Virtualization Report | David Marshall | October 2007

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October 2007

October 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Mac OS X Virtualization! Is It Trick or Treat?

When we talk about virtualization on the Apple Mac platform, we are usually talking about virtualizing Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems as guest operating systems on either VMware Fusion or Parallels' Desktop for Mac products. But in this case, we are actually talking about virtualizing the Mac OS itself.

Is this a Halloween trick? Or treat? I suppose it depends on the way you look at it. The good news, however, is that there is definitely change in the air.

If you remember the long, drawn out discussions in the past, the idea of virtualizing Mac OS X was clear. Apple stated that the license only allowed you to install and use one copy of the Mac OS X Server software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. So it was a one license, one machine EULA. Which pretty much ruled it out as a guest operating system even though both VMware and Parallels said it was "possible" to virtualize the OS.

Now, it looks as though a subtle change has been made to Apple's End User License Agreement (EULA) in the new Leopard Server operating system. It reads:

2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions.
A. Mac OS X Server Software.
This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Mac OS X Server software (the "Mac OS X Server Software") on a single Apple-labeled computer. You may also Install and use other copies of Mac OS X Server Software on the same Apple-labeled computer, provided that you acquire an individual and valid license from Apple for each of these other copies of Mac OS X Server Software.

So there it is, the trick and the treat. The treat - it seems evident that Apple is loosening up its licensing to allow their OS to get virtual. The trick - the licensing change only applies to Leopard Server and not to the desktop edition that many of us are using today. The change also requires you to have a license for each virtualized instance and it still has to be running on Apple hardware. So PC users, you're still going to have to shell out extra money for that Intel-based Mac if you want to run OS X Server.

This could be great news as well when SWsoft/Parallels launches its server based virtualization product for the Mac. SWsoft's Ben Rudolph said that for many Mac users, it is the "holy grail" of XServes to run multiple, isolated, near-native instances of OS X Server on the same box, at the same time. And with Parallels Server for Mac, XServes should be able to have the power to run OS X, Windows and Linux server operating systems all on one piece of hardware.

Happy Halloween!

Posted by David Marshall on October 31, 2007 07:22 PM

October 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

DataCore Software and DevonIT at Citrix App Delivery Expo

There was a lot of great virtualization information that came out of the Citrix App Delivery Expo in Las Vegas this month. Lucky for me, I was able to attend the show and see it first hand. DataCore Software, the virtualization SAN provider, showcased its virtual SAN storage solutions that support the Citrix application delivery infrastructure. And DevonIT, a desktop appliance provider, was exhibiting its latest solutions that leverage the Xen virtualization technology from Citrix.

And something new, at the end of this Podcast, please stay tuned for a special Podcast from AMD as they speak with Jeff Walpole from Global Alliance Marketing at Novell. They talk about the AMD Virtualization Experience, Novell's partnership with AMD, and their experience with AVE last year and why Novell decided to participate for the second time. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on October 29, 2007 05:07 PM

October 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Endeavors Ends Law Suit and Launches New Product

Endeavors Technologies, Inc. (at one time doing business as Stream Theory), announced that they have come to an agreement to end all outstanding lawsuits that Stream Theory has pursued on its patent portfolio. Under the agreement, Exent has been granted licenses to Endeavors' and Stream Theory's streaming patents and Endeavors and Stream Theory were granted licenses on Exent's streaming patents.

Peter Bondar, CEO at Endeavors, said "with the agreements signed with Microsoft, Citrix, AppStream and now Exent, we have consolidated our position as a major supplier of application streaming technologies and intellectual property." Commercial terms of the agreements were not disclosed.

Around the same time, however, the company also announced its latest product line - Application Jukebox - the company's next-generation application streaming and virtualization family of products.

"We are excited by the possibilities we see for Application Jukebox," said Bondar. "We envision a future where the Application Jukebox Player will be on every client, delivering applications in the same manner that a jukebox delivers music. We see an enormous opportunity in the SaaS market and are working with a number of organizations that are preparing to offer applications on a rental basis using this model. They are enthusiastic about the additional functionality and ease of use provided by Application Jukebox."

There are three editions of the new Application Jukebox product:

Application Jukebox Lite Edition (free) - A fully functional version supporting one server that allows administrators and ISVs to evaluate the product and discover the ease of creating and managing streamable versions of existing applications.
Application Jukebox SaaS Edition - Includes metering and a kiosk mode to support a pay-as-you-go, application rental model, its customizable portals create an easy-to-use environment for OEMs or ISVs to build a unique application access landing site.
Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition - Adds Active Directory support, and includes user and group monitoring, plus extensive tracking and support to cost-effectively streamline license management.

Application Jukebox products contain three key components:

Application Jukebox Player sits on the client to create the virtual application environment and provides user authentication and application license enforcement.
Application Jukebox Server controls and delivers applications, provides usage monitoring and logging, plus group, user and application level administration.
Application Jukebox Studio allows ISVs and IT administrators to create a streamable, virtualized "appset" from standard, Windows-based applications that is then published to the server.

The product is expected to have an availability sometime in early 2008.

Posted by David Marshall on October 28, 2007 09:35 AM

October 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Symantec Extends Windows Protection with BESR to Altiris Environments

While at the Symantec/Altiris ManageFusion event in Orlando, I was able to speak with Steve Fairbanks, senior director of product management at Symantec. During the show, Fairbanks briefed me on a new version of Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0 that offers integration with Altiris technology to help provide its customers with rapid Windows backup and recovery needed in today's IT environment.

"By combining the power and flexibility of Altiris manageability with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 7.0, IT administrators have the best of both worlds at their fingertips - the leading systems management solution together with complete Windows system recovery," said Fairbanks. "Through this integration we are automating business processes to protect our customers' data and computing environments."

From the outside looking in, it seems as though the Symantec acquisition of Altiris is going quite well. For the past six months, Symantec has been integrating BESR 7.0 with Altiris Notification Server, allowing IT administrators to have a single, familiar management console from which to work. As a result, customers can perform an immediate backup of a single system, create backup policies to protect servers, desktops and laptops, or recover individual files and folders as well as entire systems to nearly any device, including virtual machines and dissimilar hardware.

Symantec said the new integration also provides Altiris management customers with a unique ability to convert physical systems to virtual (P2V) and virtual back to physical (V2P) and perform granular recovery for Microsoft Exchange, and end-user file recovery capabilities via Google Desktop or Backup Exec Retrieve. The Backup Exec System Recovery Exchange Retrieve Option simplifies Exchange recovery, providing fast and easy recovery not only of the entire Exchange server but also of individual messages, attachments, folders and mailboxes.

This latest announcement brings Symantec and Altiris further down the virtualization path, and brings yet another offering into the P2V market space. But because it is built on years of backup and recovery technology, P2V is just one small component in this product's arsenal. As a volume based solution, it captures a recovery point of the entire Windows system (including operating system, applications, system settings, configurations and files) without impacting user productivity. The product also provides comprehensive reporting, status, backup job and overall system protection information in the Altiris configuration management database.

Symantec and Altiris have been clear with their endpoint management strategy - with a goal of providing customers with the best solutions for their management needs. And this is just another example of how well the integration of the two companies is going.

Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Integration Component for Altiris is planned to be available in early November 2007.

