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The SCO Group Offers Free 1-Year Subscription on New Virtualized Version

September 4, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

The SCO Group today announced that it is offering a free one-year subscription with the purchase of its new OpenServer 5.0.7V virtualized version of the UNIX operating system. The licensing promotion is available until October 2, 2009.

SCO’s new OpenServer 5.0.7V is a virtualized version of its popular UNIX operating system that is optimized for the VMware environment. OpenServer5.0.7V gives customers a familiar environment while increasing the power and
efficiency of a virtualized infrastructure and extending the life of existing OpenServer applications to run on modern hardware.

OpenServer 5.0.7V is offered as an Enterprise Edition and is licensed under an annual subscription model; however the subscription fee for the first yearwill be waived with this special promotion for all purchases made through October 2, 2009. OpenServer 5.0.7V requires the installation of a time-limited subscription license available from SCO resellers.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: openserver, openserver 5.0.7V, OS, sco, sco group, sco openserver, sco openserver 5.0.7V, the sco group, Unix, unix os, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware

OpenOSX Releases WinTel 3.0, Speeds Up Virtualization Performance

June 12, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

OpenOSX Thursday announced WinTel version 3.0, the company’s Windows, Linux and other OS virtualization solution for Mac OS X.

WinTel is an application that allows host operating systems (and applications) such as Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu Linux to run in protected, virtual environments within windows on Mac OS X. WinTel’s new virtualization performance is comparable with the performance of VMWare’s Fusion and Parallels Inc.’s Parallels Desktop software.

According to OpenOSX, the update allows users to run most of the instructions of the virtual machine natively, drastically increasing performance in the process. The firm said performance was comparable to VMWare’s Fusion or Parallels.

The OpenOSX WinTel product is available immediately for US$30 plus shipping delivered on CD-ROM, with download-only delivery available for US$25.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: desktop virtualization, linux, Mac OS X, mac osx, openosx, OS, virtualisation, virtualization, windows, wintel, wintel 3.0, wintel version 3.0

VirtualLogix VLX Now Supports Symbian OS

October 20, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VirtualLogix today announced that its virtualization software product, VirtualLogix VLX, is the first to support Symbian OS, the market leading open operating system for advanced data-enabled mobile phones. VirtualLogix will demonstrate a prototype configuration of the Symbian OS running simultaneously with Linux on several mobile platforms at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, on 21-22 October 2008.

The first product to support Symbian OS on a virtualized mobile platform, VirtualLogix VLX provides new opportunities to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and semiconductor vendors to leverage the benefits of virtualization in their phone product designs. As a member of the Symbian Partner Network, VirtualLogix is committed to developing ground-breaking solutions based on the Symbian platform for the benefit of the mobile industry.
VirtualLogix VLX for mobile handsets separates hardware management and application management on mobile platforms, allowing an application running on the Symbian OS to access a peripheral device managed by another operating system kernel, such as Linux. With additional security for financial and other high-risk transactions, VirtualLogix VLX for Symbian permits handset manufacturers and wireless operators to deliver more reliable mobile phones with advanced features to the mass market.

Filed Under: News, Partnerships Tagged With: mobile handsets, mobile phone, mobile virtualization, operating systems, OS, Symbian, Symbian OS, virtualisation, virtualization, VirtualLogix, VirtualLogix Symbian, VirtualLogix VLX, VLX

Clavister Releases Secure OS CorePlus 9.10, Adds Virtualization Support

October 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IP-based security and unified threat management (UTM) specialist Clavister has recently launched the latest version of its network security operating system. Clavister CorePlus 9.10 delivers support for virtualization and improved traffic optimization to its UTM security portfolio.

Companies now have the option to buy Clavister Security Gateways supporting virtualization using VMware ESXi 3 as a virtual appliance or as conventional hardware or software appliances to suit their networks requirements.

The continued growth of enterprise applications such as VoIP, and the addition of them to the network, means that companies are experiencing increased levels of traffic on the network. This introduces new security challenges and can lead to uncontrolled bandwidth consumption. Clavister’s new operating system brings with it a number of features for traffic optimization including gigabit traffic shaping, IDP traffic shaping, route load balancing and SLB server monitoring.

In addition to traffic management and optimization and support for virtualization CorePlus 9.10 also features:

  • VoIP/SIP enhancements – A number of new features gives much more flexibility in terms of network setups, such as SIP proxy placement, SIP extensions and security enhancements.
  • SSL/TLS termination – Supports TLS/SSL termination and the transformation of HTTPS traffic to HTTP traffic, providing the possibility to perform deep content inspection of the traffic. It also offers a single source for managing all certificates for all servers.
  • LDAP authentication – Provides support for direct connectivity between Clavister Security Gateways and LDAP directory services such as Microsoft Active Directory.

CorePlus 9.10 is available through the Clavister Partner Network and via their website. Existing customers with an active Clavister Software Maintenance Agreement will be able to upgrade for free.

CorePlus 9.10 is an important upgrade to the core operating system that lies at the heart of Clavister’s product portfolio that can be configured and fine tuned to produce exactly the right level of protection.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Clavister, Clavister CorePlus, Clavister CorePlus 9.10, CorePlus, CorePlus 9.10, OS, secure OS, unified threat management, UTM, virtualisation, virtualization

Ubuntu Releases “Hardy Heron”, OS Version 8.04 In Beta

March 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

After four Alpha releases, Ubuntu has now released version 8.04 of the popular Operating System, code-named “Hardy Heron”, in beta. Apart from the boat load of new features, libvirt and virt-manager have been integrated in Ubuntu. They allow for easy guest creation and basic management of virtual machines out of the box. Virt-manager can be used to administer guests on a remote server.

The kernel also includes virtio, greatly improving I/O performance in guests.

virtualization-kvm-ubuntu.png

The beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 also comes with the following new features:

Xorg 7.3

The latest Xorg, Xorg 7.3, is available in Hardy, with an emphasis on better autoconfiguration with a minimal configuration file. This Beta brings a new Screen Resolution utility that allows users to dynamically configure the resolution, refresh rate, and rotation of a second monitor. This will be particularly handy for laptop users that connect to a projector or external monitor.

Linux kernel 2.6.24

This Beta includes the 2.6.24-12.13 kernel based on 2.6.24.3. This brings in significant enhancements and fixes that have been merged in the last few months into the mainline kernel.

GNOME 2.22

Hardy Heron Beta brings you the latest and greatest GNOME 2.22 with lots of new features and improvements, such as a new Nautilus that uses GVFS as its backend. GVFS makes it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and will make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.

PolicyKit

PolicyKit is now integrated in the administrative user interfaces. PolicyKit allows fine-grained control over user permissions and enhances usability and security, by allowing administrative applications to be run as a normal user and gaining extra privileges dynamically only for privileged operations instead of requiring the whole application to run as root.

PulseAudio

PulseAudio is now enabled by default. Some non-GNOME applications still need to be changed to output to pulse/esd by default and the volume control tools are not yet integrated.

Firefox 3 Beta 4

Firefox 3 Beta 4 replaces Firefox 2 as the default browser, bringing much better system integration including GTK2 form buttons and common dialogs. and icon theming that matches the system.

Transmission

The GTK version of the popular Transmission BitTorrent client comes preinstalled in Ubuntu, replacing the Gnome BitTorrent downloader.

Vinagre

The new Vinagre VNC client is installed by default in Beta, replacing xvnc4viewer. Vinagre allows the user to view multiple machines simultaneously, can discover VNC servers on the network via Avahi, and can keep track of recently used and favorite connections.

Brasero

The Brasero CD/DVD burning application, which will complement the CD/DVD burning functions of Nautilus and replace the Serpentine audio CD burning utility, is installed by default in Beta.

World Clock Applet

Integrating the features of the intlclock applet, the GNOME panel clock in Beta can display the time and weather in multiple locations.

Inkscape

Inkscape 0.46 introduces native PDF support, providing an easy, open source solution to editing text and graphics in PDF documents. Users will appreciate being able to draw up flyers, posters, and other docmuents, save them as PDF in inkscape, and send them to a print shop for printing without ever leaving Ubuntu or loading a proprietary tool.

ActiveDirectory integration

Likewise Open, available from the universe repository, enables seamless integration of Ubuntu within an Active Directory network. Users can use their AD credentials to log onto Ubuntu machines and access any kerberized services provided by an Ubuntu Server.

iSCSI support

iSCSI Initiator has been fully integrated in the kernel, allowing Ubuntu to mount iSCSI targets as a block device. iSCSI is available in the Ubuntu Server installer if iscsi=true is passed on the kernel command line at the beginning of the install process.

