In February Computer Associates (CA) appointed Andi Mann as its new Vice President of Product Marketing for Virtualization Management. Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) for more than four years, Mann is a well-know and respected industry analyst, extremely focused on the virtualization and cloud computing markets. His insight and privileged position in the industry will hopefully increase the confidence in the CA virtualization strategy and capability to execute. So far the company in fact didn’t play a too active role, and while its messaging seem to imply a renewed

Second day here in Prague for the Catalyst Conference 2010. Yesterday virtualization.info reported about a subset of the agenda, providing live coverage of three sessions about Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing. Today the focus will shift on server and desktop virtualization, including a promising session about client hypervisors. The first session we are going to cover is titled Server Virtualisation, Mobility, and Shared Physical Infrastructure: New Beginnings , performed by Chris Wolf , Research Director at Gartner. Wolf is on stage. He starts describing the state of the union for the virtualization market: many companies now consider virtual infrastructures as the default platform for all x86 applications, and this platform is the foundation of emerging standard architecture models designed by vendors like VMware, Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Microsoft and HP, featuring a deeper integration between servers, storage, networks, security and management. Part of emerging trend is achieving greater density. Wolf mentions the endless debate rack-form-factor servers vs blade systems, and he still recommends 2-way rack servers. Another emerging trend is adopting more than one virtualization platform. Wolf reports that practically all organizations have at least two: a bare-metal one (type-1 VMM) for production virtual machines and a hosted one (type-2 VMM) on many end-users workstations, for development, testing, etc. Wolf also reports that customers usually run separate server and desktop business units, choosing VMware or Hyper-V for server consolidation and XenServer with XenApp for client consolidation (aka VDI), while non-critical workloads are served by free products from all vendors. The adoption of multiple virtualization platforms implies working with more tools and images, in an environment where portability is complex. Of course the benefit of this is that the lock-in is reduced. On the security front, there’s a disconnection between security and operations. Some solutions are emerging but they aren’t ready to offer truly secure multi-tenant environments. On top of that we don’t have any standard security model. On the networking front, layer 2 switches are being converted into virtual switches (Cisco is leading the effort with the Nexus 1000V and the Open vSwitch project, supported by Citrix, is following) and other network appliances are following too. This may translate in a revenue shrink for networking vendors. The effort to extend existing virtual infrastructure to become IaaS private cloud infrastructures is good on paper but it’s extremely difficult. Wolf predicts that it will take up to 5 years to reach an acceptable maturity level.

This week virtualization.info is in Prague, Czech Republic, to follow and report about the Burton Group (a Gartner independent subsidiary) Catalyst Conference 2010 Europe. The event features a specific

This week Xen.org opened a new section of its website dedicated to research papers. One of the first two published there is especially interesting: Post-copy live migration of virtual machines From the abstract: We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of post-copy based live migration for virtual machines (VMs) across a Gigabit LAN. Post-copy migration defers the transfer of a VM’s memory contents until after its processor state has been sent to the target host. This deferral is in contrast to the traditional pre-copy approach, which first copies the memory state over multiple iterations followed by a final transfer of the processor state. The post-copy strategy can provide a “win-win” by reducing total migration time while maintaining the liveness of the VM during migration. We compare post-copy extensively against the traditional pre-copy approach on the Xen Hypervisor. Using a range of VM workloads we show that post-copy improves several metrics including pages transferred, total migration time, and network overhead. We facilitate the use of post-copy with adaptive prepaging techniques to minimize the number of page faults across the network. We propose different prepaging strategies and quantitatively compare their effectiveness in reducing network-bound page faults. Finally, we eliminate the transfer of free memory pages in both pre-copy and post-copy through a dynamic self-ballooning (DSB) mechanism. DSB periodically reclaims free pages from a VM and significantly speeds up migration with negligible performance impact on VM workload.

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Core Security Technologies, provider of the CORE IMPACT family of comprehensive enterprise security testing solutions, has issued an advisory disclosing a vulnerability that could affect large numbers of organizations and consumers using Microsoft’s Virtual PC virtualization technology and leave them open to potential attack. A Core Security Exploit Writer working with CoreLabs, the research arm… This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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ScaleMP, a provider of virtualisation solutions for high-end computing, today announced that R Systems, a service provider of flexible, on-demand high-performance computing resources to the commercial and academic research community, has deployed ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation in its data centers. With vSMP Foundation, R Systems is able to isolate customer systems for security purposes, help… This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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