When Citrix announced the launch of the Open Virtual Switch project in May 2009 it raised a lot of attention. The early bits of Open vSwitch appeared online in August 2009 , along with a technology roadmap that clears the intention to compete against the VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch architecture and the Cisco Nexus 1000V software switch. It took almost an entire year to reach version 1.0 . Meanwhile Open vSwitch became a key component of the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) networking infrastructure, another project supported by Citrix. Customers are waiting to see a commercial implementation of the Open vSwitch and how Citrix will integrate it in XenServer and XenDesktop. Maybe the time has come: Citrix briefly announced that a new beta cycle for its hypervisor is about to begin and that the new build will feature a distributed virtual switching technology. Citrix opted to keep this beta private but it’s not shy to share a few details about the new feature: Greater visibility into the networking layer of the XS virtualization platform via standard tools and processes, including RSPAN and NetFlow. Distributed, fine grained networking configuration and control policies, including ACLs and QoS, that apply across VM migrations. The beta is planned to take place from July 12 to August 6, so it’s likely that Citrix plans to release a new version of XenServer (5.7? 6.0?) in time for the VMware VMworld 2010 conference (August 30 – September 2).

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After unveiling the list of features that will appear in the next major release of the VMware vSphere platform (currently numbered 4.1, but likely to change in 4.5 to align with the upcoming release of View 4.5 ), virtualization.info can now share full details about the performance improvements introduced by some of them, like Scalable vMotion , Wide VM Numa , Memory Compression and others. Let’s start with the new configuration limits that can vSphere 4.1 can reach: 3,000 virtual machines per cluster (compared to 1,280 in vSphere 4.0) 1,000 hosts per vCenter Server (compared to 300) 15,000 registered VMs per vCenter Server (compared to 4,500) 10,000 concurrently powered-on VMs per vCenter Server (compared to 3,000) 120 concurrent Virtual Infrastructure Clients per vCenter Server (compared to 30) 500 hosts per virtual Datacenter object (compared to 100) 5,000 virtual machines per virtual Datacenter object (compared to 2,500) The hostd footprint and memory consumption (down by 40%) has been greatly reduced, speeding up some operations by a factor of 3x. Scalable vMotion vSphere 4.1 supports up to 8 concurrent virtual machines live migrations and VMware seems to have renamed the feature in Scalable vMotion . The engine has been significantly reworked to reach a throughput of 8GB/sec on a 10GbE link, 3 times the performance scored in version 4.0. Wide VM Numa The vSphere 4.1 NUMA scheduler has been reworked to improve performance when a certain virtual machine needs more cores than the ones available on a certain NUMA node, assuming that the server has a large number of NUMA nodes. Depending on workloads and configurations, the performance improvement is up to 7%. Transparent Memory Compression vSphere 4.1 introduces a new memory over-commit technique called Transparent Memory Compression (TMC) that compresses on the fly the virtual pages that should be otherwise swapped on disk. Each virtual machine has a compression cache where vSphere can store compressed pages of 2KB or smaller size. TMC is enabled by default on ESX/ESXi 4.1 hosts but the administrator can define the compression cache limits or disable TMC completely. This results in a performance regain of 15% when there’s a fair amount of memory over-commitment and a regain of 25% in case of heavy over-commitment.

Yesterday Novell announced the upcoming availability of three new major release from its PlateSpin division: Migrate 9.0, Protect 10.0 and Forge 3.0. All three products have in common the same physical to virtual (P2V) migration engine originally developed by PlateSpin and formerly called PowerConvert. Over time, PlateSpin first and Novell then, forked it in three different tools to serve different use cases. The new wave of releases introduces support for Linux guest operating systems, which is available for P2V, V2V and P2P migrations. In details, this means that PlateSpin Migrate now can apply its Live Transfer and Live Server Sync technologies to Linux workloads. Novell introduces the two new features almost one year ago with Migrate 8.1 . PlateSpin Migrate 9 also supports the migration of Windows Clusters between physical and virtual infrastructures. PlateSpin Protect 10 (we are not sure if or when Protect 9 has been released) introduces a new, unified disaster recovery plan for all server workloads, whether physical or virtual, running both Windows and Linux, and a redesigned web user interface. Last but not least, the Forge 3.0 physical appliances, besides the support for Linux workloads, now come with increased memory and storage capacity, a new smart replication technology, support for Windows Clusters protection and APIs. The three products are expected to be available within the end of June.

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Yesterday Microsoft announced the release of System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010 and System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) 2010. The new version of SCE is based on the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 engine, and so it supports physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations, virtual-to-virtual (V2V) migrations of VMware virtual machines, Live Migration, PRO workload optimization technology, and a number of additional things: Additionally, the maximum number of Windows Server devices that SCE can manage has been raised from 30 to 50.

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InstallFree, a developer of desktop application virtualisation and management solutions, has announced the general availability of Version 2.0 of its flagship product, the InstallFree Bridge. The new release helps customers speed migrations to Windows 7 by using InstallFree’s unique application virtualization technology to eliminate desktop and web application compatibility issues, including the… This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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Almost one month ago, immediately after the VMware Partner Exchange conference, TechTarget published a scoop about some new features that may appear in the upcoming version of vSphere, expected later this year. The list includes: Transparent Memory Compression This will avoid swap when RAM is overcommited by compressing a set of target pages to a special region . VMware measured the latency of this technique as a hundred times better than the latency of swapping on rotating disks.