Virtualization Report | David Marshall | November 2007

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November 2007

November 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum Returns to San Francisco

IDG's InfoWorld Executive Forum returns for the fifth time, and once again takes place in the beautiful Hotel Nikko in San Francisco on Monday, February 4, 2008.

This event is geared toward the executive level, and it offers a real-world guidance and discussion around the best practices for a dynamically managed IT environment. The one-day event will highlight the top sessions from the two-day event that recently took place in New York. In addition, the event staff has added all new keynote presentations and panel discussions covering key virtualization themes from software licensing implications to the skillset and security needed for the technology.

Virtualization industry expert and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) analyst Andi Mann returns to the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum stage to deliver what promises to be an exciting keynote presentation. A lot has changed in the industry since Mann's first InfoWorld keynote back in 2006. This time, he will discuss the changes in virtualization and IT management that have occurred over the past 12-18 months, present a perspective on the current state of the virtualization space, and provide actionable advice to help you understand and overcome the many challenges in managing a virtual IT environment. I promise you, this is a keynote that you don't want to miss.

Sessions will also include case studies detailing the processes, challenges and results of server, storage and desktop virtualization as well as focused sessions on both virtual server security and the Green IT energy savings achievable through virtualization technologies.

If you haven't made plans yet, I invite you to check out the latest information and agenda on the events Web site, here.

And when you are ready to sign up and register, go here. Register before December 10, 2007 for early bird pricing.

Posted by David Marshall on November 30, 2007 06:59 PM

November 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Double-Take Software Updates Disaster Recovery Solution

Double-Take Software unveiled the latest version of its replication and recovery product, Double-Take 5.0.

The company said that its latest 5.0 release is the only disaster recovery product to combine continuous data replication and full server protection, a combination that eliminates the need to install and maintain applications, patches and configurations on the standby server for disaster recovery.

One of the product's new features is called "Full Server Failover". This feature reduces the complexity of setting up a standby system for failover and can be used to streamline protection for any applications running on a Microsoft Windows server without the need for pre-installation or configuration of any application software on the standby server. Added benefits include the ability to protect servers in the LAN or WAN, support for 32- and 64-bit operating systems and more importantly, the fact that it is hardware independent, meaning the standby system doesn't have to be the same make, model or configuration and can even be a virtual machine.

Version 5.0 also includes a feature called the "Enterprise Install Console", which helps customers deploy and maintain their Double-Take installations by helping to automate Double-Take installs or upgrades throughout the environment.

Double-Take version 5.0 added support for advanced scripting which can be executed within a specific user context, enhanced restores to maximize uptime for end-users since there is no need to take applications offline during a restore, and integration with Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for snapshot processes.

"Every organization knows they should protect their business-critical systems from unwanted downtime. The challenge to-date has been that implementing protection has come at the cost of needing to configure and maintain their disaster recovery environment. This 'protection tax' requires that they keep their disaster recovery servers' operating systems, applications and configuration in lock-step with their production environment which can be a costly effort," said Bob Roudebush, director of solutions engineering for Double-Take Software. "With Double-Take 5.0 and features like Full-Server Failover, we're repealing the 'protection tax' for our customers and providing them the ability to protect or migrate entire servers easily all while the production workload remains available. This allows them to devote their time and resources to more worthwhile efforts while still remaining protected in the event of a disaster."

In summary, key new features include:

Full-Server protection and failover
Automated Microsoft SharePoint Services protection
Flexible and easy migration between physical and virtual machines and between dissimilar hardware
Enhancements to Microsoft Exchange 2007 Cluster protection
Enterprise Install Console for centralized and automated deployment/upgrade of Double-Take
Advanced Scripting
Enhanced restore capabilities

Posted by David Marshall on November 30, 2007 06:18 PM

November 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

CiRBA Announced New 4.5 Version to help Continue the Company's Strong Annual Growth

CiRBA, Inc., provider of data center intelligence solutions, recently announced that the company has seen tremendous growth throughout 2007, noting that the virtualization and consolidation planning software markets have finally emerged. Consumers are becoming well aware of the problems with server sprawl, space constraints and power consumption in their data centers, forcing them to take a more holistic and critical view of their environments.

"Virtualization and consolidation rank high as strategic priorities, as IT executives seek to reduce physical server counts and complexity within IT infrastructures," said Gerry Smith, president and CEO of CiRBA. "Our remarkable growth over the past year shows that organizations around the world are choosing CiRBA as their technology of choice for dealing with their number one challenge in transforming their environments - planning."

To continue this momentum, CiRBA just launched version 4.5 of its Data Center Intelligence software as well as a new "one-click analysis template technology".

Some of the turnkey features incorporated into the 4.5 release include things such as the addition of unicode technology, allowing CiRBA's product to be used in any language, even Japanese and Chinese, for global presence.

They also added "Proactive Resource Placement" which allows for virtual environments to be set up moving forward by examining the history at a specific date and time to predict workflow at that time and better manage resources.

"Currently data center managers or management software use short-term utilization trends to make decisions on where to place resources," said Andrew Hillier, CiRBA Co-Founder and CTO. "Proactive Resource Placement enables organizations to leverage historical data to prepare for changes in workloads in advance. This enables optimal decisions about where to place important resources to maximize utilization and performance throughout the data center."

The company also added something called "One-click Analysis Templates", which allows users to quickly analyze existing server environments to determine which virtualization technologies best suit their unique needs. The initial release of this functionality includes templates for VMware with motioning, VMware without motioning, XenSource (with and without XenMotion), Oracle VM and Sun's xVM.

"There are new virtualization technologies entering the market on a weekly basis, and given the relative strengths and weaknesses of each solution there is not one 'best' virtualization solution," said Hillier. "This is comparable to the fact that there has never been one 'best' hardware platform to use across a data center. Every IT environment has technical and non-technical attributes that make it better suited to a particular virtualization strategy, and the challenge is to find that strategy."

Posted by David Marshall on November 29, 2007 06:41 PM

November 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Hardware Vendors Continue to Sign Agreements with Virtualization Vendors

The server virtualization software market is expected to grow to as much as $7 billion in 2011 from $800 million in 2006. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at just 6% today. And most analyst firms conclude that VMware has control of an estimated 80% of the current server virtualization market.

Whether you believe those numbers or not, it remains quite evident that VMware is the dominant player in this space. But as it always happens, there are others gunning for position against the top player, looking for ways to gain more of a percentage control of their own. One way for virtualization platform providers to do that is to make sure they get onto the server hardware before it ships to the end customer. And so, we watch as all the key virtualization platform providers begin to rally around the hardware vendors and sign various partnership agreements to try and provide customers with a choice of platform - and in many cases, pre-installed and ready to go out of the box.

"End users are asking for a choice in server virtualization solutions as they look to refresh and 'virtualize' their data centers at multiple tiers including servers, network, and storage," said Mark Bowker, Analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.

Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation announced a technology partnership with the application delivery giant, Citrix. According to a recent press release, the agreement has Citrix providing support for its XenServer Enterprise Edition virtualization platform running on the Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 S3 server, and the two companies also plan on collaborating on future products. This model Fujitsu server is now Citrix certified for XenServer Enterprise Edition.

"As a leader in bringing virtualization solutions to market, Fujitsu is continually looking for new ways to ensure our customers have the ability to choose a virtualization technology that meets their specific needs," said Richard McCormack, senior vice president of marketing for Fujitsu Computer Systems. "A technology partnership with Citrix provides Fujitsu customers with access to a highly reliable, industry-leading virtualization platform, while companies first looking to implement virtualization now have a powerful, fully tested combination of Citrix XenServer software and Fujitsu hardware to turn to."

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software solutions, also made an announcement about their new worldwide authorized reseller agreement with Dell Corporation. Dell will work through Virtual Iron's distribution channel and resell the software to end-users as part of an extensive portfolio of server virtualization and storage offerings.

According to the company, Dell servers provide an ideal platform for Virtual Iron. And virtualization is a key component of Dell's scaleable enterprise strategy that aims to help customers cost-effectively scale, improve utilization and simplify IT operations.