Posted by David Marshall on October 27, 2007 06:22 PM

October 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

New VMware Fusion Update in Time for Mac Leopard

With the latest version of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) due out sometime today, the folks over at VMware have announced a new version of its VMware Fusion product, Fusion 1.1 RC1 build 61385.

VMware said that the RC1 version of Fusion has been working well with the pre-release version of Leopard, but that they haven't officially tested it with the final version due out today. The good news for those existing Fusion users is that the new version will be a free upgrade.

Based on user feedback, VMware has introduced a number of new features and bug fixes in the latest release.

Fusion 1.1 includes preliminary support for Leopard and has added localized versions of the software to include French, German and Japanese. It also added support for 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Vista.

A number of improvements to Unity (the feature that allows you to run Windows applications seamlessly) have also been made. My Computer, My Document, My Network Places, Control Panel, Run, and Search are now available in the Applications menu, Dock menus, and the Launch Applications window. It also improved performance in window dragging and resizing in the Unity view.

A number of Boot Camp improvements have been made as well such as allowing the Boot Camp partition to automatically remount itself after the virtual machine has been shut down. Fusion can also now support Microsoft Vista installed on Boot Camp as a virtual machine.

Graphics have also been updated. They have improved the 2-D drawing performance, especially on the Santa Rosa MacBook Pros. And experimental support has been added for DirectX 9.0 for 3-D graphics and gaming. However, it still doesn't have shader support, so if a game requires shaders, the game may not run at all. It also doesn't support 3-D acceleration in Unity view - you must use Single Window or Full Screen view.

You can download the product and find out more information within the Fusion release notes, here.

Posted by David Marshall on October 26, 2007 04:40 AM

October 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Makes OSP Extensions to Hypercall (API) Available

Today while at the Citrix iForum, Mike Neil (GM, Virtualization at Microsoft) said that Microsoft will be extending the Open Specification Promise to the hypercall application programmer's interface (API) within Windows Server virtualization (codename Viridian), and that it will be available when Windows Server virtualization is released to manufacturing (RTM).

The hypercall API enables partners to develop solutions with Windows Server virtualization allowing customers to achieve dynamic IT environments. These APIs are available for use by any organization seeking to integrate or extend their software with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server virtualization.

"The majority of our customers have mixed-source environments, and they want their platform vendors to make things work together," said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager, Open Platform Solutions at Novell. "That's why we entered into a technical collaboration agreement with Microsoft. As a result, Novell is the first vendor to develop and ship technology that will allow a paravirtualized Windows Server 2008 to be hosted as a guest on the Xen hypervisor. Microsoft's decision to put the hypercall API under their Open Specifications Promise will make it even easier for Novell, our customers and partners, and the entire open source community to develop high-quality virtualization solutions that deliver true interoperability between Windows and Linux."

"Citrix is committed to the delivery of value-added virtualization solutions for the Windows platform, so interoperability with Microsoft's virtualization solutions is key to our success. This is made possible by Microsoft's open and progressive approach to licensing key technologies such as its VHD image format and the Windows Server Virtualization hypercall API," said Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization & Management Division, Citrix. "This will allow us to ensure that virtual machines created on XenServer will be compatible with Microsoft WSV when it is delivered as a component of Windows Server 2008."

Microsoft is taking a step further in its commitment to interoperability by extending the Open Specification Promise to the hypercall API within Windows Server virtualization. With the OSP, any individual or organization is free to implement, commercialize and modify Microsoft's virtualization format technology for free, now and forever. In October 2006, Microsoft expanded its commitment to interoperability by applying the OSP to Microsoft's Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) image format.

Windows Server virtualization is scheduled to RTM within 180 days of the RTM of Windows Server 2008, which is currently scheduled for Q1 2008.

Posted by David Marshall on October 24, 2007 10:59 AM

October 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Releases Update for VM Additions for Linux

Microsoft has announced that it has updated its Virtual Machine Additions for Linux to 2.0 for its virtualization platform.

The company said that the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running qualified Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. And they have added support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

Installing the Virtual Machine Additions in your Linux guest operating system will help improve guest and host synchronization for time sync, heartbeat generation and coordinating shutdown operations, as well as improve mouse functionality, the display graphics and the SCSI hard disk emulation.

The list of qualified Linux guests include:

Enterprise Distributions

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

Standard Distributions

Red Hat Linux 7.3
Red Hat Linux 9.0
SuSE Linux 9.2
SuSE Linux 9.3
SuSE Linux 10.0

You can register and download the package, here.

Posted by David Marshall on October 24, 2007 10:42 AM

October 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

CIS Releases New Security Guidelines for VMware ESX Server

Back in September, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) released a whitepaper titled "Virtual Machine Security Guidelines - Version 1.0". In it, they addressed security concerns that apply to virtual machine technologies. But while the document focused on issues unique to virtual machines, it fell short of discussing security hardening steps needed for the popular VMware ESX Server virtualization platform.

In the second part of this document, ICS takes a look at security measures needed in the implementation of a VMware ESX Server 3.x environment.

It reads:

This document addresses the security aspects of virtual machine technologies and VMware ESX Server 3.x implementations. While these topics cannot be completely separated from the standard security issues of operating a physical computer or basic issues of running the individual operating systems involved, this document's primary focus is on virtual machine security issues. For this reason, we do not cover all of the steps needed to harden the guest operating systems. The Center for Internet Security has multiple documents, which address guest operating system security recommendations. Recommendations are based on a variety of public sources and input from members of the Center for Internet Security (CIS).

In this 70 page document, they cover installation considerations, network security settings, minimizing boot services, logging, file permissions, user accounts and more.

As VMware migrates toward 3i implementations where the VMware COS is no longer in play within their ESX environment, many of these security concerns go away. Until then, this is a great place to start if you want to make sure that your environment is secure.

You can download the documents by registering, here.

Posted by David Marshall on October 24, 2007 10:25 AM

October 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Citrix Making a lot of Noise at iForum 07

Citrix Systems is holding their 10th annual technology conference - Citrix iForum 07, the App Delivery Expo - here at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

The show is bringing together the old and the new. Long time Citrix customers may be being exposed to server virtualization for the first time in many cases. Citrix is exposing its end-to-end solutions, showcasing its Presentation Server technology and its newly acquired technology from both Ardence and XenSource.

With over 4,000 people in attendance at the show, Citrix is making a lot of noise - the keynote session started out with a bang! Literally. With an explosion of fire works set off before Citrix's CEO Mark Templeton took the stage, people sat up and took notice.

Mark Templeton highlighted the company's vision and strategy for application delivery. And if you didn't understand where all the pieces and parts fit into a tightly grouped offering and a solid end-to-end strategy before the keynote, you left knowing exactly what Citrix intends on doing for the next few years.

In addition to the NEC partnership announced by XenSource before the Citrix acquisition, Citrix and Dell have since come out with an announced partnership to make server virtualization technology a reality for customers of all sizes on Dell hardware. By offering Citrix XenServer OEM Edition across Dell's PowerEdge server line in the coming year, the companies will bring built-in, easy-to-use virtual machine installation and management to millions of Dell customers worldwide. As part of the agreement, Citrix XenServer will support Dell OpenManage and XenServer OEM Edition and XenServer Enterprise will be tested, qualified and supported by Dell.

Citrix also announced an agreement with HP to qualify and sell Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition on industry-standard HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. HP and Citrix's expanded relationship provides customers the ability to purchase an entire virtualization solution, from server to software, from HP with the added benefit of interoperability and HP support.

