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Update: Xen 4.1.1 Maintenance Release

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The Xen.org community has announced that there is a new maintenance release of Xen available, version 4.1.1. It includes the following changes:

– Security fixes including CVE-2011-1583 CVE-2011-1898

– Enhancements to guest introspection (VM single stepping support for very fine-grained access control)

– Many stability improvements, such as: PV-on-HVM stability fixes (fixing some IRQ issues), XSAVE cpu feature support for PV guests (allows safe use of latest multimedia instructions), RAS fixes for high availability, fixes for offlining bad pages and changes to libxc, mainly of benefit to libvirt

– Compatibility fixes for newer Linux guests, newer compilers, some old guest savefiles, newer Python, grub2, some hardware/BIOS bugs.

Release: Zenoss Core 3.0

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Zenoss, the corporate sponsor of Zenoss Core, today announced the general availability of Zenoss Core 3.0 under the GNU General Public License (V2).

Fueled by the 85,000-member Zenoss community, the newest release features an updated user interface to improve usability giving users a complete view of all IT infrastructure — physical, virtual and cloud computing.

Beyond its new functional capabilities, Zenoss Core has been integrated with multiple open source IT automation projects, providing a framework for improved functionality and enabling better prevention of service failures.

Since the last Zenoss Core release in November 2009, the community has added more than 100 new and updated management extensions to the project (called ZenPacks).

What’s New in Zenoss Core 3.0

  • Simplified Interface. Based on feedback from thousands of users, Zenoss Core 3.0 includes an easy to navigate interface that allows for a better experience using and configuring Zenoss. Users now can more easily filter network monitoring data and organize their dashboards through a more efficient layout to help surface critical information for managing their physical and virtual infrastructure.

  • Virtualization Monitoring Framework. The Zenoss Community has developed extensions to expand monitoring for numerous virtualization technologies: VMware ESX, VMware ESXi,Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen, and libvirt.

  • Deep monitoring for Amazon Web Services (EC2). Zenoss Core can be extended to collect information for these objects monitored through Amazon’s CloudWatch APIs. As a result of the Zenoss in the Clouds community initiative, Zenoss Core can also be extended to monitor Google App Engine, Redis NoSQL databases, Ganglia-managed distributed computing systems and events from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), which is frequently used in enterprise business and cloud environments.

  • Integration with Configuration Management and Automation Tools. The Zenoss Community has developed integration with popular open source management tools Puppet andCfengine to enable interoperability between tools and provide automated disaster recovery and prevention.

  • Highlights of new community ZenPacks compatible with Zenoss Core 3.0 include:

    • Event Histograms aggregate network errors and provide graphs to visually display where faults and failures are in the network, when alerts are peaking, and what type of errors are being generated.

    • HP EVA Monitor provides comprehensive monitoring and a graphical representation of storage, updating graphics based on events.

    • MySQL SSH Monitor provides identical monitoring to the Zenoss Core MySQL Monitorwithout requiring remote access.

    • Opengear wrote ZenPacks, extending Zenoss open source management tools to monitor performance of its advanced console server solutions and the target equipment attached.

    • Additional highlights: Oracle Database, Memcached, Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ), Collector Tool, and Nginx.

The Zenoss 3.0 release can be downloaded from the Zenoss Community website at:http://community.zenoss.org/community/download.

Release: Openvirt 2.0

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Digital Networks has released a new version of its server virtualization platform, Openvirt 2.0.

Openvirt provides commercial quality virtualization that is completely free of license fees and a web based control panel that makes for easy management.  Full virtualization of unmodified operating systems includes support for Linux, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD virtual machines.

Live migration is supported even between hosts with completely different CPUs. A high availability service will automatically restart virtual machines which were running on a physical host that failed.

Integration with iSCSI, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand SANs is supported. Most networks including 10 Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand are supported.

“Not only can Openvirt save your organisation serious money in license fees, it also gives you real access to your data.” said Lee Chisnall, CTO of Digital Networks. “There are no proprietary control panels restricting access to your data. The open design of the platform allows you to build completely bespoke solutions.”

Openvirt is now based on Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS. This is supported until April 2015.

