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Virtuozzo

HP To Embed Parallels Virtuozzo In Integrity Server Line

July 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

eWeek reports that HP will start selling and supporting Parallels‘ container virtualization technology, Virtuozzo, with its Integrity server line-up, starting today.

HP Integrity servers support the company’s Unix operating system, HP-UX, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and several variations of Linux. The Parallels Virtuozzo containers are designed to work with both Windows and Linux. HP already embedded VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenServer at factory level, so this is a way for them to give customers even more options to virtualize.

The Parallels Virtuozzo containers will cost $4,500 per two processors and the Parallels Infrastructure Manager bundle costs $5,000. The Virtuozzo suite does not currently integrate with HP’s management software for Integrity.

Filed Under: Featured, Partnerships Tagged With: citrix xenserver, container virtualization, Hewlett Packard, HP, HP Integrity, HP Parallels, HP-UX, Integrity, Parallels, Parallels Infrastructure Manager, Parallels Virtuozzo, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, virtualisation, virtualization, Virtuozzo, VMWare ESX Server, Windows Server 2008

Keep It Quiet, But Parallels Acquired ModernGigabyte

March 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

The Register sure has some pretty observant readers. Apparently one of them noticed an early preview of a deal which has been forged two months ago but was only to be announced tomorrow: Parallels acquired ModernGigabyte, the makers of billing software ModernBill and other automation solutions for the hosting provider market.

virtualization-moderngigabyte-modernbill.jpg

From the website section about the deal, which is supposed to be shared with the press starting tomorrow:

 

What is Parallels announcing?

Parallels is announcing the acquisition of ModernGigabyte, the creators of the ModernBill automated billing system.

 

What is Parallels acquiring?

Parallels is acquiring all of the assets of ModernGigabyte, including its products, services, intellectual property, and its existing staff. ModernGigabyte products include:

  • ModernBill, a billing system for hosting and service providers
  • ModernAuthorize, a real-time payment and credit card processing service
  • SSL Factory, an automated delivery system for SSL cetificates
  • ModernDNS, an automated domain registration service
  • FraudGuardian, a real-time fraud checking service for online ordering

Why did Parallels acquire ModernGigabyte?

Parallels believes that customers will benefit from this acquisition. ModernBill is already integrated with many of the Parallels family of hosting products and now small hosting providers will be able to purchase both control panels and a billing solution from the same company.

Dedicated hosting providers can offer ModernBill along with Plesk to create a complete reseller package.

Parallels ISV partners which have adopted the Application Packaging Standard (APS) will benefit by having a ready to deliver solution for hosting companies to sell their products.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and the deal between the two private firms was actually approved by both companies on January 11 of this year. Note that Parallels plans to maintain the current prices on the ModernBill website.

 

 

Filed Under: Acquisitions, News Tagged With: FraudGuardian, ModernAuthorize, ModernBill, ModernDNS, ModernGigabyte, Parallels, Parallels Virtuozzo, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, SSL Factory, swsoft, virtualisation, virtualization, Virtuozzo

The Current State of Open Source Virtualization

March 26, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 6 Comments

We’ve started by looking back at a decade of Open Source virtualization, and in this second part of the series we’ll tackle today’s landscape (last updated in March 2008).

The least you can say about the current state of Open Source virtualization is that the field is extremely diverse: different approaches in the virtualization area are all represented, with paravirtualization, OS virtualization and hardware-assisted virtualization in various colors and flavours.

Let’s start with paravirtualization:

Xenmaster Ian Pratt released the 1.0 version of Xen somewhere in September 2003, it wasn’t till the Xen 2.0 release (around December 2005) that Xen adoption really started to accelerate. Ian announced the 2.0 release in November 2004 with support for both Linux 2.4, 2.6, FreeBSD and Live Migration support.

Xen pioneered Paravirtualization, giving it both a giant performance boost but also an argument for the naysayers who claimed it was impossible to run Windows on the platform. The fact that the Cambridge lab had access to the Windows source code and even had it running on Xen wasn’t really an argument since they were unable to redistribute it.

Different Linux distributions adopted quickly making Xen the de facto Linux virtualization solution. Also: the Open Solaris project was working on Xen support, first only as a guest but later also as a host operating system.

