Underexposed

(Credit: VMware)

VMware released version 1.1 of its Fusion virtualization software to run Windows on Intel-based Apple computers Monday--along with an offer for free versions of the software to some bloggers.

"I have convinced the powers at VMware central that there's big-time value in having a strong, open conversational relationship with the blogosphere," Peter Kazanjy, senior product marketing manager for VMware's Mac products, said in an e-mail sent to bloggers and seen by CNET News.com.

"I'm...offering an open NFR (not for resale) policy for people who are honest-to-goodness bloggers." There's "no obligation to blog about VMware Fusion, but if you do, please go ahead and send a link back to us to vmware.com/mac," he added. Unlike the free 30-evaluation version VMware also offers, the NFR version doesn't expire.

The offer was sent to fewer than 60 bloggers, a VMware representative said, and Kazanjy apparently didn't want to extend it to the entire blogosphere. "Feel free to let your blog friends know, but do me a favor and don't blog this offer," he said in the letter.

Fusion is playing catch-up with SWsoft's Parallels, which entered the market first. But VMware, which leads the overall virtualization market, is on the attack: the company also released a beta version of a tool to import Parallels virtual machines into VMware so that Windows installations can be moved to the other virtualization foundation.

According to VMware and Kazanjy, features in Fusion 1.1 include "robust" support for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard"; upgraded but still experimental support for DirectX 9.0 3D graphics; support for Boot Camp partitions as virtual machines; improvements to the "Unity" feature that lets Windows applications occupy a window unencumbered by menu bars and other Windows operating system elements; the ability to synchronize iPhone with Microsoft Outlook running in Windows; and performance improvements.

Fusion costs $80, but the upgrade is free.

VMware Server 2 beta, too
On Tuesday, VMware announced an open beta of VMware Server 2.0, its free server virtualization product known years ago as GSX Server. Unlike the premium ESX Server, VMware Server runs on a host operating system, Linux or Windows.

The new version should be generally available in 2008, VMware said.

New features include:

• Support for VMI, "paravirtualization" technology that lets Linux run much faster.

• Support for Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 beta, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon", among others.

• A Web-based management interface.

• Support for up to 8GB of memory and two processors per virtual machine.

• Support for 64-bit guest operating systems, as long as the software is running on a 64-bit host.

Virtual Iron, a start-up trying to commercialize the open-source Xen virtualization software, has just gotten a new chief executive, and he wants to grab some of the attention lavished on rivals in the suddenly high-profile market.

The new CEO is Ed Walsh, who led Avamar Technologies, a company focusing on economizing storage by reducing duplicative data, which EMC acquired in 2004. John Thibault, who was named Virtual Iron's CEO in 2005, will remain executive chairman of the 73-employee Lowell, Mass.-based company, Virtual Iron plans to announce Monday.

Virtual Iron has been in the virtualization business for three years, getting started as Katana Technology with the idea that virtualization could let software be spread across multiple machines. That didn't work out, though, so the company shifted gears in 2006 to sell software that lets customers control software running on Xen.

Walsh knows he has his work cut out for him as he tries to give the company a higher profile. "Now's the time to put in a little sales and marketing and to hit the gas," he said.

To help that part of the business, Virtual Iron also has hired John McCarthy from EMC and McData to be senior vice president of sales.

Virtualization, which lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, is a hot area, but the heat lies mostly with market leader and EMC subsidiary VMware, which had a successful initial public offering in August, following up last week with $65 million in net income on revenue that grew 90 percent from the year-earlier quarter to $358 million.

Also in August, Citrix Systems announced a deal to acquire Xen's primary backer, XenSource, a move it completed last week.

Meanwhile, Virtual Iron will have to reckon with other start-ups, including Qumranet, and Microsoft plans to make its serious virtualization debut in about a year.

Walsh seems to have Microsoft and XenSource more in his competitive crosshairs than VMware. He recognizes that XenSource has better recognition as a provider of Xen-based virtualization, but believes Virtual Iron's product is stronger.

"They have great marketing. The project has to catch up with their marketing," Walsh said. Virtual Iron, he said, "is the polar opposite." And Microsoft, he said, "isn't even to the table yet."

Walsh does have a strategy to work around VMware's dominance: partnerships with software companies on whose toes VMware is stepping. "They're racing so hard to grow this, they're going to gore the oxen of a lot of the ecosystem," he said.

VMware announced details of its forthcoming Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 on Monday, including an experimental feature to shut down servers if they're not necessary.

The feature, called Distributed Power Management, monitors how hard servers are working and moves virtual machines to new machines to let unneeded servers be shut down. When workload picks up again, the servers are powered up again, according to the publicly traded EMC subsidiary.

