Virtualization Report | David Marshall | November 2006

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November 2006

November 30, 2006

Novell Launches Interoperable Management Solutions

Novell announced the first offerings of its desktop-to-data center management initiative, including the availability of a comprehensive set of solutions which orchestrate the management of virtual machines, high-performance computing and other IT resources.

Following the agreement with Microsoft earlier this month, these offerings are the next steps in Novell's plan to deliver on its vision of interoperable, cross-platform management solutions. Systems management solutions from Novell provide open standards-based management that covers the entire enterprise IT environment, from Linux to UNIX to Windows, and helps customers maximize the value of their technology infrastructure. These solutions are also well positioned to help organizations more closely align IT to their business needs, control costs and minimize their risks.

As organizations adopt new technologies, including Linux, open source and virtualization, they gain performance and cost benefits but can face an additional level of management complexity. Four new solutions from the Novell ZENworks systems and resource management family provide a complete set of integrated ITIL-based services that automate management across diverse server and client platforms for both physical and virtual environments. These systems management solutions from Novell now manage and schedule heterogeneous virtual machine deployments, including Xen virtualization on Linux, and automate the load balancing of these machines. To increase the strategic use of available resources, these new solutions use policy-based orchestration to schedule jobs, reserve resources in advance, dynamically re-prioritize resources to meet service demands, and learn to proactively provision or deprovision resources.

"Companies today are looking to virtual machines as one way of consolidating servers, saving power and space, and increasing the efficiency of their IT investments," said Ronni Colville, research vice president at Gartner. "However, while virtualization can reduce the physical requirements of the data center, it can also compound the level of management complexity. To maximize their computing potential in the data center, customers need cross-platform systems management solutions for both virtual machines and physical machines."

With these new ZENworks solutions, customers can automate IT data center operations using dynamic, policy-driven solutions that ensure security and compliance, eliminate administrator effort and enable total control over their IT environment from the desktop to the data center.

Novell ZENworks Orchestrator serves as the "brain" that allows for policy-based automation. Unlike other management products, ZENworks Orchestrator takes a heuristic approach to learn from previous events and resource demands.
Novell ZENworks Virtual Machine Management gives organizations the ability to confidently employ virtualization in their data centers, whether running on Linux, UNIX or Windows machines. From VMware to Microsoft to Xen virtualization environments, this policy-based solution automates the process of deploying and managing virtual data center assets, as well as dynamically provisioning workloads and ensuring business continuity. This solution also manages virtualized environments in Novell Open Enterprise Server.
Novell ZENworks HPC Management provides grid-based management of Java applications and enables workloads to be distributed for parallel execution. This includes automated high-performance multicast data distribution which can move and copy large volumes of data to remote resources for processing.
Novell ZENworks 7.5 Asset Management, the only product on the market that runs readiness reports for both Windows Vista and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 from Novell, helps customers to control and manage their IT infrastructure with a clear and complete picture of their asset environment.

Joe Wagner, Novell general manager of systems and resource management, said, "The latest Novell ZENworks management solutions are aimed squarely at answering customer calls for interoperable solutions. Novell ZENworks Orchestrator and Virtual Machine Management allow organizations to leverage the power of virtualization and increase the performance of their IT investments. These two solutions, complemented by ZENworks HPC Management and ZENworks 7.5 Asset Management, put customers in control of their computing resources, while reducing the costs and simplifying the management of their desktops and data centers."

For more information about Novell's desktop-to-data center management initiative, go here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 30, 2006 08:02 PM

November 30, 2006

Virtual Bridges Announces Upgrade to Win4BSD

Virtual Bridges, a provider of enterprise and SMB solutions using virtualization for business, announced today an upgrade to their Win4BSD Pro Desktop product. Win4BSD Pro Desktop runs as a FreeBSD/PC-BSD application and allows users to run Windows Applications and Desktops seamlessly on the BSD platform.

The Win4BSD Pro 1.1 upgrade includes support for diverse FreeBSD platforms, simplified installation, performance improvements and a roll-up of the maintenance releases since Win4BSD Pro was first released.

Major highlights of Win4BSD 1.1

More robust, expanded support for diverse FreeBSD platforms, including upcoming 6.2
Improved support for PC-BSD 1.2 systems, including updated (and enhanced) PBI package
Simplified installation process by eliminating dependencies on pre-requisite packages on some systems
Maintenance fixes roll-up from post 1.0 fixes

"Win4BSD has become an overnight success in the BSD community as it addresses the Windows application compatibility challenge in a direct, cost-effective and easy-to-use way", said Jim Curtin, president and CEO of Virtual Bridges. "This updated release reflects our commitment to the BSD platform and to other underserved markets requiring virtualized Windows solutions."

"Win4BSD Pro 1.1 demonstrates our continuing commitment to deliver Windows on the FreeBSD family of platforms," said Leo Reiter, CTO of Virtual Bridges. "It builds on our 1.0 release by incorporating fixes and enhancements to better support current and future generations of the FreeBSD operating system."

Win4BSD Pro Desktop features include:

One-Click-to-Windows provides extremely easy installation of Windows
Runs Windows Applications and Desktop on BSD at near-native speed
Ability to display either full desktop mode or "floating" application mode
Windows malware resistance through "renewable" Windows architecture
Full support for audio playback and recording
Allows re-use of your existing Windows license for both cost-savings and broad application compatibility
Full integration between the FreeBSD/PCBSD and Windows filesystems for user documents and settings

Win4BSD Pro Desktop is a sibling product to the company's award-winning Win4Lin Pro Desktop and is based on the same code base. Win4Lin Pro Desktop is currently at Version 3.5.

Pricing and Availability

Win4BSD Pro 1.1 is being offered to new users at the price of $49.99 until December 8, 2006 (Regular Price $69.99). Existing Win4BSD Pro users can download Version 1.1 at no charge.

Posted by David Marshall on November 30, 2006 07:32 PM

November 30, 2006

SWsoft Virtualization Customer a Top 10 IT Project in InfoWorld 100

SWsoft customer arvato mobile GmbH has been named to the "Top 10" in the 2006 edition of the InfoWorld 100. Arvato mobile, a division of arvato Bertelsmann AG, was recognized for its use of Virtuozzo virtualization software in its datacenter. The InfoWorld 100, a listing of the most innovative corporate IT (information technology) solutions for 2006, honors IT projects that demonstrate the most creative use of cutting-edge technologies to further their business goals.

Arvato mobile uses SWsoft Virtuozzo, the leading operating system-level virtualization solution, to consolidate physical servers onto virtual servers that offer greater flexibility in managing workloads and the entire datacenter, while reducing the number of physical servers required. Disaster recovery was also a critical application in arvato mobile's decision to use Virtuozzo.

In the InfoWorld article describing arvato mobile's use of Virtuozzo to run mission-critical applications, Lukas Losche, director of IT operations, arvato mobile said that "All of these applications need to have 100 percent uptime, and they are very demanding in terms of system resources, system scalability, and especially system security."

Losche added: "If we detect a hardware error, we are able to move a database server from one hardware node to another with practically zero downtime."

In the case of arvato mobile, three administrators manage 600 virtual environments, resulting in a remarkably high efficiency ratio for the IT staff.

"We are very proud that our Virtuozzo software played an important role in helping arvato mobile with its technology implementation that is both innovative and delivers real business value," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft. "From small and medium businesses to Fortune 50 organizations, SWsoft customers are realizing the benefits that come from OS-level virtualization."

"It's been said that fortune favors the bold. The inspiration for this year's finalists to tackle such sweeping changes varies widely - from reducing delivery time of products and services to replacing cumbersome legacy systems," said Richard Gincel, InfoWorld Senior Editor. "But regardless of the motivation, high ambition unites them all."

To be considered for the InfoWorld 100, projects must stretch beyond the typical, off-the-shelf solution, using multiple technologies in innovative ways to serve well-defined business goals. Winners appear in the November 13, 2006 edition of InfoWorld and online.

Posted by David Marshall on November 30, 2006 04:22 PM

November 30, 2006

Gartner: Server Sales Slowed by Virtualization

According to the latest estimates of server sales from the IT analyst firm Gartner, as companies continue to embrace virtualization technologies, they are buying fewer physical servers causing a slow down in the growth of the server market.