Then came the VT capabilities, and once again Xen was leading the pack, bringing out a Xen version that supported hardware-assisted virtualization. So the Open Source Xen version was beating the competition on different levels – speed, flexibility, etc. – but had one key element missing: the management layer, a GUI, the part that people actually spend money on …

Meanwhile, the company XenSource Inc. had been founded by the original developers of Xen and they started to work on a set of management tools and bang, next thing we know is Citrix announcing the acquisition of XenSource for $ 500 million USD in the summer of 2007.

While the discussion between Xen and VMware was still going on to see what infrastructure was needed in the kernel to support virtualization, KVM (Kernel Based Virtual Machine) had come out of nowhere: a lightweight kernel module that enabled the VT Capabilities of the new generation of CPUs and that ended up in the mainstream kernel in no time. KVM was ultimately included in the 2.6.20 release of the Linux kernel after merely a couple of months of development.

KVM enabled Qemu to benefit from the VT features and a new team was born. KVM is the lean and mean, small virtual machine, and the fact that it was so small only made it easier to adopt in the main tree. KVM is maintained by Avi Kivity who is working at Qumranet, with Moshe Bar amongst its founders about to launch a product called Solid ICE, aiming for the desktop virtualization market. KVM however is not doing all the work, a modified Qemu version acts as the user space part that enables the full power of KVM.

Today different distributions support both KVM and Xen and are working towards a single tool set to manage them both.

Qemu started to pop up everywhere in the virtualization arena in 2007, e.g. within the VirtualBox project from innotek, a German software company located in Stuttgart.

VirtualBox is one of the most important open source solutions if you want to run other operating systems on your desktop. It’s free, it’s open and it has all the features you would expect from its commercial counterparts! Sometimes these commercial counterparts, facilitate ‘match making’ events, which outcomes are not intended. For example at VMworld in New York in September ’07, Achim Hasenmueller, co-founder and kernel wizard at innotek was introduced to the Sun Microsystems management and less than four months later they announced their ‘marriage’ (Sun acquired innotek for an undisclosed amount in February 2007). As VirtualBox was already running on a multitude of Operating Systems such as Windows, Linux and OS/X, they evidently also added Sun’s Solaris to this impressive list. VirtualBox also supports a large number of guest platforms, including common Windows flavors (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista).

We’ve been talking mostly about paravirtualisation and hardware-assisted virtualization with KVM, Xen and VirtualBox, but of course there is much more out there. Let’s have a look at the players on the Operating System Level virtualisation are, an identical copy of one kernel providing a secured container where user space programs can run. Today, there are 2 main players in this area (VServer and OpenVZ). VServer was started by Jacques Gelinas and is currently lead by Herbert Pötzl from Austria. The Linux-VServer started July 2001 as BSD Jail reimplementation for Linux. In 2004, it was rewritten from scratch for the 2.6 kernel.

Not much of a surprise, people tend to think that Linux-VServer and OpenVZ have a lot in common, and some people even think OpenVZ was once based on a fork of Linux-VServer. According to Herbert Pötzl that isn’t true today: the projects do not share any code, although they provide roughly similar functionality in often quite different ways … In 2003 however , Linux-VServer was forked into FreeVPS by Alex Lyashkov and soon after that, it was integrated into the H-Sphere product, maintained by Positive Software.

SWsoft was founded back in 1999 and released their commercial Virtuozzo product in 2001, as a proprietary virtualization solution for Linux and later also supporting Windows. When SWsoft acquired Plesk in 2003, a proprietary framework to manage hosted solution, evidently virtualization fitted nicely in this picture since the OS level virtualization OpenVZ uses is a perfect match for web hosting.

SWsoft then went on to buy Parallels and managed to keep it a secret for almost 3 years. In late 2007, they finally decided that their Parallels brand was better known than their Virtuozzo or Plesk brands and decided to change the company name into Parallels alltogether. Having a single kernel for each virtual machine that runs in your environment is both the advantage and the disadvantage of OpenVZ and Linux-VServer. Its advantage of being a lightweight solution that can scale easily to hundreds of machines with no significant penalty is also its biggest disadvantage – what if something goes wrong with that kernel? Other approaches such as Xen and KVM allow you to run different kernels , or even different operating systems, which of course requires much more memory for each instance.