Virtual Infrastructure includes two main components. First is ESX Server, the underlying hypervisor that lets a single physical computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously in compartments called virtual machines. Second is VirtualCenter, which lets administrators monitor and manage those virtual machines.

Among other new features in VI 3.5, which is scheduled to be generally available later this year:

• The new ESX Server 3.5 gives Linux a boost with support for paravirtualization, which speeds some operations when the operating system is tailored to run on a virtual-machine foundation. It also can use a hardware feature called nested page tables that speeds memory accesses, modernizes storage and network abilities, and can run on servers with up to 128GB of memory.

• VMware Update Manager, which allows administrators to monitor which patches have been applied to operating systems and to apply those patches, regardless of whether a virtual machine is running or paused and saved to disk.

• Storage VMotion, a feature demonstrated at VMworld that lets a database's data store be moved from one storage system to another even as it's in use. The feature can be handy when taking a storage system down for repairs or upgrades, though the network resources required to move the data store to a new storage system can consume some of the capacity the database had when running ordinarily.

VMware sells VI in three editions: the basic Foundation, the mid-range Standard and the top-end Enterprise. For every two processors installed in a server (a processor being an x86 chip with up to four cores), Foundation costs $995, Standard costs $2,995 and Enterprise costs $5,750.

The Foundation product used to be called Starter, but the renamed version now removes previous limits on server processor count, memory utilization and shared storage.

Update: I corrected the CEO's name spelling.

Given how much time and money it sunk into KVM, the Linux-based, open-source virtualization project, it's not a surprise that that stealth-mode start-up Qumranet was working on virtualization. But until Monday, the company refused to say just exactly how.

At DemoFall 2007, Qumranet unveiled its strategy: software that makes it easier to run desktop PCs on central servers rather than on actual PCs. Others, notably market leader VMware, already have a start in that market, but Qumranet aims to make it possible by buying software from one company rather than hiring a systems integrator to stitch together a hodgepodge of components, said chief executive and co-founder Benny Schnaider.

Virtualization lets a single machine run multiple operating systems simultaneously. In the desktop virtualization arena, that's useful for replacing power-hungry desktops with energy-efficient servers that in principle also are easier to manage and back up.

Qumranet's SolidIce software runs on KVM virtual machines, which themselves run atop Linux. However, by virtue of features in newer Intel and Advanced Micro Devices processors, Windows can run unmodified on KVM.

Unsurprisingly, the company argues that it's cheaper than using full-fledged PCs. For basic desktop computing tasks, such as Word processing, SolidIce can squeeze about 20 instances of Windows onto a single dual-core, dual-processor server with 16GB of memory, said John-Marc Clark, vice president of marketing--and a former employee at remote desktop specialist Citrix Systems. Of course, somebody also has to pay for thin clients or PCs to tap into the remote servers.

Qumranet, founded in 2005, has funding from Sequoia Capital and Norwest Venture Partners. Of its 45 or so employees, about 5 employees are in the United States, with most research and development in Israel. The company is hiring sales and marketing now that its first product is available, Schnaider said.

The company also has technology it calls Spice (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) that's geared to transfer keystrokes, mouse clicks and audio to the server and to send video and audio back to the user. It's got partial support for USB devices today, Schnaider said. However, the company also supports Microsoft's RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

Clark sees a number of situations in which SolidIce would be useful. Many of them are the same as what we've heard for years from VMware and more recently SWsoft's Parallels group, but they're still worth noting for the uninitiated: providing a secure desktop to a temporary contractor; testing software or Web sites using various combinations of desktop software; avoiding painful transitions during PC upgrades; computer training rooms with a few dozen identical machines that need to be restored to a pristine state at the end of class; and running older software on incompatible new operating systems such as Windows Vista.

SAN FRANCISCO--Ubuntu sponsor Canonical announced a version of its Linux software stripped down for use just on virtualized environments.

The version, called Jeos for Just Enough Operating System and pronounced "juice," is now available, Canonical announced here at the VMworld conference Tuesday.

The version is intended to be a more compact and higher-performance foundation for virtual machine "appliances" that bundle the operating system with higher-level software. Virtualization lets operating systems and higher-level software run in compartments called virtual machines, and those VMs can be stopped, started, saved to disk and moved from one computer to another.

At VMworld, software maker Business Objects demonstrated an appliance built atop Jeos, the company said.

In other news of partnerships between the virtualization and open-source realms, VMware announced a project called Open Virtual Machine Tools. The open-source code can be used to improve the performance and features of virtual machines, according to the company.