The report shows that worldwide revenue from server sales grew by 4.4 percent to just over $13 billion, however that is down from the 5.1 percent growth experienced in total last year. And with about 2 billion servers sold worldwide during the third quarter of 2006, the volume grew by 9.1 percent over the same quarter last year, but still down from the 13.2 percent growth seen last year.

IBM Corp. continued as the server market leader with a 33.7 percent share and a 7.4 percent revenue gain to $4.38 billion. Hewlett-Packard Co. followed with 25.3 percent with a revenue decline of 6 percent to $3.29 billion. Dell ranked third with a 10.8 percent share with Sun Microsystems not far behind in fourth place with 10.1 percent.

Gartner says despite the numbers, the server market is still growing, but that they expect it to grow at a slower rate because of the increased adoption of virtual servers. The analyst firm expects that virtualization technologies will have a significant impact on server sales over the next five years, especially with regard to x86 class servers.

Posted by David Marshall on November 30, 2006 03:51 PM

November 29, 2006

Virtualization: Looking Ahead

As Intel announces its advancements with multi-core technologies, Virtual Iron Software reaffirms its support for the new technology. And what about Microsoft? At IT Forum/TechEd 2006, the subject of virtualization and Longhorn just happened to come up. Find out more. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 29, 2006 07:09 PM

November 28, 2006

Egenera, XenSource and vBlade Software

Egenera launched its vBlade software, a new way to manage both physical servers and virtual machines by providing a single environment for configuring, allocating, repurposing and managing both types of resources. Their first vBlade implementation utilizes XenEnterprise from XenSource, a commercial implementation of virtualized Windows and Linux on the Xen hypervisor.

Additionally, XenSource announced that it has entered into an OEM agreement with Egenera whereby Egenera will integrate XenEnterprise into Egenera PAN (Processor Area Network) Manager software as part of the new vBlade offering.

XenEnterprise offers the ability to easily move multiple virtual servers onto a single physical machine, and then migrate those virtual servers elsewhere whenever additional resources are needed - a solution that helps to greatly reduce the total number of servers needed by an organization, and thereby reduce IT costs.

"Egenera is a pioneer in using virtualization to simplify the datacenter and help enterprise IT become more efficient and cost effective," said Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of XenSource. "With the integration of XenEnterprise with PAN Manager, customers will be able to take advantage of even greater levels of efficiency, performance and utilization, while maintaining the overall simplicity of management within their datacenters."

Unlike legacy servers, Egenera servers have always been virtual assets that are deployed, managed and repurposed quickly and simply. Rather than tie a specific operating system and application to a physical server, Egenera's PAN architecture creates pools of compute, storage and network resources that can be easily shared and automatically repurposed based on business priorities and service level agreements.

With the introduction of vBlade software, users can define pools of physical and virtual blades, and deploy Egenera's virtual servers on either physical or virtual blades in the same exact manner across the entire PAN - including multiple BladeFrame systems - making the provisioning of servers to physical or virtual blades simple. This also provides easy failover, rapid scalability, load balancing and disaster recovery on a larger scale.

vBlade software will be priced as a separate add-on to the Egenera BladeFrame system. A preview release is now available to Egenera customers, and will become generally available in the first half of 2007.

Posted by David Marshall on November 28, 2006 04:21 PM

November 28, 2006

CA Advances Unicenter to Manage Virtual Environments

CA announced the availability of its heterogeneous, platform-agnostic solution that provides centralized management for virtualized and clustered server environments - Unicenter Advanced Systems Management (Unicenter ASM) 11.1.

Unicenter ASM is a key element of CA's Virtual Platform Management solution, which helps organizations simplify the management of their physical, virtual and clustered server environments. It supports CA's EITM vision by unifying and simplifying the management of multi-vendor, heterogeneous virtual platform environments, and by improving service while reducing cost.

Unicenter ASM automatically balances workloads in complex environments that include clusters and virtualized platforms. Through pre-defined business policies, it performs centralized dynamic resource brokering across virtualized server resources. If the performance of a mission-critical application begins to degrade and additional memory or CPU capacity is required, Unicenter ASM can automatically reallocate available resources to that application. Unicenter ASM can also make resources available by moving the least critical application on the virtual machines to a different server. If and when the demands of the mission-critical application diminish, Unicenter ASM will then automatically reallocate resources to other applications as necessary.

The software also enables customers to leverage a wide range of virtualization technologies including Hewlett-Packard's MC/Service Guard, IBM's HACMP (High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing) and pSeries LPAR-capable eServers (P4 and P5), Microsoft's Virtual Server and Cluster Server, Red Hat's Advanced Server cluster, Sun's enterprise and mid-Range servers, as well as Sun Cluster and Sun Fire servers, Veritas Cluster Servers running Solaris and Windows, and VMware ESX/GSX Servers.

"As data center virtualization grows, enterprises will wind up with virtual environments that incorporate technology from multiple vendors," said Andi Mann, senior research analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "A truly vendor-neutral solution like Unicenter ASM will therefore become essential for keeping data center operations running smoothly."

CA's announcement of Unicenter ASM 11.1 joins a growing list of competitive offerings from companies such as Opsware, IBM, CiRBA and Egenera to name but a few. In 2007, this list of heterogeneous management solutions is expected to continue to grow.

Posted by David Marshall on November 28, 2006 08:04 AM

November 28, 2006

Invirtus Joins the VM Conversion Race

Invirtus, Inc. announced today the availability of a new beta product, their Enterprise VM Converter product which the company claims is an enterprise-class platform conversion application that transforms physical machines into virtual machines. "IT managers who need a cost-effective, simple but powerful way to migrate physical systems into virtual machines will find that Invirtus is a valuable part of any Enterprise migration strategy!" said Tom Edwards, Invirtus CEO.

The software will allow users to convert any number of Windows host operating systems running on a physical machine into a guest operating system that will be run on a virtual machine. These host operating systems can be converted one-by-one or simultaneously by scheduling automated batches without the need for user intervention. In addition, there are never any reboots and no software is required to be installed on the machine being converted.

Invirtus VM Converter Beta provides the following list of features:

Manual Conversion Mode allows users to convert one server at a time
Automated Multiple Conversion Mode allows users to simultaneously manage unattended multiple conversions of hundreds of servers
Advance scheduling (can be timed in advance for lowest server workload)
Mixed environment (vhd/vmdk file types supported)
No reboot required
Easy to use, no training required
Designed to work with vmdk files from all versions of VMware Workstation, VMware Server, VMware ACE, VMware GSX Server, VMware ESX Server
Designed to work with vhd files from Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

IT professionals interested in becoming Beta testers can sign up on the following Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on November 28, 2006 07:10 AM

November 26, 2006

Free Parallels Update Brings Virtualization to Windows Vista

Parallels announced that it is bringing virtualization to Windows Vista via a free update for its Parallels Workstation 2.2 for Windows and Linux product.

In addition to offering full support for PCs running Vista as a primary operating system, the company claims that the update will also improve the performance of Windows Vista virtual machines by as much as 200 percent. The update also offers a complete Parallels Tools package for Windows Vista virtual machines. Parallels Tools is a free set of helpful add-ons included with each copy of Parallels Workstation 2.2 that improves the usability of virtual machines by enhancing video, sound and networking support, as well as enabling file sharing and the cutting, copying and pasting of data between operating systems.

"The world runs on Windows, and so it was critical for us to offer fast, stable primary and guest OS support for Vista, the next generation of this important operating system," said Benjamin Rudolph, Marketing Manager, Parallels. "Now, users can not only test Vista in a safe, secure virtual machine, but can also run any other OS in a virtual machine on any PC with Vista as its primary operating system. With this new capability, Workstation really offers users the best of all worlds."

Registered Parallels Workstation customers will receive the Workstation 2.2 update automatically if the auto-update feature of Parallels Workstation is enabled. Alternatively, users can manually download and install the update by going here. There is no cost for this update. You should be aware, however, that upgrading Workstation 2.2 will not require re-installing any guest OSes or applications, but the Parallels Tools should be reinstalled.

New users can download and evaluate Workstation 2.2 free for 15 days.

Posted by David Marshall on November 26, 2006 04:34 PM

November 26, 2006

LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit

If you didn't believe that virtualization was making a huge splash into the Linux and open source community, maybe this will help shape your opinion - Virtualization has its own track at the next LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit being held at the Marriott Marquis in New York, NY on February 14th and 15th of 2007.

