History

Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:

IDC has recently published a Technology Assessment document on PlateSpin. Below is a selection from the report:

PlateSpin has recently announced and released the next major version of its operating environment portability solution, PowerConvert. One of PowerConvert’s features is enabling users to transfer information from old servers to new ones, a ‘physical to physical’ migration as well as migrate back from a virtual machine to a physical server. PlateSpin also introduced support for 3rd party imaging formats such as Acronis and Symantec to perform ‘image to virtual’ and ‘image to physical’ migrations.

For details, please download the full report.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware , Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that it was presented with Morgan Stanley’s 2005 Innovation Award at the firm’s Fifth Annual CTO Summit.

“With respect to technology as both a business enabler and as an agent for business growth, Morgan Stanley’s culture inspires an offensive mind-set where innovation is a critical underlying theme,” said Guy Chiarello, Morgan Stanley’s CTO and CIO. “The CTO Summit and, more recently, the Innovation Awards are ways in which IT supports that culture. Morgan Stanley is pleased to present VMware with this award.”

Designed to identify influential technology companies, Morgan Stanley’s Innovation Awards recognize impactful technologies that have not only added measurable value and efficiency to the overall technology marketplace, but that have also enabled Morgan Stanley to continue to leverage innovative technology in its own environment.

“It is a wonderful honor to have Morgan Stanley, one of the industry’s most respected global financial services companies and IT organizations, recognize VMware for the impact our technology has had on the industry over the last seven years,” said Diane Greene, president of VMware. “Morgan Stanley’s rigorous evaluation process and its subsequent decision to deploy VMware virtual infrastructure within its IT department is a further endorsement of our products. As we look ahead, we remain committed to continuing to bring useful and innovative technology to market .”

VMware virtual infrastructure, used by more than 10,000 enterprises worldwide , delivers real business value through reduced IT operating expenses, server consolidation and containment, improved business continuity, streamlined test and development and deployment and management of secure enterprise desktops.

Quoting from Intel official announcement:

Lenovo’s demonstration of its ThinkPad* X41 Tablet captured top honors at the inaugural Technology Innovation Accelerated Awards held at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

Seventeen demos vied as finalists for the awards, which recognize technological pioneering and adoption of Intel’s new platform strategy. The company’s platform strategy centers on the integration of suites of hardware, software, services and support that enable new capabilities for people in all facets of their lives – at work and at home, in productivity, information, entertainment and healthcare.

Lenovo was a triple winner, taking Best of Show for its ThinkPad X41 Tablet demo that also took top honors in the Mobility category. Lenovo’s demo of a ThinkCentre M52 featuring Intel® Active Management Technology won first place in the Digital Office category.

The complete list of categorical winners:

• Data Center
  VMware for its Hardware Assisted Virtualization Technology. The demo showed an Intel Xeon processor with Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T) and Virtualization Technology running VMware Virtualization Platform for consolidation of heterogeneous OSes.
• Digital Home
  AVerMedia Technologies for its AVerTV MCE Media Expansion Card, a PCIe interface dual tuner and HW MPEG encoders TV tuner card with DVI output capability that utilizes the Intel 945G SDVO interface. Demonstrated was a cost-effective Windows XP Media Center Edition solution with Intel 945 Platform. The live demo included TV viewing and PVR function in Windows XP Media Center Edition.
• Digital Office
  Lenovo for its ThinkCentre M52 featuring Intel AMT. The demo showed remote provisioning of a powered down client system through Intel AMT.
• Mobility
  Lenovo for its ThinkPad X41 Tablet demonstration that also won Best of Show. Demonstrated was the product’s function with LANDesk software. The demo showed off the product’s superior mobility, security, performance and ease of use. The ThinkPad X41 Tablet, features Intel Centrino Technology (Pentium M 758, 915GM, Intel 2915ABG, Intel GMA, and DDR2 RAM).
• Research and Technology
  NEC for its 64-bit Montecito Solution. The NEC Express 5800 series 1000 platform supports three generations of Itanium processors in a single system: McKinley, Madison and Montecito. The Express 5800 will run applications written for all generations of Itanium. The Express platform can be configured as separate partitions or as a single symmetric multi-processor.
• Storage
  Promise Technology for its SuperTrak Ex8300 with IOP331 processor RAID 6 Multiple Drive Failure. The demo highlighted Promise Technology’s emerging solutions for RAID, an emerging technology for shared storage systems and the large, high-capacity SATA disk arrays used in many servers today.

