Year: 2007

Quoting from the OnStor official announcement:

ONStor Inc., the leading provider of scalable clustered NAS solutions for the enterprise, today announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program.

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ONStor will receive software for validation and integration, pre-sales development, technical support and subscription services, marketing tools and access to certification services to promote its virtualization solution to end users.

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ONStor recently announced a new addition to its Pantera line of virtualized storage solutions with the launch of the Pantera 5000. A fortified version of its clustered NAS solution, the Pantera 5000 more than doubles the per cabinet capacity of the Pantera 2000 and offers higher performance to support the large, fast-growing file storage demands of medium to large enterprises and organizations with substantial digital imaging storage requirements…

virtualization.info already revealed that VMware is going to release this December its new and much expected Infrastructure 3.5 (formerly 3.1), the commercial name for ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 bundle.

Most customers are eagerly waiting to access the bits because of many improvements and major new features, but don’t hope to have the product before the last day of the year.

Against forecasts anyway, VMware may release today, announcing availability at the Lehman Brothers Annual Technology Conference, where Diane Green, company president, will perform the presentation.

A further hint comes from some online magazines which published an article about VI 3.5 release yesterday, way too ahead of time for a Dec 31 launch date.

Diane Greene keynote is set for today at 7.30am (PST) and can be watched live here.

Update: As readers probably saw by themselves Diane Greene didn’t launch VI3.5 today as speculated.

virtualization.info has learned that the definitive launch date is set somewhere in the Dec. 6-11 week.

The upcoming web-based management tool for physical and virtual machines from Sun, Ops Center, will be available January 8, 2008 according to The Register and other .

Sun will give away Ops Center for free, also releasing the source code next week, but there will be a commercial version with support and services for $100-$350 per managed server.

Since the new xVM hypervisor will be released only in Q2 2008, this very first edition of Ops Center will not have any suppor for it. An update will be available at xVM release timeframe.

From its corporate blog James O’Neill, IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft, reveals that Virtual Server 2005 support will end in 2014 and that the company will not release a new version of the product, betting on upcoming Hyper-V success.

O’Neill also briefly wrote about Virtual PC’s future, a very hot topic which has been carefully avoided so far.

First release of Hyper-V is only aimed at server virtualization and it’s unsure what Microsoft will offer for desktop virtualization in the future: a version of Hyper-V for Vista, a new release of Virtual PC or just a new version of Application Virtualization (former SoftGrid)?

The new virtualization startup Fortisphere just launched and it’s already grabbing away a key figure from a main player: SWsoft.

Quoting from the official announcement:

Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise virtual machine lifecycle management software, today announced that Dan Harding has joined the Fortisphere management team as vice president of sales.

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Armed with significant experience in the burgeoning virtualization market, Harding comes to Fortisphere from SWsoft, a leader in server virtualization and automation. As vice president of enterprise sales for SWsoft, he developed and grew virtualization revenue by more than 200 percent annually for the U.S. enterprise markets.

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Prior to joining SWsoft, Harding was regional vice president of sales for Cable and Wireless, a leader in IP network and enterprise hosting solutions. Before joining Cable and Wireless, he was employed by dynamicsoft (purchased by Cisco), a leading provider of infrastructure software. Prior to dynamicsoft, Harding spent six years at UUNet where he completed his tenure as regional vice president of carrier sales, managing a sales team that focused on key accounts including Dell, AOL, Bellsouth, Earthlink, Savvis, Qwest, and Gateway. Dan holds a B.S. in business administration from Marymount University…

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft, a fast-growing virtualization and automation solutions company, was named “European Entrepreneur of the Year 2007”. The prestigious Audemars Piguet “Changing Times Award” rewards the European entrepreneur whose company has made the greatest impact on the greatest number of people over the past three years.