The summit includes proven best practices from IT pioneers who have used open source to enable robust, innovative solutions that deliver solid business impact. It offers two full days of real-world peer case studies, intensive technical training, insightful keynotes, and cutting-edge solutions to prepare you for the next generation of open initiatives.

The virtualization track currently consists of the following sessions:

Case Study: Shared Penguins: How to Have Hundreds of Virtual Servers With a Shared Root - Speaker Steve Womer of Nationwide Insurance: We have implemented a shared file system, in our zLinux environment. This allows us to share the linux binaries among several hundred servers, reducing our disk requirements by 57%. This session will discuss our approach, advantages and disadvantages.
Virtualization and the Next generation Data Center - Mike Grandinetti from Virtual Iron moderates a panel discussion - Virtualization holds great promise, but many first and second generation virtualization technologies compound the problem by adding cost and complexity in the form of virtual server sprawl, new management requirements and performance overhead. Emerging virtualization technologies are addressing these shortcomings and enabling leading enterprises to take virtualization to the next level. Virtualization has become a key strategy to reduce the complexity and cost involved with managing and operating data centers. This panel session will discuss these emerging technologies and examine how they can be leveraged to make the data center more efficient, flexible and agile while dramatically reducing cost and complexity.
GEP and PGA: Linux Grid Computing in Financial Modeling and Drug Discovery - Speaker Daming Li of LITEC Systems Corporation - Gene Expression Programming (GEP) and Parallel Genetic Algorithm (PGA) on Linux grid computing cluster have proven to be a very effective way of tackling intensive mathematical problems in financial modeling and drug discovery. Based on the features of stock objects, we present our GEP grid computing models including the fitness that appropriated to the special rules of stocks, give experiments and analysis on the real stock price index of NYSE. The results show that the precision that predicts by using our models is higher than traditional method. The availability of molecular structures of drug targets and candidate compounds has opened the door for the application of large scale grid computing technology to conduct virtual drug design. Through the use of PGA on Linux grid computing cluster, we developed the computing power to effectively discover potential drug candidates. Our models generate better profiles of combinatorial drug candidates optimized by PGA.
Virtualize Your Entire Data Center - Speaker Alasdair Rawsthorne from Transitive - Virtualization solutions for Intel's industry-standard microprocessors are well known in the industry, and data center managers are implementing them increasingly to consolidate servers to achieve higher utilization, provide resilience, and to improve costs by operating much more flexibly than in the past. The latest hardware virtualization technology, which for the first time provides true instruction set architecture (ISA) independence, has synergies with other emerging virtualization technologies that allow managers to virtualize an entire data center without any application source code or binary changes and at speeds comparable to native ports.

This talk will show you how to consolidate RISC and UNIX workloads onto industry-standard microprocessors, to achieve even greater consolidation than previously. An architectural description introduces you to new technologies for moving applications between platforms. A case study examines the process of virtualizing an entire heterogeneous data center, and a demo gives you a first hand experience of a single virtualized consolidated system supporting multiple instruction sets and operating systems.
Linux Virtualization Technology Alternatives - Speaker Kir Kolyshkin of OpenVZ - Different virtualization approaches (emulation, hypervisor-based, operating system-level) and their pros and cons are outlined. Details of the OS-level virtualization approach are given, using OpenVZ as an implementation example. Operating system features - virtualization, isolation, resource management and checkpointing - are described, as well as user-level tools. Possible usage scenarios of virtualization are presented.
Virtualization's Impact on Enterprise Security - Speaker Kris Lamb of ISS - Virtualization alone does not equal security. As virtualization is rapidly deployed worldwide, it is critical to understand the business risks at the network, application and behavioral levels. Kris Lamb of Internet Security Systems will discuss issues related to securing virtual assets from exploits and malware and how to provide defense-in-depth for your environment. Throughout this session, Lamb will reveal how the evolving virtualization market space can be leveraged to innovate organizations' security processes to both protect the infrastructure as well as meet the rising standard of due care with corporate compliance.
Case Study: Living in a Virtual World - Speaker Bruce McMillan of Solvay - This session will describe the server consolidation project of Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in Marietta, GA. Topics covered will include; needs analysis, proof of concept, design and testing, implementation, cost savings and lessons learned.

You can register for the summit, here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 26, 2006 04:11 PM

November 26, 2006

VMware VI3 - What About Backup Solutions?

When VMware introduced VI3, it also introduced the VMware Consolidated Backup feature to help with our backup needs. Two companies going after your virtualization backup dollars are Vizioncore and PHD Consulting. So what do they offer? listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 26, 2006 04:03 PM

November 26, 2006

Virtualization of Graphics Resources Patent - is it Apple?

You can find out a lot about a company, its product roadmap and the things that they are interested in by looking at the patents that they file. Case in point, the Macintosh News Network recently posted about an interesting find while it perused the US Patent & Trademark Office publications.

According to the Macintosh News Network, the US Patent & Trademark Office published two patent applications that were both filed back in July 2006 and titled "Virtualization of graphics resources". The site stated that the patents generally relate to computer graphics, and more particularly to virtualizing resources for computer graphics. In many instances, the patent points to OpenGL and graphics address re-mapping table (GART) entries.

The article does state that Apple isn't listed as the official assignee but that this is common practice today. The patent does however list Ken Dykes by name, and he was listed on a previous Apple patent for an iPod harness.

Patent Background
A graphics kernel driver typically interfaces between graphics client drivers and graphics hardware to assign graphics resources to each client driver and to administer the submission of graphics commands to the graphics hardware. Each client driver has explicit knowledge of the graphics resources it is assigned and references the resources in its commands using the physical address of the resources. As more sophisticated graphics features are developed, the demand for graphics resources is ever increasing but the graphics resources are limited by the graphics hardware and other system constraints. The assigned resources cannot be shared among clients because the graphics hardware is not designed to handle resource contention among the clients. Additionally, the client drivers are required to manage their own internal resource conflicts. For example, they must handle their attempts to use more than available graphics memory.

Is Apple looking to the virtualization of graphics resources? Read the entire post and judge for yourself. It does sound interesting.

Posted by David Marshall on November 26, 2006 03:31 PM

November 26, 2006

Virtual Machine Detection in Malware

Virtualization, as we know, offers itself to a number of use case scenarios and solutions. One such use case that isn't talked about much is the examination of computer forensics. Honeypots are a common way for security professionals to conduct research on the common practices among computer hackers and attackers. By leveraging a honeypot, researchers and administrators can gain a better understanding of the patterns and behaviors of their attackers. Virtualization can help with creating this honeypot environment.

The problem with using server virtualization to create these honeypot environments is that there are numerous ways for an attacker to identify when a system is running within a virtualized environment. One quick giveaway is looking at the hardware in the system. A virtual device can be a dead giveaway to an attacker. Another way to identify a virtual machine is by looking at its BIOS which is typically quite different than the actual BIOS used on the host server. And of course, if the virtual machine has some sort of virtualization software or tools installed to help optimize performance, the system can be easily identified as a virtual machine.

Attackers are becoming more aware of people using virtualization to try and thwart their efforts. As such, they are creating their malware with a self-defensive property to detect if the computer is a virtual machine. According to a recent post on the SANS Institute diary, 3 out of 12 malware specimens recently captured in their honeypot refused to run in VMware.

It continues by stating, "There are many ways for malicious code to detect that it's running in VMware: looking at the presence of VMware-specific processes and hardware characteristics are some of the simpler ones. More reliable techniques rely on assembly-level code that behaves differently on a virtual machine than on a physical host. VMware-detecting features are sometimes built directly into the malicious program, and are sometimes added by a third-party packing utility."

It offers up a number of ways to deal with packed executables that check for the presence of VMware, such as patching the malicious code so that the offending routine never executes. Another option is to modify your VMware instance to make it more difficult for the malicious program to detect that it's running in a virtual machine.

Interestingly, two readers came up with the idea to develop a mechanism for configuring non-virtualized systems to look like virtual machine. By masking itself in this way, it could potentially fool malicious software into thinking that the environment is a virtual honeypot, effectively fooling it into refusing to run and thus helping to immune the system against certain infections.

