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TAG: Virtualization Apps/Tools

May 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft opens Beta of its Offline Virtual Machine Servicing tool

Microsoft has opened up the Beta program for one of its latest virtualization tools, the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool. The tool aims to address one of the new IT challenges created by virtualization - how do I keep my offline, stored or template virtual machine images up-to-date?

Virtual machines that are stored offline for a period of time are not receiving updates or patches to its operating system, applications or anti-virus solution. These images typically become out-of-date and out of compliance, and if deployed or cloned, they can either quickly be attacked, compromised or attack other network resources.

While the name of the tool is "Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool", the tool doesn't quite go as far as you might think, not yet anyway. At the present time, the tool involves bringing the "offline" virtual machine "online" in order to update it, and when finished, it returns it back to its offline and stored state. The tool sounds very similar to VMware's new Update Manager tool, also used for patch management.

Microsoft's tool works with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (VMM), PowerShell, and either Microsoft Windows Server Update Services 3.0 (WSUS) or Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007.

Microsoft describes the workflow like so:

The tool uses "servicing jobs" to manage the update operations based on lists of existing virtual machines stored in VMM. Using Windows Workflow Foundation technology, a servicing job runs snippets of PowerShell scripts to work with virtual machines. For each virtual machine, the servicing job:

"Wakes" the virtual machine (deploys it to a host and starts it).
Triggers the appropriate software update cycle (Configuration Manager or WSUS).
Shuts down the updated virtual machine and returns it to the library.

The tool works with Windows Task Scheduler to determine when to run the servicing job.

If you haven't already, sign up for Microsoft Connect and then sign up for the Beta of Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool.

Posted by David Marshall on May 14, 2008 05:05 AM

May 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft makes their heterogeneous virtualization management play

During Microsoft Management Summit 2008, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, outlined the company's dynamic datacenter strategy. Part of Microsoft's strategy is to expand its virtualization capabilities and to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.

"At Microsoft we are helping redefine what it means to do IT management in the enterprise with the new capabilities we are announcing today," Muglia said. "By taking our knowledge of the Windows environment and expanding it to address heterogeneous management needs across platforms, applications, hardware and virtualization, we are opening up a new level of opportunity for companies to drive greater efficiency, responsiveness and value for their business."

Muglia got a positive response from the crowd for the announcement of Microsoft's next version of Virtual Machine Manager. And well he should have. Microsoft is taking a different approach here than I think it would have only a few short years ago. Facing an uphill battle in the virtualization market for the past couple of years, the company is coming at the problem from another angle, management. The argument has been made by many, including myself, that the hypervisor is headed toward becoming commodity. Yes, blasphemy to many people, however, approaching virtualization from the management and application side seems to be a key positioning statement. And it is one that Microsoft is ready to make with Virtual Machine Manager.

Microsoft wants to be the single pane of glass for managing virtualized and physical IT assets. So to reach that goal, the company is going to manage the physical assets as well as the virtual assets from its own hypervisor solution, Hyper-V, its hosted server virtualization platform, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, as well as virtualization platforms from its competitors, starting with VMware ESX.

Out of the gate, VMM won't be able to do everything that VMware VirtualCenter is capable of doing. So, there will be a few important gaps in the product from that perspective. However over time, in typical Microsoft fashion, the product will be enhanced and improved upon... the question will be how quickly, and how important are the missing components to the mass IT audience.

Andi Mann, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates, said that Microsoft understands the big picture here in a way that certain competitors don't.

"Firstly, Microsoft understands that the success or failure of virtualization deployments rests substantially on how well you are able to manage them. Secondly, Microsoft understands that this management must be heterogeneous, as virtualization tends overwhelmingly to involve multiple layers of complexity."

In EMA's recent Q1/08 research report conducted with surveys of over 600 enterprises, findings showed that virtualization typically involves multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, UNIX, etc), multiple technologies (server virtualization, OS virtualization, application virtualization, desktop virtualization, cluster/grid computing, etc), and multiple vendors (VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, etc). The report found that 60% of enterprises planned to deploy server virtualization products from multiple vendors, and in general, over 90% of virtualization deployments will involve multiple platforms, technologies and vendors. Only 2% said they would deploy virtualization with just one platform, one technology and one vendor.

So perhaps Microsoft is right on the money with this one?

Mann brought up a good point while discussing the need for heterogeneous management, saying that if you cannot manage this complex heterogeneous environment, and these multiple layers of complexity, you risk human errors, increased downtime, rising costs, internal political problems, skill shortages, and more. This is a critical part of virtualization success, and "Microsoft is answering this requirement in a way that very few competitors are, least of all VMware."

Microsoft has a long way to go to reach feature parity with VMware's hypervisor product. But it looks like this new management approach to the dynamic datacenter might put Microsoft in a good position.

Mann summed it up best for me by saying, "Who would have thought that Microsoft, of all people, would look to win the virtualization battle with a heterogeneous solution?"

Beta software for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is now available for download. You can also find out more information about the product on Microsoft's Website or their System Center blog site.

Posted by David Marshall on May 4, 2008 03:21 PM

April 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Veeam announces beta program for its Reporter Enterprise Edition

Veeam has come a long way since releasing FastSCP to the VMware community back in October of 2006. Launching a number of virtualization application solutions since that time, the company has most recently entered into the VMware backup application race with their Veeam Backup for VMware Infrastructure 3 product.

Now, the company is further extending a previous product, Veeam Reporter, upgrading it to a more enterprise offering. Yesterday, the company opened up a public beta for Veeam Reporter Enterprise Edition. The new offering is now designed for large VMware Infrastructure 3 environments.

New features in Veeam Reporter Enterprise include:

Enterprise-level reporting - The Veeam Reporter Enterprise client-server architecture provides a web-access interface and SQL database back-end, allowing any administrator to generate and view granular reports on his or her area of interest.
Unattended data collection and ad hoc reporting – Veeam Reporter Enterprise separates the data collection and report generation steps, so users can set automated collection to occur at specific intervals, ensuring an up-to-date view is ready any time.
Configuration change management – Veeam Reporter Enterprise updates the SQL database incrementally, allowing configuration change management reporting. Administrators can get point-in-time views of their virtual environment and generate reports to analyze configuration changes over time.

"Our larger customers like the functionality of Veeam Reporter, but they need more scalable capabilities, such as a Microsoft SQL back-end, automated data collection, and a web interface, so that’s what Reporter Enterprise delivers," said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam president and CEO. "We're still making performance improvements, so the beta version will not be as fast as the final released version will be, but those who are interested in trying it out and giving us their feedback will have a strong voice in helping to create the final version of the product."

This beta version is available now, and will work until July 15th. Veeam makes it known that there is no planned upgrade path from the beta to the final release, and all history will be lost once you move to the final version from the beta build. If you'd like to participate in the beta program, you can download the beta now.

Posted by David Marshall on April 22, 2008 04:57 AM

April 20, 2008 | Comments: (0)

openQRM 3.5 released, but Qlusters bids it adieu

A posting on SourceForge.net states that Qlusters has released openQRM 3.5 to the open source community. The 3.5 release succeeds release 3.1.4 and includes a set of new features based on input from various datacenters and test/dev labs.

And while a new release of a software solution is usually quite interesting, what is catching most people's attention is the rest of the announcement.

In addition to making 3.5 available for download, Qlusters announced at the same time that they are saying goodbye to the open source project. In spite of the project being downloaded more than 120,000 times, Qlusters has decided to part ways and leave the ongoing development of openQRM in the hands of the open source community.

Matt Rechenburg, the openQRM project manager, will continue to actively lead the project. However, without Qlusters, there is no commercial vendor standing behind the project to back it up. However, if they want to, the open source community can certainly continue with the project. If there is enough involvement and interest in the solution, perhaps another vendor will swoop in to support it.

