shareVM- Share insights about using VM's

Phoenix Technologies is offering a Linux-based virtualization platform called HyperSpace enabled by the HyperCore hypervisor embedded within the BIOS. HyperCore is most likely Xen-based and runs specialized core services side-by-side with Windows on Intel VT CPU’s.

Primary value

Its primary value proposition is that it is a fast boot environment. The concept is to boot the user into a VM running Linux and show him a Mozilla-based browser within the first 10 seconds, while Windows is booting up in parallel in another VM within the first minute or so. While the Windows boot in in progress, the user can connect (through Linux) with an available wireless network, browse the Internet, and switch between the two virtual machines using the F4 function key.

What do users think?

Here are some interesting reviews,

• Phoenix Technologies HyperSpace instant-on OS review
• Phoenix HyperSpace Dual and Hybrid
• A peek at Phoenix’s HyperSpace fast-boot Linux add-on
• Torture-Testing Phoenix HyperSpace, the Linux-Based Instant-On OS

Some other fast boot environments are:

• DeviceVM Splashtop (US Pat. 11772700 – Filed Jul 2, 2007 filed for virtualizing dual OS boot)
• Asus ExpressGate
• Dell Latitude On

However, currently …

Phoenix was selling HyperSpace Dual (Linux only, no HyperCore) and Hybrid (Linux + HyperCore) in 2009 but they seem to have discontinued the Hybrid product line. Was the adoption poor due to limited hardware support? Or, shudder, was the product not fulfilling a customer need?

Perhaps we may see it once again in the near future, the HyperSpace front page hints that “HyperSpace 2.0 is coming soon”.

The technology is cool, but …

Fast boot alone is not a compelling need. There aren’t many times in life when users can’t wait an additional 30 or so seconds to have full access to Windows.

If you look at why Mac users have adopted VMware Fusion for running Windows, you’ll realize that there must be a compelling need for users to change their behavior and adopt something new and different. Users in corporate environments switched to Macs because they did not want a Common Operating Environment Windows desktop, which was locked down by IT. Using Fusion, they can continue to use Office, particularly, Outlook, and especially the Outlook calendar, to continue to meet the demands at work without missing a beat. Conversely, people who have always used Macs did not want to change their lifestyle when they joined a new company and using Fusion, they were able to assimilate into the corporate routine very quickly.

So the question at hand is, what is the compelling use case for a BIOS-based client hypervisor to gain adoption and market penetration?

What is the killer use case?

Perhaps the killer use case is the one that both HyperSpace and SplashTop are already fulfilling today for NetBooks and Nettops, using non-virtualized Linux to provide a Mozilla or Chrome browser as the primary interface for email, Facebook, Zynga, IM, browsing the Internet and using Microsoft Office compatible apps.

This begs the question, is there a compelling need for a Type 1 BIOS-based client hypervisor?

Gabe Knuth has an interesting twist to offer in his post

So what if Citrix, who’s already going to give XenClient away for free, were to partner with Phoenix and other BIOS manufacturers to find a way to include XenClient in the BIOS?

Dear Reader, What do you think?

I wrote a Python 2.6 script to find and list VM’s older than 90 days on my Windows workstation, so that I could compress them, move them to a 1TB drive attached to my machine, or to a file server, or delete them.

find_old_vms is a tool to find and list old VM’s (vmdk’s, vhd’s) on your hard drives that are older than a given number of days.

Usage: find_old_vms in_this_directory_tree older_than_days

Example: find_old_vms “c:\\” 90

Download for Windows XP, 2003, and Linux. The script uses atime (latest file access time), which is not supported on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Code:

#
# NOTE: This script uses atime - the last access time for deciding whether a VM
# ****  file is a candidate. On Windows XP, atime is updated every hour, whereas,
#          Windows Vista and Windows 7 do not provide an atime.

import os, sys, glob, time

# dtroot is the pathname for a node in a directory tree
# age is the number of days for which a file has not been accessed
# size in bytes is the maximum size of a file
def scan(dtroot, age, size):
	""" scan <dir> scans the <dir> on host for virtual images
	"""
	filecount = 0
	wctime = time.time(); # get current time

	for root, subdirs, files in os.walk(dtroot):
		# Build a list of filenames that have a suffix vmd* or vhd*
		vfiles = glob.glob(os.path.join(root,"*.v[mh]d*"))
		for f in vfiles:
			atime = os.path.getatime(f)
			elapsed_time = (wctime - atime)/(60*60*24)
			if elapsed_time > age:
				filecount = filecount + 1
				print f, " last accessed ", int(elapsed_time), " days ago\n",

if __name__ == "__main__":

	import sys

	# User asked for help
	if sys.argv[1] == '?':
		print "\nfind_old_vms in_this_directory_tree older_then_days\n",
		print "Find all files with the suffix .v[mh]d* that have not been accessed since older_than_days",
		print "through a recusrive descent starting from the root in_this_directory_tree",
		sys.exit()	

	# Validate that the first argument in_this_directory_tree is a valid path
	if not os.path.exists(sys.argv[1]):
		print sys.argv[1], " is not a valid directory. Please provide another",
		sys.exit()

	# Arbitrarily limit search to 10 years
	invalid_age = 0
	if int(sys.argv[2]) < 1:
		invalid_age = 1
	elif int(sys.argv[2]) > 3650:
		invalid_age = 1

	if invalid_age == 1:
		print sys.argv[2], " is invalid. Please provide between 1 and 3650 days",
		sys.exit()

	scan(sys.argv[1], int(sys.argv[2]), 0)

If you remove the restriction of searching for vImh]d* files, it will help you find other older files as well. I will appreciate your feedback.

