Qemu is popular and open source emulator that lets you virtualize nearly any OS on any other OS. Qemu has now been ported to a new platform: Browsers. Most modern browsers like Chrome 11 and Firefox 4 can run this javascript based Emulator making it possible to run an actual Linux in your browser.

Since javascript is slower than native code, one would expect slower boot times for the Linux, but it boots amazingly fast. With a very minimal download and couple of seconds, your browser window boots into an actual Linux based on commandline. Ofcourse CLI-only makes the OS snappy for executing all your shell commands.

If you aren’t excited so far, read this again: “A PC emulator written in javascript, and running solely in browser“.

Try it now

Technical details of the Javascript based Qemu (read full)

This PC emulator is written entirely in Javascript. The emulated hardware is:

• a 32 bit x86 compatible CPU
• a 8259 Programmble Interrupt Controller
• a 8254 Programmble Interrupt Timer
• a 16450 UART.

The code is written in pure Javascript using Typed Arrays which are available in recent browsers. It was tested with Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 on Linux, Window and Mac. It doesn’t work with Opera.

CPU Emulation

The code is inspired from my x86 dynamic translator present in QEMU, but there are important differences because here it is an interpreter. The exact restrictions of the emulated CPU are:

1. No FPU/MMX/SSE
2. No segment limit and right checks when accessing memory (Linux does not rely on them for memory protection, so it is not an issue. The x86 emulator of QEMU has the same restriction).
3. No CS/DS/ES/SS segment overrides. FS/GS overrides are implemented because they are needed for Thread Local Storage in Linux.
4. A few seldom used instructions are missing (BCD operations, BOUND, …).
5. No single-stepping
6. No real mode
7. No 16 bit protected mode (although most 16 bit instructions are present because they are needed to run 32 bit programs).

Most of these restrictions are easy to remove.

Linux distro & kernel

It runs 2.6.20 Linux kernel with configuration available here.

Boot

The disk image is just a ram disk image loaded at boot time. It contains a filesystem generated with Buildroot containing BusyBox. I added my toy C compiler TinyCC and my unfinished but usable emacs clone QEmacs.

Javascript Performance

PC emulator is about 2 times slower using V8 than Jaeger Monkey on 32bit desktops.

I still have to try this on mobile browsers, let me know if that works for you.

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Why 10.6.6? Apple introduced Mac App Store, a versatile store for Mac apps, so if you wish to try them out, here’s your easiest bet!

Summary for Snow Leopard 10.6.6 VMware : We’ll download a pre-configured Vmware image for OSX 10.6.6 and then upgrade it to 10.7 Lion.

Pre-requisites / Downloads

• VMware Workstation 7
• Hardware Virtualization support
• Mac OSX 10.6.6 Vmware Image

Running Mac OSX 10.6.6 in VMWare Workstation

This would be pretty easy if you are not new to Vmware and Hackintosh installations. Its pretty straightforward, most of the stuff is already in-place.

• Launch VMWare Worksation and Select “Open Existing VM or Team”
• Unzip downloaded file and Browse and Select MacOs10.6.6 (If it asks you to “Take Ownership”, do so.)
• For the first Run, do not change settings, just Power on the virtual machine.
• Select “Moved it” if you get a prompt about virtual machine files.
• At run time, you would see the empire EFI screen, click on the screen so that you are “In” the virtual machine and Press F5.
• Using your arrow pad, hit the “Left” arrow to chose the “mac” named hard drive.
• On arrow pad again, hit the “Down” arrow. Go down once more to the “Boot Verbose” option.
• On the bottom of Mac desktop, hit the gear looking icon (system preferences.) That should be easy to find even though its all russian.
• In the top category select the thing that looks like a flag. Click and drag English to the top.
• Go to next tab and chose the top two tabs to “U.S. English” and “English (United States).” or any other language you are comfortable with. When done, log out. On next login it will ask you password. Just hit enter, there’s no password set.
• That’s’ all you are now running Mac OSX in Vmware.
• You can configure settings for your virtual machine on next boot. Play around with RAM and Video RAM settings.

What’s Next: Install Mac OSX Lion 10.7 on VMware workstation, stand by.

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Blackberry realizes the fact that it landed in the modern smartphone/tablet OS market quiet late and that’s why they would like to cover-up the shortcomings by letting users run Android apps on their Playbook, which are already available in large numbers.

RIM today announced that the PlayBook will be able to run Android 2.3 (interesting that they’ve assigned an OS version requirement) applications via runtime environments that will handle both BlackBerry OS phone apps and Android apps.

Of course we would love to see them running but there are a number of problems that Blackberry would run into.

Android apps run on top of a customized Java virtual machine aka Dalvik virtual machine that is cleaner and meaner than the desktop counter part. The apps are written in Java using the Android SDK but at the runtime, these API calls are translated to call core system libraries that are written in C/C++. This is done using JNI (Java native interface). These system libraries talk provide the core functionality and often interact with the kernel that provides Hardware abstraction layer. Kernel is also responsible for interactions with the hardware. So in order to run android apps outside of the android eco-system, you would need to have the fullstack implemented. Alternatively, you can translate java calls into your OS specific (QNX here) native calls which in turn controls the hardware. But doing that is both tricky and incomplete solution.

Alien Dalvik made it possible to run Android apps on Blackberry, Nokias and its not hard to guess that as a hacker hobby, this project is way to wonderful, and its too far from being “usable”.

So where is the Problem with Running Android apps on Playbook?

• Barely any Hardware acceleration: None of the Android apps on Playbook would leverage hardware acceleration. Clearly most graphic intensive apps especially Games would run painfully slow and glitchy on the device.
• Poor Hardware support: You might not even get access to your hardware through android apps to Playbook. Even when it does, it would have slower response times, defeating the purpose. e.g. accelerometer used to play games would create an almost unbearable experience. And don’t forget that your camera, NFC, bluetooth, wifi apps (that directly talk to hardware other than for network connectivity) would not work.
• Fragmentation to a new Level: If you look closely at the some of the apps (especially games and highend apps), they have different flavors of the apps designed to run optimally on a different hardware using NDK. On Playbook, such apps would not be just slow, but also incompatible most of the time.
• More Resource hungry: The customized Dalvik that would run on Playbook would be an additional layer for the QNX based tablet device. It would crunch more CPU, memory when trying to run android apps vs. blackberry native apps. Even the RIM’s CEO agrees with this, Jim Balsillie noted that the virtual machine could have performance issues, and that games and other resource-heavy apps will want to be coded specifically for the PlayBook using RIM’s QNX platform and SDK.
• No Honeycomb support: Oh yeah, even if they plan to cover up all those drawbacks, they just actually ported smartphone apps to a tablet device, not Tablet OS/apps. Would you be ever happy with Gingerbread apps stretched onto 7″ screen?
• No Android Market: RIM will run its own android market, and will not have license to run Android Market. So it would be purely upto the mercy of the android developer to publish their app to Blackberry’s android market which would be called “App Player”. To me that sound like VMWare or  Wine on Linux.

Porting a VM alone would not help Blackberry get where they want. There has to be a deeper OS-wide integration to support full Android apps. As far as we know, they have actually done a part of that with Playbook, but its not good enough for the claim. It would be much worse than running a Mac OS X inside windows using Virtualbox or VMware.

Of course we can achieve near-native experience but it would take years to have full deep down integration with Android. It won’t be as easy as RIM is touting it to be. We won’t be surprised when we get handson on one.

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At this early stage, Gingerbread-x86 project is fully compilable and it just works. Gingerbread-x86 runs on your PC using a Virtualization of Qemu, just like Virtualbox or Vmware.

