Xen

Ubuntu To Adopt KVM As Primary Virtualization Platform

February 14, 2008 by Kris Buytaert 2 Comments

Ubuntu is the first Linux distribution to choose KVM over Xen as it’s virtualization solution.

In an interview from UbuntuWeekly with Soren Hansen, the 26-year-old who works for Canonical as virtualization specialist on the Ubuntu server team, said:

“We’ve chosen to settle on KVM as our main virtualization focus. KVM is a special version of QEMU which utilizes the new virtualization extensions that both Intel and AMD have added to their newest CPU models.”

The Ubuntu team is integrating libvirt, virsh and virt-manager as a graphical frontend in their upcoming edition.

Ubuntu is quickly becoming the leading Desktop distribution , so choosing for KVM as their virtualization platform makes a lot of sense. Traditionally, Xen has been the server virtualization platform where as KVM , developed by Avi Kivity from Qumranet, has been gaining more desktop use adoption.

To Be Followed: ivi, A Java Virtual Interface

January 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

From the lostcreations team comes:

ivi, which stands for Java Virtual Interface. ivi is currently the beginnings of a single GUI application that allows an IT administrator to manage a VMware virtual infrastructure, Xen servers, KVM boxes, and even OpenVZ systems all from one interface. ivi is currently very alpha and can only connect to VMware VI3 and Xen systems. The l o s t c r e a t i o n s blog will chart the progress of ivi.

[Source: Server Virtualization Blog ]

Q-layer Announces € 7 ($ 9) Million Round.

February 7, 2007 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Belgian based virtualization start-up Q-layer just announced that it has closed a € 7 million ($ 9 million) round with Wellington Partners, Partech International and Big Bang Ventures.

This funding seems to confirm the industry trust among venture capitalists that 2007 will be the virtualization break-through year and that there is room in this market for more than VMware, Xen and Microsoft.

After a € 1.4 million first round in May 2006, Q-layer announced that Munich-based Wellington Partners and San Francisco-based Partech International have taken the lead in a € 7 million ($ 9 million) investment in the company. The lead investor of the first round, Big Bang Ventures will also participate in this round. Q-layer plans to use the proceeds of this round to build up its market presence in the US and Europe. As a result of this investment, Bart Markus of Wellington Partners and Nicolas El Baze of Partech International will join Kristof De Spiegeleer (founder & CEO); Niko Nelissen (VP Business Development) and Frank Maene of Big Bang Ventures on the board of directors.

BEA to run Java sans operating system

December 11, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

C|Net reports that BEA Systems has created a version of its Java application server designed for virtualization technology, using an approach that cuts the operating systems out of the picture. At the company’s customer conference in Beijing this week, BEA will give details of a forthcoming product called WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and of related products, including an administration application.

WebLogic Server is a Java application server used to run Java programs, such as high-volume Web sites. The virtual edition is a break from BEA’s current offering in that it was written to run on VMware’s hypervisor, which is the basis for VMware’s virtualization software.

Some virtualization software uses a hypervisor that lets a single computer run several instances of an individual software package.

In BEA’s case, it created software called Liquid VM. Liquid VM is an addition to the company’s JRockit Java virtual machine, which runs directly on VMware’s hypervisor.

That virtual machine allows Java programs to interact with hardware servers without the need for an operating system, according to Stephen Hess, director of product management for the WebLogic Platform.

The goal of the virtualization push at BEA is to give IT administrators a set of tools to consolidate several Java applications on a single server and to optimize their performance, he said. Typically, virtualization is used in corporate data centers to improve the utilization of existing servers by putting several workloads on a single machine.

“Our goal was to double the utilization by running natively,” said Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic products, “and to double the performance.” The setup will allow companies to create new instances of Java applications to meet spikes in demand in a few seconds, compared with 45 minutes, as is the case now, he said.

WebLogic Server Virtual Edition is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of next year. An accompanying management console for administrators, called Liquid Operations Control, is due in the summer of 2007.

The company intends to create editions of its WebLogic virtualization software to run on virtualization packages from Xen and Microsoft, executives said…

Read more on this article by Martin LaMonica at source

Hitachi elbows into the Virtualization Game

December 6, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware, Xen and Microsoft Look Out!

Jave Developer’s Journal reports that Hitachi is claiming to have a mainframe-derived firmware approach to virtualization that’s better than VMware or Xen or Microsoft.

The approach has been built into a new species of Hitachi’s blade servers called BladeSymphony with Virtage, Virtage being the so-called “breakthrough” embedded widgetry that bakes virtualization into the hardware as an alternative to third-party virtualization software.

Virtage

Being firmware, Hitachi says, Virtage can decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance. The box runs both Windows and Linux.

IDC group VP Vernon Turner, the head of the researcher’s Enterprise Computing practice, says BladeSymphony with Virtage is a “leap ahead in the virtualization game” and will fuel the proliferation of blades.

The machine has been out in Japan since August. Hitachi America Ltd, the company’s year-old server unit, will start offering the Itanium version of the box here in January. The company is wholly unclear when it will have an advertised Xeon unit and be able to mix and match Xeon and Itanium blades in the same chassis.

…As an Intel account, Virtage exploits Intel’s VT extensions in Itanium and Woodcrest. Applications never have to be changed to be virtualized, it said, like they sometimes have to be with VMware. …Hitachi claims the BladeSymphony server is the industry’s first real enterprise-class mission-critical blade server and Hitachi chief systems architect Paul Figliozzi says the box deserves that distinction because of its multi-blade SMP interconnect architecture, hot-swap capabilities, high performance, 16 PCI slots and native virtualization.

Hitachi positions it as the place to consolidate all three data center tiers – the edge, the application and the database – into a single chassis and hence lower TCO. Hitachi marketing VP Steve Campbell says that for rival IBM to do that would take a combination of both Intel servers and p Series iron for the back-end, a less elegant solution that takes up more real estate.

BladeSymphony’s SMP architecture lets up to four blades be lashed together into a single system. Since the 10U chassis holds eight blades altogether that’s two 16-way SMP systems to a chassis. Each Itanium blade holds two dual-core processors for a total of 32 cores per chassis, reducing footprint and power consumption.

Hitachi has been peddling the BladeSymphony line for the last two years and owns 20% of Japanese blade market.

IBM announces virtualization management tool

November 3, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtualization Manager

Stephen Shankland at CNET reported on IBM announcing a new management software to govern many types of virtual machines. IBM’s Virtualization Manager is a dashboard that lets administrators take actions such as allocating computing resources to virtual machines. The software can control IBM’s own System p and System i servers as well as x86 servers running VMware, Xen and Microsoft virtualization foundations.It’s part of the Tivoli Systems Director package. One customer is Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, a German engineering and science research group, which is using the software to manage 2,000 servers, some using Xen and VMware.