Virtualization Report | David Marshall | May 2007

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May 2007

May 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

ToutVirtual Touts VirtualIQ Pro for Virtualization Management

Carlsbad, California based ToutVirtual today announced the release of its virtualization management product called VirtualIQ Pro.

The company had originally announced a free version of its policy-based, automated management solution back in July of 2006, calling it VirtualIQ 525. The product supported up to 5 CPUs or 25 virtual machines, and could manage virtualization platforms from VMware as well as open-source Xen. Since that time, the company has recently discontinued availability of the freeware product and instead replaced it with the pay version of VirtualIQ Pro. The new pay version offers more functionality and wider virtualization platform support.

VirtualIQ Pro has expanded its feature set to include real-time monitoring, host and virtual machine performance management, capacity planning, and faster root-cause analysis. The product's Web-based console allows IT administrators to automate virtual machines with policy configurations, determine resource usage of CPU and memory, create alarms and generate reports.

And unlike management products from the virtualization platform vendors themselves, ToutVirtual prides itself on being vendor agnostic, supporting multiple heterogeneous virtualization platforms from VMware, Microsoft, XenSource and Novell.

The product is sold as a standalone software package or bundled and sold as a software appliance. The software appliance can manage up to 10 CPUs or 50 virtual machines, while the software package is scalable to an unlimited number of CPUs and virtual machines.

"We hear over and over again that what customers need now is the ability to manage virtual servers using policy-based and automated IT processes," said Vipul Pabari, chief technology officer for ToutVirtual. "VirtualIQ Pro is a unified management console that enables broad deployment of virtualization technology in a snap. VirtualIQ Pro's capacity planning, performance management and web- based reports enable IT administrators to proactively manage their cross-platform virtual server environment."

VirtualIQ Pro products provide IT managers the following technical benefits:

Faster root-cause analysis in real time
Ease of installation and deployment
Visibility of physical hosts and virtual machine usage for quick capacity planning
Host and virtual machine performance management
Agentless operation for simple installation and support
Policy-based real-time alarms, actions and virtual machine backup
Real-time and historical reports for proactive management

VirtualIQ Pro products are cost-effective and produce a better ROI via:

Single, unified web console which allows management of multi-node heterogeneous virtual platforms
Better IT resources balancing by means of business service priority settings
Scalable product offering to match business growth
Deployment capabilities at departmental, server room, or data center level with the same user interface
Reduction in capital and operational expenditures via capacity planning, performance management, and root-cause analysis tools

The list price for each software appliance is $599 for a one year subscription or $1499 for a three year subscription. The software solution is based on the number of CPUs and virtual machines.

Posted by David Marshall on May 30, 2007 04:45 PM

May 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

ClearCube's Blade Solution Delivers on VDI

ClearCube Technology has expanded the capabilities of its blade solution as they enter into a closer partnership with VMware and gain certification to OEM VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The company is the first to certify its PC blade solution for VMware VDI.

The company announced its Sentral v.5.5 management software suite last month, and now it is official, the software will help an organization to more efficiently manage physical and virtual resources.

"ClearCube's leading PC blade solution for VMware VDI is a unique offering that provides reliable end-user computing power in VDI deployments," said Bruce Cohen, president and CEO, ClearCube. "With VMware VDI and our Sentral v5.5 management software, ClearCube is bringing to market a true PC virtualization solution. The desktop virtualization solution enables organizations to make the most of their investment in virtualization by supplying reliable and cost-effective computing power to all employees."

ClearCube says that organizations that deploy its solutions can consolidate computing resources in their data center to improve security and ensure uptime. And when combined with the enterprise-class VMware virtualization platform, they can provide organizations with VDI solutions that ensure end-user computing power.

With Sentral's unique connection broker technology, organizations can automatically switch between virtualized and dedicated physical computing resources. ClearCube said that this flexibility helps guarantee end users always have the computing power required to effectively conduct their jobs.

ClearCube's technology deploys VDI licenses on a per-user basis, not a per-blade basis. They said doing so is more cost-efficient and allows customers to support the appropriate number of users on a blade and still deliver the required user experience.

"As virtualization technology spreads across the enterprise, organizations need to manage both virtual and physical resources efficiently," said Roger Kay, president, Endpoint Technologies Associates. "Joining the VMware Hardware Alliance Program allows ClearCube to deliver a complete virtual desktop solution based on PC blades."

Posted by David Marshall on May 29, 2007 08:40 PM

May 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

As Virtualization Expands, what about Security?

As virtualization and server consolidation continues to expand within IT organizations, what, if anything, are they doing about security? Is security still a concern? The British Computer Society recently wrote that security is no longer the prime concern of many IT managers. But Reflex Security on the other hand is working out major performance and feature enhancements to its Virtual Security Appliance to help secure the virtual network. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on May 29, 2007 08:34 PM

May 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Capacity and Chargeback Virtual Appliance for VMware ESX

Before virtualization came around, IT departments typically had a process in place to account for department chargebacks when it came time for billing departments for computer resource consumption. Now, many of those systems just don't make a whole lot of sense.

Because virtualization consists of pooled resources, it becomes difficult to track and determine how these resources are really being used over time and thus how to account for them.

In a recent survey conducted by IDC's Industry Insights Information Technology Management Service (ITMS), results revealed that respondents view their existing IT chargeback (i.e., the IT expenses that are charged back to individual business units) processes as moderately effective and fair.

While the majority of companies report having begun deploying virtualization, only 50 percent are factoring virtualization resources into their chargeback methodologies. Of those who do, less than half (40 percent) believe it adds to business user confusion, while the balance (10 percent) report it enhances the process by more tightly mapping resources to business units.

To answer this problem, VKernel introduces what it calls the world's first capacity and chargeback virtual appliance which includes the operating system, MySQL and Apache wrapped up in a 400MB VM package. Drop the appliance into your VMware ESX Server environment and begin generating reports that show your virtual machine resource (CPU, Storage, RAM and network) consumption. Its reporting also helps you understand total resource consumption by groups of virtual machines that support business application such as email, CRM and other systems. And it generates chargeback reports that are based on actual consumption of resources in your environment.

You can download and try the V-Kernel Beta, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 27, 2007 04:11 PM

May 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

3Tera Releases AppLogic 2.0 Grid OS

This week, 3Tera, developer of the AppLogic platform for grid-based utility computing, announced its 2.0 release of the platform. The latest release adds comprehensive application monitoring and support for multiple CPUs per appliance. SaaS and Web 2.0 providers will be happy to know that the new product offers greater scalability, improved resource utilization, and improved visibility and control over application performance.

Vlad Miloushev, President and CEO, 3Tera, said, "While a lot of people are beginning to talk about cloud computing, we already have users in production. AppLogic 2.0 extends the limits of utility computing by providing unparalleled transparency and control of application operation. SaaS and Web 2.0 providers can leverage these capabilities to constantly monitor application performance, network response time, resource usage and many other critical variables from anywhere in the world-using only a browser."

Some of the new features found in AppLogic 2.0 include:

Application Monitoring which provides unprecedented visibility into the operation and performance of customer applications. Every element of the application can be monitored simply by adding counters to a custom dashboard using the new monitoring GUI. Hundreds of variables are available as visual graphs that display the values of selected counters within the appliances.
Multi-CPU support allows running SMP virtual appliances for processor-intensive software components like databases or JVMs. Each appliance can now have as little as 1% of a CPU and as much as 4 CPUs - a 400X range of resource utilization, allowing users to finely tune their application performance.
Pre-packaged clustered LAMP stack infrastructure helps new users get a quick start. By simply adding the application code they can have a full-featured, scalable online application, complete with monitoring that can be scaled in production from a single CPU to more than 32 without modification.
GUI enhancements include a web shell for accessing both virtual appliance and grid controller command line interfaces as well as balloon connections for easier infrastructure editing

A complete list of all the new features is available on the company's Web site, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 26, 2007 06:39 AM

May 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

JumpBox - Virtual Appliances Made Easy

JumpBox has a simple goal in life, to make the deployment of server based software so easy, anyone can do it.

