History

IBM announced a new tool called Virtualization Manager 1.0.

Worldwide press bounced the news so the product, released as an extension for IBM Director 5 enterprise management solution, seems new.
It isn’t: Virtualization Manager is a revamped and renamed version of old, well-known and much appreciated Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2.x, which was already able to control VMware ESX and GSX Servers and Microsoft Virtual Servers.

This new edition introduces preliminary support for Xen (running on Novell SUSE 10) and IBM Virtualization Engine (running on System p), and a valuable web interface, featuring an approach a la VMware VirtualCenter (without needing it):

The biggest win of this product, which is free of charge as the whole Director for IBM customers, is capability to perform migration of virtual machines from a virtualization platform to another:

Download Virtualization Manager here.

While some OpenVZ parts are already supporting Linux kernel 2.6.19, the development team is now focused on kernel 2.6.18 support which will power upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Debian Linux 4.

Download the kernel 2.6.18 beta patches here.

Quoting from the Parallels official announcement:

Parallels is making installation of the Windows operating system on a Mac even easier than installation on a PC with the introduction of the Parallels Installation Assistant. The software comes included as part of Parallels Desktop for Mac…

The Installation Assistant provides a powerful, easy to use ?Express Windows OS Installation Mode? for Windows XP and Windows Vista that completely automates the virtual machine setup and Windows installation processes. Users select which Windows version they plan to use, enter their name, company information and Windows activation key, and then click ?finish? to begin installing Windows in a pre-designed virtual machine that has been optimized for their version of Windows. From that point on, installation is completely automated and requires no user interaction; users do not need to enter any additional information, select settings, or answer any potentially confusing technical questions posed by Windows during installation.

After Windows installation is complete, the Installation Assistant automatically installs Parallels Tools, a free set of useful add-ons that improve networking, video, and sound support, syncs mouse activity and OS system clocks, and enables cutting, copying and pasting of data, as well as and file sharing, between Windows and OS X.
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In addition to the Installation Assistant, the new build of Parallels Desktop for Mac offers Shared Networking, a powerful new networking mode that lets users seamlessly connect their virtual machines to the internet via a cable modem, LAN, broadband card, Wi-Fi connection, or dial-up modem, without any manual network reconfiguration. Because Shared Networking enables multiple IP addresses to appear as one IP address on a network, it enables users working with internet connections like DSL or Cable modems that are only configured for use with a single IP address to easily connect their virtual machines to the internet. This same feature also effectively hides virtual machines from the outside world, making them far less likely to be the victim of a hacker attack.
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Existing Parallels Desktop for Mac users with auto-update enabled will receive the Installation Assistant and Shared Networking feature automatically…

While VMware is preparing to show its proposal for virtualization benchmarking, VMmark, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) is considering to develop a standard.

Quoting for the SPEC official announcement:

The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has formed a new working group to develop standard methods of comparing virtualization performance for data center servers.

Current SPEC member companies committed to developing a new virtualization measurement standard include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VMware.

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In developing a new virtualization benchmark, SPEC will draw on its expertise in creating widely used system-level benchmark suites such as SPECjAppServer2004 and SPECweb2005…

Where Microsoft is in this initiative?

Sun Blueprints department released a very interesting 226 pages book about Solaris Containers (aka Zones):

This Sun BluePrints Collection of previously published articles has been thoroughly updated and consolidated into a single book format. It provides an overview of the resource management concepts and technologies that comprise Solaris Containers, and explains how to create, use, and integrate Solaris Containers within a system and infrastructure.

Emphasis is placed on explaining each concept and providing detailed examples that can be used to create more effective environments and effect better resource utilization.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction
• Chapter 2 – Resource Management Concepts
• Chapter 3 – An In-Depth Look at Containment and Virtualization
• Chapter 4 – Managing Workloads
• Chapter 5 – Managing Resources
• Chapter 6 – Isolating Applications
• Chapter 7 – Creating Solaris Containers
• Chapter 8 – Integrating Solaris Containers into the Environment
• Chapter 9 – Managing the Environment
• Chapter 10 – Troubleshooting
• Chapter 11 – Putting It All Together?Deploying Sun Java Enterprise System 2005-Q4 on the Sun Fire T2000 Server Using Solaris Containers

Highly recommended. Read the whole whitepaper at source.

