History

Three months ago VMware launched an incredible challenge to the IT communities world: create the best virtual appliance ever and win up to $100,000.

The deadline for send your creations, May 26th 11:59 PM PST, is now over.

Submitted virtual appliances will now start appearing in the Virtual Appliances Directory where the whole community will be able to download and rate them (and discuss them in VMTN Forums).

The thrill will stay for another 2,5 months, until August 14th when the prestigious judging panel will reveal winners.

Stay tuned on virtualization.info for a review of most exciting virtual appliances!

Quoting from the OpenVZ official announcement:

Mandriva, the publisher of the popular Mandriva Linux operating system, and the OpenVZ project today announced that the OpenVZ operating system virtualization software will be included as part of the Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0.
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We are pleased to offer OpenVZ as a standard component in the Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0 toolbox to simplify production management and maximize hardware usage,” said David Barth, CTO at Mandriva.

“Embedding the OpenVZ technology directly into the Mandriva kernel will give Mandriva customers unparalleled virtualization functionality,” said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project…

Register for the beta here.

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

Microsoft released a very interesting paper, solving a typical question of small companies looking for effordable solutions: Can I use Virtual Server within my Windows SBS?

Does your small business face any of these issues?

• Your business applications require dedicated servers, but you only have one server
• Your business applications are incompatible with the current version of Windows Small Business Server 2003 (Windows SBS)
• You want to provide Terminal Services capabilities without compromising security

With Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 running on Windows SBS, you can solve all of these issues, without costly hardware expenditures. Use Virtual Server to create virtual machines, which run on the same physical server as Windows SBS.
Then, run your Windows applications on the virtual machines—including legacy applications or applications that require a dedicated server—in their native Windows environments (including Windows NT). Applications and services run on the virtual machine just as they do on physical servers, with few limitations.

Read it here.

Quoting from the BMC Software official announcement:

BMC Software today announced that the BMC Virtualizer solution has won a CMP Media LLC’s Network Computing 2006 Well-Connected Award. BMC Virtualizer outperformed the competition in the category of Network Infrastructure: Virtual Manager.

The first policy-based automated virtualization solution, BMC Virtualizer helps to deliver higher levels of application availability, reduce costs and achieve data center consolidation for enterprise IT environments with large and growing multi-server clusters. This solution provides an alternative to static server over-provisioning with dynamic, policy-based provisioning to meet rapidly changing user demands.
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BMC Virtualizer automatically provisions appropriate server resources – whether physical or virtual – for applications based on business need and enables the sharing of the server resources across multiple applications. The solution eliminates 1:1 server failover requirements by managing a smaller pool of shared failover servers. This automates application server failover and recovery in less than five minutes…

On the Juice community pages Altiris disclosed its next major release of Software Virtualization Solution (SVS), codename Lightning, is actually planned for early 2007 and will provide both Microsoft Windows Vista and 64bit support.

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

Summary
With practical guidelines and examples, Advanced Server Virtualization emphasizes design, implementation, and management from both a technical and consultative point of view. This book presents step-by-step guidelines for planning, deployment, installing, configuring, and creating virtual servers. Covering Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware, it addresses platform-specific virtualization features such as virtual machines, hard drives, networking, and resource management. It offers best practices that allow users to avoid common pitfalls and achieve quicker success in server virtualization implementation. It also discusses software licensing issues and the cost-benefits of deploying virtual servers.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction to Server Virtualization
• Chapter 2 – Types of Server Virtualization Technologies
• Chapter 3 – Server Virtualization Concepts
• Chapter 4 – Business Cases for Server Virtualization
• Chapter 5 – Other Uses of Server Virtualization
• Chapter 6 – Planning for Deployment
• Chapter 7 – Server Virtualization Platform Differences
• Chapter 8 – The Microsoft Virtual Server Platform
• Chapter 9 – Installing Microsoft Virtual Server
• Chapter 10 – Configuring Microsoft Virtual Server
• Chapter 11 – Creating a Microsoft Virtual Server Virtual Machine
• Chapter 12 – Microsoft Virtual Server Advanced Topics
• Chapter 13 – The VMware ESX Server Platform
• Chapter 14 – Installing VMware ESX Server
• Chapter 15 – Configuring VMware ESX Server
• Chapter 16 – Creating a VMware ESX Server Virtual Machine
• Chapter 17 – VMware ESX Server Advanced Topics
• Chapter 18 – The VMware GSX Server Platform
• Chapter 19 – Installing VMware GSX Server
• Chapter 20 – Configuring VMware GSX Server
• Chapter 21 – Creating a VMware GSX Server Virtual Machine
• Chapter 22 – VMware GSX Server Advanced Topics
• Chapter 23 – Upgrading VMware GSX Server and ESX Server
• Chapter 24 – Guest Operating System Techniques
• Chapter 25 – Scripting with Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware GSX Server and VMware ESX Server
• Chapter 26 – Other Advanced Topics
• Chapter 27 – Tools and Utilities
• Chapter 28 – Related Products and Open Source Projects
• Chapter 29 – Other Virtualization Resources

Abouth the Authors
David Marshall is a senior architect at Surgient, the leading provider of virtual lab applications for automating software testing, training, and demo labs. He is also the editor of the Infoworld Virtualization Report (weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/) and the virtualization news blog, VMBlog.com. Marshall is a Microsoft Certified Professional and holds additional certifications from CompTIA and others. He has extensive experience architecting, deploying and managing complex virtual infrastructure environments for a variety of Fortune 1000 clients over the past six years. Prior to joining Surgient, Marshall was employed by ProTier, an early virtualization service provider acquired by Surgient in 2003, and by BankOne. Marshall holds a B.S. in Finance and Information Technology Certification from the University of New Orleans.

