Year: 2006

Quoting from Trade Arabia:

Fujitsu Siemens Computers, a leading European information technology (IT) manufacturer, has started an eight-country Middle East virtualisation tour with an event that was attended by more than 70 enterprise customers in Abu Dhabi.

The firm has also announced a joint commitment with AMD and Network Appliances to offer a blueprint for a virtualised data centre.
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The Virtualisation Road Show is travelling to eight countries in the Middle East (United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait and Pakistan).

Read the wholer article at source.

InfoWorld published a nice review of QEMU 1.3.0 rating it 8.5/10 and providing this bottom line:

Technically a simulator, QEMU nonetheless has virtualization capabilities that allow it to run Linux on Windows (or vice versa). It can also run code from one CPU on a system with a different physical CPU, so an x86 Windows system can execute a virtualized Sparc-based Solaris image.

QEMU is slower than commercial virtualizers, but it’s lightweight nature and platform support compensate for performance.

Read the whole review at source.

Altiris, Dell, Intel, VMware, EMC and ZiffDavis are sponsoring a joned webcast for May 25th, first one of a 3-episode serie:

One of the most compelling solutions that a Virtual I/T Infrastructure can provide is improved efficiency in the datacenter. In most data centers, server utilization rates are far below 25%, resulting in increased power, cooling, maintenance, and management costs. Additionally, there are even more complexities in a test environment due to multiple server models and software environments. The same is true for development activities; they need to account for the different production platforms that might be used. Finally, there is legacy application support, where platform-specific “quirks” can be eliminated going forward.

In order to obtain these important efficiencies while improving the speed and responsiveness of a production environment, a group of industry leaders is working together to provide a complete solution that can be implemented quickly with immediate results. By working jointly on the key components of architecture, servers, storage, virtualization infrastructure software, and management, Dell, Intel, VMware, Altiris and EMC provide this best-of-breed solution. The leaders would like to invite you to an important eSeminar that showcases their integrated approach in providing a robust virtual I/T infrastructure solution. These accomplished partners in this growing area are joining together to provide you with the insight and knowledge that can help drive the success of your next virtualization project. During this eSeminar you will learn about:

• How this group of partners has joined forces to help simplify deployment of a virtual I/T environment and begin the transition to production environments
• How this team works together to improve ongoing maintenance of a virtual I/T environment
• How Dell acts as the direct, single point of contact for virtual I/T environments
• How reference solutions can reduce your cost of implementation

Register here.

Quoting from the Akimbi official annoucement:

Akimbi Systems, the global leader in Virtual Lab Automation software, today announced that its flagship product, Akimbi Slingshot, has been named the Best Software Testing Solution by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) 2006 Codie Awards. Announced at the 2006 Codie Awards Gala in San Francisco on May 16, Akimbi Slingshot was chosen from six finalists selected in January 2006.
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The Codie Awards showcase the software and digital content industry’s finest products and services, and remain the standard-bearer for celebrating outstanding achievement and vision. The only industry competition of its kind, the Codie Awards program provides companies with peer recognition and praise…

Quoting from CERN Courier:

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The mission of openlab II will continue to be a close collaboration with major trustworthy industrial partners able to demonstrate technological leadership and delivery of viable solutions. In addition, closer collaboration with the European Grid infrastructure project EGEE will be formalized, by taking advantage of the fact that EGEE enters a second phase in May 2006, called EGEE-II. EGEE is currently the largest multiscience Grid-deployment project in the world, with 70 institutional partners in Europe, the US and Russia.
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Based on the openlab workshop Industrialising the Grid, held in June 2005, a number of topics were defined as of interest to CERN, the EGEE project and the openlab partners. Two specific themes were singled out as being of particular interest to some of the current openlab partners. These were:

• a Grid interoperability and integration centre (GIC) with close links to EGEE-II
• a platform competence centre (PCC) with the main focus on the PC-based computing hardware and the related software

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The PCC will address a range of important fields, such as application optimization and platform virtualization.

Software and hardware optimization is seen as a vital part of the Grid deployment, since the demand for resources by the scientists is very likely to outstrip the available resources, even inside the Grid. Such optimization relies on deep knowledge of the architecture of the entire computing platform. On one hand this covers hardware items, such as processors, memory, buses and input/output channels. On the other hand it covers the ability to use advanced tools, such as profilers, compilers and linkers, specially optimized library functions, etc.

Platform virtualization can allow Grid applications to enjoy a highly secure and standardized environment presented by a “virtual machine hypervisor”, independent of all the hardware and software intricacies. The virtualization concept, initially offered as purely a software solution, will gradually move into hardware, allowing greatly improved performance of both the hypervisors and its “guests”.