It still isn't clear as to why Qlusters left the project. The company just received $10 million in VC funding last July, but so far haven't said anything about what they plan to do going forward.

Matt Aslett from the 451 Group has an interesting way of looking at things:

No word yet from Qlusters on its future direction. However, it is not surprising to see changes at the company. It has been particularly quiet since former CTO William Hurley left to become chief open source strategy architect at BMC. In fact, I was more surprised to see an announcement regarding Qlusters than I was the fact that it is getting out of openQRM development.

Qlusters did say that they would like to wish the openQRM project community, and Matt Rechenburg, a future of prosperity and continued success.

Posted by David Marshall on April 20, 2008 12:47 PM

April 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Vizioncore's public beta of vReplicator 2.5 available

Back in September of 2007, Vizioncore announced the release of vReplicator 2.1, the company's replication tool for virtual environments. That version added a more simplified disaster recovery process, easier failover testing, and improved replication speeds.

The product gives users the ability to replicate the entire virtual machine from many hosts to a single host and between different hardware platforms. With this software, replication is performed at the storage block level.

Now, the company is offering a beta version of vReplicator - version 2.5. And with this latest version, the company has added new features to help with the replication of virtual machines.

vReplicator 2.5 now includes a VSS driver that utilizes Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service to pause application writes. This feature will enable quiescing of supported databases to provide a transaction consistent image at the D/R site.
vReplicator 2.5 offers a new method of replication that combines the control of snapshot replication with the intelligence of Vizioncore's Differential Engine. Customers can schedule shorter replication intervals by utilizing snapshot replication, knowing that vReplicator will automatically engage it's leading Differential Engine to resynchronize the source and destination VMs without the need to resend the whole image.
Enhanced Job Control
Replicate to more than one destination
Reporting Enhancements
Skipping VMDKs

The beta release can be downloaded on Vizioncore's Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on April 15, 2008 07:22 PM

April 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Skytap reveals cloud-based services as it enters virtual lab market

Skytap had a busy week - it emerged out of stealth mode, changed its name from illumita (going from a some what confusing name to a name that better reflects the company's vision), and at the same time revealed the limited availability of its first product offering, Skytap Virtual Lab, a virtual lab automation solution available as an on-demand service over the Web.

"Skytap provides customers with cloud-based services that enable them to capitalize on the wave of virtualization technology sweeping the industry," said Scott Roza, chief executive officer of Skytap. "Cloud computing is gaining traction because a growing percentage of companies are demanding solutions that deliver value quickly, scale with business need, and don't have the risk of an in-house implementation. Skytap's Virtual Lab, which combines cloud-based virtualized infrastructure with an industry leading lab automation application, has tremendous potential to improve the timely delivery of quality applications to the business while increasing lab efficiency and lowering cost."

The company's first product, Skytap Virtual Lab, may sound familiar to many of you. The company is entering a fairly crowded space to compete with industry veterans such as VMware Lab Manager, VMLogix LabManager and Surgient VQMS.

Much like these other solutions, Skytap Virtual Lab enables application development and test teams to provision lab infrastructure on demand and automates the set-up, testing and tear down of complex, multi-tiered environments.

Skytap's solution differs from VMware and VMLogix in that the company offers their product as a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, planning entry level subscriptions starting at $100/mo and virtual machine usage from as low as $1/hr. Other than the pricing model, this is very similar to what Surgient has been offering for years. Although in addition to their hosted solution, Surgient also offers an installable version for customer's who want to create their virtual lab environment in-house or at a hosted datacenter facility of their choosing.

Skytap seems to have a sharp group of people on their management team. Scott Roza, CEO, was the vice president of worldwide OEM and channel sales for HP/Opsware's Business Service Automation business unit. Also from HP, Steve Brodie, CMO, has a solid background in this space as the former Sr. Director of products for the Mercury Performance Testing product line. In keeping with the HP theme, John Janakiraman, VP of Engineering and CTO, was the research manager for the Data Center Architecture team at HP Labs. Matt Perrine, VP of Sales and Business Development served as EMC's first sales vice president for its Open Software Division. Ian Knox, Director of Product Marketing brings experience and knowledge from Microsoft where he acted as group product manager for Microsoft Visual Studio. And finally, Jed Stafford, Director of Operations, served as a Network Architect, also at Microsoft.

According to the company, Skytap Virtual Lab capabilities include the following:

Virtual Infrastructure On-Demand. Virtually unlimited hardware, software and storage available from any location and any browser. Skytap Virtual Lab scales up and down with software project demands and requires no upfront investment.
Automated Set-Up and Tear-Down of Environments. A full-featured, Web-based virtual lab automation application that eliminates manual set-up and tear-down tasks and enables the rapid provisioning and replication of multi-machine production environments for development and testing.
Skytap Library. A pre-populated software library that includes major operating systems, databases and applications in multiple languages that dramatically reduces media installation tasks and enables construction of lab environments by dragging and dropping pre-configured virtual machines.
Collaboration in a Virtual Environment. The capability to instantly collaborate on software issues and defects in a virtualized environment. Entire multi-machine lab environments can be suspended and shared with distributed, global team members to enable reproduction and diagnosis of software bugs and issues.

The company offers a product tour of its solution to try and give you a better visual as to what they are selling.

Posted by David Marshall on April 13, 2008 03:35 PM

April 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)

eG Innovations tackles the virtualization management market

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Srinivas Ramanathan, founder, president & CEO of eG Innovations, Inc. I stopped by their booth at VMworld Europe, and was happy to follow up with Ramanathan a few weeks later to find out more about the company and its product solution.

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Q. Tell us a little about eG Innovations.

A. eG Innovations develops products that make IT infrastructure management easy, effective, and efficient. The focus on monitoring business services end-to-end rather than individual network, server, application silos differentiates eG Innovations' products. The company's patented technologies provide proactive monitoring of every layer of every tier in the infrastructure, thereby enabling rapid diagnosis and recovery in enterprise and service provider networks. By ensuring high availability and optimum performance of mission-critical business services, eG Innovations' solutions help enhance customers' competitive positioning, lower operational costs and optimize the performance of their infrastructures. The company has over 120 customers in 14 countries, including of all sizes in government, banking/finance, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing and service industries.

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Q. The virtualization management space is becoming somewhat crowded lately, with a number of companies either migrating their management solution over to support virtualization or new companies starting up to try and answer the management issue. How does the eG VMware Monitor differ from other products in the virtualization space?

A. Many solutions in the virtualization space focus on monitoring the virtual environment as a "silo." These solutions extract metrics using instrumentation/APIs available in VMware ESX and Virtual Center. Even though these metrics may be incorporated into a common console where metrics for physical servers, networks and applications in the infrastructure are also available, there is little or no correlation between the virtual infrastructure's performance and the performance of the applications that rely on the virtual infrastructure. The eG Enterprise suite also relies on the in-built VMware instrumentation for insights into the VMware infrastructure.

However, it differs from other VM monitoring solutions in several key ways:
(i) Firstly, the ESX infrastructure has only an "outside" view of each of the VMs supported by it. The VM Kernel does not know the details of what is going on within a VM; e.g., if the CPU usage of a VM is high, is that because the workload is high, or because there is a single run-away process that is taking up all the CPU resources? To effectively monitor a virtual infrastructure, it is essential for a monitoring system to have an "inside" view of each VM -- to know what is happening within the VM. eG Enterprise includes a patent-pending In-N-Out monitoring technology wherein a single agent is able to monitor the ESX server, the service console, and provide both an inside and an outside view of each of the VMs.

