Finally, there is a common machine format. Only took a few years.

OVF supports a number of features that will enhance customers’ experience with virtualization, including portability, platform independence, verification, signing, versioning, and licensing terms. OVF enables:

* A simple, robust, and user-friendly experience
* Increased customer flexibility through virtualization platform independence
* Simple creation of complex pre-configured multi-tiered services
* Portability of virtual machines and efficient delivery of enterprise software
* Platform specific enhancements and adoption of advances in virtualization through extensibility

Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource have submitted the Open Virtual Machine Format Specification (OVF) to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for further development into an industry standard. The OVF specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of (collections of) virtual machines. Its goal is to facilitate the automated, secure management not only of virtual machines, but the appliance as a functional unit.

The proposed OVF uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform a portable package containing all required installation and configuration parameters for the virtual machines. This allows any virtualization platform that implements the standard to correctly install and run the virtual machines.

This is a great step in the right direction. I really like the idea of someday being able to download 1 compressed file, containing a collection of virtual machines, already configured to deploy a complete server platform. Just imagine, having the database, e-mail, web, file, and firewall server each packaged individually, and then grouped together. 1 complete open-source virtualization server room, in a single file.

VMware has gone a step further, and opened up their disk format to open source as well. “VMware is offering our virtual machine disk format openly and freely to the virtualization industry,” said Brian Byun, vice president of products and alliances at VMware. “We are doing so because we believe open and freely- useable specifications should increase the availability of complementary products, provide customers unfettered choice and increased interoperability in their virtualized IT environments and further expand the virtualization market which is good for VMware.”

VirtualIron said “We’ve always supported open standards, whether it’s the current Microsoft VHD or the future OVF.”

“The format is based on a TAR file, includes disk images (eg VMware VMDK or Microsoft VHD), but also includes a description of the rest of the virtualized hardware. Moreover, unlike prior formats (as far as I know), OVF can describe collections of VMs, so as to describe multi-tier services.”

Sources:
Virtual PC Guy’s WebLog : DMTF accepts new open virtual machine format
Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) -Virtual Machines - Virtualization - VMware
VMware Introduces Open Virtual Machine Disk Format Specification
Open Virtual Machine Format Specification (OVF) Submitted to DMTF.
DMTF Accepts New Format for Portable Virtual Machines from Virtualization Leaders
VMware Intros Open Virtual Machine Disk Format Specification
Open Virtual Machine Format (Virtualization Blog)
Dugie’s Pensieve » Blog Archive » VMware, Microsoft and XEN agree

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Just a little bit from Apples website, in case you didn’t take the time to read it when you downloaded boot camp:

Boot Camp Beta Expiration

Boot Camp Beta versions 1.0 through 1.2 expire on September 30, 2007. Boot Camp Beta is licensed for use on a trial basis for a limited time. To continue previewing Boot Camp after September 30, click the Download Now button above to install the latest version of Boot Camp Beta. You do not have to reinstall Windows. This new beta license will allow you to continue using Boot Camp until Mac OS X Leopard is available (expected October 2007).
Updating to Boot Camp 1.4 beta

If you previously installed Boot Camp beta, you can easily update to Boot Camp 1.4 beta. You don’t need to partition your hard drive again (unless you want to change its size) or reinstall your Macintosh and Windows software or documents, but it’s very important to update the Boot Camp Assistant software, create a new Mac Drivers CD and install the updated software it contains onto Windows. Complete instructions are provided in the Installation and Setup Guide included with the Boot Camp 1.4 beta software.

There is no word about whether it will continue to function after these dates, but it will be violating the terms of service, and will not be eligible for support from Apple. This is just a little trick to get everyone to upgrade to Leopard when it ships later this month. One of the legal solutions, if you aren’t already running it is Parallels. Run Windows on Mac OS X without rebooting!. Parallels allows you to mount the windows partition as a source for the virtual machine.

If you’re not ready to upgrade to Leopard right away and still want to use your Boot Camp partition, Parallels makes life very, very easy:

Option 1: The redirection
For months now, Parallels Desktop has been able to use a Boot Camp partition as a virtual hard drive, meaning that you can boot your Windows XP or Windows Vista partition in a virtual machine at any time, and move back and forth between the two. When Boot Camp’s license expires, you can still access your hard drive partition without using Boot Camp by booting the partition into a virtual machine. You won’t have to reinstall anything or worry about losing any of your critical Windows files.

Option 2: The full-on migration
Tired of Boot Camp and want to go all-Parallels? Run Parallels Transporter (bundled free with every copy of Desktop for Mac) to convert your Boot Camp partition to a fully-functional Parallels virtual machine. Copy the new virtual machine over to your OS X partition and start using as a new VM within Parallels Desktop. Once its Transported, you can delete your Boot Camp partition and free up a ton of disk space. Working with a native Parallels image also gives you access to key features like undo disks & snapshots.

Enjoy your favorite Windows-only 3D games and graphic applications on your Mac - Get Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac!

Sources:
Apple Boot Camp Beta Expires With Leopard — Mac OS X — InformationWeek
Apple Boot Camp
The Official Parallels Virtualization Blog: What to do with your expiring Boot Camp partition

The news is that Hitachi has announced a new level of hardware virtualization, which could possible eliminate the need for any Virtualization software in the enterprise environment. By moving the hypervisor completely to the cpu core, it will eliminate the base os. Most products, besides some base os solutions using a custom os, require either windows or linux in its full potential to be running underneath all of the virtual machines. By moving this processing to the hardware it will improve performance greatly. There aren’t any publish statistics yet but it will revolutionize the industry. Why pay for software which is prone to viruses, crashes, and extra cpu cycles when it can be done by hardware.

