Year: 2006

Quoting from the NextIO official announcement:

Denali Software and NextIO today announced the availability of verification intellectual property (IP) products that support NextIO’s virtual I/O design IP and Shared PCI Express Switch.

Virtual I/O technology is the hardware complement to software server virtualization products, like VMware, enabling more virtual servers to share a single physical I/O controller…

Following a similar article of last month here another very interesting one about storage needs VMware customers need to address.

Quoting from SearchStorage:

In the wake of VMware Inc.’s Infrastructure 3 announcement this week, beta testers and users say the addition of native iSCSI capabilities, clustering and a centralized backup option are a step in the right direction, but they also want to be able to manipulate data more easily with virtual machines.

VMware also boosted the number of LUNs that can be assigned to a virtual disk from 128 to 256 and added distributed journaling inside the file system for faster recovery. The product already allows snapshots of the OS and VM settings. But mirroring virtual disks, striping VM data across physical disks, adding LUNs on the fly to virtual disk and snapshots of data are “things we don’t do just yet that we may get around to doing,” said Patrick Lin, technical director of product development for VMware.

“I hope they’ll think seriously about it,” said Tom Becchetti, a VMware user who asked that his company not be named. “People want to be able to do serverless, networkless backups. They want to do block-change maps.”
…
Becchetti added that three months ago, VMware opened up APIs to other vendors, such as Double-Take Software to make replication more efficient. “Why haven’t they done this with backup vendors?” he asked. “The pieces are all there.”

VMware also announced the ability to support high-availability (HA) dual-node server clusters using what Becchetti termed a “half-done VMotion,” which he said was a good development. But it led him, he said, to question even further why capabilities like mirroring hadn’t yet been made available.

“They’re at the layer in the code to do that, at least mirroring at the virtual disk level.”

Becchetti also said that volume management was so tricky for him with ESX that he would often use GSX instead with his Symantec NetBackup tool. “It works better, especially with Linux, to do volume management that way,” he said. “But then we don’t get the benefits of ESX, like shared memory.”…

Read the whole article at source.

The newest edition of highly expected conference from Microsoft, the TechEd 2006, arrived.

The event, taking place in Boston from 11th to 16th June, will feature several sessions about virtualization:

• SVR003 – Introduction to Virtual Server 2005 R2
  This session will encourage discussions of the many innovative methods that sofware developers, QA testers and technical professionals have used virtualization technologies to enhance the application development lifecycle.
• SVR302 – Virtual Server R2 SP1 Beta: Introduction
  This session focuses on the new features of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 such as Intel VT and AMD VT support, Volume Shadow Services support and how to use the features to provide additional solution capability. The session also covers the roadmap for virtualization technologies from Microsoft.
• SVR335 – Virtual Server Solution Scenarios
  This session focuses on the three main solution areas for Virtual Server: Branch Office solution, high availability with clustering, disaster recovery, and test and dev environments. The session provides best practices on how to evaluate the requirements for a specific virtualization solution and some key tips and tricks for effective deployment of Virtual Server.
• SVR216 – Virtual Server: Customer Success Stories
  This session focuses on customer success stories of how customers evaluated and selected Virtual Server over competing technologies/vendors. This session provides you with best practices on how to evaluate a virtualization solution and an example of how a customer actually deployed virtualization in their environment.
• BOF41 – Creative Uses for Virtualization in the Development Lab
  This session will encourage discussions of the many innovative methods that sofware developers, QA testers and technical professionals have used virtualization technologies to enhance the application development lifecycle.
• BOF21 – Using Intel Virtualization Technology with Microsoft Windows
  The attention on virtualization as a capability on client and servers has been growing recently. With the rise of new use models and the introduction of hardware technologies such as Intel VT, the reliability and usability of the virtualized system has entered the mainstream. This session will be an open discussion on the uses for virtualization for clients and servers. Developers should come prepared to discuss ideas around potential new revenue streams using virtualization. IT Pro customers should be ready to discuss the way virtualization deployments are and will be changing the way the industry does business.
• MGTTLC03 – Virtual Machine Management with System Center
  This chalk talk presents the opportunity for an open Q & A regarding Microsoft’s approach and tools for virtual machine management. In particular, this chalk talk provides the opportunity to learn the various tips and tricks for management of a virtual data center.
• SVRTLC11 – Virtual Server Solution
  Abstract pending

Check the whole agenda here.

