Year: 2009

The security vendor Tripwire continues to shift its focus on virtualization.
So far the company extended its support to virtual infrastructures (only VMware ones at the moment), released a free configuration checker for VMware ESX, and hired the popular expert Stephen Beaver as virtualization evangelist.

Today Tripwire moves another step towards VMware and release a second free tool called OpsCheck.

OpsCheck, which supports ESX 3.0/3.5 (including ESXi version), connects to VMware vCenter through a secure channel and verifies if VMotion is properly configured and operational by checking virtual machines device configurations, data stores, and networks.

The product is available as a Java application running on any Windows Server 2003 box with JRE 1.5 or later.

The Canadian startup Lanamark continues to unveil pieces of its hosted capacity planning solution.

After the major upgrade released at the beginning of this month, the company now makes available a new Server Virtualization Design Module.

The module does something truly useful: develops multiple capacity plans, one for each supported virtualization platform (Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Virtual Iron and of course VMware ESX), and compares them side-by-side.

Every analysis takes into account technical (new/redeployed/upgraded servers, storage arrays support, etc.) and business (software license cost, delivered services) constrains.
To do so Lanamark built an online repository (which is constantly updated) featuring TCOs for every component of a virtual infrastructure.

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After more than one year VMware is finally ready to release a stand-alone version of its physical to virtual (P2V) / virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tool that matches the one embedded within VI 3.5.

So far the Standalone version (formerly split in Started Edition and Standalone Enterprise edition) of the product was frozen at version 3.0.3 and it’s unclear why the company took so long to upgrade it.

The new 4.0 version (build 146302) includes:

• Support for Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu Linux distributions as source
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as source
• Support for Parallels Desktop virtual machines as source
• Incremental hot cloning (Converter now replicates any change happening to the source machine during the P2V migration)
• Power off source machine at the end of the conversion
• Selection of the target virtual disk and virtual volumes configuration
• Configuration of the target virtual machine

This product (now available in a single edition) remains available free of charge. 
VMware published an insightful comparison between this version and the one included with VI 3.5:

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After signing a major OEM agreement with IBM and a promising technology partnership with eG Innovations in October 2008, Leostream is ready to close additional deals.

This time the company allies with BOSaNOVA, a thin client vendor that offers VDI Ready CE.Net, Linux and XPe devices.

At this point the Leostream connection broker has a conspicuous number of partners in the server-based computing industry: Wyse, IGEL Technology, Praim, Astec Technology, Cranberry, Devon IT and even Fujitsu Siemens.

Last week VMware updated its desktop product for Apple Mac OS: Fusion.

The new minor release 2.0.2 (build 147997) introduces the following features:

• Support for Mac OS X 10.5.6 as host OS
• Support for Mac OS X 10.5.6 Server and Ubuntu 8.10 as guest OSes
• Support for Parallels Desktop 4.0 and Parallels Server for Mac 1.0 virtual machines
• Support for DMG CD/DVD images in addition to ISO images

Representing a virtual infrastructure through diagrams can be challenging as the industry didn’t agree yet on a common symbology.
A first attempt to simplify the task came from Scott Herold in December 2004, when he released a nice stencil for Microsoft Visio on his website VMguru.

Four years later the virtualization stencils are back, this time thanks to VMware.

Filling a void that Microsoft wasn’t interested to fill, last week VMware was kind enough to release a massive collection of high quality icons (available in 2D and 3D through a PowerPoint slide deck) that represent pretty much every aspect of a virtual infrastructure, from a single virtual machine to an entire VDI environment:

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At the beginning of December 2008 virtualization.info broke the news: Cisco is about to enter the x86 server market launching its first blade system in collaboration with VMware and possibly with EMC.

The platform, codenamed California, will feature a massive amount of memory, data center automation tools, a Nexus 5000 networking module, and deep integration with VMware Infrastructure.

It doesn’t matter if Cisco will really merge with EMC or if it will just acquire VMware (or none of these options): California is real and its launch is near.

InformationWeek just published additional details about the hardware specifications:

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Rumors of a possible EMC/VMW acquisition by Cisco has resurfaced.

virtualization.info has discovered some circumstantial evidence which combined could mean that something huge is about to go down.

• Cisco is raising cash for possible acquisitions, as reported earlier today.
• Yesterday’s SEC filing is evidence that someone is hoarding VMware shares.
• At Cisco Networkers 2009 a tighter Cisco/VMware/EMC strategy was evident.

Monday’s SEC filings shows that Cisco posted a prospectus on raising $4 billion in senior bonds. The book building is run by all the major investment banks and is closing on February 17.
Cisco must be really confident for such a major issuance in these market conditions, but Standard & Poors is giving the senior unsecured notes an A+ rating with a stable outlook.
Cisco will use $500 million of the $4 billion to repay short term debt.  When combined with sizeable cash holdings, this leaves them with with $4.7 billion in cash at the US parent company. According to CNET that amount excluded cash holdings at subsidiaries overseas.

That is not enough for a full takeover as the market cap of EMC is around $25 billion and VMware about $10.5 billion, but a possible stock swap with a cash settlement sprinkled on top could certainly interest EMC investors (Cisco currently hold 1.7% of the total outstanding stock).

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Leaked by the VMware Partner newsletter, and confirmed by a VMworld Europe 2009 abstract (DC10 – Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability), the upcoming vCenter Server Heartbeat will be announced on Feb 24.

SearchServerVirtualization is reporting that the new module will implement a hot-standby achitecture, monitoring sever and network hardware, as well as the vCenter application instance itself.
Hearbeat can either restart the application or fail-over it through LAN or WAN.

Heartbeat is not developed by VMware. The name of the partner that is providing this solution will be unveiled at VMworld.

Whoever is the partner (SSV speculates on NeverFail Group) it only supports Windows installations and uses Microsoft SQL Sever as backend database.

While the virtualization community is still intensely discussing the benchmarks around XenServer, ESX and Hyper-V used for VDI scenarios, provided by Ruben Spruijt / Jeroen van de Kamp and confuted by VMware, a new study surfaces.

This performance analysis, committed by VMware, shifts the focus from VDI to application virtualization, comparing Citrix XenApp 5.0, Microsoft App-V 4.5, Symantec SVS Pro 2.1 and VMware ThinApp 4.0.1.

The measurements were performed using the Devil Mountain Software (DMS) Clarity Suite: the Clarity Tracker Agent is deployed on the benchmarked Windows machines, the Clarity Studio produces workload simulation, and the results are uploaded for further analysis to the Exo Performance Network.

The conclusion are rather interesting:

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