"Many Dell customers are leveraging Virtual Iron's comprehensive virtualization capabilities to improve their operational efficiency and business agility," said Mike Grandinetti, Chief Marketing Officer at Virtual Iron Software. "These companies are able to take advantage of comprehensive virtualization capabilities in a very easy to use and easy to afford solution. Working with Dell, we are able to further enhance this value proposition and bring enterprise-class capabilities to a much larger segment of the market."

Posted by David Marshall on November 28, 2007 08:31 PM

November 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

DMTF Releases Open Standards for System Virtualization Management

The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) recently announced the release of a new standard for managing virtualized environments.

Who are they? The DMTF is an industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives. The task force has approximately 4,000 active participants representing 44 countries and nearly 200 organizations.

Five new preliminary profiles have been announced, all based on DMTF's Common Information Model. They have now been made public and according to the DMTF, they are ready for implementation. According to a recent press release, a number of DMTF member companies and alliance partners have already begun implementation.

It will be interesting to see what current virtualization platform management and virtual machine lifecycle management companies think about these "standards". As the virtualization market continues to grow, the management area of this market is suddenly taking off. Will existing companies and new startups find these specifications a hindrance or will they embrace them?

"With the ever-increasing adoption of virtualization, DMTF aims to simplify and provide ease-of-use for the virtual environment by creating an industry standard for system virtualization management," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "Our role also extends to ensure the success of this standard, so we are thrilled to host the first-ever SVPC plugfest to test early implementations for interoperability."

The new standard also recognizes supported virtualization management capabilities, including the ability to:

discover inventory virtual computer systems
manage lifecycle of virtual computer systems
create/modify/delete virtual resources
monitor virtual systems for health and performance

Five preliminary profiles are publicly available here:

DSP1042, System Virtualization Profile
DSP1057, Virtual System Profile
DSP1059, Generic Device Resource Virtualization Profile
DSP1041, Resource Allocation Profile
DSP1043, Allocation Capabilities Profile

Posted by David Marshall on November 28, 2007 08:06 PM

November 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Entuity to the Network and Quest to the Desktop

Virtualization management and control is important, so companies like Entuity are looking to virtualization to expand their network management suite, EYE 2008, to help with the management and control of the overall network within a virtualized environment. Quest Software is also no stranger to virtualization. With virtualization applications from Vizioncore and Invirtus already in the company's arsenal, they recently added more ammunition with the acquisition of Provision Networks. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 27, 2007 08:05 PM

November 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

HP to Resell Scalent V/OE Software for HP BladeSystem

HP and Scalent Systems have announced an agreement that makes Scalent V/OE software available through HP in December 2007 as part of the HP BladeSystem c-Class Solution Builder Program.

According to HP, the software will allow its customers to seamlessly add, swap, and failover between blade servers, while transparently maintaining the consistency and integrity of their business systems. This extends the functionality of HP's BladeSystem Insight Control and the recently announced enhancements to BladeSystem virtualization and power management features.

Scalent V/OE infrastructure virtualization software enables data center managers to react in real-time to changing business needs. It does this by dynamically changing the software stack that servers are running and how those servers are connected to networks and storage systems, without making physical changes to the infrastructure. This ability to make real-time server software, network connectivity and storage access changes adds greater infrastructure flexibility, helps drive down costs and increases deployment and failover capabilities of data center systems.

"The addition of Scalent V/OE to the HP BladeSystem c-Class Solution Builder portfolio should greatly improve infrastructure operations for IT administrators," said Paul Miller, vice president of Marketing, Enterprise Storage and Servers, HP. "Our customers will have a new solution to deploy or repurpose entire tiers of networked servers in minutes without manual intervention -- increasing performance, agility and building on HP's Adaptive Infrastructure strategy."

This announcement comes after Egenera's own announcement that it was going into the software business with its PAN Manager product - going up against Scalent's solution. At the same time, the agreement helps further HP's agenda and answers its own competitors such as Dell who continues to make waves in both the blade server and virtualization market.

Posted by David Marshall on November 26, 2007 08:44 PM

November 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

ManageIQ Launches into Virtualization Management

The virtualization management space is really starting to heat up. Recently announced new comers Embotics and Fortisphere are now being joined by ManageIQ, a company founded and managed by a team of people who helped Novadigm down the path of acquisition by Hewlett Packard.

ManageIQ has launched its new virtualization management suite - Enterprise Virtualization Management or EVM - which it believes will help organizations address the current challenges of managing virtual environments.

The initial product offerings in the EVM suite includes EVM Insight, which enables organizations to better understand their virtual environment, and EVM Control, which provides the foundation for a strong policy and compliance management program.

EVM Insight delivers the following:

Comprehensive Real-Time Discovery – captures and automatically maintains indepth configuration information through SmartState technology. Detailed configuration information is captured for hosts, virtual machines, virtual appliances, VirtualCenter instances, storage and network elements, OS, applications, patches, and accounts.
Identification and Tracking - assigns unique identifiers to virtual resources for reliable tracking and recording of operational and configuration events across infrastructures and lifecycles using patent-pending Virtual BlackBox technology. Real-time event and configuration correlation enables point-of-origin, relationship, and genealogy mapping.
Visualization and Reporting - delivers a rich set of reports, graphs and analytics about the virtual infrastructure with customizable role-based views and comprehensive relationship mapping, including genealogy, virtual services, host affinity, and snapshot trees. A unique Virtual Timeline supports user-friendly time-based presentation of infrastructure events, including configuration events such as discovery, operation events such as start and stop, and policy events. Patent-pending Virtual Thumbnails create an iconized, visual representation of information associated with virtual machine guests and hosts, including their status and level of compliance with policies.
Baselining, Comparison and Drift Analysis - enables the identification and articulation of fine-grained differences between configuration versions, deviations over time, genealogical changes, and ad hoc comparisons. These powerful capabilities enhance impact and problem analysis, release management, and standards compliance in virtual environments.

EVM Control provides the following:

Configurable Policy Enforcement - enables policy enforcement anywhere throughout the lifecycle, across a range of operational and configuration points, providing maximum flexibility. Policies can be applied to desired points such as on discovery, creation, or cloning, before starting or stopping machines, and during release and change management events. A centralized policy store ensures updates are immediately effective, assuring the most current version of policies are always enforced.
Adaptive Policy Engine - dynamically determines the optimal combination of configuration, operations, security, and business policies appropriate for an event, a host, or a virtual machine. The engine leverages real-time configuration information about the virtual environment in selecting and applying policies, enabling policy enforcement against even new or unknown machines. Offline VMs can be fully evaluated, minimizing risk, and allowing the identification of systems requiring updates without the overhead required to start systems before they can be managed.
Policy Actions - provides a comprehensive and extensible set of automated responses to policy decisions such as generating notifications, issuing warnings, and quarantining or disabling virtual machines. EVM Control can also invoke workflows or user-defined scripts and automation to address complex remediation issues.
Simulation and On-Demand Enforcement - evaluates interactions between policies to perform "what if" and impact analysis, and ensure a safe transition of new policies to a managed environment. Policy checks verify correct configurations are in place, before deployment or during activities like problem determination.
Role Delegation and Separation of Duties - enables domain owners to define and implement only those policies appropriate to their operational responsibilities. Logging and Auditing - documents and records system modifications and policy changes with a detailed history of changes and transactions.

The company is already a VMware Technical Alliance Partner as well as a XenSource XenReady Partner. Using those alliances, the company plans to support VMware, Microsoft and Xen environments once the product releases with availability planned for December 2007. Pricing for this technology will start at $25,000.

Posted by David Marshall on November 26, 2007 08:20 PM

November 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)

3Tera Updates AppLogic and Verari Offers New Blade Server

3Tera, grid computing and utility computing provider, announced that the company is adding 64-bit support to enhance their scalability and control of resources for AppLogic customers. And Verari Systems delivered a new standard for today's data centers, designed with the future in mind. The company announced the addition of their VB1255 blade server. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 22, 2007 01:38 PM

November 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Thinsy Announces Latest Xen Based Virtualization Platform

California based Thinsy announces that it is joining the growing list of Xen based virtualization platforms. Just after Oracle announced the introduction of its Xen based platform, Oracle VM, Thinsy becomes the seventh commercial virtualization platform announced making use of the Xen hypervisor technology.

