History

InfoWorld Test Center published an extensive review of version of VMware ESX Server and VirtualCenter, now blend under the name of Infrastructure 3.

The product achieved a score of 8.7/10 and InfoWorld concluded saying that:

VI3 reinforces VMware’s standing as the leading virtualization platform vendor. Plenty of new features including iSCSI support and Distributed Resource Scheduler, as well as improved performance, will grease the wheels of server virtualization in enterprise datacenters. VI3 does have rough edges, including the absence of 10-Gig support, but overall it’s a hit.

Read the whole review at source.

Quoting from IT Business:

Most Canadian enterprises are achieving about half the consolidation ratios per processor that vendors claim virtualization will bring, according to a report published by Info-Tech Research on Wednesday.
…
visits or in-depth phone interviews with more than 30 companies two months ago, Info-Tech concluded that vendors are exaggerating the number of servers that can actually be consolidated through virtualization, inflating the technology’s potential…

Read the whole article at source.

While not expliclty said, this article is clearly referring to VMware, the only virtualization vendors who indicates in official documentation average expected VMs/core consolidation ratio, depending on chosen product.

In years Microsoft never declared such value, which highly depends on several factors but it’s critical for customers when facing return on investment calculations.
Xen development team and commercial companies offering it, XenSource and Virtual Iron, didn’t as well. And neither the russian start-up Parallels ever expressed a position about this topic, even if they are still focused only on desktop virtualization where this value is not fundamental.

While it’s possible VMware reported a too optimistic value, it’s worth to remember that a certain VMs/core ratio is achievable only approaching a virtualization project with enough knowledge: the most delicate part in server consolidation projects is recognizing physical server candidates for P2V migration and architecting the virtual datacenter accordingly.

Skilled virtualization architects know that migrated services need to be arranged in a rational way inside virtualization platforms, trying to balance low and high workloads together.
Most of times missing suggested consolidation ratio depends on a poor design.

Parallels continues to release updates to its virtualization solution for Apple Mac OS at a frenetic pace.
It’s evident they aim to release this new version for upcoming MacWorld in San Francisco, planned for 8th January.

The new build (3036) introduces:

• a display rendering feature called Coherence, mimicking seamless application approach introduced by Citrix in remote desktop, able to show Windows applications inside a virtual machine as part of the underlying Mac OS desktop
  (check a nice screencast here)
• a P2V/V2V migration tool called Transporter, able to migrate physical PCs and VMware/Microsoft virtual machines
• drag & drop between Windows guest OSes and Mac host OS
• capability to virtualize a Windows partition made with Apple BootCamp
• a new user interface with a virtual machines catalogue

Download the new beta here.

Meanwhile Apple continues to deny they are working on native virtualization capabilities for new Mac OS release, codename Leopard.

After its launch in summer 2006, Sentillion launches second release of its vThere, a security wrapper for desktop virtualization platforms.

At the end of November the company replaced the underlying virtualization engine, moving from VMware Player to emerging Parallels Workstation.
Now vThere 2.0 introduces notable features:

• Enhanced Image Compression
  Improved vThere image compression to provide rapid download of vThere images allows for even faster rollout of the technology to large numbers of remote workers, including teleworkers, branch office employees, contractors, business partners or temporarily displaced employees who require immediate access to corporate
• A securely-hosted Web site for image distribution
  Through www.vThere.net, organizations can quickly provision vThere images to remote users. Users can download and access their vThere images through a simple one-click process
• Centralized Activation Management
  Activations of vThere images can be managed centrally, allowing for license management control, de-provisioning of images and management reporting
• Image Revocation services
  vThere images can be automatically revoked from the end-user computing device according to system administrator policies for employee termination or as needed
• Centralized Policy Management
  Improved capabilities for managing security privileges and access policies associated with vThere images, such as file sharing and local USB port access
• Location specific computing
  vThere will detect whether the image is being accessed remotely or on the enterprise network and manage the network access automatically

Pricing for Sentillion’s vThere solution is $125 per user. The vThere image creator toolkit is $795 per administrator workstation. vThere 2.0 is available immediately.

vThere is the only competitor of VMware ACE in years, and considering the weak marketing message of VMware for its youngest product, there is a real chance Sentillion and Parallels have a real opportunity to gain market shares against the Palo Alto company. Mostly considering raising trends in endpoing security.

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

Once again Ben Armstrong, Program Manager of Virtual Machine Team at Microsoft, provides a veru useful tip for Virtual PC customers:

In Connectix Virtual PC 5.0 we moved to using a new BIOS and also moved from the 430TX chipset to the 440BX chipset.

One problem that this caused was that Windows virtual machines created on earlier versions of Virtual PC would not boot because they could not find the chipset they were looking for. The solution we came up with was simple. When booting a virtual machine would check the version information on the virtual hard disk, if the virtual hard disk was created with an earlier version of Virtual PC we would change the identifier on the motherboard chipset to the 430TX identifier (even though we were still emulating the 440BX chipset).

It turned out that this work just fine.

Dennis Zimmer released a free tool able to convert VMware ESX Server 2.x virtual machines in VMware Server ones, so it can be used as cheap disaster recovery site if ESX suffers a fault.

Download it, free of charge, for command prompt or GUI.

It’s worth to remember this task will be achievable as well with the upcoming VMware Converter 3.0, now in beta.

Quoting from the Stratus official announcement:

Stratus Technologies, Inc., a leader in IT technology and services for continuous availability, and XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen™ hypervisor, today announced they have signed a collaborative agreement with the goal of fusing continuous availability and virtualization technologies to create new IT infrastructure solutions with superior reliability, flexibility and manageability.
…
Under terms of the non-exclusive agreement, Stratus will work with XenSource to include XenEnterprise as an integral component in Stratus’ Continuous Processing architecture…

Number of vendors ready to offer management tools for virtualization platforms continues to raise. The last one is Managed Objects which is expected to announce a new solution in 2007, as reported by IT Week:

IT management software specialist Managed Objects has revealed plans for a new suite specially designed for monitoring and managing virtual machines.
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Speaking exclusively to IT Week, Managed Objects’ president and CEO Siki Giunta said the rapid adoption of virtualisation software by many firms meant there would soon be a surge in demand for software capable of monitoring how virtualised systems impact business processes.
…
“We want to be there with a product when companies realise they need that management. There will definitely be a big announcement in 2007.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Mike Laverick published a long (1h 20m) interview with Patrick Lin, Director of Product Managementm Datacentre Platforms at VMware, and Michael Di Petrillo, Senior System Engineer for the VMware Competitive Intelligence Team.

The interview is very technical and aims to answer several questions raised in VMTN forums, where Mike often provides support.

You may want to check list of questions Mike submitted before listen the whole interview.

Ruben Spruijt, Senior Consultant for PQR, wrote a 8 pages comparative overview between Microsoft SoftGrid, Altiris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) and Citrix Streaming Server (codename Tarpon).

It’s just a comparison of technology approaches, without in-depth evalutation of architectures or performances.
And it’s only partially reliable since the Citrix Streaming Server is still in early development stage, with a planned release for H1 2007, with a subsequent change (introduction of PortICA protocol for Windows) in architecture in H2 2007.
But it may still be interesting for who has no idea of how these products work.

Read it at source.