To do that, the company is creating a library of pre-installed, pre-integrated open source web applications that are bundled with the JumpBox platform. Using virtualization software like VMware, you simply download these application packages onto your computer, take about 30 seconds to configure everything and then run them. They make easy work of deploying these types of applications.

The company recently announced two new JumpBox bundled applications to their library: Joomla! and SugarCRM.

The Joomla! JumpBox was the most requested application on their download survey. Joomla! is described as one of the more popular content management systems today and is used widely around the world. This JumpBox includes Joomla! version 1.0.12.

The SugarCRM JumpBox comes with SugarCRM version 4.5.1c. If you aren't familiar with SugarCRM, it is a customer relationship management system that can be used to enhance marketing performance, drive sales, improve customer satisfaction and provide overall insight into business performance.

To make things even easier, JumpBox has recently added (at the request of many users in the company's forums) a series of tutorials on how to accomplish specific tasks with setting up and working with JumpBox. Specific questions include:

Run a JumpBox the first time after downloading
Backup your data
Restore your data from a previous backup
Configure the JumpBox to use a proxy
Change the admin password
Set a static IP address
Login to the application itself

These and more tutorials can be found on the Web site or accessed here.

You can find out more about JumpBox and their offerings, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 26, 2007 06:11 AM

May 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Red Hat Dives into the Virtual Appliance Market

Virtual appliances are hot right now! And it doesn't matter what you call them. Red Hat's operating system is certainly no stranger to the virtualization appliance market. But recently, the company announced that it was working with Intel to deliver an appliance that would work with desktop PCs and Intel vPro technology. They also announced a partnership with Sybase and announced a database appliance with integrated virtualization. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on May 25, 2007 05:15 PM

May 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Veeam Software Updates Its VI3 Reporting Tool

Veeam Software announced that they have released an update to their virtualization reporting tool - Veeam Reporter 2.0 for VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3).

If you aren't familiar with the product, Reporter 2.0 collects information about a VI3 environment, its components and configuration settings, and provides comprehensive reports for analysis and documentation. The tool is fully integrated with VMware VirtualCenter and ESX Server, and according to the company, it can quickly discover and collect information about a VI3 environment in less than five minutes.

Veeam Reporter 2.0 collects every detail of ESX or VirtualCenter configurations and saves them in a variety of formats. File formats include: Visio, great for visualizing and analyzing the virtual infrastructure; Excel, good for building an inventory list and for searching for details such as IP addresses for virtual machines; Word, which provides the ability to compare documents to help track changes; and the PDF format offers a portable format for distribution and archival purposes.

It also offers a high-level view of the entire VI3 environment, from networking, storage, VMotion and configuration points of view.

"Since its first release a few months ago Veeam Reporter has become a very popular tool among ESX administrators and consultants", said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam Software president and CEO. "The new version is built on customer feedback, and brings the product to the next level with new functionality and scalability."

Pricing for Veeam Reporter 2.0 starts at $120 per CPU. More information about the product can be found, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 24, 2007 07:12 PM

May 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Upset about Delayed Viridian Features? SWsoft Says Try Virtuozzo

If you are upset about Microsoft postponing certain features from its Viridian hypervisor, SWsoft suggests you stick with the Windows host platform but that you take a look at Virtuozzo.

Concerned about support? SWsoft said they are a Gold certified partner with Microsoft, and they work closely together to support customers on the Windows platform. And SWsoft is backed by 24-hour, 7-day support from Microsoft for customers operating Windows-based applications within Virtuzzo virtual environments.

Still not sure? Ilya Baimetov, Director of Technology at SWsoft, offers a few reasons on his Blog why you might want to give Virtuozzo a try if you are waiting on certain features from Viridian. He writes:

Virtuozzo has always had dynamic resource allocation - you can change how much memory, CPU power, disk space and quite a few of other parameters of a VE (virtual environment) on the fly, in real time. No other server virtualization technology - not VMware ESX, not XEN - support dynamic resource management.
On Linux, Virtuozzo does live VE migration without SAN or any other shared storage, and we're making very good progress in implementing the same capability on Windows. Look for that to be delivered soon.
Virtuozzo supports as many CPU cores (or any other resource) as the host OS supports. And for those who need real scalability, Virtuozzo supports Itanium. Again, no other server virtualization technology scales nearly as well. Virtuozzo supports any number of CPUs, any amount of memory or disk space, any number of devices - on the host and in the guests. And there is no performance penalty. When an application in a guest is using 8 CPUs, it does it with the native efficiency of the underlying OS. As for VMware ESX, if you ran any heavy workload in a VM with 4 virtual CPUs, you know the difference very well, especially if you had few more VMs on the same machine.

You can find out more information about Virtuozzo, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 24, 2007 04:48 PM

May 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

EMC to Keep 90% Stake in VMware for 2 Years

In February, EMC announced plans to sell off or IPO a 10 percent stake in its acquired virtualization giant - VMware. The IPO is expected to bring in a cool $100 million, which is nothing to sneeze at since the acquisition only cost the company $625 million back in January of 2004.

According to Reuters, EMC's CFO, David Goulden, said the company doesn't plan to reduce its stake in VMware for at least two years after the initial public offering. Goulden told Reuters, "We're obviously going to assess the situation down the road based on what's happening."

He said the company aimed to keep its 90 percent stake after the IPO for some time, adding, "I'm looking at least a couple of years time horizon."

If you were planning to try and acquire more than 10 percent of the company... I guess you'll have to wait a while. :)

Posted by David Marshall on May 21, 2007 05:42 PM

May 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Performance Tuning and Benchmarking VMware Workstation 6

What a perfect time to come out with this whitepaper! VMware just recently announced the release of the long awaited desktop virtualization platform, VMware Workstation 6. And now, the company has created a valuable whitepaper titled "Performance Tuning and Benchmarking Guidelines for VMware Workstation 6".

This 34-page whitepaper provides valuable guidance in optimizing performance using VMware Workstation 6.0 and also offers a helpful performance benchmarking methodology, both of which are extremely important to people whether already virtualizing or still just thinking about it. (BTW, come on in, the water is fine!)

The preface reads:

There are some areas in which the best-performing configurations of VMware Workstation virtual machines vary slightly from the configurations of native machines. One of the goals of this book is to provide guidance about these variations. To this end, we discuss configuration of the host, the VMware Workstation software, and the operating systems and applications in the individual virtual machines.
The benchmarking guidelines in this book are intended to assist in the acquisition of meaningful, accurate, and repeatable benchmarking results. These guidelines are useful when you perform comparisons between VMware Workstation and either native systems or other virtualization products, as well as when you run benchmarks in virtual machines in general. The guidelines should not, however, be considered VMware best practices in all cases. Among other reasons, this is because benchmarking sometimes involves saturating one resource while overprovisioning others, something that would not be desirable in a production environment.

The book also includes examples of common pitfalls that can impact performance or affect the accuracy or relevance of the results obtained by benchmarking tests.

You can download the whitepaper, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 21, 2007 05:25 PM

May 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Why Not Acquire Them? A Look at Thintropy and Indigo Stone

New software products are coming out all the time, and many of these products are getting scooped up and acquired into other products. Case in point, there are two recent acquisitions that have taken place. First, we'll discuss XDS acquiring Thintropy to help with their vision for the consumer desktop virtualization market. And then, we'll talk about how EMC is far from finished gobbling up technology, as it recently acquired Indigo Stone to help EMC in the bare metal recovery game. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on May 21, 2007 05:18 PM

May 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

CiRBA Launches Version 4.2 of its Data Center Intelligence Solution

CiRBA Inc. released version 4.2 of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI) solution. This release provides improved usability, performance enhancements, data acquisition enhancements and expanded system audit coverage.

