Egenera raises $26 million in Series E funding

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera, Inc., a global leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today announced that it has raised $26 million in a Series E round of funding. Led by Pharos Capital Group and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the round was completed at a significantly increased valuation over Egenera’s previous financing round. Along with new investors Pharos and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Egenera’s core major investors also participated in the round.

The Series E financing will be used to further accelerate the company’s global growth and to fuel technology innovations in virtualization and utility computing. With today’s announcement, Egenera has raised more than $150 million in private funding…

SteelEye extends high-availability solution to VMware Infrastructure 3

Quoting from the SteelEye official announcement:


SteelEye Technology today reached another milestone in Linux application and data protection as it announced two new products.

The first is LifeKeeper™ for Linux v6, an update to its award-winning high availability clustering solution.

In addition to protecting VMware ESX Server 2.5, now LifeKeeper for Linux v6 adds management for applications and data residing in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell and VMware Infrastructure 3 systems…

Benchmarks: IBM WebSphere 6.02 on VMware ESX Server 2.5.3

After changing in its benchmarking policy, and while waiting the launch of VMmark, a complete benchmarking system for virtualization platforms, after years VMware starts to disclose some performance measurements on its products:


For this set of experiments, we compared a baseline running multiple WebSphere Application Servers on a single server to running each application server on a VMware virtual machine (VM) in a single server. This allowed for the simplest comparison configurations. Each server was separately administered, and each application executed independently, with no load balancing performed across the applications. A shared, non-virtualized, database was used by all applications.

For the baseline measurements in this paper, we chose to run multiple applications using separate application server instances. Running multiple application servers works well when a single server does not use the maximum performance of the server, that is, it cannot maximally utilize the CPU, memory, and other resources.

Another approach is to use virtualization to run multiple guests machines, each with a single instance of the application server. This approach was used for the VMware measurements in this paper. This approach provides greater isolation between the applications. For performance comparison purposes, these experiments ran WebSphere Application Server instances in each guest machine, however, virtualization also provides an opportunity to consolidate different types of applications…

Read the whole whitepaper at source.

Thanks to Run-Virtual for the news.

Release: VMware Workstation 5.5.2

VMware released a minor update for Workstation, now reaching version 5.5.2 (build 29772), bringing in a broader support for host and guest OSes.

Host operating systems:

  • Windows Server 2003 R2, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Mandriva Linux 2006, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • SUSE Linux 10.1, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 update 7, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Update 8, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 3, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 4, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
  • Ubuntu Linux 6.06, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Ubuntu Linux 5.10, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Ubuntu Linux 5.04, 32-bit, 64-bit

Guest operating systems:

  • Windows Server 2003 R2, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Mandriva Linux 2006, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • SUSE Linux 10.1, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 update 7, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Update 8, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 3, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 4, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
  • Novell NetWare 6.5 SP5, 32-bit
  • FreeBSD 6.1, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
  • FreeBSD 6.0, 32-bit, 64-bit (experimental support)
  • Solaris x86 10, 10 Update 1, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Ubuntu Linux 6.06, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Ubuntu Linux 5.10, 32-bit, 64-bit
  • Ubuntu Linux 5.04, 32-bit, 64-bit

Download it here.

Whitepaper: A Comparison of Software and Hardware Techniques for x86 Virtualization

A very interesting whitepaper about differences between software-assisted and hardware-assisted virtualization has been published by VMware:

Until recently, the x86 architecture has not permitted classical trap-and-emulate virtualization. Virtual Machine Monitors for x86, such as VMware Workstation and Virtual PC, have instead used binary translation of the guest kernel code. However, both Intel and AMD have now introduced architectural extensions to support classical virtualization.

We compare an existing software VMM with a new VMM designed for the emerging hardware support. Surprisingly, the hardware VMM often suffers lower performance than the pure software VMM.
To determine why, we study architecture-level events such as page table updates, context switches and I/O, and find their costs vastly different among native, software VMM and hardware VMM execution.

We find that the hardware support fails to provide an unambiguous performance advantage for two primary reasons: first, it offers no support for MMU virtualization; second, it fails to co-exist with existing software techniques for MMU virtualization.We look ahead to emerging techniques for addressing this MMU virtualization problem in the context of hardware-assisted virtualization.

Read the whitepaper at source. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Keith Adams, co-author of this paper, for the news.

Novell defends Xen against Red Hat claims

Quoting from the ZDNet:


“If you look at the Xen open source project, we have been the number two contributor during the past 10 months or so to that project. So we’ve kind of contributed most of the enterprise readiness for the Xen platform,” Rex said.

“We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualisation hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said ‘Yes, this technology’s ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10’.”…

Read the whole article at source.

But if Novell is so sure Xen is ready for production deployment why is supporting it just when its own operating system is running on virtual machines?

Virtualization vendors to support new AMD Opteron Rev.F

Quoting from the AMD official announcement:

AMD today announced broad software industry support for its upcoming Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor family, which provides the ISV (independent software vendor) and open source software development communities with hardware support for the development of the next evolution of business-class enterprise applications.

“Customers and partners are demanding solutions that help them achieve business agility and advance their businesses with high-performance IT infrastructure,” said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp. “The Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor, along with current and future versions of Windows Server, will enhance software development and drive further adoption of the latest innovations in security, virtualization and management.”

VMware’s virtualization platform and AMD Opteron processor-based systems are combined today in some of the most advanced data centers, resulting in significant power savings and unprecedented resource consolidation,” said Brian Byun, vice president of Products and Alliances at VMware. “The Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor includes additional hardware support that further accentuates the benefits of VMware Infrastructure 3 as a true distributed platform for sharing resource transparently across the enterprise.”

“Back in early 2003, Novell worked alongside AMD to bring the first production-level 64-bit operating system to the enterprise market, and since that time, our collaboration on solutions for the open source community has remained very active,” said Roger Levy, vice president, Open Platform Solutions, at Novell. “AMD’s Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor platform will enable customers to take full advantage of virtualization features in the recently launched SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.”

AMD plans to announce the availability of the Next-Generation AMD Opteron on August 15, 2006.