Year: 2004

Vodafone says virtualization brings saving

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Quoting from Vnunet:


More firms will be encouraged to try server virtualisation after telecoms giant Vodafone last week detailed how the technology had unlocked substantial savings – and could also improve control over apps run on externally-hosted servers.

Vodafone project manager Doug Colvin said his firm will deploy up to 300 new Wintel servers in 2005, and will manage most of them with VMware virtualisation tools.

He added that in the longer term, virtualisation could let Vodafone outsource its server operations. “Why not contract third-parties such as HP to own and operate VMware server farms and pay them to host our virtual server systems?” he said. This new hosting scenario could make it easier for firms to retain control of mission-critical applications and speed up the deployment of new applications.

Vodafone’s research found that virtualisation technology would cut the maximum time to acquire and deploy a new server from 40 days to 32.5 days. It also found that upgrading a single site of 140 servers to run across two sites using VMware’s ESX Server would save £270,000 each year.

This approach would also give firms the flexibility to move between server hosting firms with minimal disruption, because virtualisation insulates applications or operating systems from server hardware.

However, Dan Kusnetzky of analyst IDC said software licensing could cause problems. “It would be very important for hosts and customers to make sure that all the software was licensed to run in this environment on the host’s machines,” he said.

Virtual Servers: Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 (RC) vs VMware GSX Server 3.1

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CNET Asia published a long comparison between Virtual Server 2005 Release Candidate and GSX Server 3.1 made by RMIT IT Test Labs.
I personally don’t like it very much because reviewers approached both products like a simple desktop application (you can notice this starting from testing platform: much more a desktop machine than a real middle business server) and left out a deep analysis of how virtual machines processes are handled (which impacts on VMs performances, stability and management).
It’s also incomplete becase Virtual Server 2005 pricing was not published at writing time.

Anyway it’s a good starting point to have an idea of raw features available.

Read it here.

Dunes releases Virtual Service Orchestrator 1.0

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Quoting from official announcement:


Dunes Virtual Service Orchestrator (Dunes® VS-O™) is a virtual service orchestration software solution for VMware VirtualCenter and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. Dunes VS-O is about capturing best practices and business policies in order to provide an end-to-end IT service that proactively meets the business objectives in an automated manner, making the data center more efficient and adaptive to changing business conditions.

Dunes VS-O unleashes the value of Enterprise Service Integrators to be applied to solving business problems involving a virtual infrastructure. It is the first integrated development platform, based on open standards, that enables rapid design, validation and integration of business processes into the virtualized data center. Combined with an environment that allows virtualization and automation of the virtual infrastructure, it enables the delivery of IT service on demand.

Dunes VS-O encompasses workflow and policy based virtual infrastructure orchestration as well as physical systems integration and automation. With Dunes VS-O you compose, deliver and guarantee the right services to the right business users at the right time and at the right costs.

EMC SRDF family supports VMware

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The SRDF family of software is the most powerful suite of remote storage replication solutions available for disaster recovery and business continuity. It leverages high-end Symmetrix storage architecture to offer unmatched deployment flexibility and massive scalability—so you can meet mixed service level requirements with minimal operational impact. The most widely deployed set of high-end remote replication solutions, the SRDF family is installed in tens of thousands of demanding environments worldwide. And only the SRDF family provides cross volume and storage system consistency, tight integration with industry-leading applications, and automated management for simplified usage.

Now qualified with EMC SRDF, VMware server virtualization enables server consolidation at remote sites for advanced business continuity protection. The result: continual, complete access to all applications and reduced costs via resource consolidation.

Veritas OpForce 4.0 supports real hardware and VMware virtual hardware

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Quoting from CRN:


Veritas Software this week plans to introduce a new version of its OpForce distributed server provisioning software.

Version 4.0 allows a single Windows-based software image to be deployed across servers regardless of underlying hardware, instead of requiring a new image for each type of server, said Jeff Hausman, director of strategic marketing for storage and server management at Veritas.

Also new is the ability to remotely install an operating system and to use multiple network cards for failover purposes, Hausman said.

The new software also discovers applications and ensures that updates are made properly regardless of hardware or operating system including, for the first time, AIX. A server change management tool flags application differences between multiple servers.

Keith Trotte, account representative at SSI hubcity, Metuchen, N.J., said OpForce’s support of multiple hardware and operating system platforms is important as customers deploy mixed environments.