If you are into Hot Motorcycles you’ll remember the 1999 Virtual Iron company, a company that manufactered a CD that helped people create a customized bike. Fast forward to 2004, where a domain-squatter was using the site, and in February 2005 a company that looks like the Virtual Iron company we know now, started using the domain. Virtual Iron had a product called Virtual Iron VFE in store, which they presented at Linux World and later also more in depth at OLS. They claimed to have developed a Virtual Machine Monitor that was also Clustered. The Virtual Iron VFe product transparently created a shared memory multi-processor out of number of servers.

Yes, this sounds familiar, it sounds like an SSI implementation, it sounds like openMosix or OpenSSI, and that’s exactly what some people thought it was. Rumors on the net claimed that Virtual Iron was indeed violating the GPL while reusing and modifying openMosix code while not redistributing it’s changes, true or false, we’ll probably never know. In August 2005 Virtual Iron started shifting as they announced they were working on having their software manage other platforms too. Today, their product is based on an open-source Hypervisor, which name you can most likely already guess (yes, indeed, they use Xen). What happened with the SSI alike technology is unclear.

The final player in this area we need to point to is Paul Rusty Russel’s Lguest, formerly known as Lhype, almost known as Rustyvisor or Wonkavisor. It is an experimental Hypervisor developed by Rusty intended as proof of concept for the paravirt ops. Redhat has been working on it also, but who knows what the future will bring?

Which brings us to the final part: where to put your money? That kinda depends on your needs:

  • If I’m talking to a hoster who needs to run lots and lots of similar machines with easy management, I’ll be pointing him to Linux-Vserver
  • If someone is looking at bare metal hardware virtualisation for his Linux machines, it’s Xen all the way
  • If he needs a platform to test different distributions and operating systems on his desktop I’ll probably be pointing to VirtualBox
  • If someone really wants to head into placing his desktops virtualized in the data center, KVM would be my bet

What if someone wants to do nothing else but use Linux as a base framework to run Windows virtual machines?

In that case the commercial Xen offerings such as the one from XenSource, Suse and Redhat would be best as they can provide you also with adapted drivers for the guest operating system. But ask me again in 6 months and I’ll probably tell you otherwise.

Watch out for the third part of this article series, with more on Xen!

Filed Under: Featured, Guest Posts, News Tagged With: citrix, Ian Pratt, kvm, Linux-VServer, open source virtualization, openvz, Parallels, qemu, qumranet, sun microsystems, swsoft, Virtual Iron, VirtualBox, virtualisation, virtualization, Virtuozzo, vmware, VServer, Xen, xensource

Parallels Packages Virtuozzo Containers 4 Software With Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

March 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Parallels (formerly SWsoft) today announced availability of its Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 server virtualization software packaged with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell. This provides customers with another choice for virtualization, which can effectively handle performance-sensitive workloads such as databases as well as support for servers using Itanium processors.

virtualization-parallels-server-beta1.png

Parallels uses the standard distribution of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, an interoperable open platform for mission-critical computing, and adds its recently released version of virtualization software to deliver an integrated solution to customers.

From the press release:

“Customers can improve server utilization rates and realize the manageability benefits of containers-based virtualization in combination with one of the most popular enterprise-class Linux distributions in the world,” said Kurt Daniel, senior vice president of marketing and online, Parallels. “Importantly, we’re giving customers one place to turn for support with this integrated virtualization solution.”

“Novell remains committed to providing a variety of virtualization choices,” said Holger Dyroff, vice president of product management for SUSE Linux Enterprise. “We view this solution as an opportunity to expand our customer base for SUSE Linux Enterprise.”

Filed Under: News, Partnerships Tagged With: Novell, Parallels, Parallels Virtuozzo, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0, SUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, swsoft, virtualisation, virtualization, Virtuozzo

Parallels And AXIGEN Launch Strategic Partnership

February 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

AXIGEN, a Romanian mail server vendor, and Parallels (former SWSoft), virtualization and automation software provider, yesterday announced the launch of a strategic technological partnership in which the companies will offer an integrated AXIGEN Mail Server and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers solution specifically for service providers offering virtualized hosting environments.

virtualization-axigen-parallels.png

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From the official press release:

The new AXIGEN-Parallels Virtuozzo Containers integration presents a high-end, flexible solution that enables Service Providers the ability to offer customized mail server solutions for customers via an easily deployable, low-maintenance SaaS model. Unlike traditional, generic hosting solutions, in which software must be installed and configured manually, the AXIGEN-Parallels Virtuozzo Containers solution allows Service Providers to offer customers a wide variety of pre-made Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, called templates, that are populated with optimized configurations of the AXIGEN mail server. Customers can choose the template that is right for their business, and have the solution deployed to them with only a few clicks.

