Virtualization Report | David Marshall | December 2007

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December 2007

December 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Catbird Security and 3Leaf Systems Getting Recognition

Catbird was recently named one of 10 companies to watch in 2008 by CRN magazine, which makes good sense. The company's solution marries two hot market segments - virtualization and security. 3Leaf Systems has also been getting a lot of media attention lately and has also received recognition for its virtualization I/O solution. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on December 28, 2007 04:16 AM

December 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld Looks at VMware VI3 3.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V

As virtualization heads into 2008, what can you expect from virtualization giant VMware and all around giant Microsoft?

VMware recently announced VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 going GA. And we've already talked about all of the great new features and the packaging and licensing that goes along with it here in the Virtualization Report. But in case you didn't see it, check out Paul Venezia's review of the product as he put it through the test in the InfoWorld Test Lab.

In his latest VMware review, Paul wrote:

I've been running ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 in the lab for weeks now, using the code provided from VMware's beta program. The highlights of the new VI3 release include new features such as live storage migration and distributed power management, plus a bevy of new add-ons – for example, an automated patch manager and a tool for capacity planning and P2V migration.
The big news in the updated VI3 isn't the core functionality – VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, High Availability, and Consolidated Backup have been in customers' hands for more than a year now. There are a few little additions here, such as Cisco Discovery Protocol support on ESX hosts (which makes switchport location trivial), but the larger story is in the management additions to the base packages.

To find out more, read Paul's full InfoWorld Test Review of this product, here.

With Microsoft's announcement about their next generation hypervisor, Hyper-V, it was back to the test lab for Paul. Here at the Virtualization Report, we've covered the new features coming down the road with this virtualization platform, and we described how Hyper-V is going to be a part of the new Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system. But thanks to Paul's thorough analysis, we can find out more about this new hypervisor without having to install it ourselves. Paul wrote:

The basis of Hyper-V is the new Windows Server 2008 platform that carries with it a host of new features and a vaguely Vista-esque look and feel. Love it or hate it, Vista-ness is apparently here to stay. Installation of Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 is as straightforward as you would think, requiring only that an admin add the Hyper-V role to the server and designate which network interfaces to use for virtual machines. After installation, the server reboots and Hyper-V is ready for action.
I installed the beta on a solid, middle-of-the-road server, a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with two dual-core 3GHz Intel CPUs, 4GB of RAM, and a single 72GB U320 SCSI drive. I had newer and more powerful hardware in the lab, but I wanted to run the beta on hardware that was virtually guaranteed to have built-in driver support. I wasn’t disappointed -- everything worked right out of the box. From there, I had the system ready to handle virtual machines in a matter of minutes. A few minutes later, I ran into problems.

To find out more about Hyper-V and see what happened when it was installed in the InfoWorld Test Lab, click here.

Posted by David Marshall on December 24, 2007 05:03 AM

December 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Cenzic Announces Hailstorm and Attune Enhances Partner Program

Web application security assessment firm Cenzic recently announced that its Cenzic Hailstorm solution has now been integrated with VMware Lab Manager and VMware VirtualCenter. And file virtualization provider Attune Systems announced the company's enhanced partner program that will help its partners benefit from the latest file virtualization technology. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on December 23, 2007 07:46 PM

December 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Simon Crosby of Citrix Discusses Virtualization Heading into 2008

Simon Crosby, former CTO of XenSource and now CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix Systems, is well known in the industry as a virtualization and open source champion.

As we leave 2007 behind us and push forward into 2008, I wanted to find out where Citrix stood in this growing virtualization environment. Between the incredible news about the Citrix acquisition of XenSource and then the high energy and excitement that took place during Citrix iForum, who better to speak with than Simon Crosby to find out more about Citrix, virtualization and what's coming down the road in 2008 - a year where virtualization really starts to attack the remaining 95% of x86 servers that refused to drink the kool-aid in 2007.

Virtualization Report: With all the buzz and constant chatter about the benefits of virtualization, how do you answer people when they ask about the downsides? Do you think there are any?

Simon Crosby: There are downsides to poorly planned virtualization deployments. Before anyone begins a virtualization project, it is important to know what the end goal is, and exactly what they are trying to achieve. Simply buying an expensive virtual infrastructure product because it's all the buzz is certain to not deliver the benefits you want, unless you have a clear view of the intended outcome. So I always say "Start at the end – ask yourself what benefits you want to have achieved." If you simply want to reduce server count, power use, save rack space and upgrade your server infrastructure, our entirely free XenServer Express Edition or XenServer Standard Edition may be enough. Indeed we have over 150,000 users of these affordable production-grade server consolidation products today – from Police department 911 services, to very large enterprises. If you're looking to virtualize your infrastructure wholesale, then the objectives include greater flexibility, dynamism, security and availability – things you can't achieve by carrying on the way you are. These features are offered in our powerful, yet affordable Enterprise Edition product, which offers all you'll need to manage a virtualized server, network and storage infrastructure as a pool of resources. Few projects end in total failure – but the cool factor can wear off fast if you've paid a lot for your virtual infrastructure and you suddenly find that you also need to change out your backup procedures and storage management tools. It all takes planning. Customers that think ahead tend to have more successful outcomes. Many of those use Citrix XenServer.

Q: AMD and Intel are now focused on virtualization and adding support for it at the chip level, what does that mean for Citrix?

A: Hardware assisted virtualization is the most important trend in x86. We rely entirely on this innovative feature to give us great performance that follows the standard hardware "shrink and clock up" curve. Thus far we are seeing over 300% performance increase year on year for hardware accelerated virtualization, something that a purely software based solution such as VMware's cannot take advantage of. Moreover there is a very exciting pipeline for additional hardware support – Extended Page Table support, I/O virtualization are two that spring to mind. The net-net is that we see the overhead of virtualization rapidly reducing to insignificant levels – we recently demonstrated 9.6 Gb/s iSCSI block I/O to and from guest VMs on XenServer, using a Solarflare NIC card, for example.

Q: When Microsoft announced Hyper-V, it was reported as if the clouds parted and the sun came shining through for the first time. Reports were made that this is VMware's biggest threat. Is that true?

Microsoft offers a scale of footprint that cannot be ignored. Over a period of time (say a year or two) a large section of the SME market will simply adopt the features provided to them with Windows Server 2008, including Hyper-V. Hyper-V is certainly not nearly as fully featured as Microsoft and the industry would have liked to see, however, XenServer, which leverages the Microsoft VHD format and is designed to extend the Microsoft user experience, offers a compelling, Microsoft compatible virtual infrastructure feature set to Microsoft customers today. Our customers are adopting XenServer as a virtual infrastructure platform that lets them move Windows and Linux VMs into production, sure in the knowledge that when Hyper-V offers the feature set to support that, those VMs can directly run in a Microsoft environment. Meanwhile, we will extend the Windows environment with high availability, disaster recovery, desktop delivery (VDI) and policy based automation solutions that add value to Hyper-V. It's worth noting that Hyper-V's ability to run Linux with high performance (enlightened I/O) is entirely dependent on the features that we deliver to Microsoft.

Is all this bad news for VMware? Yes.

Q: So if you had a crystal ball, do you think Xen and Microsoft will finally make VMware's ESX Server hypervisor pricing come down in the next year or two?

A: VMware is engaging in the art of marketing like never before. They are laying claim to management as the high ground for virtual infrastructure – and painting the vision of the next generation Datacenter OS. This is problematic in many ways. Our field tells us that VMware is heavily addicted to VI3 revenues, and is out attempting a land grab before we and Microsoft can gain significant share. They have artfully positioned VI3 as a combination of management and hypervisor, allowing them to state that the hypervisor is free, and they continue to load up on enterprise management features in VI3 Enterprise. This puts them in direct conflict not only with Microsoft and other OSVs at the platform layer, but also the established systems management vendors, who are increasingly alarmed at the idea of a powerful VMware selling data center management. Citrix is not a systems management vendor – we sell an affordable, powerful virtualization platform together with end-to-end application delivery automation solutions, partnering with Microsoft and with the major systems management vendors to make the offering directly interoperable with established ISV software and IT procedures. Another key category is Storage Management, where VMware appears to be going head to head with existing storage management, availability and clustering solutions, as well as changing the game on backup and image management. Our partnership with Symantec/Veritas allows us to deliver powerful VM-aware storage solutions without a forklift upgrade of the storage infrastructure.

