Year: 2004

BMC Software teams with VMware to deliver business service management to customers

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Quoting from Yahoo! Finance:


From its exclusive Business Service Management (BSM) Executive Event, BMC Software, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise management solutions, today announced an expanded relationship with VMware, the leading provider of virtual infrastructure solutions, and new products integrated with VMware virtual infrastructure software to help customers tie IT and business together more effectively. BMC Software now gives customers the ability to plan their migration to VMware virtual infrastructure and optimize their VMware environments with minimized risks. The new products — PATROL® Performance Assurance® for Virtual Servers and PATROL for Virtual Servers provide virtualized environments with stronger capacity, performance, and dynamic workload management, a key implementation approach BMC Software has seen with customers embracing BSM. BMC Software’s BSM strategy enables companies to move beyond traditional IT management to better manage their critical services from a business perspective.

VMware virtual infrastructure enables companies to reduce their IT infrastructure costs by virtualizing computing, storage and networking and managing it centrally. The company’s virtual infrastructure software creates a single pool of computing, storage and networking resources that can be re- allocated to workloads as business needs change.

BMC Software is working with VMware Virtual Infrastructure API’s to deliver BSM solutions such as enterprise-class tools for capacity management that enable VMware customers to allocate server capacity based on business needs. BMC Software is also working to associate VMware virtual infrastructure directly with business services via PATROL management. BSM directly benefits VMware customers by enabling them to better align virtualized resources with business objectives. VMware solutions directly map to BMC Software’s Capacity Management and Provisioning Route to Value (RTVs). Capacity Management and Provisioning is one of eight of BMC Software’s RTVs, which are methods for quickly implementing BSM solutions.

“BMC Software has more than 20 years’ experience in virtualized performance management, bringing a level of expertise to VMware management that is unmatched in the industry,” said Mary Smars, vice president and general manager, Distributed Systems Management, BMC Software. “With the management depth we offer with our PATROL solutions, BMC provides customers with a comprehensive approach to maximizing their VMware environments, resulting in lowering their cost of operations and increasing their IT efficiency and ultimately their business success.”

“As the market leader in virtual infrastructure software, VMware welcomes the availability of BMC Software’s respected production support tools such as PATROL Performance Assurance and PATROL management for VMware virtual infrastructure. Together, we provide customers managing mission-critical environments with a powerful solution for gaining complete control over their virtual infrastructure,” said Brian Byun, vice president of alliances at VMware. “Our relationship with BMC Software promises to enable customers to lower IT costs and demonstrate the contribution of IT to the overall success of the business.”

New PATROL Solutions Add Intelligence and Speed to Dynamic Provisioning Efforts

BMC Software is delivering comprehensive management solutions for VMware virtual infrastructure software, including monitoring, capacity management and optimization, with the introduction of PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers and PATROL for Virtual Servers. BMC Software’s PATROL Performance Assurance solutions offer capacity management and analysis tools that enable companies to better understand and manage the performance of their IT infrastructure and the business services that execute across the infrastructure. PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers offers comprehensive performance analysis and sizing support for VMware software deployments. The solution helps to determine which servers can be virtualized as well as how to ensure optimal performance, response time and throughput of business services on virtual infrastructure when deployed in daily production environments.

Through BMC Software’s exclusive methodology, customers can profile the application assets and their resource requirements on current systems and test VMware deployment scenarios before implementation. In production, PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers gives customers the ability to view historical trends and exceptions to identify and resolve resource issues before they affect users. IT also can publish daily performance charts to business users, including detailed application views to allay concerns about application responsiveness on virtual infrastructure. PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers will be available with PATROL Performance Assurance version 7.2, which will be generally available in October. PATROL Performance Assurance 7.2 is a significant upgrade that also extends BMC Software’s application and database support with the addition of analytic tools and predictive modeling for applications that run on IBM’s DB2 UDB or Microsoft SQL Server database environments.