You can get started on a Linux or a Mac by checking out the source code from GIT repo using the following commands:

 $ repo init-u git://git.android-x86.org/manifest.git-b gingerbread-x86
 $ repo sync

SourceForge mirror:

 $ repo init-u git://android-x86.git.sf.net/gitroot/android-x86/manifest.git-b gingerbread-x86
 $ repo sync

Features in Gingerbread-x86:

• Gingerbread-x86 will use kernel 2.6.37.
• Sound and Wifi.
• Ethernet and mouse inputs are buggy

Note from the developer: In order to reduce the revised rate, I will move a number of common files device / common / directory, including the keymaps and firmware. If you want to join apk, can be placed on device / common / app / directory, build system will automatically add it to iso file.

You need 64bit OS with Java 1.6

Note to the changes of build system:

* AOSP has merged Intel’s generic_x86 target. But it sucks,
and conflicts with our efforts. Anyway, I’ve tried to minimize
the conflicts, and move common files like firmwares and keymaps
to device/common/.

* You may also put prebuilt apks in device/common/app/.
They will be included in the iso_img or usb_img automatically.

* Wifi is on by default. To disable it in your target, set
BOARD_WPA_SUPPLICANT_DRIVER :=

* Touchscreen is on by default. To disable it, set
BOARD_USES_TSLIB := false

* Gingerbread uses ext4 as the filesystem for /system.
If you create a customized kernel config, make sure
you have set CONFIG_EXT4_FS=y

NOTE: In case you are not a developer or donot understand any of this, behold, I`ll prepare a new tutorial for non-geeks in the near Future. You can follow our updates on twitter @taranfx or Facebook page.

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Installing Android Froyo on PC

Note: Steps of installation are essentially the same whether you are installing Natively or Virtualize in VMWare, Virtualbox.

Pre-requisite: Download VM ISO Image, Other Native installation downloads

Note for Vmware/ VirtualBox installation (ignore if installing Natively): Change your virtual disk type to be IDE because the default type in VMware is SCSI, and Android-x86 kernel is not configured to support SCSI. Here’s how to create new VM in VMWare:

• Create a virtual machine.
• Edit virtual machine settings after the virtual machine created.
• Choose the hard disk and remove it.
• Add a hard disk to create a new virtual disk, then you can choose IDE as your virtual disk type.
• When finished, you can install android-x86 normally.

Installation

1. Burn the iso image to cdrom, or create a bootable USB disk (recommended). For creating Bootable USB, use Unetbooting (checkout this Howto video) or Linux live usb.

2. Boot from the Android-x86 installation CD/USB, choose the ‘Install Android to harddisk’

3. Next we choose the partition where you would install Android x86. You can create or modify listed partitions. Its even possible to install Android to an external disk like USB drive. In case your device isn’t shown in list, try ‘Detect devices’. The good part is that Android installation can co-exist with existing Linux partition, without formatting, provided you’ve ext3 Filesystem on it.

4. Next, Android installation asks you to install Grub bootloader. Choose yes. If there is an NTFS partition in the installed disk, the installer will ask if you want to create a boot item for Windows. You would have to add other bootable OSes  to/grub/menu.lst manually e.g.

title Windows    rootnoverify (hd0,0)    chainloader +1

Here first 0 represents Drive and 2nd represents partition number. 0,0 represents first partition of first disk.

Sit back and relax as the installation finishes. You should see a successful screen like the one below. You are now ready to reboot into Android!

And there you have it, Up and running:

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Why Virtualization on your Smartphone

Most professionals carry two cellphones  one cell phone for work and another for personal use. However, if there exists a Phone capable of securely switching between home and work identities, and in a way your IT manager will approve of, you won’t need two.

How Virtualization is Possible on Android Phones

Smartphones today are powerful enough to multitask apps in background, without any impact on the performance. Vmware had been working to make this possible on current gen 1Ghz ARM processors. In the near future, we would start seeing Nvidia Tegra2 based dual core CPUs, and everything would seem better.

LG is bringing this to practice by tying up with VMWare. VMWare runs as an application on top of the phone’s Google Android OS, and is called Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). Users will simply tap a VMWare icon on the phone’s touchscreen and the phone will instantly switch identities–and phone numbers. On this dualSIM phone, the second identity will be one entirely managed by the corporate IT department, letting them ensure security and compliance regulations are adhered to.

The virtualized Guest will have its own set of apps and contacts, and the IT department will have the power to shut down the work account should the employee lose the phone.

The pont to n ote here is that the concept had been cooking up since a long time. VMWare announced its Mobile Virtualization Platform more that two years ago and demoed it.

Most cell phones use ARM-designed chips, and the company’s latest effort in the form of the Cortex-A15 includes not only improved performance but also virtualization extensions that could dramatically improve virtualization performance.

The two operating systems are able run on the same phone simultaneously, and are entirely separate from each other. The virtualization would be 100% pure neither of the OS would be aware of the other one, however, second OS is likely to be modified in various ways to boost performance in a virtualized environment.

LG would be betting on Android for the host and guest. (Of course Apple, Microsoft, RIM will never license their OS to run in VM.) The host would be a stripped down version of Android that is optimized for performance.

When?

Good question. Soon, very soon.  LG would be announcing this Phone in early in 2011. The phone model is unknown, but we suspect it could be LG Optimus with Tegra2. Few companies have already shown interest in LG’s idea, but there are some questions that are to be answered: Who will buy it – Consumer or Employers?

Whatever the case be, its actually interesting to see how smartphones could phase out PCs. If its not now, it might happen when we see Quad cores on phones.

UPDATE from MWC 2011:

VMware and LG’s demoed the the Virtualized OS at MWC 2011 and we must admit that its pretty slick. The speed of the transition from the owner’s OS to the virtualized OS is nothing short of amazing considering it is all running from the device’s SD card. VMware has started with Android and LG, but there’s apparently nothing holding them back from offering this on any smartphone platform — and honestly, we can’t wait to see more. Checkout the video after a break:

For more Tech, iPhone, iPhone apps, Android, Gaming, Tech News, catch us @taranfx on Twitter.

With Virtualbox 3.1 came the Live Migration feature as the virtualization industry’s first “Teleportation” capability, allowing running virtual machines to be moved between hosts — including different operating systems, types of computer (server to client) and CPUs (Intel to AMD).

Virtualbox 3.2 takes it further, and supports  ”Experimental support for Mac OS X guests”. We already published an guide on how to Install Snow Leopard on Virtualbox, now it’s seemed to get official, atleast starting with Virtualbox 3.2 Beta 1.

Let’s take a look at other major additions:

• Dynamic RAM allocation: Dynamically increase or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (aka Memory ballooning)
• New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance. On VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported.
• CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only)
• Delete snapshots while the VM is running
• Multi-monitor support
• USB tablet/keyboard Emulation via Guest Additions
• Better Remote Desktop: RDP video acceleration
• Advanced Networking: NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
• Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system

In addition, there are large number of bugfixes and performance improvements in 3D support, Mac OS X hosts, Linux, solaris guests, and Virtual machine manager.

On the other note, now Virtualbox has been rebranded to: Oracle VM Virtualbox.

Download Virtualbox 3.2 Beta 1

[via Virtualbox forums]

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Taking it further, is Salesforce and VMware, who are turning cloud computing into a Java runtime environment. The companies have partnered to together enable Spring framework based Java cloud. The foundation would be  VMware’s vSphere virtualization infrastructure and will be hosted, of course, at Salesforce.com.

VMforce (the name is obvious) will be able to host any Java application that can be built to utilize existing Salesforce’s database infrastructure. So what this means is that Enterprises and Businesses can build and host their Java applications on the salesforce’s infrastructure just like its possible today with Google’s App Engine. But way more capable.

