VIRTUAL MACHINES

Here is the change log:

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)
• VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (”branched snapshots”; see the manual for more information)
• 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)
• More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)
• The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
• Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
• Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
• Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)
• Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: guest SMP fixes for certain rare cases
• GUI: snapshots include a screenshot
• GUI: locked storage media can be unmounted by force
• GUI: the a log window grabbed all key events from other GUI windows (bug #5291)
• GUI: allow to disable USB filters (bug #5426)
• GUI: improved memory slider in the VM settings
• GUI: the VirtualBox website couldn’t be opened from the help menu (bug #4559)
• 3D support: major performance improvement in VBO processing
• 3D support: added GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array support
• 3D support: fixed crashes in FarCry, SecondLife, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Eve Online (bugs #2801, #2791)
• 3D support: fixed graphics corruption in World of Warcraft (#2816)
• 3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (#4653)
• 3D support: fixed incorrect rendering of non ARGB textures under compiz
• iSCSI: support iSCSI targets with more than 2TiB capacity
• VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash (bug #5424)
• Network: fixed the E1000 emulation for QNX (and probably other) guests (bug #3206)
• NAT: added host resolver DNS proxy (see the manual for more information)
• VMDK: fixed incorrectly rejected big images split into 2G pieces (bug #5523, #2787)
• VMDK: fixed compatibility issue with fixed or raw disk VMDK files (bug #2723)
• VHD: fixed incompatibility with Hyper-V
• Support for Parallels version 2 disk image (HDD) files; see the manual for more information
• OVF: create manifest files on export and verify the content of an optional manifest file on import
• OVF: fixed memory setting during import (bug #4188)
• Mouse device: now five buttons are passed to the guest (bug #3773)
• VBoxHeadless: fixed loss of saved state when VM fails to start
• VBoxSDL: fixed crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)
• X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)
• Mac OS X hosts: don’t auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (bug #4866)
• Mac OS X hosts (64 bit): don’t interpret mouse wheel events as left click (bug #5049)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed a VM abort during shutdown under certain conditions
• Solaris hosts: combined the kernel interface package into the VirtualBox main package
• Solaris hosts: support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture (with OSS audio backend).
• Shared folders: VBOXSVR is visible in Network folder (Windows guests, bug #4842)
• Shared folders: performance improvements (Windows guests, bug #1728)
• Windows, Linux and Solaris Additions: added balloon tip notifier if VirtualBox host version was updated and Additions are out of date
• Solaris guests: fixed keyboard emulation (bug #1589)
• Solaris Additions: fixed as_pagelock() failed errors affecting guest properties (bug #5337)
• Windows Additions: added automatic logon support for Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Windows Additions: improved file version lookup for guest OS information
• Windows Additions: fixed runtime OS detection on Windows 7 for session information
• Windows Additions: fixed crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)
• Linux Additions: added support for uninstalling the Linux Guest Additions (bug #4039)
• Linux guest shared folders: allow mounting a shared folder if a file of the same name as the folder exists in the current directory (bug #928)
• SDK: added object-oriented web service bindings for PHP5

AT&T upped its cloud portfolio Monday when announced it was working with VMware and Sun to develop its own cloud computing service.’

Much like other cloud computing offerings, AT&T’s Synaptic Compute as a Service aims to give users scalable on-demand computing capacity that they can increase or decrease depending on their immediate needs and without the need to invest heavily in on-site infrastructure. The service’s key features include a Web portal for ordering and managing service capacity; disk capacity for every virtual server’s operating system; and 24-hour network monitoring and management by AT&T’s support staff.

The service utilizes VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform and its vCloud API to help AT&T connect and integrate its own cloud with the public Web. AT&T also says that it is also using Sun’s hardware software and reference architecture to “create an environment to make it easy for developers to build and deploy value-added services.” Sun, along with IBM, was one of the first companies to offer a computing-on-demand service that treated computing power more like a utility and that was a precursor to today’s cloud-based offerings.

According to a post from David Marshall over at InfoWorld: In addition to recently settling their legal disputes Intel and AMD have entered into a 5 year cross-licensing agreement. The two companies will share enough informations about their servers to hopefully make them more compatible with each other. Potentially they may finally solve a very serious hypervisor compatibility issue.

Live Migration in a Mix environment

When it comes to live-migrating a VM running on Intel to an AMD server or vice versa…well you can forget about it.

You may not notice much of a difference between installing a Linux or Windows operating system on top of either a physical AMD- or Intel-based server, but there is a big difference and cause for potential problems when you are implementing avirtualization platform. While the hypervisor itself doesn’t necessarily care if it is being installed on top of an AMD or Intel host server, problems come about with virtual machines installed on these host servers later if applied in a mixed environment.

Live migration technology has quickly become one of the key enabling technologies found within a modern hypervisor platform. With it, a virtual datacenter gets the added bonus of business continuity and disaster recovery by being able to quickly and easily move a virtual machine from one server to another without any down time to the end-user or the application.

However, there is a problem — there usually is, right?  This capability doesn’t extend itself to servers operating in mixed mode with CPUs from different chip vendors. In other words, it won’t live migrate a virtual machine from an AMD-based server to an Intel-based server or vice versa, one of the reasons being that these two chip vendors have slightly different CPU instruction sets and different model-specific registers (MSRs).