Q: Often times I hear VMware speak about how Xen is an immature product. How do you respond to that?

A: The largest deployment of virtualization on the planet is built using Xen. Amazon, both internally and with EC2, leads the industry in terms of secure, massively scaled out virtualization deployments. Xen continues to beat VMware on performance, and it is being widely deployed by Google, Facebook and other major internet brands. I hope I don't need to point out that every virtualization offering on the market (including Hyper-V) draws from the Xen architecture – even the nascent feature set of KVM.

Citrix XenServer offers only (and all of) the core features customers need to get the key benefits of virtual infrastructure, in an open product that is extended by the world's leading innovators in different categories. Take fault tolerance for instance: Stratus and Marathon are both XenServer OEM partners. Marathon demonstrated five nines fault tolerant virtualization at VMworld – and won best new technology award – whereas VI3 is limited to VM restart. Our approach is to partner with the best in the industry, rather to try to re-invent or cut key partners out of the value chain.

Q: What's next for virtualization as a hypervisor and platform? Is it all about management down the road? Or are there other tricks of the trade that can be implemented?

A: 2008 is all about the hypervisor embedded in server hardware, and about the market getting real for VDI. XenServer will be an option on over 50% of x86 server hardware in 1H08, "baked in" during system assembly. This offers customers an incredible value proposition built into the box – and dramatically accelerates the adoption of virtualization. Citrix XenDesktop will launch in 08 too, and will be the industry's only comprehensive, end to end desktop delivery system, leveraging all of the key infrastructure components built by Citrix over the years for its core Presentation Server business today. Citrix believes that it can dramatically enhance the security and manageability of large scale desktop deployments, at a fraction of the cost and complexity of VMware's Propero-based first generation product.

Q: What are your customers telling you? Is there something specific that they are missing with Citrix and Xen?

A: Our customers love the product. They want us to deliver more features faster. Now that XenSource is part of Citrix you can expect to see us dramatically accelerate the rate of value-added features for XenServer, both based on our own development and our partner solutions that are certified as Citrix Ready. We believe we have everything that we need to compete head to head with VMware, and as the Citrix channel ramps on XenServer, we certainly hope to dramatically accelerate our own market penetration. Our business is still doubling quarter on quarter, which is very exciting.

Q: Do you see anything new or interesting in virtualization for 2008?

A: New features from the platform vendors include enhanced performance for enhanced page table support, our first support of I/O Memory Management Units (IOMMU) and virtual machine device queues that accelerate the I/O path for latency sensitive workloads. We aim to stay at the peak of performance and features through close collaboration with the hardware vendors. I see increasing interest in virtualization on client devices as well as VDI based virtualization of desktop OSes, to enhance manageability and security. Finally, I see a keen interest on the part of storage vendors to add value to their arrays and infrastructure to support virtualization functions natively. By way of example, XenServer today can directly invoke primitives on leading NAS Filers to initiate thin provisioning, snapshotting and cloning of VMs – something that is way beyond the reach of VMware with their proprietary cluster file system and legacy VMDK hard disk format.

Q: Server consolidation has been the battlecry for virtualization in 2006 and 2007, what's the next major use case to help push virtualization forward in 2008 with the remaining 95% of x86 servers?

A: In my view we have been too focused on server virtualization as the "hammer", which has to be applied to anything that looks like a "nail". We need to deliver the benefits of centralization, simplicity, dynamism, availability and automation for servers that aren't virtualized. Citrix Provisioning Server offers this today. It effectively performs a P2V of a native client or server image which it captures in a centralized storage repository. Servers and clients are set up to network boot, and their virtual hard disks are then streamed dynamically over the network. Provisioning Server scales massively – we can boot thousands of VMs from one Windows golden image, dramatically reducing the number of images to manage, and the complexity of OS patch and security management. The benefits: instant on provisioning of workloads, reduced patching, dramatically reduced storage needs, and an instantly scalable virtual or native data center environment.

Q: How has the Citrix/XenSource acquisition affected the Xen open source community? Can you tell us a little more about how this has played out?

A: As of Jan 1 the Xen project will have its first full time program manager focused solely on community development, and we will soon double the size of our open source development team – all courtesy of Citrix. The net effect will be an increased rate of development on Xen, from Itanium super computers to ARM based PDAs. The community has recently been strengthened with the addition of the multi-vendor Xen project advisory board, that oversees the project, recommends the roadmap and sets policies for licensing of the Xen trademark. The support that Citrix has given to the project is tremendous, and the most recent Xen developer summit was a strong demonstration of the strength of the project, with over 200 developers present. You can find the project at www.xen.org.

Q: In your opinion, why is the open source approach to virtualization better than the approach VMware has taken? Are there any negative aspects to the open source approach?

A: Open source is the most creative and powerful way to develop a core code base that multiple vendors can deliver to market. Uniquely perhaps the Xen project does not aim to commoditize all features – only the hypervisor – and has specific interfaces at which the open source "engine" can be combined with other open source or proprietary features by different vendors. This allows the vendors to price to value, and not to cost (as, say traditional open source vendors that only support the code are forced to do). More importantly, it correctly incentivizes the participants to continue their contribution. This is why Xen is so powerful.

VMware's product contains open source technologies, but they like to pretend that it is all proprietary. They take, but do not give back. This is a one way street that eventually leaves them with the burden of creating all features and the clear feeling on the part of the community that they have not played fair. We reject the VMware approach to open source, and are interested to see whether the community continues to advance the view that in fact ESX Server is a derived work of Linux.

Q: In 2008, what is it going to take to get Citrix into every deal that VMware is going after and then win the deal? How do you move from an SMB positioning to an Enterprise player when price doesn't seem to be enough?

A: There are many deals in which we don't stand a chance – deals where VMware has been selected as "the vendor for virtualization". However we increasingly find that VMware's failure to build a credible ISV ecosystem, and its closed, proprietary approach to the market, is leading customers to demand an alternative – that is, dual sourcing – so that they do not face the risk of being locked up in an expensive, proprietary single vendor stack. Our opportunity arises from our openness – our embracing of ISV partners, our embracing of existing systems management and storage management vendors, and our advanced high performance architecture. Customers that think strategically are purchasing XenServer.

I'd like to once again thank Simon Crosby for taking the time out to speak with me and for sharing his vision into the new year. 2008 is going to be an exciting year for all of us in the virtualization community. I for one can't wait to see what people are coming up with to advance this technology further.

Posted by David Marshall on December 22, 2007 10:36 AM

December 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

GlassHouse Hopes Virtualization Can Fuel the Company's $100M IPO

GlassHouse Technologies, an independent IT infrastructure consulting and services firm, has registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to file their initial public offering (IPO) in hopes of raising nearly $100 million.

All of the shares to be offered will be sold by the company. The numbers of shares to be sold in the proposed offering, and the offering price, have not yet been determined. According to a filing with the SEC, the company plans to use the money raised in its IPO for operating capital and strategic acquisitions.

And speaking of acquisitions, in July 2007 the Framingham, Mass. based company announced that it had acquired Chicago-based server virtualization consulting company, RapidApp. This acquisition gave the company a huge push within the server virtualization market. In addition to server virtualization, the acquisition also extended GlassHouse's offerings into virtual storage, virtual desktop infrastructure and application delivery and deployment services.

Despite the company's focus on red hot technologies, GlassHouse still reported a net loss of $9.6 million in 2006. However, the company has been able to increase its services revenue from $26 million for the first three quarters of 2006 to over $40 million for the same period in 2007.

