Year: 2006

Quoting from Dark Reading:

Network access control (NAC) has gotten so complicated, expensive and unmanageable that a new kid on the block wants to sell you virtual machinery to execute a little something it calls “effortless NAC.”

Fresh off a Series A round of funding valued at $6.45 million, NAC startup FireEye Inc. says it will help enterprises guard against infected internal users without using quarantines, deploying software agents, or administering policies.

FireEye’s 1U-rackmount appliance connects via span port or network tap to an adjacent Ethernet switch. Without obstructing network flow or adding to it, the appliance gets a copy of all traffic traversing that switch. Inside the FireEye appliance, so-called virtual machines replay the traffic, watching how it behaves with various Windows versions and flagging any anomalous reactions that usually signify malware’s afoot. Devices exhibiting signs of infection get immediately quarantined till they can be cleaned, says Chad Harrington, VP of sales and marketing for FireEye…

Read the whole article at source.

FireEye founder, Ashar Aziz, is a former Sun employee, covering the CTO role in the Solaris 10 N1 Containers project, as reported by SiliconBeat.

IDC is preparing a big virtualization replica in San Francisco, California for 22th June 2006, after launching the first event in New York in February.

The list of speaker has just been published. Among others:

• Rajiv Arunkundram, Senior Product Manager, Virtual Server Marketing Group, Microsoft
• Diane M. Bryant, Vice President, Digital Enterprise Group; General Manager, Server Platforms Group, Intel Corporation
• Diane Greene, President, VMware
• Rich Lechner, Vice President, Virtualization, IBM Corporation
• Joe Menard, Corporate Vice President of Software Strategy and Alliances, AMD
• Nabeel Youakim, Vice President & Product Line Executive, Citrix Presentation Server, Citrix Systems, Inc.

The whole agenda is available here. You can register for it here.

Quoting from Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of software solutions for creating and managing virtual infrastructure in the data center, today announced that it has secured additional venture financing from SAP Ventures.

The investment brings Virtual Iron’s total venture funding to $31.5 million. SAP Ventures joins Virtual Iron’s prestigious list of blue chip investors – Highland Capital, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs and Intel Capital…

Quoting from QLogic official announcement:

QLogic® Corp., the leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches, today announced that its Fibre Channel HBA drivers are fully compliant and interoperable with the XenSource Xen Hypervisor 3.0, an open-source virtualization software code that will be included in the upcoming releases of Linux operating systems (OSs) such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

QLogic HBA drivers combined with the virtualization-enabled OSs will offer end-users the means to establish a fully integrated, reliable virtual server environment and reap the benefits of dramatically increased server efficiency…

A big interest raised around this new utility since Parallels annuncement and beta release, 10 days ago.

Previously known as VM Compactor, Parallels changed its name in VM Compressor and now approaches final shipment with this release candidate.

The new build brings several bug fixes and following new features:

• Uninstall feature for primary Mac OS X
• /r command line key to register product from the command line
• Event to guest Windows Application event log upon finishing its work
• Possibility to Add/Remove tasks by click on task itself, not only on checkbox

Download it here.

As you may have noticed virtualization.info doesn’t cover storage virtualization. Among other reasons I believe that at this point market has still no serious needs to get enough interested. The following article’s author seems to agree with me.

Quoting from ComputerWorld:

Three years’ worth of market hype hasn’t been able to overcome one apparent truth about multi-vendor storage virtualisation: virtually no one is doing it.

At the recent Storage Networking World conference in San Diego, customers and industry analysts said there are a number of reasons why network executives aren’t rushing out to buy intelligent fibre channel switches or appliances that virtualise or pool the storage resources on arrays from different vendors.
…
So far, Hitachi, HP, IBM and Sun are shipping either array-based storage virtualisation or fibre channel switches that pair with server appliances to add intelligent services to the storage fabric. Hitachi has an intelligent controller in its TagmaStore array that virtualises the storage resources attached to it. IBM and EMC manufacture server-based appliances that attach to director-level fibre channel switches from Brocade, Cisco and McData to virtualise storage resources.

All these companies say they support heterogeneous storage virtualisation. Hitachi’s TagmaStore, for instance, can connect to IBM Enterprise Storage Server and EMC’s Symmetrix and Clariion products…

Read the whole article at source.

Finally VMware seems it’s opening to public benchmarking by publishing this great whitepaper:

This white paper provides guidance in implementing benchmark tests using VMware
Workstation 5.5.
The paper discusses:

• Performance benchmarking methodology
• Configuring the systems under test to produce the best performance possible. This includes the host system, the VMware software, and the guest system
• Ensuring that the tests are making “apples-to-apples” comparisons

The paper also includes examples of common pitfalls that can affect the accuracy or relevance of the results obtained by benchmarking tests.

The guidelines in this paper are intended to assist in the acquisition of meaningful, accurate, and repeatable benchmarking results. These guidelines are useful when you perform comparisons between VMware Workstation and either native systems or other virtualization products, as well as when you run benchmarks in virtual machines in general. The guidelines should not, however, be considered VMware best practices in all cases.
Among other reasons, this is because benchmarking sometimes involves saturating one resource while overprovisioning others, something that would not be desirable in a production environment.

Note: Though this paper specifically addresses VMware Workstation 5.5, most of the guidelines recommended here also apply to VMware Player 1.0.

Read it here.

The whitepaper suggests a fair amount of benchmarking tools for all aspect of computing devices, but you would also consider take a look at virtualization.info list for further suggestions: How to stress test virtual machines.

Quoting from the Cassatt official announcement:

Cassatt ® Corporation, an innovator in providing enterprise software to enable agile IT infrastructures, today announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Program.

With this technology alliance, Cassatt will optimize its flagship product Collage™ with VMware ESX Server, virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating, and managing servers in mission-critical environments. In addition, Cassatt and VMware plan to provide cooperative support for joint customers…

Even if Sun Fire x4100 and x4200 servers will be officially supported for local booting just since the upcoming ESX Server 3.0, VMware already released a special driver for LSI 1064 controller which works with the new ESX Server 2.5.3.

Download the driver here and read the related Knowledge Base article here.

The availability of this driver time ahead official release means a lot of customers demostrated insterest for the new Sun servers, never supported by ESX before.
I believe Sun hardware will gain a lot of popularity at ESX Server 3.0 launch time.

Thanks to Ken Brady and Tony Kay for the news.

Redmond Magazine published the top five products chosen by its readers for several IT market segments.

In the Network and System Management one VMware won 2 awards:

• for Best Virtual Server Product with VMware GSX Server, beating Virtual Server 2005
• for Best Virtual PC Product with VMware Workstation, beating Microsoft Virtual PC

Very interesting but next time I would prefer more precise details since both GSX Server and Virtual PC have no release version numbering.