Release 2.0 platform components:

  • Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS base OS
  • Linux kernel 2.6.33
  • QEMU-KVM 0.12.3
  • Libvirt 0.8.0
  • Control Panel Release 11

Release 2.0 includes these new features:

  • High availability service
  • Kernel Samepage Merging for reduced memory usage
  • Guests disk usage monitor
  • Centralised SQL server for monitoring records
  • Full system logging
  • Power distribution units support
  • Cluster test
  • Pre-built templates for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu
  • Detailed template creation tutorials
  • Batch cloning
  • Release check service
  • Plus many other minor improvements and refinements

KVM News In Short

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Over the past couple of weeks different new releases of KVM and related software saw the light . Virt-manager 0.8.0 was officially announced the most interesting new feature probably being the the Clone VM wizard but also a bunch of system tray icons for smooth desktop integration and CPU pinning support are very interesting.

Daniel Berrange noticed that Redhat has released windows kvm virtio drivers under GPLv2 This means that apart from the paravirtual network drivers that were already available now also the paravirtual block device drivers are available

It shows that RedHat is working towards a much more featureful KVM management framework into their upcoming RHEL release as they also updated their virtualization management layer libvirt 0.7.0. Most interesting new features include initial VMWare ESX driver support, added support for VBox 3 , QEmu hotplug network card support , and improved storage management .

If you have a recent Fedora 11 box and you want to test all these new features, you might want to be enable the fedora-virt-preview repository

[virt-preview]
name=Virtualization Rawhide for Fedora 11
baseurl=http://markmc.fedorapeople.org/virt-preview/f11/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

OpenNebula 1.4 Beta 1 Is Ready for Testing

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The OpenNebula team has announced the availability of OpenNebula 1.4 Beta1 Hourglass (1.3.80), the first preview of the next stable release of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager.

OpenNebula focuses on incorporating bleeding edge technologies and innovations in many areas of virtual infrastructure management and Cloud Computing.  OpenNebula 1.4 aims to be the swiss-army knife of Cloud Computing, letting you deploy any type of Cloud.  The OpenNebula team has been set now to bug fixing mode to provide a robust and stable OpenNebula 1.4.0 to your data centers.

Please note that OpenNebula 1.4 Beta 1 is not suitable for production settings. Its sole purpose is gathering feedback and testing new exciting features.

Highlights of OpenNebula 1.4 are:

  • EC2 Query API interface on top of OpenNebula, so you can transform your OpenNebula installation into a Public Cloud
  • A new OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) to easily develop any Cloud interface or Cloud application (several Cloud interfaces, such a OGF OCCI-API, are planned)
  • Support for the VMware Hypervisor family
  • Multiple user support and access-right control for Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks
  • Advance contextualization support to integrate VM packs and implement multi-component services
  • Libvirt interface has been moved to the libvirt repository
  • New ElasticHosts drivers and support for multiple Amazon EC2 Clouds in Hybrid Cloud deployments
  • Easy integration within your data-center services and procedures with a new hook system
  • Many bug fixes, and scalability and performance improvements in several components of the OpenNebula system
  • A whole new set of documentation pages, guides and examples

REFERENCES:

RHEL 5.4 will feature KVM

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July 1st marked the availability of the first Beta version of what will eventually become Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL) , for Virtualization.com readers the most important part of this upcoming release is with no doubt the full shift from Xen to KVM. When late last year RedHat picked up Qumranet it was clear that they weren’t going to gamble on 2 horses (Xen and KVM) and that for RedHat KVM was their platform of choice

Where initially KVM was considered for a lot of people as the Desktop Virtualization platform of the future , RedHat is now placing it in the center of their Enterprise Linux distribution.

But they aren’t ready yet .. when RedHat travels around the globe demoing it’s Virtualization platform it got from Qumranet is often critized for not having fully opened the code yet and and that their management platform still requires people to use a windows only management interface (much like Xensource had with one 3.X release) But with RedHat’s promise to open source Qumranet’s code that is probably only a matter of time.

The bigger question however is that of the migration from Xen to KVM. Different people have already build their toolchain, methods and procedures around working with Xen, some of them have based it on LibVirt, others on the Xen tools themselves, they are really happy about the Xen framework but they are really happy about a RHEL based platform also. Given it’s long term commitments RedHat has to provide Xen for a long time to come.

CentOS and Unbreakable, being Rebuilds of RHEL will have automatically KVM support included , but Oracle already showed the world it is aiming it’s arrows at Xen.

So how does the RedHat userbase feel about this .. are they going to follow RedHat to KVM or are they going to stay with their trusted and familiar Xen platform ?