But the real question is….
Why are we virtualizing to begin with?

The power of running multiple systems on a single box is very powerful. It is awesome for testing and deploying multiple servers on a single rack unit. But before virtualization became popular, people where running database, webserver, ftp etc on just one system for many years. Why have we tried to get away from this, because new software is CRAP. Software is no longer written as well as it used to be, and really depends on allowing the operating system do too much of its error checking. It seems like the reason why people don’t run databases and exchange on the same box is if a virus comes through and eats up the cpu, it will have the effect of an D.O.S. attack, making the database unavailable to other users. If some company decided to start from scratch, building dedicated enterprise servers to provide database, email, and file server capabilities to the enterprise network I really don’t think they would look anything like what we have now. I like Suns idea of containers, which as I understand it, the services run independent of each other isolated, but while on the same host operating system. All applications should be running in isolation. Also, there would be a finer degree of control. Why do a huge, probably over 85% of servers are running process for no reason. I have heard that finally windows server will be able to run headless. Something unix has been able to do for a very long time. GPU don’t belong in a server. Thats all for now, more on this later.

Sources:
Can new server hardware make virtualization software obsolete?

After reviewing a brief article which asks more questions that it answers over at techtarget. “The best way to back up a virtual machine” I really thought about how a medium to large company does backups on their physical network and realized that virtual machines shouldn’t be any different. But there are more options with virtual machines, because of the management consoles associated with them. Having worked in an environment where I had to run weekly tape backups I know that you generally don’t back up the whole machine each week. The Data is the value, not the OS. Why are people thinking they want to fill up their backup tape servers with complete virtual images? Because they are lazy.

For people who don’t remember the early days of computing, when things where simple. You had a floppy disk with your program and operating system, and a second floppy disk with your data. You could share your data disk and keep your software at home. Then came hard drives, and people would do partitions, and have the operating system, the applications, and the data on 3 separate partitions, or if lucky separate drives. Now why are people thinking it is good policy to forget the past and put the data with the vulnerable operating system?

How would I go about setting up a medium sized redundant virtual farm? Glad you asked, here is my thoughts.

If you are in a heavy data server farm, then you should have your data in an isolated enclosure, which the backup server can access directly, and the virtual machines can also access.

If you are in a heavy processing needs, then you may want use images to create the virtual machines for a clustered or load sharing environment, so when you make changes to your machines you can deploy the new images quickly and easily. Ever consider using Subversion with Virtual Machines? Every time you deploy a new image, just save a version. New image doesn’t work, just go back a version.

For smaller business, the one thing I would recommend avoiding is using a backup agent to talk to the virtual machine guest os. This just plain doesn’t make sense. The amount of overhead being used to talk to the guest os, request files and perform the backup just don’t seem practical. There are a few exceptions to this, and that would be something like a e-mail server or small database server where having the data in a san or nas isn’t practical for a smaller company.

Warning, Never try to back up any running virtual machine. All reports show that it is best to stop the machine to have complete safe file access.

Sources:
How to back up virtual machines in Virtual Server 2005
Backing up and restoring Virtual Server
Backing Up Virtual Machines and the GSX Server Host
Backing Up the Virtual Machine
Asigra Targets Virtualization with its 64-bit Software
Why Run VMware Over NAS?

How about this strange idea, Remote Office Live CD?

Now initially it sounds strange, having a remote office server, running with a live CD, but it does have some really unique potential.

You run a small to medium sized business, where 80% of your workforce works, or could work from home. They all require access to the company database, using ancient software which doesn’t support VPN or other complex networking technology. So, how do you deploy out a database server to 50 plus employees who may only have 1 physical computer at home? Simple, a live CD. Build a live cd, with virtualization, and a virtual database server on the first CD, and then use a second cd, flash card or external hard drive for the database. Or, have the virtual machine updated itself using VPN on boot.

If your database, for example merchandise catalog is only updated bi-weekly, then just send out a second CD or new flash drive every other week. The live CD means that no matter how much crap is on the computer at the house, it won’t affect the “company business”, due to no local access.

If you need to update anything on the operating system, send out a new first CD. Due to the nature of a livecd, there is very little risk of a long term virus lasting any longer then the power cycle of the computer.

From an IT standpoint this would make home office support so easy. All users would be guanteed the same desktop experience every time they turn their computer on. No more problems of the kids homework taking over that system you sent them home with for “company business.”

The same idea would work well for sending out demo software to clients, something Microsoft is testing now with their Virtualization products. They offer a collection of VHDs, for testing, which “could”, possible be loaded onto a virtual machine off a boot cd. This isn’t an optimal setup, but it would possibly work:

PC -> Linux Boot LiveCD -> Linux Distro -> VMware -> VHD converted to VMware -> Vista

This allows you to build a Vista boot CD.

Sources:
OpenVZ Virtualization Software Available with CentOS On ‘Live CD’ To Simplify Trial Usage
Virtualization For Everyone in Ten Minutes or Less and XenExpress
Xenfire 2.0
Run IT on a Virtual Hard Disk