History

From official Xen development mailing list Keir Fraser, Project Leader at XenSource, announces a major change in Xen version numbering along with several new features:

The imminent next Xen release introduces a host of important new features including PV 32-on-64, HVM save/restore, and XenAPI 1.0. Now is a good time to bump our version number and reclaim the redundant second digit!

We plan to rename the xen-3.0.5-testing.hg tree to xen-3.1.0-testing later today. The release candidate will be renamed to 3.1.0-rc4. The final release will be called 3.1.0 (as opposed to 3.0.5-0 in the old numbering scheme).

Further bug-fix releases in the 3.1 series will be called 3.1.x (as opposed to 3.0.5-x in the old numbering scheme)…

Read the whole message at source.

Thanks to Tim Freeman for the news.

Followng release of second beta for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007, Microsoft is also launcing beta 2 of its Virtualization Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM, formerly MOM) 2007 Virtualization.

This management pack provides a tight integration between two products, and will enable reporting capabilities inside Virtual Machine Manager 2007.

Enroll for this public beta here.

At the same time Microsoft also released beta 2 of Virtual Machine Manager 2007 as virtual appliance to simplify product evaluation.

The .vhd image is available in the beta program site.

The US startup InovaWave just launched a public beta program for its new version of optimization tool for virtualization platforms: DXtreme.

This new version, available only for Windows platforms at the moment, introduces support for 64bit virtual machines and will be officially presented at upcoming Microsoft TechEd conference in Orlando.

InovaWave also hired Mike Ames as Vice President of Finance and Administration.

Prior to joining InovaWave, Ames served as CFO at Neogent (purchased by Sun Microsystems) and has held a number of financial leadership positions at Vignette, Tivoli, Lotus, and IBM.

Quoting from the Akorri official announcement:

…

The new BalancePoint 1.5 capabilities for VMware include:

BalancePoint Examiner for VMware:

• Delivers end-to-end performance information for ESX Server and VM guests running on data center infrastructure, enhancing native VMware VirtualCenter management capabilities
• Provides deep visibility into the server and storage resources that are being used by applications running on VMware
• Helps troubleshoot and resolve VMware application performance issues

BalancePoint Analyzer for VMware:

• Helps optimize performance by identifying points of resource contention and assessing the impact of data center infrastructure changes
• Provides specific recommendations for improving application service levels
• Analyzes performance and capacity utilization over time, keeping track of metrics even as VMs are migrated to different servers using VMotion

Quoting from the Network General official announcement:

Network General Corporation, the leading provider of IT Service Assurance solutions, today announced Virtualization Forensics, the next in a series of Business Forensics solutions built on the Network Intelligence Suite. The new Virtualization solution gathers and reports performance data specific to virtual machines from VMware and Microsoft, spanning virtual and physical servers.

…

With the delivery of Virtualization Forensics, Network General provides application monitoring products integrated with traditional packet-level network and application traffic analysis products, yielding an unparalleled view of IT services. The performance of multiple virtualization technologies are viewed across IT domains by powerful web-based Business Container consoles, delivering management and performance information through a real-time view of the overall business instead of narrow technology performance metrics…

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software, today announced that it has successfully completed interoperability testing to become an IBM System Storage Proven solution. The validation ensures customers that Virtual Iron’s virtualization and management platform is optimized for IBM-based data centers. Virtual Iron successfully completed interoperability testing with the IBM DS4000 series storage array families…

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, the leading provider of server repurposing software for large data centers, today announced it has won a Red Herring 100 Spring Award, given to the top 100 private technology companies based in North America .

Red Herring’s editorial staff diligently surveyed the entrepreneurial scene throughout the North American region and from 800 candidates identified the top 100 companies that are leading the next wave of innovation. Companies were selected based on quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial data, quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development…

Germany startup innotek is not just lastest player in the virtualization industry, offering a new hosted virtualization solution called VirtualBox.

innotek is preparing to launch another virtualization product, this time a true hypervisor (like VMware ESX Server, Xen and upcoming Microsoft Windows Server Virtualizatoin or codename Viridian), called hyperkernel.

Based on existing product’s description hyperkernel is going to be the first microkernel based hypervisor on the market (VMware ESX Server vmkernel is not).