App Engine limits (and restricts) itself to POJO java applications with limited choice of database: BigTable, a non-relational database (non-RDBMS). However, VMforce will host and run a typical J2ee application on most popular J2ee framework i.e. Spring (using Spring application-hosting layer) and a full blown traditional RDBMS database.

No doubt, Java developers currently lack a simple path to cloud deployment.

“There are over 6 million developers who know Java. It has transformed this industry and brought enterprises onto the Internet. But enterprise Java developers don’t have a clear path into the cloud. Can they deliver these next-generation cloud applications? Is there a gap between where Java is and where cloud computing is going?”

Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, said that “developers value, above everything else, productivity.” He said that, for new applications, deployment to a cloud can increase productivity and reduce internal IT complexity. He said that these benefits are at the heart of the partnership between VMware and Salesforce.

The companies together believe that this gap must be filled, so that we can deploy Real business Java apps to the cloud, giving developer more power to deliver the next generation of application development and deployment.

VMforce should open up to the public this fall. With vSphere being mature enough for most Cloud apps, it would help  in evolution and maturing of Cloud-based Java application.

How it Works:

On top of vSphere, the VMforce cloud will offer a Spring application-hosting layer and a database. Developers will use the SpringSource Tool Suite to build and deploy applications built specifically for the VMforce cloud. Those tools will include automatic analysis tools that can call out the portions of an application that will need to be changed to work in a cloud environment.

The app deployment and maintenance will be done via “The SpringSource Tool Suite” ,a  free development environment. To create a new application, there are a number of wizards but nothing new that needs to be learned. New applications can also be created using Spring template wizards.

However, the bad part: Applications using Enterprise JavaBeans aren’t candidates for moving to VMforce, and other Java EE applications would require significant rework in order to run in that environment. The VMforce platform is targeted at developers creating new Java applications for the cloud. This could be a big limitation of this Cloud service.

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Officially, this would be the First Application server which is Fully Virtualization-aware. As a result, the enterprises who crave for new tools to help simplify the administration of Java applications in virtualized environments would now have a sigh of relief.

The new apps marks Oracle‘s first Virtualization release since it’s acquisition of Sun microsystems.

“With these groundbreaking products, Oracle has made virtualization a reality for Java enterprise applications,” Steven Harris, a senior vice president of product development at Oracle, said in a statement. “With Oracle WebLogic Server running on JRockit Virtual Edition, we have eliminated the trade-off of server density and performance by bringing the world’s No. 1 application server to virtualized environments.”

Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder is designed to help organizations quickly and easily deploy multi-tier enterprise applications in virtualized environments. It enables administrators to easily connect appliances as pluggable building blocks, known as “assemblies”, which can be used to create multi-tier applications.

The framework is ideal for automatically capturing the configuration of software components.

WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option combines and optimizes Oracle’s WebLogic Server with JRockit Virtual Edition for virtualized datacenters to improve application performance.

Oracle touts “Oracle WebLogic Server with JRockit Virtual Edition” as the “world’s #1 application server”. Of course, the WebLogic application server has been optimized for virtualized environments thereby making efficient use of hardware.

Note: The only x86 server virtualization certified for all Oracle software, Oracle VM is available as a free download.

Why this is amazing: What is relatively more important is that Oracle WebLogic Server can now run directly on Oracle VM without an Operating system, a unique capability enabled by Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition.

In a virtualized environment, Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition handles essential operating system functions including TCP/IP, hardware device interaction, file I/O, and process scheduling, while freeing up hardware and management resources by removing operating system capabilities that are not essential for enterprise Java applications.

Definitely, this is a big deal for enterprises who earlier had hard time Virtualizing Java applications. Int he future when Oracle completes its plan for merging Java VMs, it would get even better.

For Latest Tech updates in Open Source, Programming, Java, Tech News find us on Twitter @taranfx or subscribe below:

Here is the complete List of Available OS:

The ready to use VirtualBox images include: (All credits to Virtual box source)

GNU/Linux

• Archlinux (website)
• CentOS (website)
• Damn Small Linux (website)
• Debian (website)
• DeLi Linux (website)
• Dreamlinux (website)
• Fedora (website)
• Fluxbuntu (website)
• Gentoo (website)
• gNewSense (website)
• gOS (website)
• Kubuntu (website)
• LinuxMint (website)
• Mandriva (website)
• Moblin 2 (website)
• moonOS (website)
• OpenSUSE (website)
• PCLinuxOS (website)
• Puppy Linux (website)
• Sidux (website)
• Slackware (website)
• SliTaz (website)
• Tiny Core Linux (website)
• TinyMe (website)
• Ubuntu (website)
• Ubuntu Studio (website)
• Xubuntu (website)
• VectorLinux (website)
• Zenwalk (website)

GNU/OpenSolaris (GNU tools running on the OpenSolaris kernel)

• OpenSolaris (website).
• Nexenta (website): the installation is done from the CD.
• MILAX (website): the installation has been done from the official ISO image.

BSD

• FreeBSD (website):the installation is done from the bootonly iso

Other

• AROS (website)
• FreeDOS (website)
• Haiku (website)
• MINIX (website)
• ReactOS (website)
• SYLLABLE (website)

The versions range from very old to new, beta releases. For instance, they have images for Ubuntu: 6.06, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10, 8.10 server, 9..04, 9.10 alpha 1 and beta.

Love Open Source!

Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source.

What comes new in the 3.1 is the Live Migration feature as the virtualization industry’s first “Teleportation” capability, allowing running virtual machines to be moved between hosts — including different operating systems, types of computer (server to client) and CPUs (Intel to AMD). Earlier ones like VMWare vSphere/vMotion don’t transverse all OS, processor architectures.

Update: Virtualbox 3.2 Features announced.

What comes more is the marvellous new feature to restore  from multiple virtual machine states of arbitrary snapshots and new snapshots can be taken from any snapshots (Branched Snapshots).

Good news come for UI enthusiasts too. 2D video acceleration for Windows guests is now more powerful. What this means is Windows 7 guest can leverage full Aero features including the glassy effects and window animations accelerated by GPU, using the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion.

On the Networking front, the network type can now be changed while a VM is running. No other VM in today’s market can do so. To add to it, there is added support for paravirtualised network adapters. VMWare used to support this but only on linux.

Fastest goes even Faster: On the performance front, it has improved by factor of upto 30%. This includes improvement in speed of Virtualized OS, Better RAM and Harddisk I/O, better Networking performance.

All in all Here is the Summary:

• Live Migration of a VM session from one host to another (Teleportation)
• VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots
• 2D video acceleration for Windows guests
• CD/DVD drives can be attached to arbitrary storage controllers
• More than one CD/DVD drive per guest VM
• The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
• New experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts (OpenSolaris/Nevada build 124 and later)
• Performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests when using non-nested paging (VT-x and AMD-V only)
• Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface)
• Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net)

Existing Features

• Handles massive workloads of up to 32 vCPUs
• Share and publish appliances with other virtualization platforms
• Runs multiple operating systems at once on one PC
• Enables cross-platform, multi-tier applications
• Supports the Solaris OS, OpenSolaris, Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux.
• Provides remote access to guest virtual machines from anywhere
• Supports virtual server environments

I would proudly call it “Enterprise-class open source virtualization from the desktop to the server”

VirtualBox 3.1 now exhibits a full complement of enterprise hypervisor features. Teleportation helps virtual machines achieve high availability. When physical hardware needs to be taken down, the virtual workload can simply be teleported to another physical host.  Sun is betting VirtualBox 3.1 will appeal more to the business market as workloads can be “teleported” to another physical host to help achieve high-availability.

Download

Free for personal use and Commercial Enterprise licence subscriptions starting at $US30 per user is the best deal we can get in the Virtualization world. Sure, VirtualBox is ready to rock the Virtualization world.

