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AMD / Red Hat Pull Off A Live Migration of VMs Across Vendor Platforms

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AMD, in collaboration with Red Hat, today demonstrated for the first time “live migration” of a virtual machine across vendor platforms. Live migration enables the movement of running virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another without disrupting service to the end user, something that, till now, has only been demonstrated across systems based on one vendor’s platforms. Today’s live migration demonstration moves a live VM from an dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to a system based on the forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, utilizing Red Hat’s high-performance open source virtualization software. See the demonstration on the AMD Unprocessed YouTube Channel or here.

Update: also, read the blog post from Margaret Lewis (Product Marketing Director at AMD) on the announcement.

Industry interest in live migration has grown as virtualization technology has become more widely adopted. Live Migration of VMs across physical servers is a vital component of data center management that enables IT managers to move VMs as necessary in order to perform tasks such as upgrading or conducting maintenance of a server, balancing the server load and proactively managing the server availability to avoid downtime or lost data. The demonstration illustrates AMD’s approach to an open and collaborative relationship with its partners to meet customer demands.

VMware Takes Virtualization To Mobile Phones

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VMware today announced plans to bring virtualization to mobile phones through the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), reports The New York Times and plenty of others. Built on innovative technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008, VMware MVP should help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. In addition, end users will benefit by being able to run multiple profiles – for example, one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone.

We didn’t know about the acquisition of Trango VP, but we did write about the company before.

“VMware is excited to extend the benefits of virtualization, which we pioneered for x86 hardware, to the mobile phone market,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “By abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, we expect that virtualization will not only enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market but can also pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users. We look forward to working closely with our partners to bring new mobile solutions to market faster.”

VMware MVP is a thin layer of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It will be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones. The MVP is planned to enable handset vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.

As NYTimes writes:

You can bet that Intel, an investor in VMware, will back the technology. The chip maker has a new line of mobile device processors sold under the Atom brand.

Intel Cuts VMware Stake In Half

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While Cisco is increasing its stake in VMware, Intel is reducing it. The company plans to sell the bulk of those shares on Tuesday, according to a regulatory filing.

Intel disclosed that it had recently sold 1 million shares in the virtualization software maker and plans to sell another 3.75 million VMware shares on the open market “approximately” on Tuesday.

The chipmaker originally paid $23 per share for the stock in a private placement. VMware shares hit a record high of $125.25 on October 31, 2007, after going public in August that year at $29 per share.

Shares of VMware, which is majority-owned by EMC, fell nearly 4 percent before recovering to trade up 0.53 percent at $31.98 in morning trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

More info in this Reuters article.

We Support Obama Because He Supports Virtualization

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Since we’re based in Europe, the editorial team at Virtualization.com is not afraid of showing some last minute support for Barack Obama in his presidential campaign. Pretty logical if you think of it, as “change” in the computing industry through Virtualization is what we have been preaching for years now. So we went over to Silicon Valley and went looking for trails of the 2008 presidential campaign. To our great surprise, John McCain was nowhere to be found in San Francisco, or maybe we have been looking on the wrong side of town (or state).

This campaigner on Market Street does a good job and even knew Obama’s opinion on our beloved Virtualization technology.


Barack Obama in favor of Virtualization. Vote for change in a datacenter or on a desktop near you. from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Anyway, today you can make yourself and us happy by casting your vote (for change, preferably). If you’re not a US citizen, than do it here.

Roger Baskerville Leaves Citrix / XenSource

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Roger Baskerville has left Citrix, where he started out as the Sales Director of Xensource EMEA , after the Citrix merger to become Regional Director Northern Europe Server Virtualization .

During his years at Xensource Roger was one of the first commercial pushers of Xen and later XenEnterprise.

Roger has now joined Vizioncore as Vice President for EMEA and he will be responsible for EMEA operations. He leads the sales, marketing and systems engineering teams based across the region. Baskerville has held a variety of senior channel focused EMEA sales leadership positions with both mature high tech organizations as well as start-up operations. Previous companies include LightPointe, Palm, Compaq and NCR. A seasoned industry speaker who is both technically astute and sales focussed, Baskerville brings with him a wealth of experience in virtualization and international sales.

Earlier this year Quest fully acquired VizionCore as part of their journey into virtualization, after earlier
already owning a smaller part of the company. VizionCore then was described as the leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management.

Today their website reads
“VizionCore Inc. provides software that helps organizations safeguard and optimize their virtualized environments and allows them to extract the maximum return on their investment in the VMware platform. Vizioncore’s software products support essential IT strategies, including business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery.”

With this move Roger stays in the Virtualization world where he has worked for the past couple of years, however moving from a fully Open Source based technology to a back to a proprietary environment.

The bigger question however is .. who else will be leaving Citrix/ XenSource. and when ? XenSource has been with Citrix for about a year now .. maybe there are other people jumping ship.

Amazon EC2 Now With Beta Support for Windows

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Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on Amazon EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form.

With over two years of operation and many highly-requested features added, Amazon EC2 is today exiting its beta into general availability and offering customers a Service Legal Agreement (SLA). The Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a Region over a trailing 365 day period, or customers are eligible to receive service credits back. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud.