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Virtual Machines in a Browser ?

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Yes we can …

When us mere mortals want to learn about a new computer language, or a new platform, we start out with the “Hello World”-variant and then try to dig in deeper…

Some people however when they want to study Javascript, raise the bar by writing optimized code for different Javascript Engines. Sharpening their skill set further by developing a JavaScript PC Emulator… That’s right, Fabrice Bellard of FFMpeg, tinycc, and Qemu fame has recently published a link to his JavaScript PC Emulator written in pure JavaScript and working in recent Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 browsers on different platforms.

Fabrice got his inspiration from the x86 dynamic translator code that is present in Qemu and he emulates a 32bit x86 cpu which is pretty close to a 486 without FPU.

More details on the actual emulator can be found on his web page.

Watch that space. For all you know, we’re going to be hooked on old school PC games in our browsers in the very near future…

Floss Virtualization Doesn’t Care About Marketing …

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It cares about Quality and Frequent code releases. The Open Source community doesn’t
wait till the week before VMWorld to announe big news, they just code along happily and when the coding is done.. they release their software.

And there was plenty of it last couple of weeks. Here’s an overview ..

  • The New Virt Manager 0.70 is out , it s featuring a Redesigned New Virtual Machine Wizard, a file browser for storage pools and volumes, there are now features to add physical device assignment (PCI,USB) for existing virtual machines.
  • Qemu, the open source processor emulator, has now a 0.10.0 Stable Branch which will be used to receive bug fixes until at least the next major release .
  • The qemu-0.10.0 changelog liss better KVM acceleration support, Bluetooth emulation and host passthrough support , Nokia N-series tablet emulation multiple vnc clients, and much more platform and hardware support. Eventually this might lead to qemu making current kvm-userspace obsolete, but that’s not for tomorrow yet.
  • Reuven announced Enomaly ECP 2.2.3, a maintenance release fixing some bugs .
  • And Matt announced openQRM 4.4 with SOAP Webservices for it’s Cloud , openQRM 4.4 now also implements “persistent appliances” which means that users can now “pause”, “unpause” and “restart” their Cloud appliances via the User-Portal. The internal billing mechanism will only charge active Cloud appliances and now fully provides the “pay-on-demand” Cloud Computing model. Also better integration for Puppet and Sshterm were added. More about it’s new features can be read on the openQRM site ..
  • And last but not least is the new ConVirt project that has just announced it’s 1.0 release .
    ConVirt is a centralized management solution that lets you provision, monitor and manage the complete lifecycle of your Xen deployment.

So that’s it’s for this week’s Open Source Virtualization updates 🙂
Be expecting more updates around the next VMWorld, or when the code is done 🙂

Open Source Virtualization Updates

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There is a lot going on in the different Open Source Virtualization projects. From KVM, over OpenVZ , to Xen.

First of all there is the news that Anthony Liguori has included kvm support in the main Qemu development tree. In his blogpost Avi Kivity explains that with the KVM code being merged in Qemu development and integration of new and bigger features will evolve faster.

But now that kvm has been merged, it is possible to make larger modifications to qemu in order to make it fit virtualization roles better. Live migration and virtio have already been merged. Device and cpu hotplug are on the queue. Deeper changes, like modifying how qemu manages memory and performs DMA, are pending.

Then there is some discussion going on about the future of OpenVZ , mainly targeted at licencing and Pete Zaitcev is wondering why Parallels hasn’t officialy modified its COPYING.SWsoft file whic
h mainly tells the world “we’re not serious about going upstream” and which makes him wonder
“Kinda makes LXC more of a fait accompli than it already is or needs to be.” According to the LXH site , the planned Linux kernel version for which LXC should be fully functionaly is 2.6.29.

And last but not least Xen has released 2 minor maintenance releases for their 3.1 and 3.2 branches Xen 3.3.1 and Xen 3.2.3 are now available for download.

IBM launches the open-ovf project

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Scott Moser from IBM’s Systems Technology Group has released the first version of the open-ovf project. OVF is a standard packaging format for virtual machines and software appliances. The open-ovf project is seeking contributors and users to help establish OVF as a transparent and platform-neutral method for packaging virtual machine images.

The goal of open-ovf is to be able to deploy a single OVF package to either Xen or KVM.
Eventually expanding that list to include VMware, Hyper-V, and other platforms. For that goal they are looking at community contributions. A good start might be the qemu-img tool that already knows how to convert between different formats.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has defined a vendor-neutral standard for packaging virtual appliances enabling automated installation, configuration and activation of any virtualization platform. The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for packaging

For a summary of OVF and the open source project, see the presentation from the recent Xen summit
The open-ovf project is hosted on sourceforge and the source code is available from it’s git repository

Should VMWare Watch Out For VirtualBox?

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Or for a lot more?

IT Wire has a good introductory article about VirtualBox.

Sadly their introduction is a bit wrong in the details, as VirtualBox obviously is not “the only professional virtualisation solution that is freely available as open source software under the GNU General Public License (GPL.) Why this matters is because it’s truly free, as in freedom.”

Amongst others Xen is also fully GPL, and given its backing from both Citrix and most of the major Linux vendors it’s also professionally supported.

Also it also isn’t the only one that can run unmodified guests , both KVM and Xen can do this, given the these days standard VT hardware support. VirtualBox however does not need VT support (and neither did Qemu).

However, it’s still a fairly good introduction and keeping these remarks in mind it’s a good read, and it shows that VMWare should watch its back, and not just for VirtualBox

Yahoo Needs Your Virtualization Advice

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Over at his own blog, Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo fame needs your advice on what virtualization software to use.

He has both a Windows machine and a Linux desktop he wants to use to run other virtual machines on.
What would your advice be?

Xen, VirtualBox , Qemu , VMWare? Or something completely different?