Firewall

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta includes ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall), a new host-based firewall application configurable from the command line which is designed to make administering a firewall easier for end users while not getting in the way of network administrators.

Memory Protection

Additional access checks have been added so that /dev/mem and /dev/kmem can only be used to access device memory. These changes will help defend against rootkits and other malicious code.

The lower 64K of system memory is no longer addressable by default. This will help defend against malicious code that attempts to leverage kernel bugs into security vulnerabilities.

Applications compiled as Position Independent Executables (PIE) are now placed into memory in unpredictable locations, making it harder for security vulnerabilities to be exploited.

Wubi

There is a new installation option for Windows users. Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation. Wubi works with a physical CD or in stand-alone mode, by downloading an appropriate ISO to install from. It can be found on the root of the CD as Wubi.exe. A full installation within a dedicated partition is still recommended, but Wubi is a great way to try Ubuntu for a few days and weeks before committing dedicated disk resources.

umenu

WinFOSS and the Windows open source software have been replaced by umenu, a simple launcher that lets the user install Ubuntu from Windows using Wubi, install Ubuntu to a partition without having to make their CD-ROM the first boot device.

To download the Ubuntu 8.04 Beta check out this page. The full and final OS is expected to be released next month.

[Source: TechConnect Magazine]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Hardy Heron, kernel, kvm, libvirt, linux, OS, ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu Hardy Heron, virt-manager, virtualisation, virtualization

Looking Back At A Decade of Open Source Virtualization

March 10, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 3 Comments

Will 2008 become the “Virtual Year”?

That’s what some people would have us believe now that the virtualization hype is reaching never before seen heights, and large acquisitions & mergers are starting to become quite common (Citrix bought Xensource, Novell picked up PlateSpin, Sun acquired innotek, Quest Software snapped up Vizioncore while VMware treated itself to Thinstall, and so on).

But few people realize or fail to acknowledge that the large majority of virtualization techniques and developments were started as, or remain Open Source projects.

Where are we coming from ?

Even without looking back, we know that IBM was one of the pioneers in the virtualization area; they were talking about Virtual Machines before I was even born. But who remembers one of the first Open Source virtualization takeovers? Back in 1999, Mandrake Software bought Bochs . Yes, that’s nineteen ninety nine, even before the y2k hype. Kevin Lawton had been working on the Bochs project together with different other developers since 1994. In 1999, he also had started working on Plex86, also known as FreeMWare.

Kevin back then compared Plex86 to other tools such as VMWare, Wine, DOSEMU and Win4Lin. Plex86 in the meanwhile has been totally reinvented. While at first it was capable of running almost all operating systems, it is now a very light virtual machine designed only to run Linux.

Wine was also a frequently covered topic at different Linux Kongress venues. As its initiators claim themselves, Wine is not an emulator, but it most certainly used to be a key player in the virtualization area. Its attempts to run non-native applications in a different operating system, in this case mostly Windows applications on a Linux platform, didn’t exactly pass by unnoticed.

However, installing VMWare or Qemu became such an easier alternative than trying to run an application with Wine. And Win4Lin, its commercial brother, had similar adoption issues. Corporate adoption for neither Wine nor Win4Lin was successful, and Win4Lin recently reinvented itself as a Virtual Desktop Server product, where it is bound to face a lot of stiff competition.

People who claim desktop virtualization was ‘born in 2007’ obviously missed part of history. Although most Unix gurus claim desktop virtualization has been around for several decades via the X11 system, the Open Source alternatives to actually do the same on different platforms (or cross-platform) have also been around for a while.

Who has never heard of VNC, the most famous product that came out the Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL) in Cambridge, England? VNC was one of the first tools people began to use to remotely access Windows machines. System administrators who didn’t feel like running Windows applications on their Unix desktop just hid an old Windows desktop under their desk and connected to it using VNC. It was also quickly adopted by most desktop users as a tool to take over the desktop of a remote colleague. After the Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory closed different spin-offs of VNC such as RealVNC , TightVNC and UltraVNC popped up.. and it’s still a pretty actively used tool.

