Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Kris Buytaert

Open Source Virtualization Updates

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There is a lot going on in the different Open Source Virtualization projects. From KVM, over OpenVZ , to Xen.

First of all there is the news that Anthony Liguori has included kvm support in the main Qemu development tree. In his blogpost Avi Kivity explains that with the KVM code being merged in Qemu development and integration of new and bigger features will evolve faster.

But now that kvm has been merged, it is possible to make larger modifications to qemu in order to make it fit virtualization roles better. Live migration and virtio have already been merged. Device and cpu hotplug are on the queue. Deeper changes, like modifying how qemu manages memory and performs DMA, are pending.

Then there is some discussion going on about the future of OpenVZ , mainly targeted at licencing and Pete Zaitcev is wondering why Parallels hasn’t officialy modified its COPYING.SWsoft file whic
h mainly tells the world “we’re not serious about going upstream” and which makes him wonder
“Kinda makes LXC more of a fait accompli than it already is or needs to be.” According to the LXH site , the planned Linux kernel version for which LXC should be fully functionaly is 2.6.29.

And last but not least Xen has released 2 minor maintenance releases for their 3.1 and 3.2 branches Xen 3.3.1 and Xen 3.2.3 are now available for download.

openQRM 4.3 Hits The Street

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At the verge of the old year .. Matthias Rechenburg released the 4.3 edition of openQRM

The new 4.3 release comes with improved usability for the storage management , implemented storage security features , a new debian build system, different fixed bugs, an improved Cloud Plugin (with auto-create-virtualmachines) , new support for VMWare server 2.X , an Enhanced Xen plugin that now allows booting via pypxeboot, and different other features.

Together with the 4.3 release Matt also published a Cloud Computing Howto

Get openQRM 4.3 here

Call for Papers 3rd International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing (VTDC-09)

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Late last year our inbox received the Call for Papers to the 3rd International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in Distributed Computing (VTDC-09)

It will be organised in conjunction with ICAC 2009 in Barcelona, Spain on June 15 2009

According to the the workshop’s Call for Papers “Virtualization has proven to be a powerful enabler in the field of distributed computing and has led to the emergence of the cloud computing paradigm and the provisioning of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). This new paradigm raises challenges ranging from performance evaluation of IaaS platforms, through new methods of resource management including providing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and energy- and cost-efficient schedules, to the emergence of supporting technologies such as virtual appliance management.

For the last three years, the VTDC workshop has served as a forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences studying the challenges and opportunities created by IaaS/cloud computing and virtualization technologies. VTDC brings together researchers in academia and industry who are involved in research, development and planning activities involving the use of virtualization in the context of distributed systems, where the opportunities and challenges with respect to the management of such virtualized systems is of interest to the ICAC community at large.”

More information is on their website

* Submission deadline: February 20th, 2009
* Notification of acceptance: March 23rd, 2009
* Final manuscripts due: April 6, 2009
* Workshop: June 15, 2009

Details on how to submit will be posted on the above mentioned website.

The Xen of Oracle, or was it the Oracle of Xen ?

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The Xen Blog has the news that Oracle joined the Xen Advisory Board.

“Having Oracle join the Xen Advisory Board is a significant milestone for the Xen.org community and Xen hypervisor,” said Ian Pratt, founder of the xen project and Chairman of Xen.org. “With Oracle’s industry leadership and enterprise market experience, the Xen.org community is further strengthened, ensuring a continued leadership position as the open source hypervisor of choice.”

“As a leading contributor to the Open Source community, Oracle is pleased to join the Xen Advisory Board,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president Linux Engineering, Oracle. “With development projects such as enhancing Oracle Cluster File System 2 with features useful for virtualization, memory management changes with the hcache and hswap projects and integrating the Linux data integrity project into Xen, Oracle continues to focus on enhancing Xen with enterprise-class features.”

Together with Wim “Seklos” Coekaerts , comes Dan “I’ll replace you with a small shell script” Magenheimer, formerly of HP and the leader of the Itanium Xen port as an Oracle Observer, and Kurt Hackel, who leads the Oracle VM dev team.

Throughout 2008, Oracle has already significantly increased its contribution to the Xen.org community, including a focus on the new Xen debugger, a new implementation effort on the Xen API, timer testing, new memory caching algorithms, and updates to support Oracle software running on the Xen hypervisor. These contributions from Oracle are valuable to the Xen customer base as they provide enhancements to the Xen hypervisor’s capabilities in the enterprise and cloud computing space. These features are also important to the development community as the new Xen debugger delivers greater insight into the hypervisor’s state during development testing, allowing for faster bug identification and fixes.

Simon Crosby comments on Oracle earlier involvement “Whereas Oracle Unbreakable Linux is a derivative of Unfakable Enterprise Linux” (in other words, RHEL) the Xen in Oracle VM comes directly from the upstream Xen.org code base, and not via an intermediate distro. This means that Oracle VM tracks the xen.org upstream code base more closely than OEL can track kernel.org. Oracle has already offered a valuable set of set of patches and contributions to the project, and will host the next Xen Developer Summit.”

Simon also isn’t that keen on the way Oracle has been supporting applications within VM’s in the past but hopes that with Oracle joining the Xen Project Advisory board they will learn about the business of partnering from the community and the ISV ecosystem.

Enomaly Releases New Enomalism Core

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Reuven announced the availability of Enomaly ECP 2.1.1 on SourceForge. Enomaly 2.1.1 is a bug fix and security release, so don’t expect to see a whole lot of new functionality –
2.2 is coming is planned to be released shortly into 2009 with lots of new features.

This maintenance release fixes a potential security exploit in the startup script’s temporary file handling as well as the following bug fixes:

* Randomly generated mac addresses are now written to the machine XML at provision time.
* The available system memory is now checked against the required memory for new machines at provision time.
* Fixed a bug regarding the valet extension module not properly checking the hypervisor type.
* Fixed a bug that disallows a machine’s XML definition to be edited.
* Fixed several misc. bugs in the valet extension module.
* Added messages to the interface stating the required extension modules.

You can download the new release here

ECP is governed by the AGPL, a free open source license

Virtuize Partners With RedHat

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Virtuize, Inc announced yesterday that it has partnered with Redhat, Inc to deliver Redhat’s Virtualization services to its customers. This expands Virtuize, Inc’s Open Source Virtualization portfolio.

Virtuize was formed in 2008 by industry specialists with over 25 years of consolidated experience to specialize in Virtualization and Cloud Computing Solutions.

More information about RedHat’s Virtualization Portofolio is on their site : www.redhat.com