Business Objects, a leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, also spoke on stage and announced its partnership with Citrix Systems to deliver a Crystal Reports Server XI virtual appliance. The new offering is a pre-installed and pre-configured solution that will help reduce deployment time from days to minutes. In addition, for the first time, the two companies are offering customers a chance to instantly evaluate the product through a virtual "test-drive", thus eliminating the cost and complexity typically associated with enterprise software evaluations.

More live demonstrations of Citrix products and technologies are promised for the second keynote.

Posted by David Marshall on October 23, 2007 11:51 AM

October 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Citrix Completes XenSource Acquisition - Goes After End-to-End Virtualization

Citrix announced that it has completed the acquisition of XenSource, a provider of Enterprise virtualization solutions based on the Xen technology. The purchase price for the transaction was approximately $500 million payable in a combination of cash and Citrix common stock.

Citrix, a pioneer and long time player in the application delivery market, is now preparing to square off against its new virtualization competitors to try and once again dominate in a market at what they do best.

The company said that it expects the server and desktop virtualization markets to grow to nearly $5 billion over the next four years. And to go after that market, Citrix plans on being the only company to offer organizations an end-to-end application delivery infrastructure that leverages the method of application, desktop and server virtualization best suited for the dynamic delivery of applications to any user.

To create this comprehensive end-to-end virtualization portfolio, the company added two new product lines to its already rich application virtualization portfolio - through the acquisition of XenSource, Citrix has added Citrix XenServer (formerly known as XenSource XenEnterprise) and Citrix XenDesktop.

Server Virtualization with Citrix XenServer. The new Citrix XenServer product line is an enterprise-class platform for managing server virtualization in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing and storage resources. Based on the high-performance Xen virtualization engine, Citrix XenServer combines comprehensive server virtualization capabilities with unparalleled scalability, performance and ease-of-use. The new product line ranges from Citrix XenServer Express Edition, an easy-to-use single-server solution available for free download, to the more comprehensive Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition.
Application Virtualization with Citrix Presentation Server. With more than 70 million users and 99 percent of the global Fortune 500 as customers, Citrix Presentation Server is the industry's de facto standard for delivering Windows applications with the best performance, security and cost savings. Presentation Server stores all Windows applications in a single central store in the datacenter, then delivers them to end users on-demand via innovative application virtualization technology. Server-side app virtualization stores applications on the server and virtualizes the presentation layer to end users, while client-side app virtualization streams applications to the desktop and runs them in a protected virtualization environment at the end point.
Desktop Virtualization with Citrix XenDesktop. Citrix XenDesktop, scheduled to ship in the first half of next year, is a new product line designed to overcome the challenges of cost, complexity and user experience that have prevented virtual desktops from becoming a mainstream enterprise reality in the past. Citrix XenDesktop will be the industry's first comprehensive, fully integrated desktop delivery system, moving beyond the limitations of existing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) point solutions to ensure the simple, secure, fast delivery of Windows desktops to any office worker over any network. Citrix XenDesktop will combine a powerful desktop delivery controller (based on Citrix Desktop Server with native ICA protocol support), Xen virtualization infrastructure for hosting any number of virtual desktops in the datacenter, and virtual desktop provisioning to stream a single desktop image on-demand to multiple virtual machines in the datacenter (based on Citrix Provisioning Server).

A common question many people have asked is will the Citrix XenDesktop solution support other platforms, or is it strictly tied to Xen technology? And the answer from Citrix was that it will support other products such as Microsoft Viridian and VMware ESX Server.

Jumping into the server and desktop virtualization market with the XenSource acquisition puts Citrix right in the middle of a market currently dominated by VMware. But with their end-to-end battlecry, great channel partner relationships and a strong and loyal customer base, this could prove to be a virtualization turning point where we no longer simply talk about a single virtualization giant in the room.

Posted by David Marshall on October 23, 2007 11:22 AM

October 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)

From Deployment to Chargeback Help - Third Parties Assist VMware

As VMware continues to grow in size and scale within your organization, third party companies continue to identify and fill niche needs that may end up plaguing you at some point. Vkernel claims to have the answer to the chargeback problem, and they did it with a virtual appliance. And if you have problems with deploying your VI3 servers, perhaps Repton has an answer for you. Using their deployment expertise, the company has come out with their V-Ployment solution. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on October 22, 2007 08:28 AM

October 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Gartner's Top 10 for 2008 - Outlook Virtual and Green

With only a few months remaining in 2007, industry analyst firm Gartner is already looking toward next year to see what technology and trends will be important and strategic for most organizations.

In its new report, the analyst has identified its top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 and is urging IT executives to take a closer look. One reason, Gartner said that if businesses don't improve the datacenter energy efficiency, the government may step in and force them to do so.

The report lists the following as the top 10:

Green IT
Unified Communication
Business Process Modeling
Metadata Management
Virtualization 2.0
Mashup and Composite Apps
Web Platform and WOA
Computing Fabric
Real World Web
and Social Software

Gartner has created a great list for 2008, so what are other industry experts thinking? Specifically for Virtualization Report readers, what are other people saying when you think about Green IT, Virtualization 2.0 and Web Platform & WOA.

Gartner said the focus of Green IT will continue to accelerate and expand in 2008. They said regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny.

Rackspace recently surveyed nearly 400 of their business customers and found the following responses that back up Gartner's analysis of Green IT:

Thirty-eight percent of respondents think potential carbon taxes or environmental regulation will somewhat impact their business.
Thirty-six percent think potential carbon taxes or environmental regulation will have no impact on their business.
Nine percent of respondents have chosen to go green because of regulatory reasons today or in the future.
Fifty-two percent would pay 5-10% more to work with a green vendor rather than other market offerings.
Fifty-one percent are willing to sacrifice 5-10% of server performance for lower carbon emissions.
Seventy-five percent would choose a green vendor over a non-green vendor if the prices were the same.

Rackspace CTO John Engates told me that based on feedback from his customers, "we agree companies will begin emphasizing social responsibility as it becomes more of a deciding factor in the vendor selection process. Regulation is inevitable, but we may not see this for a couple of years. With 2008 being an election year, I think 2009 is the year we'll actually see more traction with data center/corporate IT regulation."

He added, "I also believe that over the next several years, R&D in datacenter design best practices will continue to advance at a rapid rate, and companies that build equipment for the datacenter will make great progress in efficient new designs for their systems."

When I asked Serguei Beloussov, CEO at SWsoft, if their customers considered the idea of Green IT as something important to them or if it was thought of as marketing hype, he said that SWsoft is definitely seeing a growing interest, not hype, in green computing. Beloussov said, "The reason why Green IT is taking off in our customer base is the matching of clear economic benefits to environmental benefits with regard to virtualization-enabled machine consolidation. By deploying technologies that can lead to a greener data center, businesses can reduce electricity cost and better use expensive physical space where servers are located. Further, they can provide a reduction in management cost and operating system sprawl (in the case of container-based virtualization) and overall better agility from the IT staff."

Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of CiRBA, told me that it was hard to see this evolving in a way that doesn't closely trend to cost savings. Hillier said, "Pound for pound (of carbon) datacenters are still fantastic vehicles for overall economic productivity growth, and for regulators to hold them to a higher standard than other forms of industry would seem odd. Self regulation, on the other hand, is very useful if it provides market differentiation (e.g. carbon neutral IT services) and/or closely parallels cost savings (as in server consolidation). Any time saving money also makes you green then you should jump on it, and I expect many people will in 2008."

