2009/06/18
TheRegister: Sun kicks out VirtualBox 3.0 beta
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Just after Oracle closes its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in about a month's time, one of the things it's going to have to sort out is a hodgepodge of virtualization products that Oracle and Sun have amassed. But in the meantime, Sun's VirtualBox development team is still at it, rolling out the first beta of VirtualBox 3.0.
According to the announcement made by Frank Mehnert, who heads up the VirtualBox product at Sun and who used to get his paycheck from Innotek before Sun acquired the small German software development company in February 2008, VirtualBox 3.0 will be "a major update."
The most significant change in VirtualBox 3.0 is support for multiple processors within guest virtual machine partitions riding atop of the VirtualBox hypervisor. The 3.0 release will, according to Mehnert, support guest partitions that span as many as 32 virtual processors on x64 processors. (A virtual processor in the VirtualBox lingo is one core, no matter how many threads it has it it supports simultaneous multithreading). The virtual SMP support for VirtualBox partitions coming in the 3.0 release will require VT-x features on Intel's Core and Xeon processors and AMD-V features on Advanced Micro Devices' Athlon and Opteron processors.
VirtualBox 3.0 also has experimental support for Direct3D 8 and 9 graphics support for applications and is particularly useful for games. If the phrases "experimental support" in a "beta program" are not a strong enough caution to you, Mehnert reminds everyone in the announcement that the beta release "should be considered a bleeding-edge release meant for early evaluation and testing purposes."
So by all means try this at home, but maybe not at the office where you are trying to get work done (presumably). VirtualBox 3.0 will support OpenGL 2.0 graphics for Windows, Linux, and Solaris guests as well. (The host OS and machinery has to support OpenGL 2.0 graphics for the guests to be able to use it). The updated VirtualBox also includes a bunch of bug fixes, which are detailed in the release notes. You can download the binaries of VirtualBox 3.0 beta 1 here.
The latest production-grade version of VirtualBox is 2.2.4, which was release on May 29. This was a maintenance release fixing bugs, not adding features. The last major release of VirtualBox was 2.2.0, which was delivered in early April as all of the IBM-Sun-Oracle shenanigans were going on. That release supported Windows 7 and Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" guests as well as expanding memory for VMs to 16 GB (up from 3.5 GB).
The 2.2 release also added Open Virtualization Format (OVF) to the VM formats already enabled in VirtualBox, which include VMware's VMDK and Microsoft's VHD virtual machine disk formats along with VirtualBox's own VDI native format. Sun has promised that live partition migration would be coming in a future release this year, but it is not clear if that will be with VirtualBox 3.0.
The big question, of course, is what Oracle will do with its Oracle Enterprise VM and Virtual Iron hypervisors and tools as well as Sun's xVM Server (based on Xen) as well as VirtualBox on x64 iron as well as LDoms and Solaris containers on Sparc iron. With Red Hat's KVM coming on strong, there may be another one that Oracle has to add to the list, which also includes both Oracle and Sun support for XenServer and ESX Server. There's a lot of overlap in there, and it is hard to believe that everything will make the cut. ®
InfoWorld: Weighing the pros/cons of desktop virtualization
by Denise Dubie
Successful server virtualization deployments lead many IT managers to believe desktop virtualization would provide the same benefits. While that is partly true, companies need to be aware of how the two technologies differ, industry experts caution.
"Desktop virtualization is a very different beast and should not be treated as simple enhancements to the server strategy," says Natalie Lambert, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "The drivers are entirely different and the environment will present new challenges to those experienced with server virtualization."
Seven tips for succeeding with virtualization Seven things that will sink virtualization
For instance, desktop virtualization doesn't offer the near-immediate cost benefits many cite with virtual server rollouts. And while virtual servers present new security and management challenges, many argue that in the desktop realm, virtualization improves security and manageability for IT departments. In addition, the sheer numbers involved can be strikingly different.
"IT managers could be taking on 500 virtual servers, and that is a lot, but it is nothing compared to 10,000 desktops," Lambert says.
According to industry experts and IT pros, there are some similarities and many differences between virtual servers and virtual desktops. Here we highlight key factors that could help avoid major headaches when moving virtualization to the desktop.
Complexity intensified
Most IT departments at enterprise companies have exponentially more desktops to support than servers, virtual or otherwise. The sheer volume of desktops should be one of the first criteria IT managers consider when making a move to a virtual platform.With more than one billion PCs in the world, there's a huge opportunity for virtualization, but "all the requirements of the PC world need to be maintained as you migrate into the datacenter," says Mark Margevicius, vice president and research director at Gartner. "The desktop realm represents a lot more moving parts, considering all the uniqueness that happens on a PC needs to be maintained."
Server virtualization teams are unlikely to be responsible for the desktop infrastructure, beyond the servers that host the virtualization platforms. That means desktop groups need to rethink patch management, software distribution and other functions when applying them to a centralized system rather than a slew of disparate desktops.
"Desktop teams know how to manage 100,000 machines, so the practices and policies are completely different. In the virtual realm, the desktops come back to the server environment but cannot be thought of in the same terms," Forrester's Lambert says.
CNet: Google's data sync tool breaks Windows search
by Josh Lowensohn
Google is working on an update to its Google App Sync software, the latest version of which breaks Microsoft's Windows Desktop Search along with several plug-ins found in Outlook.
A post by Google on its enterprise blog late Tuesday details some of the broken plug-ins, which include Adobe's Acrobat PDF Maker toolbar, as well as Microsoft's Office Outlook Connector and Outlook change notifier. As a fix, Google is recommending that users with Google App Sync installed, and who need to use these tools and plug-ins simply uninstall the program until a fix can be made.
While the plug-ins may not be as important to some users, the crux of the problem is that Google's add-on disables Windows Desktop Search, and some other third-party search tools. It's not doing this maliciously though; Google says it does it to keep them from endlessly attempting to index the sync files the special software creates. Getting those programs to stop doing that will take cooperation from the companies that make them (including Microsoft), which Google says it's working on.
Google introduced its App Sync software earlier this month as an optional tool to its Premier and Education Edition users. It lets them sync up messages, calendar appointments, and contacts between Outlook and Google's hosted office services.