– What if you could use your existing Windows computer, that already has all your favorite programs installed, and turn into a virtual machine?

– What if you could virtualize the Physical PC and make it portable inside any virtual machine running on a different system.

This guide will help you achieve this in an easy way and you can use the created Virtual HDD with any software: Virtual PC, Parallels, VMWare, Virtualbox, etc.

Here are the possible combinations:

1. You are running Windows 7 and you want compatibility of XP softwares.

2. You are running Mac (Snow Leopard) and you are migrating from Windows/Linux to Snow leopard permanently. In this case follow this guide: VMWare Fusion 3.

3. Running Ubuntu or any other Linux distro inside Windows or vice-versa.

Related: Download VirtualBox Images for Unix, Linux

Let’s start.

Step 1. Download

Microsoft’s Sysinternals has made an application called Disk2vhd, that lets you easily migrate an existing computer to a virtualized hard drive (VHD). It’s a tiny utility doesn’t even require installation. Download here

Alternatively, you can use VMware Converter too (for Windows, Linux, Mac Hosts). The procedure is almost same.

Step 2. Creating Virtual HDD
Run Disk2vhd, it will immediately show you all the drives and partitions on your computer that it can migrate to a VHD.  Simply select a drive that you wish to create a VHD file from and click Create. Disk2vhd will convert the hard drive into a VHD file even if the computer /drive is currently in use.

Wait while it finishes and creates .vhd file. This could take several minutes depending upon drive size.

Step 3. Run it in your Virtualization software

Take the .vhd file and run it in any desktop virtualization software: Free Windows Virtual PC, VirtualBox, or VMware Player or paid softwares like Parallels, VMWare, etc.

Tip: If you have Windows 7 running as HOST, you can mount virtual machine as a standard hard drive, and can even boot from it if your computer is running Windows 7 Ultimate.

Related: Choosing the Right Windows 7 Version [Flavor]

You may use Disk2vhd to create virtual machines of your Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and higher machines, including x64 systems.

Virtualization has been around for more than decade in Zen, VMWare, VirtualBox, parallels, and several others. Of these VirtualBox is the fastest but not as feature-Rich as VMWare products. VMWare Fusion is inclined towards Mac based Platform to virtualize almost any OS.

Mac users are deprived of certain apps that never made it to Leopard like certain VPN clients, etc. The best way is to run Windows inside Mac rather than having a dual-boot which wastes alot of time, Virtualization is the best solution.

VMWare Fusion 3, releasing later this month, is designed to take advantage of both the recently released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and the upcoming Microsoft Windows 7. Fusion 3 is the most feature-full virtualization solution — Suitable and effective for Desktop users, than any other previous version of Virtualization apps. So let’s go through the best feature one by one:

Faster Performance, Scalability

Fusion 3 has got some cutting-edge enhancements that improves the overall performance. The hypervisor (core of Virtualization) has been re-written to support faster interactions between Host OS Kernel and the guest. Some of the things like USB get direct memory access, making I/O faster.

VMWare Fusion 3, unlike previous versions, natively supports the 64-bit kernel and allows users to run 64-bit guest operating systems, even if their Mac is running the 32-bit kernel. 64-bit maps to larger memory addresses and hence scales higher.

GPGPU: General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit or GPGPU ,as the name says, enables users to use the idle GPU do to general purpose computing that normally is done by CPU. Snow Leopard is known to to leverage this heavily. VMWare Fusion3 is also rumored to take advantage of this one. So expect more powerful virtualization.

Seamless Integration
VMWare Fusion 3 will offer Snow Leopard users the best way to run Other OSes: Windows, Linux or Leopard Server on their Macs. This is justified by the improvement in Unity mode. This is something unique. It let’s users access the Windows Start menu, Applications from Mac desktop, rather than inside the VMWare window, alongside Mac apps in the dock and in the menu bar. This makes accessing files, apps and documents from your virtual machine even easier and more seamless than what we have seen in the past. Here is one running Chrome:

Better Graphics Support: Aero, DirectX 9

Virtualized setups still lag behind when it comes to 3D graphics and gaming, but that gap is getting smaller and smaller. VirtualBox is a fairly decent virtualization solution for graphics. But it doesn’t do it well. In fact, no virtualization program does it till date: Fusion 3 is the first one to break the barrier and let the GPU do the magic. The Result? Aero Support for Windows 7 and Vista.

With the power that drives iMac, MacBook Pro and Macbook, all users should have the ability to see Aero’s glassy delight inside the VM. Though it will run best with the new MacBook Pros that have Nvidia Graphics.

The story doesn’t end here. VMWare Fusion 3 also supports OpenGL 2.1 and Direct X 9.0c — which means that depending on your graphics card, you can even play games in Windows without having to use any tool like: Boot Camp. Of course they will never be as-good-as native OS graphics. Still, it’s a biggest step towards graphics in Virtualization.

Migrate Old Windows Machine to Mac Seamlessly

VMWare has made it easy for people to migrate their existing Windows PCs to a Virtualized version seamlessly. so, if you are new to Mac, don’t worry you get your old Windows along. Here is the official video on how to do it.

This was already possible with Parallels, but VMWare Fusion 3 goes beyond. It lets the user connect to their old Windows machine  over the network and copy that computer into a new virtual machine. Pretty cool ehh ?

Verdict and Availability:

If you migrated to Mac from Windows, this is one killer app you can’t live without. Stop Multi-booting for trivial apps , when you an Virtualize them.

VMWare Fusion 3 is now available for pre-order at VMWare’s site, the Apple Online Store is selling it for $79.99. Existing VMWare customers can upgrade via VMWare’s site on October 27th for $39.99 and the upgrade is free for new Fusion 2 users.

Cisco and VMware  announced a method for using VMotion across data centers that are located as far apart — 200 kilometers.

Users have been pushing VMware to offer a method of allowing VMotion to be used between data centers, and this reference architecture is a step in the right direction. But it is only a step and not a true failover technology. It does not replace VMware’s disaster recovery product, Site Recovery Manager.

The long-range Vmotion technique was originally demonstrated at Cisco Live! But VMware formally announced support for it. It can be used with Cisco switches that support VLANs, namely the Catalyst 6500 as well as the Nexus 7000. It requires that users implement VMware’s latest product, vSphere.

The current reference design provides only what its makers refer to as “Disaster avoidance” not “disaster recovery.” Long-range movement of a virtual machine using VMotion must be performed manually (although users could write scripts to move VMs.)

As per Cisco:

VMotion solution and CiscoLive!, we have been working dilligently with VMware to develop and refine the solution.  Inter-data center workload mobility has a lot of moving parts involved.  Essentially, you need to be able to address three areas:

1. Mobility at layer 2
2. Mobility of the data, since there is seldom value in moving the workload if it loses access to the data it needs
3. Mobility at layer 3 and of services

Technical issues with the network and storage have yet to be solved to allow VMotion to support more automated long-distance failover. These include an inability to maintain an IP address if a VM is moved from one ISP to another, for instance from a data center in New York to another in San Jose. Likewise, storage is a problem. Until storage vendors come up with a way to support active/active SANs for the same VM moved between two physically far locations, no-latency failovers won’t be possible between data centers.

Some of the features are better found in Oracle’s VirtualIron.

How good is this new Technique?

This technique is not recommended, and not supported by VMware, when users have Disk Raw Mapping (DRM) turned on and used with clustered servers on either side.

All that said, for Cisco users wanting to deploy vSphere, this design can be practical in helping them manage VMs between data centers. It can be used for disaster situations where users have warning (tornadoes, hurricanes). It can be helpful for load balancing applications between data centers to offset an expected traffic spike. It also represents major progress on the network portion of the long-range VMotion problem.