All exhibitors and sponsors of IDF were eligible. Judging the 17 finalists, narrowed down from 30 total entries, were hundreds of journalists and analysts covering the three-day technical conference at Moscone Center.

“Promoting technology leadership efforts driving Intel’s evolution to a platform strategy, the Technology Innovation Accelerated Awards recognize companies and individuals who take a creative approach in creating exciting new products through technologies that promise to exceed customer expectations,” said IDF General Manager Rob Chapman.

Intel plans to expand the awards program internationally, and hold a 2nd Semi-Annual Technology Innovation Accelerated Awards at IDF in March 7-9, also in San Francisco.

Quoting from the Windows Server Division blog:

Intel’s Pat Gelsinger just demo’d a future version of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 running Intel’s Virtualization Technology (VT). IDF attendees saw an early preview of a future release (post-Virtual Server 2005 R2) of Virtual Server. This future release will provide support for both Intel VT and AMD Pacifica. This release is scheduled for beta in 1H 2006 and availability in 2H 2006. One great thing about CPU-assisted virtualization is improved performance for non-Windows guest OSes (i.e., Linux), which will be supported on Virtual Server R2 later this year.

The Gelsinger demo had PC #1 running a NT 4 Legacy app, web server app and SQL Server. Gelsinger then wrapped up the NT 4 Legacy app and moved it over to PC #2 to show the portability of VMMs running Intel’s VT.

Separately today, you should know that we announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 – not Virtual Server 2005 SP1– will be the official name of the next version of Virtual Server 2005. The official name will appear in the RTM of the product in Q4 2005.

In another stage demo, Gelsinger announced VMware ESX Server will run Intel’s VT. The demo showed WinServer 2003 x64, Oracle db on RedHat Linux, and Windows NT 4 on one PC. Gelsinger blue-screened the NT 4 server, while the other two remained stable/running.

Gelsinger wrapped up the virtualization conversation by saying Intel’s VT will first appear on Pentium (desktop) chips later this year, Itanium procs beginning of 2006, and Xeon procs later in 2006.

Quoting from ENT News:

If you’ve noticed that Microsoft service packs seem to be flush with new features, apparently Microsoft has too. The company announced a new name for Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 on Wednesday. It is now called Virtual Server 2005 R2.
Virtual Server 2005 SP1/R2 has been in beta testing since April and remains on schedule for release by the end of the year. The new “R2” name will take effect at the release to manufacturing milestone.

Meanwhile, Microsoft added a post-R2 version of Virtual Server to the roadmap. Not yet named, the new version of Virtual Server will support the hardware-level virtualization platforms being developed by Intel and AMD.

Virtual Server 2005 R2

The most notable new feature of the R2 version of the year-old Virtual Server 2005 is support for Linux guest operating systems. Other new features include: support for x64 versions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, allowing more virtual machines per host; performance enhancements such as improved hyper-threading; built-in support for network installations of guest operating systems; and higher availability through support for clustering across hosts.

“The addition of the new features is the reason we are renaming the release to R2, in line with our release naming guidelines,” Microsoft said in a statement.

The name change has important implications for licensing. Had the new features been delivered in a service pack, they would have been free for customers already running Virtual Server 2005. In an R2 release, current Virtual Server customers without Software Assurance contracts must purchase a new license to get the new features.

Post-R2 Virtual Server

The post-R2 release is scheduled for beta testing in the first half of 2006 and general availability in the second half of the year, Microsoft said. Introduced via a demonstration this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the post-R2 version will be the first version to support the Intel VT, or “Vanderpool,” and AMD “Pacifica” chip-level virtualization capabilities. Both Intel and AMD are working to make their chips more adept at running multiple operating systems simultaneously.

