An anonymous reader wrote to mention a TechWorld story about Windows Vista. According to the Gartner Group, Windows Vista is likely to be the last of its kind. "The problem is that the operating system's increasing complexity is making it ever more difficult for enterprises to implement migrations, and impossible for Microsoft to release regular updates. This, in turn, stands in the way of Microsoft's efforts to push companies to subscription licensing. The answer, according to Gartner, is virtualization, which is built into newer chips from Intel and AMD, and has become mainstream for x86 servers through the efforts of VMware." Speaking of Vista, C|Net reports that a new release candidate is on the way. The average tester should expect it by the end of September.

Jim Buzbee writes "Those you keeping up with the latest virtualization techniques being offered by both Intel and AMD will be interested in a new white paper by VMWare that comes to the surprising conclusion that hardware-assisted x86 virtualization oftentimes fails to outperform software-assisted virtualization. My reading of the paper says that this counterintuitive result is often due to the fact that hardware-assisted virtualization relies on expensive traps to catch privileged instructions while software-assisted virtualization uses inexpensive software substitutions. One example given is compilation of a Linux kernel under a virtualized Linux OS. Native wall-clock time: 265 seconds. Software-assisted virtualization: 393 seconds. Hardware-assisted virtualization: 484 seconds. Ouch. It sounds to me like a hybrid approach may be the best answer to the virtualization problem. "

porjo writes "Peace has been established on at least one front: XenSource and VMware are working together to improve virtualization in the Linux kernel. Their original disagreement has been displaced by a commitment to work on a solution together, says Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, the company that builds products around Xen virtualization software. The two are trying to come up with a common approach to virtualization support in the Linux kernel. [snip] The work now under way would let hypervisors from Microsoft, VMware, and Xen work together in the same data center. Under such a scenario, it would be possible for a Xen virtual machine, trapped on a piece of failing hardware, to be automatically moved over to a VMware hypervisor on another piece of hardware."

njyoder writes "As previously posted about, Joanna Rutkowska claimed to have discovered an allegedly undetectable vulnerability in Vista that takes advantage of AMD cpu's virtualization capabilities. a virtualization professional (Anthony Liguori of the Xen project) has now voiced his opinion to state this is bunkum. There are two parts two this — the ability to take over the machine and seamlessly drop the OS into a VM (which is very difficult, but possible) and the ability to have windows run in the VM undetectably (which is impossible). In fact, Rutkowska's prototype is VERY detectable. This is unfortunate mistake that people make when they jump to conclusions based on what is unfounded speculation and that includes the assumption that this would somehow be Vista specific, if it worked (noting that Vista doesn't run with administrator privileges by default)."

daria42 writes "Novell has fired back at Red Hat's claims that the open source Xen virtualization software is not yet ready for enterprise use. 'We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualization hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said "Yes, this technology's ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10."', Novell's chief technology officer said today. 'So I guess the other vendors would not do that if it weren't ready.'"

sunshineluv7 writes to tell us TechTarget is running a good overview of 'why, when, and how to use virtualization technologies to consolidate server workloads.' The summary provides links to several podcasts and other articles relating real world experience with how to utilize virtualization to best meet your needs. From the summary: "Advances in 64-bit computing are just one reason that IT managers are taking a hard look at virtualization technologies outside the confines of the traditional data center, says Jan Stafford, senior editor of SearchServerVirtualization.com."

Techie writes "Microsoft has decided not to move forward with a version of Virtual PC for the Intel-based Macintosh. The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch, Scott Erickson, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, told eWEEK. The article says Microsoft will also be discontinuing support of Visual Basic scripting in the next version of Office for Mac." From the article: "As cross-platform compatibility remains a top priority at Microsoft, Erickson says that as the company develops the next version of Office for Mac, the files will continue to be compatible across platforms, including with the 2007 Microsoft Office System for Windows. VB macros within files will not be accessible and users will not be able to view or modify them. However, the files themselves can be edited without affecting or changing the macros. "

pdscomp writes "VMware has just announced at today's Apple WWDC 2006 Conference that they are developing a port of VMware to Mac OS X. People interested in beta testing the product later this year can visit this link to sign up for the public test. It will be interesting to see how things play out between VMware and Parallels. Will Microsoft bother porting Virtual PC now that there will be two other Intel OS X virtualization solutions available? Now all we need is to get Mac OS X running under Xen."

HiTech writes "eWeek has an article looking at Oracle's frustration with both XenSource and VMware over their reluctance to work together. The goal is to develop a single interface for virtualization solutions in the Linux kernel. Oracle's comments follow those by Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman at Oscon last week that XenSource and VMware were butting heads instead of working together to come up with a joint solution. Brian Byun, VMware's vice president of products and alliances, admits the company had been approached by a neutral third party for offline mediation to establish how best to make this happen. But Simon Crosby, the CTO for XenSource, rules out any mediation, saying he believes the two companies are committed to solving the real technical issues."

