Microsoft just opened the beta program for a new tool, the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool, which aims addressing a concrete challenge: keep updated a large amount of virtual machines stored in a VM library and acting as templates for cloning operations.

Since these virtual machines are not supposed to be powered on the task is challenging.

To solve it, the new Microsoft tool uses PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 and a patch management product between Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007.

Thanks to PowerShell scripts,...

According to the news that virtualization.info broke yesterday, Dell announces today its new server for virtualization: the PowerEdge R805 and 905 (two sockets the former, four sockets the latter).

The hardware comes with an interesting configuration (AMD Quad-Core, 16 DIMM slots, integrated quad-ports NIC with TOE, up to 292GB local storage, etc.) and the option to pre-install a couple of hypervisors: VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer Embedded Express (renamed XenServer Dell Express Edition).

The VMware lightweight hypervisor, which was supposed to be free, is priced $99.
The Citrix hypervisor for...

Yesterday, opening its new conference for partners, the Partner Exchange 2008, VMware announced a new technical certification for VAC partners: the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX).

The VCDX targets virtualization architects who already achieved the VCP certification and it's made by two exams:

• the VMware Enterprise Administration Exam (which include live labs)
• the VMware Design Exam (which includes simulations and questions about design scenarios)

Additionally, the candidates have to present and discuss a VMware design and implementation plan (it's not clear if this one must be a real-world,...

Proxmox Server Solution GmbH is building an open source management tool for virtualization platforms: Proxmox Virtual Environment.

The product, still in beta (0.9), has some interesting capabilities:

• Bare-metal installation (based on Debian Etch 64bit, which includes the supported virtualization platforms)
• Support for KVM and OpenVZ
• Web-based management console (AJAX based)
• Host-level backup (OpenVZ containers only)
• Support for host-level clustering (Proxmox VE Cluster)

Additionally, the developer is...

A new startup enters the virtualization market today with a soft launch: Neocleus.

The company, founded in 2006 and based in US (with the R&D center in Israel) received a first round of investments in 2007: $5 million from Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel.

Neocleus has a strong focus on security as testified by the management team: its co-founder and CTO, Etay Bogner, comes from SofaWare (the historical partner of Check Point, leader in enterprise firewalls), its Vice President of R&D, Yair Tor, comes from BeeFence (a startup focused on intrusion detection systems) and its Chief Security Architect, Yoav Weiss comes...

Some virtualization vendors have an online ROI/TCO calculator that prospects and customers can use to justify the purchase of their hyperivsors: VMware has one, Parallels has one.

Microsoft, which is preparing to release Hyper-V 1.0, now has one as well: the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool.

Compared with the others above, this calculator requires an impressive profiling of the company's current situation for three different areas: production server, development and test lab, and desktop virtualization.
From that data and for all these scenario, the tool provides a very deep analysis of the TCO, the entity of the investments (up...

Qumranet, the US startup that supports the development of KVM (the hypervisor included in the Linux kernel), announced its first product in September 2007: Solid ICE, an all-in-one VDI solution (the virtualization server based on KVM, the management console, the connection broker and the accelerated remote desktop protocol) for KVM virtual machines.

The company is finally releasing its product which immediately jumps to version 4.1.

This first version has some interesting features to offer, like:

• Support for Windows 2000 and XP virtual machines
• Self-service web portal
• Active Directory authentication support
• Virtual machines pools provisioning
• Fault-tolerant connection broker
• Optimized remote desktop protocol (SPICE) with support for bi-directional audio/video...
• Ericom brings VDI to Oracle VM, for free
  

  After InMage, Ericon is the second company announcing its support for the Oracle controverse hypervisor released in November 2007.

  So PowerTerm WebConnect becomes the first VDI solution for Oracle VM, filling an empty niche market while the VDI crowd competes around VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and the upcoming Microsoft Hyper-V.

  Ericom published a 3 minutes demo of the product here.

  The price of this version is unclear: the websites uses the word free instead of free trial everywhere.
  Download it here and please report back if there are feature limitations or timebombs.

  
  

  Update: Ericom contacted virtualization.info and confirmed that PowerTerm...

