Virtualization Report | David Marshall | February 2008

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February 2008

February 25, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Migrating between processor types? And then, oh by the way, what is lguest?

For those of us who have tried to migrate virtual machines between physical hosts with AMD processors and Intel processors, we are well aware of the problems and limitations found in this scenario. But some people are just starting out in this virtual world, and they might be getting bad information from people. Those of us in the know should be educating people rather than trying to further an agenda. Confusion seems to get further out of hand when marketing battles take place between various platforms.

And then on the quieter side of the fence, what about lguest? Have you heard of it? Been exposed to it yet? What do you think about it? listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on February 25, 2008 10:47 AM

February 24, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Vizioncore offers 10 tips for P2V migrations

When people finally climb aboard the virtualization train and go down the road of server consolidation, one of the first questions they have is, "How do I move my existing servers into a virtual machine format?"

And that really can be an annoying process for someone if they don't have any clue as to where to begin. Sure, IT admins know all about imaging and backups, but if they are just now being exposed to virtualization, they typically don't know much about the migration process let alone the terminology of P2V.

Vizioncore has been at this virtualization stuff for quite some time. And because of years of experience, they are able to offer quite a few different software applications that help people out with their virtual environments.

To help combat some of the fear or frustrations around P2V, Vizioncore has created a "Top 10 Tips for a Successful P2V Server Migration" brief.

The company said that the brief is based on Vizioncore's experience from thousands of successful server conversions and it presents tips for managing the process and selecting the solution that best meets organizational requirements. Highlights of the brief include:

1. Assess immediate and future needs - scalability and speed are two of the biggest differentiators among conversion solutions - understand current and future needs.

2. Establish timelines, deadlines and budgets - total conversion time and simultaneous conversion capacity of different approaches are important considerations.

3. Assess skills - personnel and budget questions can't be answered until you determine whether your staff has the skills and time to execute the conversion.

4. Set a success rate goal - determine how many failed conversions you can withstand, set a success rate goal, and use it to help evaluate options.

5. Learn the options and their limitations - there are four basic approaches to P2V conversions, and each is effective in specific use cases, and each has limitations.

6. Estimate the total time of each method - more than one approach might seem appropriate, but there is likely a big difference in how much time each approach requires.

7. Prep servers to streamline the conversion process - conversion times go down and success rates go up when physical servers are effectively prepared in advance.

8. Automate execution as much as possible - executing each conversion step takes from 30 minutes to 20 hours - the time required impacts project cost and deadlines.

9. Verify and test - the complexity of preparation and conversion creates opportunities for error - newly-converted virtual machines must be tested to ensure success.

10. Repeat as necessary - the method must be repeatable. Some solutions have features to eliminate the redundancy for converting dozens or hundreds of physical servers.

"There are many approaches for converting physical servers to a virtual environment, but practical options sharply decline as the size of the project grows," said Jason Mattox, VP of Support and Product Development for Vizioncore. "For large-scale server migrations, staff time is often the most expensive element of the virtualization project. Expertise and availability are also common constraints. Organizations must consider the end-to-end conversion time when evaluating different approaches and determine which tasks they need their conversion solution to handle. By considering and managing these variables, organizations can select the most efficient solution for their needs."

The complete article titled "10 Tips for a Successful P2V Server Migration" is available for download, here.

Posted by David Marshall on February 24, 2008 06:58 PM

February 24, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware's performance team releases two new papers

One of the claims to fame of VMware's virtualization products have been their ability to perform very well over the last few years - creating a benchmark, in my mind, for others to reach and achieve with their own platforms.

Performance has been and continues to be one of those hot topics covered in the virtualization space. People are always trying to squeeze out every bit of performance that they can in their environment, and rightly so.

And along side of trying to architecturally and programmatically improve the performance of their product, VMware has also created a performance group called VROOM! that takes a deeper look at various performance issues on the company's blog site.

VROOM! team members recently added two new performance papers online.

SPECweb2005 Performance on ESX Server 3.5

Virtualization is revolutionizing data center computing by making it easy for people to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications seamlessly on the same computer. More and more organizations are adopting VMware Infrastructure 3 for server consolidation and to reduce the total cost of ownership.

VMware ESX Server 3.5 is designed for high performance. With a number of optimizations for superior performance, even the most I/O‐intensive applications perform well when deployed on VMware Infrastructure 3. In this paper we compare the performance of a virtual machine to that of a similarly configured native machine using the industry standard SPECweb2005 workload.

In our virtualized tests we achieved close to 85 percent of native throughput performance using the highly network‐intensive SPECweb2005 workload. In the tests focused on measuring latency, we did not observe any noticeable difference in application latency between the native and virtual environments. These results demonstrate that users need not sacrifice performance in order to embrace the benefits of virtualization technology.

Performance of VMware VMI

VMware ESX Server 3.5 introduces support for guest operating systems that use VMware's paravirtualization standard, Virtual Machine Interface (VMI). This paper describes VMI and its performance benefits, concluding that VMI-style paravirtualization offers performance improvements for a wide variety of workloads, but that the actual performance gains depend on the nature of those workloads.

Posted by David Marshall on February 24, 2008 01:35 PM

February 24, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Is VMsafe VMware's answer to security concerns?

According to a recent report put out by the Reuters news agency, VMware has formed partnerships with some of the world's biggest security software makers, namely Symantec Corp, McAfee Inc, the Internet Security Systems division of International Business Machines Corp, EMC Corp's RSA security unit and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. Why? VMware wants to better protect the hypervisor and its virtual machines.

The project is being called VMsafe and the official announcement is expected in a matter of days at the VMworld Europe conference taking place in Cannes, France.

Security complexities and unknown security factors probably have kept any number of organizations from adding the server virtualization technology into their production environments. And I'm sure VMware is quite aware of that problem, and they know that they need to have a clear answer for these security concerns in order to further penetrate the market.

Third-party companies such as Blue Lane Technologies and Catbird showed up at VMworld 2007 to showcase their VMware security solutions, and it looks like both companies will be exhibiting at VMworld Europe 2008. It will certainly be interesting to see how this new VMsafe solution compares with the offerings from these companies and ultimately how it will affect them.

Posted by David Marshall on February 24, 2008 05:04 AM

February 23, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0 released but lacks virtualization support

Sun Microsystems announced the general availability of Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0, the company's heterogeneous systems management tool. The management tool will become a key component of Sun xVM software, the company's open virtualization and management platform.

From a single console, Sun xVM Ops Center enables customers to simplify the management of all assets, regardless of the operating system or hardware platform on which they run. The management console automates time consuming, routine system administration tasks, making it easier for users to manage thousands of IT assets simultaneously. As part of the company’s ongoing commitment to the open source community, Sun has released updates to the source code used to build Sun xVM Ops Center to the OpenxVM.org community under the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3).

