Year: 2007

VMware arranged a new webcast for March 29 about disaster recovery capabilities of its ESX Server 3.0 & VirtualCenter 2.0.

Attendees will learn about:

• Ways that you can use VMware Infrastructure to provide better backup and easier recovery, including how to eliminate the need for backup windows by using VMware Consolidated Backup
• Options for leveraging replication to protect virtual machines
• Using VMware Infrastructure capabilities to provide easier testing of disaster recovery plans

Register for it here.

In April and in May I will speak at the Windows Server “Longhorn” Roadshow produced by Windows IT Pro.

During these months I’ll touch different US cities, presenting sessions about upcoming Windows Server Virtualization hypervisor (codename Viridian) in Virtualization and Server Management track, along with Michael Otey, Technical Director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine:

This track provides detailed knowledge of Windows Server “Longhorn” based virtualization in terms of its architecture and key usage scenarios. In addition, this track provides a detailed discussion of Server Management technologies now part of Longhorn such as the new streamlined Server Core installation option, PowerShell for enhanced command line management, and Remote Management Scenarios for Windows Server “Longhorn”.

I’ll be in:

• Chicago – April 10
• Atlanta – April 12
• Anaheim – April 17
• Santa Clara – April 19
• Boston – May 02
• Detroit – May 08

I’d be happy to meet virtualization.info readers during the roadshow, so if you are going to attend be sure to stop by and say hello.

(if you are interested in knowing other events I’ll speak at check my 2007 speaking schedule)

In January 2007 virtualization.info launched the first online infrastructure available for rent, featuring enterprise-class servers, fibre channel SAN, and fully redundant network equipment: Rent-A-Lab.

Today, due to its big success, virtualization.info is happy to announce a remarkable hardware upgrade to this facility.

Almost all existing machines have been replaced by 6 brand new HP ProLiant DL 380 G5, each sporting 2 powerful Intel Xeon 5300 (Clovertown) Quad-Core 1.86GHz processors with Virtualization Technology (VT-x) extensions, with 4GB RAM (which can be extended on demand), a couple of ultra-fast 72GB 10,000RPM SAS hard drives (if you don’t need the available SAN), and 6 network interface cards with TCP/IP Offload Engine (for testing heavy network workloads scenarios).

The management station has been upgraded too, now based on a rock-solid HP ProLiant DL 380 G4 with a 2 Intel Xeon 3.2GHz CPUS and 4GB RAM.

With such configuration (8 cores per machine) customers are finally able to extend their testing from VMware and Microsoft products to new virtualization platforms like XenEnterprise and Virtual Iron (including new Microsoft Windows hypervisor, codename Viridian, when it will be available), and perform meaningful comparisons on their own without marketing meddling and without breaking any vendors’ EULA.

So go on and check the introductory demo of Rent-A-Lab, its topology map, its equipment’s detailed configuration and obviously its price list. And book it today!

As virtualization.info readers may remember in May 2006, immediately after Microsoft announced acquisition of Softricity, another application virtualization company called Stream Theory claimed a patent infringement from competitors, including Softricity, AppStream and Exent. Such patent infringement may involve Citrix as well, which is working on application virtualization solutions on its own and through recent acquisition of Ardence.

Now, after 10 months, Tadpole Technology, which owns subsidiary Endeavors Technologies and its Stream Theory brand, reached an agreement with both Microsoft and Citrix, allowing software giants to use its patents.

This helps Tadpole difficult economical situation, as Citywire reports.

Meanwhile Stream Theory brand has disappeared from official website, replaced by Endeavors Technologies one.

Thanks to ThinComputing.net for the news.

Pradeep Padala and several collegues from University of Michigan, University of Waterloo and HP Labs, published a very interesting 14-page paper about how to address complexities in granting required resources for applications hosted in a virtual infrastructure:

…

Meeting application-level quality of service (QoS) goals becomes a challenge in a consolidated environment as application resource needs differ. Further-more, for multi-tier applications, the amount of resources needed to achieve their QoS goals might be different at each tier and may also depend on availability of resources in other tiers. In this paper, we develop an adaptive resource control system that dynamically adjusts the resource shares to individual tiers in order to meet application-level QoS goals while achieving high resource utilization in the data center.

…

To evaluate our controllers, we built a testbed simulating a virtual data center using Xen virtual machines. We experimented with two multi-tier applications in this virtual data center: a two-tier mplementation of RUBiS, an online auction site, and a two-tier Java implementation of TPC-W. Our results indicate that the proposed control system is able to maintain high resource utilization and meets QoS goals in spite of varying resource demands from the applications.