Check out the article on the ISC SANS site, here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 26, 2006 01:30 PM

November 21, 2006

VMware Pushed VDI - NEC and Provision Networks Listened

VMworld's list of hot topics included VMware's VDI. The VDI solution made its way into the keynote address and also made itself known on the exhibition floor. NEC announced the launch of a new virtual PC class thin client system - and Provision Networks announced its own solution for transforming the physical desktop computer and its applications into on-demand virtual services. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 21, 2006 06:27 PM

November 21, 2006

Update While Waiting for VMware Workstation 6.0

There doesn't seem to be a lot of effort in creating new features for the 5.5 version of VMware Workstation, after all, why bother with 6.0 on the horizon. On the other hand, VMware doesn't seem content with its list of supported host and guest operating systems for the Workstation 5.5 product, as it announced a new dot release - 5.5.3.

Updated Support for Host Operating Systems

Workstation 5.5.3 adds support for the following host operating systems:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, Update 4 (AS, ES, WS), 32-bit and 64-bit
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, Update 8 (AS, ES, WS), 32-bit and 64-bit
Experimental support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, 32-bit and 64-bit
Mandriva Corporate Server 4, 32-bit and 64-bit
Experimental support for Mandriva Linux 2007, 32-bit and 64-bit
Experimental support for Ubuntu Linux 6.10, 32-bit and 64-bit

Updated Support for Guest Operating Systems

Workstation 5.5.3 adds support for the following guest operating systems:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, Update 4 (AS, ES, WS), 32-bit and 64-bit
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, Update 8 (AS, ES, WS), 32-bit and 64-bit
Experimental support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, 32-bit and 64-bit
Experimental enhanced support for Microsoft Windows Vista, 32-bit and 64-bit
Mandriva Corporate Server 4, 32-bit and 64-bit
Experimental support for Mandriva Linux 2007, 32-bit and 64-bit
Experimental support for Solaris x86 10 6/06 (Update 2), 32-bit and 64-bit
Experimental support for Ubuntu Linux 6.10, 32-bit and 64-bit

Posted by David Marshall on November 21, 2006 05:54 PM

November 21, 2006

SWsoft Announces Updates for Virtuozzo

SWsoft announced updates for the Linux and Windows versions of its Virtuozzo server virtualization software that dramatically improve networking management and provide greater support for Linux and Windows applications.

Both the Virtuozzo 3.0 for Linux Service Pack 1 and Virtuozzo 3.5.1 for Windows Service Pack 1 deliver advanced networking features that include:

Ethernet layer network adapter support - enables a virtual environment (VE) to run any Ethernet dependent application or service
VLAN support - allows set up of a virtual networking infrastructure that meets strict security requirements with complete network traffic isolation via support for virtual environment network adapters
Improved CPU management - the Linux update enables system administrators to assign any number of virtual CPUs, up to the number of physical CPUs available. The Windows update includes a new CPU scheduler to provide better isolation and enables strict CPU upper limits for each virtual environment.

"These updates to our Virtuozzo operating system-level virtualization technology provide significant improvements in terms of performance, scalability and security for our customers," said Kurt Daniel, vice president of marketing and alliances, SWsoft. "Wider application support and advanced networking deliver greater flexibility and make it easier and more cost-efficient to create and manage Virtuozzo-based virtual servers."

The Windows update also includes support for Citrix Presentation Server, which now can be directly installed in a virtual environment without any special configuration.

Virtuozzo 3.0 for Linux Service Pack 1 is available now from SWsoft and its partners worldwide. Virtuozzo 3.5.1 for Windows Service Pack 1 will be available in one month.

Posted by David Marshall on November 21, 2006 05:46 PM

November 21, 2006

OpenVZ Delivers Live Migration Capability

The OpenVZ project announced availability of its operating system-level server virtualization software in the form of a kernel based on Linux 2.6.9, including for the first-time in a stable branch, fully-tested and performance-tuned live migration and Virtual Ethernet device features. Previously, those features were only available in the development branch of OpenVZ software.

According to the company, delivery of the checkpointing and live migration functionality as part of OpenVZ brings a capability that no other open source operating system-level virtualization software offers. It allows system administrators to move virtual servers between physical servers without end-user disruption or the need for costly storage capacity.

With checkpointing and live migration, the state of a running virtual environment is frozen and the image stored on disk then restored on another server. The function executes between any two servers on a network, so the capability works for any server and any application. One of the more interesting statements, OpenVZ delivers this capability without additional requirements, such as a storage area network (SAN).

Also, the Virtual Ethernet device function allows for network devices to be created inside virtual environments using designated names and hardware (MAC) addresses that are different from the actual physical device.

"Now, the user community can enjoy rock-solid OpenVZ software with advanced features," said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. "This represents months of work on performance tuning and quality testing to ensure delivery of stable software code."

The new OpenVZ kernel software can be downloaded here. Also, users can access helpful installation instructions from the OpenVZ wiki. The site serves as a forum to gain and share knowledge about OpenVZ and includes documentation and a knowledge base with helpful advice.

Posted by David Marshall on November 21, 2006 05:33 PM

November 21, 2006

Butler Group's Technology Audit of Altiris SVS

Independent analysts at the Butler Group research firm recently released a 7 page technical audit paper on Altiris' Software Virtualization Software (SVS) 2.0 product.

From the Abstract:

Altiris Software Virtualisation Solution (SVS) v2.0 is a simple and easy approach to virtualising desktop applications in a Windows environment. Currently IT departments struggle with some aspects of desktop application management, mainly the resolution of Dynamic Link Library (DLL) conflicts, which result in applications failing because a newer and not compatible DLL has been installed as part of another application.
Butler Group considers the simple filter driver approach to enabling applications to be virtualised rather than modify the infrastructure, so that it is capable of executing virtual applications, which represents a significant step in driving the wider adoption of application virtualisation. However, Altiris SVS currently does not support thin client applications or server-based applications; Altiris has stated these will be in the next major release of SVS scheduled for mid 2007. Altiris considers the forthcoming release of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 to be a catalyst for wider adoption of application virtualisation: SVS provides a simple and easy-to-use interface that can greatly reduce the management time involved in desktop operating systems or application migrations.

Find out more from the Butler Group report such as product analysis, product operation, product emphasis, and product strategy.

Download and read the report for yourself.

Posted by David Marshall on November 21, 2006 05:04 PM

November 18, 2006

XenSource Launches Partner Program for XenEnterprise

XenSource, Inc. introduced a partner program that will leverage relationships with independent software vendors (ISVs) and independent hardware vendors (IHVs) to develop high performance products for virtualized environments based on Xen technology. The new partner program is expected to broaden the XenEnterprise ecosystem which already includes more than 45 global market leaders.

The new program will offer companies three levels of participation, each providing a level of integration that best suits the member company:

Technology Partners: for companies interested in increasing awareness of the virtualization support provided by their products through the XenSource website partner pages, which will highlight solutions by category.
Premier Partners: for companies seeking a more integrated marketing strategy that includes joint PR and branding; shared collateral such as white papers, case studies, and solution descriptions; and participation at XenSource user conferences. Additionally, XenSource will invest in co-marketing initiatives including channel partnerships and interoperability and compliance testing.
Strategic Partners: for companies committed to XenSource technology, this level of partnership is by invitation only and includes long-range, fundamental engineering interactions; development and optimization activities; and co-marketing initiatives including channel tie-ins.

All partners will have early access to technical specifications, and participate in the XenEnterprise Beta programs. There is no fee for charter members who join by December 1, 2006. For more information or to apply for the program, go to the following Web site.

Charter members include:

IHVs: AMD, Azul Systems, Brocade, Emulex, Intel, Isilon Systems, QLogic, SuperMicro, Tehuti Networks and Verari Systems.

ISVs: Availigent, Avinti, Avocent, Cassatt, Citrix, CohesiveFT, ConVirt, Embotics, Enigmatec, Enomaly, Evident Software, Hyperic, Ingres, Klir Technologies, LeoStream, Marathon Technologies, Microsoft Corp., Mountain View Data, PlateSpin, Platform, Propero, Provment, Qlusters, rPath, SignaCert, Sphera, SteelEye Technology, ToutVirtual, Transitive, uXcomm, Verari Systems Software, Virtual Appliances, VMLogix, Voltaire, and Zmanda.

