Year: 2007

Quoting from the Stratus official announcement:

Stratus Technologies, Inc. announced today its membership in the VMware Community Source program, which enables Stratus to collaborate on highly available and reliable virtualization solutions. The program provides Stratus and other vendors with the opportunity to work with VMware on VMware ESX Server source code development and product direction under a royalty-free license.

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The Stratus ftServer server family of Intel Xeon processor-based systems supports both the Windows and Red Hat Linux operating systems. Pricing begins as low as US$10,000. Systems are highly configurable to support a broad range of business requirements, application types and workloads. Field-proven uptime reliability for ftServer systems consistently exceeds 99.999 percent…

Stratus ftServers are manifactured by NEC which redistributes them in parallel under the name of Express5800 FT.

Both NEC and Stratus yesterday announced quad-core versions of their fault tolerant servers, which will be available in June.

Microsoft just posted a couple of new introductive whitepapers focused on integration between Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1, in development since one year, and AMD SVM and Intel VT extensions:

• Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and Next-Generation AMD Opteron Processors Increase the Business Value of Virtualization
• Reducing Technology Costs with Intel Virtualization Technology and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

All papers bring the Final marker in title, leading to think SP1 launch is imminent.

Tomorrow Bob Muglia will officially start Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2007 with its keynote Delivering the Building Blocks for Dynamic Systems Management.

This could be the best opportunity to announce the Virtual Server update and possibly a beta 2 for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Microsoft also published a third, much more interesting (but yet very introductive) paper, titled Using Virtualization to Achieve Affordable Disaster Recovery, and focused on disaster recovery scenarios, addressed with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and PlateSpin PowerRecon and PowerConvert products.

Even if not clearly detailed in the document, PlateSpin PowerConvert extends virtual machines live backup capability introduced with this Service Pack, greatly reducing need for VMs downtime.

(it’s worth to remember this capability cannot be exploited with Windows native Backup solution, as virtualization.info exposed in September 2006)

Thanks to Andrew Dugdell for whitepapers links.

While waiting for VMware Infrastructure 3.1 beta program, worldwide customers may start wondering what the term VI Ops hides:

At the moment virtualization.info has no informations about this new thing, but, assuming it’s a new add-on for VMware Infrastructure 3, it may be a self-service provisioning system (Ops may be the shorthand for Operators), like the one Microsoft introduced with its System Center Virtual Machine Manager beta 1.

VI Ops, whatever it is, has to be added to a misterious codename Integrity virtualization.info discovered in June 2006 and which is still unveiled.

Update: This article from SearchServerVirtualization confirms VMware efforts in provisioning space, already started in June 2006 with Akimbi acquisition and subsequent release of Lab Manager 2.4:

[The second category] is management and automation solutions — for example, resource optimization and virtual machine lifecycle management, which looks at how you provision, change/modify and de-provision a virtual machine — the kind of stuff you need to do to prevent server sprawl. We have all the core functionality today, but we want to tie in a nice end-user workflow capability.

It seems the new HP ProLiant Partner program is collecting successes in virtualization space, with Virtual Iron following the SWsoft move of last week.

Quoting from the Virtual Iron official announcement:

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class software solutions for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management, today announced it has joined the HP ProLiant Partner Program and BladeSystem Solution Builder Program. Virtual Iron is one of just two charter members of the new invitation-only ProLiant Partner Program.

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HP has produced a new white paper validating the Virtual Iron solution on the HP ProLiant server platform. This document provides a public lab-validated proof point and a solution proof-of-concept. Several HP ProLiant rack mount and blade servers were tested including the ProLiant BL460c, BL465c, BL480c, DL380 G5, DL385 G2, DL580 G3 and DL585 G2 servers.

The white paper is available online here.

The Virtual Iron software has also been validated in the HP Test Lab on the HP ProLiant DL140, DL320, DL360 and DL365 servers…

Not happy enough reaching release candidate status for Workstation 6.0, its subset Player 2.0 and its superset ACE 2.0, VMware is preparing to launch the much expected ESX Server 3.1 + VirtualCenter 2.1 (aka VMware Infrastructure 3.1) beta program.

More informations as soon as possible.

VMware just updated three beta programs together, allowing testers access to Workstation 6.0, Player 2.0 and ACE 2.0 release candidates.

All betas share the same build number (42757) and this is quite understandable considering Player is a subset of Workstation and ACE is a superset of it since version 2.0.

While new builds of Workstation 6.0 and ACE 2.0 seem to introduce just integration with each other, Player 2.0 RC shows some surprises introducing experimental support for 2-way Virtual SMP, USB 2.0 support and Shared Folders.

All products are expected to be released in Q2 2007. Meanwhile enroll for the Workstation 6.0 beta program, the Player 2.0 beta program, or the ACE 2.0 beta program.

VMware continues to call current ACE 2.0 beta as Enterprise Edition, probably meaning a limited amount of ACE capabilities will be available at no additional cost in Workstation 6.0.

As not enough VMware is offering ACE 2.0 Enterprise Edition for free to VMware Infrastructure 3 customers until April 16.

vizioncore officially opened public beta of its upcoming esxReplicator 2.0.

In this new release vizioncore introduces a new, more efficient replication engine which has an improved error handling and supports VMware ESX Server 3.0, but also delivers improvements to user interface, now offering real-time statistics, jobs wizards and integration with VMware Virtual Center 2.0. But the most notable improvements relates esxReplicator awareness of VMware VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) tasks.

Download the beta here.

After announcing it in September 2006, INSYSTEK finally opened beta program for its suite of management tools with virtualization environment support: Virtualize IT.

The whole suite is made of three components, Inventory Manager, Control Center and NSMC, offering traditional enterprise management capabilities now blended with virtual machines management ones. Among others:

• Virtualization host configuration (including support for VMware ESX Server)
• Virtual machines provisioning (template deployment and re-designing), cloning, cold and hot migration
• Virtual machines inventory

Enroll for the beta here.

Quoting from CNET:

Any new x86 server can run virtualization software, but Dell plans to release a model that’s geared specifically to those drawn to the newly mainstream computing trend, CNET News.com has learned.

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Parker offered only a few details about the plan, but he did say that the server will have two processor sockets.

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Parker also indicated that the machine will be amply endowed with computing resources…

Read the whole article at source.

TechIQ is reporting SWsoft’s department Parallels may be preparing a new products for Apple Mac OS X Server.

virtualization.info already reported Parallels has plans to deliver a server and an enterprise server version of its virtualization solution in January 2006, updating readers with new dates in August of the same year. But company was exclusively alluding to a Windows/Linux hosted solution and a bare-metal one.

Given the huge success collected in the Apple market and limited profit opportunities available on other enterprise markets, where SWsoft is already present with Virtuozzo, it’s easy to think Parallels may want to shift its main focus on Mac OS at the moment.