KVM has officially been released in Linux Kernel 2.6.20 as of Feb 4. The inclusion of KVM in the Linux kernel instead of Xen doesn’t seem to bother Xen project leader Ian Pratt according to http://www.devxnews.com/.

“Xen is a true hypervisor, whereas KVM is a legacy virtualization solution akin to VMware Workstation, VMserver and Microsoft Virtual PC,” Pratt told internetnews.com. “It lacks the benefits of para-virtualization performance enhancements that have been pioneered by Xen and are now being copied by VMware and Microsoft.”

Ian also stated that he isn’t looking for Xen to be included in the Linux kernel anymore stating:

“Putting Xen into Linux doesn’t make sense: hypervisors are different beasts from operating systems, so they share little code.”

Of particular interest are the comments about VMware copying Xen’s para-virtualization techniques. Although I doubt VMware will comment, I’d love to hear what they have to say about that.

You can read the Devx article here.

VMware’s VMmark Benchmark suite finally goes beta and along with it VMware now has released a new corporate blog VROOM!. VROOM! will be published by the VMware Performance Team.

So far, VMware hasn’t released anything to download yet except a whitepaper unless you are participating in the Beta Program.

http://www.virtualization.info/ reports:

“So while a comment from players like Microsoft, SWsoft, Sun and others is waited, VMware is working to develop VMmark as a SPEC endorsed standard.

Meanwhile Intel and IBM, who are SPEC members as well, announced theirs plan to develop an independent benchmarking system.”