Sun xVM Ops Center runs in cross-platform Linux and Solaris Operating System OS-based x86 and SPARC environments. Key features in Sun xVM Ops Center include:

Server Discovery & Inventory Management – Automatically scans and identifies servers across the network, even when powered off, which enables faster deployment and management of IT assets.
Firmware and Bare Metal Server Provisioning – Delivers automatic and 'hands off' installation of bare-metal operating systems, RPMs and firmware, bringing new efficiencies to IT departments.
Patch Management & Updating – Provides up-to-date patch management tools for Red Hat, SUSE and the Solaris OS, offering organizations greater control over their datacenter plans and minimizing downtime. In addition, unique patch simulation capabilities remove uncertainty when customers apply updates.
Managing & Monitoring – Securely and remotely manages users and heterogeneous datacenter assets, and proactively resolves problems by monitoring critical parameters, improving the security and stability of systems.
Compliance Reporting – Provides an up-to-date view into the system state, patch status, and software portfolio, which helps with quick and accurate reporting and compliance validation.

However, the 1.0 release of the product is missing two key features: Microsoft Windows support and support for virtualization. Oren Teich, Sun Director of Product Management and Marketing for xVM, said that while Windows support is not currently available, the company is committed to offering it in the future. Teich also said that come this Summer, Sun would be releasing its hypervisor product along with an update to xVM Ops Center that would add new virtualization capabilities.

"Sun xVM Ops Center is the next milestone in delivering on our Sun xVM virtualization strategy," said Steve Wilson, vice president of xVM, Sun Microsystems. "The Sun xVM strategy is built around three key differentiators: enterprise-grade features, openness and interoperability – all designed to meet the needs of customers who are looking for best-of-breed solutions for their dynamic datacenters. Sun's unique virtualization and management strategy gives our customers choice and breadth, spanning from desktop and servers to storage, appliances and networks."

A satellite server is priced at $10,000 per year and supported subscriptions for xVM Ops Center are priced from $100 to $350 a year per managed server, depending on functionality required.

Posted by David Marshall on February 23, 2008 07:30 AM

February 23, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware issues security updates and fixes for VI3

On February 20th, VMware issued a number of security updates and product fixes for their VMware ESX Server product.

ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003359: Security Update to the Samba Package: This patch provides updates to the Samba package distributed with the service console for ESX Server 3.0.2. The patch addresses a stack buffer overflow flaw in the way Samba authenticates remote users. A remote unauthenticated user can trigger this flaw to cause the Samba server to crash, or execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the Samba server.
Note: This vulnerability can be exploited only if the attacker has access to the service console network.
ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003360: Security Updates to the Python Package:
This patch provides service console updates for the Python package. The patch fixes security issues with an integer overflow issue with the way Python's Perl-Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) module handles certain regular expressions, a flaw in Python's locale module where strings generated by the strxfrm() function are not properly NULL-terminated, and multiple integer overflow flaws in Python's imageop module that can allow an attacker to cause the application to crash, enter an infinite loop, or possibly execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the Python interpreter.
ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003362: Fix for aacraid SCSI Driver Security Issue:
This patch fixes an issue where the aacraid SCSI driver does not check IOCTL command permissions. This flaw might allow a local user on the service console to cause a denial of service or gain privileges.
ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003364: Virtual Machines on the ESX Server Host Do Not Power on Automatically:
This patch fixes an issue where a virtual machine does not auto start on reboot of the ESX Server host.
ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003365: ESX Server Host Might Stop Responding When a CD-ROM Drive Is Accessed:
This patch fixes an issue where the ESX Server host running on Intel's Harwich and Foxcove platforms might stop responding when a CD-ROM drive is accessed from a virtual machine under heavy CPU loads.
ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003366: iSCSI LUNs in the Pass-Through Mode Might Cause the ESX Server Host to Stop Responding:
This patch fixes an issue where iSCSI LUNs in the pass-through mode might cause the ESX Server host to stop responding.
ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003179: Fixes for Remote Console Blackout, OpenSolaris Boot Delay, Duplicate Packet Issue; Support for Virtual Machines to Share Generic SCSI Devices:
This patch fixes the following issues:
- Fixes an issue where a virtual machine using a e1000 NIC stops responding under heavy Pre-boot Execution Environment (PXE) network load, when the IBM Tivoli driver attempts to write to the e1000 register.
- Fixes an issue where OpenSolaris virtual machines might take a long time to boot due to SCSI errors.
- Enables virtual machines on the same ESX Server host to share generic SCSI devices.
- Fixes an issue where a virtual machine's remote console appears blacked out, when the virtual machine is accessed from a computer via a network that has a Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnel to the virtual machine's ESX Server host.
- Fixes an issue where broadcast/multicast packets are duplicated when two or more virtual machines are connected to a vSwitch using NIC teaming.
ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1003374: Fixes for VMware Tools Installer:
This patch provides updates for the VMware Tools installer to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and changes the name of Windows XP Professional x64 guest operating system in VMware tools to be correctly communicated to the ESX Server host.

Posted by David Marshall on February 23, 2008 05:50 AM

February 20, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization continues to flow through the channels

The server virtualization market is continuing to grow year over year, where IDC currently targets the annual growth rate at around 60%. The key is to continue to get consumers onboard with the technology through education, increasing ease of use, relaxing pricing, and by continuing to open up new channels of delivery to get the product into the hands of the people.

Virtual Iron is trying to address the pricing and complexity gap with their enterprise virtualization solution, and they also just announced the expansion of their European distribution partnership with Avnet Technology Solutions. Already in Belgium, Germany and Italy, this agreement futher pushes Virtual Iron's product into Europe by expanding into Australia, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Russia, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Ukraine.

"The market for virtualization is expanding rapidly across Europe and our channel partners are looking for solutions that create new opportunities and enable their value-added services," said Sukh Rayat, vice president for EMEA sales at Avnet Technology Solutions. "Virtual Iron has differentiated itself from other solutions with very comprehensive capabilities in the industry's easiest-to-use package. The product is well-suited to address a wide variety of data center initiatives and opens up a whole new market segment for our channel partners."

Virtualization giant VMware is also expanding its efforts. The company just announced a new channel distribution agreement with the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions (AIS) Division of Tech Data Corporation. AIS has been supporting value-added resellers that are implementing virtualization solutions to enhance IT operations for end users from the small sized business to the very large enterprise.

Tech Data has trained more than 200 inside and field sales representatives, product managers and systems engineers, who are either certified VMware Sales Professionals (VSPs) or VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs). The company plans to more than double the number of VSPs and VCPs as it trains additional resources in the coming months.

"Virtualization is doing much more than transforming data centers through server consolidation," said Senior Vice President and General Manager, Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Pete Peterson. "The applications for virtualization extend way beyond the data center, providing VARs and their end-user customers with significant opportunities to implement more efficient and cost-effective IT strategies. From secure application access through thin client and blade PC solutions to enhanced data protection and business continuity, VARs and their CIO customers need to understand the far-reaching benefits of implementing virtualization solutions like those from VMware."