And with the recently successful acquisitions and IPOs taking place in the virtualization market, GlassHouse may believe that it can successfully ride that wave into a $100 million IPO of its own.

Posted by David Marshall on December 20, 2007 07:45 PM

December 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware is Bringing Unity Feature to Workstation

Christian Hammond, a Senior Software Engineer with VMware, revealed on his personal blog that the next version of VMware Workstation will offer the incredibly successful Unity feature found in VMware's Mac desktop virtualization product, VMware Fusion.

Workstation 6.5 has reached the 'Friends and Family' beta stage, and plans on introducing the Unity feature that has helped make virtualization on the Mac extremely popular. VMware brought this feature to Fusion with Unity, and Parallels introduced its Mac virtualization customers to basically the same technology called coherence.

If you haven't been keeping up with Mac virtualization, the Unity feature can be thought of as a "seamless window" akin to Terminal Services or Citrix Presentation Server. In this way, rather than having to deal with the entire virtual desktop on your screen, the application windows themselves are displayed on the host machine directly. It keeps the clutter to a minimum and still allows you direct access to the applications on the virtual machine from your host environment. Now you get the idea of why this feature has gained so much popularity.

Christian details the following features as working in the latest beta build of VMware Workstation 6.5:

Windows 2000/XP guest support
Shaped windows
Dragging windows
Resizing windows
Minimize/maximize
Window stacking (Z-order)
Custom mouse cursors
Keyboard/mouse support
Windows of the same application in the VM can appear as groups in the taskbar like any other app's windows.

However, not everything is working and ready to go. He lists the following as items that are identified as not yet working:

Virtual desktops do not work. If you move windows to other desktops, you'll have problems.
Multiple monitors may or may not work correctly.
Alt-dragging or otherwise moving a window in a way other than by using the titlebar will cause things to get out of sync.
If you attempt to drag a window off-screen, the window manager may block it, but the events will still be sent to the guest. This could cause the window to get 'stuck'.
Minimizing a window using the taskbar may cause visual oddities.
Partially obscured windows may look wrong when in Compiz's Expose mode or similar modes where all windows are displayed at once.
There's no proper start menu integration. Exit Unity mode to launch new applications or press the Windows key or Control-escape while in a guest application to bring up the guest start menu.

Posted by David Marshall on December 18, 2007 07:53 PM

December 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Moka5 Introduces Its Engine to Mac OS X

Moka5, provider of virtualization software for managing desktop computers, is now creating its main product for Mac OS X. The moka5 LivePC Engine allows users to create, run, and share LivePCs, which are complete managed virtual computing environments that can be streamed or demand-paged over the network. These LivePCs can be shared with others on the moka5 web site or put on a portable USB drive for use on different computers.

The company has just announced the release of a new Engine. They said that its Moka5 Engine now runs on Apple computers with VMware Fusion installed. Using this technology, you can now run LivePCs on Mac OS X.

New features of the Engine include:

Mac Edition now available: A preview version of the Moka5 Engine for Mac has been released. Now you can use LivePCs on any Mac that has VMware Fusion installed.
Unattended install: Building a Windows LivePC is now easier. Moka5 has integrated the xpfromcd tool into Moka5 Engine directly, so you can just enter your information (Username, Machine Name, and Product Key) and then let the Moka5 Engine do the rest.
Update notification: Moka5 Engine will now indicate when an updated version of a LivePC is available.
Upgrade to VMware Player 2.0.2: Moka5 Engine now comes bundled with the latest version of VMware Player.
BareMetal updated: Moka5 Engine for BareMetal has been updated for improved compatibility and better configuration control.

"Extending the LivePC platform to the Mac is something we've had in the works for a while and I'm very happy to be able to share this preview version with our users," said John Whaley, Moka5 Founder and Principal Engineer. "Mac users with VMware Fusion can now run the same LivePCs that run on Windows and BareMetal, and build and share LivePCs with friends or the community. Cross-platform support is a big part of our goal of making it possible to use your computing environment anywhere."

Mac requirements for the new Engine include:

Intel Mac with OS X 10.4 or 10.5 and 2GB of free disk space
1GB RAM (2GB recommended for creating LivePCs)
VMware Fusion 1.1 pre-installed
Account with administrator privileges unless the Moka5 Engine and VMware Fusion has been previously installed
Network connection to the Internet (during installation and for updates)

You can download it, here.

Posted by David Marshall on December 18, 2007 07:06 PM

December 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

SAP Support on VMware and the Endeavors Free Offering

We recently talked about the support or lack of support being offered by Oracle for their applications in a VMware ESX Server environment - But SAP is now coming forward signing a different tune. Let's hope that this is only the beginning, and that software manufacturers are finally embracing virtualization the way they should be. And in other news, Endeavors is taking a different approach to software and virtualization support. The company is talking about application virtualization and streaming, and they are now trying to make more people aware of the technology by offering a free version of the product.

And after, stay tuned for part III of another special Podcast from the VMware Virtualization Express Podcast Series. Andrea Eubanks, Senior Director of Enterprise and Technical Marketing at VMware, talks about VMware's Infrastructure in the Agile Datacenter – specifically about how VMware offers businesses many advantages in lowering capital and operating expenditures. And then, Patrick Lin, Senior Director of Product Management at VMware continues his discussion about VMware's virtualization solution.
listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on December 18, 2007 06:31 PM

December 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)

SWsoft - New Name with Added Vision

SWsoft, perhaps the second largest virtualization software producer in the market, recently decided that it would change the company name, its logo, its product names and its vision all in one fell swoop.

In January 2008, the company will adopt the Parallels name for its new corporate name and image. It wasn't long ago, the beginning of this year, that SWsoft officially announced that it had quietly acquired Parallels several years earlier. And now, the acquired becomes the name and face of the acquirer.

When asked why the change, SWsoft CEO Serguei Beloussov said that they want to look like one company with a single vision and a single brand.

At the same time as the name change, the company also announced its new initiative called "Optimized Computing", which focuses on providing consumers, business and service providers with what the company describes as the industry's broadest portfolio of multi-platform virtualization and automation software.

"This means enhancing Windows, Linux, Mac, x86 and ia64-based bare metal systems with innovative hypervisor-based virtualization, container-based virtualization and a suite of complementary automation solutions," said Beloussov. "Truly optimized computing requires virtualization, system automation and business automation components - which our company is unique in providing."

SWsoft said that 2008 would be a big year for the company. They will release a new version of Virtuozzo, the company's container or operating system virtualization application; major updates to Parallels Desktop and Parallels Workstation; a server based hypervisor; and a new virtualization management software that will manage not only Virtuozzo and Parallels, but also other popular third-party virtualization platforms from a single, flexible interface.

Multiple SWsoft products will soon be renamed gradually to foster clarity, simplicity and strength.

Parallels Desktop (no change)
Parallels Workstation (no change)
Parallels Server (no change)
Parallels Virtuozzo Containers (Virtuozzo)
Parallels Management Console (VZMC)
Parallels Infrastructure Manager (VZCC)
Parallels System Automation (PEM)
Parallels Business Automation (PEM/HSPc)
Parallels Plesk Control Panel (Plesk)
Parallels Plesk Expand (Expand)
Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder (Sitebuilder)
Parallels Ensim Pro (Ensim Pro)
Parallels HSphere (Hsphere)
Parallels Confixx (Confixx)
Parallels Open Platform (Fusion)
Parallels Technology Network (SWDN)
Parallels Partner Network (PartnerNet)
Application Packaging Standard (no change)
OpenVZ (no change)

These names will be phased in with new program releases.

You can find out more information, here.

Posted by David Marshall on December 17, 2007 08:13 PM

December 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

NetXen Makes 10-GigE Available on VMware

Following a two year collaboration between NetXen and VMware, the first 10-Gigabit Intelligent NIC solution to be natively supported by VMware is now available.

