• VMware VMotion Compatibility Analysis
  VMotion is a powerful capability that enables organizations to migrate virtual images between compatible servers without experiencing downtime. CiRBA has developed new rules that enable organizations to map where VMotion will and won’t work amongst servers they already own or intend to purchase.

CiRBA will release DCI 4.4 on end of September, with a licensing model based on monthly subscription.

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

After announcing new version of its virtual lab management solution, VMLA 5.3, in June, Surgient finally releases the product and, for the first time ever, allows potential customers to download a part of it (the Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System or VQMS) directly.

Download a 45-days trial of VQMS 5.3here.

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

Keeping focus on Apple market as long as possible, Parallels already releases first Feature Update for recently launched Desktop 3.0.

The new update introduces performance improvements, enhancements to Parallels Coherence Mode and a new feature called Mirrored Desktop, Documents and Media, which basically replicates Mac OS user environment inside Windows guest operating systems.

Download a trial here.

After revealling that codename Viridian beta 1 will be included in Windows Server 2008 RTM, set for February 28, Microsoft published a 10-minutes demo of the technical preview included in Window Server 2008 RC0.

It’s the first time Microsoft shows Viridian to a broad audience since first demo presented at WinHEC 2006.

The video shows Viridian integration in a full version of Windows, a scenario which Microsoft didn’t plan initially, stating that virtualization capabilities would be available only on Windows Server Core 2008 Edition.

The whole video is available for download here and in streaming here.

The upcoming ESX Server 3i VMware announced at VMworld 2007 will be available from several OEMs, as virtualization.info disclosed last month.

While IBM was the first to announce support for this new product in new System x3950 M2, Dell will be the first to ship it, as The Register is reporting:

The mysterious Dell virtualization server appliance – code-named Veso – will ship at the end of November, leading the charge for systems with embedded hypervisors.

VMware CEO Diane Greene and Dell CMO Mark Jarvis revealed technical details about Veso during a speech today at the VMworld conference. The Veso box will ship as a two-socket unit based on AMD’s new four-core Opteron chip. It will also have twice as much memory as Dell’s typical two-socket systems and have four I/O channels as opposed to two on normal units.

Jean-Baptiste Su published a photo of the Veso and some technical details:

• 2 x AMD quad-core Opteron
• 16 memory slots (up to 128GB RAM @ 667GHz)
• 4 PCI slots
• 20 Network Interface Cards (10/100Mbits with 10GBit option at a later time)

While waiting for the launch Dell published a 5 minutes demo of the new Veso here.

Late November launch may imply the whole VMware Infrastructure 3.5 will be ready for that time. This fits the scheduling considering the new platform is already in beta 2.

virtualization.info invites Dell, AMD and VMware to provide a Veso unit for an exclusive review.

Quoting from the Novell official announcement:

Novell today announced significant enhancements in the performance of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server when the Linux operating system is running as a virtual machine guest in a VMware environment. To deliver this improved performance, Novell modified the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel to support the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), a communication mechanism between the guest operating system and hypervisor that simplifies the task of virtualization and makes Linux a more efficient guest operating system when running in VMware environments. The VMI modifications, along with the paravirt-ops interface, have been accepted by the upstream Linux development community and will be included in upcoming releases of the standard Linux kernel, as well as future versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.

… the VMI code is available today to customers who participate in Novell’s beta program…

Novell currently is the most active enterprise distribution provider in virtualization industry. Besides this integration the company it’s also a major contributor of open source hypervisor Xen, which includes in its SUSE Enterprise Linux as well, and it has a long term partnership with Microsoft to grant interoperability with upcoming codename Viridian.