Wade A. Reynolds is a senior architect at Surgient, the leading provider of virtual lab applications for automating software testing, training and demo labs. Reynolds is a Microsoft Certified Professional and specializes in designing and implementing enterprise solutions using virtual infrastructure technology including VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server. Reynolds has several years of experience in the architecture, deployment, and troubleshooting of small to large scale advanced server virtualization solutions for many prestigious clients. Reynolds has software development, database design, network engineering and systems integration experience developed at companies such as SCP Pool Corporation and General Electric. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Dave McCrory currently works as an expert in Enterprise Data Center Virtualization and Hosting Technologies. McCrory has been granted two US Patents and has five others pending, all based on Data Center Management and Virtualization technologies. He has worked with Microsoft Virtual Server in its Alpha state as well as with its predecessor, Connectix Virtual Server. While working with these products, he provided these companies with assistance on the original designs. Additionally, he also was the first successful Alpha site for VMware ESX Server. Previously, he has also worked as a consultant for both Sprint and General Electric. McCrory also founded ProTier, a startup company that wrote virtualization management software that was later acquired by Surgient. He has also attained Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Master Certified Netware Engineer, and Citrix Certified Administrator certifications.

Quoting from the XenSource official announcement:

XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced the appointment of Larry M. Augustin to the company’s Board of Directors. A recognized industry expert, Mr. Augustin is one of the group who coined the term “Open Source”, and has written and spoken extensively on the subject worldwide. Mr. Augustin is currently an independent investor in and advisor to a variety of early stage technology companies.
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Mr. Augustin currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Fonality, Hyperic, JBoss, Medsphere, OSDL, Pentaho, SugarCRM, and VA Software. Prior to becoming an independent investor, he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners. In 1993 Mr. Augustin founded VA Linux (now VA Software), where he served as CEO until August 2002 and led the company through an IPO in 1999. As a result of its success, in 2000, Worth Magazine named him to their list of the Top 50 CEOs…

PlateSpin just released a new version of its capacity planning tool, introducing a critical feature: the Consolidation Planning Module.

For the occasion published a dedicated press release:

PlateSpin today announced the general availability of the Consolidation Planning Module for PlateSpin PowerRecon, a completely automated analysis engine which determines optimal fit between application workloads and server resources.

The Consolidation Planning Module takes hardware, software and performance information gathered by PlateSpin PowerRecon, and automatically recommends an optimal allocation of servers to the most appropriate virtual hosts such as VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, or Microsoft Virtual Server.
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The Consolidation Planning Module expands the capabilities of PlateSpin PowerRecon with the following features:

• Automatically analyzes the five critical dimensions of workload: CPU, Disk, Memory, Network, and Time across hundreds of servers simultaneously
• Target server templates allow users to input virtual host server characteristics of their preferred makes and models prior to purchasing them
• Modeling of virtual host utilization and allocation of VMs to those hosts
• Time-based analysis to stagger multiple workloads evenly across virtual hosts
• Automatically determines number of host servers required as target for a given set of physical servers to consolidate
• Analysis support for both Windows and Linux servers

…
The Consolidation Planning Module is available for purchase immediately. Existing customers with maintenance agreements can download the update from the web site at any time.

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

Quoting from the rPath official announcement:

rPath, provider of the first platform for creating and maintaining Linux software appliances, today announced it has been notified by Congressman Brad Miller’s office that it is a recipient of a $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Department of Energy (DOE).

rPath will use the grant to enable its rBuilder platform to create Xen virtual machine images for deployment in grid environments such as the Open Science Grid.
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rPath’s virtual appliance technology solves this problem by combining applications with their operating environments in virtual containers which can be run on any available grid…

During the Bill Gates keynote at WinHEC 2006 Microsoft demonstrated the new Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian), definitively called Windows Server Virtualization.

Jeff Woolsey, Window Virtualization Program Manager, showed:

• a migrated Virtual Server 2005 virtual machine inside the Windows Server Virtualization
• a running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 guest OS
• a running 64bit Windows Server 2003 guest OS powered with 2 virtual CPUs
• how to add or modifiy virtual hardware to a powered on virtual machine without downtime (in particular they added a virtual NIC and changed memory assignement from 4GBs to 5GBs)
• a running 64bit Windows Server codename Longhorn guest OS powered with 4 virtual CPUs

All of this from a dedicated Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in.

Microsoft also announced that Windows Server Virtualization will be able to live add storage to virtual machines and support up to 8 virtual CPUs.

Note that live modification of virtual hardware are features not provided by any virtualization vendor while more than 2 virtual SMP is offered just by Xen.

Later, during the Bob Muglia keynote the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager (codename Carmine) was demonstrated as well.

Eric Winner, Virtual Machine Manager Lead Program Manager, showed:

• how to perform a physical to virtual (P2V) migration
• how to provision new virtual machines from a masters’ library in an automatic way (through the Self Service Portal)
• how to redistribute virtual machines on physical hosts depending on workload

In his keynote Muglia also mentioned application virtualization (obviously referring to ongoing Softricity acquisition) and OS partitioning, mentioned by Microsoft itself 1 month before WinHEC.

The sneaking message is that Microsoft is going to provide all three major virtualization tecnologies in the Longhorn wave: server (or hardware) virtualization, OS partitioning and application virtualization.

Watch the Bill Gates keynote (Windows Server Virtualization is at minute 27:00) or read the transcript (Jeff Woolsey’s part).

Watch the Bob Muglia keynote (Virtualization and Virtual Machine Manager are at minute 33:00) or read the transcript (Eric Winner’s part).

Hear a Silicon Valley Sleuth podcast with Jim Ni, Windows Server Marketing Group Product Manager, about Microsoft virtualization strategy.

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