OSS_ilation writes "Red Hat was all about virtualization in a recent announcement for an 'integrated virtualization' initiative with XenSource and chipmakers AMD and Intel. The move was seen as a way for Red Hat to bring its commitment to virtualization technology into 'sharper focus [...] with the release of a product roadmap that includes virtualization technology built into its enterprise version of Linux.' Red Hat's CTO, Brian Stevens, said the move would remove the complex 'rocket science' aspect of virtualization, and drive the technology into more enterprises as a result."

Steve Wilson writes "Cassatt Corporation has released new software that enables administrators with large J2EE farms to much more efficiently use their resources. In order to do this, it leverages the virtualization capabilities inherent in the JVM to create a single shared pool of hardware resources which which all J2EE applications can draw."

Drawoc Suomynona writes "The Xen virtual monitor is a new generation virtualization software that enable running multiple OSes at the same time with unprecedented level of performances. Manuel Bouyer was recently interviewed about his work porting Xen to the NetBSD operating system. The interview touches on why some consider Xen to be so good, how hard it is to integrate such a software package into an OS, and more."

Jane Walker writes "The push for a virtual data center and utility computing continued this week as Novell announced that SuSE Linux would have support for Virtual Iron out of the box." Novell has also guaranteed that 'that all existing independent software vendor (ISV) certifications will not be affected.' From the article: "'The applications certification [component] is huge,' said Novell director of data center applications Justin Steinman. 'Customers want to know that their existing applications are not going to break when they deploy their technology [on a virtual server].'"

yahyamf writes "CNET News.com is reporting that in the face of increasing competition in the OS virtualization market VMWare is going to give away its GSX server product for free, in the hope that customers who try it will eventually migrate to the more powerful ESX server. The company recently released a free VMWare Player which could only run but not create virtual machines. The company faces competition from rival products such as SWsoft's Virtuozzo, Mircrosoft's Virtual Server, as well as open source software like Xen"

RomanianClimber writes to tell us News.com is reporting that SWSoft is trying to get OpenVZ into the Linux kernel. OpenVZ is an operating system level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. From the article: "In this, it has a major ally: Red Hat, the top seller of the open-source operating system, which plans to add the software to its free Fedora version of Linux for enthusiasts. The companies' move to make OpenVZ partitioning standard in Linux is timely, said Pund-IT analyst Charles King."

Last week you submitted questions for Dr. Herb Thompson, author of the latest Microsoft-sponsored Windows vs. Linux study. Here are his answers. Please feel free to ask follow-up questions. Dr. Thompson says he'll respond to as many as he can. He's registered a new Slashdot username, FFE4, specifically to participate in this discussion. All others claiming to be him are imposters. So read, post, ask, and enjoy.

Robert wrote to mention a CBR Online article which reports that Red Hat has begun testing on Fedora Core 5. From the article: "The next version of Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat's enterprise Linux distribution is not scheduled for release until the second half of 2006 but will include stateless Linux and Xen virtualization functionality and improved management capabilities. Fedora Core 5 Release 1 includes updated support for XenSource Inc's open source server virtualization software, as well as new versions of the Gnome and KDE user interfaces, and the final version of the OpenOffice.org application suite."

DIY News writes "Red Hat is aggressively pushing to get Xen virtualization technology included in the Linux kernel as quickly as possible. This move comes as Microsoft is pushing its own virtualization products and recently relaxed some of its licensing requirements around Windows Server 2003 to facilitate more pervasive adoption and use of those technologies."

rfinnvik writes "VMWare Inc. has released a new free (as in beer) virtual machine runtime called VMware Player. According to VMWare, this free VM runtime makes it possible for anyone to run virtual machines created in their Workstation, GSX or ESX products. It also runs virtual machines created in Microsoft's virtualization products. The runtime is available for both Windows and Linux."

AugstWest asks: "I've been doing some research into what the available clustering options are for pooling CPU resources, and it looks like most of the solutions I've found require that programs be re-written to take advantage of the cluster. Since there are virtualization apps like Bochs and VMWare, where the applications just make use of a virtual CPU as if it was a real CPU, why aren't there clustering solutions that do this as well?"