Posted by David Marshall on November 18, 2006 03:52 AM

November 18, 2006

Virtualization Helping our Children

AppStream and Ripple Effects have teamed up for a good cause - to help children cope with traumatic life experiences.

To quickly reach more children with help in the aftermath of recent school violence, AppStream, Inc. and Ripple Effects announced today that they will join forces to make science-based online training easily available to children, at no cost.

AppStream, Inc., a leader in on-demand PC software deployment, is providing the software delivery mechanism through its free software-on-demand service called AppStreamLive. Ripple Effects, a leader in software tools to solve behavior problems, is providing a free software module titled "Dealing with Hard Things." To make sure this resource gets to children when they need it most, the companies are making the program available for a short time at no cost. The training program can be used by children and their supporting adults such as counselors, teachers, parents and psychologists. The free program is available immediately at www.appstreamlive.com.

AppStreamLive, the delivery mode for the free tutorial, is a free website that enables PC applications to be accessed online very simply and easily since downloads and software installations are avoided. AppStreamLive removes the technological barriers that often come with installing software, so users can begin accessing software programs within minutes of streaming.

"Dealing with Hard Things" is a tutorial designed to help children ages 7-10 cope with difficult times in the wake of traumatic experiences. Children can use the software independently or together with a counselor, teacher or parent, and it is particularly useful for the indirect victims of recent violence - kids who have seen disturbing television images and heard horrifying stories. The tutorial promotes three important components of resilience: managing feelings, asking for help, and regaining some sense of personal control. The tutorial is drawn from Ripple Effects' comprehensive training software, which helps children develop skills to reduce their chances of becoming either perpetrators or victims of violence, manage difficult issues, and connect more deeply with caring adults.

"Although professionals have to be involved with direct victims, for the thousands of indirect victims of violence and terror, massive counseling is not a practical option. Computer-mediated guidance is," says Ripple Effects CEO Alice Ray, a national expert in social-emotional learning, Emmy-winner, and Clinton presidential appointee to a national youth violence prevention initiative.

"Ripple Effects' software program for helping kids cope with trauma, combined with AppStream's simple method for accessing PC software, will immediately provide children with a powerful tool for overcoming difficult life experiences," said Brad Rowland, vice president of marketing, AppStream. "The entire team at AppStream is proud to be able to use our technology for a program such as this one."

Posted by David Marshall on November 18, 2006 03:41 AM

November 17, 2006

Virtual Appliances are Hot Right Now

One of the hot topics in virtualization right now has to be virtual appliances. VMworld 2006 talked about and showcased numerous virtual appliance products. Two of the products include: Reflex Security which has a network intrusion prevention solution and Zeus Technology which offers an extensible traffic manager appliance. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 17, 2006 04:51 PM

November 16, 2006

Q and A with VMware's Mendel Rosenblum

I had the chance to hear VMware's co-founder, Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, speak during one of the keynote presentations at VMworld 2006. His discussion about the future of virtualization was fantastic! Even more awe inspiring was getting the chance to actually meet with him, shake hands, and talk about virtualization with him during my book signing at the VMworld Company Store. The man is a true visionary and yet very down to Earth.

TechWorld was also able to catch up with Dr. Rosenblum at the show, and asked him a number of interesting questions. TechWorld wanted to find out where he saw the company taking this fast evolving technology. Some of my favorite questions and answers follow:

Q: What combination of factors has made virtualisation the hot topic of today? A: A lot of the excitement around virtualisation stems from problems in the current software environment - a combination of modern operating systems and applications. People weren't happy with issues such as reliability and security. While the OS is supposed to be in charge of the hardware, people spend too much time managing them, and they're not robust enough to run multiple applications. What was needed was a thinner layer to do the mapping onto the hardware resources.

For example, you could imagine a distributed OS that allows free flow of information between applications, or one that stops bad processes bringing down the entire OS - but we evolved not to do that.

And some of the older technology was too slow - now the hardware has arrived.

Q: What's the most promising development outside of VMware that you believe can or will aid VMware's stated aim of virtualising everything? A: Finally we're getting hardware support for virtualisation - we can only do so much in software to get resources treated as a pool - with boxes connected by faster networks that's exciting. We've never done anything in hardware, only software. Virtualisation is an incredibly useful technology - virtualisation will be pushed by partners from shops that service SMBs and want to be able to build a virtual infrastructure. And there are vendors who want to use the technology to improve security.

Q: What are the barriers to running 3D graphics in a VM - and when do you anticipate overcoming these? A: We can do some of this in software - need to wait until the ATIs and nVidias see virtualisation as important. I know they're working on it, and today's GPUs are like mini-supercomputers. The technology is not that different from Silicon Graphics old systems with multiple graphics cards - it's just about putting the pieces together.

The good news is that even Microsoft is helping by the way it's specifying the graphics level - you can read the state out of the chip. As for timing, that depends on graphics people. It's an example of what we'd like to see - let the hardware architects figure out how to make it happen.

Q: Your model seems to be to keep ahead of Microsoft by scattering a pile of free software in your wake as you push the technology forward. A: Want to avoid being in a niche - we're better than the competition, who can't do what we do so we can charge a premium price. Guided by the notion of the virtual appliance model, we needed a free player to seed the VA market. Our sales people hate it because it's free but developers like to impact a lot of people so that's a good thing for them.

But then, they also like to have stock options that go up in value.

Read the entire interview, here. TechWorld has a number of other great questions and answers.

Posted by David Marshall on November 16, 2006 04:48 PM

November 16, 2006

Software Acceleration with the Help from Virtualization

Virtualization isn't just for server consolidation anymore. Software companies are identifying and addressing other important gaps in the marketplace where virtualization can fit in to solve a problem. One such area is in the software development and testing process.

Leveraging virtualization tools, software developers and QA team members can streamline their application development and testing cycles. Rather than spending valuable work cycles building and configuring environments over and over again, software engineers can instead focus on the work they were hired and trained to do - testing and development. This improves the software development life cycle, lowers the cost of developing and testing the application, speeds up the process of detecting and correcting software bugs, and should bring a more refined, finished software product to market in a timelier manner.

VMworld 2006 turned out to be a great place to showcase this type of technology. VMware used VMworld 2006 to introduce everyone to VMware Lab Manager, the company's new software development life-cycle management platform that was acquired back in June from Akimbi Systems. Also in attendance was Surgient, long time provider of virtual lab management applications that automate the deployment, configuration and teardown of complex enterprise software environments or "virtual labs" on demand. And making its presence known to the show's attendees, Bangladore, India-based VMLogix announced the North American launch of its own solution, interestingly enough, also called LabManager.

VMLogix LabManager

VMLogix LabManager provides users with an innovative software lifecycle management solution that fully leverages emerging virtualization platforms, including Microsoft and VMware, and provides complete support for physical machines. With VMLogix LabManager, developers, testers and IT operations staff can ensure rapid, highly repeatable, resource-optimized deployments of complex, multi-machine software test environments.

Ravi Gururaj, CEO and founder of VMLogix said "VMLogix LabManager reduces costs, improves software quality and accelerates application release times. With this launch, developers now have a user-friendly, efficient framework, which helps them virtualize and simplify the software development lifecycle processes."

Surgient VQMS

Back in October, Surgient announced the 5.0 version of its Surgient Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS) while at Mercury World 2006. The release added enterprise-class functionality and scalability, including broad support for complex heterogeneous environments and advanced management capabilities for image and policy-based resource management, such as dynamic pooling, scheduling and calendaring, remote access and comprehensive, customizable reporting tools.

When asked about the new competition entering the market, Erik Josowitz, Vice President of Marketing at Surgient, said "The new products, VMware Lab Manager and VMLogix LabManager, further validate Surgient's vision of applications that put virtualization technology to work. Surgient pioneered virtual lab management beginning in 2003, so it's great to see the market expand to support new lab management offerings."

VMware Lab Manager

VMware Lab Manager automates the setup, capture, storage, and sharing of multi-machine software configurations, and then provides development and test teams with access to specific configurations through a self-service interface. It extends the power of VMware Infrastructure and offers a number of added benefits.

The product uses a shared pool of server, networking and other software lab resources and allocates them to teams on an as-needed basis to help with asset utilization.