The company has announced the EnSpeed VM family of products which is made up of the EnSpeed Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) server and the EnSpeed VM Orchestrator.

The EnSpeed VMM is a Xen based virtualization server that is installed on bare metal. The company is taking a different approach with its virtualization platform offering than its competitors. Rather than focusing on an expensive SAN solution, Thinsy is providing enterprise grade features using direct attached storage (DAS) and its LiveSync technology. They offer:

High Availability Backup for VMs to failover to a secondary VMM, should the primary VMM server fail – all without SAN or NAS external storage.
Live Migration of powered up VMs from the primary VMM server to the backup VMM server.
VM Snapshots - enables full backups, without powering off the VM
Daily Incremental backup of VMs – without powering off the VM.

The EnSpeed VM Orchestrator is the company's java based Web server hosted application. It provides the following functionality:

Create and load Virtual Machines onto EnSpeed Virtual Machine Monitor Servers. The Virtual Machines are created using Virtual Appliance Images stored in the Orchestrator's Virtual Appliance Library
Power On/Off of Virtual Machines loaded onto the EnSpeed Virtual Machine Monitor Servers.
Open a remote console to the Virtual Machine within a web browser window.
Take a snapshot of a running VM, in order to download a full backup. This is done without powering off the VM.
Download incremental backup images of the VM

The company hasn't reached a 1.0 release version yet, but the products are both available for download, here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 21, 2007 02:44 PM

November 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Offers SCVMM 2007 Scripting Guide

The Virtual Machine Manager Scripting Guide is a 143 page guide that explains how to create Microsoft Windows PowerShell scripts that execute Virtual Machine Manger 2007 commands, and provides many useful sample scripts.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 is a server application that facilitates the centralized management of a large physical and virtual system infrastructure.

The Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (VMM) command shell is built on Microsoft Windows PowerShell, an administrator-focused, interactive command-line shell and scripting language that is integrated into the Windows operating system. VMM commands, called cmdlets, can be used separately to perform simple administrative tasks, as an alternative to using the VMM Administrator Console. VMM cmdlets and other command-line elements can also be aggregated into scripts to perform more complex tasks and to automate tasks involving a large number of managed virtual machines that would be burdensome to perform from the Administrator Console.

You can download the guide, here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 19, 2007 03:09 PM

November 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Oracle OpenWorld - Compellent and Pillar Data Systems

Two stories that came out of Oracle's OpenWorld event center around Compellent and Pillar Data Systems. Compellent Technologies announced their membership into the Green Grid, and showed off their environmental and energy efficient products at the trade show. The other announcement came from Pillar Data Systems as they announced their support for the new Oracle server virtualization platform. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 19, 2007 09:22 AM

November 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Mellanox Introduces Infiniband to VMware Environments

Mellanox Technologies, supplier of semiconductor-based, server and storage interconnect products, announced that later this year VMware's newest server virtualization platform, VMware ESX Server 3.5, would be providing enablements for Mellanox Infiniband based adapters.

The InfiniBand LAN networking and block storage drivers are based on the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version 1.2.5 and were developed by Mellanox, VMware and other participants of the VMware Community Source program. Mellanox's industry leading InfiniBand adapters seamlessly replace multiple fiber channel and Gigabit Ethernet adapters typically deployed in virtualized environments, which reduces data center power, cooling, capital expenditure and cost of ownership.

"Higher I/O bandwidth and I/O consolidation in VMware environments are critical needs, further exacerbated by deployment of multi-core CPUs and I/O real estate constraints driven by green data center initiatives," said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Mellanox is pleased to have worked with VMware to deliver a solution that marries the high price-performance capabilities on Mellanox I/O adapters to the robust, seamless and easy-to-use virtual infrastructure platform from VMware."

According to the company, when InfiniBand I/O adapters are used with VMware ESX Server 3.5, a single adapter can replace multiple gigabit Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs while maintaining or enhancing I/O throughput from virtual machines. For example, SAN throughput from a virtual machine can reach up to 1500 Megabytes per second (MB/s) or it can be shared linearly across multiple virtual machines, e.g., about 400 MB/s per virtual machine across four virtual machines on the same VMware ESX Server host. This is equivalent to using four 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs, one dedicated to each of the four virtual machines. This I/O consolidation and scale out, which results in significant cost and power savings, is achieved transparently as operating systems and applications running in the virtual machines continue to run over traditional virtual NIC and HBA interfaces available in VMware virtual machines. Network and storage I/O provisioning for virtual machines and features like VMware VMotion are also configured transparently using VMware VirtualCenter 2.5, which exposes only the familiar virtual NIC and virtual HBA interfaces available over the unified InfiniBand I/O adapter. Similarly, features such as high availability and migration of virtual machines are preserved as if they were operating on Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs.

Solution Benefits

LAN and SAN functionality is available over unified server I/O using high bandwidth InfiniBand connectivity. This reduces cabling complexity and reduces I/O cost (50 – 60%) and power (25-30%) significantly
LAN performance (from VMs) of close to 3X Gigabit Ethernet has been achieved
SAN performance (from VMs) of close to 10X 2Gb/s Fibre Channel has been achieved
LAN and SAN performance scales linearly across multiple VMs
Completely transparent to VMs as applications in VMs continue to work over legacy NIC and HBA interfaces that have been already qualified on
All VMware functionality including migration, high availability and others are available over the InfiniBand fabric (just as they are available over Ethernet and Fibre Channel fabrics)
All VMware ESX Server 3.5 supported guest operating systems are supported
Management and configuration using VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 maintains the look an feel of configuring NICs and HBAs, making it easier for IT managers to configure the allocation and management of LAN and SAN resources over InfiniBand
InfiniBand to Ethernet and InfiniBand to Fibre Channel gateways from leading OEMs are supported, ensuring end to end connectivity with Ethernet LANs and Fibre Channel SANs respectively.

You can find out more information by reading one of the company's whitepapers, I/O Virtualization Using Mellanox InfiniBand And Channel I/O Virtualization (CIOV) Technology.

Posted by David Marshall on November 18, 2007 04:54 PM

November 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Taking a Closer Look at Utility Computing with Virtualization

Virtualization has been around for quite some time, but it's only within the past 2 years that the technology has really started to take off and gain in popularity. Likewise, utility computing is only now starting to get the notice that it believes it's due. Commercial utility computing solutions based on virtualization such as 3Tera's AppLogic and Amazon's EC2 are starting to get more attention.

To help try and understand the utility computing market better, I was lucky enough to get the chance to speak with 3Tera's Bert Armijo, Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Product Management and Peter Nickolov, President and CTO.

Q: Virtualization is the latest popular buzzword in the technology industry and every media outlet is talking about it in some form or fashion. Can you tell us, why aren't more people talking about Utility Computing?

A: New technologies, developments that aren't linear extensions of existing systems, always take time to catch on. Virtualization came out in 1999, but it wasn't until five years later, in 2004, that it became a hot topic. Utility computing really started just last year with the introduction of 3tera's AppLogic in February 2006, and six months later Amazon launched EC2.

Now that we have users who have been in production for more than a year and new releases of code are coming out, we're seeing more and more interest and coverage.

Q. Do you believe that utility computing is the next step for people once they get into virtualization? Is the technology inevitable?

A. There are a lot people adopting AppLogic that have never used virtualization, so I don't see it as a required stepping stone for utility computing. The value propositions are different.

Utility computing is a business enabler. Most Web 2.0 users start using AppLogic because they want to be sure they can scale when they get demand. SaaS vendors want to be able to replicate applications for users at will. Enterprise users are interested in making infrastructure become responsive to business requirements. Virtualization, on the other hand, is most often used for server consolidation. The adoption has been driven by cost savings, and that's clearly reflected in the coverage they've gotten.