The company's solution helps organizations quickly analyze and map the safest path to an optimally consolidated and virtualized data center. Some of the new features in CiRBA 4.2 include:

New Map Navigation Window - Through its unique compatibility maps, the CiRBA solution offers an intuitive way of visualizing an organization's server environment. A new analysis Map Navigation Window in version 4.2 provides a practical and scalable visualization of large maps to enable data center managers to look at the big picture but quickly and easily zoom in and focus on areas that warrant closer examination.
Customizable Statistical Distribution Report - CiRBA provides specialized Statistical Distribution Reports to facilitate compliance and consolidation analysis initiatives. The report identifies statistical outliers in an organization's environment by providing detailed comparative variance and distribution analysis of the configuration of systems in a data center. In version 4.2, outliers can be selectively removed from the report to reflect an organization's accepted server configuration variances
Data Acquisition - Whether it's for a one-time QuickStart implementation or a long term deployment with ongoing scheduled audits, CiRBA's comprehensive data acquisition options provide unparalleled flexibility to collect configuration, workload and non-technical constraint data for data center transformation analysis. CiRBA's already extensive list of data acquisition options has been further expanded in version 4.2.
- Agentless WMI Configuration and Performance Data Collection
- New Data Import interface
- Expanded SNMP Agent Coverage to include:
  - SuSE SLES9 x64 SP3 and SLES10 x64
  - SuSE SLES8 SP1 and SLES9 SP3 for pSeries
  - Microsoft Virtual Server version 2005
- Analysis Usability and Performance - Extensive advancements in map caching and other performance optimizations in version 4.2 makes all actions, from generating analysis maps to making rule edits and performing what-if analysis, significantly faster.

For more information, visit their Web site, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 20, 2007 03:27 PM

May 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtual Bridges Releases Product to run Windows on Solaris 10

Austin, TX based Virtual Bridges recently announced the release of its Win4Solaris product which allows Windows to run on the Solaris 10 operating system.

The company announced two products:

Win4Solaris Pro Desktop - which runs as an application on x86 systems with the Solaris 10 operating system. It allows users to seamlessly run Windows applications and desktops on these systems.

Win4Solaris Virtual Desktop Server - it combines with Sun Ray and Secure Global Desktop to allow users to serve Windows application sessions from a Solaris 10 based server, no longer requiring a separate Windows server to provide access to Windows applications.

The product focuses on integration with the host Unix or Linux environment. And rather than supporting multiple guest OS environments, the company says it specializes in virtualizing Windows for Unix and Linux users for both ease of use as well as utilization efficiencies.

Win4Solaris Pro Desktop features include:

Runs Windows 2000/XP Applications and Desktop on the Solaris 10 OS at near-native speed
Cut and Paste between Solaris 10 and Windows
Ability to display either full desktop mode or "floating" application mode
Windows malware resistance through "renewable" Windows architecture
Allows re-use of your existing Windows license for both cost-savings and broad application compatibility
Full integration between the Solaris 10 and Windows file systems for user documents and settings

Additional Features in Virtual Desktop Server include:

Resumable sessions
"headless" start for instant user access
Batch start and stop feature for volume deployments
Remote audio/multimedia when used together with Sun Ray
Local printing support
web portal access
Maximum flexibility in guest OS and applications supported per host
Consolidation of Windows desktop licenses for easy management and change control

Both products are available now, and pricing starts at $149.99 for Win4Solaris Desktop Pro. More information can be found, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 20, 2007 03:11 PM

May 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Xen 3.1 is Available for Download

In case you missed the news, the Xen team was excited to announce that it had released Xen 3.1 for download. The team said the release represented a major milestone in the Xen project. This version contains performance and stability enhancements, as well as additional features for all architectures and a brand new management API.

Highlights of the release include:

XenAPI 1.0 Support - Which includes XML configuration files for virtual machines, VM life-cycle management operations and secure on- or off-box XML-RPC with bindings for many languages
Basic save/restore/migrate support for Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM).
Dynamic memory control for HVM guests
32-on-64 paravirtualized guest support (run PAE PV VMs on a 64-bit Xen)
Blktap copy-on-write disk support

You can download it, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 20, 2007 02:50 PM

May 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Dell Shows off VMware HA/DRS with Video Demonstrations

For those of you who still haven't gone down the path of evaluating or purchasing VMware's VI3 High Availability (HA) or Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) or even if you haven't driven past someone using it and honked your horn just to say hello, you might want to check out the latest listing of video clips from Dell's TechCenter.

Back in March, I wrote about Dell's video demonstration of VMware's VMotion capabilities. My only complaint was that they didn't add any audio to go along with the video. Well, Scott Hanson took my "hint hint" remark to heart and not only retrofitted the VMotion video with audio, but now he brings us a whole new series of videos (yes, with audio) covering HA and DRS.

If you haven't seen these technologies in action yet, I invite you to watch these video clips.

VMware HA/DRS Demonstration of Planned Maintenance - 2:38
This demo shows the ability of VMware DRS to easily migrate VMs off ESX Hosts in need of planned maintenance. Planned maintenance such as firmware and BIOS updates can then be performed with little impact to the users on those VMs.

VMware HA Demonstration of an Unplanned Outage - 2:08
This demo shows what happens when the Virtual Infrastructure is presented with an ESX Host failure. A Dell PowerEdge blade is physically removed from the chassis, and the resulting failure and recovery of the VMs is seen in the demo.

VMware DRS Demonstration of Dynamic VM Migration with Spikes in Workload - 3:58
Using the DVD Store Application, workload is generated on a VMware DRS cluster to create an unbalanced environment. DRS recognizes this unbalance and migrates the VM using Vmotion to another ESX Host in the cluster that has free resources.

Scott has also added a PDF White Paper to go along with the video demonstration - VMware HA/DRS Solution Scenarios on Dell PowerEdge Servers.

Thanks for notifying me about the updates Scott, and thank you for creating these helpful video demonstrations. And I'm going to be on the lookout for Dell's blade teleportation feature, keep me posted!

Posted by David Marshall on May 20, 2007 02:12 PM

May 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Akorri Offers Application Service Level Management for VMware

Akorri introduces their BalancePoint 1.5 management software and ties it to the rising virtualization market.

The company hopes their new software will help accelerate consolidation by improving performance and efficiency of the virtual infrastructure. The new version offers IT administrators cross-domain visibility into application performance and infrastructure utilization that is critical to making capacity planning decisions across the infrastructure.

Akorri says its product's analytics technology enables IT organizations to quickly solve performance problems, optimize application performance, improve infrastructure utilization and accurately plan for growth and change.

"Customers of all sizes have asked us to help them maximize their investments in virtual infrastructure," said Rich Corley, Akorri founder and CEO. "Virtualization offers tremendous advantages over traditional approaches, but new management technologies are required to achieve the full benefits in data center environments. BalancePoint 1.5 provides new levels of visibility and control for applications running on VMware by mapping the server and storage resources supporting each application and using Akorri's advanced analytics to help deliver enterprise-class performance."