Posted by David Marshall on February 20, 2008 05:13 AM

February 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Pano Logic fine-tunes LAN deployments with new software

Last month, Pano Logic closed a second round of funding of $12 million which the company said it would use to keep up with the growing demand within the enterprise for desktop virtualization solutions. Pano said the money would be used to accelerate product development, expand sales and marketing efforts, and secure additional channel/SI partners to address the midmarket.

And the company is already making good on accelerating product development. Pano Logic has a new software release, Pano Virtual Desktop Solution 1.5, which is optimized for LAN deployments, supports VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VMware VirtualCenter 2.5, enables new usage models and provides more efficient resource management capabilities.

According to Michael Fodor, VP of Product Management at Pano Logic, "The new release's emphasis on LAN optimization and usage models is important, and will prove incredibly useful as more enterprises begin to identify and differentiate the needs for desktop virtualization in their LAN environments from their WAN environments."

The company has been getting a lot of interest with its shiny, silver box. And some of the new features it hopes will add to that interest include:

Support for the latest VMware releases – Adds support for the latest versions of VMware Infrastructure 3 including ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5.
Kiosk mode usage model – Enables Pano devices to be deployed in public or shared locations for any user. Kiosk mode allows users to have easy access to limited-purpose, highly secure virtual desktops, whether deployed in conference rooms, lobbies or shared work areas.
Device and location-based usage model – Provides access to designated desktop virtual machines based on the particular Pano device being used. Device restricted mapping allows users to be connected to desktop virtual machines based on the Pano device and its location within the network. For industries such as healthcare that must comply with data privacy policies based on physical and logical rules, this usage model provides the advantages of desktop virtualization while still enabling location based policies.
Resource optimization – Conserves CPU and memory resources by shutting down idle desktop virtual machines (DVMs) when not needed.
Expanded USB peripheral support – Adds certified support for more USB peripherals, including printers, scanners and authentication devices such as fingerprint readers and proximity cards.

The new 1.5 software release will be available on February 25, 2008 with a starting price of $300.

Posted by David Marshall on February 19, 2008 04:55 AM

February 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Veeam Software expands into VMware management

Veeam Software, well known for its widely distributed FastSCP tool, announced that it has entered into the VMware management market with a new suite designed to address many of the challenges facing ESX administrators.

According to Veeam, the management suite works with and extends VMware's own management platform, VMware VirtualCenter.

The company said that the new suite offers the following capabilities:

Reporting and Documentation – Veeam Reporter automatically discovers and collects information about the VMware Infrastructure 3 environment, its components and configuration settings, including virtual machines, network, storage and VMotion. Reporter generates comprehensive reports in Visio, Excel, Word or PDF formats to help ESX administrators with configuration and change management. In addition, Reporter's Storage Capacity Report helps administrators and datacenter managers with storage management, capacity planning and chargeback.
Performance monitoring and troubleshooting – Veeam Monitor is an agentless solution that supports the monitoring of multiple ESX Servers and multiple VirtualCenters. Veeam Monitor provides single-screen detailed reporting and alerting of key usage and performance statistics by cluster, resource pool or virtual machine.
Configuration management – Veeam Configurator allows administrators to manage advanced settings and subsystems of multiple VMware ESX Servers easily without accessing the command line, writing scripts or manually editing configuration files. Veeam Configurator provides a Windows GUI that integrates with and extends the capabilities of VMware VirtualCenter.

"Virtualization technology offers an opportunity to dramatically improve the flexibility and manageability of enterprise systems," said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam Software president and CEO. "On the other hand, fast virtualization adoption by medium and large enterprises creates new systems management challenges. These new virtualized environments call for different approaches, as well as new management tools. Traditional physical systems management tools simply aren't designed to do it. Veeam has created the most comprehensive set of tools designed specifically for VMware ESX environments."

Veeam's new management suite for VMware is now available at a cost of $270 per socket. The company will be demonstrating the new product while at VMworld Europe next week.

Posted by David Marshall on February 19, 2008 04:42 AM

February 18, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Storage and software in the virtual datacenter

Today, we take a look at storage and software in the virtual datacenter. DataCore Software, the virtualization SAN software company, released their latest software product into the market - Virtual Infrastructure Foundation Plus or VIF+. And Network Appliance, known for their NetApp storage devices, also launched software into the market - SnapManager and Provisioning Manager. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on February 18, 2008 08:22 PM

February 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Amazon's S3 data storage service hit with outage

In 2006, Amazon.com launched several pay-as-you-go services that were aimed at the developer community: Simple Storage Service (S3) which offers unlimited Internet storage, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which lets developers create and manage virtual machine instances, and Simple Queue Service for message delivery.

For the most part, these services have been fairly robust and worked as advertised. And the services have remained fairly inexpensive since they don't offer a '5-nines' guarantee SLA behind it.

However, Amazon Web Services were dealt a substantial blow yesterday when it was struck with a temporary outage that reportedly took thousands of Web sites down - each of which relied on the company's hosted storage solution. Reports of Amazon's S3 services being unavailable appeared around 4:30 AM PST and then the service was later restored within a three hour window.

A message thread quickly popped up on the Amazon Web Services Forum titled 'Massive (500) Internal Server Error.outage started 35 minutes ago' where consumers of the service demanded answers to their questions.

Comments were being made such as: "and this is why you have to setup a fail-safe", "the s3 service is great but this just proves you can't rely on it", "My business is effectively closed right now because Amazon did something wrong. I'll have to reconsider using the service now.", "Errors happen, but there MUST be a fail-safe way of reporting them."

All of the comments weren't negative. Some said, "While I'm surprised this kind of error is possible, a big thanks to Amazon for getting onto this so quickly" and "its at least good that amazon fixed the issue within 2 hours thats fast if you compare other companys that might fix it in a day or two".

The Amazon Web Services Team commented throughout, but finally responded with the following update of information:

Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations. While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests. Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.
Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls. The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place. In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles. This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST. By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.

As we said earlier today, though we're proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable. As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements. We are taking immediate action on the following: (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls. Additionally, we've begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.

If Cloud Computing is going to take off and become widely adopted, the service needs to reach 5-nines (99.999%) of reliability and uptime - even if that means the price has to go up. At the very least, the option has to be made available to users. Until that can happen, it sounds like most users would at least be happy with a dashboard of information and a notification system from Amazon that would alert end users if something goes wrong. Without notification from Amazon, many consumers spent time and money trying to troubleshoot the problem on their end, until they finally realized the problem was on Amazon's side of the fence.

