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Last week, Sun Microsystems has released the next major update for its recently acquired VirtualBox product - Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.

What is Sun xVM VirtualBox?

VirtualBox is an absolutely free virtualization product for x86 platform. It supports both 32bit and 64bit architectures and can be used in both server and desktop virtualization.

VirtualBox supports a standard set of features, including the following:

• Unique design - modular and lightweight
• All VM configuration is stored in XML files
• Solaris, Windows and Linux are supported as both host and guest OSes, Mac OS X is supported as host OS.
• Performance: Guest software to optimize the guest VM performance for Linux and Windows
• Networking: Flexible virtual networking (you can even to PXE boot over NAT)
• Storage: SATA support
• Storage: you can use VMware-created disk images (VMDK files)
• Shared folders - seamlessly transfer files between host OS and guest VMs

What’s new in VirtualBox 1.6

Obviously, you’ll notice that VirtualBox now looks like a Sun product - colors have gone through subtle changes which reflect Sun’s elements of design.

Feature-wise, here’s what’s new in this major update:

• Solaris and Mac OS X host support
• Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
• Guest Additions for Solaris
• A webservice API
• SATA hard disk (AHCI) controller
• Experimental Physical Address Extension (PAE) support

Apart from this, I really like many other improvements:

• VMM: reduced host CPU load of idle guests
• VMM: many fixes for VT-x/SVM hardware-supported virtualization
• USB: fixed problems with USB 2.0 devices
• NAT: improved builtin DHCP server (implemented DHCPNAK response)
• NAT: port forwarding stopped when restoring the VM from a saved state
• NAT: make subnet configurable
• Storage: better write optimization, prevent images from growing unnecessarily.
• Shared Folders: many bugfixes to improve stability (I’d love to see it fixed cause it was unusable in 1.5 on my 64-bit Ubuntu Gutsy)
• Linux additions: several fixes, experimental support for RandR 1.2
• Linux additions: compatibility fixes with Linux 2.6.25

For a full changelog, please visit the VirtualBox changelog link below.

I’ve already downloaded it and will definitely give it a try on my home PC. One thing I’m really interested in is double-checking whether there’s any tweaking to get VMware Server 2b2 and VirtualBox co-exist in the same Ubuntu Hardy environment.

See also:

• Changelog for VirtualBox
• VirtualBox 1.6 download

Qumranet has just announced the general availability of its desktop virtualization suite called Solid ICE v4.1.

Solid ICE

I’ve been to Qumranet stand at VMworld Europe 2008, and was really impressed with the technology demo.

Read more

If you haven’t heard about Planet V12n before, it’s an initiative by the VMTN to aggregate all the virtualization blogs they can find. There’s also a Planet VMware aggregator for VMware-only blogs

Last week, Desktop Vitualization blog was added to the Planet V12n list, and I’m really proud to join the rest of great blogs already featured there. Thanks for adding me to the list! And to all the new readers of this blog - welcome and thanks for stopping by, hope to see your comments!

Head over to the VMTN blog to look at the full list of participating blogs, it’s an excellent way to learn more about the virtualization community.

Last week saw a rather interesting release: a VDDK - Virtual Disk Development Kit by VMware, which seems to be a complete toolset for working with VMware VMDK disk images and coding your own applications which interface with them.

Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK image specification) is used by many vendors, and so such an SDK from VMware is a great way to reinforce VMDK position on the market.

What is VMware VDDK?

Virtual Disk Development Kit is essentially the following three things:

• VMDK disks mount utility (mounting Windows or Linux partitions directly from VMDK images)
• VMDK disks management utility (growing VMDK images and changing their type, even shrinking VMDK images under certain conditions)
• VMDK Virtual Disk API - a programmatic interface to access VMDK images from your applications

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Mar

31

VMware Server 2.0 beta 2

Last Friday saw the long-awaited release of VMware Server 2.0 beta 2, Build 84186.

New features in VMware Server 2.0 beta 2

VMware website highlights the following new features of this VMware Server 2.0 release:

Updated VMware Infrastructure (VI) Web Access management interface: With the faster performance, improved stability and broader range of configuration options, the VI Web Access management interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive management experience. In addition, embedded help files are context sensitive based on the task being performed.

