Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
After less than 2 months Virtual Iron is ready to release 3.6 version of its virtualization platform based on Xen engine.
This new version introduces several improvements to iSCSI support and new support for VLANs.
Download the free version here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.
SteelEye security provider (and VMware Technology Partner) entered the virtualization space this summer extending its LifeKeeper high-availability solution to ESX Server 2.5 and 3.0. Now the company is going further with this new Protection Suite, introducing high-availability for VMware VirtualCenter 2.0 too.
So at today SteelEye is able to perform:
This way SteelEye is going to compete against Symantec (for their Veritas Cluster Server for ESX Server), PlateSpin (for their PowerConvert and new disaster recovery initiative) and vizioncore (for their esxRanger and esxReplicator) at least.
Following the successful Microsoft example of MSDN and the not so successful VMware example of VMTN, Parallels is now launching its own developers community network, also preparing to enter the virtual appliances market.
Quoting from official announcement
Parallels, Inc., maker of award-winning desktop virtualization solutions for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, announced today the Parallels Technology Network (PTN) – an online community for users, as well as developers using Parallels virtualization technology to deliver their software in self-contained virtual appliances.
Via the PTN, which is available online at http://ptn.parallels.com, users and developers will have access to a wealth of information related to Parallels virtualization technology. In addition, developers can make their software available to Parallels users as virtual appliances…
According to this announcement Parallels already exposed its Virtual Appliances Directory.
Quoting from the uXcomm official announcement:
uXcomm, the leading provider of software products that monitor, control and optimize virtual and physical server environments, today announced that the company has acquired the assets of Virtugo Software, a pioneer in performance and service level management tools for virtual environments. The combination of Virtugo’s products and uXcomm’s Service-Oriented Management Architecture (SOMA) now enables IT professionals to address a growing problem in the data center: trying to manage 1000s of virtual servers on 1000s of physical servers.
…
The combination of uXcomm’s XManage platform, which supports XenSource’s core virtualization technologies, and Virtugo’s VirtualSuite, which supports VMware, provides the first integrated management solution for heterogeneous physical and virtual environments.
…
Under terms of the agreement, uXcomm is purchasing all of Virtugo’s VirtualSuite product line, including Perform and PerformLite, Capacity, Optimize, Meter and Connect, as well as the company’s proven and tested architecture. The company is assuming responsibility for all sales and support contracts and has retained several key members of the Virtugo staff, including Chris Dickson, who is joining uXcomm as vice president of business development…
Both Virtugo and uXcomm have been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
XenSource just published presentations from Xen Summit Spring 2007, arranged in New York in April.
Some of them are particularly interesting like:
Download all of them here.
VMware just made available presentations of european Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX) 2007 conference.
Some of them are particularly interesting like:
virtualization.info was there as guest, and published a report you may want to read: part 1 and part 2.
Slides, supposed to stay private before a news leak happened today, are available here.
After last month comparison of Xen 3.0.2 and OpenVZ for Linux kernel 2.6.16 made by Björn Gross-Hohnacker for his diploma thesis, this time is HP Labs’ turn to perform a benchmark analysis.
This new 14 pages document titled Performance Evaluation of Virtualization Technologies for Server Consolidation exposes a bigger overhead in Xen over OpenVZ:
…
In this paper, we evaluate two representative virtualization technologies, Xen and OpenVZ, in various configurations. We consolidate one or more multi-tiered systems onto one or two nodes and drive the system with an auction workload called RUBiS.
We compare both technologies with a base system in terms of application performance, resource consumption, scalability, low-level system metrics like cache misses and virtualization-specific metrics like Domain-0 consumption in Xen.
Our experiments indicate that the average response time can increase by over 400% in Xen and only a modest 100% in OpenVZ as the number of application instances grows from one to four. This large discrepancy is caused by the higher virtualization overhead in Xen, which is likely due to higher L2 cache misses and misses per instruction. A similar trend is observed in CPU consumptions of virtual containers. We present an overhead analysis with kernel-symbol-specific information generated by Oprofile…
Read the whole paper at source.
The youngest virtualization competitor innotek has yet to affirm first version of its desktop solution for Windows and Linux, VirtualBox, but it’s already set to challenge Parallels and VMware on Apple space too.
The company in fact just opened public beta of VirtualBox for Mac OS X, which is based on upcoming version 1.4, introducing 64bit guestOS support and capability to import VMware virtual machines (.vmdk files).
Since innotek is releasing VirtualBox as open-source under GPL license, it may become over time a serious threat for Parallels dominance and current VMware efforts to regain market shares.
Download the beta here.
Popular virtualization vendor Parallels has a very complex story.
At beginning of 2004, just after VMware acquisition by EMC, the german company Netsys GmbH entered the virtualization market as third virtualization player, with a product called twoOStwo, mainly focused on IBM OS/2 virtualization, which was provided by a russian development team called Parallels Ltd.
After just four months, in April 2004, this new solution completely disappeared for unknown reasons.
One month later, in May 2004, twoOStwo re-surfaced with the new name Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA), owned by a company called Serenity System International. Parallels Ltd. was still in charge for development but NetSys completely disappeared.
After one year of limited progresses the SVISTA project has been abandoned, and in September 2005 Parallels launch its virtualization solution once again, this time as independent vendor, under the name of Parallels Workstation.
Six months later virtualization.info discovered Parallels was actually controlled by russian entrepreneur Serguei Beloussov, already owning another virtualization vendor called SWsoft and disaster recovery provider Acronis.
Few months later, finally SWsoft unveils this relationship and publicly declares acquisition of Parallels.
Now Parallels and its owner SWsoft are going to face a lawsuit from original financier Netsys, which believes original twoOStwo copyrights are infringed, and just requested a full trial in Berlin count court to determine how much of original product is still inside today’s Parallels solutions.
Despite its result, this trial may impact on Parallels products distribution at least in Germany, where Netsys is determined to enforce its rights as much as possible.
After hitting release candidate status with Workstation 6.0 / Player 2.0 / ACE 2.0, VMware is now focusing on its most recent product, Lab Manager, acquired by Akimbi last year, which just reached 2.5 public beta status.
In this new version (build 212) VMware introduces:
Lab Manager 2.5 release notes also expose an upcoming ESX Server 3.0.2, which will be supported side by side with 3.0.1.
(virtualization.info readers also know VMware is working to release Virtual Infrastructure 3.1 in near future)
Enroll for the beta program here.
VMware also published an introductory paper on virtual lab automation available here.