Year: 2007

After the virtual machine self-service portal, anticipating of years advent of VDI, Richard Garsthagen, Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, started a new personal project on his own blog.

vcPlu is a Windows service able to interact with VMware VirtualCenter 2.x and show detailed informations about monitored virtual machines:

• Virtual Disk usage (seen from within the VM)
• Snapshot presence and size

vcPlus also allows to sync the guest operating system FQDN to the display name of the virtual machine in Virtual Center. In next released Richard already planned to introduce an advanced alarm system able to send an email when monitored details reach thresholds.

Download it at source.

Quoting from the Macquarie Telecom official announcement:

Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, today announced it has joined a select group of leading global hosting providers in the new VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP).

…

This latest service offering provides Macquarie Hosting customers with the option of either going physical or virtual with their online mission critical server infrastructure. These services include:

• Virtualised dedicated hosting: Allows organisations with mission critical online applications to immediately and cost-effectively increase or reduce their hosted infrastructure capacity to meet demand
• Disaster recovery: Enables organisations to migrate their infrastructure, live, to virtual machines and recover from unplanned outages in minutes
• Utility-based computing: Transform your hosting infrastructure into a flexible pool of IT resources so customers can draw capacity as needed

Under the program, Macquarie Telecom will also develop customised virtual infrastructure offerings to meet specific customer requirements…

Macquarie Telecom is the first hosting company publicly announcing adhesion of VMware SSP, announced just few days ago.

QLogic has just released a new whitepaper to fight back performance superiority claimed by its competitor Emulex in April.

The research claims QLogic 4GB FibreChannel HBAs achieve 38% higher performances in scalability testing on a VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 environment.

…

Tests were performed to compare I/O performance of QLogic and Emulex 4Gb FC HBAs in a VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 virtualized environment with Windows Server 2003 as a guest OS. IOmeter was used to measure the IOPs and throughput values across a range of block sizes. The IOmeter tests were run to measure how HBA performance would scale across instances of 1, 2, and 4 VMs for:

• Sequential Reads
• Sequential Writes
• Sequential Read/Write (full duplex)

Windows Server 2003 was the guest OS used in all three test cases. I/O was run in a physical compatibility mode on a mapped raw LUN per VM…

Read the whole whitepaper at source.

Despite different test approaches and results it’s worth to note that first performance comparison, claiming Emulex superiority, was realized by an independent research firm, while this one, claiming QLogic superiority has been realized in house.

Quoting from the Symantec official announcement:

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NetBackup 6.5 introduces a host of new features and enhancements including native disk-based backup, data deduplication, deep integration with intelligent backup appliances and VTLs, heterogeneous snapshot management, granular recovery for critical applications and virtual machines, and innovative new licensing and pricing programs.

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NetBackup leverages VMware Consolidated Backup, a capability provided by VMware, to guarantee consistency and remove the backup burden from the primary VMware server host. NetBackup 6.5 also goes a step further, by introducing a breakthrough capability to enable a single image-level backup to deliver both full-image or granular file-level recovery. Finally, VMware backups can be performed to tape or disk, and can apply the new PureDisk Deduplication Option for deduplication and replication of VMware backups…

Quoting from the Cassatt official announcement:

Cassatt Corporation, a provider of software to run IT as a utility, today announced a technology and business partnership with BladeLogic, Inc., a leading provider of data center automation software, that will provide enterprise customers an integrated solution to advance utility computing.

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Together BladeLogic and Cassatt will provide a rich utility computing solution for improving IT operations in the data center:

• BladeLogic’s software discovers and creates an actionable catalog of live services based on software configurations across physical and virtual servers and applications. Those services are then used by the software to automate configuration management tasks such as inventory, compliance, remediation, patch management, and provisioning.
• The Cassatt Collage software automatically discovers and pools all hardware and software resources (physical and virtual servers, application servers, BladeLogic configuration catalogs, and network resources) and dynamically allocates these IT resources according to business policies as demand on applications ebbs and flows…

Quoting from the InovaWave official announcement:

InovaWave today announced that its DXtreme for Windows product was named as a winner of the “Best of TechEd Awards 2007” in the Windows Server Infrastructure category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine and Office & Sharepoint Pro.com.

The judges reviewed over 260 IT products and services submitted for the contest and chose 45 finalists to be interviewed at TechEd in Orlando, Florida…

SearchServerVirtualization is reporting a breaking news, still unconfirmed, about VMware preparing a lite version of ESX Server:

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According to several sources close to VMware, ESX Lite is real and currently under development. The new lightweight hypervisor would be installed directly on the motherboard, simplifying the deployment of an ESX host and ensuring 100% hardware integration…

Read the whole article at source.

If confirmed this move would arrive without too much surprise, considering hard mission VMware has: take away hardware control (and its political power over industry) from Microsoft’s hands.

Advent of KVM virtualization solution, which uses a different approach anyway, as Linux kernel module, makes this task even harder with big distributors like Red Hat and Novell having a new chance to maintain hardware control despite virtualization (just like Microsoft is trying to do with its upcoming hypervisor Windows Server Virtualization, codename Viridian).

Update: virtualization.info has just learned the information is confirmed. VMware and some OEM partners (Dell is one of them) are going to offer hardware with embedded ESX Server. Something which could be called a real hardware appliance.

After acquiring Ardence application virtualization and streaming provider at the end of 2006, Citrix was expected to start integration of technology in its Presentation Server.

But a brief roadmap exposed by Brian Madden reveals upcoming versions of Citrix main product, codename Ohio (2007) and codename Delaware (2008), will not include include any of Ardence capabilities.

To have products convergence it seems customers will have to wait until 2009 at least, when codename Parra may bring integration with several other technologies beside Ardence ones.

Read the whole roadmap at source.

InfoWorld published a brief review of new major release for Parallels Desktop, assigning a rating of 9.1/10 and providing this conclusion

Parallels Desktop 3.0 brings several new features to the Mac OS X virtualization game, including direct graphics acceleration capabilities, snapshots, and offline browsing of VM file systems. It’s a very worthy companion to anyone bridging the gaps between the Windows and Mac world, and the price is definitely right.

Read the whole review at source.

While Trigence is working to move its application virtualization solution from Linux to Windows to reach cross-platform capability, Thinstall is trying to perform the opposite process, bringing virtualized applications from Windows to Linux desktops, in a simpler way.

In a new short webcast Jonathan Clark, company’s CEO, shows a Thinstall self-contained application being started and executed on a Ubuntu Linux desktop, thanks to Wine open-source virtualization solution.

Check the webcast at source.