Download the whole paper at source.

Authors maintain a website about adaptive control of resources in a virtualized infrastructure which is worth to visit for further updates.

Pradeep Padala and several collegues from University of Michigan and HP Labs, published a very interesting 10-page paper about amount of overhead produced by resources re-allocation in a virtual infrastructure, comparing Xen and OpenVZ environments behaviour:

Today’s enterprise data centers are shifting towards a utility computing model where many business critical applications share a common pool of infrastructure resources that offer capacity on demand. Management of such a pool requires having a control system that can dynamically allocate resources to applications in real time. Although this is possible by use of virtualization technologies, capacity overhead or actuation delay may occur due to frequent re-scheduling in the virtualization layer.

This paper evaluates the overhead of a dynamic allocation scheme in both system capacity and application-level performance relative to static allocation.

We conducted experiments with virtual containers built using Xen and OpenVZ technologies for hosting both computational and transactional workloads. We present the results of the experiments as well as plausible explanations for them.

We also describe implications and guidelines for feedback controller design in a dynamic allocation system based on our observations.

Download the whole paper at source.

Authors maintain a website about adaptive control of resources in a virtualized infrastructure which is worth to visit for further updates.

Quoting from the AppStream official announcement:

AppStream Inc., a leader in on-demand application deployment and management, today announced a partnership agreement with Integrated Computer Solutions, Inc. (ICS), a full service information security and technology services firm headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama. Under the partnership ICS will leverage AppStream’s award-winning streaming technology as the primary application delivery mechanism for ICS’s SmartDesktop solution.

ICS’s SmartDesktop, a solution in the emerging category of desktop seat management, addresses the challenges organizations face with managing today’s antiquated desktop environments. Unlike other seat management solutions, SmartDesktop takes a holistic approach to the entire desktop lifecycle and applies the application streaming technology from AppStream as the on demand software delivery and management mechanism…

Quoting from SearchWinIT:

Altiris will be the primary provider of support for its products even after Symantec and the systems management vendor begin to integrate their product lines this spring.

The vendors’ integration plans — as to which products will stay and which will go — are still unknown. Symantec-Altiris will make its product integration plans public beginning in April, said Mark Magee, director of product marketing at Lindon, Utah-based Altiris Inc.

…

Altiris, which will run as a separate business unit of Symantec Corp. once the acquisition is approved, will continue to support its code, product offerings and customers moving forward, even as Altiris’ products are integrated with Symantec’s, Magee said.

…

“Saying [Altiris] is going to continue supporting products is one thing, actually seeing Symantec give Altiris control over product development of the company’s management solution and not as an augment to security or storage is another,” said Fred Broussard, analyst with Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.

Another sign that would make him believe that Altiris will remain in control of its own destiny is if key executives such as CEO Greg Butterfield stays in a management position and Altiris’ sales staff is not replaced by Symantec’s sales staff.

“They need to send some strong signals that they are serious about the Altiris acquisition, such as not firing sales staff under the guise of redundancy,” he said…

Read the whole article at source.

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 a new program for VMware users that enables them to quickly and easily upgrade from VMware Server and VMware ESX 2.5 to Virtual Iron at a fraction of what it would cost to upgrade to VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. The program includes seamless virtual machine migration from VMware to Virtual Iron using PlateSpin’s PowerConvert platform.

Virtual Iron is offering the VMware Upgrade Program in three different product bundles. Each bundle includes:

• Perpetual License for Virtual Iron Software
• One (1) yr. of Virtual Iron Support at Gold Level
• PlateSpin Power Convert V2V Migration & Support
• Additional V2V migrations are available at special discount pricing upon request

Upgrade prices are set this way:

Virtual Iron announcement is very timely considering SearchServerVirtualization just reported VMware customers’ complains about upgrade prices.

Update: Note that this offer is limited to the first 100 customers only.

Quoting from SearchServerVirtualization:

VMware ESX 2.x users are proving slow to upgrade to VMware Inc.’s latest and greatest, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3), introduced last summer. At least one VMware reseller is pointing the finger at the high cost of upgrading to the new platform.

According to price lists obtained from VMware resellers, the cost of upgrading from VMware ESX 2.5 with Virtual Center to Virtual Infrastructure 3 Enterprise is $4,900 per dual-processor server, compared with $5,750 for a net-new license. Depending on when the ESX 2.x license was purchased, customers paid between $3,000 and $5,000 per dual-socket server.

That doesn’t sit well with some ESX 2.x users, many of whom have had ESX 2.x installed since 2003 and are paying annual license and subscription fees of 21% to 25%…

Read the whole article at source.