History

Along with Xen, OpenVZ is surely the most active open source project about virtualization at the moment. But while Xen has been slowed down by VMware in its path towards integration with Linux kernel, OpenVZ found no obstacles so far and its development team annouces a main contribution to be included in upcoming kernel 2.6.19:

• IPC virtualization (contributed by OpenVZ’s Kirill Korotaev and Pavel Emelianov)
  This is functionality that enables different processes to create shared memory segments, send messages to each other, and use semaphores. In a virtualized system, you don’t want a container (VE) to see IPC objects from another container.
• utsname() virtualization (contributed by Serge Hallyn from IBM)
  utsname() returns basic information about the kernel being run (same as displayed by uname -a) — such as the kernel version/release, host and domain names, and system architecture (for example, i686). So, before we had a single utsname structure in the kernel, visible to all the processes. Why do we need to virtualize it? At the very least every virtualized system should have its own hostname. We might want to change other fields, too.
• preliminary PID namespaces feature (mostly contributed by Eric W. Biederman, and also some bits from Oleg Nesterov, IBM’s Sukadev Bhattiprolu and Cedric Le Goater)
  Every container (VE) should be able to use its own set of process IDs (PIDs), and should not see another container’s PIDs. Eric’s approach is to not use pid directly in the kernel, but use a pointer to the struct pid — a structure that could hold both PID and VEID (i.e. container ID). Submitted set of patches cleans up different places in kernel where it uses PID directly, to switch to struct pid.

At the same time the OpenVZ project approaches for the first time a new hardware achitecture: after supporting x86 and Itanium, it’s now approaching Power architecture, developed by IBM and Freescale Semiconductor, actually heaviliy used in IBM System p5 servers.

After an intense beta testing Parallels finally released at the same time products updates for both Windows/Linux and Mac OS customers.

Parallels Workstation (for Windows and Linux) 2.2 includes following features:

• Full support for AMD SVM and stronger support for Intel VT
• Support for Windows Vista as guest OS
• Better sound and video support
• Better networking support (use WiFi connections in Linux primary OSes, and switch bridge connections between a LAN cable and WiFi connection on the fly in any guest OS)
• Better USB support (including support for isochronous devices and Windows Mobile 5 devices)
• A new shared folder utility lets users share files and folders between OSes

Parallels Desktop (for Mac OS) Update includes following features:

• Support for any Intel-based Apple hardware with any memory configuration (including Mac Pros with up to 16GB of RAM, and the full line of Core 2 Duo iMacs)
• Support for Windows Vista as guest OS
• Support for Mac OS X 10.5 (codename Leopard) as host OS
• Better USB support (including support for isochronous devices and Windows Mobile 5 devices)

I have to say this naming convention is very confusing, making hard for customers to track which product and version they need or are using.
A much straight Parallels Workstation for Windows/Linx and Parallels Workstation for Mac OS wouldn’t work well enough?

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

After posting few days ago a technical article to realize a low-cost NFS storage for VMware ESX Server 3.x, vizioncore returns with another one, this time focused on iSCSI.

Read it at source.

I still suggest to adopt an even simpler solution, realizing low-cost netwrok storages in minutes with:

• OpenFiler (supporting CIFS/NFS/iSCSI)
• FreeNAS (supporting CIFS/NFS)

After a long beta testing Virtual Iron finally published the 3.0 release of its virtualization platform.

This new release is highly expected for 2 reasons:

• the Xen open source hypervisor is now the underlying virtualization engine
• Virtual Iron offers a free of charge version of the platform even for business deployments

Virtual Iron 3.0 is offered in 3 edition, with different capabilities and licensing:

• Professional Edition
  supports partitioning and basic management of a single Virtualized Node (max. 2 sockets) and is available at no charge
• Consolidation Edition
  supports server partitioning and basic management for multi-server configuration and support
• Enterprise Edition
  enables server partitioning for multi-server configuration and advanced management capabilities for rapid provisioning, high availability (LiveMigrate, LiveRecovery), disaster recovery (LiveRecovery), workload management and policy-based automation (LiveCapacity)

Virtual Iron also offers download of open source modified software for this version here.

In any case the product requires a new generation CPU from AMD or Intel among following:

• Intel Xeon 5000 or 7000 series
• Intel Core Duo T2000 series
• AMD Opteron 2200 or 8200 series

The product supports only 2 guest OSes:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 V2 (both 32 and 64bits)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3 (both 32 and 64bits)

but Windows guest OS support is expected in the upcoming Virtual Iron 3.1 version, available in beta in the coming months.

