History

While AMD told the developers in attendance at its Reviewer’s Day a lot about Pacifica, it has not said much publicly yet. The company is making sure that VMware and Microsoft, which sell the software-based virtualization hypervisors that most companies use today on X86 iron, have been involved in the development of Pacifica; AMD is also collaborating with the upstart, open source XenSource alternatives to VMware’s GSX Server and ESX Server and Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 products.

AMD is being very careful to pitch Pacifica, which is akin to Intel’s “Vanderpool,” now called Virtualization Technology or VT for short, for its Xeon and Itanium processors, as a means of extending the existing software-based hypervisors that VMware and Microsoft currently sell. But the truth of the matter is that abstracting the X86 instruction set and virtualizing it was the real value in the virtualization software that these companies sell, and both VMware and Microsoft, as well as any products that come from the XenSource community, will be relegated–and properly so–to the realm of providing management of virtualization capabilities that are propped up by the chips. This is great news for chip makers like AMD and Intel and for workstation and server customers, but it remains to be seen how virtualization software makers such as VMware, Microsoft, and XenSource will fare. VMware has about 10,000 server customers, and the limiting factors to the adoption of its products have been the relatively high cost of its software and overhead associated with its use; Microsoft has a much smaller installed base, but the same limiting factors. Pacifica and Vanderpool will eliminate much of that overhead, and VMware and Microsoft will eventually have to drop prices on their virtualization products, since they don’t virtualize the hardware to the same extent and since XenSource will be offering similar capabilities across all X86 platforms for what will presumably be a very modest price. The virtualization software business will go to the higher ground of proving who has the best, easiest management tools–and we will all benefit from this substantial change. That is why VMware, Microsoft, and XenSource are getting on board. They still have an excellent chance of making real money, and because Vanderpool will be on the “Montecito” Itanium chips that come out early in 2006, they will be able to support the Itanium platform for the first time. IBM already has similar virtualization hardware and a hypervisor for its Power-based servers, the iSeries and the pSeries, but these are not compatible with VMware, Microsoft, or XenSource products.

Pacifica will be embedded in PC and server chips from AMD that are due in the first half of 2006. It will not be available in the dual-core Opterons that are expected within a matter of months.

Teams
Teams functionality makes it easier to manage connected virtual machines and simulate “real world” multi-tier configurations. A team is your designated group of virtual machines, and the private networks that connect them.
Teams allow you to configure power operations, such as power on/off and suspend/resume, in the exact sequence you desire. You determine network characteristics between the virtual machines in a team, including network bandwidth and packet loss percentages. The console view displays active thumbnails of all the virtual machines in a team, allowing you to easily identify and switch between any of the virtual machines on your team.

Clones
Clones facilitate collaborative testing and debugging, get colleagues up and running quickly with virtual machines, and simplify the process of making a complete copy of a virtual machine. Clones allow you to duplicate virtual machines in two different ways – linked and full.
Linked clones make it easy to set up a library of baseline virtual machines on a shared drive, to be accessed and shared by you and others, without using unnecessary disk space on local machines.
A full clone?a complete copy?is also available when you need an identical virtual machine without the need to locate files within the host file system or to tediously install everything required to duplicate an existing guest configuration.

Improved Multi-Virtual Machine Performance
Workstation 5 includes significant improvements in memory utilization when virtual machines are used concurrently. This allows you to efficiently run multiple virtual machines with much less total memory.

Improved Networking Performance
Workstation 5 offers optional, enhanced networking performance by leveraging VMware’s custom network driver. Once you install the updated VMware Tools, the necessary network drivers integrate seamlessly to offer significantly improved network performance.

Improved Suspend/Resume and Snapshot Operations
Workstation 5 performs significantly faster suspend/resume and snapshot operations, enabling you to spend more time testing and less time waiting for power operations to execute.

New Host Operating System Support
···SUSE Linux Pro 9.2
···SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0
···Mandrake Linux 10
···Windows Server 2003 SP1 beta (experimental support)
···Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 beta (experimental support)

New Guest Operating System Support
···Windows Server 2000 Small Business
···Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 3.0
···SUSE Linux Pro 9.2
···SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0
···Mandrake Linux 10
···Novell NetWare 6.5 SP3
···Novell NetWare 5.1 SP8
···Novell Linux Desktop 9
···Sun’s Java Desktop System
···Windows Server 2003 SP1 beta (experimental support)
···Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 beta (experimental support)
···SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP1 (experimental support)

Other various service pack updates and kernel updates

Improved 64-bit Host Support
···Workstation 5 includes hardware support for AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, and Intel EM64T.
···Software support includes 64-bit host operating systems:
······Windows XP (experimental support)
······Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0
······SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 7, 8, 9
······Windows Server 2003 SP1 (experimental support)
······Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 (experimental support).