Is utility computing inevitable? I'm biased, of course, but I believe so. Building data centers, racking servers and plugging network cables in no longer adds value to most businesses. We've proven that not only can you tap readily available computing resources as easily as plugging in a toaster, but that the result is more resilient and flexible. Technology transitions don't happen over night, though, so we're working with many customers who want to build their own utility as well.

Q. Where do you see server virtualization technology lacking at the moment? Are there any missing features?

A. Virtualization isn't lacking, it was simply built for a different purpose. Virtualization is designed to carve a resource into smaller pieces for efficient usage. It was also, as it turns out, a needed technological stepping stone to utility computing.

Utility computing is really about aggregating resources and making them consumable in a new way. That's why when folks simply try to apply virtualization to utility computing the lack of certain services becomes acute resulting in compromised storage and networking features. We've written about that in a previous article "The 7 services virtualization lacks for utility computing."

As an example of the difference in scope between virtualization and utility computing, consider an actual debugging example. We have a customer running a search engine on AppLogic who was troubleshooting lost page requests. About 1 out of 1,000 requests was being dropped. After an hour on WebEx with our engineers it became clear it'd be easier if we could run our own tests. The customer simply exported a copy of the app to us and two hours later we had our own running copy. Yes, I really mean they copied and exported an entire SEARCH ENGINE; load balancers, firewalls, web servers, data bases and more. And when we got it all we had to do was hit run. That type of power in manipulating a huge application is what I mean by utility computing is an enabler.

Q. In your opinion, are there any current virtualization vendors that are approaching the notion of utility computing?

A. I think they'd like to. Certainly, the OVF shows that they're thinking about it. However, OVF also shows that they lack an understanding of the fundamental issues that need to be solved to truly enable utility computing.

Perhaps more importantly, Xen and VMware have become so successful that their markets are forcing them in different directions. For instance VMware has initiatives for virtualization on the desktop and Xen is now being used in cell phones. These are huge exciting markets that will require major technological breakthroughs to fully exploit - and they require quite different solutions from utility computing.

We do find other vendors are noticing as well, though, as the series of cloud announcements over the last year shows. However, thus far most of these appear to be revamping of existing technologies or new specialized programming environments rather than general purpose utility systems.

Q. Where does 3Tera's AppLogic and Amazon's EC2 fit into the equation?

A. AppLogic and EC2 are the first demonstrable utility computing systems on the market.

The systems share some similarities. For instance, both use grid architecture. Both are also based on virtualization as a foundation layer. In fact, both are based on Xen. The reason for that, as I noted earlier, is that existing virtualization lacks certain required services. Xen, being open source, allowed for easy extension.

However, the two systems take different approaches to some key issues like storage and networking. EC2 has no permanent storage, and if you try building a utility system you'll quickly discover why - storage in a system like this is extremely complex. AppLogic, on the other hand, incorporates the direct attached storage in the servers directly into the grid which allows storage volume and performance to increase as the grid grows.

Q. To finish things off, what other information about 3Tera's AppLogic can you leave InfoWorld Virtualization Report readers with?

A. In the end, utility computing isn't simply a service, but rather an ecosystem. We currently work with half a dozen partners who run AppLogic in more than 12 data centers in the US and Europe. This week AppLogic was demonstrated in Japan for the first time during the Web 2.0 conference in Tokyo. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, we'll license the system to enterprises looking to build their own in-house utility. We're also working on an exchange for virtual appliances and complete application infrastructures. Thus, you can build applications completely devoid of hardware and select where, and at what scale they'll run only when they're actually executed. If business needs change you can reduce, or increase resources, almost at will. You can even move an app to a new data center with a single command. This is true utility computing.

I'd like to thank 3Tera's Bert Armijo and Peter Nickolov for taking time out of their busy schedules to help educate us on utility computing and 3Tera.

Posted by David Marshall on November 18, 2007 07:29 AM

November 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft's Virtualization becomes Hyper-V

During Microsoft's TechEd IT Forum conference in Barcelona, Spain, the company finally named its upcoming hypervisor virtualization platform. What was once code-named Viridian and then announced as Windows Server Virtualization (WSV) will now be officially known as "Hyper-V".

At the same time that Microsoft announced the new name for the virtualization hypervisor technology, it also announced packaging, licensing and pricing information. In addition, Microsoft also squeezed in an announcement about a complementary program called the Server Virtualization Validation Program that allows virtual machine vendors to validate their solutions with Windows Server operating systems.

In addition to shipping with Windows Server 2008, Microsoft will also offer Hyper-V as a separately shipped add-on product, available for an oddly priced fee of $28. Microsoft is also going to ship three other versions of Windows Server 2008 without the Hyper-V technology. All in all, Microsoft is expecting to have eight different versions of its Windows Server 2008 product which could leave customers dazed and confused.

Versions of the operating system will be available in both 32- and 64-bit editions, with the exception of an Itanium-based version. However, if you want to own and make use of Hyper-V, you are going to have to use a 64-bit version, as only that edition of Windows Server 2008 will support it.

When thinking about editions of the operating system without the Hyper-V technology, the question in my mind is why would someone want to purchase a version of Windows Server 2008 without it for a savings of a mere $28? The unbundling and the nominal fee for Hyper-V probably has more to do with government anti-trust issues as opposed to any customer related issues, although it still seems like it will ultimately cause more confusion to end-users in the end.

Officials have stated that Windows Server 2008 is still on track to meet its current delivery date of the first quarter of 2008. And Hyper-V is scheduled to ship within 180 days after the release of Windows Server 2008.

Much like the announcements from VMware, Citrix and others, OEM partners are also getting in the mix, ready to offer Hyper-V to their customers. Partners including Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NEC and Unisys are already committed to working with Microsoft to offer Hyper-V solutions once it is available.

And in response to industry and customer demands for more comprehensive technical support of virtual machines, Microsoft also announced the Server Virtualization Validation Program. Beginning June 2008, vendors will be able to self-test and validate certain technical requirements of their server virtualization software running Windows Server 2008 and prior versions. The program will enable Microsoft to offer cooperative technical support to customers running Windows Server on validated, non-Windows server virtualization software.

Posted by David Marshall on November 17, 2007 02:32 PM

November 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)

What's all the Hubbub about Virtualization and Databases Anyway?

I'm always interested when new virtualization platforms hit the market, so when Oracle announced Oracle VM, I listened. After all, to me, databases have always been one of those "don't ask, don't tell" stories in the virtualization world, or quite simply, one of those enterprise applications that you probably don't want to virtualize in a production environment.

While the announcement gave me a lot of information about what Oracle was doing, it also left me asking questions. I was confused about performance claims, support issues and licensing.

One thing that really grabbed my attention was the company's claim that Oracle VM was three times more efficient than other server virtualization products. I'm very interested in improving virtualization performance - I've watched it blossom over the last seven years, so anything to continue that trend is perfect in my book. Unfortunately, the claim really stopped there as it didn't provide any specific benchmark test plans or results.

Brian Byun, VP of Global Partners and Solutions at VMware told me that his company really couldn't comment on Oracle's performance claim since Oracle hasn't published any information such as performance metrics or specific software versions or vendors used in their benchmarking.

However, VMware quickly responded in any number of ways, one of which was an interesting post on the company's performance blog site, VROOM!, titled Ten Reasons Why Oracle Databases Run Best on VMware.

Byun said the blog post contained results from a real-world customer performance test that shows how databases, specifically Oracle databases, run very well and are optimized on VMware ESX Server 3.5. The results show near-native transactional throughput (more than 90%) running Oracle databases, 50x the I/O headroom on a single VMware ESX Server 3.5 host compared to typical database I/O workloads we have observed on physical 4-processor systems, and linear scaling of Oracle DBMS workloads across virtualized SMP and across large systems running multiple separate database instances on the same machine.

As a final comment on our discussion about Oracle's performance claim, he added, "We look forward to evaluating Oracle's reproducible performance results once they are available."

In a more subtle answer to Oracle's virtualization announcement, VMware also recently published a new whitepaper, SQL Server Performance in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment, where VMware attempts to show how well Oracle's competitor database product functions within a VMware environment.