Gartner also talks about Virtualization 2.0 saying that virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. However, by themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and resiliency.

Engates said, "the management and automation piece to virtualization is absolutely critical to get the most of the technology as far as flexibility, resiliency, disaster recovery and more. However, the management and automation tools around virtualization have yet to enter the market specifically for large service providers. Today, these tools don't meet the needs of large-scale data center operators like Rackspace who are operating more than 30,000 servers in multiple data centers across the globe." Instead, Rackspace is forced to fill the gap themselves by creating their own tools to provide the company with the management and automation that they require.

Beloussov agrees that management and automation are critical to make Virtualization 2.0 successful. In that list, he also adds the need for performance and says, "Next-generation virtualization must enable any workload to be virtualized without performance or availability loss, no matter how demanding it is."

When talking about Gartners top 10 list, Hillier made an interesting observation when he said that virtualization has become the unwitting enabler for many of the top 10 items listed by Gartner. And he added that many of the top 10 issues didn't even exist when virtualization was first conceived, yet its advantages in efficiency and flexibility make it an obvious choice to deal with many of them.

When asked about virtualization specifically, Hillier noted that "Firstly, virtualizing the 'low hanging fruit' is completely different than tackling the complex mission critical systems that reside deep in the data center. This will cause organizations to place more rigor on the planning and execution of these initiatives, and to integrate this more seamlessly into the long-term management of the environment. In addition, virtualization is only truly transformational if the paradigm is embraced fully, and quick-and-dirty implementations will leave you with a 'virtual physical' environment, that looks and smells like a physical environment but takes up less rack space. This may be expeditious, and indeed is warranted in certain situations, but it completely undersells the potential of the technology."

SWsoft and Rackspace both agree with Gartner's assessment that Web Platform and WOA should be watched in 2008. Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets and companies should be evaluating where SaaS can provide value in 2008-2010.

Beloussov said that WOA and SaaS have already made a tremendous impact in today's enterprise, but that he agrees that much more lies ahead. "The next step is to develop common standards that developers, ISVs, service providers and internal IT departments can leverage to deliver WOA and SaaS-based applications more efficiently and to broader sets of users."

While SaaS may be perfect for many applications, Engates said that SaaS will only take you so far. Applications that are highly customized will migrate to web platforms rather than following the SaaS route.

He predicts that the hosting provider will absorb the infrastructure complexities for them such as hardware resources, scaling, security, etc. while the customer simply plugs into the 'cloud' and focuses on the application. Engates said, "Rackspace is delivering many of its core offerings 'as a service' like storage, backup, bandwidth and most recently mail. Our customers already take advantage of 'infrastructure as a service' at Rackspace and increasingly more of our offerings will be delivered using this model."

What do you think about Garner's Top 10 List for 2008? How does it fit within your organization's goals or outlooks?

Posted by David Marshall on October 21, 2007 06:58 AM

October 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Citrix and Dell with On-Demand Desktop Streaming

Citrix is slowly starting to expand their product line into the virtualization space. First, they announced their acquisition plans for XenSource, next they revealed their channel partner strategy for its go to market plans for the XenSource product, and now they have unveiled the company's streaming product which it had acquired from Ardence. And Dell is making good use of this technology as well, as it announced its On-Demand Desktop Streaming solution that makes use of the new Citrix product. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on October 19, 2007 08:28 PM

October 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Amazon EC2 Now Packs a Bigger Punch

The Amazon EC2 team has recently added two new instance types to their EC2 offering, a web service that provides rentable, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

They have introduced a "Large" and an "Extra Large" instance type to complement the original instance type and provide more flexibility for EC2 users. The new types provide more memory, CPU, and storage, and are now based on 64bit technology.

The system is powered by the Xen virtualization technology and has been fairly well received. Last month however, the company confirmed that it had an EC2 control and monitoring API outage which caused some of its customers to lose instances and data.

New supported instances include:

Small Instance (Default) - $0.10 per instance hour
1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform.

Large Instance - $0.40 per instance hour
7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

Extra Large Instance - $0.80 per instance hour
15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

You can enroll for this open beta program, here.

Posted by David Marshall on October 19, 2007 04:45 AM

October 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtual Iron Bundles Server Virtualization Environments

In the early days of virtualization (and by early, I mean a few years ago), installing either VMware ESX Server or Xen virtualization was considered a difficult chore by many and thus a barrier to entry for many organizations.

VMware and XenSource have both come out with OEM deals with hardware vendors to supply their hypervisor platforms as embedded solutions.

Now, as of October 16th, Virtual Iron will join the "ease of installation" program by bundling the latest version of its virtualization software with rack mount and blade servers from HP and IBM. The bundles are being made available through Tech Data's Advanced Infrastructure Solutions Division and its network of value-added resellers in North America.

The company is going to bundle a pre-configured Virtual Iron v4 Extended Enterprise Edition version of its software with HP ProLiant DL380 G5, DL385 G5 and server blades for the new HP BladeSystem c3000 enclosure, as well as with IBM System x, 3500, 3550 and 3655 servers.

The company said that the pre-configured solutions support enterprise-class server consolidation and complete management of multiple Windows and Linux operating systems on a single server or across multiple servers. The combinations are designed for easy deployment and management and enable VARs to provide cost-effective and efficiently managed data center solutions that provide higher performance and more reliable service levels.

Virtual Iron has always positioned itself as the SMB friendly server virtualization platform when it comes to pricing. Recently, VMware tried to step into these shoes when it announced a lower price point acceleration kit of its VI3 solution. Virtual Iron's response is to join with two of the largest suppliers of servers to the enterprise, HP and IBM, and to offer through pre-configuration ease of installation and setup along with their already low prices. Virtual Iron said that the bundles would fit within the budgets of small and medium sized businesses that want to try out x86 virtualization for the first time.

"Server consolidation and virtual infrastructure management are of increasing interest to our customers and we are constantly being asked about which solutions deliver the best price/value performance and are easiest to deploy," said Dave Spear, vice president and general manager of Virtual Technologies, LLC, a Tech Data value-added reseller of both HP and Virtual Iron. "The HP-Virtual Iron bundle offers us the ability to deliver on this need quickly by offering a trusted partner's hardware with the latest enterprise-class virtualization and management capabilities."

Posted by David Marshall on October 17, 2007 05:03 AM

October 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Offers Planning and Design Guides for SoftGrid and Viridian

Microsoft is starting a new Beta program called Infrastructure Planning and Design that is part of the company's Solution Accelerators group.

According to Microsoft, the Infrastructure Planning and Design guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series are expected to help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies where each guide plans to address a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.

All guides share a common structure including:

Definition of the technical decision flow through the planning process.
Listing of decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity and other characteristics.
Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.

The Infrastructure Planning and Design Beta Program is ongoing and will showcase multiple Beta release waves to support virtualization and Windows Server 2008 technologies in the coming months. Future plans will extend the architectural guidance to additional Microsoft operating system and software technologies.

The first two guides look at Microsoft's SoftGrid application virtualization technology and the company's hypervisor virtualization technology found in Windows Server 2008, Windows Server Virtualization (Viridian). The next guide in the series will cover Microsoft's Terminal Services technology.