It also helps to "close the loop" between development and test in terms of defect reporting, verification and resolution by taking snapshots of complex configurations exhibiting problems and then assigning that snapshot a LiveLink URL that can be entered into a bug report. This seamless sharing of the actual defect environment reduces the time required to reproduce, troubleshoot and correct the reported bug.

Another added benefit is the additional flexibility gained with outsourcing development and/or QA. VMware Lab Manager provides secure remote access to a software lab that can host remote developer desktops and provide remote access to shared complex lab configurations. This eliminates the time-consuming and costly replication of equipment in offshore or outsourcing partner labs, and it provides flexibility to rapidly add, remove or replace outsourced resources as business requirements change.

VMware Lab Manager went into a private beta in the third quarter of this year, and the public beta version is now available for immediate download. VMware Lab Manager is expected to be generally available in December 2006. The solutions from Surgient and VMLogix are available now.

Posted by David Marshall on November 16, 2006 03:30 PM

November 15, 2006

SWsoft Developer Network Gaining in Numbers

SWsoft recently announced that its SWsoft Developer Network (SWDN) had attracted more than 1,000 subscribers in less than 90 days. Now offering even more features, SWDN will provide developers and partners with resources for the development of innovative, integrated solutions based on SWsoft's products.

SWDN provides a central repository for documentation, community forums and downloads. The Community Technology Preview program was added for the recent launch of Plesk 8.1 for Linux/Unix, giving developers an opportunity to preview, test and provide feedback on product features directly to SWsoft engineers. SWDN's Open Fusion Forums offer another new resource for developers to share experiences and ask questions.

"Direct input from our customers and partners is integral to the development of innovative, high-quality products and demonstrates our strong commitment to open collaboration with the development community," said Ilya Baimetov, director of Technology, SWsoft. "We will continue to enhance SWDN with valuable programs for our users and new features to improve usability and content."

SWDN is appropriate for anyone interested in developing, testing or integrating their solution with one or more SWsoft products. SWDN offers two levels of involvement:

Community Developer: free access to developer forums, the technical library and the SWsoft knowledgebase.
Professional Developer: free access for the first year (only $295 annually thereafter), which includes the Community Developer benefits plus development licenses for all SWsoft products.

Developers and partners can join today by visiting the following Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on November 15, 2006 04:51 PM

November 14, 2006

Red Hat and VMware Firm Up Relationship

So, I suppose Microsoft and Novell don't have an exclusive lock on announcing expanding relationships between virtualization platforms and Linux operating systems?

Red Hat recently announced their own expanding relationship with virtualization market leader VMware. The relationship in part is to help better support customers and ISVs who are deploying virtualization today. As part of this relationship, Red Hat and VMware are delivering certification and focusing on open, community-based interoperability between Red Hat and VMware solutions.

Red Hat and VMware will accelerate their efforts to drive adoption of open and accessible interoperability points through a community-based development model. By collaborating on key technology issues such as virtual machine disk formats, paravirtualization, and management API's, the companies intend to work within the open source community to create a common, interoperable virtualization model that ISVs and customers can trust - no matter which deployment model they choose.

Red Hat has already certified VMware Infrastructure as both a certified software application and a certified virtual hardware platform for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition, all VMware solutions fully support running Red Hat Enterprise Linux inside a virtualized environment. Starting today, the Red Hat Application Stack virtual appliance is certified and available in VMDK format in the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace for both customers and ISVs to evaluate in a pre-production environment.

Red Hat and VMware plan to jointly deliver channel bundles of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Application Stack paired up with VMware Infrastructure and VMware Server. These bundled solutions are designed to bring together the best of open source and virtual infrastructure in an integrated and jointly supported solution bundle for customers, systems integrators, and channel partners to adopt and leverage.

Posted by David Marshall on November 14, 2006 07:59 PM

November 14, 2006

Virtualization Solves Global Warming

Can you believe it? A software company is helping with energy conservation - all jokes aside. During a keynote presentation at VMworld 2006 in Los Angeles, VMware's President, Diane Green talked about power management and how VMware fits into the puzzle.

To help validate this notion of "green" virtualization, Diane Green brought Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) director Roland Risser out to explain. PG&E announced a utility financial incentive program that supports virtualization projects in the data center. Virtualization enables customers to consolidate their data centers and remove a large portion of their existing servers.

"We'll give our customers a check for every server they unplug," said Risser. PG&E customers who are interested in earning financial incentives for virtualization projects must apply for the rebate prior to beginning their consolidation project. These businesses can then receive a credit from PG&E for $750 - $1350 for every server removed. The program has a cap where businesses can earn up to a maximum rebate amount of $4 million per project site.

Risser explained to the audience that it is cheaper for PG&E to reduce the energy demand of its customers than it is to invest in new energy technologies or build new generator capacity.

For more information on PG&E's virtualization technology rebate program, visit their Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on November 14, 2006 07:33 PM

November 14, 2006

Leostream Expands Connection Broker

In an effort to further promote the adoption of hosted desktops and the benefits of thin client computing, Leostream Corp. announced that its Connection Broker for hosted desktops has gained support from two of the leading suppliers of thin computing, Neoware and Wyse Technology.

The Leostream Connection Broker provides controlled access to desktops that are running in virtual and physical machine environments, including VMWare's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and IBM's Virtualized Client Solution (VCS). Connection Broker also provides policy-based connectivity between fat, thin, and web-based clients to physical machines, virtual machines, or Citrix sessions using the most appropriate remote desktop protocol.

Leostream Connection Broker provides a protocol-agnostic solution to the problem of connecting users to the computing resources they need to do their jobs. Supplied as a Virtual Appliance, it comes as a self-contained system that can be setup and configured in a few hours.

Benefits include:

Zero user retraining - hosted desktops look and behave like physical desktops.
Single sign-on from either Thin or Fat (Windows 2000, XP, and Vista) machines avoids the need to re-enter usernames and passwords.
Progress reporting keeps user informed of progress and errors associated with assigning a desktop, such as "no Hosted Desktop available," or "Hosted Desktop starting."
Integration with existing remote desktop viewer avoids the need for Java, ensures a highly responsive user experience.
Support for a wide range of remote desktop protocols enables the complexity of the backend system to be hidden from the user - they just login and are automatically connected to the appropriate resource using the necessary connectivity.
Hosted desktops centralize sensitive information, reduce risk of data loss.
Thin clients can be locked down so it is not possible to copy data onto removable storage. The thin clients themselves are not worth stealing and contain no user data - ensuring compliance with data security regulations such as HIPAA.
Desktops can be remotely managed and assigned to users from a pool and be returned to the pool after use.

Free trials can be obtained from their Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on November 14, 2006 04:19 PM

November 13, 2006

Acronis Makes Server Migration Speedy, Accurate and Simple

The P2V and virtual machine imaging and migration market just got a little more crowded. Acronis, Inc. announced the launch of Acronis FullCircle, a software application that allows IT organizations to move an entire server's data seamlessly to and from physical and virtual servers.

FullCircle is based on FAST (Fast Accurate Simple Transmission) engine technology that enables users to migrate and convert data seamlessly between physical and virtual environments. This "virtually aware" technology automatically customizes the data being migrated to its new environment. FullCircle works with multiple operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Linux, and a variety of hardware and virtual servers on the market.

Acronis FullCircle provides:

Virtual Environment Flexibility - FullCircle supports multiple hardware platforms and operating systems, including both 32 and 64-bit servers and VMWare, Microsoft and Parallels virtual environments
FAST (Fast Accurate Simple Transmission) engine - The conversion and migration engine was designed specifically for such physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical conversions. The engine is fully integrated with the Acronis disk imaging technology and can migrate systems to dissimilar hardware
Fully customizable - FullCircle's wizard-based controls allow users to customize the migration process and migrate an entire system or specific files to another server
Minimal disruption - With FullCircle, IT has the option of migrating either live data or data at rest with either an on-line or off-line migration
Historic Data Retrieval - FullCircle is currently the only product that allows users to migrate historic data. Used in conjunction with Acronis True Image, which takes a snapshot of a server for backup purposes, Acronis FullCircle can take the backup image and migrate that to a new server
Speed - Since Acronis FullCircle automatically modifies data to meet the criteria of its new environments, migration times are reduced from days to hours and hours to minutes
Ease of Use - The wizard-based controls driving Acronis FullCircle enable IT directors to delegate the migration process to less skilled data center employees, which frees ups senior personnel for more strategic assignments

Acronis FullCircle complements the existing Acronis line of storage, backup and disaster recovery products. Once data has been moved from server to server with Acronis FullCircle, organizations can continue to backup and restore both their physical and virtual servers using Acronis True Image.