The reference architecture is available for  from Cisco’s blog.

Did any one ever thought a Virtualization giant like VMWare would buy Java based Framework developer Company “Spring Source”, popular for it’s “Spring Framework”, used in most J2EE web applications today.

VMWare’s acquisition of SpringSource, is the most significant development in the history of the Java development platform, after the Oracle-Sun deal.

VMWare is now into serious Cloud Computing. The company sees its role in the cloud, very crucial. The acquisition of the commercial open-source middleware/framework company makes perfect sense. First make your Virtualization highly resilient, portable then partner with Networking giants for Virtualization Aware Networking, and then jump into software market.
SpringSource gives VMWare a development “platform,” the next step,  to deliver in VMWare-based cloud services and a unique Ecosystem to define both application construction and deployment architectures.

The vision constructed by SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson a while ago, speaks to an environment in which developers can declare not only how objects should connect with one another, but how they should be packaged into virtual machines and deployed into the virtualized infrastructure:

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a Platform as a Service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.

The impact of this acquisition has focused on how it plays as a competition to Microsoft Azure, which–when combined with the Hyper-V virtualization platform–threatens VMWare’s dominance in the enterprise. Forrester Research thinks it’s much more than that, however:

VMware has a bigger agenda SpringSource helps to fulfill making vCloud bigger than simply an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) alternative and keeping Microsoft at bay. Enterprises are already demanding that cloud environments and internal cloud solutions support their hypervisor standard VMware. So it wasn’t going to be a stretch to get vCloud adopted, assuming it delivered as promised. But the battle isn’t IaaS, it’s becoming the equivalent of the operating system for the next generation data center and you can’t achieve that aim without applications; and you can’t become application-relevant without being relevant to developers.

Stephen O’Grady says it’s not just about the development and integration, but also about tooling:

When (colleague Michael) Cote and I met with SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson at OSCON a few weeks ago, one of the primary topics of discussion was the development experience. This could wind up one of the unheralded benefits of the acquisition: Rod gets the tooling story. He understands that Microsoft, again, is setting the bar for the development experience by allowing its developers to localize the cloud environment via Visual Studio. With VMware’s virtualization capabilities, the tooling story for SpringSource could get very interesting vis a vis cloud development and deployment.

Everyone is excited about the future of cloud computing — There are technologies evolving for both public and private clouds that give developers just as much control over every element of how their applications are built, deployed, and operated as they have had in the past.

These technologies are a combination of declarative descriptive configuration policies and automated software and systems that can interpret those policies and respond as required.

SaaS is a key-player in today’s industries. Spring Framework has done wonders in this. SaaS offerings allow customization at levels of granularity unthinkable before Spring demonstrated dynamic instantiation. Custom applications deployed to IaaS offerings could declare that they require a isolated networks for backplane communication, connectivity to two different storage systems by name (perhaps even one in the cloud and one through FCoE), or provide monitoring through specific protocols.

VMWare is not the only company that can currently achieve this vision. Microsoft is in a great position to allow a similar story for its developers, assuming it partners with the right systems companies to push dynamic configuration beyond Hyper-V into the physical infrastructure layers. .Net and the Microsoft tool set are already quite capable of delivering significant coordination between application development and deployment. Citrix and Red Hat, by contrast, do not yet seem to have such a sophisticated vision.

BTW, VMWare got cloud monitoring powerhouse Hyperic in the deal as well.

What’s your take on VMWare’s acquisition of SpringSource. Is it as important as the cloud pundits, or is there little excitement worth raising hair here?

Sources- CNet, Betanews, WSJ

Cloud has brought us unlimited and unmatched processing power that we could never think of a decade ago.

Earlier, I wrote how cloud computing was actually a Dark (Cloud) Knight. And the joker was successful in showing the Gotham that even the best among us could fall. This finds a corollary in the cloud computing world.

A Look back at the Benefits: Cloud storage offers some exciting advantages. It offers “pay as you go”, with no capital outlay and no need to buy extra equipment in anticipation of future storage demands. You scale storage dynamically and pay only for what you use. But you must trust your data to the cloud and the vendor behind the service.

Are we Ready to Build up the Trust? Few mid-size or large businesses are willing to trust the cloud today, although some are experimenting. “There’s a huge amount of interest,” says an analyst at Burton Group. But, he adds, none of his firm’s Fortune 100 clients is using a cloud storage service for live data today.

Fortune 100 companies believe It’s probably wise to proceed with caution, Cloud storage today is pretty much an early-stage concept.

Aside from a few Billionaires, like Amazon and Verizon’s Online Backup and Restore service, most offerings come from small start-ups.

“It’s best suited for low-priority or low-access, low-touch kinds of applications, primarily file-based as opposed to block-based,” says a Computerworld columnist. But he says he does have clients that use services from Amazon as temporary expansion space for testbeds or marketing programs. Another company quotes ”We have a lot to lose. If we’re playing, we’re only going to play with the big guys,”

Talking about Amazon’s S3 integration with educational universities, so far, has worked well. But it’s still questionable “If Amazon went down for two days, It could be a Nightmare”.

Cloud Security concerns pose Adoption Hurdle
But the attraction is real!

Reliability and Liability are still unknown in the cloud computing world: Businesses considering using cloud services will need to protect themselves against “information malpractice,” according to Drew Bartkiewicz, the VP of cyber-risk and new-media markets at the Hartford insurance company. He said that companies should stay away from cloud providers that are not open to discussing contractual, legal, privacy and compliance concerns.

Michelle Munson, co-founder and developer of Aspera thinks that reliability “is a much bigger issue than people are letting on.” She went on to say that liability and security aside, if cloud computing consolidates into too few providers, it would represent a global security concern of the highest order. Munson points to natural disasters as a primary consideration, like the Middle Eastern undersea outage in 2008 and to Google’s 2-hour May 14th outage, saying companies may not realize their exposure until after the fact. “Wait until the first 12-hour outage from a major cloud provider.” she said.

The Target Segment

The current segment under Cloud focus is nothing more than “A Storage”. The amazon and Verizon services haven’t gone much far from it. Though Google with its Apps, VOICE have taken a small step further. Still It’s merely a begining of what Cloud has to offer.

As per CloudSecurityAlliance, In the 21st century, cloud computing business models (a) challenge the presumption that a company possesses, or even controls, all of the digital business information for which the law imposes duties to preserve and produce, and (b) potentially jeopardize a company’s ability to preserve and produce required records and information. As a result, companies face substantial barriers to implementing cloud computing solutions if, as a result, their compliance capabilities and legal profiles are compromised.

Microsoft’s Azure is like a product thrown out to the market to analyze the prospects of a suite-solution-approach. We will still have to wait a while to know how well it can do.

Th REAL power of Cloud is still yet to be seen. The processing power we would be able to leverage with Cloud services of the future will be enough to glorify the future industry.

Virtualization- The Single Immortal Warrior

Except for Virtualization, nothing else has promised a good level of security. Optimal practices in Virtualization can lead to very good results. Refer to Tips for Optimizing Virtualization across Networks.

If you are not yet convinced about power of Virtualization, consider reading Five reasons why you should consider Virtualization.

Virtualization is the single domain where had been a lot of investments and fruitfull results from Vendors like Cisco, VMWare. Cisco has innovated in field of Virtualization aware networks. On the Server Virtualization side,  VMWare’s vSphere and Oracle’s Virtual Iron have seamless, secure portability of In-service Hardware switching in your data center where you no longer have to be worried about Dynamic Load sharing. thanks to Virtualization, OS is nothing but an application which can be flexibly load-balanced in the way you want to mould it to.

