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Hypervisor

Red Hat Unveils Virtualization Strategy At Boston Summit

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Today at Red Hat Summit in Boston, two of Red Hat’s emerging technology engineers, Dan Barrange and Richard Jones, presented the new tool sets that their team has developed for work with Xen virtual machines (VMs). It includes command line utilities, which will become part of the oVirt tool set, a web-based virtual machine management console built using Ruby on Rails.

oVirt uses Red Hat’s open source libvirt management framework that provides hypervisor-agnostic management interfacing, allowing the same tools to manage multiple different hypervisors. Libvirt already supports six hypervisors : Xen, KVM, QEMU, OpenVZ, Linux Containers (LVX) and Solaris LDoms.

The company also announced that its own embedded, lightweight, stand-alone hypervisor and accompanying management console are available in beta right now. Red Hat’s new Linux hypervisor hosts both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Rather than base the software on the open-source Xen hypervisor, Red Hat has chosen the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project, which is already used by the major Linux OSs as the default server virtualization package. Another key difference: while Xen works well with Linux, it’s an add-on. KVM, on the other hand, is an integral part of Linux.

Read more about Red Hat’s virtualization announcements here.

Wind River Releases Proprietary Hypervisor For Hardware Virtualization

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Wind River Systems, the California, US-based provider of Device Software Optimization (DSO), today introduced a multicore software solution for device development, which aims to help companies solve complex business challenges by taking advantage of multicore processing and virtualization.

Wind River Systems

In connection with today’s announcement, Wind River announced that it will introduce a scalable hypervisor that aims to enable virtualization for devices across a broad range of vertical markets, including networking, industrial and consumer devices. The ability to virtualize hardware allows multiple operating environments to share underlying processing cores, memory and other hardware resources.

Wind River’s hypervisor will incorporate the same design practices and technology that Wind River uses for its products, such as Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS). The hypervisor will be tightly integrated with VxWorks and Wind River Linux, and can support a variety of other operating systems. It will be available for early access in August 2008.

Sun xVM VirtualBox Downloads Pass The Five Million Mark

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Sun Microsystems today announced that Sun xVM VirtualBox, the free and open source desktop virtualization software it acquired by taking over its maker innotek earlier this year, has surpassed five million downloads in just 18 months.

Sun xVM VirtualBox

The press release touts the xVM VirtualBox 1.6 software to be the first free hypervisor to support all major host operating systems (OS), including Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris. Sun unveiled xVM VirtualBox 1.6 earlier this month. Currently downloaded more than 10,000 times a day, the new version includes more than 2,000 enhancements and full support for Mac OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris host operating systems. It also features newly added support for high performance virtual devices, improved scalability and Web services for remote administration.

xVM VirtualBox software is a key component of Sun’s xVM virtualization and management software portfolio, which includes Sun xVM Ops Center, Sun xVM Server, expected for release in the Summer of 2008, and the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software.

Neocleus Reveils Strategy For Its Endpoint Virtualization Approach

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Neocleus today announced (PDF) its strategy and approach for addressing the security, performance and IT manageability requirements of enterprise endpoints across a distributed network.

Neocleus

According to the company, current endpoint solutions are capable of connecting dispersed employees to the network but result in significant problems in the form of endpoint performance issues, usability complications and critical security vulnerabilities that can render networks defenseless. With corporate dependence on the functionality of these endpoints becoming paramount in their ability to generate revenue and drive enterprise growth, these problems are deemed simply unacceptable.

Neocleus Aims to tackle organizations’ most pressing endpoint issues – performance, manageability, security and cost. The company’s solutions, which include its Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor, enable critical IT tasks to operate in trusted virtual environments that run outside of and side-by-side with Windows while still offering complete access to all the capabilities offered by the underlying endpoint hardware.

“Endpoints are vast storage tanks of information and the gateway to accessing corporate data banks as well. As the variety of endpoints proliferates they become harder to control and more valuable to attackers,” said Charles Kolodgy, research director for Secure Content and Threat Management Research at IDC. “Applying virtualization to endpoints offers organizations significant advantages for securely delivering services, data and applications. Virtualization makes it possible to isolate critical corporate IT functionality without needing to be concerned about the other unauthorized applications residing on the machine.”

Neocleus contributes its technology to the open source community and remains “committed to creating an ecosystem of innovation that facilitates growth for partners and collaborators”. These open source contributions enable software developers to focus on building and maintaining high-performance applications without concern for performance or security issues that result from virtualization initiatives and technologies, and they do so without worrying about the underlying endpoint architecture.

Dell Reportedly Plans To Give Away VMware ESX Server 3i For Free, World Keeps Turning

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According to The Inquirer, it appears Dell is considering to stop charging VMware ESX Server 3i licensing fees on its PowerEdge servers to its customers. This was reportedly said by VMWare’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Martin Niemer and comes two weeks after the virtualization vendor announced it would start embedding the 32 MB hypervisor across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM servers.

This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as VMware had added to the previous announcement that hardware vendors would be able to choose which premium they would charge to end customers, if any.  Expect the other hardware vendors to follow suit and drop the prices for including the hypervisors significantly (or even zero) if Dell comes through, especially with the sharp-priced Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V on its way.

But don’t expect this to have a serious impact on the whole VMware reseller channel’s bottom line, as some blogs are proclaiming already.  The real money is in the enterprise offering and upgrades anyway, and the smaller distributors and resellers have other advantages when it comes to SMB offerings besides pricing.

Podcast Tip: Andrea Arcangeli on KVM and hypervisor virtualization

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Let us join Michael Dolan in pointing you to a great podcast on LinuxCast (LinuxWorld), featuring Don Marti interviewing Andrea Arcangeli on the topic of KVM and the benefits of the kernel taking on the hypervisor role (rather than separating the hypervisor and rewriting all the supporting structures as Xen does).

Listen to the podcast here!