The beta release should roughly coincide with the first availability of server chips from the two chipmakers sporting the new virtualization architectures.

Microsoft has been hinting that Virtual Server might go away after virtualization is integrated into Longhorn Server through Microsoft’s “hypervisor” technology. To be clear, Microsoft has not been promising that hypervisor would be available with the initial release of Longhorn Server, which is currently set for 2007. Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division, has said that the hypervisor technology might debut in a Longhorn Server service pack or R2, in the 2008 or 2009 timeframe.

“This release will provide customers and partners an important transition from Virtual Server 2005 to the Windows hypervisor technology, which will be delivered in the Windows Server ‘Longhorn’ wave of products,” Microsoft said in a statement about the post-R2 version of Virtual Server.

A bad move here: Microsoft should work hard on bridging the gap with the upcoming VMware Workstation 5.5 and instead is asking customers to pay a new product (which is just a small upgrade).

Anyway what this R2 release will bring? John Howard explains this on his blog:

At the IDF (Intel Developers Forum) yesterday, Microsoft made the announcement I’ve been waiting to go public on for a couple of months now. Virtual Server 2005 SP1 is no more. Well, that isn’t exactly true, the changes which are present for those of you beta-testing SP1 will be released, and in the same timeframe (ie end of this year) but it is now going to be called Virtual Server 2005 R2. This ties in very much with the Windows Server 2003 R2 release also due at the end of this year.

To recap on some of the changes in Virtual Server 2005 R2, you will see x64 host support, changes to ease the use of Virtual Server on hyperthreaded architectures, PXE booting, performance improvements, both when running guests and installing guests (the SCSI shunt driver being one of those improvements for example) and the support of non-Microsoft guest OS’s including Linux and Solaris.

As you are no-doubt already aware, announcements back at the MMS this year for the future of virtualisation within the Microsoft product set, specifically the “hypervisor” or Windows Virtualisation in the Longhorn Server timeframe. This still stands, but many of you felt there was a long way between SP1/R2 of Virtual Server 2005 and that future release. Hence, there will be a future release/update to Virtual Server due out which is due to beta in the first half of next year and release in the second half of next year. Un-named currently, and also at this stage, without detailed public specifics on what will be in this release, significantly it will take advantage of the VT and Pacifica technologies present in Intel/AMD processors. This will make the transition towards windows virtualisation in the future much easier.

This should be a NDA information, but since BetaNews and Bink leaked the news we can take a look at the new Workstation 5.5 beta program.

In this release every new feature is a key features:

• Full support for 64-bit host and guest OSes
  Will be finally possible to run a mixed 32 and 64 bit virtual environment on a single 64 bit physical server
  (a check will prevent you from running a 64 bit guest OS inside a 32 bit host OS)
• Experimental support for 2-way Virtual SMP
  Now every end user could run 2 CPUs VMs without engaging the mainstream ESX Server product. And the greatest thing is that even a single processor machine (if powered by Intel HyperThreading) will be able to use VSMP
  (not clear if this would be available on AMD dual core CPUs also)
• Convertless support for Microsoft products VMs
  Even if it’s still possible to convert VMs coming from Microsoft Virtual Server / Virtual PC, now you can run them as they are
  (changes to VMs are written in a VMware format file)

Workstation 5.5 is now in beta 2 phase and should released soon with another cool feature not mentioned here.

Three comments about this:

1. VMware is working hard transforming this product in the developer must-have tool (multi-snapshots, clones and now Virtual SMP are real examples). After this release I hardly believe any software engineer would work without an IDE and VMware Workstation.
2. VMware Workstation is gaining powerful features every release and actually just web interface and extended memory support divides it from GSX Server. The new expected GSX 4.0 should bring a lot of new features to remain interesting for customers (already developing and testing with Workstation and producing with ESX).
3. Microsoft is now really far from VMware. If nothing happens at Redmond better focus on the upcoming hypervisor, cause there are few chances to win the battle of non-paravirtualization products.

So virtualization.info wasn’t updated from end of May to end of August, but what happened meanwhile in the virtualization world? A lot. Really.

