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Novell And Red Hat Upgrade Linux Enterprise Distros, Improve Virtualization Support

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Novell and Red Hat announced upgrades of their Linux-based enterprise distros, featuring improved virtualization and hardware support. In addition, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2 adds a new subscription management tool, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2 adds new security, clustering, desktop, and networking features.

Virtualization is the big story here. Red Hat has upgraded RHEL’s core virtualization hypervisor, Xen, to version 3.1.2, and has improved its support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architectures.

RHEL now supports virtualization of very large systems, says Red Hat, including systems with up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory. New CPU frequency scaling support is said to reduce power consumption for virtualized processes. RHEL also gains new clustering capabilities, including improved application failover support, which when combined with the virtualization enhancements, should lead to greater server farm stability.

Virtualization also seems to lead the way with Novell SLES 10 Service Pack 2 enhancements, which support Xen 3.2 (compared to RHEL 5.2’s Xen 3.1.2 support). Novell claims that with Xen 3.2, the new SLES is “the only Xen-based virtualization solution with full support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 guests, and live migration of those guests across physical machines.” Novell and Microsoft went in on an interoperability lab last fall.

Meanwhile, the company has been dropping hints about SLES 11, which is due in the first half of 2009. Novell hopes to make SLES 11 available as an appliance that will be supported by a new toolset designed to quickly build specialized images. Novell is planning versions optimized for specific ISV stacks, as well as a new embedded version to allow independent hardware vendors to embed virtualization and operating systems directly into the hardware. Other touted SLES 11 enhancements relate to “mission-critical data center technologies, Unix migration, virtualization, interoperability, green computing, and desktop Linux,” says Novell.

Both distros are available from today, according to both companies.

[Source: Linux Watch]

Citrix Unveils XenDesktop 2.0

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“It’s like getting a fresh new PC every day.” That’s how Citrix is touting its long awaited VDI solution, dubbed XenDesktop version 2.0, probably just because it’s what all the cool kids name their solutions nowadays.

Citrix

XenDesktop 2.0 was unveiled at Citrix Synergy 2008, with the company also revealing some previously unannounced details about the complete XenDesktop product line, including the release of a new Express Edition offering free desktop virtualization for up to 10 users, and new Enterprise and Platinum Editions which integrate application virtualization via the new XenApp for Virtual Desktops feature.

These are the five editions in detail for the XenDesktop product line:

  • Express Edition – free desktop virtualization for up to 10 users.
  • Standard Edition – offers a cost-effective, but high performance, entry-level desktop virtualization solution suitable for departmental implementations.
  • Advanced Edition – an enterprise desktop virtualization solution for organizations that have an existing application delivery already it place. Advanced Edition adds powerful virtual desktop provisioning capabilities that reduce storage costs and simplify desktop lifecycle management by enabling a single desktop image to dynamically create and update hundreds of virtual desktops on demand.
  • Enterprise Edition – comprehensive desktop delivery solution including integrated application delivery. Enterprise Edition adds fully integrated application delivery with XenApp for Virtual Desktops, based on the most proven application virtualization technology in the industry with over 100 million users and 99 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers.
  • Platinum Edition – ideal for customers looking to implement desktops as a service from the datacenter. Platinum Edition adds extensive optimization, security, monitoring and end user support benefits to create the ultimate desktop experience and best overall product value. This edition also includes the award-winning Citrix EasyCall™ technology, giving users instant click-to-call capability from any application, as well as a built in on-demand remote assistance feature that allows support staff to see exactly what end users see if a problem occurs, chat with them in real time, and even take permission-based control of the end-user’s mouse and keyboard to walk them through a problem resolution live.

XenDesktop is available now and can be downloaded today. Suggested retail pricing is per concurrent user as follows:

  • XenDesktop Express – free download
  • XenDesktop Standard – USD $75
  • XenDesktop Advanced – USD $195
  • XenDesktop Enterprise – USD $295
  • XenDesktop Platinum – USD $395

Citrix also unveiled a new Desktop Appliance Partner Program aimed at establishing trusted standards for desktop appliances, a new class of device that is purpose-built to deliver a superior user experience for virtual desktop delivery.

$500 Million For XenSource, Where Did All The Money Go?

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Over at Cambridge Cluster , Philip Baddeley wonders where the $500 million that Citrix paid for Xensource has gone.

In August of last year, Citrix and XenSource agreed on an acquisition price of $500 million in a mixture of cash and Citrix stock. The deal came trough in late October of 2007. Now 7 months later, Philip wonders where all the money went.