I have reviewed several appliances in the Secure Content and Threat Management and Identity, Access and Vulnerability Managament categories of the VMware Appliance Marketplace to identify the Top 20 appliances. Here are the steps I followed for selecting the appliances listed below:

• I have relied on the Average customer Rating, expressed as a 5 star, or a 4 star, etc., rating (you may wish to review my analysis of VMware’s ratings)
• I discarded all virtual appliances that solely package OS distributions, primarily, ubuntu, fedora, etc. My rationale is that an OS by itself provides low business value to an IT Administrator. While an IT administrator can use these just as if they were using a ghost image, these virtual appliances neither package applications in a usable form, nor simplify the task of installing and configuring the applications that provide business value. Besides, the base OS virtual appliances are available in a category by themselves
• I also discarded several appliances rated 4 star or less, which are present in the directory but have either broken or stubbed out download links. They seem to have been retained in the directory to beef up the appliance count, however, they are not useful to the community.

Which virtual appliance do you use the most and why do you like it?

I have reviewed several appliances in the IT Administration and Systems Infrastructure categories of the VMware Appliance Marketplace to identify the Top Ten and more appliances. Here are the steps I followed for selecting the appliances listed below:

• I have relied on the Average customer Rating, expressed as a 5 star, or a 4 star, etc., rating (you may wish to review my analysis of VMware’s ratings)
• I discarded all virtual appliances that solely package OS distributions, primarily, ubuntu, fedora, etc. My rationale is that an OS by itself provides low business value to an IT Administrator. While an IT administrator can use these just as if they were using a ghost image, these virtual appliances neither package applications in a usable form, nor simplify the task of installing and configuring the applications that provide business value. Besides, the base OS virtual appliances are available in a category by themselves
• I also discarded several appliances rated 4.5 star or less, which are present in the directory but have either broken or stubbed out download links. They seem to have been retained in the directory to beef up the appliance count, however, they are not useful to the community.

Which virtual appliance do you use the most and why do you like it?

Here are the Top 10 posts for Q1 2009, the numbers of views are in parentheses.

1. Defragment Ubuntu, Fedora, ext3, ext4 (2247)
2. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for IT Administrators (2186)
3. VirtualBox – setup, share, shrink, convert (842)
4. How to convert a VMWare VMDK to a Microsoft, Xen VHD? (810)
5. How does shrink with vmware disk manager work? (614)
6. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for Security (607)
7. Pre-configured VHD (Virtual Appliance) available from Microsoft (593)
8. Most popular VMWare Virtual Appliances for Web Apps (558)
9. Virtual Machine Disk Image Compression (320)
10. rsync vm, vhd for backup, disaster recovery, ec2 (317)

Defragmentation of virtual disk files remains the dominant theme. There is an equal amount of interest in virtual appliances, particularly those for system administrators.

Search terms:

• ext4 defrag ubuntu
• ext4 defrag
• convert vdi to vhd
• e4defrag ubuntu
• virtualbox shrink
• rsync vmdk
• wubi
• defrag ubuntu
• defrag ext3
• windows 7 virtual appliance
• defragment ext3
• vmware appliances
• defrag ext4
• xen vhd
• ubuntu ext4 defrag
• defrag ext4 ubuntu
• vmware firewall appliance
• vmware appliance
• “vdi to vhd”
• convert vhd to xen
• ext3 defrag
• windows 7 beta vmware virtual appliances
• defrag fedora
• ext3 defragmentation
• virtual appliance windows 7
• ubuntu defrag
• hercules load balancer virtual appliance
• fedora defrag
• convert vmdk to xen
• shrink vmware disk

Oracle Corporation has delivered a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), to make it easy for customers to get started deploying Oracle solutions on Amazon EC2. The following appliances are built on Oracle Enterprise Linux Release 5 Update 2 as the base OS:

• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Enterprise Edition – 32 Bit
• Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Express Edition – 32 Bit
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 – 64 Bit
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Release 3 – 32 Bit
• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Standard Edition/Standard Edition One – 64 Bit
• Oracle Database 11g Release 1 Enterprise Edition – 64 Bit

Oracle Secure Backup

For on-premise Oracle installations, AWS offers a dependable and secure off-site backup location through the Cloud Backup module, which is a part of Oracle Secure Backup – a tape backup management solution. It provides customers the flexibility to back up data to either tape or the Cloud.