Quoting from the HP official announcement:

HP today unveiled new research that indicates IT consolidation will grow at a strong rate in the coming years.

The research, conducted by market intelligence firm IDC, reveals that the IT consolidation market is expected to grow 6.5 percent from 2004 to 2009, from $18.1 billion to $24.7 billion, outpacing growth of the overall IT market.(1)

The IT consolidation market forecast figures reveal growth trends within each of the four major enterprise technology categories that HP serves: storage, servers, infrastructure software and services…

Microsoft published a 15-minutes live demo of Softricity SoftGrid 4.0 from Microsoft Management Summit 2006 where the product has been launched.

Look at it here.

It’s worth to remember Microsoft is acquiring Softricity right now.

Thanks to VirtualServer.tv for the news.

Quoting from SWsoft official announcement:

SWsoft is recognized as a Top 100 IT Vendor of 2006 by IT Week magazine in the June 5, 2006 issue. During the past year, privately-held SWsoft’s revenues increased more than 160 percent and launched Virtuozzo, a new award winning approach for server virtualization for enterprises worldwide.
…
In April 2006, SWsoft’s Virtuozzo product was the winner of the “Product Excellence Award – Best Virtualization Solution” judged by a group of respected industry experts at the semi-annual major LinuxWorld conference and exposition held in Boston.

Again, in April, Virtuozzo earned the “Analyst’s Choice” rating by eWEEK Labs in a cover story of this leading industry magazine.

Last December, SWsoft received the Top 50 Technology Innovator of 2005 Award (December 2005) from IT Week.

If you are interested in discover more about Virtuozzo you could check the virtualization.info SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows 3.5.1 review.

Quoting from OpenVZ official announcement:

For early adopters and advanced technologists who want to test virtualization technology with the IPv6 network protocol, the OpenVZ project today released its operating system-level server virtualization software technology with support for the next-generation Internet Protocol Version 6.
In addition, support for bridged networking is now available, which gives OpenVZ virtual servers the ability to run software that relies on special network capabilities such as broadcasts, multicasts, or those having a MAC (media access control) address…

Download it here.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera Inc., a global leader in utility computing, today welcomed four new members to the Egenera Alliance program, a strategic initiative designed to ensure that customers derive maximum value from their Egenera® BladeFrame® system deployments.

Through rigorous testing in Egenera labs, Citrix Systems, GoAhead Software, TeamQuest Corporation and Zeus Technology have qualified as Assured Solution Alliance members, validating applications running on Egenera® systems.

Quoting from Application Development Trends:

…
Tom Bittman, Gartner VP and distinguished analyst, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for an upcoming ADT feature on virtualization.

”Between now and the end of the year I expect VMware to change their pricing model again,” he told me. ”I also think it’s important for them to start shifting the argument from who has a good hypervisor to the management around it.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the InstallAware official announcement:

InstallAware Software Corporation has released InstallAware 6.0, a setup authoring tool for ISVs and enterprises deploying products, patches, updates, and device drivers. InstallAware 6.0 creates Windows Installer setup packages with support for the latest technologies, including Microsoft .NET 2.0, Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 Service Pack 1, Windows Vista, 64 bit operating systems, and Driver Installation Frameworks 2.01.
…
Also new to InstallAware 6 is Driver Installation Frameworks 2.01 (DIFx) support, hybrid 64/32 bit installations from a single setup file, the ability to minimize setups to the system tray and show message balloons, Windows Task Scheduler support, and detection of Virtual PC and VMware virtual machines…