Independent virtual machine console: With the new VMware Remote Console, you can access your virtual machine consoles independent of the VI Web Access management interface plus resize the virtual machine console windows as needed.

Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.

Multi-tiered permissions: Configure different levels of permissions to access virtual machines in different ways, including browsing, interacting, configuring and administering virtual machines.

New hardware editors: Edit and add devices such as USB 2.0 devices and legacy devices such as floppy drives, serial and parallel ports.

Automatically start your virtual machines: Select which virtual machines that you want to automatically start when VMware Server starts. In addition, there is also an option to boot the virtual machine directly into the BIOS Setup Screen.

Link to Virtual Appliance Marketplace: Access thousands of pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine. This speeds up time to value and simplifies software development, distribution, and management.

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Mar

31

Failed to allocate page for guest RAM error in Linux VMware Workstation

I’ve been spending increasingly more time running Ubuntu on one of my desktops. It has replaced the Windows Vista I had and so far I quite like the experiment. Out of the box, all of the hardware was properly supported and even the NTFS partitions left from Vsita install are easily available.One of the first things I’ve decided to install was the trial version of the latest VMware Workstation: 6.0.3 build-80004. And although it installed without a problem, when I tried to run one of the previously created virtual machines, I got the following error:

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!

As it turned out after a quick investigation, that was a result of running a VM from a NTFS partition, because its default mounting settings don’t have the exec option.

Since you shouldn’t be running anything critical through an NTFS driver anyway, I simply moved the VM onto one of the ext3 partitions and, sure enough, it fixed the guest RAM allocation error.

Update: if your scenario prevents you from moving a VM to a native partition, use the following option:

mainmem.UseNamedFile = “FALSE”

You should add it to the vmx file of your VM. Thanks for the tip, benito!

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Mar

20

Slides and Videos from VMworld Europe 2008

At last, PowerPoint slides are available for all the VMworld Europe 2008 sessions and labs.

There’s 16 videos for you to watch, and absolutely every session and lab has a set of slides available for download.

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Mar

18

Critical security vulnerabilities fixed in VMware’s hosted products

Many of you have probably heard about the recent Core Security findings which resulted in a security advisory CORE-2007-0930, Path Traversal vulnerability in VMware’s shared folders implementation:

A vulnerability was found in VMware’s shared folders mechanism that grants users of a Guest system read and write access to any portion of the Host’s file system including the system folder and other security-sensitive files. Exploitation of these vulnerability allows attackers to break out of an isolated Guest system to compromise the underlying Host system that controls it.

Successful exploitation requires that the Shared Folder’s feature to be enabled which is the default on VMware products that have the feature AND at least one folder of the Host system is configured for sharing.

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Mar

13

Microsoft Plans to Acquire Kidaro

Looks like Microsoft is expanding their desktop virtualization campaign with acquisition of Kidaro:

Microsoft Corp. today announced its intended acquisition of Kidaro, a leading provider of desktop virtualization solutions for enterprises. In combining Kidaro’s virtualization technology with its suite of desktop management tools, known as the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance, Microsoft will enable IT professionals to optimize their desktop infrastructure by providing management capabilities for Virtual PCs, streamlining deployments and easing application compatibility issues.

Windows Virtualization Team blog also confirms:

the three founders of Kidaro will be joining Microsoft and play similar roles here, and that the plan is to keep Kidaro’s R&D team in Israel.

See also:

• Press release @ Microsoft: Kidaro Acquisition

Kris Buytaert has just posted a great post on Virtualization.com: Looking Back at a Decade of Open Source Virtualization. While it’s a lengthy article, it’s definitely worth your read if you’re curious about the history of virtualization, primarily desktop virtualization.

I come from Unix system administration background, and have been in this industry for just over 10 years - long enough to recognize all the names and technologies in the article and to testify: indeed, there were quite a few ways of running graphical desktop sessions remotely long before 2006 or 2007. Some of them are not as simple to use, but almost no technology stays stale - new approaches are being developed daily, and you couldn’t be more spoiled for choice of desktop virtualization than you are today.

Have a look at the Open Source Virtualization reivew, I’m sure you’ll like it.

keep looking »