Two bigs took a lot of attention this period for different reasons.
At one side Microsoft confirmed its new hypervisor technology but explained it won’t be part of any codename Longhorn betas. We all should wait for a dedicated beta program after Longhorn Server release (likely happening on 2007), asking ourselves if Virtual Server is really going to die for that time.
A consolation: Vista (codename Longhorn Client) will include Virtual PC in some way.

About Virtual Server: it’s evolving very slowly. It now works well with Windows 2003 guests but as you probably know the only other change planned is the Service Pack 1 release (at the end of year) that will bring Linux VMs support.

At Redmond anyway problems are rising with VMs technologies implications and licensing so someone is start thinking a new, more modern licensing model.

Microsoft also took the world press online pages for a new security project called HoneyMonkeys, where a bunch of automated VMs actively surf the web looking for malicious sites and 0days attacks.

Closing about Redmond company I remind you that Virtual PC 7.0.2 for MacOS 10.4 is out (fixing some Tiger issues).

At the other side Cisco is supposed to be on acquiring EMC Corporation. In the last period the networking giant demostrated a vivid interest for virtualization since this year after the Topspin acquisition. They even hosted a webcast about virtualization benefits.
This could be an earthquake in the VMware world so we should follow this move very carefully.

In between AMD finally released technical specifications about its virtualization extension, Pacifica. But I hardly believe anyone could find anything readable inside the paper.
Luckily someone provided some details about it.

To speed up Pacifica adoption few days ago AMD also released the SimNow AMD64 simulator for free, simplyfing developers task to tune their applications for 64-bit real and virtual architectures.

VMware, which is now mentioned in Wikipedia, has been as usual one of the most active player: the Palo Alto company first released a new bug fixing wave of products: ESX Server 2.5.1, GSX Server 3.2.0, P2V Assistant 2.0.3 and ACE 1.0.1 (eventually bundled with LANdesk Security Suite).

Then arrived the announcement of a serious improvement of its already very active virtualization community, now called VMware Technology Network (VMTN). Changes aren’t only at the design level: VMware introduced a cheap subscription for developers to gain all company products at a discounted price (it really mimics Microsoft MSDN subscription) and a new Virtual Machine Center where you’ll find some pre-installed VMs with various OSes and enterprise servers.

This new VMTN already produced good things: a paper about new Workstation Teams technology, one about Clones usage in development, another one about timing inside VMs (I was waiting this since 2 years), another about ESX Server software architecture and a last one about Virtual SMP best practices.

Inside the VMTN also born a couple of interesting (but unsupported) projects: Virtualization Toolbox, aimed at maintainance of ESX Server, and LDAP_search, which simplify ESX Server integration with Microsoft Active Directory.

While Microsoft is facing licensing doubts, VMware announced that its licensing model will be per-socket instead of per-core. This is a great news for anyone is buying now AMD dual core CPUs.

The two biggest news anyway were given few days ago:

1. VMware opens up its source code (actually ESX Server) for partners, permetting them to customize products as needed (this is going to be strictly controlled), trying to enstablish some virtualization standards
2. the whole product line is going to support paravirtualized Linux OSes and Sun Solaris (isn’t clear if Solaris will be also able to act as HostOS)

There is another huge news connected with VMware Workstation 5.0.1 beta but I’m under NDA so you’ll have to wait an official announcement or an open beta.

On the events front VMware called for presentations at VMworld 2005, detailed the agenda and sent out invitations for the Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX) 2005, the annual technical conference for partners (sessions are oriented to VPCs), taking place at Vienna this year.

On the partnership front VMware joined a new community around blade technologies started by IBM: Blade.org.

As last news I can tell italian readers that the wide known italian distributor Itway is now became also a VMware distributor.

PlateSpin is the forth most interesting virtualization company of the period. They first announced a new OS Portability technology, then released the evolution of the acclaimed PowerP2V based on this technology, called PowerConvert.
PowerConvert seems really flexible, permitting to save a physical server/VM on an image compatible with market leaders products formats (Symantec Ghost, Acronis TrueImage, etc.), and re-deploying it anywhere in a physical or virtual environment. I hope to try it soon.