The whitepaper says, "Current data indicates that database applications running on individual physical servers represent a large consolidation opportunity. Over 50 percent of these database applications run on two-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machines, and in 90 percent of the cases transaction rates are under 20 transactions per second. CPU utilization averages less than 10 percent and approaches 20 percent at peak levels. As might be expected, I/O and data transfer rates are also low. Not surprisingly, many such database applications have been successfully migrated to virtual machines running on VMware ESX Server systems..."

The paper describes transaction processing workload performance in virtual machines using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and VMware Infrastructure 3. And the paper's primary goal is to prove that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can successfully handle enterprise-level transaction-processing workloads when running inside VMware virtual machines. And without simply stating that it runs well or better than a competitor product, VMware gives specific test plans, configurations and performance results to prove a point.

Oracle's announcement also said that its database software would only be supported in an Oracle VM virtualization environment. So I asked VMware how this announcement would play out with current and future VMware customers who want to virtualize an Oracle database on VMware's platforms. Byun said, "Oracle's support policy, which hundreds of VMware customers use today to deploy Oracle applications and databases from test and dev to production, remains unchanged. Oracle will still handle support calls from customers for known problems in Oracle products that are virtualized. If an issue arises that is suspected to be virtualization-related, Oracle would refer the customer to VMware."

And when asked about Oracle's position on its application licensing policy, Byun said, "customers tell us they want to deploy virtualization in a manner that is neutral to their application software licensing agreements. Today, customers are telling us that Oracle still needs to provide improved 'virtualization-neutral' licensing guidelines that will let them reap the benefits of virtualization, as many other leading ISVs have done."

He added, "We believe that with the introduction of Oracle's Xen stack, customers will be in a better position to ask for that clarification. We plan to continue to work with Oracle and other ISVs to help move the industry toward licensing policies that are value- and revenue-neutral to customers and the ISV."

Posted by David Marshall on November 17, 2007 07:19 AM

November 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Opens Beta Program for its Free Server 2.0 Platform

Virtualization platforms - it seems like everyone out there is offering up their own branded product these days, and many of them are free. Back in the day when this stuff used to cost you a pretty penny (ok, so not all platforms are free... yet), VMware offered a hosted platform called VMware GSX Server. Over time, the platform changed its name and has been refined into what I believe to be a solid, well performing virtualization product.

Now, VMware is announcing that the latest version, VMware Server 2, is ready to go forth and multiply. It's been a while since a new version of Server was announced, and there hasn't really been a lot of fanfare over the product. Even though it's free, its pay-for sibling products, VMware Workstation and VMware ESX Server, seem to get all of the attention.

But according to VMware, more than 3 million copies of VMware Server have been downloaded to date, with approximately 70 percent of these downloads coming from companies that can be categorized as small to medium sized businesses.

"VMware Server is ideal for businesses interested in quickly and easily experiencing the benefits of virtualization," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware.

VMware admits that giving away VMware Server is a good way for new customers to evaluate and begin using VMware software.

Once a customer gets a taste of all the benefits that virtualization has to offer and also realizes its ROI, they can open up their wallets and transition over to VMware's enterprise-class product - VMware Infrastructure 3 - and then add on more sophisticated features and functionality to help them fully deliver on their virtual infrastructure.

VMware Server 2 boasts a number of new features. It will include a new Web-based interface that supports more than 30 guest operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 Beta, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.10. And it adds support for 64-bit guest operating systems when run on top of 64-bit compatible processors.

The new version can also support transparent paravirtualization through VMI, high speed USB 2.0 devices, and has increased support for up to 8GB of memory per virtual machine with up to two Virtual SMP processors.

VMware has made the beta available for download, here. However, the company wasn't specific on a release date, only saying that the product would be available sometime next year.

Posted by David Marshall on November 15, 2007 08:42 PM

November 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Oracle Jumps into Virtualization with Oracle VM - So What Changes?

Oracle is the latest player to toss its hat into the virtualization ring with the company's latest announcement of Oracle VM, a virtualization platform based on the open source Xen hypervisor.

At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, the company announced its own server virtualization platform which supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. The platform also supports both Linux and Windows guest operating systems, although it sounds like Windows guests may operate slowly until Oracle finishes developing needed paravirtualized Windows drivers.

Oracle applications supported on the new Oracle VM platform include:

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle Database 11g Release 1
Oracle Application Server 10gR2 and 10gR3
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10.2.0.4
Oracle Berkeley DB 4.6
Oracle TimesTen 7.0.3.1
Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 and 12
Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.4.x and 9.0
PeopleTools 8.49.07 and above
Oracle Siebel CRM 8.0
Oracle Hyperion 9.3.1

"Customers can now optimize resource consolidation by deploying Oracle VM with Oracle Unbreakable Linux, and run the full Oracle software stack -- Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Applications -- all with one worldwide support call," said Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, Edward Screven.

He added, "With Oracle VM, customers can respond more rapidly to business changes, increase ROI and reduce lifetime total cost of ownership. Oracle VM brings enterprise-class support and backing to server virtualization, giving customers the confidence to deploy virtualized solutions."

Until now, Oracle hasn't really been considered "virtualization friendly" in my book. So, what's changed? Well, support for running Oracle applications in a virtual machine for one thing. However, I use the term "support" loosely. Evidently, Oracle has only lightened its support policy when it comes to Oracle VM virtualization - the other players aren't so lucky. I firmly believe that this policy will ultimately have to change, and Oracle will have to support their applications running on other virtualization platforms.

But the company seems to be sticking to its virtualization unfriendly licensing policy, even when it comes to its own platform. Oracle insists on continuing its licensing policy based on the number of physical processors found in the bare-metal server rather than moving to a virtualization friendly, per instance licensing policy. Perhaps this too will change with time.

In the press release announcing Oracle VM, I also found it curious that Oracle claimed its platform was three times more efficient than current x86 based server virtualization products. The company claims that it ran many performance benchmarks comparing Oracle products running with Oracle VM against the existing leading server virtualization product to come up with that determination. No further data was provided regarding the tests that were run, nor any data on exactly which existing leading platform it was compared against, although we can assume it was VMware ESX Server - but which version? What configuration? The lack of product names and data could be because of VMware's strict benchmark comparison policy.

VMware did not hesitate to respond to Oracle's platform announcement or its performance claims. "Oracle's introduction of yet another variant of Xen is clearly a response to the significant virtualization industry that VMware has established," said Parag Patel, VMware's vice president of alliances.

Patel went on to say, "The offering does not address the capabilities required to achieve the cost savings and IT simplification that customers are realizing everyday from VMware's Virtual Infrastructure. It is also an unproven offering and lacks features that VMware customers value and view as key to a virtualization deployment, including high availability, integration with third-party backup software and extensive hardware certifications."

I'm sure there is going to be more information to come. Stay tuned!

Oracle VM is going to be available as a free download, here. Pricing for enterprise-class support is priced on a per-system basis, with 24x7 support for a system with up to two CPUs priced at $499 per year per system and a system with unlimited CPUs priced at $999 per year per system.

Posted by David Marshall on November 13, 2007 08:14 PM

November 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Gear6's CACHEfx Appliance and Xsigo's ConnectEd Program Attacking the I/O Bottleneck

A big problem within today's data centers is the issue of I/O. As processors and memory continue to climb in speed, performance and size, I/O is one of the few areas in the server that hasn't improved much, and thus, is quickly being identified as the bottleneck in today's equipment. Two companies addressing that problem are Gear6 and Xsigo. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 13, 2007 07:40 PM

November 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Updates Mac Virtualization with Fusion 1.1 Release

VMware has announced the immediate availability of VMware Fusion 1.1, the company's award-winning desktop virtualization platform for the Intel-based Mac. The latest release is a free upgrade to existing VMware Fusion 1.0 customers; and it can expand its customer base to include French, German and Japanese customers with the latest localization of the product.

The updated version of the desktop virtualization application has added support for the latest Mac operating system, OS X 10.5 - Leopard.