Pricing was not yet available but will be announced when the product ships in volume.

Posted by David Marshall on November 13, 2006 08:43 PM

November 13, 2006

XenSource Gains High Availability Partner

One of the great new features found in VMware's VI3 was the highly anticipated and much needed high availability (HA) offering for VMware's enterprise virtualization platform. Realizing just how useful this new feature would become, I started wondering what other virtualization platforms would do to try and match this solution. This question brought me to a company called SteelEye and to a product called LifeKeeper. Back in September, I spoke with Bob Williamson, VP of Products for SteelEye, and asked him that very question.

Today, SteelEye Technology announced that it had joined the XenSource Partner Program as a charter member and Premier Partner. This partnership will give SteelEye access to technical information and resources that are needed to enable its suite of high availability clustering, data replication and disaster recovery solutions for Xen-based environments within its LifeKeeper Protection Suite on both Linux and Windows.

"This alliance is a powerful combination," said Bob Williamson. "As a long-time supporter of the use of open source technologies for business-critical computing, we appreciate the focus and effort which XenSource has placed on bringing Xen to the enterprise. We will support that initiative by working closely together to ensure that the SteelEye family of products is available to support the use of Xen for enterprise deployments."

LifeKeeper allows users to cluster together physical and virtual servers in any combination to build cost-effective configurations which optimize application and data availability. Critical resources are monitored and automatically migrated among physical and virtual servers as needed to ensure that they are always available.

LifeKeeper offers an extremely flexible HA clustering solution by offering the ability to run in either shared storage or replicated data clusters. The product also crosses platforms with support for both Linux and Windows. And LifeKeeper provides for both shared-nothing configurations using data replication and shared storage configurations which can be built using direct-attached shared SCSI, Fibre Channel SANs or iSCSI storage devices.

Posted by David Marshall on November 13, 2006 08:13 PM

November 13, 2006

VMworld 2006 Still Being Talked About

VMworld 2006 may have ended, but people are still writing and talking about the world's largest virtualization forum. So what happened at a virtualization event that brought 7000 people together in one place? listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 13, 2006 07:44 PM

November 11, 2006

Vizioncore Announces Its Latest Backup Solution

During the VMworld 2006 event, Vizioncore announced the availability of its latest backup and restore solution - esxRanger Professional 3.0. The company says the solution works seamlessly with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to provide a powerful and cost-effective hot backup and disaster recovery solution for large-scale implementations of VMware's VI3.

esxRanger Professional 3.0 integrates with VI3 and VMware Consolidated Backup to enable LAN-free and service console-free backups of virtual machines to provide high-performance backups at high speeds. The combination of these solutions offers customers a complete backup solution with zero network load and no overhead on the VMware ESX Server host, allowing the virtual machines to use all the resources of the host.

According to the company, esxRanger Professional 3.0 delivers the ability to restore either the entire virtual machine or selected files within those virtual machines as needed. In addition to enabling backup and restore with VCB, the 3.0 version offers broad feature support for the VI3 platform and continues to provide the key features and functionality of previous versions, including:

Block-level differential backups: Reduce both the time and space requirements of backups.
File level restore from full or differential backup: Allow users to restore a single file without the need to restore an entire virtual machine.
Integration with VMware Infrastructure 3: Enable administrators to upgrade to VMware Infrastructure 3 from VMware ESX Server without change of functionality.
VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware VMotion awareness: Allows seamless backup during virtual machine migration.
Archive retention policy: Simplify management of archived data while reducing disk storage requirements.
Enterprise restore interface: Restore a file, image or multiple images, all within the same GUI.
Script-free usage via intuitive GUI: Allow simple management of all backup and restore tasks within the one interface.

"Vizioncore continues to offer both easy-to-use and expert-level solutions that integrate with VMware Infrastructure," said David Bieneman, CEO Vizioncore, Inc. "With the release of esxRanger Professional 3.0, Vizioncore continues to provide users with one of the most comprehensive and rapid backup solutions available for VMware Infrastructure."

Posted by David Marshall on November 11, 2006 07:10 PM

November 11, 2006

Finally, a Virtual Machine Charge-Back Solution

As data centers around the globe continue to adopt and implement virtualization solutions into their organizations, one of the issues or questions that always seem to pop up is - "how do I continue to charge-back for system resource usage from one department or customer to the next?" This virtualization pain point is slowly being addressed to make up for one of the shortcomings or differences between physical and virtual infrastructures.

Vizioncore, perhaps best known for its virtualization backup solution, announced the availability of esxCharter 2.0 which provides real-time and historical monitoring as well as enhanced performance control for the VMware ESX Server environment. The new 2.0 version offers its customers the ability to measure the use of individual virtual machines by business units, departments or other functional areas.

According to Vizioncore, esxCharter allows VMware administrators to quickly diagnose performance bottlenecks in their infrastructure with a near real-time, 'top-down' view of their entire virtual infrastructure. They claim that each layer can be traversed for performance metrics to assist in fine-tuning performance for enhanced operation. Virtual machines can be compared to one another on a particular host to determine how best to adjust performance to overcome bottlenecks.

esxCharter 2.0 was developed for compatibility with VMware's VI3. And in addition to the charge-back feature, the product offers enhanced reporting, monitoring and configuration capabilities that include: trend reports with flexible query options, I/O performance metrics for intelligent views, SQL Server database for enhanced access and integration, and intelligent alerting and automated e-mailing of reports. The pricing for this solution starts at $299 per CPU socket.

Posted by David Marshall on November 11, 2006 06:29 PM

November 11, 2006

PlateSpin Enhances Versions of its Software Solutions

Long time data center automation solution provider, PlateSpin, announced that it had launched enhanced versions of its data center automation and optimization software - PowerConvert 6.5 and PowerRecon 2.5.

PlateSpin launched the new products while at VMworld 2006 in Los Angeles, California this past week. The company says the latest releases contain features that will transform the way organizations plan and implement data center consolidation initiatives.

Their PowerConvert software solution streams servers between physical hardware, blade infrastructures, virtual machines, and image archives over the network. PowerRecon is agentless software that measures, analyses and determines the optimal fit between server resource supply and workload demand. PlateSpin says that together, the two products form the world's first and only end-to-end continuous server consolidation and disaster recovery solutions leveraging virtualization technologies.

"Organizations tend to think of server consolidation as a one-way, once-and-done physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration," said Stephen Pollack, PlateSpin founder and CEO. "However, our work with over 2,000 data center clients indicates that P2V migration accounts for only 1/3 of the total server consolidation effort. Servers must be continually monitored and migrated across physical and virtual infrastructures to accommodate changing workloads and business requirements. PlateSpin PowerConvert and PowerRecon allow organizations to perform end-to-end server consolidations faster and easier by completely automating the project planning, physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical conversion phases of a continuous consolidation initiative."

New Features of PowerRecon and PowerConvert

New levels of integration between the two products allow customers to automatically create an optimal consolidation plan with PowerRecon that can be seamlessly transferred to PowerConvert for implementation.
PowerConvert's live transfer functionality enables customers to migrate a physical server into a consolidated virtual environment or vice-versa, without having to take it off line. The live transfer feature also includes application-level control so the data can be captured with integrity. Accelerated and uninterrupted migrations mean added ROI for the consolidation initiative.
Unlike standard P2V tools, PowerConvert's Virtual-to-Physical capability makes it possible for customers to continuously adjust and right size to ensure an optimal pairing of server software and data center infrastructure.
Stream OS and applications in any direction between virtual infrastructures, including VMware, Microsoft, and Virtual Iron.
Supports the movement of Microsoft Windows, Red Hat, and SuSE Linux based servers.
PowerRecon enables users to collect data from multiple geographically-dispersed data center sites and aggregate and analyze it holistically to build server consolidation scenarios that optimize resources across the data center.