SoftGrid Application Virtualization Guide (37 Pages)
Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization is the only virtualization solution on the market to deliver applications that are never installed, yet securely follow users anywhere, on demand. It dramatically improves IT efficiencies, enables much greater business agility, and provides a superior end-user desktop experience. The Infrastructure Planning & Design Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization guide discusses when to use standalone mode and connected mode for application distribution. It assists designers in the infrastructure planning process for SoftGrid by providing a clear and concise workflow of the decisions and tasks required for each method. This guide enables you to plan the infrastructure required for meeting your application virtualization service goals.

Windows Server Virtualization Guide (50 Pages)
A virtualized computing environment can improve the efficiency of your computing resources by utilizing more of your hardware resources. Windows Server virtualization enables you to create a virtualized server computing environment using a technology that is part of Windows Server 2008. The Infrastructure Planning and Design: Windows Server Virtualization guide discusses Microsoft virtualization options using Windows Server virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. The guide explains design considerations at critical decision points and helps plan for an optimized server virtualization infrastructure architecture to meet organizational goals for performance and consolidation.

You can join the Beta program and download these guides by going to Microsoft's Connect Web site, here and then click Invitations.

When prompted for an invitation code, enter: IPDM-QX6H-7TTV

Posted by David Marshall on October 16, 2007 07:49 PM

October 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

XenSource More than Doubles Customer Base in Q3

With the help of the company's recent release of its new, feature-rich XenEnterprise v4 server virtualization platform back in August, XenSource was able to watch its customer growth nearly double in Q3.

Today, XenSource reached new milestones at the company and announced that it had signed its 1000th customer. New XenSource customers include ASIERUS, Carsdirect.com, Cornell University, McKesson, Miami Herald, Microsoft, Polycom, Postini, Raytheon and Sleek Networks.

At the same time, XenServer and the freely available XenExpress products also experienced record customer traction. The company said that it had received more than 25,000 downloads of XenExpress in Q3.

In addition to the rapid customer adoption of its commercial products, XenSource also experienced significant traction with server vendors for its XenExpress OEM Edition product line. To compete with VMware's recently announced VMware ESX Server 3i product, XenExpress OEM Edition is designed to allow customers to acquire servers with XenSource virtualization built into the server which is then supported by the OEM.

"Since introducing XenEnterprise v4, we've seen significant adoption from customers worldwide," said John Bara, VP of marketing for XenSource. "As more organizations move towards server virtualization to improve the performance and operational efficiency of their data centers, they're realizing that XenSource is a powerful choice and has a high performance, easy-to-use feature set that meets all of their virtualization needs."

Customers like Alex Brown, sr. network engineer, Georgia Public Broadcasting, were looking at virtualization solutions to better manage server sprawl, increase server utilization, decrease lengthy deployment cycles and to help create their test environment. Mr. Brown said that XenEnterprise v4 solved all of these pain points for his organization. He said, "The cloning features eliminated our server sprawl and reduced the server deployments for our web team from a few days to less than four minutes. XenEnterprise has increased our utilization rates and helped us create a top-rate test environment."

Posted by David Marshall on October 16, 2007 07:04 PM

October 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization Gets Real at Altiris ManageFusion 2007 in Orlando

Last week, I was once again lucky enough to be able to attend a premiere IT trade show - ManageFusion. The folks at Altiris must have a secret formula written down somewhere when it comes to events. From the facilities chosen, the food provided, the way they handle registration and breakout sessions and labs, to the team members in attendance available for questions, the parties, the keynotes and the exhibition booths... all done first rate and first class. The theme at this year's event was "Getting Smart", and I witnessed and spoke with a lot of people doing just that.

Steve Morton, the Group Vice President of Product Marketing & Management for the Altiris segment at Symantec, once again entertained the masses as the host of the event. There is no death by power point during his keynotes, which I have to say is a welcomed treat. So what did I learn? Content is king after all at these types of events, and like everything else at the show, content was done first class. Virtualization was in the air: Application Virtualization, Application Streaming, Intel vPro Security, Hardware Independent Restoration and a great one day break out session from Altiris, Dell, Intel and VMware. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on October 16, 2007 06:27 PM

October 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Finished Baking How To's in These Virtualization Cookbooks

If you've previously read any other technology cookbooks released from other publishers or other companies, then you are probably already well aware of the value provided by these technological recipes.

Cookbooks are structured and designed in a way to give us the information that we need in the amount of time that we have to spare. These Microsoft cookbooks do exactly that. They tend to provide step-by-step instructions to help you get a basic understanding of the concepts, techniques and applications being used. In addition to providing you with the general information that you need, you should be able to reference these cookbooks as a how-to-guide to perform specific tasks.

So with that quick overview, check out these valuable cookbooks covering Microsoft's virtualization technologies.

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager
The goal of this cookbook is to provide the steps and guidance necessary for you to successfully install and configure Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager. You may then create and manage virtual machines, and perform P2V migration.

Download and read it, here.

Backup and Recovery using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 and Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Edition
The goal of this cookbook is to guide you through installing Acronis server imaging solutions for workgroups and installing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. The cookbook covers creating a virtual machine (to serve as a standby for recovery) and restoring the contents of a server representing your production workload to the waiting virtual machine.

Download and read it, here.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager
The scenario presented in this cookbook will take you through the steps necessary to install Virtual Server and SCVMM, and then convert a workload to a virtual machine. This cookbook also includes the steps necessary to install DPM and to back up a running virtual machine, as well as information about monitoring and reporting using DPM.

Download and read it, here.

Quick Migration with Virtual Server Host Clustering Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition & Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1
This cookbook describes a simple configuration in which you use Virtual Server 2005 R2 to configure one guest operating system, and configure a server cluster that has two servers (nodes). With this configuration, you can migrate workloads easily from one node to the other.

Download and read it, here.

Mobile User Access of Applications. Terminal Server running on virtual machines using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1
In this cookbook we will install Terminal Server on a virtual machine and access the terminal server remotely. We will also show how to install Remote Desktop Web Connection and how to configure Windows Firewall to allow remote clients to access the terminal server.

Download and read it, here.

Hosted Backup and Recovery Solutions for Service Providers using Data Protection Manager (DPM) and Virtual Server (VS)
This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience providing data backup and recovery to customers as a hosted solution using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

Download and read it, here.

Simple Offsite Backup and Recovery of virtual machines using DPM and VS
This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for backing up and restoring virtual machines running in an offsite location using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

Download and read it, here.

Simple Onsite Backup and Recovery of virtual machines using DPM and VS
This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for backing up and restoring running virtual machines using Virtual Server and System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

Download and read it, here.

High Availability with VS and WS03R2 Enterprise Server Clustering
This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for implementing high availability of server workloads using Windows Server 2003 Server Clustering and Virtual Server using Intel-based hardware.

Download and read it, here.

Application Isolation and Operation in BO Using VS
This cookbook will provide procedural, step-by-step guidance to an IT Generalist audience for isolating and operating applications on separate virtual machines in branch offices using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, in an Intel-based hardware environment for regulatory compliance and improved legacy workload performance.

Download and read it, here.

Posted by David Marshall on October 14, 2007 08:39 AM

October 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Targets the SMB Market with Virtualization Offerings

Last week, in addition to announcing its latest virtualization platform update, VMware also announced its plans to go after the SMB market with a new set of offerings that target those companies and their efforts to tackle virtualization projects.