Posted by David Marshall on February 16, 2008 12:54 PM

February 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware community spices up VMware Storage VMotion

One of the things I like about being in the IT industry is the sense of community. And as both VMware and virtualization in general continue to expand in popularity, the virtualization community continues to grow around it. Case in point, VMware offered a new feature with its VI 3.5 product, Storage VMotion, and members of the community have already started helping others through the creation of additional 3rd-party utilities that help expand the ease of use of this VMware feature.

VMware describes Storage VMotion as a state-of-the-art solution that enables users to perform live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous storage arrays with complete transaction integrity and no interruption in service for critical applications.

This feature does for virtual machines and storage what VMware VMotion did for virtual machines and compute capacity. However, members of the community may not have been overly excited about the way it was implemented.

To try and answer that calling, there have already been two virtualization community members that have taken matters into their own hands.

Alexander Gaiswinkler has created a Storage VMotion graphical user interface. His instructions are simple: Install the VMware Remote CLI on a Windows machine to the standard path, Save the file vms.pl into the C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VI Remote CLI\bin directory, Save the svmotionGUI.exe on the machine, and then Double click it.

You can download this utility from the VMware Community Forum.

Around the same time, Andrew Kutz from Lostcreations developed his own utility to solve end-user woes from using VMware's Storage VMotion capabilities.

The tool is called SVMotion, and it is a VI 2.5 client plug-in that extends the client's functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke Storage VMotion operations. Kutz caveats the tool with a notice that the plug-in is not supported by VMware in any way.

Kutz told me that he had been tinkering around with reverse engineering the VI Client Plug-In architecture for a few weeks before Gaiswinkler's stand-a-lone GUI application came out. The application was well received, said Kutz, but it was only a wrapper for the VMware RemoteCLI and he believed it should and could be a real plug-in.

When asked about the challenges of creating such a project, Kutz said "there is of course zero documentation on how to write VI client plugins"; and so he plans on releasing a white paper soon that will show other developers how they can create their own plugins. Kutz stated that "VMware also bypasses their own SDK within the plugin framework, instead transforming the largely procedural SDK set of APIs into a more object oriented namespace called Vmomi. And of course, this has no documentation either."

The VMware Community Forum has been discussing both of these utilities. So far, everyone seems to really enjoy the functionality that these tools deliver. Kutz said, "The VMware forums are alive with users wondering why VMware has not incorporated this functionality themselves." And he added, "My best guess is that they are working on it, but are running into some of the same challenges as me. For example, my plugin does not show file sizes (yet). This seems like a natural necessity for a storage migration plugin, but getting file size information from datastores is slow and cumbersome, and does not lend well to a snappy interface."

You can find out more information about the SVMotion plug-in on Lostcreations.com, here. And you can download the tool, here.

Remember, neither of these tools are supported by VMware and therefore are to be used at your own risk.

Posted by David Marshall on February 16, 2008 07:32 AM

February 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware: virtualization management suite

Tek-Tools Software, a provider of IT resource management software solutions, announced a new module for the company's Profiler Suite - Profiler for VMware. The new module is designed to optimize capacity utilization, performance, and availability of virtual IT infrastructures. With the addition of this module to the Profiler Suite, end users can now monitor all four IT infrastructure components – servers, storage, backup and apps – from one console including virtual servers.

"Profiler for VMware showed us that we could take many of our physical hosts and convert them to Virtual Machines, saving us space and cost in our datacenters and helping us centralize over eight terabytes of storage," said Ed Delgado, Storage Administrator, Risk Metrics. "It is a welcome addition to the Profiler Suite. Now I can look across the entire IT infrastructure – physical and virtual -- from a single console. At a glance from the Profiler console I can see how servers are performing, how much storage is available, the status of backup operations and application availability. Plus, I can drill down in any area for more in-depth reporting, the growth rate of allocated storage or historical performance of ESX servers, for example."

According to the company, Profiler for VMware provides visibility for:

Capacity planning – Eliminating wasted storage, reclaiming orphaned storage, and developing strategic growth plans based upon historical utilization, trending, and forecasting for both allocated and utilized storage.
Virtualization planning - Identifying candidates for virtualization.
Performance monitoring – Utilizing real-time and historical analysis and what-if scenario planning to optimize performance in the virtual environment.
Availability monitoring – Tracking inventory, status, and resource-utilization with threshold-based alerts across the virtual environment.

To find out more about the product, I spoke with Steve Harding, Director of Marketing at Tek-Tools.

Q. What made Tek-Tools get into the virtualization management business?

A. Customer demand. Tek-Tools has more than 800 customers using the Profiler Suite, which has been monitoring the physical infrastructure – servers, storage, backup and applications – for years. Customers said, we're adopting virtualization technologies and it's adding a significant layer of complexity in terms of management. Tek-Tools is introducing Profiler for VMware as its first virtualization monitoring tool to provide customers with visibility into the virtualized environment from the same solution that monitors their physical infrastructure.

Q: What do you feel are some of the biggest limitations of virtualization management right now? And how does Tek-Tools fill that void?

A: Virtualization has been positioned as the savior for server sprawl, and while it does deliver tremendous utilization improvements, it adds management complexity and can lead to virtual server sprawl. With consolidation, you no longer have physical servers to go to, and therefore you need visibility, or a "super human" admin to cope with it all. Profiler for VMware delivers visibility into the virtual environment. With this new module, the Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into the virtual and physical infrastructure from a single console.

Q: How is your company addressing the challenges posed by virtualization?

A: By providing visibility into the two big areas of the IT shop today: Physical and Virtual, Admins can now look at the performance of all components in each one of those groups from one single easy-to-use console.

Also, virtualization immediately causes server and storage sprawl. Profiler can help identify over- or under-utilized resources and reclaim wasted storage that was not easy to identify before.

Q: Your software has been described as being agentless. Can you describe for us how you get the data and how you interact with the virtual machines?

A: Profiler for VMware leverages VMware's native APIs. The Profiler modular architecture allows for a single point for data-collection, or multiple for large environments. Profiler's data collectors make web services calls to the VMware's Virtual Center console.

For smaller environments where Virtual Center is not available, Profiler allows polling data remotely from each individual ESX Hosts if desired.

Q: With Profiler for VMware now released, what are your thoughts on a Xen-based profiler or Hyper-V? Is heterogeneity important to your users? Or are they more concerned with managing VMware and physical environments?

A: We are definitely looking into other virtualization vendors and yes, heterogeneity is important to our customers and therefore to us. We decided to start with VMware given the fact that it's currently #1 in the market. We treat virtualization as a platform/category and not as a single vendor. Tek-Tools has always been platform-neutral and we try to support every major vendor in each category. You can expect to see announcements about expanding our virtualization platforms support from us soon.

Q: Where do you see virtualization heading in the next year or two?