Isochronous USB support
Workstation 5 offers support for isochronous USB input devices such as web cameras and microphones, as well as output devices such as speakers. Use your webcam or work with multi-track audio within your guest OS.

Command Line Interface
Workstation 5 offers a new command line interface (CLI), enabling you to create scripts to automate certain manual steps. See Command Line Reference.

Movie Record and Playback
Workstation 5 offers the ability to record your actions within a virtual machine and save the movie in an .AVI format, facilitating team collaboration. Replay the resulting .AVI file on any PC equipped with an .AVI player. A free Windows player is available for download from the VMware web site.
Record steps to reproduce defects in a particular configuration, or record configuration steps prior to running an application. Share the movie with colleagues to enable team collaboration. See Movie Capture.

Improved Linux User Interface
Workstation 5 offers a new GTK-2 based user interface on Linux, which provides an improved look and feel, and enhanced usability.
Easier Upgrades and VMware Tools Installation Improvements
Starting with Workstation 5, on Windows hosts you can automatically install a new release over an existing Workstation release. The installer automatically uninstalls the previous version before installing the new version. Workstation 5 also streamlines VMware Tools installation for Linux virtual machines, by allowing users to install VMware Tools without exiting the X session. See Upgrading VMware Workstation, and Installing VMware Tools.

Support for NX bit
Workstation 5 now supports the no execute instruction bit for guest operating systems that can leverage it. Aimed at thwarting malicious buffer overruns, NX allows properly written applications to designate memory space as executable, so that any code trying to access other memory space is not executed.

VMware Workstation 5, which features memory sharing technology borrowed from the company’s ESX Server, has a Teams feature that allows users to connect multiple virtual machines together with configurable network segments in order to simulate and test higher-end applications on a programmer’s desktop system, company officials said.

The new version also allows desktop users to take multiple point-in-time “snapshots” of running virtual machines, and then revert back to a previous snapshot with a single mouse click. Version 5 makes it possible for users to mark any virtual machine as a template, allowing multiple users to share its base installation. Any changes made to the virtual machine are saved in a new virtual machine that is connected as a way to reduce disk space and better empower team collaboration, company officials said.

“There are a lot more people building visor-based applications today, but building them is expensive because developers can’t afford to buy machines for each and every developer. But with feature like Teams, for instance, allows developers to create multitier configurations on a single physical machine,” said Srinivas Krishnamurti, a senior product manager at VMware.

One developer said the new product’s virtual capabilities have served to reduce their hardware costs.

“We cut our costs by buying fewer PCs, and we can do more on one computer than we could with separate boxes. With language testing, for example, we can boot up four virtual machines in different languages at once, and then run and compare our products against different languages and configurations at the same time. We can also isolate issues without having to worry about degradation of hardware or needing to rebuild systems,” said Cliff Thornton, manager of Solution and Interoperability Quality Control at Cognos.

In Version 5 VMware has also added support for 64-bit operating systems and processors including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. Support for chips with 64-bit extensions, such as AMD’s Opteron and Athlon 64 and Intel’s EM64T, are also supported.

The company has also added new 32-bit operating system support to the product for host and/or guest operating systems including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 3, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, SuSE Linux Pro 9.2, Mandrake Linux 10, Sun’s Java Desktop System, and Novell’s Linux Desktop 9.

The primary N1 vision was a network-centric philosophy that views the network as a resource that make computing more flexible, adaptive and easily connected; managing the datacenter as if it were a single system using virtualization and data automation; managing policy; as well as provide load balancing and other autonomic technologies.

N1 was also designed to manage and coordinate the provisioning of new hardware and software.

However, making this entire vision a reality would have required Sun to support a wide breadth of hardware and platforms. Sun will now shift its focus to making N1 work with its own products.

As first reported by eWeek, John Loiacono, Sun’s executive vice president for software has confirmed suspicions that Sun will drastically alter its plans for N1 implementation in the coming months when a new version of the framework is publicly released.

According to the report, Sun will take a different approach to how N1 provisions multi platform services that is both simplified and more realistic. Sun says that its work in utility computing and with grid computing technologies is the basis of its changed vision.

Loiacono said Sun will begin to push a project known as the Customer Network Systems group (CNS) that will make each component of Sun’s product portfolio from servers, to the operating system to its Java Virtual Machine (JVM) able to “connect back to Sun.”

Sun will then be able to provision and patch products and share service information if the customer opts in.

“This combination can lower total cost of ownership through server virtualization that scales and utilizes each server to its fullest potential,” Kurt Daniel, SWsoft’s marketing director, said in a statement.