Yesterday's post on the upcoming Windows Vista's image-based installer drew more than 450 comments. Some readers praised the change as sensible, even overdue, and others drew distinctions between various ways "image-based" software installations are implemented in real life, both in the Windows and Unix worlds, and supplied objections to the switch. Read on for some of the most interesting comments in the Backslash summary of the discussion.

suso writes "Microsoft has released a statement to the press, saying that they are to work with Xensource on making Windows Server work with Xen through Microsoft's own hypervisor technology." Coverage available from Reuters as well. From that article: " As a result of the collaboration, the next version of Windows Server, code-named 'Longhorn,' will provide customers with a virtualisation system that promises to help run both Windows and Linux on the same machine more cost-effectively. Microsoft said it expects to conduct a public trial of Windows Server virtualisation by the end of this year and to release a commercial version of the software within 180 days of the date when Windows Server 'Longhorn' is released. Microsoft aims to release 'Longhorn' by the end of 2007, it said."

InformationWeek is reporting that, during the same week that Microsoft announced the free price for Virtual PC, VMWare 1.0 was released for free as well. Though there were already many free options for virtualization available, these major products signal a shift in the industry. From the article: "There are many ramifications here. Obviously, the slew of products means network managers can now adopt virtual servers into their overall strategies and don't have acquisition costs providing a justification to avoid it. Other than the very-high-end VMware ESX and the midline Microsoft Virtual Server on mainstream XP platforms, virtualization is essentially free wherever you might want to use it."

GvG writes "After making Virtual Server available for free some time ago, Microsoft announced today it is offering Virtual PC as a free (as in beer) download. They also announced a change to the Vista license related to virtualization: Customers who deploy Windows Vista Enterprise have the ability to install up to four (4) copies of the operating system in a virtual machine for a single user on a single device. Even better, nothing in the license requires that Microsoft Virtualization technologies be used - if you want to use a competing product as your Virtualization solution, you still get the four extra licenses for use with VMs."

epit writes "VMware has released v1.0 of their VMware Server product for free (as in beer) as planned. Up until now, it had been a beta download. You can download your copy via the VMware website. Release notes are also available."

Dysfnctnl85 asks: "As a follow up to the previous discussion 'Alternatives to Citrix Remote Computing?', I've hit another brick wall in my quest to enhance the way my company does remote computing. Right now I've setup Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 R2 on two 64-bit machines with 16gb of RAM each. Before I can setup Presentation Server 4, I need to install the Novell client to allow access to our NetWare servers. After doing some research on Google, and hopping forums on the Novell Support boards, I've determined that Novell has no plans to release a 64-bit client for any Microsoft OS until Vista launches." Has anyone managed to get VMWare, Citrix and 64-bit Windows working together?

phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has put up a great review of the first full release of Parallels' virtualization software for OS X, Parallels Desktop 1.0. From the article: 'Move over emulation, virtualization is in and it's hotter than two Jessica Albas wresting the devil himself in a pit of molten steel. It's no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host's processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next. Add to that the fact that it's cheaper than getting a new machine and you have the guaranteed latest craze. Not even the Hula Hoop can stop this one.'"

PCM2 writes "Virtualization is all the rage these days. All the major Linux players are getting into the game with support for Xen, while Sun has Solaris Containers, Microsoft has Virtual PC, and VMware arguably leads the whole market with its high end tools. Even AMD and Intel are jumping onto the bandwagon. InfoWorld is running a special report on virtualization that gives an overview of all these options and more. Is it just a trend, or will server virtualization be the way to go in the near future?"

techmuse writes "eWeek has an article about a prototype rootkit that is implemented using a virtual machine hypervisor running on top of AMD's Pacifica virtualization implementation. The idea is that the target OS, or software running on it, would not be able to detect the rootkit, because the OS would be running virtualized on top of the rootkit. The prototype is supposed to be demonstrated at the Syscan conference and the Black Hat Briefings over the next month."

Ravi writes "I recently got hold of a very nice book on Ubuntu called Ubuntu Hacks co-authored by three authors - Kyle Rankin, Jonathan Oxer and Bill Childers. This is the latest of the hack series of books published by O'Reilly. They have made available a rough cut version of the book online ahead of schedule which was how I got hold of the book but as of now you can also buy the book in print. Put in a nutshell, this book is a collection of around 100 tips and tricks which the authors choose to call hacks, which explain how to accomplish various tasks in Ubuntu Linux. The so called hacks range from down right ordinary to the other end of the spectrum of doing specialised things." Read on for the rest of Ravi's review.

feminazi writes "Jeff Boles attributes VMWare's dominance over Microsoft in the virtualization market to a combination of product depth and focus, but especially to the fact that 'VMWare is actually delivering Microsoft's product in the way that Microsoft should be delivering it.' The ease of GUI but with those enterprise-ready traits that Microsoft is still struggling with: application separation, and decent resource utilization."