Posted by David Marshall on November 11, 2006 05:49 PM

November 10, 2006

VMware Announces Winners of Virtual Vanguard Awards

As promised, VMware announced the winners of the first-ever Virtual Vanguard Awards during a ceremony at VMworld 2006. The awards recognize VMware customers who have best employed VMware Infrastructure to create innovative, high-ROI and leading-edge IT strategies. The Virtual Vanguard Awards judging panel consisted of Stephen Elliot, research manager for IDC's Enterprise Systems Management Software Service; Eric Kuzmack, IT architect at Gannett; Jonathan Paul, advisory analyst at Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services; and several judges from VMware.

The winners represent achievements in four categories:

Best Overall ROI and Operational Benefits - This award showcases the company that has seen the quickest and largest ROI using VMware technology. The entries were judged on the overall impact of costs avoided, time-to-ROI or operational benefits-not the largest or quickest ROI in terms of absolute numbers. The judges also looked at the effect of virtualization on total IT budget, operational performance and/or corporate bottom line.

IndyMac Bancorp, Inc., the winner in this category, used VMware virtualization software to create an efficient and flexible infrastructure, saving 60 percent on the cost of hardware and 76 percent on network infrastructure, equating to a total savings of nearly $4 million.

Most Comprehensive VMware Infrastructure - This award honors the most comprehensive VMware Infrastructure deployment based on a combination of total size and on amount of total infrastructure virtualized. The judges looked for customers utilizing virtualization technology in multiple ways across their IT infrastructure, from desktop to data center and from development to production, and have virtualized at least 50 percent of their development, staging and production environments.

The winning submission came from Phoenix Insurance Company, which has virtualized more than 80 percent of its development, pre-production and production environments. In addition, the company has used VMware software to create a separate disaster recovery setup.

Most Critical Application in Production - This award recognizes the most mission-critical application running on VMware Infrastructure. "Mission-critical" was defined by the consequences of application failure: Should this application become unavailable for any noticeable length of time, the impact on the applicant's company would be serious. Examples of such serious consequences might include loss of revenue, broken service-level agreements, customers unable to pay bills or place orders, violations of regulatory compliance rules and compromised security.

The winner in this category, Tescom, runs many of its mission-critical enterprise applications on VMware Infrastructure, including e-mail servers, customer relationship management applications and accounting and finance applications, all of which are used by employees around the globe.

Vanguard Award for Innovation - This award honors customers who have taken virtualization to new levels, leveraging the technology to push the envelope and create unique, innovative solutions to IT challenges. The winner, Stowers Institute for Medical Research, created a virtual desktop grid by using VMware Player to harness the idle CPU time of its Windows desktop computers. When most desktops are idle at night, the virtual grid provides a significant contribution to the institute's full-time physical compute grid.

"Our customers break the boundaries of traditional computing by leveraging virtualization and VMware products, and we continue to be amazed and impressed by their creativity and innovation," said Diane Greene, VMware President. "VMware remains committed to delivering software that helps customers solve complex business challenges and realize significant benefits. The Virtual Vanguard Awards are our way of highlighting some of the ways customers have used our products to achieve such benefits."

Posted by David Marshall on November 10, 2006 09:08 AM

November 10, 2006

Virtual Appliances Keep Gaining Steam

One of the big takeaways from this year's VMworld has been the growing importance and wide distribution of what VMware has coined as "Virtual Appliances". The topic was widely discussed in break-out sessions, throughout the exhibit hall from various partners, and it even made it into the keynote presentations. And during the VMworld 2006 event, VMware announced it was launching a marketplace and certification program for these virtual appliances.

Discussed and downloaded on VMware's VMTN site for some time now, VMware is now making this collection of more than 300 virtual appliances available in the Virtual Appliance Marketplace where customers can download, evaluate, or in some cases purchase these appliances.

"We've seen tremendous momentum around virtual appliances—a virtual appliance is downloaded every minute from our Web site," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware. "Virtual appliances provide a better way to distribute pre-packaged, ready-to-run software for production and evaluation use. By deploying virtual appliances on VMware Infrastructure, customers gain additional benefits such as automatic load balancing with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, high availability with VMware High Availability and agent-less backup with VMware Consolidated Backup. With the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and certification program, customers can download virtual appliances that are optimized for VMware Infrastructure and designed for performance and usability."

VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace - The process of evaluating, deploying and managing software is less problematic and much more efficient with a virtual appliance. Customers can simply download and start an appliance and when ready, the same application can be moved seamlessly into a production environment on VMware Infrastructure. More than 300 virtual appliances spanning collaboration, email security, enterprise applications, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, operating systems and traffic management are available from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

VMware Virtual Appliance Certification Program - ISVs certify their appliances through the VMware Virtual Appliance Certification Program that provides them with technical best practices for performance and usability, validation testing and implementation feedback. The program also ensures that the ISV fully supports the entire virtual appliance environment. Current ISVs offering certified virtual appliances include Astaro, B-hive Networks, CohesiveFT, LoadBalancer, PortWise, ProofPoint, Red Hat, Reflex Security, SpamTitan, Ubuntu, Zeus and Zimbra. Certification details can be found on the following Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on November 10, 2006 08:44 AM

November 09, 2006

Virtualization Helps Launch New Products - Kidaro and InovaWave

The Virtualization Report recently helped launch two new virtualization products by announcing them to the public. Kidaro's Managed Workspace enables organizations to extend fully operable enterprise work environments to users anywhere. While InovaWave launched DXtreme for Windows which provides a performance boost to virtual machines. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 9, 2006 09:59 PM

November 06, 2006

Microsoft Takes Cue From VMware's Virtual Appliances

Virtualization gives us the ability to encapsulate an entire server and compute power into a file or virtual hard disk. This instance is called a virtual machine, and VMware has taken that virtual machine up the food chain some time ago when it packaged it all up into a nice and convenient little package, complete with a bow on top and called it a "Virtual Appliance".

People immediately went crazy for it, mainly because of the convenience factor that it offered. Think about it, someone can create a virtual machine, complete with an installed operating system and a configured application or group of applications, tie it all together to meet some demand or use case, and then share that virtual appliance with others who need to make use of a similar instance to alleviate them from the pains of creating an identical environment.

Thus, the virtual appliance was born, and people have been sharing them all over the Web ever since. VMware even created an entire "virtual appliance challenge" last February around it to try and get people to put their thinking caps on and come up with the next great appliance idea. And VMware's VMTN site even boasts about housing more than 300 virtual appliances online.

But one thing was missing from the virtual appliance space. That one thing was Microsoft. You see, you can't "share" your Microsoft operating systems because of licensing restrictions - so people have been creating virtual appliances on VMware using Linux distributions for their guest operating systems.

That is, until now. Well, sort of.

At VMworld 2006, Microsoft is going to make available their new virtual hard disk (VHD) Test Drive Program. It is going to allow customers to confidently evaluate enterprise software from Microsoft and its software partners in a fraction of the time.

According to Microsoft, its VHD Test Drive Program will provide customers with an enhanced server-based software evaluation experience that's faster, better supported and more flexible. You can now access the entire catalog of pre-configured Microsoft and partner products and solutions in the VHD format and start evaluating and testing today from www.microsoft.com/vhd.

"This program enables Microsoft and its partners to distribute their enterprise software and applications within a virtual machine so that IT professionals can confidently and quickly evaluate Windows Server-based software," said Mike Neil, senior director of virtualization strategy in Microsoft's Windows Server Division. He continued, "A similar program for Windows Vista will be available in the first quarter of 2007."

Furthermore, Neil explained, "These virtual machines, which are provided in Microsoft's virtual hard disk image format, are pre-built and pre-configured so that they can be downloaded or distributed for easy setup and evaluation. This allows customers to evaluate software in a fraction of the time it usually takes, such as setting up SQL Server 2005 in minutes instead of hours."

The VHD Test Drive Program is designed to offer the more than 7,000 software vendors the ability to start delivering pre-configured applications within Windows Server-based virtual machines to their customers.

Microsoft expects more than 20 partners to begin distributing their software via the VHD Test Drive Program later this quarter, including Altiris, BEA Systems, Check Point, Citrix, CommVault, Dell, FullArmor, HP, Network Appliance, Platespin, Portlock, Quest Software, SourceCode Technology Holdings, Symantec and UGS.

Microsoft's VHD Download Center currently has four VHD Test Drive products for download.

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