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Archives for August 2008

VMware, Cisco Join Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program

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Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, which was first announced in November 2007, and launched last June with the patricipation of Citrix, Sun, Novell and Virtual Iron, signed up two notable new members.

Cisco has announced its membership and is already included on the SVVP website, and VMware signed up pretty late so they’re not on there yet (but Chris Wolf had already confirmed the news). Microsoft and VMware had been working diligently for several months on the completion of their support agreement and VMware’s inclusion in the SVVP, and this will evidently drive virtualization adoption even further the coming months and years.

The costs associated with joining the program include membership in TSAnet at Mission Critical level, so that the vendor and Microsoft can share support information, incremental costs, if any, to perform the validation tests, and a nominal expense (currently $250) to qualify each ‘configuration’ that is submitted for validation.

Microsoft

Corticon Technologies Embeds Composite Information Server in EDC-Multi Source

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Corticon Technologies and Composite Software today announced Corticon has embedded the Composite Information Server in the Corticon Enterprise Data Connector (EDC)-Multi Source.

Corticon’s EDC-Multi Source enables access to relational databases, legacy data sources, web services, XML, message queues as well as leading packaged applications such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft and Oracle through Composite Application Data Services.

Corticon’s EDC-Multi Source provides a direct connection from the rules engine to relational databases and other enterprise data sources. This allows it to automatically retrieve data required to execute a decision service or update data sources directly during rules processing, improving performance and simplifying integration. Consistent with Corticon’s model-driven approach, Corticon EDC features code-free modeling in defining data access connections, providing a level of abstraction that accelerates the creation and maintenance of decision services.

Corticon Technologies

DataSheet Proposal for Xen 3.3 Hypervisor Published

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Stephen Spector published a post yesterday on the Xen blog featuring a proposed data sheet (PDF) for the upcoming Xen 3.3 release, which we said was in final testing stage in the beginning of this month.

Update 26 August: Xen 3.3.0 is available for download.

The complete list of new features in Xen 3.3 includes:

Performance and Scalability

  • CPUID Levelling
  • Shadow 3 Page Table Optimizations
  • EPT/NPT 2MB Page Support
  • Virtual Framebuffer Support for HVM Guests
  • PVSCSI — SCSI Support for PV Guests
  • Full 16-bit Emulation on Intel VT
  • Support for memory overcommit allowing more VMs per physical machine for some workloads

Security

  • PVGRUB Secure Replacement for PYGRUB
  • IO Emulation “stub domains” for HVM IO
  • Green Computing
  • Enhanced C & P State Power Management
  • Graphics Support
  • VT-d Device Pass-Through Support

Miscellaneous

  • Upgrade QEMU Version
  • Multi-Queue Support for Modern NICs
  • Removal of Domain Lock for PV Guests
  • Message Signalled Interrupts
  • Greatly improved precision for time-sensitive SMP VMs
XenSource

Dell Fails to Trademark Term ‘Cloud Computing’

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The US Patent and Trademark Office has already denied Dell‘s request to trademark the term “cloud computing” , according to consultant Sam Johnston. This comes as no surprise.

According to Johnston, the USPTO has issued a “non-final action” that denies the application, ruling that the term cloud computing is “a descriptive term of art in the relevant industry” and also “generic in connection with the identified services and, therefore, incapable of functioning as a source-identifier for applicant’s services.”

Remains to be seen of Dell will dispute the decision.

Anyone care to file a trademark request for ‘virtualization’ in the meantime?

[Source: DataCenterKnowledge]

Platform Computing Releases VM Orchestrator 4

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Platform Computing has announced the next version of its virtual environment management product for the enterprise data center, Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO) 4. Platform VMO 4 provides faster delivery of virtual computer environments to end users while optimizing resource utilization, availability, and power consumption, to improve an enterprise’s return on investment from its virtualization environment. The solution offers a cost-effective enterprise virtualization management solution for Citrix XenServer, with support for virtualization platforms from other vendors to be delivered in the coming months.

Platform says VMO 4 increases IT productivity and responsiveness to business service levels through a Self-Service portal that supports delegated administration and allows end users to request and control usage of their own VMs without administrator involvement. At the core of VMO’s automated management is the multi-host dynamic resource management engine, which increases resource utilization across the virtual environment to remove bottlenecks and server silos according to flexible configurable policies that map to business priorities.

Platform VMO 4 will be available later this month.

Platform Computing

IBM launches the open-ovf project

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Scott Moser from IBM’s Systems Technology Group has released the first version of the open-ovf project. OVF is a standard packaging format for virtual machines and software appliances. The open-ovf project is seeking contributors and users to help establish OVF as a transparent and platform-neutral method for packaging virtual machine images.

The goal of open-ovf is to be able to deploy a single OVF package to either Xen or KVM.
Eventually expanding that list to include VMware, Hyper-V, and other platforms. For that goal they are looking at community contributions. A good start might be the qemu-img tool that already knows how to convert between different formats.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has defined a vendor-neutral standard for packaging virtual appliances enabling automated installation, configuration and activation of any virtualization platform. The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for packaging

For a summary of OVF and the open source project, see the presentation from the recent Xen summit
The open-ovf project is hosted on sourceforge and the source code is available from it’s git repository