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Microsoft has released Windows Server 2008 images for both Hyper-V and Virtual Server (thanks to Andrew Dugdell for pointing that out).
VHD Images for Microsoft Virtual Server:
VHD Images for Microsoft Hyper-V:
Stephen Shankland wrote on news.com
Virtual Iron and XenSource both have altered course with their virtualization products, which is software that lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Virtual Iron has scrapped its own virtualization software in favor of the open-source Xen project. Meanwhile, the leader of that project, XenSource, is steering away from management tools and aiming squarely for virtualization leader VMware.
The two companies are describing their new strategies at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston this week. And with more news in the area from VMware, Microsoft’s Virtual Server group and SWsoft, the show might well be called VirtualizationWorld.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, VMware executives might blush at the strikingly similar rhetoric from Virtual Iron and XenSource.
“The market really wants a competitor to VMware,” said Simon Crosby, XenSource’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
“It’s time for a company to step up and be a viable commercial competitor to VMware,” said Virtual Iron Chief Executive John Thibault.
It’s no surprise why competitors are angling for advantage. A February Forrester survey of 1,221 customers with at least 1,000 employees found that 41 percent of North American customers are using virtualization already or are planning pilot tests. And 60 percent plan to spend more money on the technology in the next 12 months.
VMware leads the market, the study found, with 43 percent of customers considering it most often for x86 server virtualization, compared with 24 percent for Windows Virtual Server. Xen “is not yet on the radar for customers,” the report said.
Virtualization, in the form most widely discussed these days, lets a computer run many operating systems simultaneously and therefore lets administrators replace several largely idle servers with one efficiently used machine. The technology works by fooling programs into thinking that they’re running on real hardware, when they actually are running on a virtual layer called a hypervisor.
That sleight-of-hand means that operating systems can share the same hardware, or be moved while running from one computer to another to cope with hardware failure or new processing demands.
Virtualization is an established feature in higher-end servers. Now, since it’s arriving in mainstream models with x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, companies like Virtual Iron and XenSource are trying to commercialize it as a stand-alone technology.
A big change coming with virtualization support from AMD and Intel means that virtualization companies today can sidestep some of clever engineering techniques VMware employs. AMD Virtualization, set to debut in months, and Intel’s corresponding VT, which started arriving in 2005, permit Xen to run an unmodified operating system. In practice, that means Xen can run Microsoft Windows as well as Linux.
The side effect is that VMware will be getting more direct competition from XenSource and Virtual Iron. But that’s not all: Another start-up called Parallels also hopes to give VMware a run for its money.
Its $50 hypervisor-based Parallels Workstation 2.1 product runs on Windows and Linux desktop machines right now, and the company plans to launch a midrange server product in mid-2006 and a high-end server product in late 2006, Marketing Manager Benjamin Rudolph said.
Lining up at LinuxWorld
VMware is looking to sustain its leadership in part by opening up interfaces to control virtual machines and making its basic virtual machine software free. And Monday at LinuxWorld, it plans to announce a related move: The EMC subsidiary is offering its virtual machine disk format specification to all comers for royalty-free use. The format competes with Microsoft’s VHD specification and Xen’s XVM.
Several announcements on virtualization moves are expected at LinuxWorld, which has morphed substantially since it began in the 1990s, following the growing impact of open-source software. The conference’s annual East Coast edition runs Monday through Thursday in Boston.
In addition to exhibitors touting operating system-related technologies, representatives from open-source databases and middleware companies are also scheduled to attend. Sessions and keynotes will also cover the impact of open-source business models on the software industry overall, including one entitled “The Death of the Enterprise Software Business Model.”
At LinuxWorld, IBM plans to announce services to help customers design, install and configure virtual machines as a way to consolidate Linux servers. It’s a sign that Big Blue, a virtualization pioneer with its mainframe servers, is also trying to profit from the technology as it becomes mainstream.
Virtualizing at the operating system is one approach, but SWsoft is taking a higher-level approach that divides a single operating system into multiple virtual environments, each with its own independent applications. At the show, SWsoft plans to announce its Datacenter Automation Suite, a Web-based management tool for tasks such as launching new environments or filling them with software templates.
Xen is catching on in the Linux realm. Indeed, it’s being built into premium Linux products from Novell and Red Hat due by the end of the year, undermining the technology somewhat as a standalone product.
XenSource ‘parks’ XenOptimizer
That fact was part of why XenSource changed direction. “What we found out over last six months, talking to a lot with customers…is that the way they want to consume Xen is through Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or) Suse Linux,” Crosby said.
