Year: 2006

Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:

PlateSpin today announced the availability of PowerStore, an online initiative which will give SMB/SME and department-level users of large organizations easier access to PlateSpin’s server consolidation and virtualization software products. PowerStore gives data center users the convenience to rent PlateSpin PowerRecon and PowerConvert directly from the PlateSpin website or through participating PlateSpin partner websites via any major credit card.
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PlateSpin PowerRecon comes in three packages: inventory, monitoring, and planning. The inventory version agentlessly gathers software and hardware inventory from x86 machines running Windows and Linux free of charge. The monitoring option adds workload utilization collection for $1 per server per day (until November 30, 2006), and the planning option automatically creates consolidation plans based on collected data for $2 per server per day.

PlateSpin PowerConvert is also available for rent in the PlateSpin PowerStore for $280 per conversion. When used in conjunction with PowerRecon, users can create complete consolidation plans and automatically load jobs into PowerConvert for the migration phase of their consolidation project…

I consider this one a big opportunity. Not mainly for PowerConvert, but mostly for PowerRecon which is an fundamental tool for candidate recognition in virtualization adoption projects.

Also, having it free of charge for virtual machines discovery and inventory is a huge plus.

Quoting from the HP official announcement:

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Later this year, HP plans to add support for Windows to HP Integrity Virtual Machines and allow multiple operating system instances to share a single processor. At that time, HP plans to extend support for HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor and Virtualization Manager to Windows and Linux. In addition to current support for HP-UX 11i, this extends the industry’s first integrated software family for planning, managing and automating virtual servers.
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Integrity servers running the HP Virtual Server Environment and a choice of operating systems enable customers to dynamically optimize IT investments across business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, J2EE application services, transactional database, and high-performance technical workloads…

After Akimbi acquisition in June (which has been worth $59 million), VMware is working hard to integrate Slingshot, now relabelled Virtual Lab Manager, in its product line.

Testers candidates have just received an invitation which details reaveals beta is expected to start on October 5th and final release is planned for end of this year.

Surprisingly versioning will continue Akimbi ones, considering the upcoming release as 2.4 instead of 1.0.

Another surprise is the fact this first rebranded release will not able to manage VMware Server 1.0 and will not be integrated with VirtualCenter 2.0.

A third suprise is support for Microsoft Virtual Server, as virtualization.info discovered in an interview with Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Platform Products at VMware.

If you never approached Akimbi Slingshot you could take a look at Virtual Lab Manager features, watch an old demo and enroll for the beta.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Quoting from the Intel official announcement:

The widely acclaimed Intel® Core™2 Duo processor is at the heart of Intel vPro technology delivering up to a 40 percent increase in performance and a 40 percent increase in energy efficiency.

Intel vPro technology also includes the second generation of Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT), Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT), the new Intel® Q965 Express chipset and the Intel 82566DM Gigabit Network Connection.
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Top enterprise-class software companies from around the world are offering products optimized for Intel vPro technology. Solutions are available today and will continue to arrive to market in the coming months from companies such as Adobe, Altiris, CA, Check Point, Cisco, HP OpenView, LANDesk, Lenovo, Microsoft, StarSoftComm, Symantec, Trend Micro and Zenith…

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Gordon Mangione, former Corporate Vice President in the Security Technology Unit at Microsoft, resigned its company 1 years ago, in November.

eWeek reported at that time this was a surprise.

Today he reappears in XenSource as Senior Vice President of Product Operations.

Update: The Register reports Mangione is the second former Microsoft executive to join XenSource.

Before him Frank Artale arrived at the company, occuping the role of Vice President of Business Development.

At Microsoft Artale was Vice President of the Windows Business Unit.

The popular virtualization vendor Parallels in the race to update its product for Apple MacPro hardware, surprisingly added support for the most expected upcoming operating systems: Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (codename Leopard) and Microsoft Windows Vista.

In the just published Release Candidate build the product only supports Leopard developer build and Vista beta 2, but extended support for newer builds is planned.

The new build also supports OpenBSD 3.8.

Download it here.

Another player appears in the new segment of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) launched by VMware.

This time is Provision Networks which launches its Virtual Access Suite.

Among its features:

• Highly scalable broker service offering fine-grained, policy-driven VM pool management capabilities including VM creation, deletion, suspension, un-suspension, power-on, power-off, expiration, and access control
• Management and monitoring features including full-desktop and application publishing, VM status reporting, and session usage monitoring
• Fault management allowing users to be temporarily redirected to a free VM in the event that of a primary VM failure
• Fine-grained access control via Access Control Lists (ACL) and virtual channel policies
• Access infrastructure including a Web interface and SSL VPN
• Client connectivity options including RDP and RDP-over-SSL, and client device support including Windows, WinCE, Java, and PXE
• Extensive user experience and last-mile technologies including seamless windows, session sharing, Kerberos authentication, universal print driver, USB handheld redirection, and more

Check complete feature list and some demos.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

One of the biggest selling point of VMware products is portability of virtual machines among all platforms.

To work flawless this process relies on compatibility between the virtualization platform and the virtual hardware generation featured by every virtual machine.
In some cases a possible mismatch denies powering on your VM.

To prevent such scenarios VMware is developing the second generation of its Virtual Machine Importer, already able to do a much wanted operation: import Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec Ghost (now included in the Backup Exec System Recovery family) computer images.

In this new version the tool is able to manipulate every kind of virtual machine and make it compatible with all most recent VMware products, including Server 1.0 and ESX Server 3.0.

The just published Release Candidate (build 30557) has still some serious compatibility issues, mostly with Linux and 64-bit operating systems in general.
So better read the release notes before downloading it.

Given its complexity finding the best support document for a particular Infrastructure 3 (aka ESX Server 3.0 + VirtualCenter 2.0) aspect could be challenging.

For this reason VMware published a very nice Documentation Roadmap (in this case the term roadmap doesn’t involve description of new features), detailing what help file is available for each feature and suggesting a reading path on issues basis.

Print it and put on the wall is highly suggested.

After 2 months from the operation, Yogen Dalal, Managing Director at Mayfield Fund venture capital firm, revealed Akimbi has been acquired by VMware for $59 million, while raised only $8 million in funding at that time.

Read the whole article at source.