The packages are being called "acceleration kits" and they are based on VMware's Infrastructure 3 virtualization suite. These packages offer various levels of features and functionality based on pricing. Packages include:

VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation Acceleration Kit: Three 2-processor licenses of VMware Infrastructure Foundation—which includes VMware ESX Server, VMware Consolidated Backup, VMware Update Manager, VMware Virtual SMP, VMware VirtualCenter agent and VMware VMFS—as well as VMware VirtualCenter Foundation Server, which includes VMware Guided Consolidation and the ability to manage up to three VMware Infrastructure server hosts. List price is $2,995.
VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard High Availability Acceleration Kit: Two 2-processor nodes of VMware Infrastructure Standard, which includes the above features of the VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation Acceleration Kit plus VMware High Availability (HA). List price is $5,995.
VMware Infrastructure 3 Midsize Acceleration Kit: Three 2-processor nodes of VMware Infrastructure Enterprise—which includes the above features of the VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard High Availability Acceleration Kit plus VMware VMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), VMware Storage VMotion and VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM), an experimental feature—as well as flexible training and consulting credits that can be applied to classes to learn how to deploy and use VMware Infrastructure 3, such as the "VMware Infrastructure 3: Install and Configuration" course. List price is $14,495.

VMware hopes that introducing new technology such as their embedded VMware ESX Server 3i firmware hypervisor, the company can continue to maintain their market lead over competitors such as XenSource, Virtual Iron and Microsoft. To that end, VMware ESX Server 3i will help SMBs by removing the complexity of installing and configuring the hypervisor, and allowing for those companies to more easily and quickly deploy virtualization in their environments.

To further ease SMB transition from the physical to the virtual world, VMware is offering VMware Guided Consolidation which is designed to enable companies to more easily migrate from physical servers to virtual infrastructures using a step-by-step wizard that identifies physical servers for consolidation, converts them to virtual machines and intelligently places them onto the most ideal VMware ESX Server or VMware Server host. And VMware Update Manager will automate patch and update management for VMware ESX Server hosts and virtual machines and is designed to relieve the significant pain point of tracking patch levels and manually applying security and bug fixes.

According to industry analyst firm The Yankee Group, virtualization deployments among SMBs — companies with less than 100 servers or fewer than 1,000 employees — is expected to double during the next two years. This group is critical to VMware's continued expansion as the company is already implemented in most of today's Fortune 1000 businesses. This SMB market is where XenSource and Virtual Iron have hammered down stakes in the ground - so this is clearly VMware's loudest attempt at combating the "we are 1/5 the price of VMware" message that competitors have been using.

So is the pricing right? What about the acceleration kit messaging?

Posted by David Marshall on October 13, 2007 06:39 PM

October 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Sun's Virtualization Strategy Includes xVM

Sun Microsystems unveiled its virtualization platform which includes a hypervisor and management tool combination called Sun xVM which the company hopes to deliver in December.

The technology will first be included in the company's management stack - xVM Ops Center. According to Sun, combining xVM and Ops Center will help the company to provide its customers with a turnkey virtualization environment. The company also said the new technology will span across its server, storage and networking product lines.

A second xVM Ops Center version is expected to ship sometime around the middle of 2008. Sun said that these initial versions will first operate on Linux and Solaris based systems and that they would later add support for Windows down the line. The company already has an agreement in place with Microsoft to ensure that Windows will ultimately work smoothly on the platform once implemented.

The xVM type-one hypervisor is based on the open source Xen hypervisor, but has a Solaris-based kernel instead of Linux. Included in the technology will be support for ZFS file systems and predictive self healing, a technology where Sun predicts and warns of component failure.

Also announced in the new Ops Center software management package is a set of management tools that will be capable of managing both physical and virtual hardware as well as software. Sun also said that the software will include discovery and inventory, application provisioning, software lifecycle automation, hardware and software monitoring and compliance reporting.

Is Sun too late to the x86 virtualization game? Well, if the reports that state that only 6% of today's servers are currently being virtualized, then maybe not. Sun seems confident that there is still more room for yet another player in this strong market.

Posted by David Marshall on October 13, 2007 05:54 PM

October 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware's VI3 Gets an EOY Upgrade

VMware announced a new version of its long standing enterprise server virtualization platform suite that the company says will provide greater levels of automation, increase overall infrastructure availability and boost performance for mission critical workloads.

Expected sometime by the end of this year, VI3 will include VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 as well as updated packaging and pricing, including new offerings specifically targeted at midsize and smaller IT environments.

New capabilities of VMware Infrastructure 3 include a very well received feature during a keynote presentation at VMworld, VMware Storage VMotion. It enables live migration of virtual machine disks from one data storage system to another with no disruption or downtime. Using Storage VMotion, administrators can dynamically balance the storage workload and address performance bottlenecks by migrating virtual machine disks to the best available storage resource. This feature is a nice compliment to the already present VMotion which keeps the storage location the same, but changes the host server location.

Something that virtualization users have been asking for, and for obvious reasons, is a way to control the patching of their virtual machines, which with virtual server sprawl and the ease of deploying images, is something that can quickly get out of hand. VMware introduced VMware Update Manager which automates patch and update management for VMware ESX Server hosts and virtual machines. VMware said that the patching of offline virtual machines enforces higher levels of patch standards compliance, more so than on physical environments.

A feature that power companies and Green initiatives will love is the experimental feature called VMware Distributed Power Management. It aims to reduce power consumption in the data center through intelligent workload balancing by automatically powering off servers not currently needed and then automatically powering on servers as demand for compute resources increases.

Other updates include:

Expanded storage and networking choices such as support for SATA local storage, 10 Gig Ethernet, and Infiniband expand storage and networking choices for virtual infrastructure
Support for TCP Segment Offload and Jumbo frames reduce the CPU overhead associated with processing network I/O
Support for hardware nested page tables such as in processor assists for memory virtualization
Support for paravirtualized Linux guest operating systems enables higher levels of performance through virtualization-aware operating systems
Support for virtual machines with 64GB of RAM and physical machines with up to 128GB of memory

VMware is also introducing new packages and pricing to try and lure in the SMB market that others like XenSource and Virtual Iron are going after.

A starter edition, now called VI3 Foundation, is expected to be priced around $995 for a 2 processor license. It will include VMware ESX Server, VMware ESX Server 3i, VMware Consolidated Backup and the new VMware Update Manager.

VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard includes the capabilities of VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation as well as VMware HA and will be priced at $2995 per 2 processors.

VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise contains the entire array of virtual infrastructure capabilities for resource management, workload mobility, and high availability. In addition to the capabilities in VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard, it also includes VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion, and VMware DRS with Distributed Power Management (DPM). VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise list price will be $5750 per 2 processors.

Posted by David Marshall on October 10, 2007 04:43 AM

October 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

RingCube's Free MojoPac and a New USB Spec

RingCube Technologies is introducing their latest entry into the virtualization space, a product called MojoPac Freedom. And guess what, they said that it is free! Who can argue with free? And then, at Intel's annual developers forum in San Francisco, a new group was announced that unveiled plans for an updated USB spec. What is it? And how does it affect virtualization? listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on October 9, 2007 08:44 PM

October 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)

A Report on Combining Virtualization and Business Continuity

The Aberdeen Group recently put out a research report titled "Are You Protected? Virtualization and Business Continuity" which states that virtualization continues to be a key IT strategy to enable new ways to solve old problems in the enterprise.