The award is sponsored by Audemars Piguet, one of the world’s premier watchmakers in cooperation with the European Tech Tour Association, an independent organization composed of key contributors to the high-technology industry. The association was founded in Geneva in 1998 in response to growing interest in emerging technology companies in various European regions…

In one day the company once famous for VMware disaster recovery solutions, Vizioncore, enriched its corporate image and broadened its portfolio to cover markets.

It happened this summer, when Quest acquired Invirtus, a company focused on virtual machines optimization and P2V migration, and integrated its offering into the Vizioncore one.

Vizioncore is not wasting time and after few months since the merge it’s already working to gain a significant visibility in the new segments: next week the US company based in Chicago will announce the Technology Preview of a major updated of the most popular product from Invirtus portfolio: vConverter 3.0.

The new version is aimed at serious competition, mostly with PlateSpin which is a leader in P2V migration space, reaching impressive results in performances: a physical server with 4GB hard drive (half of which is filled) can be live migrated in less than three minutes thanks to patented features vzBoost and Hyperfill (this time includes vConverter installation inside the target server. The migration itself takes less than two minutes).

Both new features increase conversion speed, reaching up to 10x speed with data preallocation techniques (Hyperfill) and kernel level drivers (vzBoost) specific for VMware ESX Server.

Besides VMware hypervisor, vConverter 3.0 will also support Microsoft and Virtual Iron virtualization platforms.

The pre-release product is already available here.

CNR is reporting an interesting news about the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) which is discussing implications of virtualization in software licensing:

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The group consists of FAST members Centennial Software, Computacenter, CSC Computer Sciences, HP, Hitachi Europe, ManageSoft, SMS Services, Rocela, Salans and Symantec/Altiris.

John Lovelock, chief executive of FAST, said: “Virtualisation is one of the hottest topics on everyone’s mind right now but there is a big gap in understanding what it really means for organisations looking to adapt the technology – both in terms of the impact it has on the day to day running of the business, the possibility of cost savings as well as the potential for ambiguity over licensing agreements with the software publishers.”

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He said there is not currently an easy way to measure usage on virtual environments and that technically it is possible but a discovery agent has to be deployed there to identify the software’s presence…

It really seems that virtualization represents an opportunity to refresh the business for everybody, no matter what.

Software licensing tracking inside virtual machines presents today identical difficulties than in physical infrastructures. There is no difference at all.

On the contrary virtualization will allow, on the long run, to more effectly enforce software licensing in at least two ways:

• transparently tracking installed software, monitoring activity inside virtual machines from the host level
• enforcing licensing limits and expirations through virtual machines security wrappers like VMware ACE or Sentillion vThere

Members of FAST should care of two classes of different problems instead:

• facilitating the first phase of the software licensing reform for those vendors who are not yet virtualization-friendly (Oracle is a very good example, despite the launch of its own hypervisor)
• start considering a second phase of this reform, to fairly handle software cost in application streaming scenarios, where a customer doesn’t use a specific application all the time.

Unfortunately virtualization represents more an economical and political revolution, rather than a technological one, so this will take a lot of time.

For the first time OpenVZ released these days a new class of patches for Linux kernel.

The new patches available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (both x86 and x64 versions), has been developed in a way it’s compatible with Xen patches, which RHEL already offers out of the box. In this way users can decide which virtualization approach they prefer, or even run both of them in parallel.

In any other case OpenVZ and Xen patches would have been incompatible with each other obliging users to choose one.

The new patches are available here.

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, provider of infrastructure virtualization software for large data centers, today announced that Scalent V/OE software will be available through HP in December 2007 as part of the HP BladeSystem c-Class Solution Builder Program.

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Making Scalent V/OE software available through the HP BladeSystem Solution Builder Program will enable customers to use their existing HP relationships, contracts and purchasing agreements to obtain Scalent software. Implemented in an HP environment, the software lets customers seamlessly add, swap, and failover between blade servers, while transparently maintaining the consistency and integrity of their business systems. This extends the functionality of HP’s BladeSystem Insight Control and the recently announced enhancements to BladeSystem virtualization and power management features…