Portability and Inter-Operatability with Optimum Security:

Businesses using the cloud should be prepared for the worst. Yes, large cloud providers can make it easier to handle general availability issues well. But what happens when the cloud provider isn’t good enough? What are the considerations for moving applications across clouds? Or should businesses perhaps consider building a cross-cloud solution in the first place?

The ability to govern and measure enterprise risk within a company owned data center is difficult and still in the stages of maturation in most organizations. Using cloud computing resources could lead to many new unknowns in the areas of governance and enterprise risk. Online agreements and contracts are untested in a court of law and consumers have yet to taste an extended outage of services that they may someday determine is needed on a 24×7 basis. Questions still remain on the ability of user organizations to assess the risk of the provider through onsite assessments. Governance of the provider’s facilities and services could leave the user without recourse or recompense placing the risk of use squarely on the shoulders of the user. The storage and use of information that is considered sensitive by nature may be allowed but it could be unclear as to who is responsible in the event of a breach. If both the code authored by the user and the service delivered by the provider is flawed, who is responsible?

The Top concerns still left lost in the cloud as noted by “CloudsecurityAlliance” are on: How to manage each of these when there is trend shift from what we do today to what would be done in Cloud:

• Information lifecycle management
• Governance and Enterprise Risk Management
• Compliance & Audit
• General Legal
• eDiscovery
• Encryption and Key Management
• Identity and Access Management
• Storage
• Virtualization
• Application Security
• Portability & Interoperability
• Data Center Operations Management
• Incident Response, Notification, Remediation
• “Traditional” Security impact (business continuity, disaster recovery, physical security)
• Architectural Framework

Concerns still persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data. As per the Vendors, security is often as good as or better than under traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford.Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible. Ownership, control and access to data controlled by “cloud” providers may be made more difficult, just as it is sometimes difficult to gain access to “live” support with current utilities. Under the cloud paradigm, management of sensitive data is placed in the hands of cloud providers and third parties.

All of them need to be Re-defined to suit a new Paradigm.

Overall, the consensus is clear: The cloud’s promise of easy, elastic computing power is not enough for users with established IT organizations. That’s not to say the interest isn’t there- it is, but real-world concerns far outweigh lofty ideas at this point. Security is what Industry demands Today.

Update: Install Android on PC, Netbook Natively

Update 2: Install Android Froyo on PC

Update 3: Run Android apps on Windows

A new Project has developed that will enable you to try this new Mobile OS  in a Virtual machine environment such as VirtualBox, VMWare or any other computer that could be booted of a CD or a USB stick.

It’s been known for some time that it is possible to run Android on x86 hardware with a port for the Netbooks like Asus EEE PC appearing earlier this year, but it was very difficult until now to get Android running on other hardware or virtual machines.

The project to create a Live CD of Android is called  LiveAndroid and can be found at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/live-android/. The project has been running for just a couple of months, but they have already achieved an image that delivers Android, with support for the mouse since their v0.2 release.

Instructions:

Step 1. Download the CD ISO image that has been split into two parts, which then have to be combined. 

The files liveandroidv0.2.iso.001 and liveandroidv0.2.iso.002 from the project site.

On Windows, you can use PowerISO to combine the ISOs.

On Linux, you can run this command:

cat liveandroidv0.2.iso.001 liveandroidv0.2.iso.002 > liveandroidv0.2.iso

In case you have trouble doing it, check this.

Step 2. Now create a new “Virtual machine” in VirtualBox/VMWare. Click on “New” and Give a name like “Android Mobile”, select “Linux” for the operating system and “Linux 2.6″ for the version. When prompted for the base memory RAM size you can enter 300MB (300MB is more than what it would expect).

Note: You don’t need a virtual hard disc image for this machine, as the whole thing will run off the Live CD so when you are on the configuration page for this uncheck “Boot Hard Disk (Primary Master)” to stop VirtualBox creating any disc image. You will be shown a warning message about bootable media after this but just click “Continue”. Click “Finish” to complete basic set up of the virtual machine, now click on “Display” and check that the video memory is set to 8MB.

Step 3. Start the virtual machine for the first time, you will be prompted to boot from a CD image. Select the LiveAndroid CD image that you made earlier. You may have to Add this to the Virtual Media Manager first to make it available. With this selected you should see that Android boots up.

Step 4. For some reason you get a warning about 15% battery power left, but dismissing this gets you into the Android environment. Navigating your way around is done with a combination of using the mouse and some special keys, these are documented here. However I found some were different on my setup. I have my “host” key (the key that transfers control of the keyboard and mouse from the guest to the host OS and has some other functions) on VirtualBox set up as the right windows key, so got this layout:

nJoy Android experience! If you need any assistance or latest tech tips, get a hold of me @geeknizer on twitter.

Lookin Beyond

It is quite interesting seeing Android running in a screen much larger than the mobile phone screens where we are more familiar with it. Will Android become commonplace on netbooks?

With the announcement of Chrome OS, an operating system designed to be a browser and not much else. Maybe Chrome OS will fill a similar niche and Android will be Google’s answer for more demanding applications. What do you think?

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Hackintosh, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their data centers.

Cisco Officials said. “Demand for virtualized data centers is high due to the complexity of managing and provisioning physical resources, securing that environment, maximizing utilization of assets, numerous network connections, and the rising costs of facilities and energy usage”.

“Power is increasing at a faster rate than the top line revenue of your company,” said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s data center, switching and services group. McCool spoke at the Cisco Live conference in San Francisco.

The key driver had been it’s inherited benefits. Virtualization removes the logical view of an infrastructure from the physical underpinnings, thus making data center resources transparent to an application and enabling that application to move. Cisco itself was faced with a “$100 million server” issue – it needed the server but didn’t have enough room for it in a current data center and faced an expensive build out of a new facility just to house it. But virtualization let Cisco pocket that stash. Virtualizing its data centers reduced its cable plant by 4,800 cables made room for 50% more physical servers and increased virtual machine capacity fourfold.

Definitely, this gave Cisco a practical approach for virtualization.

Another example,  a New Jersey financial institution. They were opening an office in Bangalore opted to host applications in New Jersey and implement virtual desktops in India with Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services and Application Control Engine products to save money.

But virtualization poses few challenges. It makes the mobile VM difficult to monitor and track and thus hard to manage. That’s why Cisco developed VN-Link, software that allows the network to become VM-aware and map policies to a VM as it moves across physical ports.though previously  when Oracle bought Virtual Iron, Oracle got this feature in-built too. But Actually, Virtual Iron is much more powerful than what Cisco solution is. That might mean that Cisco is not alone, it’s quiet possible Oracle is also packing it’s bags for serious Cloud Computing.

Cisco’s VN-Link is intended to provide full visibility to VMs for the network administrator and VM management for the systems administrator. VN-Link is integral to Cisco’s Nexus 2148T fabric extender to provide network interface virtualization, which provides a “direct, consistent view of VMs and the (data center) operational model” by divorcing VMs from their physical interfaces.

This, combined with a unified switching fabric supporting Ethernet and Fibre Channel, simplifies and provides greater and more consistent visibility into all data center operations, Bugnion said. The environment can be managed from a network perspective or from a server perspective, he said.

Cisco’s platform for enabling all of this, of course, is the Unified Computing System. UCS is intended to be a single point of data center management through its ability to discover, view and configure resources, such as servers, and apply and enforce service profiles on those servers.

“Our strategy (with UCS) is to accelerate virtualization through increased visibility and control,” Bugnion said. “We’re focused on that part of the data center in which the network plays a central role. Management and energy efficiency is not an afterthought.”

To date, Savvis and Thomson Reuters are two publicly announced potential customers for UCS. They note significant results from using or trialing virtualization and UCS.

The future of cloud computing lies in hands of success of Virtualization. Cisco, Oracle, IBM, HP, and lots other are serious in making it a success.

