Linux Integration Services v2.1 Now Available

 

We are really excited to announce the availability of the Hyper-V Linux Integration Services for Linux Version 2.1. This release marks yet another milestone in providing a comprehensive virtualization platform to our customers. Customers who have a heterogeneous operating system environment desire their virtualization platform to provide support for all operating systems that they have in their datacenters.

Driver support for synthetic devices: Linux Integration Services supports the synthetic network controller and the synthetic storage controller that were developed specifically for Hyper-V.
Fastpath Boot Support for Hyper-V: Boot devices take advantage of the block Virtualization Service Client (VSC) to provide enhanced performance.
Timesync: The clock inside the virtual machine will remain synchronized with the clock on the host.
Integrated Shutdown: Virtual machines running Linux can be gracefully shut down from either Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Support: Supported Linux distributions can use up to 4 virtual processors (VP) per virtual machine.
Heartbeat: Allows the host to detect whether the guest is running and responsive.
Pluggable Time Source: A pluggable clock source module is included to provide a more accurate time source to the guest.

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Linux Integration Services v2.1 Now Available

VMWare Embedded and Ubiquitous

Just weeks after Microsoft Released to Manufacturing its Windows Server 2008 product line, it continues to struggle to actually get its new Hyper-V virtualisation technology (previously code-named Viridian) off the ground and shipped to customers. This is no time to be stalling!!! Hyper-V is expected to land within the next 3 months.

Today the current industry de-facto standard for virtualisation, Palo-Alto based firm VMWare announced key software deals with server industry giants Dell, HP, IBM and Fujitsu, signing new agreements ensuring that its ESX 3i hypervisor will be embedded into servers produced by the four hardware manufacturers, beginning within the next 60 days.

VMWare’s statement puts a very dark cloud over Microsoft’s delayed release of Hyper-V. Microsoft has been struggling to get its virtualisation products off the ground over the past few years with stiff competition primarily from VMWare and Xen both of which are cross-platform.

These four key hardware vendors, again the de-facto standard for most IT data centres around the world, along with this new agreement will likely ensure that VMWare remains not just the de-facto standard for some time to come.

Must admit, personally, I’ve only been using the existing Microsoft Virtualisation technologies to-date including Virtual PC and Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition which I’ve found completely reliable although not as functionaly rich as VMWare’s offerings.

Have Xen installed on my OpenSuse Linux box at home but never actually got round to doing much more with it.

I was at a Microsoft Developer event for the launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 a few weeks ago in Belfast, where we were given a demo of Hyper-V and must admit it really did look quite good. Microsoft was able to explain the architecture they had selected for Hyper-V and the advantages it should bring over VMWare… but they’re late in delivering and, as you can see from today’s announcement, late really isn’t good enough.

Anyway, the company I work for has signed an Enterprise Agreement with VMWare for use internally, and we have an increasing number of customers adopting it also – so, admittedly a little late to the game on this one – VMWare is one of the next key skills I intend to develop in the next few months. Have been using Microsoft Virtual Server R2 within a small development environment I have with W2k3 Active Directory, Exchange 2003 , SQL Server 2005 and SharePoint 2007, which I think I’m going to migrate to VMWare ESX Server machines instead as part of my self-learning on this. As well as this I’ve just today made recommendations to use VMWare to host three new development servers and three new production servers for one of our new internal projects. Hopefully will get them!