The new BalancePoint 1.5 capabilities for VMware include:

BalancePoint Examiner for VMware:

Delivers end-to-end performance information for ESX Server and VM guests running on data center infrastructure, enhancing native VMware VirtualCenter management capabilities
Provides deep visibility into the server and storage resources that are being used by applications running on VMware
Helps troubleshoot and resolve VMware application performance issues

BalancePoint Analyzer for VMware:

Helps optimize performance by identifying points of resource contention and assessing the impact of data center infrastructure changes
Provides specific recommendations for improving application service levels
Analyzes performance and capacity utilization over time, keeping track of metrics even as VMs are migrated to different servers using VMotion

Posted by David Marshall on May 20, 2007 05:39 AM

May 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)

SWsoft Financials and Parallels One Stop Shop

It looks like parent company SWsoft and its desktop virtualization acquisition, Parallels, are both making announcements. In a recent press release from SWsoft, the company released information about their first quarter 2007 financials. Evidently, VMware isn't the only virtualization vendor achieving good numbers. Parallels made an interesting announcement of their own. It seems as though they are working with Tech Data Corporation to create a one stop shop with Apple hardware, virtualization and Microsoft Windows. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on May 17, 2007 04:23 PM

May 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

AMD Updates Its I/O Virtualization Technology

AMD has announced the second version of its I/O virtualization technology specification. The latest specification extends the benefits of AMD's I/O Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) to provide a secure, scalable, high-performance solution for I/O virtualization in x86-based servers, desktops, and notebook computers.

AMD Virtualization Technology (AMD-V) and the AMD I/O Virtualization Technology (IOMMU) Specification Rev 1.2 are designed to provide high throughput, scalability and overall system efficiency.

AMD says IOMMU was developed in close cooperation with both hardware and software partners that worked as a collective whole to advance the benefits of AMD's Direct Connect Architecture.

"The IOMMU 1.2 spec is a breakthrough development in furthering our ability to deliver on the promise of virtualization," said Joe Menard, corporate vice president for AMD. "As multi-core processors become critical for consumer and enterprise applications, IOMMU will provide an essential platform for virtual machines to manage I/O devices in a secure and efficient manner."

IOMMU revision 1.20 offers the following enhancements designed to handle a number of different types of systems:

Enhanced security and system reliability - adds precise device access control to protect against malicious or errant device DMA
Enhanced virtualization capabilities - improves performance and scalability by enabling direct device access by applications reducing overhead in guest and device paths
Open Standards - designed to conform to PCI-SIG IOV and ATS standards
Interrupt remapping - enables central management of interrupts in a virtualized system
ACPI tables - provides information from platform firmware to system software of key I/O topology information
Enhanced error recovery - provides information for efficient detection and recovery from page faults and errors

The IOMMU 1.2 specification is designed to be used by hypervisors and operating systems in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments, and is useful for server consolidation, protecting operating system integrity, and secure initialization.

Posted by David Marshall on May 16, 2007 04:46 PM

May 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager and QLogic's SANblade HBAs

According to a recent press release, QLogic Corp. is now working with Microsoft to integrate N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) technology with Microsoft's virtualization management solution, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

The result is that the Microsoft VMM will have the capability to create and provision virtual SANblade HBA ports across multiple physical servers. The company claims that combining Microsoft's VMM with QLogic SANblade HBAs, storage administrators will be able to create virtual machines and ports that are easier to deploy, manage, and support across a virtualized datacenter.

Microsoft is collaborating with QLogic and other Fibre Channel HBA vendors to define a standards-based approach to support NPIV within the Windows operating system architecture and management application interface.

Microsoft's SCVMM initiates system calls to the HBA to create, delete, modify and query virtual ports. It gives storage administrators the ability to create virtual HBA ports within multiple zones and assign them to virtual machines for migration without having to reconfigure any zoning or LUN masking settings.

Mike Neil, General Manager for Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft, said "By eliminating the need for complicated tasks such as reconfiguring zones, server administrators will be able to easily and quickly perform migrations of virtual machines."

The solution will be available to customers during the second half of 2007.

Posted by David Marshall on May 15, 2007 04:29 PM

May 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Sifau Software Brings Swarm Encrypted SAN Storage Appliances to VMware

Siafu Software is trying to make storage in virtualized environments easy and cost effective. The company just announced that its Siafu Swarm Series of IP SAN Appliances for affordable, easy-to-manage encrypted iSCSI storage are now available for VMware Infrastructure 3 environments.

By using Siafu Swarm as the virtual storage solution for VMware infrastructures, companies can efficiently and affordably consolidate their storage while taking advantage of high performance and powerful data security features. "Customers deploying VMware require the security of true business continuity without any risk of interruption," said John Matze, president and CEO, Siafu Software. He added, "We've designed our Swarm Series of iSCSI appliances to deliver true data security, without compromise -- all for an affordable price."

The Siafu Swarm is designed to help companies increase storage utilization, enhance corporate data protection methods and simplify disaster recovery processes. To help assure disaster tolerance for VMware environments, it features powerful RAID 5/6 protection and RAID 51/RAID 61 active/active protection for redundant appliances.

Key features of the Siafu Swarm for VMware include:

Active/Active failover for continuous data access
1 - 7.5TB of storage in single or high availability configurations
Snapshots with Microsoft VSS consistency
AES 256-bit encryption
Intuitive user interface to manage multiple Swarms from a single console

Siafu Swarm IP SAN solutions for VMware are available now and start at $8,995.

Posted by David Marshall on May 15, 2007 04:08 PM

May 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

PlateSpin Advances PowerConvert Solution

Canada's long time virtualization solution provider, PlateSpin, has enhanced its PowerConvert solution with a minor dot release advancing the software product to a 6.6 release version. PowerConvert 6.6, which enables customers to manage and move workloads at will across a variety of virtual and physical infrastructures, provides new workload protection capabilities for the growing number of PlateSpin's medium and large datacenter customers.

"Organizations are starting to recognize that server workloads - the data, applications and operating system that reside on a physical or virtual server - are becoming the base unit of business value in the data center," said Stephen Pollack, PlateSpin founder and CEO. "PlateSpin's strategy to unify the management of the workload lifecycle is aimed at empowering organizations with the solutions they need to profile, manage, optimize and protect all workloads in the data center. Our broad vision for unifying the management of workloads throughout their lifecycle continues to resonate with customers. Within a single technology platform investment, data centers are able to leverage PlateSpin's workload awareness and anywhere-to-anywhere (X2X) workload migration capabilities to successfully accomplish common IT initiatives such as server consolidation, hardware migration and cost-effective disaster recovery."

When used in combination with PowerRecon 3.0, PlateSpin's advanced workload profiling, analysis and planning solution, customers can effectively choose the best protection strategy for each workload in the data center based on a thorough time-based workload profile and real-time resource utilization data.

New features found in PowerConvert 6.6 include the following:

Block-Level Replication - In addition to file-based replication, PowerConvert now provides high-speed block-level replication to further enhance the product's data protection and disaster recovery capabilities. With block-level transfer, only the portion of a file that has changed is replicated, making it ideal for incrementally synchronizing larger database servers and enabling efficient offsite data transfers. Block-level replication is offered as an option at a premium price.
Server Sync - Customers can now perform an incremental transfer to a server workload without first having to perform a full PowerConvert server conversion. By separating full and incremental transfers, customers gain more flexibility in performing file-based transfers over the network to a remote recovery site, especially when slow-speed connections are the only options.
Wizards and Easy Job Configuration - With intuitive built-in conversion logic and an updated drag-and-drop interface, PowerConvert reduces learning curves and shortens the time to complete projects. Additionally, new purpose-built wizards for common tasks and mature job configuration capabilities have been added to make the process of configuring anywhere-to-anywhere workload movement faster, easier and more reliable.

PowerConvert 6.6 is available now. Click here to find out more information about this product.

Posted by David Marshall on May 15, 2007 03:45 PM

May 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Sentillion Offers Virtual Desktop Printing Solution

Sentillion vBusiness has announced a secure local printing driver solution as a free add-on module for its vThere desktop virtualization software. The technology allows a remote user to print securely from within a vThere virtual desktop image to any printer connected to the host, local or network.