SSI hubcity specializes in application development and deployment, and is starting to ramp up to take advantage of OpForce. This will include hiring application performance specialists, Trotte said.

“We want to help customers tune and optimize their applications,” he said. “Go in, pin-point bottlenecks, look at the application layer. Now Veritas [OpForce] can do all that. It gives customers a single way to dig and view multiple parts of their data centers.”

OpForce is part of Veritas’ push to bring utility computing to the enterprise and the channel, which accounts for almost half of OpForce revenue, Hausman said. “Our whole concept is you can use bits and pieces as you move to utility computing,” he said. “You don’t buy utility computing.”

OpForce works not only with multiplatform physical servers but with virtual servers created by software such as VMware’s ESX Server, he said. “If you have VMware and OpForce, you use VMware to define partitions, and then OpForce can discover the partitions, treat them as individual servers and repurpose them.”

The list price for the OpForce management server portion is about $7,500. Target servers are $500 per CPU. Multicore processors are considered a single processor.

VMware VMworld 2004 sessions available for download

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In VMware Community Web Forum are finally available following presentations:


Leveraging Blades in the Virtual Infrastructure
High Availability Clustering: Business Continuity in a Virtual Environment
P2V: Moving Your Servers and Workloads to Virtual Machines
Getting the Most Out of VMware GSX Server and Workstation
Development and Testing Best Practices
Tips & Tricks for ESX Server
Introduction to VMware ACE
The Development Environment at Monster
ESX Server and Your Storage
VirtualCenter: Inside and Out
Application Lifecycle Management in the Enterprise
VMware ESX Server Technical Overview
User Management Best Practices
Zero to 200 Virtual Servers, 500 to 200 Physical Boxes in 365 Days
VMware VirtualCenter at Administaff
Security in a Virtual Environment
Success with VMware at IRI
Disaster Recovery Through Virtual Infrastructure
Planning Optimal Workloads for Virtual Infrastructure
Application and OS Migration with VMware
Server Consolidation with Virtual Infrastructure

Xen, Virtual Machine Monitor, reaches 2.0

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Quoting from official announcement:


The Xen team are pleased to announce the release of Xen 2.0, the open-source Virtual Machine Monitor. Xen enables you to run multiple operating systems images concurrently on the same hardware, securely partitioning the resources of the machine between them. Xen uses a technique called ‘para-virtualization’
to achieve very low performance overhead — typically just a few percent relative to native. This new release provides kernel support for Linux 2.4.27/2.6.9 and NetBSD, with FreeBSD and Plan9 to follow in the next few weeks.

Xen 2.0 runs on almost the entire set of modern x86 hardware supported by Linux, and is easy to ‘drop-in’ to an existing Linux installation. The new release has a lot more flexibility in how guest OS virtual I/O devices are configured. For example, you can configure arbitrary firewalling, bridging and routing of guest virtual network interfaces, and use copy-on-write LVM volumes or loopback files for storing guest OS disk images. Another new feature is ‘live migration’, which allows running OS images to be moved between nodes in a cluster without having to stop them.

Build a complete Citrix MetaFrame lab with VMware Workstation

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Brian Madden released a very interesting article about how to setup a whole Metaframe infrastructure within a VMware virtual environment.

Here the abstract:


Most IT Professionals agree that having a lab for proper testing and staging is crucial to a stable, successful Citrix environment. However, some may argue that labs are complicated, costly and seemingly unjustified. Although these may seem like valid points, the risk of having your production environment come crashing down due to an untested patch or software upgrade proves that it’s well worth the time and cost of setting up a lab.

A lab is a great tool to have at your disposal. You can use it to test a new software release or security patch or possibly a new printer driver that a client is requesting. Perhaps you just want an environment where you can learn more about the inner workings of Citrix, Web Interface or Secure Gateway. If you’ll be faced with upgrading your production environment to MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0, it’s best to do a “dry run” in a lab before victimizing your production environment and possibly causing serious downtime.

Many times, people don’t build labs because there is no spare hardware, no space available, or simply no time to commit to assembling a lab. However, with the advent of server virtualization, building a lab can be accomplished with significantly less hardware and in a much shorter amount of time.

Go ahead and read it here.

