News

Microsoft To CIOs: “Virtualization Is Too Expensive”

March 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

At the European CIO summit, Barbara Gordon, Microsoft’s EMEA VP for Enterprise Sales stated that Microsoft sees price as a differentiator in the virtualization market.

“What I hear is that users need to take out cost from their environments and virtualization is the credible approach. You have to ask if virtualization today is delivering cost effective value? And that it justifies the costs that are being charged?” She added, “Price is a differentiator. Existing players are quite expensive. Microsoft can add value to this market with a server play and an application play.”

Asked if the Microsoft Hyper V would have different versions that would offer different levels of functionality similar to those offered by VMware Gordon would not be drawn, according to Australian PC World.

“The time of individual point products is lessening. Our approach will be take a look at the environment, and make sure that the right virtualization functionality fits that environment. The fact is that it is the technologies that work well together and have good functionality that will let the user spend time adding value. So we’ve got a very broad offering.”

Martin Niemer, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware (yes, also the one that said Dell would soon start shipping servers with VMware ESX Server 3i included free of charge, said:

“We’re not seeing any signs that customers don’t understand all of the issues associated to moving to virtualization. They understand that what it comes down to is that even the hyper visor is zero cost, which Hyper V won’t be, the question is how many virtual machines can you run on a server. If you can’t run that many you still have to run it on two servers and that doubles your cost. That’s really going to be the decision point. It depends on what users want. If you want basic partitioning you can buy a server with a Vmware ESX 3i integrated hyper visor or buy a foundation version of ESX. And if you want additional functionality such as high availability you can buy a slightly more expensive licence.”

Niemer said he didn’t foresee Vmware being forced to adjust its pricing when Hyper V came to market.

We’ll see.

Parallels Packages Virtuozzo Containers 4 Software With Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

March 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Parallels (formerly SWsoft) today announced availability of its Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 server virtualization software packaged with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell. This provides customers with another choice for virtualization, which can effectively handle performance-sensitive workloads such as databases as well as support for servers using Itanium processors.

Parallels uses the standard distribution of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, an interoperable open platform for mission-critical computing, and adds its recently released version of virtualization software to deliver an integrated solution to customers.

From the press release:

“Customers can improve server utilization rates and realize the manageability benefits of containers-based virtualization in combination with one of the most popular enterprise-class Linux distributions in the world,” said Kurt Daniel, senior vice president of marketing and online, Parallels. “Importantly, we’re giving customers one place to turn for support with this integrated virtualization solution.”

“Novell remains committed to providing a variety of virtualization choices,” said Holger Dyroff, vice president of product management for SUSE Linux Enterprise. “We view this solution as an opportunity to expand our customer base for SUSE Linux Enterprise.”

Will Increasing Memory Costs Slow Down Virtualization Growth?

March 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Memory vendor Kingston Technology (check out the short interview we did at their VMWorld Europe 2008 booth) says memory in industry standard servers is causing virtualization projects to become unnecessarily expensive and that fears over warranties are holding back users from upgrading.

“Not having enough memory restricts the number of virtual machines, and also restricts the overall performance. Not having enough memory is either down to improper planning, or in most cases, the inability to purchase enough memory due to the higher cost of OEM memory,” the company said.

Hewlett-Packard does not seem to share their vision:

Rhys Austin, who runs the virtualization practice for industry standard servers at HP agreed that too little memory will affect virtualiszation performance but strongly rejected Kingston’s assertion that users were worried about price or warranties.

[Source: PC Advisor]

Microsoft Opened Up Virtualization For Vista Under Court Pressure

March 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Earlier this year, Microsoft surprisingly flip-flopped its earlier decision not to allow users to run Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium as guest operating systems on a virtual machine. According to Computerworld, court documents now prove MS did this because of a complaint filed with antitrust regulators.

According to a status report filed with U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, Microsoft changed the end-user licensing agreements (EULA) of Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium under pressure from Phoenix Technologies Ltd. Phoenix, best known for the BIOS, or firmware, that it sells to PC makers, had filed a complaint with regulators sometime after early November 2007, arguing that Microsoft should open the less-expensive versions of Vista to virtualization.