The solution is called NetSlice and it offers drivers for VMware's latest version of VI3, version 3.5. The NetSlice driver technology is designed to optimize the I/O subsystem of virtual machines.

This is an area that has been identified by many as a problem within virtualization. As the technology gets combined with server consolidation initiatives, a heavy burden gets placed on the network subsystem that typically wasn't there previously. Today's 1 Gig network adapters can't keep up. The NetSlice architecture provides a broad set of I/O virtualization resources that enable virtual machines to achieve significantly higher I/O performance than non-virtualized NICs.

"Virtualization, multicore processors and high-performance networking will form the basis of next-generation virtual datacenters," said Vikram Karvat, senior director of marketing, NetXen. "The new NetSlice driver with ESX Server 3.5 support will allow our customers to deploy leading-edge networking and virtualization technologies that are architected and validated jointly between NetXen and VMware. The result is a robust, high-performance networking solution that will enable virtual infrastructures to continue to scale."

NetXen Intelligent NIC products with I/O virtualization support are currently shipping to leading server OEMs. The NetSlice driver for VMware ESX Server 3.5 is inbox and also available for download from VMware.

Posted by David Marshall on December 16, 2007 08:41 AM

December 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtual Iron Version 4.2 Strengthens Business Continuity

With a growing list of who's who in the virtualization platform market, virtualization vendors like Virtual Iron have been trying to carve out their own niche market to help them expand their sales efforts.

Moving beyond the server consolidation use case, Virtual Iron is introducing the latest version of its product, 4.2, to help production environments with business continuity by focusing on increased support for disaster recovery, high availability and dynamic capacity management.

The new version of the company's virtualization suite includes a new management tool called LiveSnapshot which provides virtual server snapshots for hot backups and patch management. These capabilities enable offloaded, space efficient and no-downtime backups on live virtual machines running in production environments and it also reduces the time needed for virtual machine patching in development and test processes.

Virtual Iron 4.2 also adds multi-pathing for virtual server Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks to better support business continuity and redundancy and help speed up the I/O process. The company has also added the ability to dynamically increase the size of both disk groups and virtual disks to provide increased storage on demand. And they've broadened support to include new operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

"Well over half of our customers today are leveraging Virtual Iron's comprehensive virtualization platform to support more advanced use cases such as disaster recovery and high availability," said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron Software. "Version 4.2 adds to these already robust capabilities to extend support for our many end users running demanding workloads in production environments while making Virtual Iron even easier to install, deploy and manage."

The company is still offering the same pricing structure with the latest version. They offer a free version of the software that supports up to 12 virtual machines per physical server, an Enterprise Edition for $499 per socket, and an Extended Enterprise Edition with all of the tools for $799 per socket.

Posted by David Marshall on December 16, 2007 08:04 AM

December 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Does Microsoft's Early Release of Hyper-V Help Combat VMware?

Microsoft fired an unexpected shot that was heard around the world when it announced the early public beta release of its widely anticipated virtualization hypervisor, Hyper-V.

Originally expected sometime in Q1 of 2008, Hyper-V is Microsoft's hypervisor virtualization technology that works with the latest release candidate of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (x64 edition). And according to Microsoft, the company is still on track to launch Hyper-V within 180 days of the RTM of Windows Server 2008.

In their official announcement, Microsoft called the news delivery a "holiday surprise" for its customers and partners. "Delivering the high-quality Hyper-V beta earlier than expected allows our customers and partners to begin evaluating this feature of Windows Server 2008 and provide us with valuable feedback as we march toward final release," said Bill Laing, general manager of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft.

Microsoft said they have expanded the features and capabilities in Hyper-V since its September 2007 Community Technology Preview. Some of the new features added include: 'Quick Migration' and high availability to help provide for planned and unplanned downtime, volume shadow services support, integration with Windows Server Manager and support for running Hyper-V with Server Core in the parent partition.

Virtual machines can now be imported and exported, and they have grown up to offer new capabilities themselves. They now support up to 4 virtual SCSI controllers, multiple network adapters and up to 64GB of memory. In addition, they've changed the emulated video card from an S3 Trio to a more generic VESA compatible device to help resolve video issues with some operating systems like Linux.

Microsoft said Hyper-V is designed to provide a broad range of customers with familiar and cost-effective virtualization infrastructure software that can help reduce operating costs, increase hardware utilization, optimize infrastructure and improve server availability.

But the big question that remains is, with virtualization being built into the Microsoft Windows operating system, will it change the way consumers use virtualization? Analysts say that only about 5% of today's x86 servers are virtualized. That leaves a lot of room on the table. But the market is quickly getting seeded with virtualization platforms from Citrix, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle and Sun, all trying to take away market share from VMware while trying to capture the remaining 95% of x86 servers.

VMware believes that Microsoft is late to the virtualization party and isn't offering anything new to combat what VMware already has in place. VMware's Senior Director of Product Marketing, Bogomil Balkansky said, "Microsoft is now releasing a beta version of a first generation product when customers need production proven, reliable, mature virtualization solutions."

He added, "Hyper-V provides only server partitioning while VMware Infrastructure is a third generation platform with a complete array of capabilities to simplify IT management and improve infrastructure availability. Tens of thousands of VMware customers have leveraged VMware infrastructure to reduce capital and operating costs to implement high availability solutions, deliver on the promise of the virtualized desktop, and better automate and manage their software applications."

Balkansky also pointed out in the interview that the beta version of Hyper-V is somewhat comparable to VMware's Infrastructure 3 Foundation Acceleration Kit. However, he said one significant differentiator of the VI3 Foundation Acceleration Kit over a Microsoft Hyper-V offering is ESX Server 3i. ESX Server 3i is built on a next-generation thin architecture that delivers strengthened security, improved reliability and simplified management.

Microsoft does have one thing on its side. Almost 2 million customers from around the world have already downloaded Windows Server 2008 evaluation code. Only time will tell if Microsoft's current Hyper-V feature set is enough to propel them into becoming the dominant virtualization vendor. Or as VMware claims, is the feature set too immature and too unproven compared to what VI3 already offers today?

If you want to find out more about Hyper-V, you can attend a Webcast with Microsoft's Mike Neil on December 18th at 12:30PM PST. Register for the event, here.

The beta is available for download, here.

Posted by David Marshall on December 15, 2007 05:49 PM

December 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware Announces Major Updates to its Flagship Product - VI3

VMware finally announced the general availability of its highly anticipated upgrade to its flagship product Virtual Infrastructure 3 - which includes VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. The company said the new release provides additional capabilities for increased levels of automation, improved overall infrastructure availability and higher performance for mission critical workloads.

Two of the more interesting and commented on features include Storage VMotion and Update Manager.

Storage VMotion does what it sounds like. It basically provides the same functionality as VMotion for storage arrays. In other words, you can dynamically balance storage workloads and resolve storage related performance issues by migrating virtual machines to the best available storage device. It helps eliminate the problems of planned downtime when you need to work on a storage array.

Update Manager is another new feature that has long been requested from VMware users. It helps automate the patch and update management for the VMware ESX Server hosts and the virtual machines in your datacenter. Patching has long been a headache in a virtual environment, so this is a welcomed feature.

In addition to the ESX 3.5 hypervisor, VMware has also made available an update to its management platform, VirtualCenter 2.5, as well as a host of new features to its VI3 suite.

VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 provides the following new features:

Virtualization platform enhancements help deliver significant performance gains for the most memory and I/O intensive workloads:
- Large memory pages for both ESX Server as well as guest operating systems improve memory processing for memory intensive workloads such as databases
- Support for TCP Segmentation Offload and jumbo frames reduces the CPU overhead associated with processing network i/o, and benefits workloads such as Citrix and Windows Terminal Services
- Support for paravirtualized Linux improves the performance of Linux workloads

VMware Storage VMotion enables live migration of virtual machine disks from one data storage system to another with little to no disruption or downtime. Administrators can dynamically balance storage workloads and address performance bottlenecks by migrating virtual machine disks to the best available storage resource, minimizing service disruptions.
VMware Update Manager automates patch and update management for VMware ESX Server hosts and virtual machines by tracking certain patch levels and manually applying the latest security/bug fixes. Patching of offline virtual machines enforces higher levels of patch standards compliance than physical environments. Integration with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) enables zero-downtime VMware ESX Server host patching capabilities.
VMware Guided Consolidation, a feature of VMware VirtualCenter enables smaller companies to easily and quickly get started with server consolidation in a step-by-step tutorial fashion. A wizard discovers physical servers, identifies consolidation candidates, converts them to virtual machines, and intelligently places them onto the optimal VMware ESX Server or VMware Server hosts.
VMware Distributed Power Management is an experimental feature that reduces power consumption in the data center through intelligent workload balancing. Working in conjunction with VMware DRS, distributed Power Management is designed to automatically power off servers not currently needed in order to meet service levels, and automatically power on servers as demand for compute resources increases.

At the same time of the release, VMware also announced changes to its naming and pricing of the VI3 suite. The product is available for purchase in the following editions:

VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation (previously called "Starter") will include VMware ESX Server or VMware ESX Server 3i, VMware Consolidated Backup and the new VMware Update Manager. VMware Infrastructure Foundation list price will be $995 per 2 processors.
VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard will include the capabilities in VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation plus VMware HA which provides automated restart of virtual machines affected by hardware failure. VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard list price will be $2,995 per 2 processors.
VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise includes the capabilities in VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard, plus VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion, and VMware DRS with Distributed Power Management (DPM). VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise list price will be $5,750 per 2 processors.
VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation Acceleration Kit: Three 2-processor licenses of VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation 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 licenses of VMware Infrastructure 3 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 licenses of VMware Infrastructure Enterprise 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 VMotion, Storage VMotion and DRS with DPM will also be available for standalone purchase with VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation and Standard.
Existing VMware Infrastructure customers with valid support and subscription contracts will receive the new products and features included in each edition at no additional cost.
VMware supports VMware Infrastructure 3 in all main operating system locales and is expected to release Japanese, simplified Chinese and German versions in the first half of 2008.

Posted by David Marshall on December 12, 2007 05:16 AM

December 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization and Storage: Taking a Look at NetApp and ONStor

When you start implementing your server virtualization projects within your organization, one of the things you grow to understand is the importance of your storage solution. NetApp is working its way into the virtualization arena by partnering with Virtual Iron and VMware. Likewise, ONStor is partnering with VMware as well, in hopes of leveraging VMware's training and marketing to get a better handle on virtualization infrastructures.

And after that we have another special sponsored Podcast from the VMware Virtualization Express Podcast series featuring VMware sponsored highlights from InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum. This Podcast looks at thoughts, insights and presentations from various VMware executives that took place at InfoWorld's event. Andrea Eubanks talks about VMware's infrastructure in the agile datacenter, and how it offers businesses advantages in lowering capital and operating expenditures. And Patrick Lin talks more about VMware's virtualization solution.
listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on December 10, 2007 05:00 PM

December 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

CIO Magazine Picks 10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2008

CIO.com recently did a story on the "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2008".

It says, "Virtualization could hardly be hotter as a trend, yet virtualization management and security tools are still in their infancy. At first, it defies logic."

And I would tend to agree wholeheartedly with that statement. Virtualization is a hot topic and a hot trend in the industry. And to me, it's just getting hotter with each passing day. The platform vendors are doing a great job with the technology, but it's the third-party vendors and the users that keep pushing this technology forward. Things are moving so fast, there's just no way the platform vendors can do it all.

The thing that's great about this technology is all of the different use cases that it solves. It's no longer just about server consolidation and legacy application support. New uses for the technology are being invented all the time, and third-party vendors keep filling these niche needs until the platform vendors can catch up.

CIO magazine lists the following 10 virtualization vendors to watch.

So I took a look at each of them to see why they were selected and to find out who and what they are all about.

CiRBA - CiRBA's Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software enables organizations to rapidly analyze and visually map the safest path to an optimally consolidated or virtualized datacenter. Covering numerous platforms, CiRBA addresses configuration, workload and business constraints required for success within any consolidation or virtualization strategy.
Vizioncore - The company is perhaps best known for their vRanger Pro backup software. But the company attacks a number of other virtualization issues as well. Now part of the Quest Software family, the company is expanding into other virtualization platforms as was evident when they changed their product names from starting with "esx" to a simplified and broader "v" naming pattern. The company's vCharter software can examine and report on what's happening within a virtual machine, while its vOptimizer can then optimize the performance, speed and size of that virtual machine.
Akorri - Akorri's BalancePoint Suite helps solve workload balancing issues by enabling IT organizations to intelligently balance application performance and infrastructure utilization. The product was designed to help get control over virtualized IT environments by providing advanced analytics and cross-domain management. BalancePoint enables IT operations staff to manage, optimize and plan application performance across server and storage virtualization.
Platform Computing - Platform Computing created VM Orchestrator and Enterprise Grid Orchestrator out of their expertise in grid computing and workload automation. Platform VM Orchestrator (VMO) is an automated, policy-driven, virtual environment manager that supports Citrix's XenServer v4 to deliver web-based virtual machine lifecycle management, multi-host dynamic resource management (DRM), resource-aware high availability (HA), and self-service virtual machine management.
Embotics - Recently out of stealth mode, the company announced its first product, V-Commander. The V-Commander software application is a centralized, policy-based VM Lifecycle Management and control system for VMs that allows organizations to gain better oversight and control over their VM environments. And it helps free up IT staff for more important tasks and expands their ability to take advantage of the inherent flexibility and agility of server virtualization.
EqualLogic - EqualLogic's storage area networks enable fast, flexible storage setup and provisioning while dramatically reducing the time and cost required to manage, maintain and grow a SAN environment – locally or remotely. Combining the fact that iSCSI storage is becoming a hot growth market and EqualLogic is optimized for virtualization, the company recently announced it was being acquired by Dell.
PlateSpin - PlateSpin is perhaps best known as a P2V solution provider. The company is perhaps one of the oldest third-party virtualization application vendors still around. Their PowerConvert tool is now an "Anywhere-to-Anywhere" solution, migrating workloads between physical and virtual machines. PowerRecon helps provide intelligence for planning datacenter initiatives by collecting inventory and utilization metrics across the infrastructure. And now they offer Forge, a physical appliance to help provide disaster recovery in the event of downtime or a site disaster.
Marathon Technologies - everRun completely synchronizes two standard Windows servers including the OS, application, network interfaces, storage, and data. Unlike cluster or failover solutions that require two fully configured systems, everRun creates a single Windows environment that operates like a standalone server. Their software prevents interruptions and downtime by fully automating fault management.
Blue Lane Technologies - Blue Lane can secure unpatched datacenter applications immediately while patching them on a schedule of your own choosing, boosting data center availability and security. Unpatched servers and VMs can be secured from network attacks at the push of a button. It also protects VMs and servers against known vulnerabilities in which vendors have yet to issue a patch and allows security teams to enforce policies (beyond patch emulation) that includes locking down individual servers/VMs from remote attacks.
Reflex Security - Reflex Security's Virtual Security Appliance (VSA) creates a virtual security infrastructure inside a physical host machine. And it applies multiple network security and policy enforcement controls to protect virtual machines, virtualized networks and the underlying host and virtualization platform. It can also safeguard communications between virtual components and resources outside the host machine providing a complete security perimeter around and between virtual machines and reduces the risk of virtual machine intrusion, infection, compliance violations or other consequences.

While this list does have 10 really good virtualization vendors to watch in 2008, I imagine it was difficult to create such a list. Why? There are so many different vendors out there right now in this space, all with interesting technology and viewpoints on how to solve different trouble areas and each offering additional features and functionality that helps to fill in holes or meet new and expanded use cases.

