Year: 2007

Quoting from the Provision Networks official announcement:

Provision Networks, a global provider of enterprise virtual desktop deployment and application delivery solutions, announced today that its entire product portfolio, including the market-leading Virtual Access Suite, can be resold by HP under a distribution agreement the companies have signed…

This is the second OEM partnership both company sign in a short period: in April Provision Networks signed a similar agreement with Virtual Iron, while HP made the same last week with Surgient.

Blades have nothing to do with virtualization. By chance both technologies can be used to achieve server consolidation. But beside that, at least at today, they are not enhancing each other in any other way.

And I’m glad Gartner seems to think in the same way, as SearchServerVirtualization is reporting:

Gartner’s research vice president John Enck is tired of the hype around blades and headlines about blades and server virtualization being the perfect marriage in particular.

“It isn’t a marriage I want to be engaged in,” Enck told attendees at his session, titled “Blades and Virtualization: Choose One, Both or Neither,” held at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit in Orlando last week…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the Mendocino Software official announcement:

Mendocino Software today announced that InfiniView, the industry’s only enterprise-class continuous data protection (CDP) solution, now supports VMware ESX Server, Version 3 and higher. By offering InfiniView’s “one button” instant recovery capability for use with virtualized servers running on ESX Server, Mendocino is offering faster, simpler recovery that will help to maximize the overall availability of VMware environments…

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that the Surgient Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS) is being resold by HP as a component of the HP Quality Center.

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Surgient VQMS consolidates pre-production infrastructure and automates the provisioning of test configurations on-demand. HP Quality Center integration enables testers and testing tools to reliably request and securely access test configurations 24×7…

Virtual Iron and Compellent arranged a new webcast for June 26 about combined use of hardware virtualization and resources virtualizaton (storage):

This webcast will highlight how these combined capabilities can help you:

• leverage the full power and ROI of server virtualization
• dramatically improve server and storage resource utilization
• improve storage flexibility through thin provisioning and logical disks
• simplify patch management and back-up through the use of snapshots
• enable more cost-effective disaster recovery and capacity management through data replication

Register for it here.

Several news magazines (ComputerWorld, ZDNet and others) are reporting a news about Microsoft moves in Windows Vista license for virtualization scenarios.

After a private pre-announcement to extend rights to virtualize all Vista editions, Microsoft changed its mind again saying wouldn’t make the change.

So at the end of the day nothing happended: Windows Vista cannot be virtualized if you have Home Basic or Home Premium editions.

This episode and other decisions taken so far reflect inner conflicts about how to execute virtualization strategy, and huge political pressure coming from several Microsoft departments.

Virtualization impacts Redmond giant on at least four critical points: licensing schemes, support policies, anti-piracy technologies and operating system architecture. So focusing on virtualization means reconsider the overall plan and investment made so far in all these areas.

Quoting from the Novell official announcement:

Novell today also announced the commercial availability of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack, a bundle of paravirtualized network, bus and block device drivers that enable unmodified Windows* and Linux* guest operating systems to run with near native performance in virtual environments created with the Xen* hypervisor technology integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise and Intel* Virtualization Technology and AMD* Virtualization hardware.

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The Virtual Machine Driver Pack includes drivers for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003, and will ship in July. Drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 will be released later this summer and will be added to the driver pack at no additional charge via maintenance update. A one-year subscription to the Virtual Machine Driver Pack will cost $299 per physical server for up to four virtual machines or $699 per physical server for unlimited virtual machines. Xen drivers for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are already available and ship as part of the SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution.

So after XenSource and Virtual Iron, Novell is the third company trying to raise some direct profits from Xen distribution. Company partnership with Microsoft is critical from this point of view, indirectly implying Novell drivers will perform better than ones provided by competitors.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

After VMLogix, another company working on virtual machines provisioning segment, Surgient, announces an updated for its solution.

In this new release of Virtual Lab Management Applications Surgient introduces following features:

• Advanced, agentless networking
  Unique to Surgient, NAIL Server enables complex networking between guest images without requiring a management agent, accelerating deployment and allowing the virtual lab environment to more effectively replicate a wider array of production configurations.
• Universal Remote Access 2.0
  With a higher performing remote access and firewall transversal system, Surgient v5.3 provides enhanced global access to a centrally deployed virtual lab anytime, from anywhere.
• Advanced Calendaring System
  An advanced calendar capability allows lab managers to adequately schedule and keep track of current and future lab usage and reservations. Version 5.3 also features improved lab reporting that enables metered self-service.

Surgient Virtual Lab Management Applications, version 5.3, will be available starting August 2007 and support both VMware ESX Server 3 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. Workgroup pricing begins at $35,000.

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

It seems that Endeavors Technologies and its subsidiary Stream Theory are in the middle of a deep and complex renewal process: first Stream Theory closed all litgations with Microsoft and Citrix and with AppStream, then Endeavors updated it’s website bringing back a focus on Application Virtualization, Streaming and SaaS concepts.

And now the company official announces hiring of a new CEO:

Endeavors Technologies Inc, the pioneer in application streaming, today announced that its Board of Directors has named industry veteran Peter Bondar as Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Bondar will also serve in the capacity of executive director on the board of Tadpole Technology plc, Endeavors’ parent company.

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Prior to joining Endeavors, Mr. Bondar founded Flying-Doctors, a boutique consultancy firm specializing in enhancing the business, corporate and financial performance of high-technology and knowledge-based businesses. He also held senior positions at Acorn Group plc, Arm Holdings plc, Tarantella and Program Management plc. Mr. Bondar has a degree from Hull University, where he studied Computer Studies and Solid State Physics…