All editions feature a remote deployable Virtualization Manager, powered by a web interface and capability to create and configure virtual machines, perform administrative tasks like backup and restore, investigate real hardware configuration and statistics, etc. in a manual or scheduled way (through a policy system).

Downlad Virtual Iron 3.0 Professional Edition free of charge here.

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

On the beta site Connect where Virtual PC 2007 program is hosted since some days, Microsoft finally published bits of the product and features of the first beta:

• Hardware-assisted virtualization
  Virtual PC 2007 includes support for virtualization technology from Intel and AMD. By default, hardware-assisted virtualization is enabled if the feature is enabled on the physical computer. You can turn this assistance on or off for each virtual machine by modifying the virtual machine settings
• Support for Windows Vista as a host operating system
  This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces support for Windows Vista as a host operating system.
  Following flavors of Windows Vista are supported : Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate
• Support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system
  This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces support for Windows Vista as a guest operating system.
  Following flavors of Windows Vista are supported : Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate
• Support for 64-bit host operating system
  This beta release of Virtual PC 2007 supports 64-bit host operating systems. However, there is no support for 64-bit guest operating systems

Apply for the beta program here and download Virtual PC 2007 beta 1.

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

Ben Armstrong published a much appreciated guide for installing Virtual Server 2005 R2 on a Windows Vista RC2 host:

There are two main parts.

First you need to configure IIS correctly. To do this you will need to enable to following subcomponents of IIS:
…
The second part is that you need to run Internet Explorer ‘as administrator’ by right clicking on it and selecting ‘Run as administrator’.

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from CNet News:

…
One performance problem comes because operating systems are accustomed to handling a part of the chip called the translation lookaside buffer, or TLB, which converts an operating system’s relative memory addresses into the actual addresses used by the hardware. But with a hypervisor actually in charge of memory, virtualization adds a second level of translation to the task.

To deal with the situation, hypervisors use software called shadow paging. “It’s complex to implement and can be fairly slow,” Sander said. Barcelona technologies, including “nested page tables” and the caching of memory addresses, speeds up the memory issue.
…
In addition, Barcelona has new instructions that shorten the chip’s “world switch time,” when it switches from guest operating system mode to hypervisor mode and back. Such a switch typically takes about 1,000 to 2,000 processor cycles, but the new instructions shorten that by about 25 percent, Sander said.
…
In addition, he said Barcelona has dual memory controllers to read and write data from memory. That’s the same number as current Opterons, but with Barcelona, the memory controllers will be able to operate independently, he said…

Read the whole article at source.

Update: ExtremeTech has published an extended description of the new processor architecture. Worth to check it.

Quoting from the IDC official announcement:

The worldwide virtual machine software (VMS) market grew to $560 million in 2005, a robust 67% growth over the previous year and topping the 63% year-over-year growth recorded in 2004.
…
EMC/VMware was the top VMS vendor in 2005, with a market share of over 55%.
…
Other highlights from the VMS market in 2005 include the following:

• Linux experienced the fastest growth
• Industry-standard (x86-based) systems lead the market for VMS software
• North American organizations purchased over half of all VMS products
• New use cases for the technology emerged

virtualization.info reflected this huge growth rate in its statistics at the end of the year.

The new virtualization startup Veeam, already raising customers interest for its Monitor solution, launched today another tool: FastSCP for VMware ESX Server.

The solution offered completely free of charge aims to simplify file transferts to/from ESX Server, with a more secure and more flexible way than FTP.

FastSCP is a GUI application for Microsoft Windows which works with ESX Server existing daemons, SSH and FTP, remapping remote resources in a Explorer-like interface:

Download it here.

As soon as the VMware offering becomes oriented for large deployments, new challenges hit its customers.
One of them surely is security maintainance, with a particular attention to patch management.

So here the latest technical note from the company about the esxupdate tool:

The process of applying software updates to an ESX Server system has become complex and time-consuming. Each new update introduces changes into the existing system, and it is crucial to apply only the required updates in order to stay current with security fixes and minimize the changes to your software environment while doing so.

Release 3.0 of the ESX Server system introduces a new software update model to address the challenges outlined above. This update model facilitates selective application of software updates specific to a particular environment. It also provides the flexibility of staying current with security and critical updates and allowing non-critical updates to be applied at a later time…

Read the whole paper at source.