Today, BMC Software is also announcing PATROL for Virtual Servers, which provides real-time management of the VMware virtual infrastructure, generating events when critical availability and performance thresholds are exceeded. The native intelligence in BMC Software’s PATROL solutions, based on the company’s strong partner relationships and enterprise-wide solutions, helps customers improve productivity by minimizing errors and downtime, improve performance and customer service by proactively managing service levels, and reduce costs by maximizing existing resources.

PATROL for Virtual Servers enables customers to discover all their virtual machines and maps them to the physical servers on which they are running. BMC Software’s PATROL adds application intelligence about these virtual machines, enabling companies to dynamically manage workloads to ensure business priorities are met. PATROL provides a single point of control to manage their virtualized enterprises, allowing customers to see their heterogeneous environments, including operating systems, databases and applications, in one console

Minime project exists and works!

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Some of you probably know an italian project, owned by Massimiliano Daneri, called “Minime” that aims to be a poor man Virtual Center, able to manage multiple VMware ESX and GSX Servers and multiple Microsoft Virtual Servers.
You also know that this project was delayed two times and never saw even a beta release, so someone could think about a fake to gain popularity.

Last week I personally met Massimilano and saw Minime with my eyes on his development workstation. I can assure the bits exist and really work!

Troika to demonstrate combined server and storage virtualization solution

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Quoting from Business Wire:


Troika Networks, Inc., the leading provider of network-based storage services solutions and enabling technologies, announced today that it will attend this year’s VMWorld 2004 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, October 27-29. At the show, Troika will demonstrate its storage virtualization and volume management solutions for VMware ESX Server. Troika is located at booth #412.

“As a VMware Technology Software Alliance partner, we look forward to participating in this conference and having the opportunity to show how Troika’s virtualization software and volume management solutions can benefit and integrate with VMware’s virtual infrastructure software products,” said Steve O’Brian, vice president marketing, Troika Networks.

Troika’s storage virtualization solution extends VMware’s virtual infrastructure software by adding full Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) virtualization capabilities through Troika’s Accelera Network Storage Services Platform. As a result, administrators will be able to create and provision any-sized storage from a common storage pool at the same time they are creating and provisioning virtual storage servers.

The integrated Troika and VMware solution leverages software from StoreAge Networking Technologies. The Troika Accelera/StoreAge SVM storage virtualization solution features a full set of data management tools, including snapshot, mirroring and replication functions, which provides users with a comprehensive set of business continuity tools that run in a heterogeneous environment. The solution is ideal for VMware environments, and supports high availability configurations for increased uptime and reliability. The generally available solution is now shipping globally to end users, and has been deployed at multiple customer sites in both the U.S. and across Europe.

The Troika Accelera/StoreAge SVM storage virtualization solution has been fully qualified for VMware ESX Server 2.1.1 and 2.1.2. The solution supports a wide variety of storage hardware and infrastructure products.

PlateSpin joins VMware as a Technology Software Alliance Partner

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Quoting from Press Release Network:

PlateSpin, a leader in solutions that bring flexibility and automation to the multi-architecture data center, joins VMware as a Technology Software Alliance partner. PlateSpin will work closely with VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, to develop integrated products and value-added solutions for customers that are adopting virtual infrastructure in the data center.

PlateSpin’s flagship conversion product, PowerP2V?, accelerates VMware virtual infrastructure deployments by automating the process of converting between physical servers and virtual machines, saving tremendous amounts of time and lowering the risk for server consolidation, test lab deployment and high availability projects. PlateSpin?s innovative conversion technology supports the migration of Windows and Linux based servers to VMware virtual infrastructure hosts. PowerP2V fully automates the process of performing physical-to-virtual (P2V) migrations without requiring users to install software agents, which allows users to remotely execute and monitor migration projects without requiring any physical contact with data center servers.