“You don’t hear as much about Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sevin Rosen as you used to. Kleiner Perkins is busy investing in anything but consumer Internet companies while Sevin Rosen decided against raising another fund last year. But, they are still cashing checks. The pair invested $6 million in a first round investment in January 2005 into. That’s a big hit for the duo. Other beneficiaries include Accel Partners, Ignition Partners and New Enterprise Associates.”

Philip mainly wonders how much of that money stayed in Cambridge:

“Was Cambridge Enterprise involved? It would have ranked as one of their top investments. If not, why not? Why was such a good deal funded outside of the Cambridge Cluster? Did any of the Cambridge Angels or the other groups invest? There is no trace of XenSource on the Cambridge Evening News website. It would make a great Equity Fingerprint and case study but I guess it was registered in Delaware and so all the details are not available. Hopefully the Cambridge Cluster has a couple or ten of new angels to keep turning the wheels. Just think what the Cambridge Cluster could have done with $500 million …”

Obviously the University of Cambridge played a big role in the conception of Xen. But did it get a return on its investment?

Interesting question.

Xen Summit Boston, Partial Schedule Announced

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Stephen Spector has just announced the current agenda for the upcoming Boston Xen Summit.

Ian Pratt and Keir Fraser will kick off the event with an overview of the Xen roadmap.

After that there will be talks about XenLoop, A Transparent Inter-VM Network Loopback Channel and trusted VMs. Tamura Yoshiaki from NTT will be talking about Virtual Machine Synchronization for Fault Tolerance using DomT and other topics are still under review by the Program Committee.

More news when the final schedule is announced .

KVM vs Xen, Who Will Win The Fight?

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Ian Pratt and Benny Schnaider are using strong words against each other.

As KVM is gaining more and more popularity by being adopted in several Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, the battle between different virtualization technologies continues to be interesting.

While KVM is being adopted by a variety of software and distribution vendors, Xen is being adopted by hardware vendors to be shipped directly with the iron.

We asked Ian at FOSDEM if he felth the Xen community was changing and if he thought the contributions from the community were slowing down.

“We certainly haven’t seen that. If you think about the life of the Xen project, there have been a number of significant changes. When we left the University to set up XenSource, people were worried we might go off and take Xen in closed source or something, but we didn’t. One of the things that we did do was just to provide greater transparency by setting up the Xen advisory board and the Xen.org website. The advisory board has members from companies like Intel, AMD, HP, IBM, … big companies that are now contributing to Xen and have oversight from the advisory board, so I think the community is pretty happy and it’s going from strength to strength.”

According to ZDNet, Ian also claims that “KVM is not a true hypervisor. It tries to add virtualization capabilities to the Linux kernel but it’s not a true hypervisor approach. The Xen community is alive and well. Xen is a true hypervisor architecture that’s better for scalability, security and availability.

One of the biggest arguments against Xen is that KVM is already in the kernel. Theodore Ts’o thinks “it’s inevitable that Red Hat and Novell will standardize on KVM because of its inclusion in the kernel.” Xen never finished their efforts and KVM was quickly adopted into that same Linux Kernel.

Strong words also from the KVM front:

“If Xen will die or not die, I don’t know. But KVM will take over and be the virtualization selection of choice,” said Benny Schnaider, CEO and co-founder of Qumranet.

KVM or Xen? Time will tell, today both have different features and it will take some time until their feature set is similar, so the choice is about what YOU need, not about what the vendors claim you need.

[Source: ZDNet]

Absolute Performance Releases System Shepherd 5.0

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Absolute Performance yesterday announced the availability of System Shepherd version 5.0, performance management software SaaS applications. System Shepherd 5.0 brings the ability to instrument and manage application software operating in VMware, Xen, Hyper-V and Parallels virtualized environments.

Absolute Performance

The 5.0 release of System Shepherd adds the ability to look deep into the virtualization software hypervisor, giving insight into the performance of multiple applications, web servers, databases and operating systems running across a single or multiple virtual machines. System Shepherd quantifies the resource utilization of all the software operating within the virtualized environment, easing performance tuning and resource management of virtualized applications and software. System Shepherd supports VMware ESX hypervisor and will expand support to Parallels, Xen and Hyper-V in the coming months.
System Shepherd 5.0 is the foundation of Absolute’s suite of On Demand software solutions for managing software performance in software-as-a-service delivered applications, content and enterprise solutions. Version 5.0 brings a fully customizable dashboard based on the flexible, iGoogle-style web-based user interface.

Everything is configured through System Shepherd’s web interface, cutting installation time down to less than a day, even hours, as compared to the weeks, months and sometimes years to install on-premise enterprise management systems.

[Source: SYS-CON]