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Archives for August 2008

Virtual Bridges Upgrades Win4VDI Product Family

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Virtual Bridges announced today the release of a major upgrade to its Win4VDI family of products.  The company says the Version 5 release brings Win4VDI on par with the company’s standalone Desktop offerings.

Win4VDI, Virtual Bridges’ Educational/SMB and enterprise product, allows an organization to easily and cost-effectively deliver multiple Windows desktop sessions to PCs, Workstations and thin clients from a non-Windows server such as Linux and Solaris OS.

With this release Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server and Win4Solaris Virtual Desktop Server have been renamed to Win4VDI for consistency with the growing Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) market space that Virtual Bridges founded with their Win4Lin Terminal Server (WTS) products.

Features of Win4VDI Products include:

  • Dynamic Renewable Desktops for instant deployment and centralized software updates and patches
  • Easy to use and install thanks to powerful management console and comprehensive documentation
  • Seamless remote printing over LAN, WAN, or Internet
  • Highly scalable infrastructure, supporting high server density
  • Powerful new architecture improves performance, scalability, security, and reliability
  • Win4DI for Linux: Works on any 32-bit or 64-bit x86 Linux platform running a 2.6.x kernel
  • Supports connectivity from almost any type of client (PC, thin client, workstation)
  • Centralized management and provisioning of users
  • Consistent user access to personal desktop environment from home, office and other network connected locations.
  • Support for multiple remote display choices – Win4Lin client, NoMachine, LTSP, VNC, and X, for example
  • Increased security and reliability by running on Linux and Solaris servers
  • Lock down Windows read, write and other operations with Linux and Solaris permissions – an administrator’s dream!
  • Provide standard application environments to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system – Windows, UNIX, or Linux on the client, but standard application profile served from Win4VDI servers.

Win4VDI allows organizations to standardize the application environment to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system – Windows, UNIX, Linux or Mac can be used on the client, but a common application profile can be created and served from Win4VDI server configurations such as blade servers, rack arrays or large multi-way machines.

Win4VDI for Linux and Win4VDI for Solaris are available immediately. Win4VDI is priced at $125 per user with a minimum configuration of 10 seats. Win4VDI for Workgoups, a 10-seat configuration is being offered at a special price of $699 until September 15, 2008.

Virtual Bridges

LeftHand Networks Reports Impressive Numbers

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LeftHand Networks today announced it has achieved 110 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. LeftHand Networks attributes its notable growth to strong customer demand for iSCSI SANs, larger SAN deployments and significant repeat business from existing customers, as well as its VMware go-to-market partnership and substantial channel expansion.

“Achieving triple digit revenue growth and surpassing key milestones of 3,000 customers and 11,000 systems sold is gratifying and reflects the significant advantages that LeftHand Networks’ SANs deliver to the market,” said Bill Chambers, founder and CEO, LeftHand Networks. “With an annual sales growth rate of 110 percent this year, compared with IDC’s market projection of 50 percent growth for the IP SAN market, LeftHand Networks continues to gain share and drive innovative product advancements.”

The company also claims demand has grown for LeftHand Networks’ Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) for VMware ESX Server, a VMware certified solution that provides highly available applications and storage without requiring an external SAN. The VSA is available for purchase as a standalone solution or as part of Virtualization Solution Kits consisting of LeftHand Networks’ VSA software combined with VMware virtualization software.

LeftHand Networks

Major Bug Kills VMware Powered Virtual Servers

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Today’s a black day for VMware, and also (and maybe especially) VMware customers who upgraded their virtual servers with the new Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2. As of this morning, many could not power on VMotion or any of their Virtual Machines. The VI Client threw the error “A general system error occurred: Internal Error”.

This was first reported by a customer in a thread on VMware Communities. You can find the Knowledge Base article on this problem here.

The problem apparently exists within the software licensing code, rather than the functional part of ESX software.The license code falsely identifies many implementations as being out of license, prevents new virtual machines from launching, or existing VMs from migrating to new hosts.

