Benchmarks: VMware ESX Server 3.5 on IBM Sytem x3850 M2

After Dell, HP and Sun, finally is the IBM turn to show benchmarks obtained with VMware VMmark measurement system.

The tested machine is a System x3850 M2 with four quad-core CPUs (Intel Xeon X7350 @ 2.93GHz) and 64GB RAM. The backend storage facility is an IBM DS4800.

With this benchmark analysis VMware now publishes performance for all major OEMs and it’s interesting to see how the IBM machine was able to serve the highest number of tiles (9) among competitors.

Now customers have a starting point to do a serious comparison between different equipments.

Enigmatec partners with Scalent

Quoting from the Enigmatec official announcement:

Enigmatec Corporation, the leading provider of enterprise-class run book automation (RBA) software, and Scalent Systems, the leading provider of infrastructure virtualization software for large data centers, today announced an integration partnership to enable policy driven automation of server repurposing in the data center. This partnership combines policy-based IT process automation from Enigmatec and server repurposing from Scalent to deliver an integrated software solution to dynamically place compute resources where and when they are needed in the data center. This implementation of real-time infrastructure dramatically lowers data center management operations costs while increasing flexibility in the face of business need change…

The partnership between Enigmatec and Scalent is particularly interesting even if there are no details about the actual integration: both companies offer automation capabilities at different levels and combining together customers may near the autonomic computing environment that virtualization is making easier to realize.

SEPATON joins the VMware Technology Alliance Program

Quoting from the SEPATON official announcement:

SEPATON, Inc., the leader in enterprise-class data protection solutions, today announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program. As a TAP member, SEPATON is better able to recommend best practices implementation of its S2100-ES2 virtual tape library (VTL) solutions to optimize the benefits of VMware virtual server environments…

Virtualization Congress launches Call for Startups competition

It’s not a secret that many venture capital firms are targeting virtualization these days. So launching a new tech company may be easier than usual when it’s time to raise some funds. But winning the market for a virtualization startup is a completely different story.

For each market segment there are three or four competitors, plus at least another ten in stealth mode.
On top of that there are the big players, like VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, which have endless resources and are launching new solutions in most areas every two months.

In short, standing in the crowd is less easy than ever before. But at Virtualization Congress 2008 we have a special place for the newest virtualization companies.

Today we will launch the Call for Startups competition (read the official press release).

What’s the prize?

One keynote in the middle of the day (we have two to assign, one for each day of the conference).

The winners will have the exclusive chance to launch their brand and product on stage, in front of Virtualization Congress audience.

A big company launch at zero marketing cost.

Which kind of audience will be reached?

First – all the potential customers that will attend the Virtualization Congress, along with the potential technology partners (and buyers) that will appear at the event.

Besides that, we are inviting influential journalists, well-known industry analysts, successful venture capital firms and angel investors.

Are there other benefits?

We’ll arrange a special meeting with our exclusive sponsor for this competition: Sierra Ventures.

What are the requirements?

Any startup which is in stealth mode today and will keep this status until Oct. 15-16, 2008 is welcome to apply by August 31.

APPLY NOW!

VMware executives are selling their shares

The bad performance of VMW in the last couple of months have been extensively commented on several financial magazines.

Now something new can be added to the analysis: in about 30 days a couple VMware top executives sold a significant amout of their shares.

The first one is Diane Greene, Co-Founder, President and CEO, which started to sell her shares (at the price of $56.67) at the end of January.
The second one is Carl Eschenback, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations, which his shares (at the price of $52.25) in early March.

While VMware top executives are selling their shares? While this may obviously be just for personal purpose, it may hint at further negative performance coming.

An interesting move anyway, considering the amount of new products and technologies that VMware is launching. Today for example HP starts selling ESX Server 3i and VMware just launched its newest product Lifecycle Manager.

Today the VMW ticker opened at $44.53, one of the lowest price ever reached since the VMware IPO.

