Virtuozity

Parallels announced the upcoming availability of Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition, a type-1 hypervisor which doesn’t need any host operating system to run. So the “for Mac” in the title just means that this specific version of the product supports Apple Xserve hardware, and thus allows customers to run Mac OS X Server virtual machines. Parallels offers a version of this hypervisor that supports other enterprise class x64 hardware since October 2009 but of course the Apple EULA prohibits to run Mac OS X Server guest operating systems on it.

Both versions share the same engine and so offer the same capabilities:

• Up to 12 vCPUs / 64GB vRAM / 2TB vHDDs / 16 vNICs / 8 USB 2.0 ports per VM
• Support for Intel VT-x, VT-d, FlexPriority and EPT
• Support for AMD-V and RVI
• Support for 32/64bit guest OSes (including all flavors of Windows, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD)
• Templates and snapshots
• VM full and incremental backups (Windows and Linux guests only)
• VM live migration
• CPU resource limits, prioritization and disk I/O priority
• Cold V2V migration between Parallels Servers Bare Metal hosts (VM to VM, or even VM-to-container / container-to-VM) and hot V2V migration (only for containers)
• Cold P2V migration from physical servers to virtual machines or containers
• Local management console and a CLI for most tasks within a single host
• Parallels Virtual Automation (formerly Parallels Infrastructure Manager) for enterprise management

Today Parallels may be the only company providing a viable virtualization platform for server and client consolidation on Xserve hardware. This will be interesting for classic server consolidation, but it will be a breakthrough if you are thinking about the possibilities regarding OS X based VDI environments. I am definitely looking forward to this release!

VMware announced the end of life (EOL) for its Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework. The company states that the next version of vSphere, due later this year, will not support VCB and will solely rely on the new vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) introduced with vSphere 4.0.

VCB binaries will be still available and supported on VI 3.x and vSphere 4.0 according to the support policy, but they will not be included in the new platform. Most partners with a strong focus on backup/restore already support VADP. VMware promises that even more vendors will offer VADP-based solutions in time for the next vSphere release.

Link: http://nss.cs.ubc.ca/remus/

Remus is an open source project which provides fault tolerance for virtual machines (VMs) running on the Xen hypervisor. The actual release 0.9 works with tip of the xen-unstable repository, supports paravirtualization and hardware VMs in various 32- and 64-bit configurations for Windows and Linux.

Remus provides transparent, comprehensive high availability to ordinary virtual machines running on the Xen virtual machine monitor. It does this by maintaining a completely up-to-date copy of a running VM on a backup server, which automatically activates if the primary server fails. Key features:

• The backup VM is an exact copy of the primary VM. When failure happens, it continues running on the backup host as if failure had never occurred.
• The backup is completely up-to-date. Even active TCP sessions are maintained without interruption.
• Protection is transparent. Existing guests can be protected without modifying them in any way.

I am looking forward to the day Remus will be announced stable and hopefully integrated into XenServer sooner than later!

Citrix announced that XenServer will become a free product in April. This is great news for the virtualization market and will put a lot of pressure on VMware. Citrix will also strengthen the cooperation with Microsoft and their management environment to ensure good integration into the Windows world, though Microsoft would like to become a major player in virtualization with Hyper-V themselves.

VMware has released an update of their P2V product vConverter. The new version vConverter 4 is now capable of virtualizing Windows Server 2008 and even Linux boxes, which is great news. If you are an enterprise customer, you will receive the update via vCenter because like the predecessor the product is fully integrated as a vCenter plugin.

After installing and activating the plugin you will find a new entry called "Import Machine" in the context menu in most views of vCenter. You can also create a scheduled task to start converting at any time you like.