Big oops indeed.

“An issue has been uncovered with ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi 3.5 that causes the product license to expire on August 12,” says a statement from VMware’s public relations company in response to press inquiries. “VMware is alerting customers and partners of this issue. Updated product bits with correct licensing will be made available for download as soon as possible. VMware regrets any inconvenience to customers. VMware is working on an immediate patch for customers in production. VMware expects to fix the issue in code in the next 36 hours once QA testing has been completed,” the statement concludes.

A work-around has been offered whereby customers should manually set the date of all ESX 3.5u2 hosts back to 10 August as a temporary fix. Brian Madden has more on the actual glitch and the workaround, as does Matthew Marlowe.

It looks like ESXi 3.5 and even some versions of Infrastructure 3.5 Update 1 with some patches have been affected. New downloads of all affected products has been disabled, and according to VMware patched products will be made available starting tomorrow.

This will hurt VMware in any event, even if we don’t really know how many customers have already downloaded Update 2, and how many of those were using it in a live environment.

VMware

0wning Xen?

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InvisibleThings.org posted some more details on their Xen Owning Trilogy session at last weeks Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Joanna Rutkowska and her crew gave a series of 3 talks discussing different potential security issues with Xen. With the VirtSec awareness growing this obviously is an important topic .

When quickly skimming trough the presentations the big question that arise is , how relevant is this all for a day to day production environment. Given the fact that some exploits assume you already root before you can install a stealth backdoor and others rely on specific hardware features that might or might not be available in your setup things might be that critical yet.

All 3 talks can be found on the Invisiblethingslab.com site

Virtualization.com will have a closer look at the discussed issues and we’ll be back with more detail later.

VMWare Joins the Linux Foundation

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The Linux Foundation announced that VMware has become a Silver member of the Foundation,

According to their site , The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the LF sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux

VMware’s participation in the Linux community includes the contribution of the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), a paravirtualization interface as an open specification, and subsequent collaboration with the Linux kernel community and others in the development of a source-level paravirtualization interface (paravirt-ops) for the Linux kernel

According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “Linux is a natural platform for virtualization and cloud computing. VMware is obviously a leader in that field and a leading ISV who has embraced the Linux platform,”

Over at the Open Road , Matt Assay responds with questions around the alleged GPL violations VMWare still has to resolve.

In VentureCake’s the VMWare House Of Cards there is a lengthy discussion is about whether vmkernel, a proprietary blob that can only be loaded by a Linux kernel, can be considered a derived work of Linux.

It’s not a new discussion but hopefully with VMWare joining the Linux Foundation it’s one that will end soon , with clarity, and License compliance. Ass Matt notes

VMware can’t hope to cozy up to Linux and its community without participating on the
principles of transparency and trust. At present, it has shown little of the former
and has yet to earn much of the latter

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Oracle releases VM virtualization templates

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At LinuxWorldExpo this week in San Francisco, Oracle Announced that it It is releasing a series of preconfigured templates for deploying software on its server virtualization technology.

The templates, which are already available at Oracle.com include configurations for Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Siebel CRM 8.0 and Oracle Enterprise Linux.

“All four of these products can be deployed as Oracle VM templates, thereby bypassing the installation process,” said Monica Kumar, senior director of Linux and open source product marketing.

The templates should save customers anywhere from a few days to a few weeks of effort, according to Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux engineering at Oracle.

This is a perfect start for testing and development environments and allows people to play around with virtual Oracle instances with little to no installation effort.

At his own blog Wim reports

We decided not to create blackboxes but create virtual machine images which have been pre-configured with recommended patches, recommended OS settings, then the Oracle product on top with the recommended patchset level and also other changes and fixes applied.

In an interview with Techtarget Wim Coekaerts also mentioned that Oracle plans on releasing VM templates for Oracle products on a monthly base.