The technology uses a secure communication channel between the image and the host, and there is no need to configure USB devices and print drivers within the image. vThere's patent pending Print Driver software also provides "universal" support for all printers, without having to download or install any additional drivers.

"With vThere we have radically simplified the capability from both an IT and end-user perspective to securely print from within a virtual desktop," said David Fusari, CTO, Sentillion vBusiness.

Sentillion enables organizations across all industries to address the challenges associated with remote access and remote employees. Their vThere solution provides home workers with the same computing experience and security as if they were physically in the enterprise, including secure access to the corporate network, the identical operating system, and applications. With vThere's secure local printing capability, remote users are now able to print files from an image to their local printer.

Administrators are used to setting up local machines and print policies, and now they can use the vThere Print Driver software within an image to determine whether they are going to allow local printing capabilities to all, some, or none of their remote workforce.

The software is available for download now and is included as part of vThere's standard pricing which is $125 per user.

Posted by David Marshall on May 14, 2007 08:29 PM

May 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization Surveys and Reports - We Find Out Everything

Within the IT community, virtualization is a hot topic. And as such, everyone is coming out with a report or survey based on their own independent fact finding missions. IDC recently reported on how server virtualization is growing in the European market. And Avanade recently commissioned a report which found out there is a lack of skills needed for implementing virtualization technology. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on May 14, 2007 07:45 PM

May 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Player - Free Virtualization Reaches 2.0

In December 2005, VMware made a breakthrough announcement as it introduced VMware Player to the market. Breakthrough, because during a period of virtualization price slashing, the product was announced as a free virtualization platform. Player was the perfectly designed application to help push the virtual appliance forward. It was and is a free desktop application that lets an end user run a virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC.

Now, almost a year and a half after its initial launch, VMware is announcing VMware Player 2.0 which adds the following features:

Windows Vista support - You can use Windows Vista as a host and guest operating system.
USB 2.0 Support - You can use peripherals that require high-speed performance, such as MP3 players and fast storage devices, in your virtual machines.
Shared folders - If the virtual machine has shared folders enabled, you can use this feature to move files between the host and guest operating systems. The virtual machine must be preconfigured with shared folders enabled, and with the path specified to the designated shared folder on the host. As a security precaution, shared folders are disabled by default in VMware Player. When you open a virtual machine with shared folders in VMware Player, a notification message explains that shared folders have been disabled, and tells you how to re-enable the feature.
Appliance view - Virtual machine appliances can now be preconfigured to display an appliance view. A virtual appliance is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment that runs on any standard x86 desktop or server in a virtual machine - for example, a Web server application with a browser-based console. The appliance view gives you a brief description of the type of server or appliance and provides a link that opens the browser on the guest system and connects to the correct port for the server console. If a virtual machine is configured with an appliance view, VMware Player defaults to the appliance view. You can also use the traditional console view if you prefer.
Welcome page - The user-friendly Welcome page gives you the option of browsing to a virtual machine file, opening a recently used virtual machine, or downloading a virtual appliance from the VMTN (VMware Technology Network) Web site.
Experimental support for Virtual SMP - You can use VMware Player to power on a virtual machine that has more than one virtual processor assigned.

You can download and find out more information about VMware Player 2.0, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 12, 2007 12:29 PM

May 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Releases Second Edition of its ACE Product

It has been almost two and a half years since VMware originally announced the availability of VMware ACE, the company's virtualization product aimed at giving IT desktop managers the ability to rapidly provision customized, secure and standardized PC environments to any unmanaged endpoint.

Fast forward, and VMware is now announcing the second edition of this product - VMware ACE 2.0. With the latest version, users can now use Linux as a host operating system for ACE user machines. And more importantly, ACE is now integrated with VMware Workstation. Workstation, when licensed with the ACE option pack, can now be used to create and manage ACE virtual machines.

Other key features found in VMware ACE 2.0 include:

ACE Management Server - The ACE Management Server enables you to manage ACE instances, to dynamically publish policy changes for those instances, and to test and deploy packages more easily. It adds new integration with your Active Directory setups and provides Active Directory/LDAP integration. The SQLite database is embedded in the ACE Management Server, or you can use an external database.
ACE Management Server Appliance - The ACE Management Server Appliance is a self-contained, pre-installed, pre-configured ACE Management Server that is packaged with a small operating system in a virtual machine. Using this appliance is the fastest way to get an ACE Management Server running in your environment.
Instance View - Instance View enables an administrator to view and control all managed ACE instances. An advanced search function enables you to locate instances in the database quickly. You can also customize the Instance View by adding searchable custom fields.
Help Desk - Help Desk is a Web application for use with ACE instances that are managed through an ACE Management Server. Administrators and help desk assistants can use the Help Desk to fix common user problems such as lost passwords and expired instances.
Pocket ACE - Pocket ACE enables an administrator to bundle and deploy an ACE onto a USB portable media device, including USB flash drives, Apple iPod mobile digital devices, and portable hard drives. It runs directly from the USB portable media device and can be run with the VMware Player that is bundled with the software.
Virtual Printer - VMware ACE includes a virtual printer that enables users to print to any printer available to the host computer from applications inside a virtual machine without installing additional drivers in the virtual machine.
Instance Customization (Automated sysprep) - The instance customization feature automates Microsoft Sysprep deployment tools actions and streamlines the process of customizing instances after they have been deployed to user machines.

You can download an evaluation of the product or find out more information about it, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 12, 2007 10:33 AM

May 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Viridian Features Trimmed - a Little off the Ears? Or Buzz Cut?

Days before one of Microsoft's largest events, Microsoft WinHEC 2007, the company announced that it was trimming three key features from its hypervisor technology, Microsoft Windows Server Virtualization (codenamed Viridian).

The first feature, and probably the most significant, to be pulled from the initial release of Viridian is Microsoft's live migration capability which is much akin to what VMware has been selling for years and calls VMotion. The feature is important because it offers the ability to move a virtual machine from one physical host server to another with no perceivable downtime. Besides being an important feature to the end user, having this ability in Viridian would give the hypervisor technology parity with competing products such as VMware, Virtual Iron and XenSource. Or more importantly, not having this specific feature in the initial release of Viridian is probably going to be a huge marketing win for its competitors. Not only does it continue to represent an important product differentiator, it also shows just how difficult the concept of live migration is to implement.

The second feature being pulled is the "hot-add" or "on-the-fly" capabilities which would allow a user to add or swap out processing, memory, networking or storage resources without having to take the virtual machine down. Microsoft demonstrated this capability a few times with a Windows guest operating system, and to me, this feature stood out the most as it seemed to be something new and innovative and could have a lot of great use case potential.

Finally, Microsoft said that it was going to reduce the number of supported processors or cores from 64 to 16. Today as an example, that means it would support a server with a maximum of 16 processing cores which can be made up of eight dual-core or four quad-core processors. This to me is the least important feature drop today, although with multi-core technology changing quickly, it may become more important next year. I'm sure it will be used as a marketing battle cry when trying to compare products, however right now, its about as important to me personally as saying that your product will support a virtual machine with 128GB of memory. It sounds great, but what kind of x86 host server am I going to buy to consolidate virtual machines that are assigned 128GB of memory each? Not exactly a mass market need right now... but I agree, it does sound good.

News about delays always comes as a shock or a disappointment. Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy at Microsoft, explained that it was necessary to scale back the scope of the virtualization platform, but assured everyone that it would be delivered on time.