The main revolution was brought by Dynamips, which exposes a flexible platform for emulation of wide range of Cisco devices. The second step was GNS3. GNS3 brought the features of dynamipps into the GUI world, making it more easier, faster to virtualize the topologies on the fly with click of a mouse.

The next step that has now made life of of a networking engineer is the portability of virtualized networks. Thanks to innovators like In2dwok, it’s now possible to have LIVE CDs for GNS3 which will enable you virtualize your network, just on any PC that exists on the planet. It’s based on a small 30mb linux (Slitaz) which is low on resources and heavy on the work, perfect in accordance with virtualization needs.

He has also developed slax based implementation of the Live CD.

Now Live CDs were not enough to save your network configuration and move on to other boxes. You have to save your dynamips .net files on Local hard disk or use another USB. So LIVE USB were were also created to extend the portability. By having a Live USB, you have the freedom to boot from USB directly into  a light weighht linux with GNS3 rpre-installed, pre-configured and customized with your topologies. I use this USB with my vmware and virtualbox and its pretty fast. The CPU limiter patch actually make life of working with GNS3 even more slick, no longer you have to worry about 100% CPU utilization. In Virtualbox, I was able to run four routers with less than 25% CPU utilization on my dual core notebook.

If you are new to GNS, you can check GNS3Labs for extensive help.

Links

- Slitaz with GNS3 preinstalled LIve CD (ISO, 35MB) and Patch for CPU Limiting

-  Live USB GNS3 via blog

- Article Homepage

Note: GNS3-Labs goes down occassionally, please retry later if links are down.

Screenshot: http://twitpic.com/8gpeb

We would try to look at the potential causes and their corresponding optimizations that can be achieved to tackle them individually.

1. Tackling Basic Network Issues

For beginners, it makes sense to understand why your virtualized applications and virtual desktops perform poorly across the WAN. It’s typically not due to the application or VDI components, but due to the network. More specifically, virtualized environments are sensitive to the following WAN characteristics:

• Bandwidth: WAN bandwidth may or may not be an issue depending on the type of traffic being sent. While most virtualized applications are fairly efficient when it comes to bandwidth consumption, some activities (such as file transfers and print jobs) consume significant bandwidth, which can present a performance challenge.
• Latency: the time it takes for data to travel from one location to one another.
• Packet loss: when packets get dropped or delivered out of order due to network congestion they must be re-transmitted across the WAN. This can turn a 200 millisecond roundtrip into one second. To end users, the virtual application or desktop seems unresponsive when packets are being re-transmitted. They start to re-hit the keys on their client machines, which compounds the problem

2. Reconcile WAN Optimization Techniques

WAN optimization devices can be deployed on both ends of a WAN link to improve the performance of all enterprise applications. The following WAN optimization techniques are used by these devices to improve the performance of virtual applications and desktops:

Latency can be overcome by mitigating the “chattiness” of TCP, the transport protocol used to by virtual applications for communication across the WAN. More specifically, WAN optimization devices can be configured to send more data within specific windows, and minimize the number of back and forth acknowledgements required prior to sending data. This improves the responsiveness of keystrokes in a virtual environment.

Loss can be mitigated by rebuilding dropped packets on the far end of a WAN link, and re-sequencing packets that are delivered out of order in real-time. This eliminates the need to re-transmit packets every time they are dropped or delivered out-of-order. By avoiding re-transmissions, virtual applications and desktops appear much more responsive across the WAN.

Bandwidth can be reduced using WAN deduplication. By monitoring all data sent across the WAN, repetitive information can be detected and delivered locally rather than resent across the network. This significantly improves bandwidth utilization in some (but not all) virtualized environments.

3. Change Application Precendence

The average enterprise has more than 100 applications that are accessed across the WAN. That means that critical applications, including terminal services and VDI, are vying for the same resources as less important traffic, such as Internet browsing. Because virtual applications and desktops are sensitive to latency, it often makes sense to prioritize this traffic over other applications using Quality of Service (QoS) techniques. In addition, QoS can guarantee bandwidth for VDI and virtual applications. The best practices like use of DSCP code points, and priotrity technicques can be used to make things silky smooth.

4. Compress and Encrypt in the Right Place

Often times host machines compress information prior to transmission. This is meant to improve bandwidth utilization in a virtual environment. However, compression obfuscates visibility into the actual data, which makes it difficult for downstream WAN optimization devices to provide their full value. Therefore, it may be a better choice to turn off compression functionality in the virtual host (if possible), and instead enable it in the WAN optimization device.

Moving compression into the WAN optimization device has another added benefit: it frees up CPU cycles within the host machine. This can lead to better performance and scalability throughout a virtual environment.

It should be re-considered, where encryption takes place in a virtual infrastructure, since encryption also consumes CPU cycles in the host. There are a no. of SSL offloaders, encryption offloader boxes availble like the ones from Radware, which can seamlessly remove this overhead from the virtualized system.

5. Re-concile Scalability and Network Intelligence

Network scalability can have an important impact on the performance of virtual applications and VDI. The average thin client machine has 10 to 15 TCP flows open at any given time. If thousands of clients are accessing host machines in the same centralized facility, that location must be equipped to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous sessions.

You can use Network intelligence products to estimate the growth and the future trends of your traffic and scale up to it right in time.

When it comes to supporting large numbers of flows, there are two “best practice” recommendations. First, as discussed above, it is recommended that compression and encryption be moved off the host machine to free up CPU cycles. Second, make sure your WAN acceleration device supports the right amount of flows for your environment. The last thing you want to do is create an artificial bottleneck within the very devices deployed to remove your WAN’s bottlenecks.

Virtualization holds the Data houses of the future, invest intelligently!

Virtualization isn’t just for large enterprises. Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are finding that virtualizing servers can be a viable IT strategy. And although server consolidation is the primary reason many organizations are initially attracted to virtualization technology, it’s hardly the only driver.

Why else does it make sense for SMBs to virtualize? Here are five reasons from the experts—your IT peers and industry analysts.

1. Effective disaster recovery. Virtualization enables companies to create contingencies in the event of system failures. “The number 1 reason for virtualization—besides consolidation—is disaster recovery,” says Gary Chen, senior analyst, enterprise research, at the Yankee Group. “Most SMBs don’t have disaster recovery capabilities, or even if they do have some sort of disaster recovery, it’s not that good.”

Virtualization, by giving companies greater flexibility for running applications and storing data, provides options in the event of a systems outage. “It really gives SMBs a good shot at enterprise-class disaster recovery,” Chen says. “Recovery times for servers are less than an hour, and it’s pretty affordable.”

2. Optimized server utilization. Virtualization enables organizations to get more-efficient use out of server hardware.

“You can dynamically allocate memory and CPUs to servers as needed,” says Brad Manning, CIO at Quaker Chemical Corp. in Conshohocken, Pa. “Development and test servers are great examples. They often sit idle, in which case their resources can be allocated to production virtuals and then have short bursts of activity intermittently when they need resources. This means more bang for your buck in your data center spending and better performance for your business applications.”

“The infrastructure team did have to go through some additional training and learn the new virtualization technology, but it was well worth the investment in time and money,” Manning says. He says the company realized its goals, including having better utilization of server resources.

3. Rapid server deployments. With virtualization, “creating new servers takes a few clicks of the mouse, which dramatically shortens this part of an IT project,” Manning says. “So for implementing a new business application, it reduces the timeline for creating the server environment and often requires only that some additional storage space be added to the SAN [storage-area network].”

Shelly Barnes of Arizona Tile LLC

Arizona Tile LLC anticipates with its planned server virtualization project, says Shelly Barnes, vice president of technology and process at the Tempe, Ariz., company. Other goals include cost savings on hardware purchases, high availability of servers and enhanced business continuity through the use of virtual servers for disaster recovery.

