History

As disclosed on January, Sun is introducing an hypervisor in its SPARC servers to seamless run Linux.

The work is going on and a Linux kernel already booted up on a Niagara CPU, as OSNews reported.

Deamon News interviewed Manuel Bouyer, NetBSD kernel developer, about the porting of Xen on NetBSD.

Read all here.

Thanks to OSNews for the news.

Virtual Strategy Magazine interviewed Bakul Mehta, Chief Strategy Officer and Vipul Pabari, Chief Technology Officer, ToutVirtual, about their new product ShieldIQ.

Read all here.

Ben Armstrong teaches us how to enable remote administration console, the VMRC, disabled by default on Virtual Server, with a simple script:

set vs = wscript.CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)

vs.VMRCEnabled = true
vs.VMRCAdminPortNumber = 5900
vs.VMRCIdleConnectionTimeoutEnabled = false
vs.VMRCXResolution = 800
vs.VMRCYResolution = 600

Read the original post for updates and comments.

Kim Wisniewsky wrote a nice how-to about installing PowerChute on the ESX Server service console:

Basically because ESX service console has no GUI, and because PowerChute has a Java GUI Installer, the only way to install PowerChute APC PowerChute Network Shutdown for Linux is to use a Helper Red Hat Linux Virtual Machine to install PCNS into, and tar up the resulting binaries and transport them into ESX…

Read it here.

From its blog, Steve Herrod, VP of Research & Development at VMware, announced the massive public beta 2 wave (2.700 testers) for ESX Server 3.0 and VirtualCenter 2.0.

Highly expected new features are finally officially disclosed:

ESX Server Guest OSes

• 4-way Virtual SMP support
• 16GB Ram support
• 64bit experimental support
• Solaris 10 x86 experimental support

ESX Server Host OS

• iSCSI support
• NFS support

VirtualCenter

• Integrated ESX Server management
• Network diagram availability
• Centralized management model
• Improved authorization system
• Distributed Availability Services (DAS)
• Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS)
• Microsoft Windows guest OSes agentless backup

Read the whole post here.

About Virtualization reports a very interesting scoop: second generation VMware ESX Server and VirtualCenter have been submitted to Common Criteria on 28th December 2004 for EAL 2 conformance certification unde the Operating Systems category.

I’m not able to find the related Protection Profile to further comment.

The certification has still to be granted at today.

Update: The EAL2 certification has been granted on March 27th, 2006.
You can check Security Target, Validation Report and Common Criteria Certificate here.

Quoting from X-bit Labs:

The long-awaited launch of the new reincarnation of AMD Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon 64 FX processors for the Socket AM2 that will allow using DDR2 SDRAM is scheduled to take place at Computex 2006 that will be open in Taipei, Taiwan, in June.
…
AMD is expected to launch two dual-core CPUs for Socket AM2 on June 2006: Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and Athlon 64 FX-62. Both processors will be based on F core revision working at 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz respectively. This way, the new AMD core will not only acquire DDR2 memory support, but also will increase the frequency potential of the dual-core AMD processors without switching to new production technology. Just as the previous E core revision, the upcoming F core revision will still be manufactured with 90nm SOI process.
…
Here I would like to note that most of the solutions for Socket AM2 will start sampling in the end of this month already. AMD’s server partners will get their hands on the first Opteron samples for Socket F starting with April 30th , and the retail models will be available for pre-ordering on April 15th.
…
F core stepping processors will support Pacifica visualization technology and Presidio data protection technology, which will require new chipsets and BIOS updates for the mainboards. Only the budget Sempron processors will have no Pacifica support. HyperTransport bus frequency for Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 and Opteron processors will remain equal to 1GHz, and Sempron CPUs will support 800MHz bus.

Read the whole article at source.

I’m personally waiting for the first AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ notebook to switch over my actual DELL Inspiron 5150 powered by Intel P4 3.06GHz.
I’ll test it with supporting virtualization products and will review it on virtualization.info.

During these months several rumors went around about the upcoming last Virtual Server updated before the new Windows Hypervisor (codename Viridian).

Today, Jeff Woolsey, Lead Program Manager Windows Virtualization, during an official webcast, definitively unveiled what’s coming with codename vNext:

• Intel Virtualization Technology and AMD I/O Virtualization Technology CPUs support
  This won’t further improve performances of Windows guest OS but will improve other OSes performances.
• Windows Server 2003 Volume Shadow Service (VSS) support
  This unluckly won’t provide virtual machines live backup as many expected, but will just automate operations of saving VM state, shutdown it and restore it at the saved state.

As already reported there will be no support for 64bit guest OSes until Windows Hypervisor.

Jeff also stated there will be a public beta program in 1H 2006.

Scott Herold reports on VMTN Forums about a new product in development from Vizioncore called esxReplicator:

Vizioncore is working on a product called esxReplicator which is capable of doing VMDK level replication across the network. There is a rules engine that can synch your data based on 2 criteria…the amount of time passed (every hour), or after a certain amount of change (32MB). As soon as the threshold is hit, the difference is sent over the wire to a remote location. Because you have full control over size or time incriments, it is a very fast replication once the initial sync is done. Because the differentials are so small, there is no performance impact to the guests in the configuration.

I have no ETA on release or timeframes of the product, it was something that they introduced and demod at the VMUG (VMware User Groug) meeting.