Release: Citrix XenServer 4.1

As expected Citrix released XenServer 4.1, the first build since the XenSource acquisition.

Known since the beta timeframe, the new version includes a series of remarkable improvements:

  • Host-level HA (XenMotion)
  • Update/patch management integrated in XenCenter
  • GUI Integration with NetApp Data ONTAP
  • Centralized logging
  • Support for nested page table technology AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI)
  • Support for NIC bonding (host level) for fail-over
  • Support for hot-plugging USB storage as a storage repository
  • Support for Windows guest OS hot disk remove
  • Support for 10Gb Ethernet NICs (Mellanox/Chelsio)
  • Support for shared fibre channel storage
  • Support for Windows Vista (32bit only), Red HAT Enterprise Linux 5 (32bit and 64bit), Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (32bit and 64bit)

Download a trial here.

Note that the Platinum edition, a bundle of XenServer, XenDesktop and Provisioning Server, is not yet available. It will follow shortly during Q2 2008.

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

Release: VMware Lifecycle Manager 1.0

VMware releases today one of the new products announced in February: Lifecycle Manager (LCM) 1.0 (build 360).

The product comes from the acquisition of Dunes Technologies in September 2007 and basically is a self-service portal for virtual machines provisioning, integrated with VMware VirtualCenter throught its APIs.

Despite the product is very easy it has a critical feature: the capability to authorize the deployment of new VMs through four different access levels: the user (who requires a new VM), the approver (who accepts or refuse new provisioning inquiries), the IT staff member (who decides where to deploy the approved VM) and the IT administrator (who can allow access to VM templates and define deployment guidelines).

Additionally the product has some chargeback capabilities to properly account specific departments in the company.

LCM is a fundamental product to limit the so called VM sprawl effect, which mostly affects those companies not adopting a strict operational framework already.

While it seems to address the needs of bigger corporations it may easily become more useful for smaller firms, where the limited amount of resource and IT staff reduces the chances to enforce the provisioning control.

On the other side, the chargeback capabilities are a critical feature for biggest corporations, where accountability will become one of the most significant challenge.

Unfortunately that the product is only slightly different from other two infrastructure automation products that VMware offers, Lab Manager and the upcoming Stage Manager, and customers may find confusing having three overlapping solutions.

Download a trial version here.

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

VMware VI 3.5 Update 1 scheduled for April 10

VMware is expected to refresh its VMware Infrastructure 3.5 in Q2 2008.

The new release introduces a difference in the naming convention used for minor builds: instead of something like VI 3.5.1, VMware will use the label VI 3.5 Update 1 (build 82663).

The updates included in the Update 1 are unknown at the moment but its distribution is imminent. The company mistakenly published the download page ahead of time, giving a clear date for the distribution: April 10, 2008.

More details will be published as soon as possible.

VMware ESX Server 3i now shipping (with HP servers)

As expected, HP and VMware starts today the distribution of the new lightweight hypervisor ESX Server 3i:

The option is available for an additional $495.

Dell should start distributing the hypervisor as well in early April, but the big difference is that Dell may give it away for free.

The ESX Server 3i option is about to become a standard in every major OEM server configuration page, since VMware plans to use the new architecture as the main one in the hypervisor’s future versions.

Anyway the product is also already available as stand-alone package, ESX Server 3i Installable, for those customers that want to use it with their existing equipment (only Dell 2950 and HP DL380 G5 supported at the moment).

Virtualization Congress 2008: Citrix accepted the challenge

As most readers already know now, virtualization.info is preparing its first independent conference about hardware/OS/application virtualization technologies: the Virtualization Congress 2008.

With this event, we challenged the industry asking big players and young startups to give innovative lectures, with meaningful demonstrations and no marketing slides.

We are not ready to show the detailed agenda yet, but we are glad to announce that Citrix is the first to accept the challenge.

Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, will present on stage:

The Virtualization Congress 2008 will take place in London, October 14-16, 2008.

The Early Bird ends April, 30, so go on and register here:
http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/registration.htm