virtualization

Native Support for Virtual Hard Disks To Be Added To Windows 7?

May 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

A team at Microsoft is hiring developers to work on adding native support in Windows 7 for Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) – Microsoft’s semi-proprietary specification for single-file virtual machine hard disks, reports the istartedsomething blog.

The job posting reads:

Do you want to join the team that is bringing virtualization into the mainstream? In Windows 7, our team will be responsible for creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs (virtual hard disks) natively. Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it.

Do you want to have the opportunity to work on a great Core OS team at the heart of Windows? If you have big ideas and want to implement them, if you love writing code, if you love delving into operating system internals, if you want to work on high visibility projects with direct consumer and customer impact and still work in a very technical environment, then you will feel right at home in this team.

Virtualization technology has been a great success with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. With native OS support on the horizon it will become an even greater hit. Our team is making this a reality in Windows 7. Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file. These are a few reasons why this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7–come help us achieve this goal.

Now, the question is, will Microsoft allow booting from virtual hard disks?

Please comment with your opinion!

Parallels’ Marketing Director Ben Rudolph Moves To Microsoft (Updated)

May 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Benjamin Rudolph, the charismatic Director of Marketing at Parallels (see the interview we had with him at VMworld Europe 2008), has apparently made the move to Redmond to help Microsoft with its forray into the virtualization arena, says Virtualization.info. Rudolph is still listed on several Parallels blogs and his LinkedIn profile still displays his position at Parallels, so this is a very recent development. We’ll update as soon as we can confirm what Rudolph’s plans are for the future.

Update: we’ve just received word from Ben that he will be leaving Parallels at the end of this month. His role at Microsoft will be heading Enterprise PR for Windows Vista.

Jenny Ellis, who formerly managed PR for Parallels in the UK will be replacing Rudolph as Worldwide PR Director.

Thoughtpolice And Its Library Of VMware Images

May 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

We just stumbled upon Thoughtpolice, a sys-admin’s effort to aggregate all VMware images for Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS) and FreeBSD, as well as a number of Fedora packages.

“Thoughtpolice was born because I kept needing to use the same VMware images over and over again. A Google search later, and I had found no place which provided a variety of VMware images. Thinking others would find these images useful, I made them public. Over the months, more and more VMware images were added, and the range expanded to include FreeBSD, evolving into the current day website.

Less than one year since launch, the website has led to more than 250 terabytes of downloads, the majority through BitTorrent, without which we would be unable to handle the bandwidth requirements.

The website is aimed both at sys admins like myself who need to get an operating system up and running very quickly, and people who just want to try Linux or FreeBSD out.”

Go check it out!

Microsoft Finalizes Kidaro Acquisition, Bullish On Expansion In Desktop Virtualization Field

May 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft on Thursday said it has now sold 6.5 million licenses of its Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) client-level virtualization software, more than double the total of 3 million licenses that it had sold as of January.

MDOP, which is available only to customers that have volume Windows licenses and Software Assurance maintenance contract, offers a variety of technologies supporting desktop virtualization and application streaming.

Shanen Boettcher, Microsoft’s General Manager of Windows client product management for enterprise users, included the updated sales total for MDOP licenses in a (relayed) post on the software vendor’s Windows Vista blog. MDOP costs between $7 and $10 per license annually, according to Boettcher.

Boettcher also said in the blog post that Microsoft has completed its acquisition of Kidaro Technologies, which sells technology designed to make the desktop virtualization experience more invisible to end users and easier for IT to manage. Kidaro‘s technology is scheduled to be incorporated into MDOP by the first half of next year, with the combination getting a new name: Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization.

Boettcher said Microsoft has invested more than $400 million in developing MDOP and expanding it through acquisitions of virtualization vendors such as Kidaro and Softricity Inc.

[Source: ComputerWorld]

Gartner: Server Market Still Growing, Despite Virtualization

May 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Just recently, Gartner published a report showing that the server market did great during all of 2007, including the fourth quarter. Server shipments rose 11 % during the fourth quarter, while revenue rose almost 3 %.

The analyst firm has now proclaimed server sales and shipments also showed strong growth in the first quarter of this year compared to last year despite continued growth of the use of server virtualization technology. Jeffrey Hewitt, VP Research at Gartner said that certain factors are “masking” the impact of server virtualization.

“A lot of the growth in physical server sales is coming from an explosion in the use of certain applications such as Web servers, which often do not lend themselves to being virtualized. Also, server virtualization is still much more accepted in mature markets such as the US, Europe, and Australia, and less adopted in fast-growing markets such as China. Additionally, customers are not running server virtualization on old hardware. Customers are buying larger servers to host virtualization. This market is so hungry for more and more horsepower. Virtualization makes it easier to host more and faster applications.”

Gartner on Thursday said that a total of 2.3 million servers were sold in the first quarter, up about 7.6 percent over the 2.1 million shipped during the same quarter last year. Revenue growth was not as strong, however. Vendors sold $13.6 billion worth of servers during the quarter, up only 4.3 percent compared to the $13.0 billion in server sales last year, Gartner said.

HP was the world’s top server vendor during the first quarter of 2008, accounting for 30.1 percent of the total worldwide shipments. Fast growth in server shipments by Dell, which boasts a 22.7 percent market share, puts that company within striking range of the top position. Dell’s shipments grew 15.8 percent over last year compared to HP’s growth of 7.8 percent.

Worldwide RISC-based and Itanium- based server shipments slipped 8.4 percent compared to last year, with all top five vendors seeing a drop in sales. However, revenue for this class of servers grew 3.7 percent over last year, with all top five vendors seeing revenue growth except for Sun, which saw revenue drop as its Solaris Unix-based focus continues to shift more towards x86-based servers, Hewitt said.

Shipments of servers with the Linux OS grew the fastest year-over-year, up 13.9 percent compared to the 6.8 percent growth of shipments of servers with Windows, Hewitt said. However, the overall base of Linux-based servers is still only half that of Windows-based servers, so in terms of absolute numbers, Windows- based server shipments grew faster.

[Source: ChannelWeb]

Silicom Provides Server Adapters For Mystery Storage Company In Its Virtualization Appliances

May 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Silicom today announced that its quad-port Gigabit Ethernet Server Adapters have been selected by an unnamed “leading storage company” as a standard component in its virtualization appliances. Silicom’s adapters will reportedly be used to enhance the throughput of the appliance as required in high-traffic and mission critical environments, and to prevent I/O bottlenecks at the appliance level.

Virtualization appliances are an innovative solution for the IT department’s need to be able to change the configuration of complex Storage Area Networks (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) without disrupting system availability. The virtualization appliance separates the logical and physical representation of storage resources, independently managing the relationships in order to free the main system from the task.

“Virtualization is on the rise as a significant market trend, and the emergence of Virtualization Appliances is good news for Silicom,” said Shaike Orbach, Silicom’s President and CEO. “Our role is to provide the technology needed to assure a high level of throughput, preventing I/O bottlenecks and other roadblocks that can limit an appliance’s performance. In installation after installation, our innovative cards have proven their ability to ‘unclog’ the pipes, resulting in an appliance that continues to work at top speed in all environments.

“This order validates the need for our server adapters in Virtualization appliances and gives us an important entry point into the Virtualization arena. This has the potential to become a significant market for Silicom as we believe that more and more virtualization appliances will be launched by additional companies over time.”