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Parallels Server Beta program launched

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Leopard server virtual machines are now possible in the Parallels Server Open beta launch.

The Parallels Server Beta program, invites you to toss your proverbial hat into the ring and help them get the product ready for shipping. Parallels Server seems packed with lots of great stuff, like:

The ability to run more than 50 different x86 and x64 guest operating systems on any, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X Server. That’s right, this isn’t just a Mac product; its ready to go on just about any server, PC or Mac.

The option to run virtual machines either in lightweight hypervisor mode (similar in implementation to Desktop for Mac) or in the headless mode via a “bare metal” hypervisor. This second option is particularly interesting as it enables VMs to run in parallel (pun intended) without being dependent on a primary operating system

The ability to – for the first time EVER – run Mac OS X Leopard Server in a virtual machine! Yes, you heard right; if you’re a Mac user, you will be able to run Leopard Server in its own VM. Great for testing and development, but also important for Mac Server admins who want to maximize their Xserve hardware.

More information by Ben Rudolph at source.

Hitachi elbows into the Virtualization Game

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VMware, Xen and Microsoft Look Out!

Jave Developer’s Journal reports that Hitachi is claiming to have a mainframe-derived firmware approach to virtualization that’s better than VMware or Xen or Microsoft.

The approach has been built into a new species of Hitachi’s blade servers called BladeSymphony with Virtage, Virtage being the so-called “breakthrough” embedded widgetry that bakes virtualization into the hardware as an alternative to third-party virtualization software.

Virtage

Being firmware, Hitachi says, Virtage can decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance. The box runs both Windows and Linux.

IDC group VP Vernon Turner, the head of the researcher’s Enterprise Computing practice, says BladeSymphony with Virtage is a “leap ahead in the virtualization game” and will fuel the proliferation of blades.

The machine has been out in Japan since August. Hitachi America Ltd, the company’s year-old server unit, will start offering the Itanium version of the box here in January. The company is wholly unclear when it will have an advertised Xeon unit and be able to mix and match Xeon and Itanium blades in the same chassis.

…As an Intel account, Virtage exploits Intel’s VT extensions in Itanium and Woodcrest. Applications never have to be changed to be virtualized, it said, like they sometimes have to be with VMware. …Hitachi claims the BladeSymphony server is the industry’s first real enterprise-class mission-critical blade server and Hitachi chief systems architect Paul Figliozzi says the box deserves that distinction because of its multi-blade SMP interconnect architecture, hot-swap capabilities, high performance, 16 PCI slots and native virtualization.

Hitachi positions it as the place to consolidate all three data center tiers – the edge, the application and the database – into a single chassis and hence lower TCO. Hitachi marketing VP Steve Campbell says that for rival IBM to do that would take a combination of both Intel servers and p Series iron for the back-end, a less elegant solution that takes up more real estate.

BladeSymphony’s SMP architecture lets up to four blades be lashed together into a single system. Since the 10U chassis holds eight blades altogether that’s two 16-way SMP systems to a chassis. Each Itanium blade holds two dual-core processors for a total of 32 cores per chassis, reducing footprint and power consumption.

Hitachi has been peddling the BladeSymphony line for the last two years and owns 20% of Japanese blade market.

Read more at source

Are Grid Computing & Virtualization Blending?

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The synergy between Grid computing and virtualization is becoming more and more apparent and is starting to find common ground in Linux.

At Novell’s Brainshare conference, virtualization is taking the spot light.  In fact, Dell made an announcement that it will offer Novell ZENworks for Linux servers.

Adam Fineberg’s (Levanta) view was reported by InfoWorld

Adam Fineberg (Vice President of Engineering at Levanta) sees specific technical reasons why Linux has become the most widely used OS for Grid environments:”Some of the key aspects of an operating system that you really need take advantage of in a Grid computing environment are the networking and file systems. The networking side is very important because of the large number of nodes, the need to quickly / easily add more nodes, exchange information between the nodes with low latency, as well as access shared storage systems and devices. Linux does very good ‘zero copy’ networking, meaning that once the data reaches the network stack, it doesn’t have to be copied again all the way through the rest of the operating system. That really keeps the networking efficient in Linux systems. With respect to file systems — because of the very strong interface that’s defined within Linux, there are a great number of file systems that are available for you. And that’s something that’s fairly unique to the Linux OS. Most of the operating systems don’t actually have a large number of file systems available for them, other than some standard ones like NFS. That makes it relatively easy to pick a file system that’s well-suited for your particular application. So having access to, for instance, XFS or JFS — which are two very high performance file systems that have good characteristics, but by the same token have very different implementations and therefore very different operating characteristics — you can optimize by choosing the file system that’s best suited for your application.”

The embracing of Linux by the Grid / Virtualization community boils down to being able to understand the boundary values of this set of complex use-case equations. Linux, being open source, lets you get at the raw OS kernel code. This gives you access to the “boundaries” of the OS, the way it interfaces to applications and the hardware. An intimate understanding of these boundary conditions are critical to Grid and Virtualization…

Read this full article at source.

VMware pushing its standard virtualization interface in Linux kernel

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Fraser Campbell tracked VMware effort to introduce several patches in Linux kernel to make it compliant to what it’s called Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), or Paravirtualization API 2.0

The Fraser article features an interesting comment from Zachary Amsden:

Zach was asked “Why can’t vmware use the Xen interface instead?” and he responded: “We could. But it is our opinion that the Xen interface is unnecessarily complicated, without a clean separation between the layer of interaction with the hypervisor and the kernel proper. The interface we propose we believe is more powerful, and more conducive to performance optimizations while providing significant advantages – most specifically, a single binary image that is properly virtualizable on multiple hypervisors and capable of running on native hardware.”

Read the full article at source.

Free VMware Server

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VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today introduced VMware Server, a free new entry-level hosted virtualization product for Linux and Windows servers. The product is available as a beta download at www.vmware.com/products/server/.

“Virtualization and VMware have become mainstream in the past year, and many customers have deployed thousands of VMware server environments across their enterprises. With VMware Server, we are ensuring that every company interested in, considering or evaluating server virtualization for the first time has access to the industry-leading virtualization technology,” said Diane Greene, VMware President. “VMware Server makes it easy and compelling for companies new to virtualization to take the first step toward enterprise-wide virtual infrastructure.”

VMware Server, the successor to VMware GSX Server, enables users to quickly provision new server capacity by partitioning a physical server into multiple virtual machines, bringing the powerful benefits of virtualization to every server.

VMware Server is feature-packed with the following market-leading capabilities:

  • Support for any standard x86 hardware

  • Support for a wide variety of Linux and Windows host operating systems, including 64-bit operating systems

  • Support for a wide variety of Linux, NetWare, Solaris x86 and Windows guest operating systems, including 64-bit operating systems

  • Support for Virtual SMP, enabling a single virtual machine to span multiple physical processors

  • Quick and easy, wizard-driven installation similar to any desktop software

  • Quick and easy virtual machine creation with a virtual machine wizard

  • Virtual machine monitoring and management with an intuitive, user friendly remote console

Availability

VMware Server beta is available for immediate download at www.vmware.com/products/server/. The product is expected to be generally available later in the first half of 2006. Support and subscription services for VMware Server will be available for purchase upon general availability.

Source at VMware website