“Parallels Virtuozzo Containers’ superior density and manageability, coupled with its ability to rapidly deploy software via pre-configured templates, make it an ideal choice for ISVs to deploy their software via a SaaS model,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels.”The partnership with AXIGEN is an excellent example of a forward-thinking application vendor harnessing the power of SaaS and of Parallels’ continued momentum with Service Providers and SaaS.”

“Given that the AXIGEN Mail server is a service provider oriented solution, we are confident the integrated AXIGEN-Parallels Virtuozzo Containers solution will better address the emerging requirements of this highly competitive environment,” said Oana Bornaz, CEO of AXIGEN. “Moreover, both Parallels and AXIGEN now benefit from an expanded customer base, a fact mutually beneficial to the development of our companies.”

Filed Under: News, Partnerships, People Tagged With: AXIGEN, hosting, Oana Bornaz, Parallels, Parallels Virtuozzo, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, SaaS, Sergei Beloussov, service providers, swsoft, templates, virtualisation, virtualization, Virtuozzo

Is Virtualization the miracle cure for software set-up?

March 31, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Stephen Shankland at News.Com reports:

Most talk about virtualization these days centers on using server hardware more efficiently. But the technology also has the potential to ease another headache: software installation woes.

 

Today, administrators installing software typically must ensure beforehand that it’s certified to run with their particular hardware and operating systems, then configure and optimize it afterward. The hidden benefit from virtualization is that users can unpack a ready-to-run collection of software components–operating system and all–and drop it onto a fresh, empty partition of the computer called a virtual machine. No muss, no fuss, no driver updates, no configuration file tweaking, no conflicts with other software.Virtualization essentially lets the companies selling the software handle the tricky part also provides a clean slate for installation.There’s one problem, however: Some software licensing plans aren’t designed to accommodate such schemes, though that could eventually change.One convert to the approach is Open Xchange, a server software company that lets customers download its software packaged into a virtual machine so they can quickly get to the evaluation stage. Within the next six months, the company plans to release software for production use, not just testing, said Dan Kusnetzky, executive vice president of marketing strategy. “We send an image that (has) a complete stack of software preinstalled, set up and ready to go,” Kusnetzky said. “We felt it would be an advantage in the competitive marketplace,” he said, because without the virtual machine approach, “it took a level of expertise to install it.” Representatives from three powers in the virtualization realm–EMC subsidiary VMware, its XenSource with the open-source Xen software and Microsoft with the proprietary Virtual Server software–all believe at a minimum that the idea has potential. But it’s VMware, which leads the virtualization market, that’s working hardest to make virtual machine-based installation a reality–and to make its underlying virtual machine technology the foundation of choice. It has a Web site where people can download sample virtual-machine-based packages from Oracle, IBM and others. “The reasons it’s going to become mainstream is you can now package your application with the operating system it really wants. You get the exact patch level and everything in the OS that you want,” said VMware President Diane Greene. And it’s particularly useful for small software companies that don’t have engineers to support a wide variety of systems. “They don’t have to necessarily port their software to every possible operating system and every possible version of the operating system.” In recent months, VMware started offering two free ways that customers can try out virtual-machine-based software packages, which it calls virtual appliances. First came VMware Player in 2005, good for desktop applications, such as an isolated partition for safely surfing the Internet. In February came part two: VMware Server for server tasks. Xen programmers are currently stabilizing their core virtual machine software, but virtual-machine-based installation will happen with Xen, too, predicted Simon Crosby, XenSource co-founder and chief technology officer. “That’s equally possible in Xen…I definitely think it’s going to happen,” Crosby said, though he acknowledged Xen doesn’t yet have VMware’s mature virtual machine management software or established presence at many customer sites.