A: It's moving more toward the old "Mainframe days", or grid-computing model, where administrators will have a big cluster of heterogeneous resources (servers, storage, etc.) and that cluster will become a "Big Black Box" which could be thought as a big supercomputer. It's not a new concept at all but there's new terminology and technology around it.

Profiler for VMware is generally available directly and through Tek-Tools' channel partners. Pricing starts at $995 USD/ESX host regardless of the number of guests on the server.

I'd like to thank Steve Harding and Tek-Tools for taking the time to speak with me.

Posted by David Marshall on February 14, 2008 07:19 PM

February 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Parallels Virtuozzo Containers offers 350 templates

Parallels will announce the availability of a Template Catalog for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers tomorrow. The company says it will offer a library of more than 350 software downloads that can be used to easily create and manage operating systems and applications running in virtual environments.

This seems like another great way for Parallels marketing to get the word out about their container solution. With so much confusion generated around the term virtualization these days, it becomes difficult for companies to market their virtualization products unless they are specifically going head to head with something like VMware ESX Server - the virtualization product that most people think about or hear about when the term virtualization is thrown out there. People are becoming more and more familiar with the term "hypervisor", but the understanding of "containers" doesn't appear as wide spread.

When looking at it, the Parallels Virtuozzo Templates remind me somewhat of VMware's Virtual Appliance Marketplace. And perhaps, much as the marketplace has been a great marketing tool for VMware and an added bonus for VMware users, so too can the Template areas do the same for Parallels and its users.

Describing it, Parallels says that when using templates, only a single instance of a software package is required and managed on a physical machine, regardless of the number of containers using the software. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers templates are very small according to the company and can be deployed rather quickly - within seconds they said.

The company lists the following advantages of this approach:

Templates reduce the duplication of software used multiple times on a virtualized server, making it possible to manage a single instance of software on a server.
Templates can be deployed and updated online without any downtime or restarting the physical server.
Because multiple containers can share real memory, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers enables 3-10 times greater density for typical workloads, as compared with other virtualization technologies.
Patches and updates can be applied to a single template, and then the changes can be automatically propagated across all similar templates that reflect the update, dramatically cutting maintenance time.

The Templates Catalog includes a number of Linux distributions, such as CentOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Ubuntu, as well as applications like MySQL, Spam Assassin, Wordpress and more.

"Parallels Virtuozzo Containers is the only virtualization technology that uses this innovative templates approach, which enables software to be deployed in seconds and managed once thus greatly reducing the administrative management tasks and associated time," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. "Our partner community is working with us to provide and extend the list of available templates."

Parallels is actively pursuing partnerships with companies and OS vendors that are interested in making their software available as a Parallels Virtuozzo Containers Template, which is located, here.

Posted by David Marshall on February 13, 2008 08:25 PM

February 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Sun expands to the desktop with Innotek virtualization acquisition

Sun Microsystems announced that it will acquire German desktop virtualization vendor Innotek GmbH, the maker of VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization product that has been growing in popularity. The announcement comes on the heels of Sun's $1 billion acquisition announcement of open source database developer MySQL. Terms of the Innotek deal haven't been disclosed.

Innotek has been growing in popularity with end users and developers because of its open source nature. The product was first made available in January of last year, and it already has more than 4 million downloads to its name. VirtualBox runs on top of Windows and Linux today, and the company already has a Mac OS X version in Beta. And only two days ago, the company announced its first Beta version for Open Solaris, the open source version of Sun's Unix operating system.

According to Sun, acquiring Innotek will help strengthen Sun's leadership in the virtualization market by extending the company's xVM platform with a desktop virtualization solution. Steve Wilson, who heads Sun's xVM team, posted on his blog that he believes that the VirtualBox technology will help broaden interest among developers in Sun's xVM product line.

Wilson explains on his blog that the two products, VirtualBox and Sun's xVM, may sound familiar at first, however they are targeted at radically different markets. Wilson writes:

"Sun xVM Server is a bare-metal hypervisor. This means it installs directly on the hardware, not on top of an existing operating system. It's a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. It includes high-end, data center features like live VM migration and dynamic self-healing. This is datacenter grade virtualization. Along with Sun xVM Ops Center, xVM Server will become the engine that drives a dynamic data center.
VirtualBox is what is technically referred to as a type-2 hypervisor. It's an application that installs on top of an existing operating system. VirtualBox supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris hosts, which means you can use it with your laptop no matter what OS you choose for your 'native' environment. This makes VirtualBox a software developer's dream. You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multi-tier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box! VirtualBox doesn't have xVM Server's data center features, like live migration, but it's incredibly light-weight."

Wilson compares xVM Server to something like VMware's ESX Server platform and VirtualBox as more of a comparable platform to VMware's Workstation or Fusion product or Parallels Desktop for Mac. And because of that, VirtualBox seems to fit in nicely with Sun's plans for a virtualization suite offering.

Right now, VirtualBox is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and can be downloaded on virtualbox.org. Sun plans on continuing to make VirtualBox freely available to users, and it hopes that its open source nature can continue to win over support from the developer community.

Posted by David Marshall on February 13, 2008 04:50 AM

February 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Vizioncore releases the latest virtualization conversion tool

Vizioncore has announced the release of vConverter 3.0, a virtualization conversion tool that the company claims as the "fastest, easiest and most reliable tool" for performing physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) machine conversions. The company can also claim wide platform support as it works with many of the leading server virtualization platform vendors: VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Virtual Iron.

According to the company, based on enterprise-class disk and networking technologies, vConverter allows system administrators to perform either single, multiple or scheduled 'lights out' machine conversions, providing an optimal way of designing and planning conversions to best fit infrastructure management needs.

To find out more information about Vizioncore's latest product and the market space that it is entering, I was able to catch up with Scott Polly, Senior Director of Product Management at Vizioncore, and get some really valuable answers.

Q: What makes Vizioncore's vConverter "the fastest and easiest" P2V tool?

A: First, if you haven’t tried it for yourself, please go to http://www.vizioncore.com/download.html and download a copy. It comes with three free bundled conversions. To comprehensively answer your question, vConverter originally shipped in late 2006, which was prior to VMware shipping its Converter 1.0. Vizioncore's vConverter 3.0 is a mature product with a code base that has converted an estimated 250,000 servers. From then to now we have worked diligently with nearly ten thousand users and have learned a significant amount about what medium and large enterprise customers need when they virtualize their physical infrastructure.

Acquisition/Price is the least of the concerns among this constituency. In fact, did you know that the upfront price of software is less than 10% of the overall cost of software in IT? The cost to maintain that software in people, infrastructure, etc. makes up the lion share of the total cost of ownership picture. As a result, the cost of resources, downtime, errors, failures, infrastructure install requirements, time in overall conversion (including pre- and post-migrations tasks) etc., all add up to a very serious amount of time and money. Moreover, as one of the industry's first software companies, today with more than 7,500 paying customers, we have the unique ability to research features and areas of concern, then approach real customers to verify that what we are building is what people want. vConverter v3 is what customers want for many reasons.