The technology has largely been adopted to date to help organizations with server consolidation. Virtualization has been instrumental in many enterprises by helping to collapse their data center footprint and thus reducing all of the costs that go along with it.

Aberdeen has found that IT management is now looking beyond server consolidation and is starting to ask that virtualization help enable the enterprise to address the truly tough missions of Business Continuity, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery.

This latest report provides some insights and clarifications into the practices adopted by Best-in-Class companies that have begun to implement this next step in applying virtualization technology.

The report shows that the adoption rate of virtualization is strong. Having surveyed nearly 300 respondents, the survey found that 53% of respondents have deployed server virtualization, while another 24% plan to implement it within 12 months. At least 38% have deployed storage virtualization, with another 25% planning to adopt it within the next 12 months.

Once these companies adopt the technology, Aberdeen concludes that the next step for these adopters is to think about how to protect these virtualized environments. The reports states: "Virtualization is clearly helping customers to move their server and storage infrastructures into a more flexible environment which enables high availablity and disaster recovery. Furthermore, given that virtualization is emerging as a disruptive technology, companies must now take appropriate steps to ensure their newly virtualized environments are just as protected as their physcial environments."

Responding executives and IT managers completed the online survey that included questions designed to determine the following:

Identify companies that are using virtualization to support business continuity, high availability, and disaster recovery
The business drivers behind server and storage virtualization deployments
The structure and effectiveness of virtualization within server and storage environments
Measure the benefits, if any, that have been derived from virtualization / business continuity initiatives

The report was underwritten by Neverfail, Pillar Data Systems, Sun Microsystems, SWsoft and Xiotech.

You can get a complimentary copy of this 21 page report by signing up, here.

Posted by David Marshall on October 7, 2007 03:09 PM

October 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Stratavia Data Palette 4.0 Offers Intelligence to IT Automation

Denver based Stratavia introduced the latest version of its Data Palette data center automation software which expands on its core offering of database automation to now address servers, networks and other applications as well.

Data Palette 4.0 includes sophisticated predictive analytics, enhanced decision automation tools and an intelligent rules engine to align the infrastructure with the business needs. The latest version can discover the state of the server and intelligently determine what action, if any, needs to be taken. As an example, the software can validate whether or not a server is up-to-date on its patch level as is required by company policy. "Now, with Data Palette 4.0, IT professionals finally have a central platform for developing and setting policies for their data center that automates urgent, manual, time-consuming tasks," said Venkat Devraj, co-founder and chief architect, Stratavia.

Data Palette 4.0 empowers IT administrators to:

Dynamically expand, virtualize and allocate server and storage space when needed
Automatically trigger alerts and set resolution policies with no manual intervention
Administer and track upgrades and configurations
Forensically report on database and IT operations for auditing and analysis
Deploy patches to prevent security threats and ensure optimal performance
Support adherence to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework of best practices.

The software can be installed on either a Windows, Linux or Unix based dedicated server and requires that agents get installed on every managed object. Pricing for these agents are expected to start around $2,000.

Posted by David Marshall on October 7, 2007 01:58 PM

October 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Parallels Answers the Expiring Mac Boot Camp Issue

While the pending release of Leopard coming from Apple is something that Mac users are highly anticipating and waiting for, it also means that the current license for Boot Camp Beta expires soon. So if you are a Mac OS X Tiger user using Boot Camp, you are going to have to upgrade to Leopard or find an alternate route to continue using your Boot Camp environment. While most users will no doubt be upgrading their environment, for some, this just isn't an option. At least not right away.

Fortunately, Ben Rudolph, Director of Corporate Communications for SWsoft, says that Parallels Desktop for Mac users just so happen to have an alternate route. Rudolph says, "If you're not ready to upgrade to Leopard right away and still want to use your Boot Camp partition, Parallels makes life very, very easy."

Rudolph states that "for months now, Parallels Desktop has been able to use a Boot Camp partition as a virtual hard drive, meaning that you can boot your Windows XP or Windows Vista partition in a virtual machine at any time, and move back and forth between the two. When Boot Camp's license expires, you can still access your hard drive partition without using Boot Camp by booting the partition into a virtual machine."

And more importantly with that option, Rudolph says you won't have to reinstall anything or worry about losing any of your critical Windows files.

The fast paced programmers at Parallels are also supposedly working on another option, although not quite ready yet. Down the road, the company hopes to be able to offer Desktop for Mac users the ability to fully migrate their Boot Camp partition to a fully-functional Parallels virtual machine. The hope is that users will be able to use their free copy of the bundled Parallels Transporter utility to perform that conversion at some future time. Doing so would allow those users to then take advantage of other Parallels features such as undo disks and snapshots.

It's certainly nice to have options, isn't it?

Posted by David Marshall on October 6, 2007 04:21 PM

October 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Yankee Group on Virtual Desktops and Microsoft's Plans for SoftGrid

Will virtualization of the corporate desktop finally end the laptop management that many IT folks face? One analyst firm said it just might offer such a solution. And speaking of the desktop, have you been following SoftGrid since Microsoft acquired the technology from Softricity? One Microsoft employee recently posted some new information about the product's future in a Microsoft TechNet forum. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on October 6, 2007 08:36 AM

October 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

HELP WANTED! Looking for Virtualization Experts?

Are you currently searching to find virtualization experts for your organization? If so, you aren't alone. This is a common request coming from IT shops around the world right now as they try to fill positions for developers, testers, administrators and datacenter engineers.

As virtualization adoption continues to grow, the need to hire virtualization solution architects, developers, implementation specialists and virtualization administrators will continue to grow as well. And if you've been listening to all of the different analyst reports that have been hitting the wire, you probably already know that the virtualization growth rate is expected to continue to climb at an alarming rate.

While the proliferation of this technology throughout the IT world is a good thing, trying to locate and acquire professionals with this special skill set isn't as easy as you might think.

"With the boom of the virtualization market, the fight for top talent with domain expertise is as intense as ever", said Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix. "Any organization that has that talent is fiercely protective of them. But, like other booms in other times (think E-commerce in 1999), the allure of start-ups and helping build something from the ground up is still compelling. That's how we're winning the battle."

Dholakia continued, "This is such a young market, true expertise in virtualization - i.e. someone who has been working in the space for 3+ years - is an extremely rare commodity. Since that talent is what drives 100% of our business, the battle to get them is at the top of my priority list every single day."

VMLogix admits that these virtualization experts can be hard to find. And because of that, people are generally willing to pay a premium to bring them onboard by enticing them away from current employers or other opportunities.

Jason Mattox, Vizioncore's VP of Products and Support and CTO finds it notable to recognize just how much virtualization is attracting professionals from other disciplines to come over to the virtualization side of the fence. He said "The pace of development, the shifting paradigm, just the sheer excitement of this technology (not to mention the VMware stock price) are powerful motivators for people to move into this industry."

Minneapolis, Minnesota based virtualization consulting firm, Xcedex, is 100% focused on helping companies go virtual. To do that, the company needs all of their employees to be considered "experts" in virtualization. The company's CTO, David Payne said, "We've never actually been able to find someone off the street that has enough experience to start and be considered an expert on day one. This was especially true in the early years working with virtualization. Most people not only didn't have virtualization experience, they hadn't even heard of VMware. What we had to do was create a training process to take people with the right background and turn them into virtualization experts. That is the method we have followed over the last 4 years."

