Year: 2006

Virtugo is a young virtualization startup actually focusing on providing utilization and performance enhancements to VMware ESX Server.

Quoting from the Virtugo official announcement:

Virtugo Software, Inc. the leading provider of performance management and optimization tools for the virtual environment, announces the immediate availability of VirtualSuite r5.2.
…
Introductions today include:

• PerformLite 5.2
  Addressing one of the most challenging issues facing IT organizations today with virtual environments “How do I asses the performance of my virtual environment?”. IT organizations want a simple and quick way of understanding how the VMware ESX environment is performing
• Perform 5.2
  Delivering a performance management tool specifically designed to enable IT organizations the ability to discover, monitor, and maintain the vital statistics of the virtualized environment. Perform incorporates host server and virtual machine knowledge to show real-time, and historical variables such as CPU, memory, and disk usage within a comprehensive user interface, allowing administrators to graph and report on those vital statistics.
• Optimize 5.2
  Extending the virtual environment by automatically tuning your virtual environment to enhance application performance. By dynamically adjusting CPU, memory, and disk resource allocations in real time the virtual environment can handle more work while decreasing application response time. Optimize was designed to maximize utilization and increase productivity of existing systems, thus enabling companies to dynamically manage workloads to ensure business priorities are met.
• Connect 5.2 for Microsoft Operations Manager
  Enabling IT organizations to marry information about the virtual environment with the information about the physical server environment. Connect provides the conduit in getting all the vital statistics from the virtual environment into a MOM. Connect monitors the virtual servers to allow for quick problem identification, notification and correction, and provides tasks to automate and perform routine operations.

Look at the demo or download it here.

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

Sun just launched a very interesting tool for managing server consolidation on Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 platforms with Solaris 10 Containers:

The Consolidation Tool for Sun Fire Servers V1.0, Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 Edition, is a software tool designed to simplify the task of consolidating multiple applications onto the Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 platform. In particular, this software allows the easy definition and creation of Solaris Containers.

The tool deploys applications into processor sets where appropriate and allocates CPUs into processor sets in a way that optimizes performance.

The software also takes full advantage of Solaris Containers (including Solaris Zones partitioning technology, pools, psets, and scheduling classes), making intelligent choices between full-root and sparse zones.

Features provided:

• Captures customer’s workload consolidation requirements
• Builds resource pools, psets, and Solaris Zones
• Deploys a short list of public domain applications into Solaris Zones
• Provides a report summarizing the deployment

A PDF presentation is available for further features details.

Download it here.

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

Thanks to Phillip Fayers for the news.

Quoting from the Akimbi official announcement:

Akimbi Systems, the global leader in Virtual Lab Automation software, today announced its 25th Akimbi Slingshot customer, an achievement realized just six months after the company’s launch in September 2005.

The acquisition of customers – including Coldwater Creek, RSA Security, Juniper Networks, Scientific Technologies (STC) and others – combined with the company’s recent build out of more than 25 channel partners in its global distribution network, reinforces Akimbi’s position as the market share leader in Virtual Lab Automation, a new class of infrastructure software that leverages and enhances the capabilities of virtualization platforms from VMware and Microsoft…

Quoting from the Akimbi official announcement:

Akimbi Systems, the global leader in Virtual Lab Automation software, today announced it has expanded its base of operations into Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) and Asia/Pacific (APAC) under the leadership of Reza Malekzadeh, who has joined Akimbi as vice president of international operations and will direct all Akimbi market activities outside North America.

The company also announced the opening of its EMEA and APAC headquarters, the immediate availability of an internationalized version of Akimbi Slingshot, the expansion of its global distribution network with 12 new international channel partners, and the appointment of two additional members of its international sales and channel management team — all of which support the company’s objective to further penetrate markets beyond North America.
…
Reza spent four years with VMware where, as employee number 10, he launched the company’s marketing efforts, introduced VMware’s products to EMEA and APAC, and helped grow the company from inception to profitability…

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera Inc., a global leader in utility computing, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued it U.S. Patent No. 7,032,108 entitled “System and Method for Virtualizing Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) Including BIOS Run Time Services,” U.S. Patent No. 6,927,974 entitled “Simplified Power and Data Connector for Use with Chassis System that Houses Multiple Processors,” and U.S. Patent No. 6,953,232 entitled “Latching Mechanism for Securing a Computer Component into a Housing.”