(ii) Each of the metrics collected by the eG agents can be automatically baselined. Past history is used to determine time-varying norms for the metrics, and alerts are triggered when a threshold is violated. By avoiding the need to set manual thresholds for thousands of metrics, auto-baselining as supported by eG Enterprise can save hundreds of man hours of consulting time. This capability is also critical for an IT infrastructure to be managed proactively - so alerts are generated before users complain.

(iii) Solutions that monitor the virtual infrastructure as a silo disregard the fact that the virtual infrastructure is an integral part of an end-to-end business service. For example, a banking application may include a web server front-end, a middleware application server and a database backend. The database server may be running on a VM that is hosted on an ESX server. If another VM on the same ESX server has an I/O-intensive application (e.g., a media server) running on it, the I/O-intensive application may affect the performance of the database server. Inter-dependencies in a virtual environment (which applications are running on VMs that are co-hosted on the same ESX server) play an important role in the performance of the end-to-end business service. eG Enterprise analyzes the performance of the virtual infrastructure in the context of the business services that it supports. Inter-application dependencies as well as inter-VM dependencies are taken into account when eG Enterprise diagnoses where the root-cause of a problem with a business service lies.

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Q. Usually I hear things like "just let VMware's DRS, HA and VMotion handle the resources and move the virtual machines around for you to keep them up and operational." Why then do you find it important to track VMotion server moves?

A. VMware DRS and VMotion are very good technologies that enable an adaptive, dynamic environment. However, the dynamic nature of the virtual environment makes proper monitoring and management a challenge. For example, a database server may be on ESX server A at one instant of time and on ESX server B at another instant of time. Hence, dependency mappings used for root-cause diagnosis (as discussed in the first question) are no longer static. The monitoring system needs to be able to dynamically determine which VM is running on which ESX server.

VMotion/DRS are based on pre-specified criteria. If these criteria are set too aggressively, this may result in unnecessary movement of virtual machines across ESX servers. Such situations need to be monitored and remedied.

One of the key questions that comes up with VMotion/DRS is - why did a VM move? Since it tracks what is happening at every layer of the virtual infrastructure, eG Enterprise has the information that administrators can use to answer this question - I.e., what happened on the ESX server prior to the VM movement - what triggered this?

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Q. What are some of the challenges with monitoring VMware infrastructures?

A. VMware technologies and virtualization in general aim to make better use of existing hardware resources, by running multiple VMs on the same hardware. Any time there is resource sharing, there are also issues of resource contention. In a VMware environment, the performance of a VM may be affected by another VM running on the same physical server.These dependencies have to be taken into account when monitoring and managing this infrastructure. The use of VMotion and DRS makes the problem even harder, since VMs could be moving from one ESX server to another.

One of the benefits of virtualization is the speed with which new VMs can be provisioned to address the business imperatives of flexibility and rapid response to changing service requirements. This of course also carries the widely discussed risk of server sprawl, with its potential for loss of control and oversight. In these times of strict corporate governance and regulatory compliance, the monitoring solution needs to give management absolute confidence that they are in control and are monitoring the overall infrastructure in an appropriate manner.

You can download a copy of a new whitepaper on this topic.

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Q. What kind of traction have you been getting with this product?

A. eG Enterprise is deployed in over 120 sites worldwide. Most of these are using VMware in some form or the other, and eG Enterprise is being used to monitor the target infrastructure end-to-end. With its support for applications hosted on ESX as well as the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), eG Enterprise offers a common way to monitor a customer's virtual infrastructure. One of our largest VM deployments is a top 5 US bank which has recently deployed over 400 ESX servers to support close to 25,000 VDI desktops.

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Q. Can you tell us more about the information you are gathering from the virtual machines themselves? Are agents involved or not?

A. Knowing what is happening within the VM is key to effective root-cause diagnosis and performance management in a virtual infrastructure. Recognizing this, eG Enterprise has incorporated a patent-pending In-N-Out monitoring technology that includes in-depth insights into what is happening with the VM guest simply by installing a single agent on an ESX server. Without requiring an agent on every guest VM, eG Enterprise is able to determine what processes are running inside a VM, which are the top resource consuming processes, which user is logged on to the guest VM, etc.

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Q. Is your solution specific to VMware only? Or does it support other platforms and applications?

A. eG Enterprise offers monitoring of the virtual as well as the physical environment. Support for over 80+ applications (Citrix, terminal services, SAP, Active Directory, SQL, Oracle, Sun ONE, and many others) and 7+ operating systems (Windows, Linux, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, etc.) is available in the eG Enterprise suite.

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Q. Are you supporting or plan to support ESX server 3i?

A. Yes - support for ESX 3i will be available as part of eG Enterprise v 4.1 which is due for release at the end of April 2008. Whereas ESX 3 and 3.5 have the service console where an agent can be installed, ESX 3i does not have the service console. Hence, eG Enterprise will provide a completely agentless monitoring solution for ESX 3i. This solution will have almost all the capabilities of the local agent in ESX 3 / 3.5.

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Q. Do you plan to support other virtualization technologies?

A. Yes. Our goal is to be the leading provider of virtualization management software. Towards this end, we are working on supporting Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, Solaris LDOM and AIX LPAR technology. Support for VMware and Solaris Containers (Zones) is already available in eG Enterprise.

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Q. What is the product's management interface? Is it web-based?

A. Yes - eG Enterprise follows a 100% web-based architecture - the agents communicate with the management console using the web protocols (HTTP/HTTPS) and the only way to access the management console to view alerts, pop reports, etc. is using the web browser.

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Q. How is the product priced? And do you offer a free trial?

A. eG Enterprise is priced per VMware ESX server being monitored; i.e., the licensing is not per CPU, per socket or per VM. This provides administrators insights into the performance of the VM kernel, the service console (if applicable) and the individual VMs and the applications that run on these VMs.

And yes, we do offer a free two week trial of the software. If you are interested, please contact eG Innovations by sending email to sales@eginnovations.com

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Again, I'd like to thank Srinivas Ramanathan, founder, president & CEO of eG Innovations, Inc. for spending time with me and telling us more about the company and its products.

Posted by David Marshall on April 6, 2008 05:40 AM

March 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)

One of the big takeaways from VMworld Europe - management tools are needed

One of the big takeaways from my VMworld Europe trip was that VMware is definitely responding to the need for management tools. During the show, I couldn't escape from the word "management". VMware announced a number of management products just before the start of the show, and then each of these (Lifecycle Manager, Stage Manager and Site Recovery Manager) applications took center stage during the keynote, the exhibit floor, the break out sessions and the hands-on labs.

Don't get me wrong here; I applaud them for this management bombardment. I think the application stack and the management of virtualization are of the utmost importance in today's virtual datacenter. Some of the problems and concerns with managing the virtualization environment have been key deterrents to people fully implementing the technology into their datacenters.

However, at the same time, what we can't afford is more confusion added into the virtualization mix. Specifically, I'm talking about VMware Lab Manager, Stage Manager and Lifecycle Manager. I sat through numerous break-out sessions covering these tools and even attended their hands-on labs in hopes of getting a better understanding of them. Afterward, it was my understanding that these products were all designed to solve different use cases (specifically, VMware Lab Manager and Stage Manager) or handle different situations. And because of that, VMware thinks of them and treats them as separate products.

VMware Lifecycle Manager comes from the technology acquired in the Dunes acquisition. The product allows companies to implement a consistent and automated process for requesting, approving, deploying, updating, and retiring virtual machines.

VMware Lab Manager comes from the technology acquired in the Akimbi acquisition. It addresses the needs of development and QA engineers by providing them self-service provisioning of multi-tier virtual machines.

VMware Stage Manager is an extension of the Akimbi technology. It addresses the needs of the IT and application administrators responsible for rolling new and updated IT services into production. And it enables the streamlined and accelerated transition of complex, multi-tier IT services through the pre-production stages into production.