VMware Fusion 1.1 also made improvements to Unity, the feature that makes Microsoft Windows on the Mac appear to be seamless to the end-user. The latest version adds support for Windows Vista, both 32- and 64-bit editions as well as support for Windows XP 64-bit edition. But perhaps the most interesting user requested addition is the option to show or hide the Windows taskbar and Start menu in the VMware Fusion View menu.

The update has improved Fusion integration with Apple's Boot Camp. Users can now use Microsoft Vista Boot Camp partitions in VMware Fusion virtual machines. And it also added automatic remount of Boot Camp partitions after the Boot Camp virtual machine is shut down.

Within any virtualization environment, a feature that I find most appealing is the improved 3D graphics and the experimental support for DirectX 9.0 acceleration. While not perfect, the ability to run many Windows 3D applications and games on the Mac within a virtual machine is a welcomed treat.

According to Pat Lee, Senior Product Manager for the Mac Products at VMware, many of the company's customers have asked VMware to help them migrate virtual machines created with third party software over to the VMware Fusion format. To help offer that ability, VMware has created the VMware Importer tool to allow its customers to easily migrate third-party Mac virtual machines over to VMware Fusion. Although the importer tool is still in beta, it is being offered as a free utility. Obviously, this tool is focused at converting Parallels users, though the company won't come right out and say so.

VMware Fusion is available now at no cost to existing VMware Fusion 1.0 customers. New customers can also buy VMware Fusion starting at $59.99. VMware is trying to make the purchase a lot sweeter by currently offering a limited time $20 mail in rebate when purchased within the United States. You can purchase the product, here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 12, 2007 04:52 AM

November 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Releases SolutionAccelerators Doc and Slideshow Deck

Microsoft is releasing a series of solution accelerators, and the first of the series is dedicated to helping an organization with leveraging virtualization in their infrastructure planning and design phase.

Microsoft says that the Infrastructure Planning and Design guides (IPD) are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.

Each guide leads the reader through critical infrastructure design decisions, in the appropriate order, evaluating the available options for each decision against its impact on critical characteristics of the infrastructure. The IPD Series highlights when service and infrastructure goals should be validated with the organization and provides additional questions that should be asked of service stakeholders and decision makers.

IPD currently consists of the following downloadable packages:

Infrastructure Planning and Design Series Introduction (11 Pages) Planning the next generation of technical infrastructure for corporations is a complex and daunting task. If done well, the Information Technology (IT) group's capabilities are well aligned with the business and will be a strategic asset for the company. If done poorly, IT can be a barrier to the agility of the organization. The success of any infrastructure is measured in how well the infrastructure choices that are made match the objectives of the business. Although there are often hundreds or even thousands of pages of product documentation available, historically it has been very difficult to find guidance on how to appropriately plan the core infrastructure for an organization.
The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) series provides architectural guidance for Microsoft infrastructure products. The series is designed to present the reader with the most concise planning guidance for Microsoft technologies. It also provides a means to validate design decisions with the business to ensure that the solution meets the requirements of both business and infrastructure stakeholders.

This paper describes the background for the guides as well as the format of each guide and defines characteristics common to all of the guides.
Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology (16 Pages)
The objective of this guide is to enable the reader to rapidly and accurately select which Microsoft virtualization technology or technologies to use for specific scenarios. The reader will then be able to proceed with the planning and design process for that virtualization technology by using the appropriate Infrastructure Planning and Design guide.
SoftGrid Application Virtualization (54 Pages)
Application coexistence continues to be a significant issue for business customers. The task of managing the portfolio of applications in a company has remained a very complex process with few tools available to help reduce this burden. Some of the challenges when managing applications include accommodating multiple versions of the same application as well as updating application packages.

Microsoft SoftGrid enables organizations to respond to the challenge of managing applications by implementing application virtualization. The purpose of this guide is to present the infrastructure planning process for SoftGrid by providing a clear and concise workflow of the decisions and tasks required to plan for each method.

This guide, when used in conjunction with product documentation, will enable companies to confidently plan the SoftGrid 4.2 infrastructure. Although additional options and guidance will be available in SoftGrid 4.5, none of the planning or sequencing work done today will be wasted effort.

The appendix includes a sample job aid for recording the decisions made during the design process.
Windows Server Virtualization (for Windows Server 2008 virtualization and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1) (46 Pages)
This guide leads the reader, step by step, through the process of planning the server virtualization environments. The first six steps in the guide focus on determining requirements for the guest operating systems, applications, and services; they enumerate the capacity and performance requirements that will be used in planning host systems. By addressing information such as resource requirements, backup approaches, and availability first, the user can determine the size of the load that the virtual applications will require from the host infrastructure.

Steps 7 through 13 in the guide focus on the planning and design issues that affect the physical host infrastructure design. Specific guest workload requirements determine the server form factor, server placement, and the storage and network architecture. Specific steps and an overview of the entire decision process appear later in this document.

You can download these documents, here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 11, 2007 01:26 PM

November 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Red Hat Reaches for Amazon's Compute Cloud

Red Hat has launched a private beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud for those users who want to scale up their applications without having to build out their own physical infrastructure. This move is only one component of Red Hat's "Linux automation" strategy aimed at delivering a Linux infrastructure that simplifies how applications operate and are managed.

The collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (including the Red Hat Network management service, its technical support and over 3,400 certified applications) available to customers on Amazon's network. This combination changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that are actually used. And since customers can easily increase or decrease capacity within minutes, it removes the need to over subscribe software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.

"In collaboration with Amazon Web Services, we are now able to offer customers yet another choice in how they deploy the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. This offering will be appealing to developers, customers looking to quickly and cost-effectively deploy web-scale services and businesses that require rapidly scaled compute resources," said Donald Fischer, vice president of Online Services at Red Hat. "The marriage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Amazon's EC2 service makes the promise of professional web scale computing a reality."

In a statement, Red Hat said that the base price for RHEL on Amazon's EC2 will be $19 per month, per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every compute hour used on Amazon's EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees.

Today, this service is available as a private beta, however, the company hopes to have a public beta ready and available before the end of the year. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

More information on this offering can be found by going here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 11, 2007 08:12 AM

November 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Electric Cloud and VMware Team to Extend Lab Manager

Electric Cloud's software production management solution is going to be integrated with VMware's Lab Manager product to help deliver dynamically provisioned virtual machines for the software build-test-deploy process.

VMware and Electric Cloud believe there is something to be said about this partnership. VMware's Lab Manager automatically sets up and manages virtual machines and the virtual infrastructure, while on the other hand, ElectricCommander automates the software development processes that run on them. Combining these two solutions will deliver what the companies are calling a "push button" environment for software build, test and deploy tasks using heterogeneous tools in virtualized environments.

"Our integration with VMware Lab Manager will help software development and IT teams harness the power of the virtual lab to save time and improve development productivity," said Mike Maciag, Electric Cloud CEO. "We have seen increasing demand from customers looking to take advantage of virtualization for software production. We're pleased to leverage VMware technology to deliver this strategic, tightly-integrated solution."

The integration of these two products allows development shops to easily provision virtual machine configurations and automatically run the build, test and deploy processes that were previously manual, disconnected and resource-inefficient.

The name of the game for solutions like this is to help software development shops minimize the bottlenecks that affect them during a normal software development lifecycle. Using virtualization solutions like this will help these shops bring their software to market faster and with higher software quality, while at the same time achieving higher productivity and reduced IT costs.

The story is a good one and the pain points real. Software developers and testers usually get the short end of the stick when it comes to the quality and quantity of the equipment allocated to them, and yet they are still expected to produce a high quality product in a short period of time. Solutions like this can only help.

Electric Cloud is going to have to make the most of its new found partnership and joint marketing efforts with VMware as they are going to have to go up against long time players in this market such as Surgient and VMLogix.

The company plans on delivering the VMware Lab Manager integration as part of an ElectricCommander release available sometime at the end of this year.

You can also register for a future Webcast hosted by InfoWorld titled "Harness The Power Of Virtualization For Fast, Self-Service Build-Test-Package-Deploy Processes" presented by Electric Cloud and VMware taking place on 12/6/07 at 11:00AM Pacific Standard Time.