Speed:
We have developed patentable technologies which result in advanced intelligence and efficient handling of the bits and bytes required for virtualizing a customer's physical infrastructure. Another exclusive Vizioncore technology in vConverter 3.0 is vzBoost. vConverter incorporates vzBoost which is a kernel level driver that speeds up all writes to the VMFS to reduce bottlenecks and this results in increased speed to VMware ESX Server.

Ease of use:
We have always maintained a reputation for being the easiest to use and have many testimonials to this effect. Offering multiple interface options (wizards, single, multiple simultaneous and/or scheduled conversions, drag'n'drop, CLI, et al), as well as the automation of numerous pre/post conversion tasks, enables any level of user to maximize his or her time and effectiveness with the tool.

Q: Wasn't Invirtus working on a P2V solution prior to the acquisition? And is this the result of the work done by Invirtus? If so, was there anything new in the product that Vizioncore introduced?

A: Quest Software, Inc (NASDAQ: QSFT), acquired Invirtus in early 2007 (Vizioncore is also a wholly owned subsidiary of Quest). The core Invirtus asset, consisting of its executives and world class development organization, integrated with the Vizioncore organization shortly thereafter. Our goal was to leverage the collective software assets and develop the best "Direct to ESX" conversion experience on the market. It is no secret that Vizioncore is one of the most successful virtualization ISVs today, with more than 7,500 customers and 1,100 Channel Partners around the world. It is also no secret that Vizioncore cut its teeth in the VMware ESX Server market space. As we see this market broadening out to incorporate more "virtual infrastructure" platform choices, we are able to leverage our development expertise and knowledge to rapidly introduce more and more relevant software solutions for our customers.

Q: Can you elaborate more on vzBoost? Is this component found in other Vizioncore products? Is this part of what makes this product "fast"?

A: vzBoost is a VMware kernel level driver that Vizioncore uses within our backup and replication product lines. Our newest product vConverter v3.0 product for P2V will also incorporate this technology to ensure P2V's don't have any VMFS write bottle necks. This driver was created to speed up any type of writes to the VMFS that occur via the service console. This driver was created using our source code access to ESX Server.

Q: What types of guest operating systems does vConverter work with? Is it only Windows based guest OSes?

A: Currently vConverter 3.0 works with versions of Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, all versions of Small Business Server and XP Professional. Windows versions, including the new bootloader found in Vista and Windows Server 2008 and Linux are coming out soon.

Q: Is Linux support planned? I've seen many P2V solutions come out that work with Windows, but not many that can address Linux. Is this market driven? Or is it just difficult to migrate a Linux machine?

A: There is a market for Linux P2V. We have multiple exciting Linux technology solutions currently in development.

Q: Do you find that more people are interested in image migration for server consolidation purposes or disaster recovery? Is this changing? With more people moving away from simple server consolidation use cases, will it shift more to a DR primary need?

A: There is still strong demand for server consolidation. Currently, less than 10% of physical infrastructure is virtualized. Meaning there is some 90% of physical infrastructure left to be virtualized. As further proof of this, the number of target platforms for virtual infrastructure (ESX Server, XenServer, Virtual Iron) is increasing, not decreasing. We believe the trend for virtualization, be it used for server consolidation, disaster recovery, continuous data protection, business continuity, etc., is more like a greenfield opportunity for Vizioncore.

Q: Can you talk more about what interested Vizioncore to get into the P2V market at this stage of the game? With other companies like PlateSpin having been doing this for so long, what does Vizioncore bring to the table that's new and interesting to separate it from the other players?

A: Our main focus is, as always, to provide additional value to our customers. In spite of the appearance of a clear leader in P2V, our customers and partners painted a much different picture. Not only was the P2V conversion race wide open, but there was a clear need for a viable solution in the P2V-DR space as well. Vizioncore has always played a prominent role in helping customers move to a virtualized environment. While our role historically has been one of removing obstacles and providing additional value, the time was right to take a more active approach and help drive implementations right from the start and help customers incorporate virtualization into their environments. With vConverter 3.0, we've been able to leverage the same disciplined approach to create not only a great solution for P2V Disaster Recovery, but also the fastest and most reliable conversion tool on the market today.

Q: Does vConverter directly tie into other Vizioncore products?

A: Yes as mentioned above, there is a vRanger Pro P2V-DR Module available that is essentially the vConverter engine running behind the vRanger UI. If the end user has already virtualized and currently uses vRanger Pro for backup and restore, the addition of the P2V-DR module lets them extend a virtualized backup and restore capability to their physical machines.

Q: Any feedback from customers as to whether they are more interested in going from physical to virtual or virtual to virtual?

A: Vizioncore has many channel partners actively offering physical to virtual integration services that include the use of vConverter. Virtual to virtual is important but nowhere near as popular a requirement as P2V. As more virtual platforms mature and as more organizations virtualize, we expect V2V conversions to increase.

Q: Does vConverter also offer virtual to physical (V2P) conversions? And how important is that ability with your users? Any plans to offer it?

A: We have V2P on the roadmap for a mid-year release. It is a check box item that we will be supporting shortly. The best advice here is to make sure your virtual infrastructure is well thought out/designed. The question as to the relevance of V2P is something that is being answered by the collective offerings of our multi-billion dollar industry. Is VMware doing all it can to ensure its platform performs like a native bare metal server? Is Citrix/Xen? How about Intel and AMD? Are Dell, HP, IBM, et al doing all they can to ensure that virtualization is able to scale to the performance needs of customer requirements? How about transactional database vendors like Oracle? Is Oracle, or Sun for that matter, trying to do all they can to ensure that virtualized database software is highly reliable and performance minded? The answer is a resounding "Yes". Why does this matter? Specifically, right now V2P is more a line item in a feature list than it is a representation of a response to actual customer requirements.

I'd like to once again thank Vizioncore's Scott Polly for taking the time to speak with me about the company's latest offering - vConverter 3.0.

Posted by David Marshall on February 12, 2008 07:46 PM

February 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Mobiles and virtualization with VirtualLogix and SIMtone acquires Aspeed

Moving beyond server virtualization, VirtualLogix showcases its virtualization solutions for mobile devices and networks while at the GSMA conference in Spain. And Simtone has announced that the company has acquired Aspeed Software in order to expand availability, scalability and performance of cloud computing. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on February 11, 2008 08:24 PM

February 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Canonical to resell Parallels virtualization software

Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced the availability of Parallels Workstation for Linux through the Ubuntu Partner Repository - giving Ubuntu users the ability to quickly find, install and run Parallels software.

The deal gives Parallels direct access to users of the most widely used Linux desktop distributions.