Those two Linux sellers now are XenSource business partners. That arrangement is one facet of XenSource’s business strategy, while selling a stand-alone product called XenEnterprise to compete with VMware is the other, Crosby said.
XenSource no longer plans to sell its Xen management tool software, XenOptimizer. “We’re parking that for now,” Crosby said. There already are several management tool companies with which customers are comfortable, and those customers “don’t want to see XenSource going head-to-head with those guys,” he said.
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Virtual Iron plans management tools
Virtual Iron doesn’t share XenSource’s reticence for management software. With the upcoming version 3 of its software, it will let Xen customers manage Xen virtual machines. For example, it can move virtual machines from one physical computer to another and restart virtual machines when a computer fails.
The Lowell, Mass.-based company plans three versions of its product. The Community Edition will be available freely under the same General Public License (GPL) as Xen itself, includes basic Virtual Iron extensions.
The Professional Edition will be free and supports management of a single server. The Enterprise Edition will let customers manage virtual machines running on multiple computers, with prices starting at $1,500.
Beta testing for Virtual Iron 3 on Linux will begin in July and on Windows in September. Both versions should be generally available before the end of the year, Thibault said.
The strategy marks a dramatic departure for Virtual Iron. Previously, the company had billed its software as providing a way to use InfiniBand high-speed links to join several low-end servers into what amounted to single multiprocessor system.
“Trying to sell InfiniBand into enterprise datacenters was, to say the least, a real challenge. We were spending more time selling InfiniBand than our own product,” Thibault said. “What got lost in translation was we had built a very full-featured management platform.”
Read full story at news.com
Reported by Stephen Shankland at Cnet News.Com in an interview with James Ni, group product manager for server virtualization at Microsoft.
” The Service Pack 1 update to Virtual Server 2005 R2 will include support for two chip features, Intel’s Virtualization and Advanced Micro Devices’ Virtualization, that ease the task. Previously it had been scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter, but a Microsoft representative confirmed the slip on Tuesday.
The postponement comes on the heels of Microsoft’s delays of Windows Vista and Office 2007. “Quality always takes priority over timeline,” the Microsoft representative said.
Microsoft’s top competitors have suffered similar setbacks. Market leader VMware had planned to release its next top-end ESX Server product, version 3.0, by the end of March but gave itself three more months. The other major competitor, the open-source Xen project, had planned to release its version 3.0 by August 2005 but in fact didn’t release it until December. ”
….
“The beta version of SP1 still is scheduled to arrive in the second quarter, said James Ni, group product manager for server virtualization at Microsoft.
The new version also will include Volume Shadow Services, which lets all a computer’s virtual machines be backed up simultaneously, Ni said. The feature also permits the graceful restart of all those virtual machines, letting customers rely on the software without having to worry as much about the consequences of server failure.
“Basically, it allows us to do a snapshot of all the virtual machines running on a host. Then you can use something like Virtual Server with Data Protection Manager to create good backup and recovery,” Ni said. “You can recover the entire host and all the virtual machines running in a very orchestrated fashion.”
Microsoft faces major competition in the market from EMC subsidiary VMware and increasingly the Xen project that’s being built into forthcoming versions of Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Microsoft is working hard for a piece of the action, however. In December, it cut prices of Virtual Server 2005 R2 from $999 to $199 for the Enterprise Edition and $499 to $99 for the Standard Edition. The Standard Edition runs on servers with up to four processors, while Enterprise is for larger machines.
At the same time, though, market leader VMware is making its own moves. It released its Player software for free, which lets people download and try out virtual machines preconfigured with software, and made its GSX Server product into the free VMware Server. That product competes directly with Microsoft Virtual Server; VMware still charges for its higher-end ESX Server.
Much of Microsoft’s attention is directed toward the future with a successor, the Microsoft hypervisor, code-named Viridian. Virtual Server requires Windows as a foundation, but hypervisors are lower-level software. ESX Server and Xen both employ the hypervisor approach.
One major change coming with Viridian will be support for 64-bit virtual machines, Ni said. That will catch Microsoft up with Xen and VMware, which support 64-bit virtual machines today.
Viridian isn’t likely to debut until 2008 at the earliest, however. It’s designed to work with the upcoming Longhorn Server, a server-oriented version of Windows Vista that’s scheduled to arrive in 2007, but it’s more likely to arrive with a service pack sometime 18 to 24 months afterward, Ni said.
“We’re not committing to whether the hypervisor is part of the initial release or not. Right now, from a scheduling perspective, it doesn’t look like it,” Ni said.
Read the full article at source.