"So we had some really tough decisions to make", Neil said. "We adjusted the feature set of Windows Server virtualization so that we can deliver a compelling solution for core virtualization scenarios while holding true to desired timelines." When talking about product development, Neil said that "the quality bar, the time you have, and the feature set are directly correlated. The mythical man-month - resources are not infinite and even if you could add more it does not help get more done faster."

And thinking about it, as important as the live migration and hot-swap capabilities are, it is more important to get the core of the hypervisor product working as close to flawlessly as possible. Since everything gets built on top of this technology, it can't be the weak link.

So with these three features pulled from the initial release of Viridian, how does that change the outlook of the product? Will it affect those people waiting to get into virtualization? Analyst firm IDC says that only 5% of hardware servers are virtualized. So what exactly are people waiting for?

Without the live migration and hot-swap capabilities, Microsoft's Viridian will still be useful for the traditional, basic virtualization use case scenarios such as simple server consolidation, development and testing, and legacy application hosting, but probably won't offer the solutions needed for the larger and more sophisticated organizations needing workload management, disaster recovery and failover mechanisms.

So while this news does come as a disappointment, there is still plenty of goodness coming in the initial release. Some of the key features of Viridian include hardware-based virtualization, a 64-bit hypervisor, delivery as a server core installation to offer better performance and secure virtualization, native support for clustering and geo-clustering with Longhorn, support for Volume Shadow Services (VSS) for backing up and replicating virtual machines, and new virtual switch capabilities that allow for Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) across virtual machines on different servers.

Microsoft competitors will surely grab hold of this marketing baton and run with it. Hopefully, this delay doesn't cause complacency in the virtualization ecosystem and slow down the innovation coming out of other virtualization platform vendors. And if it doesn't, how much further back will that put Viridian on the parity scale?

Posted by David Marshall on May 12, 2007 06:22 AM

May 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Gartner Says Virtualization will Top IT Agenda Until 2010

According to Gartner, virtualization will be the most important technology in IT infrastructures and operations up to 2010, dramatically changing how IT departments manage, buy, deploy, plan and charge for their services.

Gartner vice president and analyst Thomas Bittman said that virtualization was no longer only about server and storage consolidation and cost saving. "It is now less about the technology and more about process change and cultural change within organizations," said Bittman. "Virtualization enables alternative delivery models for services. Each virtualized layer can be managed relatively independently or even owned by someone else, for example, streamed applications or employee-owned PCs. This can require major cultural changes for organizations."

The total number of virtual machines deployed worldwide is expected to increase from 540,000 at the end of 2006 to more than 4 million by 2009, according to Gartner, but this is still only a fraction of the potential market.

"Several things will make virtualization critical to most enterprises in the next few years: the need to consolidate space, power, installation and integration, and providing server resources which are capable of responding to unpredictable workloads," Bittman said. "By the end of next year, virtual machine hypervisor technology will be almost free, embedded in servers by hardware manufacturers and in operating systems by software vendors, further accelerating adoption."

Virtualization is having a considerable impact on the server market worldwide, according to Gartner.

"Every virtual server has the potential to take another physical server off the market," said Bittman. "Today more than 90 percent of users deploying virtual machines are doing so specifically to reduce x86 server, space and energy costs. We believe that virtualization reduced the x86 server market by 4 percent in 2006, and by 2009 it will have a far greater impact."

Virtualization on the PC has even more potential than server virtualization to improve the management of IT infrastructure, according to Bittman.

"Virtualization on the client is perhaps two years behind, but it is going to be much bigger. On the PC, it is about isolation and creating a managed environment that the user can't touch. This will help change the paradigm of desktop computer management in organizations. It will make the trend towards employee-owned notebooks more manageable, flexible and secure."

In his keynote presentation, Bittman said that the gap between the well managed and the badly managed IT infrastructure is growing. A November 2006 survey of 700 Gartner clients showed that most organizations are in the very early stages of their infrastructure and operations maturity.

"Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place," said Bittman. "Automation is the critical next step to help organizations stop 'virtualization sprawl', which is not much better than server sprawl."

Posted by David Marshall on May 9, 2007 06:46 PM

May 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Offers First Commercial Product to Support Paravirt-Ops

VMware, Inc. today announced the general availability of its latest Workstation product, version 6.0. Along with that announcement, the company also announced that it was supporting cross-platform paravirtualization with the open-interface standard paravirt-ops.

VMware typically uses its Workstation product as a proving ground for new technology. And so, like many additional features and technologies before it, paravirt-ops is being added into Workstation before any of VMware's other platforms, and therefore becomes the first commercially available virtualization product to support the new technology.

Paravirtualized Linux operating systems are modified operating systems specifically optimized to run in a virtual environment. Unlike current paravirtualization technologies, paravirt-ops enables transparent paravirtualization, which allows users to run the same Linux kernel in paravirtualized mode on a hypervisor as well as on native hardware. As a result, organizations have to support and maintain fewer Linux kernels, saving management costs and simplifying application development.

Paravirt-ops is an open interface developed through a community process that included collaboration from the Linux community as well commercial vendors IBM, Red Hat, VMware and XenSource. Paravirt-ops was included in the latest version of the Linux kernel (version 2.6.20) and includes support for the VMware VMI interface, which provides a hypervisor-agnostic paravirtualization interface.

"Interoperability and open interfaces are a major focus for VMware," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware. "VMware support for paravirtualization through the paravirt-ops interface demonstrates our commitment to working with open communities such as Linux and with other leading vendors to achieve open interoperability and optimizations for end users."

VMware becomes the first of the paravirt-ops proponents to offer support for the new interface in a commercially available product. According to XenSource, they are close to providing support for the technology in their product as well.

Virtualization competitor Virtual Iron on the other hand appears to be satisfied with hardware accelerated virtualization provided by Intel and AMD rather than using paravirt-ops and touching the kernel in any way.

Posted by David Marshall on May 9, 2007 06:16 PM

May 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Releases Much Anticipated Workstation 6.0 Product

VMware, Inc. announced today the release of its industry-leading desktop virtualization product, VMware Workstation 6.0. The product operates on top of a wide range of host operating systems that include various Linux distributions and Windows versions. And it offers an even wider range of guest operating system support. Operating system support, both host and guest, now includes Microsoft Windows Vista which will help facilitate re-hosting of legacy systems, enable upgrade and migration projects with minimal end-user disruption and simplify Windows Vista evaluations.

The latest version also adds industry first support for multiple display monitors. Users can configure one virtual machine to span multiple monitors or multiple virtual machines to each display on separate monitors to help enhance desktop productivity. And with added USB 2.0 support, users can take advantage of high-performance peripherals such as Apple iPods and fast storage devices.

VMware Workstation, introduced almost 8 years ago, continues to be one of the most advanced desktop virtualization products for industry-standard PCs. The product includes full 64-bit support, an industry first support for up to 10 network interface cards and experimental support for two-way Virtual SMP for enhanced workloads.

"This feature-packed release of VMware Workstation demonstrates our commitment to delivering cutting-edge products that help enable users to maximize the benefit of virtualization on the desktop," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware. "VMware Workstation 6 raises the bar significantly for desktop virtualization-it is a must-have product and the only choice for serious desktop virtualization users."

The aim in all the upgrades is to improve usability of a virtual workstation, said James Phillips, senior director of software lifecycle solutions at VMware. "You want to make sure the virtual desktop experience is consistent with a non-virtual desktop experience," Phillips said.