"Partnering with Canonical is a great way for Parallels to bring user friendly desktop virtualization to the ever-expanding global community of Ubuntu users," said Bryan Goode, director of business development, Parallels. "Parallels Software provides Ubuntu users with added flexibility to any program from almost any operating system, without having to give up their Ubuntu desktop, even for a few minutes."

The company is making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the operating system's built-in software update tool interface and using a feature called the Ubuntu Partner Repository. The repository supplements the thousands of free and open source applications available through other Ubuntu repositories, and contains both proprietary and open source applications provided by Ubuntu Partners.

The Parallels Workstation virtualization software allows users to run both Windows and Linux operating systems simultaneously on a single system.

"We have always been committed to providing Ubuntu users with choice," said Randy Linnell, consumer services manager, Canonical. "Parallels is excellent virtualization technology which many users have requested. Being able to come to a commercial arrangement to make it available is great for Ubuntu users and the project itself. We look forward to users supporting it."

The version of the Parallels virtualization software available through the Ubuntu Partner Repository is a trial version. However, users can purchase permanent keys for the software through the online Canonical store, shop.canonical.com or direct at the Parallels Web site, www.parallels.com.

Posted by David Marshall on February 10, 2008 05:21 PM

February 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VKernel gets $4.6 million in Series A investment

Virtualization giant VMware may have watched its stock price drop, but that hasn't stopped venture capitalist firms from investing money in VMware's partners.

VKernel, a creator of virtual appliances that manage virtual server environments, announced that it had raised $4.6 million in its first round of institutional funding. The Series A round was led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners.

"The server virtualization market is growing explosively," said Mitchell Kertzman, managing director at Hummer Winblad. "This has us very excited about VKernel's vision as it is providing the essential tools for IT staffs to virtualize their environments faster, more cost-effectively, and with greater confidence."

Founded in January 2007, VKernel is creating a suite of virtual appliances that address systems management challenges within virtual server environments. The company's current chargeback appliance enables IT groups to immediately solve today's critical pain points by providing cost visibility into the resource consumption of each virtual machine, resource pool, host, or cluster.

"Organizations of all sizes are virtualizing their server farms, which is creating a new set of systems management challenges," said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. "To be successful, IT groups need tools that address their most pressing issues. Unlike traditional systems management products that are difficult to install, learn, and use, VKernel is delivering tiny virtual appliances designed to solve specific issues."

VKernel's Chargeback Virtual Appliance is available for download on the company's Website.

Posted by David Marshall on February 10, 2008 05:00 PM

February 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 RTM: Hyper-V clock begins

Things must have been extremely busy over at the Redmond campus last week, what with the announcement of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 going gold or being released to manufacturing (RTM).

Other than the obvious news that Microsoft is releasing a new version of the server operating system, what it means more specifically to me is the start of the internal clock counting down the release of Microsoft's hypervisor technology, Hyper-V (or Viridian for those of us waiting long enough).

Sometime within the next 180 days, we should be able to get our hands on a finalized, complete version of the long awaited virtualization technology. Within the RTM release of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft did include a Beta version of the hypervisor - I believe it to be the same Beta version that was included with the RC1 build of Windows Server 2008. So that should at least allow us to continue to play with the technology, but I wouldn't recommend putting this version into production use in your environment. Been there, done that! When something is marked as Beta, it's for a reason. There are always bugs in a product (you learn something working in QA - testing is never done!), but you know you'll find bugs easily in a Beta product. I say install it, try it, learn it - just not in production.

Users of this Beta Hyper-V version should also know that it sounds like Microsoft is planning an in-place upgrade of the hypervisor. Stay tuned, hopefully more information on this will unfold soon enough.

Server 2008 isn't yet available for customers to purchase. But that should happen around March 1st. A global launch of the product is planned with something called "Heroes Happen 2008", where the operating system will be joined in a three-prong attack with SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

Posted by David Marshall on February 10, 2008 04:15 PM

February 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware looks to the desktop with Virtual Desktop Manager 2

VMware has been the dominant player in the desktop and server virtualization market with products like VMware Workstation, VMware Server and VMware ESX Server. And now, the virtualization giant has enhanced its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution with the release of VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2 -- yet another product from VMware that was created by integrating technology acquired from one of its acquisitions, this time, Propero.

VMware Desktop Manager 2 allows users to securely connect to their virtual desktops in the data center and helps bring back the thin client to IT environments. The new version enhanced the installation and manageability of the solution, making it available to the end user to install and configure it themselves, as opposed to its predecessor version which needed VMware professional services to help configure the product on-site.

According to VMware, VMware VDI integrates VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2 and provides an easy-to-manage desktop virtualization solution that takes advantage of virtualization technology used by more than 100,000 organizations. VMware VDI streamlines desktop management, reduces operational costs and provides business continuity capabilities that until now were available only for mission-critical server applications.

"Our customers are deploying VMware desktop virtualization solutions in greater and greater numbers," said Jeff Jennings, vice president of desktop products and solutions at VMware. "Our expanded VDI solution now provides these organizations with a complete and integrated end-to-end desktop virtualization solution. Customers can now manage virtual desktops with greater levels of operational efficiency, flexibility, and security."

The desktop virtualization market could easily pass the server virtualization market in the future. IDC predicts that desktop virtualization will become a $2 billion market by 2011. Although thus far, adoption rates of the technology can probably be safely categorized as being only fair. Expect that to change as the kinks continue to get worked out, and products like this continue to advance.

Pricing for VMware VDI is based on a list price of $150 per concurrent user and is packaged into two bundled offerings: the VMware VDI Starter Edition and the VMware VDI Bundle 100 Pack. Both bundles include VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition for VDI (which consists of VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5) and the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2. The VMware VDI Starter Edition, which enables 10 virtual desktops, has a list price of $1,500. The VMware VDI Bundle 100 Pack, which enables 100 virtual desktops, has a list price of $15,000. Customers may add on to either edition by purchasing additional licenses in increments of 10, based on the list price of $150 per concurrent user.

Posted by David Marshall on February 7, 2008 05:52 AM

February 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)

IBM's PowerVM virtualization for SMB customers

When we talk about virtualization and its history, we have to talk about IBM and the old mainframe days. IBM introduced virtualization technology to market some 40 years ago. And now, the company is repackaging its Unix Advanced Power Virtualization (APV) software that has been around since 2004 into a new product offering called PowerVM.

With IBM's PowerVM virtualization platform, customers can create up to 160 virtual partitions in a single system, which dramatically improves the utilization of the server.

PowerVM Express is specifically designed for small and medium sized businesses and is reasonably priced at $40. The Express edition is designed for three LPARS per server. In addition, the company also offers Standard and Enterprise editions that allow ten LPARS per server socket.