So, what's on your list? What virtualization companies or technologies are you planning to watch out for in 2008?

Posted by David Marshall on December 10, 2007 04:07 AM

December 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware CEO Answers Concerns about Competition and Pricing

VMware CEO, Diane Greene, told a room full of people at the Lehman Brothers investor conference that she wasn't concerned about competition affecting her product's pricing or positioning.

Greene said that while competitors are coming into the market, coming out with a hypervisor product isn't an easy task. She said that VMware isn't really seeing these competitors come up very much because they don't have an offering that basically gives the same benefits that VMware offers its customers. In fact, Greene told the audience that when competitor products do come up during deal negotiations, a natural thing for a purchasing agent to do, at the end of the day they know they are going to deploy VMware.

But the fact of the matter remains, over the next 12 to 24 months, VMware is going to have to contend with competition coming from the likes of Citrix, Red Hat, Novell, Virtual Iron, Oracle and Microsoft to name but a few. So the real question is, can VMware retain its 80-90% share of the virtualization market? And can it do so with the same amount of return that they've been so very fortunate to earn as of late, making it the world's fourth largest publicly traded software manufacturer with a market value of about $37 billion.

When asked about the sustainability of their software margins, Diane Greene told investors at the Lehman conference that VMware is a pretty progressive company and that they have continued to develop new products that have added value to help enable them to maintain their price points because of all the amazing new functionality that is of very high value in terms of cost savings for their customers.

And when asked if over the next 12-24 months with all of the competition coming, if she thought that VMware would still be able to be a premium priced product going forward? Greene said that it was a myth that VMware is a premium priced product. She said that VMware is charging for some pretty amazing features in their Enterprise bundles, and continuing to add functionality that lets people automate and make their datacenter incredibly efficient, flexible and easy to manage. And at that price point, VMware doesn't see any issue because of the roadmap that the company has in place.

Greene told the investors that VMware's software is far more feature rich and has far more advanced capabilities than rival virtualization companies. And she added, VMware allows businesses to get more out of their virtualization than just simply consolidating servers. It can boost the efficiency of the datacenter, streamline operations, and provide high availability and disaster recovery.

VMware shares have more than quadrupled since the company's IPO at $29 per share. On October 31, shares hit a record high of $125.25. But the stock has declined since then, as low as $71.44.

The competition is coming, and they are all going after the market leader make no mistake. This month however, VMware is also expected to release its 3i and 3.5 versions of its latest VMware Infrastructure virtualization platform. Greene said her competitors don't have a comparable solution, is she right?

Posted by David Marshall on December 9, 2007 08:23 AM

December 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Survey Says: I/O Bottleneck Exists within Virtualization

Last week, a vendor sponsored survey from Xsigo was published claiming that an I/O bottleneck exists within server virtualization deployments.

Vendor survey skepticism aside, many people in the virtualization community will agree that this problem does indeed exist, although it varies from one deployment to the next. Can you spot a bottleneck problem with every virtualization host server? No. In fact, many servers may never be afflicted with this pain for a number of reasons: the virtual machines may not be running intensive applications that exasperate the problem, the problem may be extremely isolated and only happen during spotty bursts, the server may have been configured with enough hardware to keep the problem at bay, or perhaps the environment was specifically designed to minimize the problem by not fully utilizing the server and keeping the density scaled down. Again, there are a number of ways to minimize or keep the problem from surfacing.

But for those of us already in the know because we've witnessed this problem first hand, the results from the survey certainly aren't anything new.

Xsigo Systems received more than 100 responses from IT staff members surveyed at Fortune 5000 companies using server virtualization. And the survey revealed that IT managers encounter significant cost and cabling issues when configuring connectivity on servers running virtualization software. Compared with traditional servers, virtualized servers are being configured with more connections, and those configurations are being changed more frequently – two factors that significantly drive up costs.

Other key findings from Xsigo's survey revealed that 35% of virtualization users had to reconfigure I/O connections six or more times in the past year, typically because they moved a virtual machine from one physical host server to another. 58% of virtualization users had to add connectivity to a server specifically for virtualization requirements, and it caused them to use larger servers such as a 3- or 4U server rather than a 1U pizza box server.

Perhaps the most significant finding from the survey is that server virtualization can significantly increase connectivity requirements: 75% of virtualization users configure seven or more I/O connections per server, compared to two to four connections for a server running without virtualization software. One way around the I/O bottleneck is certainly with the addition of hardware and consequently a spider web of cabling. Not a great solution mind you, but certainly a solution. Because of that, 65% of virtualization users considered cable reduction in their environment a high priority.

Current I/O infrastructure in the data center was designed for traditional server usage, not virtualized server implementations that are currently on the rise. According to IDC, server shipments in support of virtualization are expected to reach 1.7 million units annually by the year 2010, growing at nearly 41% per year.

Because users often prefer dedicated connectivity for individual virtual machines, servers frequently require additional I/O. A simple problem, like having a server with six I/O ports when seven is needed in order to accommodate virtualization capabilities, can add significant capital and labor expenses to a data center.

Posted by David Marshall on December 8, 2007 03:11 PM

December 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Need Help with Virtualization ROI/TCO? VMware's Latest Online Calculator to the Rescue

Back in April of this year, VMware released the first version of its ROI calculator. And while it went a long way to help customers visualize the potential benefits of infrastructure virtualization, it stopped short by concentrating on the value of server consolidation. As the value proposition of virtualization continues to evolve beyond simple datacenter consolidation, so too has the VMware ROI/TCO calculator.

The latest version of the calculator helps provide a methodology for capturing the reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) from implementing any of VMware's virtualization products and solutions, including:

VMware Infrastructure (VI3)
VMware Lab Manager
VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

You can quickly assess potential cost savings with the calculator by completing five easy steps:

Fill out a simple survey questionnaire. Answer a few questions about your company and then select whether you are interested in consolidation cost savings, virtual lab benefits or desktop control and manageability savings.
Customize assumptions. The calculator uses over 200 additional metrics to calculate a cost benefit/ROI analysis. These values can be reviewed and refined.
Review total cost savings and return on investment (ROI). You can see your customized cost savings, comparing your current (as is) total cost of ownership over the next three years and the cost savings estimated for a virtualized VMware environment.
Save analysis. You can save your analysis to review or re-open at a later time.
Obtain detailed reports. After registering, you can click on the report button to receive a full report of your personalized analysis results including the executive summary overview and detailed results by category in either a PDF or RTF format. Data can also be exported to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Try the calculator for yourself, click here.

Posted by David Marshall on December 8, 2007 07:31 AM

December 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

PlateSpin Introduces Hardware Appliance for Disaster Recovery

PlateSpin, a long-time virtualization application software company, just announced a new venture - an innovative disaster recovery hardware appliance for protecting physical and virtual server workloads using VMware Infrastructure as a foundation for the solution.

The product is called PlateSpin Forge, and it's a purpose-built consolidated recovery solution that includes prepackaged and preconfigured hardware, software and virtual infrastructure to help accelerate deployment, simplify configuration and reduce total cost of ownership.

PlateSpin has always been ahead of the curve. Early on, the company offered a multi-platform virtualization management solution, followed by its capacity planning software and its award winning physical-to-virtual migration software. Now, the company enters into a one-click disaster recovery market, a place where virtualization technology is really starting to find another strong niche, much like that of server consolidation.

"Traditional recovery infrastructures have failed to keep pace with business requirements," said Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin Ltd. "Organizations often have had to choose between costly and complex clustering and high-end replication solutions or suboptimal lower-cost alternatives like tape backups that can be slow and cumbersome to test and restore. Offering a comprehensive, affordable and easy-to-use appliance for protecting the majority of workloads in the data center, PlateSpin Forge provides a new alternative for deploying and managing disaster recovery solutions. With PlateSpin Forge, organizations can achieve recovery time and point objectives that approach the level of protection provided by clustering for a cost that is closer to imaging and tape backup solutions. As enterprises explore new ways to extend their use of infrastructure virtualization technologies, PlateSpin Forge makes it easy and affordable to implement, manage and test a virtual recovery infrastructure designed to protect both physical and virtual assets in the data center."