VMware Lab Manager is the only one of these applications currently available. The others are still in Beta with an expected Q2 release. Once the applications come out and people start to bang away at them, I would assume that some sort of VMware Management suite would then take shape and the applications would get wired together for a more powerful workflow experience.

According to Ravi Gururaj, founder and CTO of VMLogix, all of the customers that VMLogix has spoken with have expressed an interest in seeing a subset of the best features of Lab Manager + Stage Manager + Lifecycle Manager built into a single management framework/tool, and that this is the direction or view of the market that VMLogix is taking long term.

One of VMware's partners and competitors, Surgient, is also taking a closer look at these new management tools - for obvious reasons.

Erik Josowitz, Surgient Vice President of Marketing, said the real issue is the notion of staging into production. And that to him, this requires 2 things: a real understanding of what is in production and the ability to model a change process on objects that maintain that context.

Josowitz said that VMware fails right now on both counts.

He stated, "VMware continues to build products that expect or require everything to be running in VMware. No customer environment we have ever seen looks like that. It rarely even looks like that for a single application." Josowitz continued, "VMware's model assumes that all production apps will ultimately be installed in VMware virtual machines and that's just not workable. Until they have a software lifecycle management solution that doesn't presume the endpoint is VMware it just won't work in most enterprises. Add the strong support and growth we expect to see around Citrix XenServer and MS Hyper-V this year and the picture becomes worse for VMware's management approach."

When talking about the change process on objects, Josowitz said, "Stage Manager addresses many of the shortcomings of Lab Manager and gets a bit closer to what Surgient does (by adding support for multiple resource pools and a workflow model) but still doesn't have any of the active resource management (scheduling, guaranteed reservations) or library management capabilities we provide. Our analysis of Stage Manager is that it's just Lab Manager 2.0. They also haven't addressed any of the issues around fencing, which is really what primarily prevents Lab Manager from working in real world scenarios. Fencing can't span physical hosts, can't model multi-tier networks, can't address and manage more than 1 virtual NIC per VM - makes it really hard to even model a basic production MS Exchange configuration!"

Many people have been bringing up the fact that VMware is either acquiring or building out technology that directly competes with its partners - like Surgient and VMLogix.

However, if VMware wants to remain the virtualization leader, it has to keep developing and providing these types of management products as fast as possible. The differentiation between virtualization vendors will come down to add-on applications. And if the hypervisor does end up becoming a commodity as many people claim, then VMware would need to provide these types of applications to its customers in order to continue to post its impressive financial numbers.

Posted by David Marshall on March 15, 2008 02:52 PM

March 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Is VMware Infrastructure plug-in mania happening?

Since James Brown rightfully took the title of "the hardest working man in show business", I suppose that it is only right that we start calling Andrew Kutz the hardest working man in VMware Infrastructure Plug-ins.

Last month, I told you how Andrew reverse engineered plug-in capabilities for VI3 VirtualCenter. And to kick things off, he not only created what many called an extremely useful or much needed GUI plug-in tool for VMware's Storage VMotion, but he also started to document the process so that other interested developers could begin to create their own useful plug-ins as well.

Andrew and his company, lostcreations, clearly state that these documented procedures and the plug-ins being created are in no way endorsed or supported by VMware. They are provided "as-is".

While at VMworld Europe, I heard the name Andrew Kutz and lostcreations mentioned in at least two break-out sessions and one hands-on lab. VMware is well aware of what Andrew has started, and in fact, I was told by at least one VMware employee that VMware is going to be releasing their own documentation and procedures on how to create your own "supported" plug-ins. Until that time however, lostcreations is moving full steam ahead.

Kutz has launched a new Web site for this very purpose, aptly called viplugins. Here, lostcreations intends to provide developers with a location to store and distribute other VI plug-ins that are being developed.

Already, there is quite an impressive list of plug-ins being made available.

One of the latest entries and perhaps most interesting additions to the list is Invoke. Andrew describes it like so:

"Invoke allows third-party applications, such as Perl scripts, Java applications, or other .NET programs, to be launched directly from within the VI 2.5 client using the currently authenticated session cookie. Aside from our original SVMotion plugin, Invoke is the most important piece of software designed to extend the VI client to arrive on the scene to date. Invoke is by its existence proof that a simple idea can be incredibly powerful in implementation. Download the Invoke plugin and see what kind of mash ups you can create!"

"Invoke will allow IBM or VizionCore, or anyone, to launch applications directly from the VI client using an existing session. This preserves experience continuity for users by enabling single-sign-on. It also allows non C# languages to act like plugins. You could launch a modal Java window (swing, awt, it doesn't matter) and it would act like a plugin, using the authentication token from the VI session."

See? What did I tell you? Extremely interesting.

But in addition to these newly added plug-ins, the VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Plugin and Extension Programming Guide from lostcreations has also been updated, with the latest version (1.3) being released today. You can download the guide, here. And remember, once you read through the documentation, feel free to share your creations on this site.

Posted by David Marshall on March 11, 2008 07:27 PM

February 24, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Is VMsafe VMware's answer to security concerns?

According to a recent report put out by the Reuters news agency, VMware has formed partnerships with some of the world's biggest security software makers, namely Symantec Corp, McAfee Inc, the Internet Security Systems division of International Business Machines Corp, EMC Corp's RSA security unit and Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. Why? VMware wants to better protect the hypervisor and its virtual machines.

The project is being called VMsafe and the official announcement is expected in a matter of days at the VMworld Europe conference taking place in Cannes, France.

Security complexities and unknown security factors probably have kept any number of organizations from adding the server virtualization technology into their production environments. And I'm sure VMware is quite aware of that problem, and they know that they need to have a clear answer for these security concerns in order to further penetrate the market.

Third-party companies such as Blue Lane Technologies and Catbird showed up at VMworld 2007 to showcase their VMware security solutions, and it looks like both companies will be exhibiting at VMworld Europe 2008. It will certainly be interesting to see how this new VMsafe solution compares with the offerings from these companies and ultimately how it will affect them.

Posted by David Marshall on February 24, 2008 05:04 AM

February 23, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0 released but lacks virtualization support

Sun Microsystems announced the general availability of Sun xVM Ops Center 1.0, the company's heterogeneous systems management tool. The management tool will become a key component of Sun xVM software, the company's open virtualization and management platform.

From a single console, Sun xVM Ops Center enables customers to simplify the management of all assets, regardless of the operating system or hardware platform on which they run. The management console automates time consuming, routine system administration tasks, making it easier for users to manage thousands of IT assets simultaneously. As part of the company’s ongoing commitment to the open source community, Sun has released updates to the source code used to build Sun xVM Ops Center to the OpenxVM.org community under the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3).

Sun xVM Ops Center runs in cross-platform Linux and Solaris Operating System OS-based x86 and SPARC environments. Key features in Sun xVM Ops Center include:

Server Discovery & Inventory Management – Automatically scans and identifies servers across the network, even when powered off, which enables faster deployment and management of IT assets.
Firmware and Bare Metal Server Provisioning – Delivers automatic and 'hands off' installation of bare-metal operating systems, RPMs and firmware, bringing new efficiencies to IT departments.
Patch Management & Updating – Provides up-to-date patch management tools for Red Hat, SUSE and the Solaris OS, offering organizations greater control over their datacenter plans and minimizing downtime. In addition, unique patch simulation capabilities remove uncertainty when customers apply updates.
Managing & Monitoring – Securely and remotely manages users and heterogeneous datacenter assets, and proactively resolves problems by monitoring critical parameters, improving the security and stability of systems.
Compliance Reporting – Provides an up-to-date view into the system state, patch status, and software portfolio, which helps with quick and accurate reporting and compliance validation.