Licensing lumps

 

Not so fast, cautions Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. “This is a direction, but not a near-term mainstream change in the way that everyone installs their applications,” Haff said. “There are too many details to work through. Licensing is one issue.” The licensing hurdle stems chiefly from the fact that the installation method requires the inclusion of an operating system, and although software companies might delight in distributing them willy-nilly, operating system companies are more finicky. Microsoft, for example, permits only evaluation copies of Windows to be distributed, and then only within a company and only to test and evaluate software, said James Ni, group product manager for server virtualization at Microsoft. “Currently there is no redistribution of the Windows Server operating system,” Ni said. Right now, the virtual installation idea is about testing software rather than full-on production use, so the evaluation software approach is appropriate, Ni argued. He’s not alone in his assessment. “I would expect this to be primarily about experimentation,” said Forrester analyst Frank Gillett. Ni didn’t close the door to virtual-machine-based software sales. Market forces dictated major changes to Microsoft licensing policies before. For example, Microsoft in 2004 began charging the same price for a dual-core processor as for a single-core processor, and in 2005 started permitting customers with one license for Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition to run as many as four copies on a single server partitioned with virtual machine software. But Microsoft’s policy is an impediment to VMware’s aspiration. Greene sees companies distributing virtual-machine-based software internally today and expects customers will eventually buy it that way, Greene said. “Microsoft is not letting their operating system be used in this model,” Greene said. And though it’s had a more permissive position in the past, it has backed off that stance: “Microsoft did not renew our license to (redistribute) Windows.” Open-source software, of course, has fewer restrictions. “Linux makes it easy,” Gillett said. …

Not just the operating system

Microsoft, Xen and VMware virtualize a computer’s hardware. But some companies tackling the problem at a higher level are offering a different revamp of software installation. SWsoft sells a product called Virtuozzo that essentially virtualizes the operating system rather than the underlying hardware. That lets several programs run at once in separate zones on one instance Linux or Windows. Sun Microsystems has taken the same approach with its “containers” technology in Solaris 10. “We have templates for close to 100 different solutions and applications for various configurations,” said SWsoft Chief Executive Serguei Beloussov. “When you apply a template to a certain virtual private server (a partition), this solution will immediately become available.” …Softricity is another company that tries to break the hard link between operating system and applications. Its software first captures all the modifications a software package makes to Windows, letting companies store employees’ configurations on a central server rather than directly modifying a PC and potentially causing conflicts among different programs. “The applications are no longer bound to the operating system,” said David Greschler, co-founder and vice president of corporate marketing. That lets administrators quickly set up new PCs or update existing ones, he said. It also means employees can move from one PC to another without disruption, because their software is automatically enabled when they log on to a new PC.

Different standards

Yet another complication comes from the fact that VMware, Xen and Microsoft use a different file format for their virtual machines. In August, VMware began trying to standardize its format. That was shortly after Microsoft began offering royalty-free licenses to use its format, called Virtual Hard Disk. And Xen uses a third format, XVM. Barriers between these formats are not insurmountable. For example, XenSource licensed Microsoft’s VHD and will offer the ability to import virtual machines created with Microsoft Virtual Server, Crosby said, and VMware shared its format as well. At the same time, VMware offers support for that feature with its Virtual Machine Importer software. Insurmountable, yes, but barriers nonetheless. “It will tend to retard the movement toward a standard hypervisor level that just sits on top of x86 hardware,” Haff said, adding that low barriers would mean customers could more easily substitute one virtualization company’s product for another. “It is not in VMware’s (or Microsoft’s) business interest to be able to have someone’s free, native hypervisor just slip in to replace ESX Server.” Another hitch stems from cultural obstacles to virtualization in general, Red Hat Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said. “The customers I’ve talked to over the last six months are challenged by the human issues: How will they deal with the sharing of physical resources across the enterprise? We’ve all gotten conditioned to having our own server environments,” he said. Virtual installation will happen, but XenSource’s Crosby understands the change won’t happen overnight, “I think it’s going to be a fairly profound change for the industry to get there.”

 

Read this full article at source

Filed Under: News, Partnerships, People Tagged With: dan kusnetzky, Forrester, illuminata, microsoft, open xchange, red hat, swsoft, virtual server, virtualisation, virtualization, Virtuozzo, vmware, xensource

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