According to the company, key features of PlateSpin Forge include:

Plug In and Protect Workloads – Each PlateSpin Forge appliance provides complete protection for up to 25 physical or virtual workloads straight out of the box. All necessary hardware, storage, applications and virtualization technology are pre-packaged and ready to go, significantly reducing the time and effort required to deploy and configure a recovery solution.

Rapid One-Click Recovery – In the event of a disaster, recovery time is just a matter of powering on PlateSpin Forge's virtual standby workload. Upon receiving a failure alert by email, Blackberry or within the Web-based user interface, the administrator can rapidly recover workloads with a single mouse click.

Failback Flexibility – Leveraging PlateSpin's multiplatform Workload Portability technology, PlateSpin Forge provides a highly flexible restore capability. Workload failback can be rapidly executed to any physical or virtual host regardless of manufacturer, make or model.

Simple, Integrated Management – PlateSpin Forge includes an intuitive Web-based interface for managing, monitoring and reporting on all aspects of workload protection and recovery. An ever-present dashboard enables users to view the status of their protection plan at all times. The Web-based interface is extremely easy to use, dramatically reducing the time, effort and training required to ramp-up and administer the recovery solution.

Workload Protection Metrics – Through purpose-built, preconfigured reporting, users can quickly access all the pertinent metrics needed to report on the health of their recovery and protection plans such as actual versus target recovery objectives, replication window sizing and protection logs for auditing purposes. All reports can be exported into Microsoft Excel for further analysis or raw report data can be queried through a simple ODBC connection.

Whole Workload Replication – PlateSpin Forge enables data centers to protect both system and data volumes within a single bootable recovery environment to avoid the common hassle of disjointed system and data restore. Schedule incremental workload replication at either the file or block level to achieve different recovery point objectives (RPO). Organizations can affordably protect physical and virtual workloads within a single technology investment. Workloads can be protected locally or remotely across a wide area network (WAN) to facilitate off-site recovery in the event of a so-called "Big D" disaster.

Easy Test Recovery – Simple one-click test recovery allows the data center user to rapidly test the integrity of workload replication. With a mouse click, the user can take a virtual snapshot of the recovery workload, power it on within a private internal network and quickly validate the recovery plan. Because the test snapshot is fenced off from the production network, the user can work freely without having to be concerned with conflicts or the integrity of the production environment. Since tests are performed on a disposable snapshot that can simply be removed when testing is complete, there is no need to run a full replication as with most other replication solutions.

Failover Preparation – In the event of a possible production failure, users are able power up the recovery workload on a fenced off network while the failure is confirmed. Users can then go live with the workload and rapidly "drop the fence" to bring the recovery workload online to failover for the production system or simply shutdown the recovery workload if the failure is a false alarm.

The Forge appliance ships with a pre-packaged dual processor, quad-core 2.6 GHz Dell server with 16GB of RAM, 6 Gigabit Ethernet network ports and 2.5TB of SATA storage in a RAID5 configuration. PlateSpin said that this configuration would provide enough resources for 25 virtual machines. Customers who need to protect more than 25 workloads can purchase additional appliances.

The company believes that this solution provides an affordable alternative to traditional recovery infrastructures and host-based replication systems because organizations can achieve a 25-to-1 workload protection ratio without incurring the expense of duplicate hardware and software licensing costs.

PlateSpin Forge will be generally available in North America on January 15, 2008. Other parts of the world will be able to purchase Forge on April 2, 2008, although an early access program is available by signing up on the company's Web site, here.

Posted by David Marshall on December 6, 2007 05:28 PM

December 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Parallels Announces Official Leopard Update and Premium Edition for Mac

SWsoft, makers of the Parallels Desktop for Mac product, announced today that the Leopard Update that's been in beta testing for the last few weeks is now officially live. This latest build works seamlessly with both Tiger and Leopard operating systems, and it resolves those issues found in Parallels when Leopard first went live. Like other Parallels minor product updates, this one is also 100% free to all 3.0 customers and the updates will also be delivered via Parallels' auto-update feature.

The company also made a second announcement today, announcing a new $99 Premium Edition of the product called, simply enough, Parallels Desktop Premium Edition. It includes the latest Leopard-ready build of Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac (normally $79), plus three utilities from leading third-party software companies that help keep Windows virtual machines safe and secure on your Mac. Bought individually, these three utilities can cost more than $175.

Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0
To protect against the viruses, spyware, spam and malware that can harm any Windows machine, even virtual ones, Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0 is included with Parallels Desktop 3.0 Premium Edition. Kaspersky offers "Triple Threat" protection, including automated hourly anti-malware updates, intelligent active heuristics that provide proactive protection to investigate all unknown files and real time behavior analysis for consistent monitoring of a system's activities for any malicious behavior.

Acronis True Image 11 Home
Acronis True Image 11 Home is the latest version of Acronis' award-winning backup and disaster recovery software. With Acronis True Image Home, users can easily back up individual files on their Windows virtual machine or take an entire image of their Windows virtual computer. Backups can be scheduled to run automatically at any interval and can be stored on external drives, DVDs and off-site computers via FTP.

Acronis Disk Director Suite
Acronis Disk Director Suite provides the ability to resize, move, copy, split and merge virtual disk partitions without losing data. It includes a boot manager that allows users to boot other operating systems, such as Linux, inside their Windows virtual machine.

"Maintaining and securing a Windows virtual computer is every bit as important as it is for a physical computer," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO, SWsoft. "We are pleased to work with Acronis and Kaspersky to make it easy and affordable for our Mac customers to protect, backup and customize their Windows virtual machines."

Posted by David Marshall on December 5, 2007 06:38 PM

December 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VirtualLogix Teams with TI and nworks Supports VMware 3.5 and 3i

Virtualization continues to grow, and interestingly enough, it's growing outside of the datacenter as well. VirtualLogix recently announced a new agreement with Texas Instruments for virtualization outside of the datacenter on front-end connected devices. And with VMware coming out with their latest virtualization platforms, 3.5 and 3i, nworks stands ready with support for these new platforms and also offers support for HP's Software Operations Manager product.

And after that, stay tuned for a special VMware Virtualization Express Podcast, a Podcast series with VMware sponsored highlights from InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum. You will hear a special presentation from Andrea Eubanks, Senior Director of Enterprise and Technical Marketing from VMware talk about VMware's infrastructure in an agile datacenter. You'll also hear from Patrick Lin, Senior Director of Product Management at VMware, as he talks about other VMware solutions. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on December 5, 2007 06:29 PM

December 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Hitachi and Transitive Team to help Migrate from SPARC

To help enterprise computing customers accelerate datacenter migration efforts, Hitachi said that it was teaming up with Transitive so that it could provide Transitive's QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC-to-Linux on the company's BladeSymphony 1000 and 320 blade server products running on Intel Xeon and Itanium 2 processors.

The partnership allows native Solaris/SPARC applications to run on industry standard Intel Xeon and Itanium based platforms. By running on top of the operating system, the QuickTransit technology allows applications that have been compiled for one operating system and processor to run on servers that use a different processor and operating system, without requiring any source code or binary changes.

Additionally, the partnership brings enterprise customers Hitachi BladeSymphony's embedded server virtualization capability called Virtage. The technology allows multiple operating system environments to operate on one or more blade servers, helping to increase server utilization and optimize server workloads.

The specific benefits of the solution are to:

Enable users of Solaris/SPARC applications to run applications on BladeSymphony 1000 and 320 without application rewrite, recompile or complex low-level changes
Break the hardware/software dependency scenario
Support multiple SPARC instruction sets introducing support for 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris/SPARC applications
Maximize return on investment by correlating equipment spend to lowered maintenance costs using Transitive's QuickTransit and to greater efficiency using Hitachi's Virtage
Provide complete end-user transparency allowing users to be productive without concerns for the underlying hardware configurations.