“We are very excited to be an official technology software alliance partner of VMware.” said Stephen Pollack, CEO of PlateSpin Ltd. “The partnership will give VMware customers the ability to convert large numbers of physical servers to virtual machines quickly and easily, enhancing the ability for the data center to evolve rapidly to the virtual infrastructure paradigm.”

?PlateSpin?s solutions allow us to provide extremely high value services to customers.? Said Sean Shea, Virtualization Specialist at Expert Server Group. ?We use PowerP2V as a solution to assess server inventory and automate conversions for our customers.?

?As a customer of VMware and PlateSpin, we are excited to see both companies working closely together through the VMware technology alliance program.? said John Lamb, Systems Engineer of Pearson Education. ?Currently, we are using PlateSpin?s automated server conversion technology to further leverage the capabilities of our VMware virtual infrastructure; and in the future, we are looking forward to continued innovation from both companies.?

PlateSpin will be appearing as a Gold sponsor at VMworld 2004, VMware’s first user conference.

BladeLogic updates datacenter software

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Quoting from The Web Hosting Industry:


Data center automation software developer BladeLogic (bladelogic.com) announced on Monday that it has released BladeLogic Operations Manger 6. The latest version of the company’s flagship data center automation software allows organizations to simplify the management of data center environments by modeling and managing services so that provisioning, change and compliance actions are executed at the service level while the underlying devices and associated configuration settings are automatically managed in the background.

The latest release also features support for VMWare ESX and SUSE Linux, architectural enhancements that allow management of servers across multiple data centers, new APIs and the availability of BladeLogic Configuration Connector, which allows IT organizations to manage configuration information stored in external repositories such as SQL and LDAP or non host-based devices such as load balancers and firewalls.

“Organizations today need to evolve their IT environment to a state where resources can be easily and quickly re-purposed to meet changing business requirements,” says Dev Ittycheria, president and CEO of BladeLogic. “With the availability of Operations Manager 6, BladeLogic dramatically extends its leadership position by delivering the most complete solution in the marketplace today.”

BladeLogic Operations Manager 6, available immediately, is priced at $1,500 per server.

Microsoft rethinks virtual machines licensing?

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Quoting from TechWorld:

Microsoft is pondering how to license when multiple instances of an application are run on a single computer. The company, however,is not eyeing a plan for utility-based computing, in which charges are based on individual usage.

The company is re-examining its options after yesterday’s announcement that multi-core processors would be treated as a single processor for purposes of software licensing.

Company officials discussed Microsoft’s positions at this week’s SoftSummit conference in California. In the area of virtualisation, in which multiple, virtual machines might be running on the same system, the company is considering strategies, according to Andrew Lees, corporate vice president for server and tools marketing at Microsoft.

Right now, Microsoft charges based on hardware capabilities irrespective of software partitioning or virtualisation. A user site might have 1,000 virtual machines running 1,000 instances of the same application, deployed on a four-processor computer, he said. Under current policy, the user would be charged for four processors, not for running the application 1,000 times.

“We’re currently looking at that now, and the whole virtualisation scenarios that are enabled are really mind-blowing,” Lees said.

The company is seeking feedback on how to proceed, he said. “We ideally want it to be simple,” Lees said. Whether or not Microsoft would generate more or less revenue based on a virtualisation licensing scheme is not now known, said Lees.

In the area of utility computing, Microsoft officials said the definition of the term fluctuates. “We all agree, I don’t think anybody in here can have a consistent definition of what utility computing actually is,” said Cori Hartje, director of worldwide licensing and pricing at Microsoft. She added she hears it described as usage-based or feature computing.

“We don’t really have a utility model today. We don’t see ourselves building one,” Hartje said.

While utility computing might be a good model for some applications, Microsoft applications such as Office and Exchange do not lend themselves to that kind of model and customers do not have the infrastructure to support it, Hartje said.

“(Utility computing) is not really something that we’re rally working on,” said Hartje.