Although the report didn’t name the Phoenix virtualization product, it was referring to HyperSpace, technology that the company unveiled in November 2007. HyperSpace embeds a Linux-based hypervisor in the computer’s BIOS that allows the computer to run open-source software without booting Windows. A little more than two months after Phoenix filed its complaint, Microsoft gave in. “After discussion with the Plaintiff States and the three-person technical committee that assists in monitoring Microsoft’s compliance, Microsoft agreed to remove the EULA restrictions, and has done so,” the status report said.

Unfortunately, Phoenix Technologies and Microsoft declined to comment about the complaint and the changes to virtualization in Vista.

Virtutech Looking To Advance Standards for Virtualized Software Development

March 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtutech, a San-Jose based Virtualized Software Development (VSD) provider, today announced an initiative to accelerate the creation of standards for the VSD industry and to drive mainstream acceptance of VSD throughout the electronic systems business. While continuing its long-standing involvement with Power.org at both the Technical Sub Committees and Marketing Programs level, Virtutech has also joined organizations in its domain-Eclipse.org, OSCI and Spirit Consortium-with the aim of fostering standards and best practices. Virtutech further announced collaboration with GreenSocs to promote Open Standards and community development.

Virtutech intends to leverage its expertise with more than 1,000 successful users accumulated over the course of deploying its Simics platform since 2001 to propose, promote and support best practices, conventions and standards for VSD.

“Virtualized Software Development has the potential to make the same dramatic impact on software development that virtualization has already brought to the data center and business applications. However, the industry needs to stand up and define, promote and drive adoption of virtualization throughout the development community,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing at Virtutech. “Virtutech intends to be an agent of change and to actively precipitate the next big virtualization wave.”

[Source: press release]

Parallels Server Beta 2 Now Available In Public Beta

March 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Parallels, Inc. (formerly SWsoft) today announced that Beta 2 of its Parallels Server hardware virtualization solution is now available for immediate public download at www.parallels.com/server/beta.

Parallels Server is a hypervisor-based virtualization solution that provides the best value for Small and Medium-size Businesses (SMBs) and enterprise departments looking to maximize their IT investments via server hardware or legacy OS consolidation. Parallels Server can be installed on any server running Windows or Linux as well as any Intel-based Mac running OS X “Tiger” or “Leopard” and can be managed through the included Parallels Management Console.

“We are extending beta testing to everyone based on the positive results from our closed beta,” said Corey Thomas, Vice President of Consumer and Business Marketing, Parallels. “Feedback has been that it is easy to install and use, reliable and fast. We’ve incorporated feature requests and fixes into this latest version and feel confident that it’s ready for a broader set of beta users to experience.”

The new features include:

A Full Bare-metal Hypervisor that allows users to run multiple virtual machines directly on the host physical machine’s hardware, without depending on a host OS. This hypervisor implementation provides users with the fastest, most stable virtual machines possible.
An Integrated Toolset that enhances and simplifies the user experience. The toolset includes: Parallels Tools, a set of helpful add-ons that make working with virtual servers easier and more productive: Parallels Transporter, a built-in, wizard driven migration tool that can move the entire contents of a real machine to a virtual machine: and an integrated, single-click backup utility.
Virtual Support for 4-way Symmetric Multi-processing (SMP), which lets users assign up to 4 virtual cores to a virtual machine for exceptional performance under heavy workloads. 2-way SMP is also supported, giving users an unsurpassed level of virtual machine customization.
Experimental Support for Intel VT-d, enabling users to leverage full hardware-acceleration technologies for faster, more stable virtual machines and better resource management. Using VT-d, users can also directly assign hardware resources such as graphics and network cards to virtual machines, giving them native access to that hardware for optimal service levels. Parallels support of this feature is an industry first and is critically important to bringing virtual machine performance and functionality closer to that of real machines.

[Source: MacTech]