The information is interesting not just in itself but also because innotek is based near Stuttgart, but has offices in Dresden too, where a microkernel called L4 is developed as university project (with some interesting applications in virtualization).

Last but not least innotek seems to have a very tight connection with Microsoft, since it Partners page reports:

innotek has a strategic relationship with Microsoft related to its leading edge virtual machine products, Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server. innotek has developed several features of the Microsoft virtualization products.

Is upcoming Windows hypervisor based on L4 microkernel and developed by innotek?

Update: Microsoft provided an official answer to this speculation denying any innoted involvement in current codename Viridian development:

Innotek’s strategic relationship with Microsoft is specific to the development of virtual machine add-ins that allow Virtual PC to run OS/2 and Virtual Server 2005 R2 to run non-Windows operating systems as guest VMs.

Innotek also provides escalation support for OS/2 running on Virtual PC. The partnership is limited to those items. And it has been a successful partnership in that there have been more than 15,000 downloads of the VM add-ins for Virtual Server 2005 R2 in the first 12 months, allowing customers to consolidate servers running up to 9 different versions of RedHat or Suse Linux.

VMware is decided to play the benchmarks game up to the end, and seems to prefer XenSource as sparring partner.

After publishing a much controversial performance comparison between ESX Server 3.0.1 and Xen 3.0.3 (which received a remarkable counter-analysis by XenSource, comparing ESX Server 3.0.1 against XenEnteprise 3.2 beta), now Palo Alto company is back and publishes another study focused on networking performances this time, against XenEnterprise 3.2:

Just a few years ago, generating enough network traffic to push a single 1 Gbps network adapter to capacity would saturate a computer’s main processor. However, processors have advanced in these few years to the point that 1 Gbps networking does not stress a modern native or virtualized system.

In order to better expose the real virtualization overhead of high-throughput networking, it is now necessary to increase the load on the system beyond a single 1 Gbps link.

In this paper, we characterize the virtualization overheads of virtual machines by measuring the performance under heavy networking in a uniprocessor virtual machine. This was done by configuring multiple 1 Gbps Ethernet adapters (“NICs”) in the server, each associated with a netperf or netserver instance running over a unique subnet and port.

The hypervisors tested were ESX Server 3.0.1 (referred to as “ESX301”) and XenEnterprise 3.2.0 (referred to as “XE320”). Both hypervisors were installed with no modifications or tuning.

For each hypervisor, the corresponding “tools” packages containing paravirtualized (PV) network drivers was installed in the guest. The hypervisors were installed on a 4-core, 3 GHz HP DL380G5 system with 16GB of memory. For the virtualized tests, a single virtual machine was configured for each hypervisor with one processor and 1GB of memory, running Windows Server 2003 Release 2 Enterprise Edition (32-bit). During the tests, the virtual machine under test was the only one running in the hypervisor…

Read the whole paper at source.

James O’Neill, IT Professional Evangelist at Microsoft, published on his corporate blog opening of Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Windows Server Virtualization (codename Viridian):

On Friday the Windows Server virtualization (WSv) team opened nominations for the Technology Adoption Programme (TAP) for Windows Server virtualization aka Viridian. The nomination process closes on May 16th.

I should explain that a TAP is designed to be an opportunity for collaboration between customers and Microsoft to validate a new product. This is achieved through product feedback as a result of deployment of pre-release builds in non-production and production environments. Customers have an opportunity to validate the design and direction of the technology, through discovery of bugs and by submitting Design Change Requests (DCR’s) for the product development team to consider.

The WSv TAP is distinct from any other Microsoft TAP – although it has links with the longhorn server TAP. The WSv TAP is not a marketing or relationship programme: it is strictly an engineering validation programme focused on scenario testing and bug discovery/submission. There are a limited number of places and it is expected to be over-subscribed – nomination does not guarantee acceptance. Participants will be selected to get the mix of characteristics (planned deployments, LHS experience, location, technology, scenario coverage, etc.) needed by the product team.

Participating in any TAP requires a significant level of commitment. The nomination questionnaire, will ask for likely deployment scenarios. If accepted, it is expected that the customer commit to these deployment scenarios. In addition, Microsoft asks that participants test, deploy, and provide timely product feedback for each of the major milestone releases; TAP Participants get 24×7 production support for these releases. Other builds may be be provided for non-production use only and support will not be provided.

To adhere this TAP program contact James O’Neil directly.