But VNC wasn’t the only contender in the field. Back in 2003, I ran into NX for the very first time , written by the Italian folks from NoMachine , with a FreeNX release co-existing alongside a commercial offering. It was first claimed to be yet another X reinvention, however NX slightly modified the concept and eliminated the annoying X roundtrips. The fact that NX used proxies on each side of the connection guaranteed that it could function even on extremely slow connections.

In the early days of this century, there was some confusion between UML and UMLinux. While Jeff Dike called his User-mode Linux the port of Linux to Linux, it was in essence a full blown Linux kernel running as a process on another Linux machine.

Apart from UML, there was UMLinux, also a User Mode Linux project, featuring a UML linux machine which booted using Lilo and from which an out-of-the-box Linux distribution could be installed. Two projects, one on each side of the Atlantic, with both a really similar goal and similar naming was simply asking for confusion. In 2003, the UMLinux folks decided to rebrand to FAUmachine. hence ending the confusion once and for all.

Research on virtualization wasn’t conducted exclusively in Germany; the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Washington was working on the lesser known Denali project. The focus of the Denali project is on lightweight protection domains; they are aiming at running 100s and 1000s VM’s concurrently on one single physical host.

And apparently, one project with a confusing name wasn’t enough. The Open Source community seemed desparate for more of that. Hence, the Linux-VServer project and Linux Virtual Server came around around the same time. The Linux Virtual Server actually hasn’t got that much to do with virtualization, at all. In essence, Linux Virtual Server is a load balancer that will balance TCP/IP connections to a bunch of other servers hence acting to the end user as one big High Performant and Highly Available Virtual Server. (The IPVS patch for Linux has been around since early 1999).

Linux VServer (released for the first time in late 2001) on the other hand provides us with different Virtual Private Servers that are running in different security contexts. Linux VServer will create different user space segments , so that each Virtual Private server looks like a real server and can only ‘see’ its own processes.

By then, Plex86 had a big competitor coming from France, where Fabrice Bellard was working Qemu. At first, Qemu was really a Machine Emulator. Much like Bochs (anyone still running AmigaOS?), you could create different virtual machines from totally different architectures. Evidently froml X86, but also from ARM, Sparc, PowerPC, Mips, m68k and even development versions for Alpha and alternative 64bit architectures. Qemu however was perceived by a lot of people as slow compared to other alternatives. There was an Accelerator module available providing an enormous performance boost, however that didn’t have such an open license as the rest of Qemu, which held back its adoption significantly. It was only about a year ago (early 2007) that the Accelerator module also became completely open source.

The importance of Qemu however should not be underestimated, as most of the current hot virtualization projects are borrowing Qemu knowledge or technology left and right. KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is the most prominent user of Qemu, but even VirtualBox, Xen (in HVM mode) and the earlier mentioned Win4Lin are using parts of Qemu.

As this is an overview of the recent Open Source Virtualisation history the focus has been on running virtual machines on Linux, or connecting to a remote platform from a Linux or Unix desktop, where most of the early developments have taken place. We shouldn’t fail to mention CoLinux in this regard, however. CoLinux allows you to run Linux as a Windows process, giving people on locked down desktops an alternative for VMWare to run Linux on their desktop.

Xen is with no doubt the most famous open source virtualization solution around, certainly after its acquisition by Citrix. Xen was conceived at the XenoServer project from the University of Cambridge, an initiative aiming to build an infrastructure for distributed computing and to create a place where one can safely execute potentially dangerous code in a distributed environment. Xen was first described in a paper presented at SOSP in 2003 but work on it began somewhere in 2001.

Next week, we’ll talk more about virtualization and open source with a detailed look at today’s landscape.

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Posts Tagged With: 64bit, Accelerator, acquisitions, Alpha, ARM, bochs, citrix, CoLinux, denali, DOSEMU, faumachine, FreeMWare, freenx, IBM, Jeff Dike, Kevin Lawton, kvm, linux, linux kernel, Linux Kongress, Linux Virtual Server, Linux-VServer, m68k, Mandrake, Mips, nomachine, nx, Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory, open source, ORL, OS, Plex86, PowerPC, qemu, RealVNC, SOSP, sparc, TightVNC, UltraVNC, UML, UMLinux, Unix, User Mode Linux, virtual desktop, virtual machines, Virtual Private Server, VirtualBox, virtualisation, virtualization, vnc, Win4Lin, windows, wine, X11, X86, Xen, xenoserver, xensource

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