History

Pete Zerger, already popular for its free VMware Server Management Pack, published a list of commercial Management Packs for monitoring VMware ESX Server 3.0 on Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) 2005, including:

• eXc VMware Management Pack
• Quest Management eXtensions
• nWorks VMware Events MP

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for automating software demo, test and training labs, today announced that it achieved record company results in 2006, closing more than five million dollars in sales in the fourth quarter alone. New customer wins, growth with current customers, technological advances, expanded partnership agreements, and new venture funding aided in making 2006 an overwhelming success…

VMware is approaching the final release of its most popular virtualization tool, Workstation, and includes another bunch of interesting features in the new beta 3 (build 39849):

• Record/Replay of Virtual Machine Activity (Experimental)
  This feature lets you record all of a Workstation 6 virtual machine’s activity over a period of time. Unlike Workstation’s movie-capture feature, the record/replay feature lets you exactly duplicate the operations and state of the virtual machine throughout the time of the recording.
• CrossTalk Communication Infrastructure (Experimental)
  CrossTalk provides a faster means of communication among applications running on the host and in virtual machines. The CrossTalk infrastructure comprises a CrossTalk SDK and CrossTalk drivers for host and guest. This experimental feature is especially suited for users who want to write client-server applications.
• Eclipse plug-in for Integrated Virtual Debuggers
  With the new Workstation IDE (integrated development environment) plug-ins, software developers are provided with menu items and toolbar buttons in Visual Studio (Windows only) or Eclipse (Windows or Linux) to easily develop and debug programs in virtual machines.

The new Record/Replay feature, announced at VMworld 2006, has been particularly expected by developers, introducing a new way to approach application debugging.

Unfortunately the new feature is not supported when virtual machine is configured to work any IDE virtual device (including hard disks and CDRoms), making somewhat complex work with it.

VMware Workstation 6.0 also introduces news on VMware Tools, which now include three experimental drivers:

• CrossTalk Driver
  Driver to allow virtual machines to communicate with applications on the host and with other virtual machines using datagrams and shared memory.
  (see above for further details)
• Descheduled Time Accounting
  Experimental driver to improve accuracy of timekeeping by charging time during which the virtual machine was not running the vmdesched service.
• WYSE Multimedia Redirector
  Driver to enhance your remote desktop multimedia experience.

Download the new beta 3 here.

Quoting from SearchServerVirtualization:

VMware is preparing to roll out a new hardware certification program that should result in a greater variety of devices on VMware’s hardware compatibility list (HCL).

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In an interview at the IDC Virtualization Forum in New York City yesterday, Parag Patel, VMware senior director of ecosystems alliances, told SearchServerVirtualization.com the program will have hardware vendors “self-certify,” instead of having VMware certify the hardware for them.

The self-certification program would rely on a standardized toolset and test routines. Hardware vendors interested in getting on VMware’s support matrix would take their equipment to a VMware-certified test lab, and run VMware virtualization on their hardware devices.

If the vendor passes the test, hardware will be placed on the HCL; if not, VMware will work with the vendor to rectify the problem, Patel said…

Read the whole article at source.

VMware already started to modify approach to hardware certification for ESX Server introducing a community driven Hardware/Software Compatibility List in middle January.

Fabrice Bellard, creator and maintainer of QEMU, announces QEMU Accelerator (KQEMU) has now adopted the open souce GPL licence v2 since version 1.3.0pre11.

Download it here.

Linux.inet.hr published a brief performance comparison of QEMU, QEMU+KQEMU and new KVM, the hypervisor included in the new Linux kernel 2.6.20.

Thanks to Fraser Campbell for the news.

Tim Freeman, Software Developer and Research Assistant at Globus Toolkit, published a wonderful post explaining how to achieve high-availability for Xen hosts, thanks to open source tools DRDB, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and Global Network Block Device (GNBD). And without a shared storage facility like a SAN.

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I have two cheap computers and so I put some big disks in them and mirrored the disks over the network. Instead of using one file server node and RAID1, this is something like a “whole system RAID”. If anything at all breaks in either computer, hosted services can keep running and data is unharmed except for whatever was unsynced in RAM.

To accomplish the disk mirror I used DRBD. DRBD is a special block device that is designed for highly available clusters, it mirrors activity directly at the block device level across the network to another disk. So like a RAID1 configuration over the network.