However, the 1.0 release of the product is missing two key features: Microsoft Windows support and support for virtualization. Oren Teich, Sun Director of Product Management and Marketing for xVM, said that while Windows support is not currently available, the company is committed to offering it in the future. Teich also said that come this Summer, Sun would be releasing its hypervisor product along with an update to xVM Ops Center that would add new virtualization capabilities.

"Sun xVM Ops Center is the next milestone in delivering on our Sun xVM virtualization strategy," said Steve Wilson, vice president of xVM, Sun Microsystems. "The Sun xVM strategy is built around three key differentiators: enterprise-grade features, openness and interoperability – all designed to meet the needs of customers who are looking for best-of-breed solutions for their dynamic datacenters. Sun's unique virtualization and management strategy gives our customers choice and breadth, spanning from desktop and servers to storage, appliances and networks."

A satellite server is priced at $10,000 per year and supported subscriptions for xVM Ops Center are priced from $100 to $350 a year per managed server, depending on functionality required.

Posted by David Marshall on February 23, 2008 07:30 AM

February 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Veeam Software expands into VMware management

Veeam Software, well known for its widely distributed FastSCP tool, announced that it has entered into the VMware management market with a new suite designed to address many of the challenges facing ESX administrators.

According to Veeam, the management suite works with and extends VMware's own management platform, VMware VirtualCenter.

The company said that the new suite offers the following capabilities:

Reporting and Documentation – Veeam Reporter automatically discovers and collects information about the VMware Infrastructure 3 environment, its components and configuration settings, including virtual machines, network, storage and VMotion. Reporter generates comprehensive reports in Visio, Excel, Word or PDF formats to help ESX administrators with configuration and change management. In addition, Reporter's Storage Capacity Report helps administrators and datacenter managers with storage management, capacity planning and chargeback.
Performance monitoring and troubleshooting – Veeam Monitor is an agentless solution that supports the monitoring of multiple ESX Servers and multiple VirtualCenters. Veeam Monitor provides single-screen detailed reporting and alerting of key usage and performance statistics by cluster, resource pool or virtual machine.
Configuration management – Veeam Configurator allows administrators to manage advanced settings and subsystems of multiple VMware ESX Servers easily without accessing the command line, writing scripts or manually editing configuration files. Veeam Configurator provides a Windows GUI that integrates with and extends the capabilities of VMware VirtualCenter.

"Virtualization technology offers an opportunity to dramatically improve the flexibility and manageability of enterprise systems," said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam Software president and CEO. "On the other hand, fast virtualization adoption by medium and large enterprises creates new systems management challenges. These new virtualized environments call for different approaches, as well as new management tools. Traditional physical systems management tools simply aren't designed to do it. Veeam has created the most comprehensive set of tools designed specifically for VMware ESX environments."

Veeam's new management suite for VMware is now available at a cost of $270 per socket. The company will be demonstrating the new product while at VMworld Europe next week.

Posted by David Marshall on February 19, 2008 04:42 AM

February 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware community spices up VMware Storage VMotion

One of the things I like about being in the IT industry is the sense of community. And as both VMware and virtualization in general continue to expand in popularity, the virtualization community continues to grow around it. Case in point, VMware offered a new feature with its VI 3.5 product, Storage VMotion, and members of the community have already started helping others through the creation of additional 3rd-party utilities that help expand the ease of use of this VMware feature.

VMware describes Storage VMotion as a state-of-the-art solution that enables users to perform live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous storage arrays with complete transaction integrity and no interruption in service for critical applications.

This feature does for virtual machines and storage what VMware VMotion did for virtual machines and compute capacity. However, members of the community may not have been overly excited about the way it was implemented.

To try and answer that calling, there have already been two virtualization community members that have taken matters into their own hands.

Alexander Gaiswinkler has created a Storage VMotion graphical user interface. His instructions are simple: Install the VMware Remote CLI on a Windows machine to the standard path, Save the file vms.pl into the C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VI Remote CLI\bin directory, Save the svmotionGUI.exe on the machine, and then Double click it.

You can download this utility from the VMware Community Forum.

Around the same time, Andrew Kutz from Lostcreations developed his own utility to solve end-user woes from using VMware's Storage VMotion capabilities.

The tool is called SVMotion, and it is a VI 2.5 client plug-in that extends the client's functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke Storage VMotion operations. Kutz caveats the tool with a notice that the plug-in is not supported by VMware in any way.

Kutz told me that he had been tinkering around with reverse engineering the VI Client Plug-In architecture for a few weeks before Gaiswinkler's stand-a-lone GUI application came out. The application was well received, said Kutz, but it was only a wrapper for the VMware RemoteCLI and he believed it should and could be a real plug-in.

When asked about the challenges of creating such a project, Kutz said "there is of course zero documentation on how to write VI client plugins"; and so he plans on releasing a white paper soon that will show other developers how they can create their own plugins. Kutz stated that "VMware also bypasses their own SDK within the plugin framework, instead transforming the largely procedural SDK set of APIs into a more object oriented namespace called Vmomi. And of course, this has no documentation either."

The VMware Community Forum has been discussing both of these utilities. So far, everyone seems to really enjoy the functionality that these tools deliver. Kutz said, "The VMware forums are alive with users wondering why VMware has not incorporated this functionality themselves." And he added, "My best guess is that they are working on it, but are running into some of the same challenges as me. For example, my plugin does not show file sizes (yet). This seems like a natural necessity for a storage migration plugin, but getting file size information from datastores is slow and cumbersome, and does not lend well to a snappy interface."

You can find out more information about the SVMotion plug-in on Lostcreations.com, here. And you can download the tool, here.

Remember, neither of these tools are supported by VMware and therefore are to be used at your own risk.

Posted by David Marshall on February 16, 2008 07:32 AM

February 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware: virtualization management suite

Tek-Tools Software, a provider of IT resource management software solutions, announced a new module for the company's Profiler Suite - Profiler for VMware. The new module is designed to optimize capacity utilization, performance, and availability of virtual IT infrastructures. With the addition of this module to the Profiler Suite, end users can now monitor all four IT infrastructure components – servers, storage, backup and apps – from one console including virtual servers.

"Profiler for VMware showed us that we could take many of our physical hosts and convert them to Virtual Machines, saving us space and cost in our datacenters and helping us centralize over eight terabytes of storage," said Ed Delgado, Storage Administrator, Risk Metrics. "It is a welcome addition to the Profiler Suite. Now I can look across the entire IT infrastructure – physical and virtual -- from a single console. At a glance from the Profiler console I can see how servers are performing, how much storage is available, the status of backup operations and application availability. Plus, I can drill down in any area for more in-depth reporting, the growth rate of allocated storage or historical performance of ESX servers, for example."

According to the company, Profiler for VMware provides visibility for:

Capacity planning – Eliminating wasted storage, reclaiming orphaned storage, and developing strategic growth plans based upon historical utilization, trending, and forecasting for both allocated and utilized storage.
Virtualization planning - Identifying candidates for virtualization.
Performance monitoring – Utilizing real-time and historical analysis and what-if scenario planning to optimize performance in the virtual environment.
Availability monitoring – Tracking inventory, status, and resource-utilization with threshold-based alerts across the virtual environment.

To find out more about the product, I spoke with Steve Harding, Director of Marketing at Tek-Tools.

Q. What made Tek-Tools get into the virtualization management business?

A. Customer demand. Tek-Tools has more than 800 customers using the Profiler Suite, which has been monitoring the physical infrastructure – servers, storage, backup and applications – for years. Customers said, we're adopting virtualization technologies and it's adding a significant layer of complexity in terms of management. Tek-Tools is introducing Profiler for VMware as its first virtualization monitoring tool to provide customers with visibility into the virtualized environment from the same solution that monitors their physical infrastructure.

Q: What do you feel are some of the biggest limitations of virtualization management right now? And how does Tek-Tools fill that void?