Mark Brunelli, News Editor writes "Tim Witham, CTO of Open Source Development Labs and a featured speaker at LinuxWorld, says the next Linux kernel will feature improved input/output and virtualization capabilities. Said Witham: 'Enabling virtualization is a big win [for Linux 2.6] as it allows IT shops to start their development cycles for a technology they will be looking at deploying within the next year or so. There has been lots of good work done with regard to system scalability, memory management, disk I/O, process and thread scalability. Also, work done for availability, like a greatly improved multi-path I/O [were victories].'"

Nora writes "IBM developerWorks has posted an open source Slimline Open Firmware (SLOF) download intended to aid the development of operating systems and virtualization layers for PowerPC-based machines. One thing that's kind of neat about it is that it is under a pretty liberal "BSD-like" license -- something I have not often seen IBM do. If I am not much mistaken (and please correct me if I am), this license makes it compatible with both GPL'd and BSD'd projects, among others. And in the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to add that I *am* affiliated with the developerWorks site."

zaxios writes "Techworld is reporting that Microsoft has announced support for running Linux on their virtualization software, Virtual Server 2005. From the article: '[Microsoft] can't compete against VMware without support for other operating systems.' Perhaps the significance of this is that Microsoft has acknowledged Linux as an OS people might want to use, which seems an upgrade from its previous status as a communist cancer."

Roland Piquepaille writes "With recent improvements in graphic cards and in powerful Linux-based PC clusters, virtual 3D prototypes are rapidly replacing actual physical prototypes in a wide range of industries, including early adopters such as aerospace or car companies. But now, software designers are also incorporating sound and tactile feedbacks to their Virtual Reality (VR) systems for real product development. In this long article, Desktop Engineering gives several examples of these new VR developments. But even if PC clusters and off-the-shelf graphic cards are cheap, a state-of-the-art VR facility such as an immersive CAVE can still cost more than one million dollars, because you need to build the viewing facility and buy expensive projection systems. However, costs are still decreasing and virtual prototyping is reaching the mainstream stage. This overview contains selected excepts and comments."

daria42 writes "The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora."

robyannetta writes "Watch out VMware and Microsoft. Here comes Xen, an open-source virtualization for the Linux environment being pushed by Red Hat and Novell. Xen has also joined forces with leading Linux distributors, chip vendors and platform vendors to create a consortium that will more broadly enable open-source virtualization development and deployment." We've covered Xen before, but it's cool to see the momentum behind it growing, as more choice is a Good Thing.

Crow writes "IBM developerWorks has posted an interview with John McCalpin, one of the guys who works on the POWER line of processors. He discusses work on POWER5 (and how the design process works at IBM -- he's also involved in work on the POWER7) and defends the decision that IBM doesn't hand-tune their ICs (as has often been criticized on Ars Technica. Also covers some of the features in the POWER processors, like SMT, the Hypervisor and virtualization -- even addresses the question of whether AIX was designed by space aliens or not. The POWER5 just broke the 3 million transactions per minute barrier on the TPC-C benchmark."

An anonymous reader writes "The Xen team are pleased to announce the release of Xen 2.0, the open-source Virtual Machine Monitor. Xen enables you to run multiple operating systems images concurrently on the same hardware, securely partitioning the resources of the machine between them. Xen uses a technique called 'para-virtualization' to achieve very low performance overhead -- typically just a few percent relative to native. This new release provides kernel support for Linux 2.4.27/2.6.9 and NetBSD, with FreeBSD and Plan9 to follow in the next few weeks. Xen 2.0 runs on almost the entire set of modern x86 hardware supported by Linux, and is easy to 'drop-in' to an existing Linux installation. The new release has a lot more flexibility in how guest OS virtual I/O devices are configured. For example, you can configure arbitrary firewalling, bridging and routing of guest virtual network interfaces, and use copy-on-write LVM volumes or loopback files for storing guest OS disk images. Another new feature is 'live migration', which allows running OS images to be moved between nodes in a cluster without having to stop them. Visit the Xen homepage for downloads and documentation."

josh asks: "For my next project, I've decided I want to do something related to x86 virtualization (the way VMware does it or Plex86 not Xen/Bochs/etc.) but I really don't know where to start. Googling hasn't been helpful (just look at the results if you don't believe me). Are there any resources for learning about this kind of x86 virtualization? I know virtual 8086 mode wouldn't work, but without that what advantage does something like VMware have over something like Bochs? Are there any F/OSS projects aimed at something along the lines of my thinking? Please enlighten me with any references and resources you might have. Thanks!"