By the way PlateSpin products are now distributed even by Magirus (in Italy too).

Also SWsoft hit the press: Intel decided to invest on the company and signed a technology agreement aimed to bring Virtuozzo able to use Intel Virtualization Technology, Dual-Core and EM64T.
Virtuozzo Server (the Linux edition) hits now 2.6.2 release version and shows a brand new P2V embedded techology called VZP2V.
If interested I suggest you to read their new whitepaper about OS virtualization.

Another start-up announcement hit the press: Virtual Iron declared general availability of its product and the plan to expand its management layer for approaching Xen technologies.

Xen meanwhile continue on its way, focusing more on security, reaching version 2.0.7 and disclosing more news about 3.0 release which should bring many wanted features like support for virtual SMP and AMD/Intel virtualization extensions.

As you know actually Xen cannot provide support for Microsoft OSes in its domains. So here it comes Win4Lin announcing they will fully support Windows 2000 and XP platforms inside Xen (you have to install Win4Lin on DumU).

Even Red Hat gained press attentions thanks to Xen which is now embedded on just released Fedora Core 4 (even if has some glitches) and is expected to be included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux too.

Solaris 10 too is connected to Xen since some Sun developers reached to run their new OS inside a Xen domain, while their company plans to resell VMware products.

Novell, like Sun, is trying to walk with one foot in two shoes, working on Xen and announcing an expanded partnership with VMware.

Another famous open source project about virtualization, Bochs, went out from letargy with the 2.2.1 release.
By the way: a crazy man just achieved to run Windows 95 and Linux on a Playstation Portable thanks to Bochs.

Also Apple had a small space in virtualization news: since Steve Jobs announcement of MacOS x86 various leaked ISOs circulated on the Net. But the OS checkes for an hardware key so it’s eventually useless. At least till now: someone has been nice enough to hack the hardware check and release a VMware image on torrents. I cannot confirm if it exists or works but the news seems real.
On various sites you should be able to find even MacOS x86 running on Intel screenshoots: these are supposed to be fake instead.

Still talking about Mac, emulators, after PearPC, are reproducing fast and so appeared Guest PC 1.5, which emulates a x86 architecture, and Mac-on-Mac, which permits to run a second MacOS instance.

Least but not last the big blue, IBM, announced its Virtualization Engine 2.0.

Ok folks, this should be everything till today. I finally can delete 250 news messages holding on my virtualization mailbox 🙂

Hello everybody.
I finally recovered my broadband connection. Then I’ll start posting again in two weeks (after my vacation).

During last weeks I backupped whole blog on Blogger mantaining every post title, body and time. Old comments are lost, sorry.
I hope the Blogger switching will mean a spam reduction in comments and a clearer template.
RSS feed address is the same. If any problem arises please let me know.

Good vacation.
Alessandro

Hello everybody.
As you may have notices this blog isn’t updated since a while. This is cause my broadband provider, the italian incumbent Telecom Italia, is having technical difficulties with my line since more than two months.
I’m desperately trying to abandon it and I subscribed another provider. But things in this country aren’t simply as one could imagine…

Working on a 28.8Kbps analog line (I can neither count on a full 56K) is really hard and I just can read my mail.

I will start posting again as soon as I have a decent connection back.

Thanks to everybody wrote me asking what happened.

Quoting from official Xen-announce mailing list:

The Xen team are pleased to announce the release of Xen 2.0.6 !

This release includes support for Linux versions 2.6.11.10 and 2.4.30, NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3, along with many bug fixes. In particular:

* a fix to a nasty VM relocation bug
* several AGP/DRM fixes
* block device performance fix
* CDROM and floppy fixes
* better hyperthreading support
* misc tool hardening and improved default security

The announcement also anticipates 3.0 release:

Early in June we will be releasing the 3.0-testing series, which is the first step toward the 3.0.0 release. There are a number of important architectural changes in the 3.0 development tree, and we’ll be creating the testing series as soon as 32 bit x86 (8GB support will not have the same level of maturity, but hopefully this will be achieved through extensive testing and continuing development over the coming weeks.