Payne continued, "The trouble with hiring for virtualization is that it isn't a mutually exclusive skill like Java programming or Cisco networking. Infrastructure virtualization touches nearly every part of the datacenter from storage & networks to operating systems and applications. So rather than look for virtualization experts, we look for infrastructure experts. These are people that have experience managing datacenters where they've been exposed to servers, shared storage, networking, OS and application management. Give me a fairly well rounded infrastructure person with decent social/consulting abilities, and I can layer on a virtualization skill set pretty quickly."

Vizioncore's Mattox said his company is hiring like crazy as well and he believes that virtualization experts do exist but that they are typically created "in the trenches".

"This is such a young technology, at least on the x86 side of the equation, that there are few avenues for formal education outside of what is being provided by the virtualization platform vendors. VMware, for example, has a certification program for their platform."

But Mattox believes that experts are coming out of two paths: one is on the user side of the technology and the other is on the provider side.

He continued, "Out of the body of knowledge that is being collected and shared across these groups, there is definitely a set of best practices emerging and being validated. A lot of the learned knowledge is shared in virtualization communities, in user groups and across blogging sites. That's where you get a 'rubber meets the road' perspective on the things that work and the things that don't."

Vizioncore, like Xcedex, looks for people with strong IT skills who are intelligent, flexible, and resourceful as well as quick studies. Mattox said "having worked extensively with virtualization on the VMware platform, we have built quite a knowledge base internally and we have been doing a good job of knowledge transfer to new employees to bring them up to speed. I think any company in this industry will need to employ this formula today."

So if an organization finally takes that leap of faith - moving from a physical to a virtual world - what options are available to them and what should they know?

"There are two ways companies can go," said Andi Mann, Research Director for the analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "One is to hire new people for their virtualization efforts, another is to train existing people. I tend to advise my clients to go for the latter for a few reasons."

"Firstly, there are availability issues around hiring new staff. They don't teach VMware or Xen at the university (yet!), so virtualization specialists simply aren't available as fresh graduates. So you are forced to go to the existing labor market, and there is such a high demand and limited supply there that you will end up paying premiums to draw people away from other companies - and they are then just as likely to jump ship again if they are offered something bigger and better elsewhere. Plus, a lot of the best people are seeing the demand and going into consulting, not looking for permanent work, so you have to wonder if you are getting the best people anyway."

Mann continued, "On the other hand, your existing IT staff already know so much, it is worth the additional investment to get them up to speed on virtualization - both formal training, and with practical skills transfer using short-term consultants. They know the existing systems, applications, and environment; they know the many different people in the organization they will need to deal with to get virtualization done. Remember, alongside the human issues of skill sets, there are the human issues of politics, and existing staff are going to be much better equipped to get them both done. And ultimately, IT needs all of their people to be virtualization people - having a separate 'virtualization team' is not sustainable in the long term, so the sooner they get their virtualization team integrated with their existing IT staff, the better."

The technology, the need and the lure are definitely there. So you better hang that 'Help Wanted' sign now and start your search for the existing virtualization experts in the industry or you better start training your existing staff today to create your own in-house experts. Either way, the clock is ticking.

Posted by David Marshall on October 5, 2007 05:30 AM

October 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Security Vulnerability Found in Xen Virtualization Software

Last week, a security vulnerability was reported in the open source Xen hypervisor.

Secunia released an advisory that stated that there was a vulnerability found in Xen that could be exploited by malicious users that have root privileges. These root users of a guest domain could execute arbitrary commands in domain 0 via specially crafted entries in grub.conf when the guest system is booted.

The problem stems from a bug found in the /tools/pygrub/src/GrubConf.py script, which reads data from the configuration of the Grub boot manager and tries to set parameters by using the "exec" command without proper sanitation.

On the next reboot of the guest domain, an offending configuration file can be used to pass commands to the shell via the script running in domain 0 and then execute the offending command. Joris van Rantwijk reported the vulnerability, and there is an example exploit found in a XenSource Bugzilla entry.

The vulnerability was detected in Xen 3.0.3, although other versions might also be affected.

XenSource was quick to supply a hotfix, security update 2007-001. The security update fixes the vulnerability in the XenServer v4 line of products. XenSource strongly recommends all users update their environment accordingly. The process needs to be applied to each server in your pool.

To download the patch and get instructions from XenSource, go here.

Virtual Iron, another server virtualization platfom that is designed to incorporate the open source Xen hypervisor, quickly came out and claimed the following:

Our software is not impacted by this vulnerability at all.
Virtual Iron does not grant any user access to dom0.
Virtual Iron does not use GrubConf.py. It is not even present in our dom0.
Virtual Iron supports only unmodified operating systems (HVM). GrubConf.py is used to bootstrap paravirtualized guests.

Posted by David Marshall on October 3, 2007 04:21 PM

October 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Vizioncore's vRanger Pro 3.2 - From Backup to P2V

Vizioncore has released an updated version of its industry recognized backup and restore solution - vRanger Pro 3.2, an agent-less backup tool that can provide a consistent backup of running VMs. The product is now enabled with a VSS driver which allows vRanger Pro to provide transactional consistency in backups and restores.

One of the interesting new features found in vRanger Pro 3.2 is its P2V D/R capability. Leveraging proven technology, vRanger allows customers to apply the same benefits of vRanger backup and restore technology to physical machines, and without agents or any disruption to the physical machine.

Each install of vRanger Pro 3.2 includes a P2V evaluation license good for three free P2V backups.

New features found in this release:

VSS - vRanger Pro includes a VSS driver that utilizes Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service to pause application "writers". This feature will enable quiescing of supported databases to provide a transactionally consistent backup image.
P2V Disaster Recovery - Leveraging the P2V engine from vConverter, vRanger Pro provides a safe, reliable way to capture image-level backups of any physical Windows server. A backup job can be configured for a physical server in just a few clicks with no disruption to the source machine. This agent-less, reboot-free process provides the ultimate flexibility in configuring environments while maintaining the low RTO of image-level backups.
Restore to Separate Datastores - VMware supports a common practice of splitting a Virtual Machine into two VMDK files (an OS file and a Data file perhaps), similar to partitioning a physical drive. Common practice for many organizations is to store these files in different locations, or datastores. vRanger Pro now supports the selection of separate datastores when restoring VMs with multiple VMDKs
NoZip Restores - vRanger Pro now supports restoring from an uncompressed backup. This allows full integration with Data Domain deduplication solutions that will greatly reduce the amount of storage space required for backups.
Enhanced Write Speeds - Using a proprietary driver, vRanger Pro has increased write speeds when backup up or restoring to VMFS. This will allow for shorter backup times, and enable a lower RTO by decreasing the time required to restore a backup.

Posted by David Marshall on October 2, 2007 07:30 PM

October 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

A Quick Look at SWsoft/Parallels and Attune Systems

SWsoft is expected to unleash new products to market within the next month or two. SWsoft and Parallels are moving at an extremely fast rate right now, and are definitely a virtualization company to keep an eye on. And after discussing Operating System and Server Virtualization, we'll take a look at a file virtualization offering from Attune Systems. The company recently announced its new platform, the Maestro File Manager. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on October 2, 2007 04:20 PM

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