"Transitive's partnership with Hitachi Server Systems creates a hardware-independent, enterprise-class solution that provides a number of benefits datacenter managers are searching for - from efficient processing, to managed and robust resource allocation, to reduced complexity," said Bob Wiederhold, CEO and president of Transitive. "Hitachi has built a line of servers that handle a multitude of tasks, and now, with Transitive's QuickTransit technology, Hitachi's BladeSymphony solutions will supply further capacity, delivering results no matter what the constraints might be."

Posted by David Marshall on December 3, 2007 03:27 PM

December 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Surgient's Future After a Strong Third Quarter

I recently read about Surgient's third quarter success and about the release of their latest virtual lab automation product, VQMS. I spoke with the company's VP of Product Strategy, Erik Josowitz, to find out how these things affect the company going forward, as well as to find out more about the competition provided by VMware.

You recently announced record third quarter earnings and said the company is on track for nearly 60 percent year-over-year revenue growth, to what do you attribute this success?

Erik Josowitz, VP Product Strategy, Surgient:
There is tremendous momentum right now around virtualization, just look at the VMware IPO and the acquisition by Citrix of XenSource and all the interest around those. More mainstream customers around realizing that virtualization must be part of their technology strategy. Those that are attempting to use server virtualization technologies are realizing that they provide only partial solutions, which leads them to investigate complementary solutions, like virtual lab management applications, that accelerate their time-to-benefit from virtualization.

Is heterogeneity in your product a big selling point? Or are most of your customers using VMware ESX Server?

EJ: Support for heterogeneous virtual and physical infrastructure is part of the discussion we have with customers in every sales cycle, even though most customers today are using our products with VMware ESX Server. The reason heterogeneity is such an important part of the conversation, I think, is that customers want to keep their options open. They realize that virtualization is really still an early technology and there will be alot of changes in the coming months and years.

VMware is the current virtualization giant in the marketplace. With so many people now entering that space, one way to differentiate yourself is by expanding into the application market. And VMware has really been doing that for the past two years. How do you differentiate your product offering from VMware's Lab Manager product?

EJ: I think VMware has made some good acquisitions over the past 2 years that help them move up the stack and provide more than infrastructure. As a best-of-breed partner and vendor, Surgient's strategy is to differentiate by providing advanced features and broad platform support that goes well beyond VMware's in-the-box solutions. Surgient's products differ from VMware Lab Manager by supporting more complex labs that better mirror what is deployed in production, enabling larger teams to more effectively share a centralized lab, and by providing tighter integration with common enterprise test management systems. We look at Surgient VQMS as an enterprise test lab management solution and VMware Lab Manager as a "workgroup" solution.

With VMware's acquisition of Akimbi and the ultimate release of VMware Lab Manager, what kind of changes have there been with your partnership?

EJ: Surgient was one of the first software vendors to integrate with VMware ESX Server and we continue to have a strong technology relationship with them - their acquisition of Akimbi didn't change that. As VMware has grown as a company they have added resources to better support their software partner and, in many ways, we work together much better now then we ever have. Of course we don't do much in the way of joint sales or marketing activities because we compete with VMware Lab Manager, but on the whole we feel it's a great relationship.

You recently announced a new version of VQMS, your automated virtual lab provisioning software for software developers and quality assurance testers, what new features stand out in this release?

EJ: We recently released Surgient Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS) version 5.3. The focus in 5.3 was making it easier to get started using the virtual lab environment, making it better to use in the most common enterprise environments and also to broaden our heterogeneous platform support. So we added an easier installation and configuration system in v5.3 as well as a new community support system through the Surgient Success website. We added advanced agentless networking capabilities in 5.3 that take the ability to create and clone labs that mirror the production environment to the next level, including advanced VLAN support that can coordinate at the switch. We also, as always, support the latest versions of virtual infrastructure from Microsoft and VMware.

Some people may not be aware of it, but your company also offers software that helps with software demonstration and training using virtual machines and automated provisioning. Can you tell us a little more about what those products offer your customers and how they are using them?

EJ: Our vision for virtual labs has always been as a platform that supports then entire software development and deployment lifecycle (SDLC). In each phase of the SDLC you have different individuals, roles and workflows and we package those commonalities into applications that can best deliver the business results required by those teams. Enterprise software companies, for example, have seen big changes in the size and complexity of deployment architecture of their applications and this has led to difficulties in demonstrating and supporting the evaluation of those applications. We have an application, Virtual Demo Lab Management System that uses virtual labs to solve these problems and understands the specific needs of the software pre-sales process. Similarly, many companies face challenges when it comes to educating the user community around enterprise applications. Studies show that people learn better when they have the ability to practice what they have learned, but it's difficult to support this in the production roll-out of an application. We have an application, Virtual Training Lab Management System, that uses virtual labs to support the classroom deployment of hands-on application training labs. This enables, for example, each student to have their own version of a production application where they can practice new skills and thus be ready to work with new applications when they are deployed. More and more we see IT operations groups charged with supporting the entire SDLC and our goal is to make sure that we have the best-of-breed applications that help them most effectively use virtual labs to achieve their goals.

What is the best way for people to learn more about virtual labs and Surgient's virtual lab management applications?

EJ: We have a community site, Surgient Success (http://success.surgient.com/), which provides discussion forums, best practices information, tutorials and other information to help ensure that their is broad understanding about the use and benefits of virtual lab management applications. We also encourage that people download Surgient VQMS and try it out and compare it to other virtual lab management applications. The product is available for free download with a 45-day evaluation license at the Surgient website (http://www.surgient.com/download). We also regularly host webinars to help educate people about the benefits of virtual labs. Many recorded webinars, as well as white papers, case studies and other information, are available on the Surgient website.

I'd like to thank Erik Josowitz for taking time out to speak with me about this subject.

Posted by David Marshall on December 3, 2007 04:55 AM

December 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

FAST Looks to Licensing Issues with Virtualization

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) was set up in 1984 by the British Computer Society's Copyright Committee. It was the world's first anti-software piracy organization working to protect the intellectual property rights of software publishers. The federation is now asking its members to look into the often puzzling world of virtualization licensing.

The anti-piracy group is bringing together many of its members such as Hewlett Packard, Hitachi Europe and Symantec/Altiris in hopes of coming up with ways to address this potential problem. Virtualization is growing faster than ever, and companies are finding out that one huge bonus that the technology offers is its ability to quickly and easily provision a virtual server. Unfortunately, this can also lead to a licensing problem if left unchecked.

FAST believes that companies are deciding to implement virtualization within their environments without understanding the ramifications of licensing and non-compliance first.

FAST chief executive, John Lovelock, believes that in many cases, the virtual environment can easily get out of control and that software vendors should provide a way to help measure usage in a virtual environment.

Lovelock added, "It is vital at this point that we demand greater clarity from vendors and look at the potential to canvas virtualization software vendors for their view on the future direction."

For the most part, software vendors certainly aren't doing customers any favors when it comes to licensing in a virtual environment. To be honest, in many respects, it can be quite confusing as to the verbiage found in many EULA's when it comes time to installing and/or tracking software in a virtual machine. Microsoft has recently attempted to address the issue, whether you are in favor of what they have done or not. Third-party virtualization management solutions are now starting to address the issue as well, trying to gain insight into what's going on within the virtual machine.

Posted by David Marshall on December 2, 2007 02:49 PM

December 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Akorri Reaches Out to SMBs and Migo Goes Virtual with Portable Devices

Performance management is a hot market segment right now in the virtualization space. And Akorri is attempting to get their product into more hands by offering new packages and pricing that caters to the small and medium sized business market. And with a new patent in hand, Migo Software is moving forward with their MigoSync product to help transform portable storage devices into mobile virtual PCs. listen LISTEN!

Posted by David Marshall on December 2, 2007 02:12 PM

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