Other new features found in Workstation 6 to help achieve that goal include:

ACE authoring capabilities: As a companion to VMware Workstation 6, VMware now offers a VMware ACE Option Pack, which enables VMware Workstation 6 users to create secure, centrally manageable virtual machines. Mobility is one of the primary benefits of this Option Pack, as it allows users to securely transport virtual machines on portable media devices such as USB memory sticks.
Integrated Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) functionality: Users can create a virtual machine in minutes by "cloning" an existing physical computer.
Integrated virtual debugger: Users can deploy, run and debug programs inside a virtual machine directly from their preferred integrated development environments (IDEs), accelerating debugging with this industry-first integration with Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio.
Background virtual machine execution: Users can run virtual machines in the background without the VMware Workstation user interface for an uncluttered user experience.
Automation APIs: Users can write scripts and programs that automate and help quicken virtual machine testing with support for VIX API 2.0.
Continuous virtual machine record and replay (experimental): Users can record the execution of a virtual machine, including all inputs, outputs and decisions made along the way. On demand, the user can go "back in time" to the start of the recording and replay execution, guaranteeing that the virtual machine will perform exactly the same operations every time and ensuring bugs can be reproduced and resolved.
Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) support (experimental): VMware Workstation 6 is the first virtualization platform to allow execution of paravirtualized guest operating systems that implement the VMI interface.

VMware Workstation 6 for Windows or Linux has a list price of $189 and is available for download today, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 9, 2007 04:30 PM

May 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Sun Microsystems and IBM Each Exploring New Technology

Sun Microsystems is exploring new technology that it created from its virtualization endeavors. The project, called Live* (Live Star), could prove to be a new software and security delivery model. And after that, IBM and Transitive Technology team up to allow applications written for Linux/x86 based platforms to run on IBM p Servers, which helps significantly expand IBM's software ecosystem. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on May 8, 2007 03:44 PM

May 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

"VMcasting" Specification Formed for Automatic VM Deployments

Virtualization and virtual appliance vendors, Enomaly Inc, virtualappliances.net, and JumpBox announced the creation of what they are calling the "VMcasting specification".

They describe VMcasting as an automatic virtual machine deployment mechanism based on RSS2.0 whereby virtual machine images (also known as virtual appliances) are transferred from a server to a client, securely delivering files containing a technical specification and virtual disk image format Extensible Virtual Machine (XVM). VMcasting together with virtual appliance formats such as XVMs eliminate the need to separately install, configure and manage interdependencies between virtualized operating systems and applications. Rather then updating single virtual machines, large groups of virtual machines can be delivered at once using a standard definition and process.

"VMCasting for automating delivery and updates of Virtual Appliances snaps in perfectly with delivering instant infrastructure and applications." says Stephen Dennis, president of VirtualAppliances.net, "Smart re-use of existing RSS technology model combined with the delivery encapsulation of XVM will make it easy to implement and use."

The concept of VMcasting is based on the similar concept of Podcasting, the popular trend of audio content delivered via an RSS feed presenting a downloadable or streaming file (often an MP3). With VMcasting, a developer publishes a secure RSS 2.0 feed where each item describes a release of a particular Virtual Machine Image or Virtual Appliance. The items descriptions may contain release notes or other information about what's new in a particular release. Therefore developers can easily be informed of upgraded versions using a virtual server management system such as the The Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard (see www.enomalism.com).

VMcasting is perfectly suited to a variety of virtual machine package formats allowing for a standard mechanism for delivery of virtual appliances. Formats include Open Virtual Appliance (XVM), Amazon's EC2 (AMI), Xen, Vmware, Parallels, Windows Virtual Server (VHD), and Qemu (Qcow).

According to Reuven Cohen, Chief Technologist at Enomaly Inc, "Virtualization technology and in particular virtual software appliances are quickly changing the way enterprise software is deployed. By creating a pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment, system administrators, programmers and IT support staff are able to more efficiently deploy software." Reuven goes on to say "Using VMcasting, system administrators can quickly and easily define parameters and policies for updating a heterogeneous virtual server environment using a standard specification and methodology."

VMcasting was developed to create an industry-standard specification as a secure & uniform definition for the deployment and management of virtual machines (or appliances), independent of any one vendor's virtual infrastructure product suite.

To learn more about VMcasting, visit either Enomalism's Web site or VMcasting.org.

Posted by David Marshall on May 6, 2007 06:31 AM

May 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Q&A Discussion about VMware's Benchmarking Policy

One of the best ways to select which virtualization platform to choose for your environment is usually based on benchmark or performance findings. Unfortunately, many of us cannot perform these benchmark tests ourselves, for any number of reasons. And so, we rely on others in the industry to help provide us with this data to help us determine the best platform choice.

Until recently, doing an Internet search for any published benchmark numbers comparing one virtualization platform to another just simply did not return any useful information. One reason for that is the end-user license agreement (EULA) that you must agree to from VMware that states that you cannot publish benchmark findings using their products. VMware changed that policy somewhat last year when it stated that they would allow people to publish their results once VMware has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other parameters of the study.

TechWorld recently asked VMware about its benchmarking policy. Speaking with VMware's senior director of enterprise and technology marketing, Andrea Eubanks, TechWorld finds out more about VMware's stand on VM benchmarking and the publication of results.

Read the entire Q&A interview, here, to find out about VMware's involvement with SPEC, VMware's free benchmarking tool - VMmark, why VMware's EULA prohibits publising benchmarking results, and why it has taken so long to come up with a virtualization benchmarking solution.

Posted by David Marshall on May 6, 2007 06:03 AM

May 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

INSYSTEK Promises Virtually Limitless Infrastructure Management

If you've ever questioned the scalability of your existing VMware management software, you might want to check out INSYSTEK which claims to offer a "virtually limitless" management solution. As the company tested the latest version of their virtualization management and reporting solution, Virtualize IT for VMware, INSYSTEK said they were able to successfully manage over 6000 virtual machines from a single console.

Using this product, the company said customers will be able to discover and map virtual environments, create virtual machines, track and manage physical and virtual relationships, and automate the lifecycle of a large number of virtual servers and desktops.

"We are extremely pleased to provide administrators the ability to manage large numbers of virtual machines from a single console" said Alex Turner, president and CEO at INSYSTEK. "We believe this will provide a definite boost to the adoption of large scale VMWare Infrastructures. There is clear need for enterprise scale virtualization management and reporting tools that allow access to both the physical and virtual environments." INSYSTEK anticipates the ability to support a virtually unlimited number of ESX Servers, virtual machines, and guests in the production release of Virtualize IT for VMWare.

Features of Virtualize IT include:

Common user interface - Manage VMWare ESX Servers, VirtualCenter, Windows Desktops and Servers from a single console. Virtualize IT is the connection between physical and virtual environments, providing access to control and configure multiple VMWare Servers and Windows hosts at the same time in one view.
Discovery, Link and Manage - Auto Discover virtual infrastructure systems and resources and dynamically link physical to virtual machine relationships. Deploy software applications, patches, and critical updates. Inventory and audit both physical systems and virtual resources for full hardware and software configurations and changes.
Virtualize IT wizards - Wizards automate many administrative functions including the ability to completely replicate inventoried physical systems as image ready virtual machines in a single easy to use wizard for hot site, backups, disaster recovery planning or desktop and server migration.
Audit and Track - Virtualize IT technology extends the already comprehensive inventory model for the complete inventory of virtual machines, resource pools and physical servers. The extended model includes all INSYSTEK's baseline configuration
audit and historical tracking features.
System monitoring - Continuously monitor physical servers and virtual machine for availability and utilization from a single interface. Set five separate alarms levels for hundreds of performance stats for physical and virtual systems and resources to manage and prevent problems. Quickly identify servers for consolidation.
Reports - Virtualize IT technology extends INSYSTEK's Crystal Reports features to include all VirtualCenter resources in additional to combined reports that provide a holistic view of the Physical to Virtual environment.

Posted by David Marshall on May 6, 2007 05:41 AM

May 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

BEA WebLogic Server and Java Virtualization

BEA Systems announced that it would start shipping its WebLogic Server Virtual Edition software at the beginning of June. The company also stated that it would follow that up with a release of WebLogic Liquid Operations Control in the third quarter of this year.