Posted by David Marshall on November 11, 2007 07:20 AM

November 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtual Management with Hyperic and Virtual Training with Surgient

Hosting firm Mosso uses VMware's ESX Server technology to help it provide the stability and scalability needed to power up and keep their customers running. And to help them manage the process, the company has turned to Hyperic HQ Enterprise. In addition to the hosting business, virtualization can also help with training. And to help manage that process, Surgient has recently integrated their VTMS lab automation product with Saba Centra, giving instructors a helping hand when it comes to lab provisioning. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 9, 2007 04:35 PM

November 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Phoenix Technologies Launches Into HyperSpace

You really shouldn't have to wait three minutes or more to use your laptop or desktop computer while it chugs along to boot up your Windows operating system. And if Phoenix Technologies CEO Woody Hobbs has anything to say about it, you won't.

Phoenix says its new technology called HyperSpace will ignite a "PC revolution" by transforming the mobile personal computing experience. The technology will provide an "instant-on" capability, quickly offering its users the ability to launch specially designed applications such as multi-media players, IP soft phones, email, instant messaging, Web 2.0 browsing and more, all by simply hitting the F4 button.

"For most of us, today's computing experience is a lot like air travel - offering tremendous possibilities, but plagued with security issues, delays and system failures," said Hobbs. "HyperSpace introduces a new framework to transform the personal computing experience through purpose-driven appliances that work within the HyperSpace environment. Working together with our partners within the PC ecosystem, we believe HyperSpace will ignite a new revolution of innovation built on the foundation of embedded simplicity."

Phoenix says that HyperSpace will deliver a high-performance, low battery-consumption environment that will enable mobile PC users to be productive at all times. The platform is enabled by an efficient hypervisor called the "HyperCore" which is embedded within the core system firmware or BIOS. HyperCore is a lightweight Zoned Virtual Machine Monitor (ZVMM) that runs specialized core services side-by-side with Windows.

This isn't the first time vendors have attempted to create such an offering. Products have popped up and disappeared over time with little to no fanfare, however, as operating systems continue to add features, functionality, security, etc. and continue to slow down the boot time, their time may have come. Not long ago, another instant-on technology called Splashtop hit the scene with limited distribution. However unlike Splashtop, HyperSpace can be invoked at any time, not just before the OS boots.

It doesn't sound like Phoenix is trying to completely replace the need for virtualization or the desktop operating system. At least not yet. It looks like there will be a limited amount of applications written for the technology, and it seems like it may be very controlled. In doing so, while limiting the applications, hopefully it will add to the security of the offering and keep the PC safe from malware.

Phoenix is already working with most major PC manufacturers, although they aren't naming names as of yet. But the company is expecting that vendors will start to integrate the new HyperSpace technology into laptops somewhere within the next six to nine months.

Posted by David Marshall on November 8, 2007 05:01 AM

November 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Dell Hands Over $1.4 Billion for iSCSI Vendor EqualLogic

Dell announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase the data storage provider EqualLogic for approximately $1.4 billion in cash.

Dell, the second largest PC maker in the world, made the move to help further distance itself from its reliance on direct sales. The price tag that Dell has agreed to pay for EqualLogic, a company specializing in iSCSI storage area network virtualization technology, would make this the most expensive acquisition in Dell's 23-year history.

In addition to gaining EqualLogic's virtualization technology that helps increase the efficiency of data storage, the acquisition will also give Dell access to EqualLogic's strong channel partnerships and relationships with over 500 channel partners and 3,000 customers.

"Our customers will be dealing with the largest increase in data we have seen in our history over the next few years," said Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell. "Leading the iSCSI revolution will help Dell accelerate IT simplification and virtualization and will drive the Dell value proposition into more areas of the enterprise storage business," Dell said.

Obviously, Dell saw the need to create its own iSCSI arrays and not simply depend on EMC to provide these types of offerings. This new push into the storage market represents the latest attempt for Dell to reach out to small and medium sized businesses with products designed specifically for that market. And this could be bad news for other companies in this space like Compellent, FalconStor, Left Hand Networks and Network Appliance who are competing for these same dollars in the small and mid-sized enterprise markets.

"Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic adds further momentum to the market for network storage solutions that support iSCSI." said Phil Soran, Chairman and CEO of Compellent. "We agree with Michael Dell's statement that our customers will be dealing with the largest increase in data we have seen in our history over the next few years. We believe that the simplification and virtualization of storage needs to be an essential element of any storage vendors' market strategy."

Soran continued, "The path to the virtual data center, though, should be lined with storage area network (SAN) products that offer simultaneous support for both iSCSI and FC server connections. A flexible approach to connectivity allows businesses to optimize their storage resources and select the right technology for each application, rather than being forced into a connectivity choice that may not work best for their business."

LeftHand Networks' president and CEO had this to say, "Today's Dell/EqualLogic announcement clearly validates the market for iSCSI SANs and sets a premium valuation for the market leaders. It also establishes LeftHand as the largest independent iSCSI SAN vendor." He added, "Inquiries about LeftHand's Advantage Partner Program have been brisk. LeftHand has strong channel relationships and remains 100 percent committed to our partners' success, without introducing potential channel conflict."

Dell said it expects the acquisition to close late in the fourth quarter of Dell's fiscal year 2008 or early in the first quarter of fiscal 2009. The purchase would cut earnings per share by between two cents and five cents cumulatively over Dell's fiscal 2009 and 2010. The acquisition has already been approved by each company's board of directors and is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

Posted by David Marshall on November 6, 2007 05:03 AM

November 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

SWsoft Expands in China and JumpBox Expands to Microsoft

SWsoft is a huge player in the virtualization market and they continue to expand that presence every day. Case in point, the company is continuing to grow its sales by expanding more and more in China. Also expanding their presence is virtual appliance provider JumpBox. The company is taking their popular open-source appliances and bringing them to Microsoft's virtualization platforms.

And after this Podcast, InfoWorld is bringing you another interesting Podcast hosted by Tom Yager. Tom speaks with Bruce Shaw, director of server and workstation marketing for AMD. Bruce gives us the inside scoop on a brand new version of the AMD virtual experience site.
listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on November 5, 2007 07:03 AM

November 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Symantec Survey Shows Virtualization can Help Data Center Struggles

According to a new report created from the results found in a recent Symantec survey, some of the biggest challenges facing data center managers include tough internal service level agreements (SLAs), continuing data center growth, and a lack of qualified personnel and other staffing issues.

Global 2000 enterprises are spending more than $6.6 billion annually to help manage data center complexity, but average data center budgets have only increased a modest 7% worldwide over the last two year period and eleven percent of respondents said their data centers are growing at an alarming 20% or more a year.

The research also shows that ongoing data center challenges such as complexity, heterogeneity and an ongoing skill shortage are driving the difficulty in meeting SLAs. 32 percent report that service-level demands have rapidly increased, and 51 percent report that they have had more difficulty meeting service-level demands during the past two year period.

As data centers increase in complexity and management challenges, staffing problems become more pervasive. SLAs are becoming difficult to maintain because of staffing issues. 52 percent of respondents believe their data centers are currently understaffed to meet existing challenges. Even more interesting, 86% admitted that they are having problems finding and hiring qualified applicants and that 57% indicated that employees' skills do not match their current needs.

Server virtualization and consolidation are considered top cost containment strategies for the majority of respondents, particularly in the United States. According to the research results:

90 percent of respondents are at least discussing server virtualization; 50 percent are implementing virtualization strategies.
91 percent are at least discussing server consolidation; 58 percent are implementing consolidation strategies.
75 percent of respondents are considering storage virtualization as a potential solution.
59 percent of respondents indicate Web applications are the most likely to be moved into a virtual environment, followed by database management applications, selected by 42 percent of respondents.

As data center managers increasingly turn to virtualization to contain costs and manage growth, there is a clear need for tools and technologies to manage both physical and virtual environments in a more consistent and comprehensive manner. These solutions can empower data center professionals to master the growing complexity of their data centers, and have greater confidence that they can deliver against the aggressive SLAs that have been set for them.