A SoftSummit attendee from Hitachi Data Systems said he could understand why Microsoft would not want to use utility computing, but that the concept is being studied by his company for possible use in selling storage systems.

“We’re seeing customer demand for a utility model,” said Steve Eckersley, an official with pricing and reseller operations at Hitachi.

Microsoft does offer Exchange on a per-email box pricing plan, for example, but charging per email would provide a disincentive to use the application, Lees said.

VMware opens up its key beta programs: ESX Server 2.5 and Virtual Center 1.2

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Quoting from official announcement:


Dear VMware Community Member,

VMware invites you to participate in the beta program for VMware ESX Server, version 2.5 and VirtualCenter version 1.2. As members of the VMware Community, your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

How to participate in the betas
**********************************************************
To request license keys for VMware ESX Server 2.5 and VirtualCenter 1.2 beta, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. You will receive a reply with the beta keys and a download link.

What’s New in ESX Server 2.5:
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ESX Server 2.5 improves upon ESX Server 2.1.x, and will include the following:

– Boot from SAN
o ESX Server can now run on diskless servers by booting off of a disk on the SAN. This greatly enhances support for common blade and rack mount configurations.

– Support for additional storage and server hardware

– Improved support for raw LUNs as virtual disks using Raw Disk Maps (RDMs) and pass-through RDMs
o Allows raw disks to be managed as easily as virtual disk files
o Pass-through RDMs enable SAN replication software to run inside of virtual machines
o Pass-through RDMs enable backup offloading solutions so that ESX Servers can be backed up faster without any load placed on the virtual machines or the on Service Console
o Allows REDO logs to be added to raw disks

– Enhanced support for scripted installations
o Allows 3rd party systems management products to remotely install and configure ESX Servers

– Improved Support for Clustered virtual machines
o MSCS in virtual machines using shared disk more reliable

– Additional support for DR backups or virtual disks
o Virtual disk snapshot scripts added to the Service Console to enable crash consistent backups of entire virtual machines

What’s New in VirtualCenter 1.2:
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VirtualCenter 1.2 is intended as a minor, maintenance release to improve upon VirtualCenter 1.1.1, and will include the following:

* Additional support for upcoming ESX 2.5 release
* Improved support for use of raw LUNs as virtual disks
* Enhanced reporting and data export capabilities
* New features in the Web Services SDK
* Extra logging for security auditing
* Additional performance improvements
* Updated SNMP support
* Resolved issues & bug fixes
* Documentation updates

Release Notes, Reviewer’s Guide & Documentation
**********************************************************
Release notes for the ESX Server 2.5 Beta release can be accessed via:

URL: http://www.vmware.com/releasenotes_esxbeta
Username: esxbeta
Password: atherton

A beta reviewer’s guide, release notes, and a revised users manual for VirtualCenter can be accessed via the following:

URL: http://www.vmware.com/support/vc12/
Username: vc12beta
Password: makalu

Please review the VirtualCenter 1.2 Beta Reviewer’s guide prior to installing the software. It contains an overview of the new features, issues resolved, and highlights documentation updates.

We will periodically update the support site with new information.

How to Provide Feedback
**********************************************************
Please feel free to e-mail [email protected] at any point throughout the beta program with questions, issues, or ideas for improvement regarding ESX Server 2.5 beta and [email protected] for similar comments on the VirtualCenter 1.2 beta – your comments will be received and seriously considered by our developers and product managers.

Beta Support:
**********************************************************
You will be entitled to basic Beta support as a part of this program. Beta support does not guarantee responses to SRs, but all requests are directed to the Development and Product Management teams for consideration.

To file an SR, please visit:
http://www.vmware.com/support/.

You may need to register for entitlement using the beta Serial Keys provided to you when you request the beta.

Thank you for your participation, we hope you have a positive experience using the ESX 2.5 and VirtualCenter 1.2 beta release.

Best Regards,
The VMware Team