Egenera’s unique BIOS technology virtualizes the operations provided by standard server BIOS, allowing those I/O operations to be performed to devices that are not physically attached to the server. Specifically, the virtual BIOS accesses virtual console and virtual storage resources necessary to transform diskless, stateless Egenera® Processing BladeTM modules into virtual servers. This technology is a key enabler for virtualizing server configuration while providing the standard BIOS interfaces required by enterprise server operating systems…

SearchOpenSource published an interesting interview with Wade Reynolds and David Marshall, architects at Surgient and co-authors (with Dave McCrory) of the upcoming book Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center about their best tips for deploying and managing virtual machines.

Read the whole interview at source.

Quoting from CRN:

…
In a phone interview before his presentation at EMC Technology Summit Monday, Raghu Raghuram, vice president of VMware’s Platform Products, claimed the company’s forthcoming platform upgrade and new consolidation add-on will deliver the most advanced virtualization capabilities in the market.

He said ESX3’s four-way SMP support as well as VirtualCenter2’s new Distributed Resources Manager (DRS) and Distributed Availability Service (DAS) are far ahead of Microsoft’s planned Virtual Server Manager.
…
“Full details of the product aren’t out yet but what the customers buys from VMware is the full solution — bare metal virtualization plus virtual machine management plus VMotion plus P-to-V [physical-to-virtual] migration. It’s the full suite that matters, not any one single component,” said VMware’s Raghuram. “It looks like Microsoft will have basic management that allows you to stop and start a VM and there seem to be a lot of products like that…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the Intel official announcement:

At the heart of the first Intel vPro-based PCs will be an Intel® Core™ microarchitecture dual-core processor. This next-generation, 64-bit microarchitecture bestows significant gains in performance and reductions in power-consumption improving responsiveness and productivity.

Intel vPro technology also includes the second-generation of Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) and Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT). Intel VT will be integrated into the dual-core processor while the next-generation Intel AMT will be integrated into the new platform chipset.
…
Further strengthening PC security, Intel VT allows for separate independent hardware-based environments inside a single PC so IT managers can create a dedicated, tamper-resistant service environment – or partition – where particular tasks or activities can run independently, invisible to and isolated from PC users.

Demonstrating the industry support for Intel vPro technology, Symantec*, an IT-trusted industry leader, today announced plans to work with Intel to build security solutions creating an isolated environment outside of the main PC operating system for the purpose of managing security threats. This tamper-resistant virtualized environment will deliver stronger control and protection in the data infrastructure…

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

Anthony Liguori is working on a VNC patch for QEMU with a possible future implementation in Xen:

…
I have been developing a VNC patch for QEmu.
…
night I got a chance to talk to Fabrice about this patch and he seemed to be happy with it. In fact, it looks like I’ve got a shot of getting it in for the next release. The code is quite ugly right now but hopefully I’ll have something that’s much cleaner by the end of the week. Then I can start looking at reusing it for Xen so I can finally get rid of the libvncserver dependency for the VFB.

Read the whole article at source.

Hi everybody from Paris, France.

As you already noticed no virtualization news from virtualization.info since a couple of days: I’m attending the technical conference for VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) and Partners called Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX) 2006 in EuroDisney.

TSX is pretty interesting to understand how the EMEA technical arm of VMware community is answering to new announcements and upcoming technologies.

It was a big surprise to see that, at the end of plenary session with Karthik Rau, Senior Director of Infrastructure Products & Alliances, nobody had anything to ask.
It was not a surprise instead to see, among others solution partners, 2 vendors collecting a majority of visits: PlateSpin and vizioncore.

Attendees provided clear feedbacks: half of them is looking for features not available (clustering as the most wanted ever) without any care on prices and the other half complaining about VMware too high prices for Virtual Infrastructure.

An interesting point it’s that while the whole conference is focused just on ESX Server the most discussed topic is VMware (GSX) Server.

Attendees opinions about sessions quality was mixed: some speakers (like Patrick Lin and Richard Garsthagen) were greatly appreciated, while others were considered excessively poor in technical details.

At the end of the event 3 big points were commonly shared:

1. the whole market is really in an early stage, with so much vendors opportunities and so many new potential customers
2. VMware is more and more focusing every day on very big enterprises, trying to satisfy highly complex requirements
3. the Virtual Infrastructure (ESX Server + VirtualCenter) is becoming so complex that to become proficient on it you have to be a networking expert, a storage expert, a security expert and a system engineer expert at the same time

I personally enjoyed very much the event for the opportunity to meet many virtualization professionals, quite every vendor I blog about since 3 years, great VMware representatives and many readers of virtualization.info.

I would also say a special thank you to Richard Garsthagen for inviting me and publicly endorsing virtualization.info, and all of you who stopped by to keep in touch and exchange great insights about the market.