• ClearCube moves the VDI business to the VDIworks spin-off
  

  In January ClearCube started a process to become an agnostic VDI vendor and broaden its business focus beyond the blades manifacturing.
  The release of Sentral 5.6 in fact introduced the support of its connection broker for 3rd party hypervisors.

  Now the company goes further, announcing the spin-off VDIworks, which will develop and sell the connection broker with the new name of Virtual Desktop Platform.
  ClearCube will continue to offer Sentral thanks to an OEM agreement between the two entities.

  The ClearCube President, Rick Hoffman, is now the VDIworks President. His place at ClearCube has been replaced by Randy Printz, previously covering...

• Dell launches its new VMware ESXi powered servers tomorrow, prefers AMD
  

  Dell is expected to launch tomorrow its new servers supporting VMware ESXi.

  The first two products will be the PowerEdge R805 and R905 which features some interesting (and surprising) hardware components:

  • AMD Opteron Quad-Core CPUs (up to 2)
  • 16 DIMM slots (up to 128GB RAM DDR2-5300)
  • PERC 6/i SAS Controller
  • Quad-Port 1Gb NIC with TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) and Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (IOAT)
  • 32MB SecureDigital with VMware ESXi pre-installed

  Still no words on the price that Dell will ask for the VMware lightweight hypervisor. In March a VMware representative reported that the OEM may offer the product for free.

  Anyway the new servers will provide support...

• Amazon to offer OpenSolaris VMs into EC2, now in beta
  

  The on-demand virtual infrastructure that Amazon offers since August 2006 under the name of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is powered by Xen and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines. But Amazon is working on extending the guest operating systems offering.

  In fact today the company started a beta program which allows customers to use Sun OpenSolaris virtual machines instead of Red Hat ones: the OpenSolaris Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

  Sun prepared two different guest OSes for this program: the first is the just released OpenSolaris 2008.05 (formerly codename Project Indiana) and the other is the Solaris Express Community Edition (codename...

• VMware opens Fusion 2.0 beta program
  

  Nine months after its entrance in the Apple marker, VMware is ready to open the beta of Fusion 2.0.

  This first public build (89933) introduces a number of features and graphical improvements like:

  • DirectX 9.0 Shader 2 3D experimental support
  • Multi-Display support
  • Virtual Printing
  • Virtual Machine Library
  • Integrated VMware Importer

  Enroll for the beta program here.

  

  
  
• Leostream raises $3 million in Series A funding
  

  Leostream is one of the oldest firm in the virtualization space, along with few others like Vizioncore and PlateSpin.
  Used to sell an enterprise management product for virtualization platforms in the early days, the company completely changed direction, dropping its first product and focusing first on P2V migration (with P>V Direct) and then on VDI (with Hosted Desktop Connection Broker).

  While others got funded and became acquisition targets (Vizioncore by Quest, PlateSpin by Novell), Leostream is one of the few that never raised major resources over time.

  The situation is now changed since Meakem Becker Venture Capital has just invested $3...

• AMD is fine tuning its CPUs for Sun xVM Server
  

  AMD announced that its facility dedicated to fine tuning, the Operating System Research Center (OSRC), has extended its focus to include Sun OpenSolaris and the xVM products.
  This may imply that xVM Server may have a performance advantage when used on AMD processors.

  It's unclear if and how this new effort will impact the upcoming release 1.0 of the new Sun hypervisor, but one thing is for sure: with Intel in strong partnership with VMware, AMD has to find another strong virtualization partner to boost the sales of its finally released quad-core CPU (codename Barcellona). Maybe the chip manifacturer...

• Release: Sun VirtualBox 1.6
  

  Sun releases today the first version of its desktop virtualization product VirtualBox since the acquisition of innotek.

  The new VirtualBox 1.6 introduces:

  • full support for Solaris (now including Guest Additions) and Mac OS versions (which means tha Sun is now an official competitor of Parallels and VMware)
  • seamless window (what Parallels call Coherence and VMware calls Unity) for Solaris and Linux guest OSes
  • support for virtual SATA hard drives (for the first time in a virtualization product)
  • PAE memory support for guest OSes
  • introduction of a web services API
  

  Download it free of charge here.