"Virtualization has typically been in the domain of large enterprises. Today we aim to simplify the adoption of virtualization technologies, making it available to small and medium-sized businesses," said Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy, IBM Power Systems. "The capabilities we deliver when combining IBM's leadership virtualization software and POWER6 technology in our new offerings take us beyond just world-class performance and allow us to help clients build more efficient businesses by saving time, space and money."

PowerVM now has the ability to implement live migration of a virtual machine similar to VMware's VMotion technology. IBM calls it Live Partition Mobility, and it moves a single LPARS workload or all LPARS workloads from one physical host server to another without any interruption to the user. Although SMB customers interested in PowerVM Express may be upset, this feature is only found on the Enterprise edition of PowerVM, priced at $1,500.

Another feature found is Lx86, which allows an IBM System p server to run Linux x86 binary applications unmodified without recompilation, in addition to UNIX and Linux on POWER applications. This feature is offered in all three editions at no additional charge as an incentive to get x86 server users to consolidate on to System p servers. Lx86 is a product of Transitive Corp. that was shown in Beta as the Application Virtual Environment.

According to IBM, nearly 70 percent of IBM POWER6 processor-based System p servers use PowerVM technology today.

Posted by David Marshall on February 6, 2008 07:14 PM

February 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)

New entries into the security and lab management virtualization market

As virtualization continues to gain in popularity, third-party companies continue to surface in order to try and fill the gaps found in virtualization. Entire businesses have been created, funded, acquired and continue to operate around different areas of virtualization technology. In this Podcast, we’ll take a look at newcomers to both the security space and to the virtual lab market. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on February 6, 2008 06:51 PM

February 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Ardence Technology now integrated within Citrix

Back in December of 2006, Citrix Systems, Inc. announced that it would acquire privately held Ardence for their operating system streaming technology in order to further the Citrix strategic end-to-end application delivery infrastructure. Since the acquisition, Citrix has been working toward integrating the technology into its own product line. And the integration is now complete with Citrix Provisioning Server 4.5.

Citrix Provisioning Server for Desktops uses a streaming technology to delivery a single, standard desktop image, operating system and software stack on-demand to physical desktops.

By delivering server workloads on-demand rather than deploying them on individual desktops, Provisioning Server for Desktops 4.5:

Uses software-streaming technology to deliver operating systems and applications on-demand to physical desktops as a service from the network.
Desktops with the same OS/application stack can be provisioned on-demand from a single, standard image.
No software is pre-installed or permanently installed on the desktop hardware.
Application processing takes place at the desktop.
Desktops can operate disklessly.

Citrix is probably still best known to many for its old Metaframe and now its Presentation Server thin client computing platform. Since the acquisition of XenServer and the company's continued journey towards its end-to-end strategy, Citrix has been trying to educate the IT community and its sales channels that the company is more than just application provisioning. With acquisitions and integrations like Ardence, the message continues to grow.

You can watch a video demonstration of Citrix Provisioning Server, here.

Posted by David Marshall on February 6, 2008 04:58 AM

February 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware's stock drops: question of faith?

VMware stock was the Wall Street technology darling with a story book beginning last year. Originally priced at $29, VMware stock (VMW) quickly soared as high as $125 last fall. However recently, the company's stock plunged by more than 30% after VMware posted "disappointing" earnings. So what was so disappointing in the news?

VMware unveiled their financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2007. The company showed total revenues for Q4 as $412 million, an increase of 80% compared to a year earlier with an amount of $229.5 million. Net income for the fourth quarter more than doubled to $78 million, or 19 cents per share. This was also up from the previous year of $31 million, or 9 cents per share.

Great numbers, but not what analysts were expecting. They expected VMware to report sales of $417 million and earnings excluding special items of 24 cents per share. And when they didn't, the market reacted with disfavor and sent the price per share tumbling down. As of this writing, the stock has been moving back up, slowly, and closed at $59.30.

Along with not meeting analyst expectations, analysts also seem concerned with the competition. Perhaps they only just recently found out about Xen, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Microsoft, SWsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc. After all, these technologies have only just recently surfaced, which may have caused alarm and uncertainty for some. Tongue in cheek.

On a serious note, these other companies have started making a lot of moves and stepping up the competitive marketing campaigns. Citrix and Microsoft have been doing a bang up job lately with their talks of co-operation and product interoperability. Citrix and Virtual Iron Software have both announced new versions of their products each with added features. Microsoft just announced RTM of Windows Server 2008 and an included beta of Hyper-V, making their virtualization platform that much more real on the competitive front. Intel and AMD continue to add virtualization capabilities directly into the x86 processor, breaking down the barrier walls of entry for others to more easily enter the market.

But that hasn't stopped VMware. They continue to advance their own product. They continue to announce new products like Virtual Desktop Manager 2. And they still have, by most accounts, the most stable and feature rich, long-running virtualization platform on the market.

So perhaps the stock will remain flat for now, as analysts figure out what the Q4 numbers mean to them and what they believe Q1 will look like for them; and they will continue to monitor competition from Microsoft and the various Xen camps as well.

Posted by David Marshall on February 5, 2008 08:31 PM

February 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Citrix introduces public beta for XenServer 4.1

While at Summit 08, Citrix had a lot to say about their acquired XenServer line. The company bulked up the XenServer team with 60 new people and were able to add 400 new customers into its camp in Q4. The company's goal is to deliver $50 million in revenue for 2008, and one way they are going to try and do that is to deliver on their next version of XenServer 4.1 (code-named Miami). To that end, the company has now opened up the beta program to the public.

This service pack or dot release enhances the previous v4 product with the following capabilities and improvements:

Scalability and Performance: Increased the number of simultaneous running VMs, Enhanced nested page table (NPT) support for modern AMD processors, VLAN support in Standard Edition, Improved Citrix Presentation Server performance and maximum number of user sessions
Reliability and Manageability: Host NIC bonding for fail-over (configured via CLI), Centralized logging, Configuration of network management interfaces via the CLI, Update/patch management integrated in XenCenter, Java bindings for XenAPI in SDK
Storage: Initial shared fibre channel storage support (via CLI only), Enhanced support for NetApp filers, including snapshot and cloning, Windows guest Hot disk remove, ISCSI improvements, Support for hot-plugging USB storage as a storage repository
Host System: Rolling pool upgrade support, NIC driver updates (e1000, BNX2, TG3), Support several 10Gb network adapters (Mellanox/Chelsio), Improved hardware support
Guest Support: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 32-bit and CentOS 5 32-bit install from physical CD, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 x64 and CentOS 5 x64 guest support, Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 x86 and x64 guest support, Windows Vista x86 guest support

One nice thing about this beta, there is no license key needed. The key is embedded into the binary, and will last through the beta period without expiring.

You can sign up for the Citrix XenServer 4.1 beta, here.

Posted by David Marshall on February 4, 2008 05:02 AM

VIRTUALIZATION REPORT PODCAST

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