A: Virtualization has been positioned as the savior for server sprawl, and while it does deliver tremendous utilization improvements, it adds management complexity and can lead to virtual server sprawl. With consolidation, you no longer have physical servers to go to, and therefore you need visibility, or a "super human" admin to cope with it all. Profiler for VMware delivers visibility into the virtual environment. With this new module, the Profiler Suite provides end-to-end visibility into the virtual and physical infrastructure from a single console.

Q: How is your company addressing the challenges posed by virtualization?

A: By providing visibility into the two big areas of the IT shop today: Physical and Virtual, Admins can now look at the performance of all components in each one of those groups from one single easy-to-use console.

Also, virtualization immediately causes server and storage sprawl. Profiler can help identify over- or under-utilized resources and reclaim wasted storage that was not easy to identify before.

Q: Your software has been described as being agentless. Can you describe for us how you get the data and how you interact with the virtual machines?

A: Profiler for VMware leverages VMware's native APIs. The Profiler modular architecture allows for a single point for data-collection, or multiple for large environments. Profiler's data collectors make web services calls to the VMware's Virtual Center console.

For smaller environments where Virtual Center is not available, Profiler allows polling data remotely from each individual ESX Hosts if desired.

Q: With Profiler for VMware now released, what are your thoughts on a Xen-based profiler or Hyper-V? Is heterogeneity important to your users? Or are they more concerned with managing VMware and physical environments?

A: We are definitely looking into other virtualization vendors and yes, heterogeneity is important to our customers and therefore to us. We decided to start with VMware given the fact that it's currently #1 in the market. We treat virtualization as a platform/category and not as a single vendor. Tek-Tools has always been platform-neutral and we try to support every major vendor in each category. You can expect to see announcements about expanding our virtualization platforms support from us soon.

Q: Where do you see virtualization heading in the next year or two?

A: It's moving more toward the old "Mainframe days", or grid-computing model, where administrators will have a big cluster of heterogeneous resources (servers, storage, etc.) and that cluster will become a "Big Black Box" which could be thought as a big supercomputer. It's not a new concept at all but there's new terminology and technology around it.

Profiler for VMware is generally available directly and through Tek-Tools' channel partners. Pricing starts at $995 USD/ESX host regardless of the number of guests on the server.

I'd like to thank Steve Harding and Tek-Tools for taking the time to speak with me.

Posted by David Marshall on February 14, 2008 07:19 PM

February 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Vizioncore releases the latest virtualization conversion tool

Vizioncore has announced the release of vConverter 3.0, a virtualization conversion tool that the company claims as the "fastest, easiest and most reliable tool" for performing physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) machine conversions. The company can also claim wide platform support as it works with many of the leading server virtualization platform vendors: VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Virtual Iron.

According to the company, based on enterprise-class disk and networking technologies, vConverter allows system administrators to perform either single, multiple or scheduled 'lights out' machine conversions, providing an optimal way of designing and planning conversions to best fit infrastructure management needs.

To find out more information about Vizioncore's latest product and the market space that it is entering, I was able to catch up with Scott Polly, Senior Director of Product Management at Vizioncore, and get some really valuable answers.

Q: What makes Vizioncore's vConverter "the fastest and easiest" P2V tool?

A: First, if you haven’t tried it for yourself, please go to http://www.vizioncore.com/download.html and download a copy. It comes with three free bundled conversions. To comprehensively answer your question, vConverter originally shipped in late 2006, which was prior to VMware shipping its Converter 1.0. Vizioncore's vConverter 3.0 is a mature product with a code base that has converted an estimated 250,000 servers. From then to now we have worked diligently with nearly ten thousand users and have learned a significant amount about what medium and large enterprise customers need when they virtualize their physical infrastructure.

Acquisition/Price is the least of the concerns among this constituency. In fact, did you know that the upfront price of software is less than 10% of the overall cost of software in IT? The cost to maintain that software in people, infrastructure, etc. makes up the lion share of the total cost of ownership picture. As a result, the cost of resources, downtime, errors, failures, infrastructure install requirements, time in overall conversion (including pre- and post-migrations tasks) etc., all add up to a very serious amount of time and money. Moreover, as one of the industry's first software companies, today with more than 7,500 paying customers, we have the unique ability to research features and areas of concern, then approach real customers to verify that what we are building is what people want. vConverter v3 is what customers want for many reasons.

Speed:
We have developed patentable technologies which result in advanced intelligence and efficient handling of the bits and bytes required for virtualizing a customer's physical infrastructure. Another exclusive Vizioncore technology in vConverter 3.0 is vzBoost. vConverter incorporates vzBoost which is a kernel level driver that speeds up all writes to the VMFS to reduce bottlenecks and this results in increased speed to VMware ESX Server.

Ease of use:
We have always maintained a reputation for being the easiest to use and have many testimonials to this effect. Offering multiple interface options (wizards, single, multiple simultaneous and/or scheduled conversions, drag'n'drop, CLI, et al), as well as the automation of numerous pre/post conversion tasks, enables any level of user to maximize his or her time and effectiveness with the tool.

Q: Wasn't Invirtus working on a P2V solution prior to the acquisition? And is this the result of the work done by Invirtus? If so, was there anything new in the product that Vizioncore introduced?

A: Quest Software, Inc (NASDAQ: QSFT), acquired Invirtus in early 2007 (Vizioncore is also a wholly owned subsidiary of Quest). The core Invirtus asset, consisting of its executives and world class development organization, integrated with the Vizioncore organization shortly thereafter. Our goal was to leverage the collective software assets and develop the best "Direct to ESX" conversion experience on the market. It is no secret that Vizioncore is one of the most successful virtualization ISVs today, with more than 7,500 customers and 1,100 Channel Partners around the world. It is also no secret that Vizioncore cut its teeth in the VMware ESX Server market space. As we see this market broadening out to incorporate more "virtual infrastructure" platform choices, we are able to leverage our development expertise and knowledge to rapidly introduce more and more relevant software solutions for our customers.

Q: Can you elaborate more on vzBoost? Is this component found in other Vizioncore products? Is this part of what makes this product "fast"?

A: vzBoost is a VMware kernel level driver that Vizioncore uses within our backup and replication product lines. Our newest product vConverter v3.0 product for P2V will also incorporate this technology to ensure P2V's don't have any VMFS write bottle necks. This driver was created to speed up any type of writes to the VMFS that occur via the service console. This driver was created using our source code access to ESX Server.

Q: What types of guest operating systems does vConverter work with? Is it only Windows based guest OSes?

A: Currently vConverter 3.0 works with versions of Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, all versions of Small Business Server and XP Professional. Windows versions, including the new bootloader found in Vista and Windows Server 2008 and Linux are coming out soon.

Q: Is Linux support planned? I've seen many P2V solutions come out that work with Windows, but not many that can address Linux. Is this market driven? Or is it just difficult to migrate a Linux machine?

A: There is a market for Linux P2V. We have multiple exciting Linux technology solutions currently in development.

Q: Do you find that more people are interested in image migration for server consolidation purposes or disaster recovery? Is this changing? With more people moving away from simple server consolidation use cases, will it shift more to a DR primary need?

A: There is still strong demand for server consolidation. Currently, less than 10% of physical infrastructure is virtualized. Meaning there is some 90% of physical infrastructure left to be virtualized. As further proof of this, the number of target platforms for virtual infrastructure (ESX Server, XenServer, Virtual Iron) is increasing, not decreasing. We believe the trend for virtualization, be it used for server consolidation, disaster recovery, continuous data protection, business continuity, etc., is more like a greenfield opportunity for Vizioncore.

Q: Can you talk more about what interested Vizioncore to get into the P2V market at this stage of the game? With other companies like PlateSpin having been doing this for so long, what does Vizioncore bring to the table that's new and interesting to separate it from the other players?

