Virtual Architect

VKernel just released Capacity Analyzer 4.0. Capacity Analyzer shows bottlenecks in hosts, clusters, resource pools and VMs. Looking at the release notes it does not seem this is a very major release. It seems Vkernel took the opportunity of the vSphere release to bring out a new version with a version number in line with the just released VMware vSphere 4.

What’s new in this release:

New Features

• [VK–1764] — WHY explanations to CCB and FCB were added. Now it is shown WHICH VMs are causing or will cause the problem
• [VK–2177] — Disk command latency and disk queue latency counters, reports and alerts were added
• [VK–2299] — User Management functionality was added
• [VK–2707] — Collection of VM partitions free/used space information and appropriate capacity reports for allocated space utilization were implemented

Next to these new features there are some improvements and bug fixes explained in the release notes on vkernel.com

Tuesday April 21 VMware released the fourth generation of it’s flagship with a new name:

VMware vSphere 4

This version claims to be the first operating system for building the internal cloud.

Some stats:

For that evening VMware arranged a special launch event with a webcast (or simulcast as they called it) with VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz. A lot has changed with this new version, but more on this in part two.

Last week (April 8 2009) Sun released a new version of VirtualBox: 2.2.0. Here is the news message:

Sun today released VirtualBox 2.2.0 which marks another major milestone for the world’s most popular free and open source hypervisor. Among the many improvements are support for OVF appliances, 3D acceleration for Linux/Solaris guests and support for up to 16GB of RAM per virtual machine. See the ChangeLog for a list of changes since VirtualBox 2.1.

So what is virtualbox anyway? VirtualBox is a group of x86-virtualization products servicing home and professional users. The key here is that it is open source and it is published under the GNU GPL (General Public License).

VirtualBox run’s on top of an Operating System (it supports multiple Host OS’s from Windows to Linux) and therefore is a non-bare metal hypervisor or as some colleagues of mine tend to say a “Software Hypervisor”. Among support for different host operating systems it also supports a diversity of guest operating systems.

The availability of support for OVF in VirtualBox shows the popularity of virtual appliances usage. It won’t be long before every self respecting company offering a virtualization solution will offer OVF support.

But imagine what the impact will be on software development, where as a software developer you now also are responsible for configuring the OS – a JEOS (Just Enough OS) – where in the past you only where responsible for writing a setup/integration manual. Testing will become easier (no more testing with different OS configurations )with delivering an app as a virtual appliance, given of course you’re not also delivering the app in the old fashioned way. On the other hand testing will now include testing the OS configuration, as now the JEOS is part of the “product”.

Feel free to comment …

Vizioncore (Quest) will release vControl in May 2009.

As Vizioncore say’s in her newsletter “VirtualVizion”:

vControl is a multi-hypervisor virtual machine (VM) management solution that provides self-service provisioning, multi-VM control and task-based automation to reduce VM administration costs and improve consistency.

vControl lets VM consumers build and deploy VMs for themselves, while providing administrators a single interface for task-based administration of VMs.  Furthermore, vControl allows organizations to automate manual and repetitive tasks, helping to reduce VM administration costs, improve management consistency and enable an affordable solution for high availability (HA) in the data center.

Another management solution for VM administration. Reminds me to put another item on the planning list: comparison of administration utilities for Virtual Infrastructures.

Very curious how this will work and what the performance of the product is – i.e. user experience. We will see what the future brings us..

Microsoft releases Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization.

MED-V is now available to customers with the new version of MS Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) for customers with Software Assurance.

MED-V provides deployment and management of virtual Windows desktops to enable key enterprise scenarios. MED-V 1.0 helps enterprises upgrade to the latest version of Windows even when some applications are not yet compatible. MED-V builds on top of Microsoft Virtual PC to run two operating systems on one device, adding virtual image delivery, policy-based provisioning and centralized management.

MED-V is a spin-off from the acquisition of Kidaro by Microsoft in March 2008.

Also in this new version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack is the update to APP-V 4.5 (formerly known as Softgrid) which also supports the Windows 7 Beta.

Veeam released version 4.5 of it’s nworks monitoring management pack and plugin for Microsoft Operations Manager (SCOM2007 and MOM2005) and HP Operations Manager respectively.

The key improvements in this release are:

- support for larger VMware environments (more hosts & virtual machines)

- less vcenter processing requirements

- improvement on reliability, and better monitoring of critical events

- officially certified as VMware Ready Optimized

- focus on business, segmentation into line of business area’s by using custom attributes of vCenter in order to monitor SLA’s

VMware released a new maintenance release on their VMware Fusion product for the Apple Mac: version 2.0.3. This is a free downloadable update for Fusion 1.x and 2.x users.

It contains a few updates:

• (driver less) Printing works again
  (on Mac OS X 10.5.6 after Apple Security Update 2009-001 it broke down)
• Runs on the latest in 2009 released Apple Computers (Mac Pro, iMAC & Mac mini’s). There are however some issues with 3D option with “non-default” ATI graphic cards, recommendation there is to turn it off until further notice.
• Experimental support for Mac OSX snow leopard Server as Guest!

There are some issues with the latest Mac Pro with Quad-core Nehalem processors. Please refer to the release notes to see information about these issues and about other updates.