BEA is said to be responding to consumer perceptions that their customers need to get better server utilization, and that Java currently doesn't work well enough in a virtualized world. BEA and other SOA vendors are increasingly emphasizing virtualization, saying the two technologies are a match made in heaven. However, BEA argues that the two technologies currently lack proper integration which leads to poor server utilization.

In the first version of WebLogic Server Virtual Edition, the virtual system will make use of VMware's virtualization platform. And it will offer a lightweight custom-built operating system that is tailored to running a Java Virtual Machine. Since it will be tailored to running Java applications, it operates with about 20-30 percent fewer resources than a standard Linux operating system. A second phase will attempt to increase power gains to 50 percent, which should help double the number of services that can run on a single machine.

BEA plans to release a preview version of the WebLogic Server Virtual Edition for the Xen platform by the end of 2007, and a preview version for Microsoft's Viridian sometime early in 2008.

Posted by David Marshall on May 6, 2007 05:14 AM

May 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

NEC Virtual PC Center and Citrix Mobile Virtual Machine Manager

NEC Corporation of America is getting into the whole virtualization, thin client, managed desktop arena. The company recently announced their NEC Virtual PC Center which the company hopes will replace today's personal computers. And it looks like Citrix might be making a new software product to help in the virtualization space as well. Want to manage your VMware ESX environment from your cell phone or mobile device? What support person or admin wouldn't want to? listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on May 2, 2007 08:39 PM

May 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Benchmark Battles: Taking it to the Network - VMware and XenSource

Back in March, you might remember the discussion we had about the benchmark whitepapers going around comparing results from VMware and Xen and then XenSource and VMware. It was interesting, and eye opening to say the least.

Well, just when you thought all of that was behind you, (ding ding), round two! This time, we're evidently taking it to the network. Yes, that's right. VMware has come out with a new paper, titled Multi-NIC Networking Performance in ESX 3.0.1 and XenEnterprise 3.2.0. This time, comparing VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 networking performance to that of XenSource's XenEnterprise 3.2.

In it, they write:

Just a few years ago, generating enough network traffic to push a single 1 Gbps network adapter to capacity would saturate a computer's main processor. However, processors have advanced in these few years to the point that 1 Gbps networking does not stress a modern native or virtualized system.
In order to better expose the real virtualization overhead of high-throughput networking, it is now necessary to increase the load on the system beyond a single 1 Gbps link.

In this paper, we characterize the virtualization overheads of virtual machines by measuring the performance under heavy networking in a uniprocessor virtual machine. This was done by configuring multiple 1 Gbps Ethernet adapters ("NICs") in the server, each associated with a netperf or netserver instance running over a unique subnet and port.

The hypervisors tested were ESX Server 3.0.1 (referred to as "ESX301") and XenEnterprise 3.2.0 (referred to as "XE320"). Both hypervisors were installed with no modifications or tuning. For each hypervisor, the corresponding "tools" packages containing paravirtualized (PV) network drivers was installed in the guest1.
The hypervisors were installed on a 4-core, 3 GHz HP DL380G5 system with 16GB of memory.

For the virtualized tests, a single virtual machine was configured for each hypervisor with one processor and 1GB of memory, running Windows Server 2003 Release 2 Enterprise Edition (32-bit). During the tests, the virtual machine under test was the only one running in the hypervisor.

And if you didn't already guess who won this round of testing, you should go read the paper. Grab it, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 1, 2007 08:13 PM

May 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Revs Products to Fix Security Vulnerabilities

VMware just released minor dot revisions to their virtualization platforms in order to address a set of security issues.

A common set of security problems was addressed across each of the platforms (VMware Player, Workstation, ACE and Server).

Virtual machines can be put in various states of suspension, as specified by the ACPI power management standard. When returning from a sleep state (S2) to the run state (S0), the virtual machine process (VMX) collects information about the last recorded running state for the virtual machine. Under some circumstances, VMX read state information from an incorrect memory location. This issue could be used to complete a successful Denial-of-Service attack where the virtual machine would need to be rebooted. Thanks to Tavis Ormandy of Google for identifying this issue. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE- 2007-1337 to this issue.
Some VMware products support storing configuration information in VMware system files. Under some circumstances, a malicious user could instruct the virtual machine process (VMX) to store malformed data, causing an error. This error could enable a successful Denial-of-Service attack on guest operating systems. Thanks to Sungard Ixsecurity for identifying this issue. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE-2007-1877 to this issue.
Some VMware products managed memory in a way that failed to gracefully handle some general protection faults (GPFs) in Windows guest operating systems. A malicious user could use this vulnerability to crash Windows virtual machines. While this vulnerability could allow an attacker to crash a virtual machine, we do not believe it was possible to escalate privileges or escape virtual containment. Thanks to Ruben Santamarta of Reversemode for identifying this issue. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE-2007-1069 to this issue.
In a 64-bit Windows guest on a 64-bit host, debugging local programs could create system instability. Using a debugger to step into a syscall instruction may corrupt the virtual machine's register context. This corruption produces unpredictable results including corrupted stack pointers, kernel bugchecks, or vmware-vmx process failures. (bug 152159) Thanks to Ken Johnson for identifying this issue. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE-2007-1876 to this issue.

In addition, VMware Player 1.0.4 Build 44386 addresses the following issue:

A problem with VMware Tools causing the guest to run out of memory.

You can download Player, here.

In addition, VMware Workstation 5.5.4 Build 44386 addresses the following security issue:

Shared Folders is a feature that enables users of guest operating systems to access a specified set of folders in the host's file system. A vulnerability exists that could allow an attacker to write arbitrary content from a guest system to arbitrary locations on the host system. In order to exploit this vulnerability, the VMware system must have at least one folder shared. Although the Shared Folder feature is enabled by default, no folders are shared by default, which means this vulnerability is not exploitable by default.
Thanks to Greg MacManus of iDefense Labs for identifying this issue.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) assigned the name CVE-2007-1744 to this issue.

You can download Workstation, here.

In addition, VMware ACE 1.0.3 addresses the following issues:

A malicious user could make plaintext additions to the encrypted preferences file by overwriting the file while VMware Player is running. (bug 117010)
In the previous ACE release, if you added a USB controller to a Windows virtual machine on a Windows host and booted the virtual machine, the USB controller failed to initialize, with the message "A supported host USB driver not found". (bug 104046)
A problem with powering on virtual machines resulted from corruption of the preferences file. (bug 115699)
A problem with VMware Tools caused the guest to run out of memory. (bugs 142230 and 27791)
The virtual machine fails to power on with error message Access to this virtual machine blocked. An error was encountered while checking if this VM was encrypted properly. (bug 87751)

You can download ACE, here.

In addition, VMware Server 1.0.3 addresses the following issues:

This release fixes a problem with VMware Tools that caused the guest to run out of memory.
VMware Server 1.0.3 fixes a bug introduced in the VMware Server version 1.0.2 VIX API. As a result of this bug, if Vix_ReleaseHandle (vmhandle) and VixHost_Disconnect (hosthandle) are called, a crash occurs in VixHost_Disconnect(). This crash is accompanied by the following error message:
VMware Server Error:
VMware Server unrecoverable error: (app)
ASSERT /build/mts/release/bora-39867/pompeii2005/bora/lib/vmdb/vmdbCtx.c:487 bugNr=23952
A log file is available in "/tmp/vmware-mark/vix-3749.log". Please request support and include the contents of the log file.
To collect files to submit to VMware support, run vm-support.
We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.

You can download Server, here.

Posted by David Marshall on May 1, 2007 07:42 PM

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