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That is how the disk is setup, now how to access it remotely? You could run a shared filesystem of course, exporting via an NFS server on host A (or B). Instead, having heard good things about Global Network Block Device (GNBD) on the Xen mailing lists, I chose to export the logical block devices (from LVM) directly over the network with GNBD. Another node makes a GNBD import and the block device appears to be a local block device there, ready to mount into the file hierarchy. This is like iSCSI but it is a snap to set up and use.

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…using GNBD, you can live-migrate the VM to any node that can do a GNBD import. This is nice to have. I only live migrate manually, though. Both DRBD and GNBD have some features that allow for seamless failover but I don’t really need any of this at home…

Read the whole post at source.

How much time before someone adopt this solution with VMware Server for Linux too?

Shuveb Hussain launched EasyVZ, the first GUI management tool for OpenVZ, the open source branch of SWsoft Virtuozzo.

EasyVZ, open source too, is only for Linux and it’s still in alpha but already assolves most common Virtual Private Servers (VPS) management tasks.

Download it here.

After launching its hyperVM product in summer 2006 with support for OpenVZ and Xen, Lxlabs is ready to push out the new 1.4, which introduce interesting features:

• Industrial Strength centralized backup for the entire cluster
  HyperVM backup uses linux hardlinks and rsync protocol to greatly reduce the space and the network overhead needed for backup management
• IP pool
  Allows the Administrator to keep track of all the ipaddresses from a single location, and also automates the process of assigning ipaddresses to a VPS
• VPS Plans
  Create vpses with a single click utilizing pre-built hosting plans
• A commercial grade port monitoring system incorporated directly into the software allowing the users to monitor specific ports on their vpses themselves
• A cluster wide reverse dns system, allowing the adminstrators to delegate creation directly to the customers
• Graphs that provide health statistics and resource usage patterns of the virtual machines
• Centralized Ostemplate management
  The ostemplates need to be maintained only on the master, and the slave nodes will automatically download them if they don’t have it
• Fine grained client control
  HyperVM 1.4 provides the ability to control every aspects of your customer by limiting each feature individually

Check an online demo here.

Lxlabs is also expected to extend hyperVM management capabilities to VMware and Microsoft virtualization platforms.

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

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

IBM today announced expanded scalability enhancements to the industry’s most powerful virtualization technology z/VM. With this new release, z/VM version 5.3 can now host the industry’s largest number of virtual images on a single hypervisor — virtualization technology that makes one computer look like multiple computers — allowing customers to further optimize and consolidate their infrastructures.

Internal testing conducted by IBM reveals that the new virtualization product release can host more than 1,000 virtual images on a single copy of z/VM.

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In addition to enhancing memory utilization, the new software plans to deliver increased CPU capacity with support for up to 32 Processor Units — raising the limit from 24 to 32 processors — a 33 percent increase over the previous release of z/VM.

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z/VM V5.3 runs on IBM System z9 (z9 EC and z9 BC) and IBM eServer zSeries (z800, z900, z890, z990) servers.

IBM z/VM version 5.3 will be available for purchase on June 29, 2007 through IBM and IBM Business Partners.

SecuriTeam reports an interesting advice about last version of VMware Workstation:

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Each VM has its own settings. one settings category is “Guest Isolation”, which includes a checkbox named “Enable copy and paste to and from this virtual machine”. This feature can work only if the “VMware tools” component is installed on the guest OS. The clipboard copy operation can transfer only text, not files or streams. Eitan has discovered the following issues regarding this component:

1. Changing the value of this feature (in either way enabling or disabling) becomes actually active only if a global operation is made towards the guest OS, like suspend and resume, reset, restart (from within the guest OS), shutdown (either from within the guest OS of by performing a “power off” from the VMware workstation application) and then turning it back on. Simply changing the check box value and pressing OK will not change current functionality of this feature.
2. When this feature is turned on and working The direction of the clipboard content transfer is the same as the direction of the focus change between guest and host operating systems and vice versa. But, when the host OS clipboard is empty and the focus is moved to the guest OS clipboard the guest clipboard is not cleared and left with its current content. Now, when focusing back to the host’s, empty, source clipboard it is now filled with the content of the guest’s clipboard thus the host clipboard is failing to keep itself erased and its previously cleared content is re-filled from the guest OS. This behavior may re-fill the host’s clipboard with data that was intentionally erased (like password or credit card number). Strangely, this behavior does not happen when the process is started from the guest OS clipboard, and if it is the first to be erased, and then the focus moves to the host, the host’s clipboard is erased. So, the issue here is only when the process starts from the host side.

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Read the whole security advice at source.