History

Steven Bink reports an updated roadmap for upcoming System Center Operation Manager 2007 (formerly Microsoft Operation Manager or MOM) revealing related Virtual Machine Manager, actually in beta 1 phase, is now planned for end of Q3.

The original news source seems to be deleted.

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

In December 2006 IDC published a new research (9-pages only) called Server Virtualization Maturity Index, predicting some expected points:

• While early server virtualization adoption was due to consolidation and migration of projects, new drivers for virtualization includes availability solutions and disaster recovery programs
• Automation is expected to play a strong role in managing virtualization resources in the next 18 months, as customers evaluate more sophisticated management tools
• Industry impacts of virtualization are becoming evident with an increase in the penetration of 4-way systems and customers choosing more richly configured systems

This is not the only prediction IDC published in December 2006: in another document the research firm repeat same things, but also throw in virtual appliances success.

Microsoft published an easy 8-pages document detailing steps to achieve successful migration of Virtual Server 2005 virtual hard disks from IDE to SCSI.
As the document outlines virtual SCSI is always preferred because it can improve performances of up to 20%, but if you have to share a virtual machine between Virtual Server and Virtual PC your only choice is IDE.

Read it here.

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for the news.

Ben Armstrong, Program Manager of Virtual Machine Team at Microsoft, published a script to query Virtual Server 2005 virtual machine details from host OS:

Option Explicit
dim vs, vm
Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
set vm = vs.FindVirtualMachine(“a virtual machine”)
‘Display information about the GuestOS
wscript.echo “Guest OS Information:”
wscript.echo “=====================”
wscript.echo “OSName : ” & vm.GuestOS.OSName
wscript.echo “AdditionsVersion : ” & vm.GuestOS.AdditionsVersion
wscript.echo “CanShutdown : ” & vm.GuestOS.CanShutdown
wscript.echo “IsHeartbeating : ” & vm.GuestOS.IsHeartbeating
wscript.echo “HeartbeatPercentage : ” & vm.GuestOS.HeartbeatPercentage
wscript.echo “IsHostTimeSyncEnabled : ” & vm.GuestOS.IsHostTimeSyncEnabled

Be sure to read the original article for updates and comments.

Update: Ben published a new article describing how to achieve same goal with new Microsoft PowerShell instead of VBS. Read it here.

Linux Magazine declared VMware and XenSource worthwhile to watch in 2007. Welcome!
ComputerWorld already said something similar 10 days ago. Like almost any another news source on the planet.

It’s remarkable SWsoft, with its open source project OpenVZ, didn’t find a place, while less performing (but popular names) are there:

• AMD
• Astaro
• Avocent
• Canonical
• Digium
• HP
• IBM
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Network Appliance
• Novell
• Oracle
• Platform Computing
• The Portland Group
• Red Hat
• Sun
• TopSpin (acquired by Cisco)

This one was too funny to not publish it: vmware.cn site (clearly not owned by VMware Inc.) mimicks official Palo Alto company website, but among available products in homepage you can find not only ESX Server, Player and others, but also SWsoft Virtuozzo and Parallels Workstation!

Isn’t it fair competition?

One of the most complex issues when dealing with virtualization is not technical: current Windows licensing scheme has not been developed with virtualization in mind, so that understanding to what and when license applies in a virtual datacenter is very vague at this point.

In October 2005 Microsoft modified its OS licensing terms so that Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition license allows up to 4 virtual OS instances, while the Datacenter Edition license allows unlimited virtual instances. With any virtualization platform, not just Virtual Server 2005. And announced codename Longhorn (rumored Windows Server 2007) will follow this policy.

This move doesn’t completely clarify things, letting customers confused when handling back-end servers licensing schemes (which are different from Windows one), or different virtualization approaches, like SWsoft Virtuozzo.

To partially address questions Microsoft just released a neat online calculator, showing diffences in price between Windows editions (Standard, Enterprise and DataCenter) in a virtualization scenario, with multiple physical server and different CPUs configurations: the Windows Virtualization Calculator.

Let’s hope this tool can be improved to consider more complex scenarios, where also back-end servers licenses can be calculated.

In the same way it did with new Windows Vista Business Edition, Microsoft released a TechNet Virtual Lab (remotely accessible for 90 minutes) already configured to work with last year acquired Softricity technologies: SoftGrid and ZeroTouch.

Access the virtual lab here.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

Quoting from the Unisys official announcement:

…
The Unisys Enterprise Virtualization solution leverages Unisys advanced technologies to enhance industry-standard virtualization offerings, such as VMware.
…
Two new technologies give the Unisys Enterprise Virtualization solution a distinct advantage. Unisys Real-Time Consolidation Accelerator provides secure, anywhere-to-anywhere automated conversions of applications and operating systems between physical servers, virtual machines, and image archives. Unisys Real-Time Chargeback provides visibility and insight into the IT costs associated with business processes across heterogeneous environments, both virtualized and non-virtualized.

The Enterprise Virtualization solution delivers key benefits, including rapid discovery of critical infrastructure components, identification of optimal virtualization candidates based on utilization data, automated physical-to-virtual implementation on Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers using VMware Infrastructure 3.0 Virtualization Server, and ongoing capture of resource utilization metrics to create visibility into IT usage and costs…

The open source management console for Xen, Enomalism, continues its progression towards 1.0 status.

The new 0.6 version introduces, among others, following improvements:

• Ability to change CPU and MEMORY allocation on virtual machines (live memory allocation)
• sHype/ACM Support on Fedora Core 6
• Windows XP / Vista Support using XenSource XenEnterprise
• Tentative support for Ubuntu 6.x series, as well as Fedora core 4 & 6

The commercial edition of Enomalism, planned for early February, will also introduce capability to manage multiple hosts.

Download it here.