A: Our main focus is, as always, to provide additional value to our customers. In spite of the appearance of a clear leader in P2V, our customers and partners painted a much different picture. Not only was the P2V conversion race wide open, but there was a clear need for a viable solution in the P2V-DR space as well. Vizioncore has always played a prominent role in helping customers move to a virtualized environment. While our role historically has been one of removing obstacles and providing additional value, the time was right to take a more active approach and help drive implementations right from the start and help customers incorporate virtualization into their environments. With vConverter 3.0, we've been able to leverage the same disciplined approach to create not only a great solution for P2V Disaster Recovery, but also the fastest and most reliable conversion tool on the market today.

Q: Does vConverter directly tie into other Vizioncore products?

A: Yes as mentioned above, there is a vRanger Pro P2V-DR Module available that is essentially the vConverter engine running behind the vRanger UI. If the end user has already virtualized and currently uses vRanger Pro for backup and restore, the addition of the P2V-DR module lets them extend a virtualized backup and restore capability to their physical machines.

Q: Any feedback from customers as to whether they are more interested in going from physical to virtual or virtual to virtual?

A: Vizioncore has many channel partners actively offering physical to virtual integration services that include the use of vConverter. Virtual to virtual is important but nowhere near as popular a requirement as P2V. As more virtual platforms mature and as more organizations virtualize, we expect V2V conversions to increase.

Q: Does vConverter also offer virtual to physical (V2P) conversions? And how important is that ability with your users? Any plans to offer it?

A: We have V2P on the roadmap for a mid-year release. It is a check box item that we will be supporting shortly. The best advice here is to make sure your virtual infrastructure is well thought out/designed. The question as to the relevance of V2P is something that is being answered by the collective offerings of our multi-billion dollar industry. Is VMware doing all it can to ensure its platform performs like a native bare metal server? Is Citrix/Xen? How about Intel and AMD? Are Dell, HP, IBM, et al doing all they can to ensure that virtualization is able to scale to the performance needs of customer requirements? How about transactional database vendors like Oracle? Is Oracle, or Sun for that matter, trying to do all they can to ensure that virtualized database software is highly reliable and performance minded? The answer is a resounding "Yes". Why does this matter? Specifically, right now V2P is more a line item in a feature list than it is a representation of a response to actual customer requirements.

I'd like to once again thank Vizioncore's Scott Polly for taking the time to speak with me about the company's latest offering - vConverter 3.0.

Posted by David Marshall on February 12, 2008 07:46 PM

January 31, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMLogix brings virtual lab automation to Citrix XenServer

VMLogix is joining forces with Florida-based Citrix to make its virtual lab automation solution, VMLogix LabManager, the first solution of its kind available on the Citrix XenServer hypervisor.

The partnership is an extension of a relationship that was originally established in August 2007 between VMLogix and XenSource. XenSource was the commercial side of the open source Xen hypervisor, which was acquired by Citrix in October of that same year.

VMLogix LabManager is an all-inclusive software lifecycle management solution which supports all leading enterprise-level virtualization platforms. VMLogix LabManager helps software engineering organizations ensure fast, repeatable and consistent development and test environment setups. The application, coupled with powerful virtualization platforms like Citrix XenServer, enables significant server consolidation in the build farm and test lab. Finally, LabManager drives increased collaboration between support, development and test, increasing employee productivity and accelerating time to market for everything from bug fixes to new product applications.

To find out more about this announcement, I was able to catch up with Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix, during his busy schedule at the Citrix Summit event taking place in Florida.

(Q) Having gone head to head with VMware Lab Manager, have you learned anything that you were able to add into your Citrix support?

(A) Fundamentally, we are working to build the best virtual lab management solution available across all major virtualization platforms. So that implies that whatever improvements we deliver for Citrix XenServer we are also committed to delivering on our other supported platforms. That said, the Citrix release is certainly a beneficiary of all the research and customer facing work we have engaged in over the past few years. It delivers a set of advanced 3rd generation VLA capabilities. Specifically, we have:

refined our workflows for the most common software Dev, QA & Support use cases;
built powerful automation capabilities for not just VM management but also automation of complex operations that span VMs and within the guest OS itself;
built advanced collaboration and user management capabilities that allow fine-grained sharing, User Interface customization, and resource access controls.

The second and third bullets, coupled with our industry-leading platform support (customers want choice and flexibility, which they get from us and not VMware Lab Manager) are the reasons that customers are selecting VMLogix over VMware Lab Manager in head-to-head evaluations.

(Q) How has the transition from XenSource to Citrix been for VMLogix? Any noticeable changes or has it been business as usual?

(A) We have had a tremendous working relationship and partnership with the XenServer team, dating from April 2007. From business development to engineering to marketing to sales - every function has helped us build the joint offering and educate the market on the benefits of the VMLogix/XenServer solution. The XenServer development team is extremely talented, and focused on delivering a world-class platform upon which partners like VMLogix can build robust, scalable solutions.

Since the acquisition, we have been actively working on go-to-market activities with Citrix as well. In fact, we are at the Citrix Summit in Orlando this week, working to educate the Citrix reseller channel about VMLogix as the superior XenServer alternative to VMware for Virtual Lab Automation.

Net net: the transition post-acquisition has been extremely smooth and positive.

(Q) Is there any difference between your VMware supported product and the Citrix one?

(A) One of the key capabilities of VMLogix LabManager is to manage virtual machines running on multiple hypervisors from the same management console. Thus, in our previous version, you could manage hosts in the lab running VMware ESX, VMware Server, and Microsoft Virtual Server. The new release, LabManager 3.3, is the same application (with improvements noted above), but with the ability to manage XenServer hosts now as well.

This multi-platform support means there is virtually no barrier for a VMware shop to switch over to VMLogix LabManager and Citrix XenServer for future virtualized servers. All the "legacy" ESX managed hosts (servers) can still be leveraged and managed from the same VMLogix LabManager console that is also managing the new XenServer hosts.

All the major features of LabManager are supported on both platforms. If there are differences, they tend to be minor platform specific implementation dependencies. In our judgement the XenServer team & platform has rapidly bridged all major gaps in the past few months.

(Q) Since Citrix doesn't have a QA product like this in-house (like VMware), and there are no other competitors yet, can you expect anything different with your Citrix relationship as opposed to the one you have with VMware?

(A) Absolutely! Our Citrix partners recognize Virtual Lab Automation as an important virtualization management application and are excited to have VMLogix fill that role in their partner ecosystem. I imagine we will continue to collaborate with the Citrix team on ways we can integrate with their other offerings to unlock more value for our joint customers.

VMware, on the other hand, given its competitive product offering in the space, isn't interested in helping us evangelize our solution on their platform nor identifying additional product opportunities. That said, we are a member of their Technology Alliance Program and they provide us all the support, APIs, etc. we need to provide a great integration to the VMware platform.

On the XenServer platform, we deliver a compelling, enterprise-grade solution. In return, Citrix assists us by evangelizing to their channel and loyal customer base on why the VMLogix-XenServer solution is the best option available.

(Q) Have you gotten any feedback from customers or potential customers about your Citrix product that you can share with readers?

(A) Our customers are universally very receptive to deploying their virtual labs on XenServer. They find the economics of XenServer very compelling without having to make sacrifices on technical capabilities. In addition, many large customers are keen to avoid vendor lock-in and plan to build hybrid labs which involve not just Citrix and VMware but also Microsoft's Hyper-V platform down the road. For that reason, they're quite excited about starting with a VMLogix/XenServer solution, or even migrating an ESX lab into VMLogix while adding XenServer for their new virtualized servers.

(Q) Any final thoughts that you would care to share with us today?