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the PlateSpin official announcement:

PlateSpin today announced that more than 1,000 enterprise customers have selected the company’s data center software solutions to manage continuous server consolidations, hardware migration, virtualization, disaster recovery, and the ongoing optimization of their data centers. In recording its fifth consecutive quarter of record revenue, PlateSpin added significant customers this past quarter to surpass the 1,000th customer milestone including Aegon, Nationwide, Axa Tech, Hawaiian Airlines, BP and Fidelity Investments.
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PlateSpin also announces the following new appointments to the executive management team to further enhance the company’s strategy and accelerate its rapid growth in the virtualization marketplace:

• Paul Philp – Chief Technology Officer
• Israel Ben-Ishai – Vice-President, Product Development
• Cadman Chui – Vice-President, Marketing
• Jennifer Small – Director, Human Resources
• John Stetic – Director, Product Management

Details and backgrounds on each of these executives can be found on the PlateSpin website

Quoting from InfoWorld:

…the very nature of Grid computing is to provide resource pools that can be dynamically provisioned to jobs in the queue.

But a very exciting and NEW, related discussion is taking place around “mashups” of virtual machines and virtual network resources. This new research area is being driven by Dr. Franco Travostino — who heads Grid activities in the capacity of Director for Advanced Technology and Research at Nortel and is co-Director for the Infrastructure Area at the GGF — and who is without question one of the most interesting players on the networking side of the enterprise Grid discussion.
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“In Seattle, at Supercomputer 2006, we created a demo by which we took some Xen-based virtual machines that were crunching some particular, computation-intensive tasks … and we moved them to Amsterdam,” said Travostino. “And then from Amsterdam, we moved them to Chicago, and them from Chicago back to Seattle. And in spite of the tens of thousands of miles, the impact on the applications was less than one second. So that’s pretty mind-boggling, to think about having a fully featured Linux environment running lots of applications, and teleporting all that across the world with such minimal disruption. DRAC is the “network middleware” that makes this long-haul migration possible at the network level. Specifically, DRAC puts in place a short-lived deterministic network service, on demand. As well, it preserves the sessions with any remote client.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Xfree 4.6.0 has been released.
It includes security updates, driver updates, fixes and among others something for the included VMware driver.

Quoting from the Release Notes:

3.2.14. vmware

Implement a workaround in the generic int10 module to allow unaligned I/O access specific to VMWare’s second generation emulated adapter.

Download it here.

Quoting from a very interesting SearchStorage article:

VMware Inc. is all the rage among users at the Storage Decisions conference, as evidenced by the hundreds who packed a session on VMware data recovery Tuesday afternoon. However some users said they hope VMware’s migration tool, VMotion, will be enhanced soon — specifically to support dynamic migration of data between storage systems.
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“When I’m upgrading those arrays, there’s no way for me to use VMotion to point VMware guests at the new storage box without turning them off,” he said.
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He’s not the only user confronting this issue. “For now, we think VMware is great for server consolidation, but it really only works locally,” said Chris Macsurak, storage administrator for MWH Global.
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Users said they were waiting to see if VMware version 3.0, due to be released at the end of this quarter, would contain the capability.

VMware spokesperson Amber Rowland declined to comment on what would specifically be supported in version 3.0, slated for release at the end of this quarter, but said, “This is an interesting direction that VMotion can go. It doesn’t support [live data migration] today, but a cold migration can be used to move a virtual machine from system to system, and it only takes a few minutes.”
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Jancewicz said he is considering a two-step process of his own: installing IBM’s Storage Volume Controller (SVC) between his servers and back-end storage so that the VMware servers never know the difference between back ends. VMware’s parent company, EMC Corp., also offers a storage virtualization product, called InVista, but Jancewicz said he felt SVC is more mature, and that he generally prefers IBM.

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the AMD official announcement:

AMD today introduced AMD Turion™ 64 X2 mobile technology, the first and only family of 64-bit dual-core processors designed for thin and light notebook PCs.
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AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology is based on the same industry-leading Direct Connect Architecture featured in the AMD Opteron™ and AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 processors, providing high-speed links between cores, memory and I/O for increased system performance.

The advanced feature set of AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology also includes:

• Multi-core Power Management, enabling reduced power consumption for extended battery life;
• AMD Digital Media Xpress for accelerated image processing, audio and video encoding and decoding, 3D graphic rendering; and
• AMD Virtualization, providing improved performance, reliability, and security for virtualized environments.

Business professionals and consumers worldwide can expect to see notebooks based on AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology in retail stores and through commercial distribution channels this quarter. Systems are initially expected from Acer, ASUS, BenQ, Flocity, FSC, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, MSI, NEC, Packard Bell, Sotec and TongFang.

Now I start considering a new laptop for myself…