No confirmation yet but will see.

Generally your guest OS does not need to be modified in order to run in a VM. However it is probably not running as efficiently as it should. The VM will never be exactly like the real hardware, it does what it can to replicate expected functionalities and translate commands from the guest. It’s not unlike speaking through a translator. It would be much easier to carry a conversation if your interlocutor could speak your language - even a little bit.

Well, most virtualization packages have reached that same conclusion. They provide additional software (mostly drivers) that can be installed on specific guest OS. With VirtualBox they are called Guest Additions.

Once installed, you may notice significant improvement at every levels: Memory usage, Sound, 3D support, Time synchronization, Better video support.

VMware ESX server - now available as a free download - runs on “bare metal”. It is a fairly complex system centered around 2 kernels. The system first boots into a linux kernel which in turns loads a custom “vmkernel” which then becomes the main hypervisor. The initial linux kernel then becomes the first virtual machine on the box.There is a highly symbiotic relationship between the two kernels.

VMware ESX also provide custom drivers that can be installed on the guests in order to speed things up — They are called guest additions in VirtualBox.

VMware or Hyper-V

Comparing VMware ESX Server and the stand alone Hyper-V R2 is a pretty tough exercise. I was hoping to find out that one was clearly faster than the other - not true. Perhaps one is less expensive - not true, they are both free.

If you are a linux shop, picking between the two gets easier. To manage the stand-alone version Hyper-V (remotely) you will need to have a Windows box. It you are running Windows shop on the other hand Hyper-V R2 is tough to beat.However for large scale Windows shop, VMware is still best of breed - for now - they do offer a number of advanced  features.

Hyper-V has a microkernelized hypervisor. That means all the device drivers are kept outside the hypervisor within a parent  OS. As a result, the hypervisor is quite small (less than 1MB). In theory that should also make it much faster than other monolithic hypervisors like VMware ESX, but as we will see in a later post that isn’t the case.

Hyper-V R1 is built into Windows Server 2008 while R2 (aslo built into Windows Server 2008 R2) has now been made available as a free stand-alone download.

Both Hyper-V R1 and R2 come with similar management tools. R2 has support for live migration while R1 doesn’t.

Nice feature comparison from InfoWorld

Comparing Microsoft Hyper-V Server R1 to R2 Features

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R1 Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Physical processor support Up to 4 processors Up to 8 processors

Logical processor support Up to 16 Up to 64

Physical memory support Up to 32GB Up to 1TB

Live migration No Yes

High availablility No Yes

Management options Hyper-V MMC, Windows Server 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Remote Server Administration Tool (free), Windows Server 2008 R2 System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

Of Note:

* Support for running up to 384 virtual machines with up to 512 virtual processors

* Processor compatibility mode for live migration across different processors from the same vendor

* Hot add/remove of virtual storage

* Networking enhancements: VMQ, Chimney, and support for jumbo frames

* Simplified management using sconfig

* Boot from flash

Type 1 hypervisors run on bare metal unlike say VirtualBox , Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. All running on top of your current OS. Citrix’s XenServer, Hyper-V, VMware’s ESX are type 1 hypervisors.

What is so great about them ?

Performance, Performance and Performance

Distributing and setting up enterprise software is about to get a whole lot easier with Virtual Appliances. Imagine installing server based groupware, wikis, accounting suite, advanced firewalls or web servers virtually any server based products  in minutes. Nothing to configure,build, tweaked, no database to install. Yes, that’s the future of enterprise software with Virtual Appliance.

What’s a Virtual Appliance ?

Basically, a compressed virtual machine image, with all the required components already installed and configured. Think frozen pizza - You throw it into the oven and diner is ready. Deployment cost has always been a significant factor when it comes to large enterprise software - think ORACLE, SAP. Imagine downloading a complete SAP suite + database of your choice pre-installed and pre-configured and simply loading it onto your VirtualBox, Xen, VMware Hypervisor and voila!

Virtual appliances and the Open Virtualization Format

Not only has virtualization advanced the state of the art in maximizing server efficiency, it has also opened the door to new technologies that were not possible before. One of these technologies is the virtual appliance, which fundamentally changes the way software is delivered, configured, and managed. But the power behind virtual appliances lies in the ability to freely share them among different hypervisors. Learn the ideas and benefits behind virtual appliances, and discover a standard solution for virtual appliance interoperability called the Open Virtualization Format.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols over at ComputerWorld looks at the upcoming shooting war between Citrix VMware and Microsoft. Citrix and Microsoft are a bit new to the virtualization battlefield, they both bring highly competitive ammunition to the table. VMware the reigning superpower of server virtualization is still winning is still vastly dominating the battlefield. For how long ?

The new version of Workstation, announced Tuesday, supports the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. VMware Workstation 7 also works with features in the Windows 7 interface — Flip 3D and Aero Peek — to show live thumbnail pictures of a user’s virtual machines.

Users can create virtual machines with up to four virtual processors or four virtual cores, and up to 32GB of memory per virtual machine. They can also pause a virtual machine to free up more CPU resources, according to VMware.