(A) We fundamentally believe the following:

More and more customers are focusing on management applications for their virtual infrastructure. Once servers are consolidated and users start creating a lot of VMs, customers need tools to manage it all (the same reason that Systems Management Software is such a big industry).
Moreover, customers want an "open" management application that will support multiple hypervisors. It's increasingly clear that VMware's days as the monopolistic player of the platform are numbered. Customers want flexibility as they navigate these uncertain virtualization waters – working with a VMLogix allows them to change course, because they are not tied to a specific platform.
Lab Management is a critical management app, responsible for all the VMs in the pre-production, or Dev/Test, environment. Using Virtual Center / XenCenter / SC VMM for the production VMs makes a world of sense – but the use case/workflows in Lab Management are unique (which is why VMware acquired Akimbi's lab management offering the first place).

Given all the above, we're excited about the trajectory of our space, and are confident that VMLogix LabManager will continue to see uptake as the best-in-class Virtual Lab Automation solution. Additionally, VMLogix now has customers based in North America, Europe and Asia; they range from start-ups to multi-billion dollar corporations; they include ISVs, Enterprises, and Hosting Providers. And most importantly, every one of them evaluated VMware Lab Manager, Surgient VQMS, or both – and chose VMLogix as their Virtual Lab Automation provider.

VMLogix LabManager for XenServer is available now, and pricing starts at $25,000. For more information about the product or partnership opportunities, click here.

Posted by David Marshall on January 31, 2008 04:46 PM

January 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)

PHD Technologies reaches company milestone: 1,000th customer

For many, the debate continues as to whether or not server virtualization is ready for the enterprise. But don't try and debate that issue with PHD Technologies, a backup and replication solutions provider for VMware Infrastructure 3 environments.

The company was proud to announce that it has reached a company milestone: that more than 1,000 enterprise customers have now selected esXpress v3 to manage backup, restoration and disaster recovery of their data centers.

According to the company, they have added significant customers this past quarter to surpass the 1,000th customer milestone. Companies taking advantage of virtualization and esXpress include ADP, Barnes&Noble.com, Siemens, Tyco and U.S. Food Service.

"1,000 new customers in the 11 months since its release is a testament to the fact that esXpress v3 is by far the most effective method of backup for virtual environments," said Laura Harbin, PHD's director of channel sales.

"We are proud to reach this significant milestone. Our continued success is a result of our dedicated Channel Partners worldwide and our commitment to deliver superior backup and recovery products with world-class support."

As you would have guessed, I would argue that virtualization technology is ready for mainstream consumption. And products like esXpress not only help companies with their existing virtual environments, they also offer answers to many of these debated issues as their technologies continue to push virtualization further into mainstream use.

Posted by David Marshall on January 26, 2008 01:44 PM

January 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)

VMware VirtualCenter gets continuous availability

If you are using VMware's VI3, you more than likely use VMware VirtualCenter to manage your VMware ESX Server farm. VirtualCenter provides the monitoring, remote management and rapid provisioning capabilities you need in your virtual environment, and it also acts as the central control point for VMware VMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). The last two features are important to help maintain and provide your virtual environment with much needed business continuance or system uptime as well as increased performance efficiency and flexibility.

But what happens if VirtualCenter goes down? Who is watching it? Or better yet, who is taking care of it to make sure it doesn't go offline?

Neverfail recently announced the release of Neverfail for VMware VirtualCenter. The product was designed to ensure that IT administrators won't lose access to the features provided by VMware VirtualCenter despite IT interruptions ranging from component failure to external interruptions.

According to the company, it offers advanced proactive monitoring of VMware VirtualCenter Server and its underlying environment by constantly checking the health of the hardware, network infrastructure, operating system and the management server software itself. If an issue arises with VMware VirtualCenter Server or one of its components, the system fails over to a secondary server which contains all data and maintains connectivity to VMware VirtualCenter until the outage can be resolved. The entire failover process is transparent and IT administrators can continue utilizing the management features of VMware VirtualCenter.

Peter Parker, Neverfail Group CEO, said "VMware VirtualCenter manages the entire virtual infrastructure, and by offering a continuous availability solution for this product, Neverfail ensures that both IT administrators and end users experience the full benefits that virtualization has to offer."

Keeping VirtualCenter up and operational is a must have in any VMware environment. So products like this are a welcomed addition. However, contrary to some reports, Neverfail's solution isn't the first product to market to provide this ability.

In April of last year, SteelEye Technology had announced SteelEye Protection Suite for VMware Infrastructure 3.

When asked about SteelEye's product, Bob Williamson, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing at SteelEye said, "Among other capabilities, this suite includes an agent that monitors and clusters VirtualCenter. We demoed the solution at VMworld 2007 and have it in production at customer sites."

He continued, "SteelEye LifeKeeper constantly monitors critical VirtualCenter services, the associated database, servers, network connections and all other critical components. On detection of any problem, an automated recovery process is begun based on policies defined by the system administrator. It also provides a simple interface for manual movement of applications to eliminate outages from planned maintenance. With support for both data replication and shared storage environments and for configurations where VirtualCenter and the underlying database reside on either the same server or separate servers, LifeKeeper provides maximum flexibility in the configurations that can be deployed."

And when asked about Neverfail being first to market, Williamson told me that simply wasn't the case. He added, "In addition to the SteelEye solution, VMware has documented for some time the use of Microsoft Cluster Services to protect VirtualCenter. NeverFail is over 6 months behind in the delivery of their solution."

Williamson did say that NeverFail's release of a competing solution validates the need that SteelEye recognized over 9 months ago, and also offered that his company is always quick to identify single points of failure in critical business applications and quick to deliver a solution to protect their customers.

Both Neverfail and SteelEye offer numerous other solutions to help protect a wide range of applications other than just VMware's VirtualCenter.

Posted by David Marshall on January 22, 2008 07:59 PM

January 20, 2008 | Comments: (0)

PlateSpin now shipping its disaster recovery solution

Business continuance and disaster recovery always sound great, that is, until management takes a look at the dollars involved. While it can be somewhat easy to justify the costs involved in providing complete duplication of a few key mission critical servers and applications, it becomes much more difficult to justify the next tier of applications requiring duplicate hardware for disaster recovery protection.

That's why PlateSpin was happy to announce the general availability of PlateSpin Forge, the company's latest solution into the virtualization world that offers a disaster recovery hardware appliance for cost-effectively protecting and rapidly recovering server workloads in the data center.

Since PlateSpin Forge was first announced in early December 2007, the solution has been deployed and tested hands-on by a select number of customers and partners as part of the PlateSpin Forge Early Access Program (EAP).

The solution offers complete system and data protection in an easy-to-implement package that includes Dell hardware, storage and application costs. And by consolidating workloads onto the purpose-built PlateSpin Forge appliance, organizations can achieve a 25 to 1 workload protection ratio without incurring the expense of duplicate hardware and software licensing costs. This makes Forge an extremely affordable alternative to traditional recovery infrastructures and host-based replication solutions which typically require costly one-to-one hardware and software redundancy.

"The early response from the market has been extremely encouraging," said PlateSpin founder and CEO Stephen Pollack. "Users have praised the recovery appliance's rich feature set and unique combination of ease-of-use and affordability."

"PlateSpin has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to offering customers innovative solutions to adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualization in the data center," said Pollack. "With PlateSpin Forge, the world's first virtualized recovery hardware appliance, we are once again transforming the data center by making it easier and more affordable to implement, test and manage a virtual recovery infrastructure. In our work with clients, we kept hearing a lot of frustration with traditional recovery infrastructures that were cost-prohibitive, complex to implement and difficult to test. Our response was to bring to market a revolutionary 'plug in and protect' recovery hardware appliance that offers a dramatically simplified approach to disaster recovery, especially when compared to traditional backup and recovery solutions."

Posted by David Marshall on January 20, 2008 07:49 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 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

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 B