PlateSpin broadens its support for virtual infrastructure with PowerP2V 3.6

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Quoting from official announcement:


PlateSpin, the leading provider of multi-architecture conversion and provisioning solutions announced the availability of PowerP2V 3.6. PlateSpin PowerP2V is an advanced automation solution that converts Microsoft Windows and Linux servers between physical server and virtual infrastructure architectures in a completely automated manner. Since its initial launch, PlateSpin PowerP2V has been used to dramatically accelerate data center server consolidation and test lab deployment projects for data centers across many industry segments including Health Care, Banking, Insurance, Pharmaceuticals, Information Technology, Education, Telecommunications, Financial Services and Government. With the release of PowerP2V 3.6, PlateSpin has extended PowerP2V’s capabilities to support VMware GSX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. PowerP2V 3.6 provides complete coverage of all popular Intel based virtual architectures by performing automated conversions between physical servers and the virtual infrastructure solutions from VMware and Microsoft.

With PlateSpin PowerP2V, users simply connect to the network, select a physical or virtual source server, and drag it to a VMware ESX Server, GSX Server, or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 host. There are no agents, pre-requisites to install, or manual work to be done to prepare for the conversion. Users simply connect to the network and start their conversion projects for Windows and Linux platforms. PowerP2V can also move machines within the data center or across geographical boundaries without requiring physical contact with source or target servers, which is a key benefit with today’s distributed computing models.

PlateSpin PowerP2V 3.6 offers the following product features and enhancements

Remote discovery and hardware/software inventory of network machines
No agents to install, no boot CDs – simply connect and start converting servers
Fully automated conversions with no manual intervention
Reconfigure target virtual machine resources such as CPU allocations, memory, and disk space on-the-fly
Convert Windows and Linux operating system servers to virtual machines
Support for converting systems with dynamic system and data disks
Static IP address support, for data center network environments that don’t use DHCP servers to configure IP addresses
Usability enhancements through the drag-and-drop graphical user interface
Selective network discovery, which allows users to isolate discoveries by domain for very large networks
File transfer network management and performance enhancements

PlateSpin customers use PowerP2V for server consolidation, where many physical servers are converted to virtual machines residing on fewer numbers of physical server hardware. This allows data centers to achieve more efficient utilization for CPU, disk, memory and network resources. It is also used for rapid replication of production environments in test labs using virtual machines, or for replicating virtual machines for managed availability and hot standby environments.

“Data centers want solutions that give them the ability to adapt to new or changing business situations as fast and as easily as possible.” said Stephen Pollack, CEO of PlateSpin Ltd. “With PlateSpin PowerP2V, customers adopting virtual infrastructure will experience dramatically increased amounts of flexibility in their data center because they are able to automatically convert servers and their associated customer facing applications to any physical or virtual environment at will.”

“PlateSpin is the only software provider we have found that addresses server conversion, provisioning, and management between multiple data center architectures. PowerP2V’s unique ability to convert between physical and virtual environments allows us to adapt data center infrastructures to today’s rapidly changing conditions faster than ever before.“ – Richard King, President of Xcedex

Pricing and Availability

PlateSpin PowerP2V 3.6 is available for the general public. Pricing starts at US$3,000 for a 25 conversion pack license. Data center site licenses are also available upon request.

VMware rolls out new modules to boost virtualization services

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Quoting from CRN:


VMware unveiled two new optional modules for its server virtualization platform on the second day of its first annual user conference.

The new options, slated to become available next year, are part of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based software vendor’s strategy to increase the virtualization of services in the data center, VMware CTO and founder Edouard Bugnion said at VMWorld, held this week in San Diego.

The first module, Distributed Resource Schedule, automates the pooling of resources such as blade servers to better scale them out, according to Bugnion. VMware’s VMotion application currently allows pooling of resources, but it’s a manual process, he said.

With Distributed Resource Schedule, administrators can specify the type and amount of server resources needed, and those resources are made available without the administrator knowing where they are physically located. The goal is to reduce manual intervention in building servers while increasing server utilization by up to 80 percent.

The second module, Distributed Availability Services, provides for automatic failover and rebooting of a virtual server in case of a failure, without the need for clustering, Bugnion said. Such capability provides resiliency against hardware failures so that if a physical server fails, its virtual machine will come back up on another server and reboot automatically, allowing customers to provide service-level agreements and offer four nines of reliability, he said.