The State of the Data Center Research Report is the result of quantitative and qualitative research conducted in September 2007 by Ziff Davis Enterprise by surveying data center managers in Global 2000 and large public sector institutions. A total of 71 data center managers participated in focus groups, while 800 data center managers completed the online survey.

Posted by David Marshall on November 5, 2007 07:01 AM

November 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Top Ten Server Virtualization Technology Considerations

SWsoft, a provider of both operating system and hardware virtualization products, has an interesting whitepaper titled "Top Ten Considerations for Choosing a Server Virtualization Technology".

This top ten list provides key guidelines for honing in on the differences between hardware virtualization, para-virtualization and operating system virtualization, and it attempts to help you understand the basic options and limitations of each virtualization approach.

While reading the whitepaper, keep in mind that it was written by SWsoft, so it will obviously tend to favor its own solution. However, it does give a good overview of these various techniques and does provide a lot of useful information, especially if you are just starting out and trying to make a decision for your own environment.

It writes:

The playing field for server virtualization has become much more crowded over the last few years. Competition is always good for a market as more choices always push vendors into providing better products at more competitive prices. It can be very time consuming to digest each vendor's marketing materials to come to the right solution for your organization. This checklist provides a list of the main considerations and basic differences between the technologies to provide a starting point for technology evaluation. The three main technologies discussed in this analysis are: hardware virtualization, para-virtualization and OS virtualization.

And the ten considerations include: management tools, virtualization level, performance, density, platform support, migration, resource management, isolation and security, intended virtualization deployment and a capabilities and performance comparison.

Posted by David Marshall on November 4, 2007 06:37 AM

November 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtual Iron to Refocus Company With New CEO

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure software, has made a company change at the top as it announced a new CEO who plans on changing the focus of the company to help maximize their market opportunity.

Replacing John C. Thibault as the company's CEO is Ed Walsh, a former EMC executive. Thibault will remain with the company in the role of executive chairman of the board, and helping to focus on the company's strategic direction.

Walsh most recently served as vice president and general manager of EMC's Information Management Software Group after the storage giant acquired Avamar Technologies, Inc. where Walsh was CEO and led the company to 700% revenue growth over an 18 month period.

With his track record, Virtual Iron hopes that Walsh will bring the right combination of strategic partner, channel go-to-market and product leadership experience to build on the company's current market position and to help accelerate the company's growth in order to get them to the next level.

In addition to hiring Walsh, Virtual Iron has also hired John McCarthy, another former EMC executive. McCarthy joins Virtual Iron as its senior vice president of sales, and in that role, he will lead the company's worldwide sales, channel and field operations.

Virtual Iron is competing in a fast-growing server virtualization market with the potential for a huge amount of growth. Industry experts expect software sales to grow to $7 billion in 2011 from $800 million in 2006. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at somewhere between 6 and 9 percent today, leaving a huge untapped market for Virtual Iron and its competitors to go after.

VMware is currently dominating this market, and the company's recent financial results prove that the virtualization giant is still growing at a healthy rate. Virtual Iron finds itself in a position where they need to prove they are a viable alternative to VMware in order to succeed in their land grab.

From a marketing perspective, Virtual Iron has had a similar story and a closer competition with another Xen-based server virtualization company called XenSource who was recently acquired by Citrix. And with Citrix changing the XenSource marketing strategy to an "end-to-end" play in order to grab new marketshare, it is clear that Walsh and McCarthy are going to need something more than just a "less expensive" alternative story to quickly grab more marketshare than Thibault and crew were already accomplishing.

"Virtual Iron has fundamentally changed the landscape in server virtualization by eliminating the primary obstacles to mainstream market growth," said Ed Walsh, new president and CEO of Virtual Iron. "By reducing complexity without sacrificing capability, the company delivers on the demands of a huge segment of the virtualization market and creates a tremendous opportunity for success."

Posted by David Marshall on November 4, 2007 05:25 AM

November 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Egenera Breaks from Blade Server Hardware to Offer Software Solution

Egenera is considered a pioneer in the blade server market, and it's known for incorporating two of today's hottest technologies, blade servers and virtualization.

Egenera's BladeFrame line is a blade server system powered by the company's Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture. And up until now, if you wanted to use the company's PAN Manager virtualization management tools, you had to purchase their BladeFrame product line. But now, with a recent announcement, that is about to change. Egenera announced that the company is going to make a future version of the PAN Manager software available to other vendors' hardware platforms.

For those of you who may have been watching the blade server market for some time now, you might be having a flashback to the old RLX Technologies company who delivered a commercial blade server back in the early part of 2000. Around 2004, under new management, RLX decided to move from the hardware business into the software business only to then get acquired by HP and then have their software consumed or disappear into one of HP's software product lines.

Unlike RLX, Egenera said that this isn't the direction they plan on taking the company - they aren't giving up on their hardware line in favor of a software only solution. Instead, the company said they will continue to innovate and advance the highly successful Egenera BladeFrame product line. Their BladeFrame system will continue to be focused on the high end of the application set where the need for high performance and availability are most critical. And by integrating PAN Manager with other third-party platforms, Egenera can enable customers to leverage the benefits of its sophisticated, time tested, advanced data center virtualization software in a much broader fashion, which will also allow the company to increase their addressable market and global distribution channels.

"Bringing PAN Manager software to non-Egenera hardware platforms is one of our most significant and strategic moves since launching the company seven years ago," said Mike Thompson, Egenera president and CEO. "PAN Manager is truly at the heart of our value proposition in the data center - giving customers the power to move quickly and without restriction as is required in today's business environment. Making our proven software available beyond our own hardware makes business sense for Egenera and gives our customers choice in how they implement data center virtualization."

Egenera PAN Manager software complements widely-deployed server virtualization (hypervisor) solutions by delivering full infrastructure virtualization that provides:

Simple and seamless provisioning and management for both physical and virtual servers, virtual networks and storage;
Cost effective high availability through Egenera's patented N+1 availability technology;
Verifiable disaster recovery through Egenera's patented N+1 DR technology;
Simple right sizing and scalability through dynamic repurposing; and
Effective chargeback capabilities, logical, secure partitioning, and named pools of resources.

The first phase of virtualization - server virtualization - utilizes hypervisor technology to virtualize one server at a time in order to improve hardware utilization. Egenera's data center virtualization software goes further by enabling users to create networks of virtual and physical servers, and move individual servers, groups of servers or entire systems from one place to another seamlessly, securely and with verifiable disaster recovery and uptime.

Egenera hasn't said who will be using PAN Manager on an OEM basis yet, or what the product's cost will be.

Posted by David Marshall on November 3, 2007 08:03 PM

November 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

IDC Report Says Green Technology Is More Than a Passing Fad

Green technology is a growing concern that is significantly affecting the buying decisions that IT executives are making, both now and in the future. At least, that's one of the conclusions being drawn from a recent survey that was conducted by the analyst firm IDC.

In the survey, IDC asked executives at American businesses how green technology is impacting their buying decisions. 80% of the survey respondents said that 'Green IT' is growing in importance for their organization, and 43% said they consider a vendor's "greenness" when selecting their suppliers.

It is clear that companies are putting a heavy emphasis on "greenness"; one half of the survey respondents claim that "reducing their organization's environment impact" was important or very important to senior management. And 81% identify green products' ability to reduce operating costs as the most important reason for considering a supplier's greenness.

From energy efficiency to ease of recyclability, a product's greenness is becoming a more important economic component in the IT buying equation. "The spread of Green IT continues as organizations gain a better understanding of the benefits of going green," said Frank Gens, IDC's senior vice president of Research. "Once a distant afterthought, economic advantages, including reductions in operational costs, are driving Green IT adoption."

IDC's survey findings came from the analyst firm's Enterprise Panel members - an online community of IT and line-of-business professionals who influence the technology-related investment decisions of their organizations.

Posted by David Marshall on November 3, 2007 07:36 PM