Quoting from the Acronis official announcement:

Acronis, Inc., a technological leader in storage management software, announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program.

The program allows Acronis to optimize its Acronis True Image and Acronis Disk Director products with VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating, deploying, backing up and managing servers in mission-critical environments.
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As a VMware technology partner, Acronis will further enhance the ability of its disk imaging and disk management products to work closely with VMware products…

The just released Fedora Core 6 introduces a user interface for Xen called Virtual Machine Manager already saw in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 beta.

Among several reviews eWeek published one with some mentions about this new tool:

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We found virt-manager fairly easy to use, although the tool definitely shows its young age. For example, there’s a promising-looking?but for now inactive?option for connecting virt-manager to a Xen system running on a remote server. There’s another inactive option for managing hypervisors other than Xen.

As virt-manager matures, we’d like to see the tool offer more feedback when operations fail. Generally, when things didn’t function as we expected, the tool was silent regarding error or troubleshooting messages…

I wonder why a product in its early-development has been included in a so-popular distribution and its making its way in an enterprise distribution like RHEL.

With these premises customers will hardly rely on Red Hat for enterprise Xen deployment, preferring dedicated solutions like Virtual Iron or XenEnterprise.

Download Fedora Core 6 here and check from yourself.

Quoting from the rPath official announcement:

rPath, provider of the first platform for creating and maintaining software appliances, announced today the ability to create virtual appliances that run on the Xen 3.0.3 hypervisor using rPath’s rBuilder.

The rBuilder platform allows software developers to combine software applications with Linux and related open source components to create virtual appliances that can be instantly provisioned and run on the Xen hypervisor and XenSource’s XenEnterprise virtualization platform.
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Reflecting the strong community demand for appliances on the Xen hypervisor, rPath has made many of the most popular projects on rBuilder Online available for download as virtual appliances for Xen 3.0.3. Examples include LAMP, MediaWiki, Gallery Photo Server, Port25 Mail Server, Music Player, OpenFiler, Cacti Network Graphing, MySQL, and PostgreSQL…

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

IBM, the world’s leading information technology (IT) services provider, today introduced a service product that helps businesses utilize virtualization technologies to simplify computing in the workplace. The new Virtual Infrastructure Access service product enables centralized computing at the server level and provides workers security-rich access to applications, information and resources.

The new Virtual Infrastructure Access service product enables centralized computing at the server level and provides workers security-rich access to applications, information and resources.

As part of the service product introduced today, a highly skilled team of End User Services experts from IBM will provide consultation, assessment, planning, design and implementation to help clients deploy virtual infrastructures for security-rich end user computing…

Microsoft is moving in the right direction about virtual machines licensing in the server space. I cannot say the same for the desktop space.

In any case Windows Product Activation (WPA) and limited number of allowed virtual machines in every product but Windows Server Datacenter Edition will create the biggest management issue in virtual infrastructures.
Blessed will be those provisioning tools (we call them today virtual lab management solutions) integrating a strong licensing management system.

I’m not the only one thinking this way. ComputerWorld published a long article about possible market scenarios and trends:

A recent survey by software management provider Macrovision found that only 28% of organisations surveyed were satisfied with their vendor’s pricing and licensing strategy.
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And virtualisation will become an issue soon, as it moves out of the test and development phase and into production environments. Lechner says 54% of IBM’s customers plan to start applying virtualisation this year.

Forrester Research believes new licensing models based around virtualisation will be introduced by vendors — and will be accepted by large enterprises — by the end of 2008.
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Tim Grieser, vice president of system management software at IDC, sees two approaches as the favourites for how virtualisation licensing will eventually be decided: either a base licence price based on some average of virtual machine images a user decides to employ, or a tiered per-server hardware price that doesn’t take virtualisation into account.
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“Software vendors are telling us we will have to pay a licence for every single virtual machine, but, if I am still using the same [physical] machine as before why should I do that?” Tang asks. “Vendors are trying to take a free ride with virtualisation, and they can’t do that.”…

The last quote is remarkable.

Read the whole article at source.