Barnes says the virtualization effort coincides with another IT project in which the company is upgrading its ERP system. Arizona Tile expects to have its virtualization environment in place by May. The company will have three to five virtual servers and 20 to 25 physical servers running, she says.

4. Improved performance. The greater flexibility in allocation of server resources enabled by virtualization can also lead to better server performance.

“Virtual server performance can be monitored, and resources can be allocated where needed,” Barnes says. “This will help us put the resources where they are needed for special projects or certain times of day.”

5. Efficient software delivery. One of the latest trends in the industry is the emergence of virtual appliances, which enable new ways to deliver software applications to users.

Software vendors are just beginning to look at this technology as a way of delivering their products to customers, Chen says. “If you have virtualization, deploying and managing applications becomes a lot easier,” he says. “Users get the applications as system images. It’s the same as having a physical machine without the physical machine” and the associated costs.

Is it State-of-the-Art or pre-launch advertising? In any case I believe that Cisco’s overview of this new (and at least partially proprietary) hardware-centric approach to Network Virtualization is a must read. It contains a very sound summary of the network challenges in virtualized environments, a recap of VMware’s Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS), Cisco’s Nexus 1000V and a somewhat vague introduction to concepts such as port profile, VN-Link and vEth.

Here is what Cisco’s Whitepaper describes:

• Core layer, the high-speed packet switching backplane for all flows going in and out of the data center

• Aggregation layer, providing important functions such as the integration of network-hosted services: load balancing, intrusion detection, firewalls, SSL offload, network analysis, and more

• Access layer, where the servers physically attach to the network and where the network policies (access control lists [ACLs], quality of service [QoS], VLANs, etc.) are enforced

Effects of Virtualization

Figure 1. Comparison of Access Layer Connectivity Options in (1) Nonvirtualized Rack-Optimized Server, (2) Virtualized Rack-Optimized Server, (3) Nonvirtualized Blade Server, and (4) Virtualized Blade Server

Hypervisor-Embedded Virtual Switch

Cisco VN-Link

Virtual Ethernet Interfaces

Port Profiles

Figure 2. Relationship Between Virtual and Physical Network Constructs in a VN-Link Enabled Switch (Cisco Nexus™ 1000V Series Switches)

• As a Cisco DVS running entirely in software within the hypervisor layer (Cisco Nexus 1000V Series)

• With a new class of devices that support network interface virtualization (NIV) and eliminate the need for software-based switching within hypervisors

Deploying VN-Link in Existing Networks with the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series

• Virtual Ethernet module (VEM)-data plane: This lightweight software component runs inside the hypervisor. It enables advanced networking and security features, performs switching between directly attached virtual machines, provides uplink capabilities to the rest of the network, and effectively replaces the vSwitch. Each hypervisor is embedded with one VEM.

• Virtual supervisor module (VSM)-control plane: This standalone, external, physical or virtual appliance is responsible for the configuration, management, monitoring, and diagnostics of the overall Cisco Nexus 1000V Series system (that is, the combination of the VSM itself and all the VEMs it controls) as well as the integration with VMware vCenter. A single VSM can manage up to 64 VEMs. VSMs can be deployed in an active-standby model, helping ensure high availability.

Figure 3. Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Distributed Switching Architecture

Deploying VN-Link with Network Interface Virtualization

• For traffic going from the server to the network, the interface virtualizer identifies the source vNIC and explicitly tags each of the packets generated by that vNIC with a unique tag, also known as a virtual network tag (VNTag).

• For traffic received from the network, the interface virtualizer removes the VNTag and directs the packet to the specified vNIC.

Figure 4. Architectural Elements of the NIV Model

Conclusion

Here’s what Oracle has to say about Virtual Iron

News Facts

• Oracle has agreed to acquire Virtual Iron Software, Inc. (Virtual Iron), a provider of server virtualization management software that enables dynamic resource and capacity management in virtualized data centers.
• The combination of Virtual Iron’s technology and Oracle VM’s scalable, high performance and highly available server virtualization product is expected to provide more comprehensive and dynamic resource management across the full software stack.
• Customers are expected to benefit from better capacity utilization, streamlined virtual server configuration, and improved visibility and control of their enterprise software.
• The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close this summer.
• Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently.
• Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Snapshot analysis

Virtual Iron has been on my radar screen for quite some time.  I’ve often written about how this company’s orchestration/management software.  This technology, combined with Oracle’s VM software would allow Oracle to directly address needs of quite a few customers.

It appears that many of the stand-alone vendors of orchestration software are feeling the pain caused by customers not always understanding or believing the claims of savings, performance and better reliability.  I’ve heard that Cassatt, Scalent and Virtual Iron were having difficulties.

Virtual Iron was a good choice for Oracle for a number of reasons including the following:

• Virtual Iron’s product is easy to install and easy to use making it ideal for SMB customers
• Virtual Iron’s product used the Xen hypervisor and could be readily enhanced to support either Oracle’s or Sun’s Xen-based hypervisor
• Virtual Iron’s product would allow Oracle to have a better, more powerful SMB offering

Virtualization, the technology that found it home for innovation at IBM mainframes with a totally different purpose has now become an integral part of enterprise serving some other benefits. Virtualization is making data centers more flexible and efficient, but the technology is also raising new challenges, IT managers say.

Consolidating onto fewer physical servers is one of the technology’s key benefits but there are some tradeoffs here. The cooling needs of a virtualized server are quite different than the needs of a server running only one application.

With virtualization increasing CPU utilization to 70-80%, “that generates a lot more heat,” says Turner, director of networks and systems at Brandeis. “If you walk behind the racks of virtualized servers, the heat is just pouring out of those guys. … We’re seeing heat dump into these rooms like never before.”

Using VMware and Xen, Brandeis has virtualized nearly all of its servers over the last couple of years, reducing its total number of physical servers from about 120 to less than 30 today. But Turner says his power use has increased on the whole because virtualization has made it easy to spin up many new applications that he didn’t run when Brandeis used only physical resources.

Also contributing to the power crunch is Brandeis’s use of a high-performance computing cluster and Moore’s law of increasing processor speeds. Brandeis has managed growing power needs by increasing the size of uninterruptable power supplies, says Turner, who specified using APC’s Symmetra for its scalability.

“We’re having to adapt the data center  to new demands that in the past just weren’t there,” Turner says.

Ultimately, the goal is to examine usage over time and power down unused nodes, while more intelligently managing live migration capabilities, he says.

Virtualization has improved development environment and made the provisioning of new servers simpler and faster, but not every workload is appropriate for the technology.

“Applications that require a lot of processing power are not good candidates for virtualization.”

Storage-area network technology is also just starting to catch up with the realities of virtualization, with the number of required storage volumes growing as IT packs more virtual machines onto fewer physical boxes, Turner says.

But virtualization will be essential at State Street as it considers building a private cloud network. While the details and implementation date have not been figured out, Meyer says her team is hoping to harness virtualization, Web services and other technologies to build a network that lets users request new services and get them quickly, without having to worry about buying a server or setting up storage.

They can request a service and the service will be there. That’s the idea, The services that users require most often will be easily available to them through the [private] cloud.

State Street is looking at public cloud services but is leaning toward keeping critical data center operations internal. “We’re evaluating the security implications [of public cloud services],” she says. “I am not sure the security is there for our business.”

At IT Roadmap, Meyer will talk generally about delivering IT services better, faster and more affordably. Despite being in a recession, IT can improve its operations and prepare for the future, she says.

“Crises produce opportunities,” she says. “We have a great opportunity ahead of us. This is the best time to position IT, because when the market comes back it will come back so fast that you have to be ready.”