Licensing

Oracle customers can now license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager to run in the AWS cloud computing environment. Oracle customers can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees.

 Ubuntu JeOS

• How to develop virtual appliances using Ubuntu JeOS

VMWare Studio

• Studio: A Free Virtual Appliance Authoring Tool With Robust Management Features
• Videos: Learn how to build a VMWare virtual appliance
• Create your own Linux appliances

Parallels

• How to build a Parallel’s virtual appliances

rPath rBuilder

• rBuilder Appliance creator
• Best practices for building virtual appliances

Rightscale

RightImages provide ready-to-go base operating systems with core cloud software.

ServerTemplates also allow you to designate any number of scripts that you want to run at boot time, upon demand, or when an event is triggered.

RightScripts allow you to specify packages that you want to install before a script is executed and even allow you to upload and attach files directly to scripts.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

• Use an existing AMI
• Create your own AMI from scratch

I was intrigued by an article on database virtualization that caught my eye early this morning and I wanted to find out what is it all about?

The business driver for database virtualization is the globalized economy where business transaction happen 24 x7 x 365 and business critical data must be available within the network boundary of a corporation, or through the Internet, spanning application downtime and IT maintenance windows.

Data virtualization is defined here as

to view data from disparate sources without knowing or caring where the data actually resides.

Data virtualization obviously leads to database virtualization, which is defined here as

the use of multiple instances of a DBMS, or different DBMS platforms, simultaneously and in a transparent fashion regardless of their physical location

James Kobielus, a Senior Abalyst with Forrester Research is predicting that real time information needs will drive database virtualization

the database as we know it is disappearing into a virtualization fabric of its own. In this emerging paradigm, data will not physically reside anywhere in particular. Instead, it will be transparently persisted, in a growing range of physical and logical formats, to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources; and delivered with subsecond delay to consuming applications.

He is making an interesting case that

Proof Points

Oracle acquired Tangosol in May 2007 and possesses a well-developed in-memory, distributed-caching technology called Coherence

Microsoft annonuced Project Velocity a year later in June 2008:

a distributed cache that allows any type of data (CLR object, XML document, or binary data) to be cached. “Velocity” fuses large numbers of cache nodes in a cluster into a single unified cache and provides transparent access to cache items from any client connected to the cluster.

xkoto was selling GRIDSCALE as a database load balancer in 2006. However, it is very smartly capitalizing on virtualization being a hot segment and has repositioned GRIDSCALE as a database virtualization product. This is a vaiid repositioning not only in the context of the definitions cited above but more importantly due to its validation by noted industry analysts:

• Robin Bloor, a database industry pundit and blogger, who describes its database virtualization capabilities
• Dan Kusnetzky, another influential industry analyst, author and blogger, whose review appears here

Gigaspaces XAP can be used for implementing a distributed cache (in-memory data grid)

GemStone Systems offers the GemFire Enterprise as a data fabric (distributed cache)

Scaleout Software also has a distributed cache offering

Here are the Top 12 referrers to our blog over the past 3 months, the numbers of referrals are in parentheses.

1. http://pro-linux.de/berichte/ext4/ext4.html (546)
2. http://dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9653 (342)
3. http://networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html (110)
4. http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/ext4-defragmentation-with-e4defrag/ (59)
5. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/189804?tstart=0 (49)
6. http://techblog.41concepts.com/2008/03/31/shrink-your-windows-disk-image-on-wmware-fusion-mac/ (42)
7. http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/01/09/amazon-launches-ec2-console/ (37)
8. http://wordpress.com/tag/vhd/ (33)
9. http://wordpress.com/tag/vmdk/ (32)
10. http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/updated-homebrew-esx-hardware-list.html (32)
11. http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2005/07/30/445621.aspx (32)
12. http://kakku.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/virtualbox-shrink-your-vdi-images-space-occupied-disk-size/ (31)

Thank you for the referrals. Hope the content is meaningful for our readers.

Updated on September 25, 2009: Please review the updated list of virtual appliances.

You may also be interested in reviewing virtual appliances for IT Administrators.

The original post has been retained as a historical reference. The download links for most of the appliances in the following table no longer work since VMware has revamped the Appliance Marketplace.

Thanks

********** ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS **********

I have ranked the virtual appliances for IT Administrators available at the VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VVAM) as described below. Apart from the serial number in the first column and the computed Rank in the last column, all other data is from the VVAM; the titles are self-explanatory.

Methodology

• I accessed the listings for Security, sorted them by Rating and cut and pasted the first 100 listing into an Excel spreadsheet.
• The Star rating that is visible on the web page shows up as a decimal fraction in Excel, this is what you see in the Customer Rating column below.
• I computed a Rank for each listing by multiplying the Customer Rating x 100 x the number of ratings for that appliance.
• Finally I sorted the result by the rank to prepare the table that appears below. I have selected the top 20 of 174 appliances.
• The virtual appliances are ordered by their rank from the highest to the lowest
• I found it interesting that several appliances that rated a 5 had either one or no user each and the bulk of the ratings are for appliances having 4 and 3 stars.