  
  

  The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has...

• KVM reaches version 68, introduces support for Intel EPT
  

  Just one week after version 67, KVM releases version 68.

  The new build introduces support for the upcoming Intel nested pages technology dubbed Extended Page Tables (EPT).
  The EPT technology should be available only in 2009/2010 when Intel will introduce a completely new architecture in its upcoming Nehalem CPU.

  Despite all virtualization vendors are working to support Intel EPT in their hypervisors, KVM is probably the first platform to offer it today.

  Download KVM 68 here.

  

  ...
• VMware releases Project North Star (formerly Thinstall) beta 2
  

  VMware continues at fast pace the beta program of the recently acquired Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite, now temporarily called Project North Star.

  Today the company releases beta 2 (build 3.386) and introduces two new features:

  • Application Sync
    This feature enables you to deploy Project North Star (Thinstall) application updates. Application Sync automatically checks for and installs updates to your packaged applications. Updates might include changes such as a new version, service pack updates, or configuration changes in the package.ini file
  • Application Link
    This feature connects deployed applications. For example, you can establish a relationship between a deployed instance of Microsoft Office 2003 and...
  • VMware finalizing VMmark 1.1
    

    In July 2007 VMware released its first benchmarking tool, VMmark, trying to fill a void still existing today: a commonly accepted measurement system to evaluate performance of different virtualization platforms on different hardware (the SPEC is still mum about its plans).

    Since that time all major OEMs, Dell, HP IBM and Sun, adopted VMmark and published on VMware website the results for their 4/8/16 cores systems.

    Now VMware is about to release a minor update which introduces support for 64bit workloads.
    Three of the six virtual servers which compose each VMmark tile are now 64bits: the Java server (running SPECjbb...

  • Parallels Server hits beta 4
    

    Parallels publishes the fourth beta of its upcoming hypervisor dubbed Parallels Server.
    The new beta re-introduces support for Mac OS X 10.5 Server as guest OS.

    The product is now in beta since almost one year (the company demonstrated the first private beta at Apple WWDC event in June 2007) but Parallels is working on it since much more: in January 2006 SWsoft (the company former name) was talking about a Parallels Server and a Parallels Enterprise Server planned for early 2007.

    Hopefully the only product survived from that original plan will be released at the upcoming WWDC, set for this June...

  • Microsoft closes a major OEM agreement with Parallels for the Apple market
    

    It seems that the Microsoft relationship with Parallels is becoming multi-dimensional.

    A number of former Microsoft employees work for Parallels since the early days when the company was known as SWsoft.
    Among them, since this January, there is also Mark Zbikowski, former Microsoft Architect who led the development effort in MS-DOS and Windows NT.

    And now the two are linked by a major OEM agreement which brings key Microsoft products (Express Studio, Visual Studio, Office 2007 and Windows XP or Vista) to the Mac OS community through Parallels Desktop.

    Microsoft had the opportunity to deliver this package, dubbed Expression Professional Subscription,...

  • Desktone announces support for Microsoft SCVMM 2008
    

    Desktone is a US startup which left the stealth mode 10 days ago to unveil an innovative hosted VDI architecture.

    While waiting to unveil the first major implementation (probably from Verizon) the small company announces its support for the upcoming Microsoft virtualization products: Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008.

    The Desktone platform supports multiple hypervisors and management consoles despite the first edition is released with support for VMware VI only. So it's natural to see the upcoming support for Hyper-V as well as for XenServer (since Citrix is one of the four firms that invested in...

  • Citrix to embed Marathon Technologies HA into XenServer or vice versa?
    

    Marathon Technologies, already providing one of the first high availability solutions for XenServer virtual machines (at guest level), managed to further integrate with the Citrix hypervisor.

    The two company are now working to include Marathon everRun VM into the XenServer setup, integrate the everRun Availability Center inside XenCenter and transparently synchronize the HA settings into each other console.

    It's not clear if this integration will be provided by a special version of XenServer that only Marathon Technologies can resell (since the company has an OEM agreement in place), or if it will be an out of the box solution for...