So, do you feel VMsafer now? VMware
announced
last week its latest security product, called VMsafe. VMsafe works at the hypervisor level, providing APIs for third-party developers that allow them to access VMs in a way not possible before.
VMware describes its functionality well on a product page: "VMsafe enables third-party security products to gain the same visibility as the hypervisor into the operation of a virtual machine to identify and eliminate malware, such as viruses, trojans and key-loggers." This, of course, is a very, very good thing.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/03/20080 comments
Steve Ballmer may have been the one making the speeches yesterday during Microsoft's
launch event
for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, but virtualization took center stage.
That's great news for those of us in the virtualization industry.
Although I wasn't at the overhyped event in Los Angeles, a number of 1105 Media editors were there. Becky Nagel, who wrote the story for our Websites, says that virtualization was a key topic throughout the presentation. And the fabulous Mike Domingo wrote a guest blog referencing a slide that Ballmer put up, talking about the top new features of each product. The No. 1 feature for Windows 2008? Hyper-V, Microsoft's new, bare-metal hypervisor, a beta version of which will be included in the server.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/28/20081 comments
Ben Armstrong, Microsoft's "Virtual PC Guy", has
responded
to an apparently growing number of reports about slow operating system installations of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor.
Apparently, loading an OS into a Hyper-V-created virtual machine (VM) is like trying to get around the Washington D.C. beltway at 7:30 a.m. on a rainy Monday morning -- bring a book to read, because you aren't going anywhere fast. The problem, Armstrong relates, is that the emulated devices loaded with the OS were optimized to work with Microsoft Virtual Server, but due to Hyper-V's different architecture, that optimization has been removed. (Emulated devices are things like network adapters and mice that the host OS virtualizes. Emulation adds a lot of processor overhead, reducing performance.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/27/20086 comments
It's
here
! It's here! Can you believe it?! Today is the 'launch day' for three critical new Microsoft products: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. I'm so excited I think I might have a stroke.
Yawn.
The issue, of course, is that VS 2008 was released last year; SQL 2008 won't be released until the summer or later; leaving Windows 2008 as the sole product actually being launched today. Does that thrill your toes?
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/27/20086 comments
One of the keys to understanding virtualization is knowing your terms. As I've pointed out before, there is a lot of confusion surrounding this space -- how is PC virtualization different from desktop virtualization? How is hardware virtualization different from server virtualization -- or is it? How does server virtualization differ from OS virtualization? I imagine you might have asked some of these questions yourself.
This morning, I found a great resource for definitions about Microsoft's new hypervisor, Hyper-V (for my money, still the coolest name for a Microsoft product ever. They didn't drab it down when they announced the final name of the product. I mean, isn't Longhorn 100,000 times cooler than "Windows Server 2008"? I usually love Microsoft's code names and hate their formal names; not in this case. First, it was "Viridian", which is cool. Then it was "Windows Server Virtualization", which has that hideous stench of Microsoft marketing hanging all over it; so naturally, I assumed this would be the final name. Then came "Hyper-V." Yes! It's bad (in a good way)! OK, detour over, back to the main highway.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/26/20082 comments
It's certainly not the news VMware wanted the day before its big
VMworld Europe 2008
conference kicks off, but a critical
vulnerability
has been found that affects VMware Workstation, along with VMware Player and VMware ACE.
As of Monday morning, a fix hadn't been posted on VMware's Website. The only solution at the moment is to turn off shared folders, which is the source of the problem. That, of course, seriously reduces the functionality of the affected products. Not good news for VMware.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/25/20080 comments
Novell
has agreed to
buy
prominent virtualization vendor PlateSpin for $205 million, in a deal expected to close in Novell's second fiscal quarter.
PlateSpin adds to Novell's portfolio of virtualization management offerings, the space within virtualization that Novell appears to want to make its bones. PlateSpin is most famous for two products: PowerRecon and PowerConvert. PowerRecon is an analysis and capacity planning tool that examines an IT environment, helping determine the best way to integrate virtualization; for instance, which servers are the best candidates, according to capacity and power, for server consolidation.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/25/20084 comments
In my various virtualization-related Web wanderings, I come across a lot of confusion about Xen; what it is, who uses it, what its place is in the virtualization market. When I first started diving into this arena, I was similarly confused.
Well, after much research and many interviews, I believe I have a handle on Xen, and will try to clear up some of the misinformation out there.
First, Xen is an open source hypervisor. It's maintained by the Xen Project, which houses the source code and remains the home of the Xen community. It was originally developed by the company XenSource, before XenSource was bought by Citrix last year for $500 million. What that means is that XenSource, as a product, no longer exists; the Citrix version is now called XenServer.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/22/20082 comments
One of the main benefits of virtualization is its portability -- being able to move a virtual machine (VM) containing a desktop environment and apps, for example, or a server operating system, from one physical machine to another, creates huge advantages for things like resource management and disaster recovery.
Virtualization allows this because it separates software from the underlying hardware, making it independent. But, like a college student that wants freedom yet still wants mom to wash the clothes which have been piling up in his dorm room for a month, it may not be completely indepenent. Mike DiPetrillo, a prominent blogger at VMware, stated recently that migrating a VM from an Intel-based server to an AMD-based one could cause big trouble.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/19/20086 comments
According to the latest CDW tracking poll, 62 percent of organizations have a strong interest in virtualization.
The poll, released yesterday, shows that 35 percent of companies are currently using virtualization, while another 9 percent are planning on implementing it in 2008, and another 18 are "seriously evaluating" virtualization. The survey studied attitudes about Windows Server 2008, which includes Microsoft's first hypervisor, Hyper-V, as a major component.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/19/20082 comments
Did you ever watch the
Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew
mysteries when you were young? I loved 'em when I was a kid, although probably like most boys, I much preferred the Hardys to Nancy. I also read the books growing up; one of my fondest memories from when I was very young was walking to the library with an armful of Hardy Boys books that I'd just finished, and getting another armful to take home and devour. I think I read every one of 'em. So naturally I loved the TV series, too.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/15/20088 comments
Here's one initial
review
of Hyper-V, courtesy of one of my favorite all-time bloggers, the irreplacable Mary Jo Foley. It's generally positive in nature. Here's the reviewer's summary:
"Overall, and for what is currently a beta of a 1.0 release, I think Microsoft did a great job with the Hyper-V manager -- console access to the VMs is nice and fast and VM performance is excellent, and the provisioning and setup process is wizard-based and straightforward. I'd currently say that from a polish and maturity standpoint, its management capabilities are definitely better than what is in Citrix XenServer 4.x, and way ahead of what currently exists in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SuSE Linux Enterprise Server."
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/15/20085 comments