IBM announces fail-over capabilities for Xen and provisioning facility for all other hypervisors

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

IBM today announced a new release of its premier virtualization management software that adds powerful new capabilities for simplifying the management of virtual and physical systems across multiple platforms. In addition, the software is now available on POWER-based servers, leveraging the expanded virtualization capabilities recently announced with the launch of the POWER6 microprocessor.

IBM will introduce two new tools for availability management and image management with the new release of Virtualization Manager. IBM Systems Director Virtual Availability Management will allow customers using Xen-based virtualization on x86-based environments to create a high availability farm to help manage and respond to unplanned host and virtual server outages and to simplify maintenance and migration tasks. As part of this offering, IBM will unveil industry first technology that provides secure live relocation for Xen virtual machines with little to no downtime in response to predictive host and virtual server failures.

The second tool, IBM Systems Director Virtual Image Management, will provide a single, unified view of different types of system templates and server images to help customers manage and deploy their systems. This new offering will allow customers to easily deploy new virtual servers based on virtual system templates and images. The templates can be used to create, customize and clone virtual images on all supported hypervisors and x86, AMD- and POWER-based systems.

IBM Systems Director Virtualization Manager V1.2 will be available in the third quarter of 2007…

As usual Virtualization Manager, delivered as a module for Director, will be free of charge for IBM customers.