Year: 2010

Last week Proxmox Server Solutions released version 1.6 of its open source management solution for hardware and OS virtualization platforms (KVM and OpenVZ): Proxmox VE.

Proxmox has been in development for a few years now. virtualization.info covered the product for the first time in May 2008, when it was still a pre 1.0 solution.
Version 1.0 was released in October 2008 and so far the company updated it quite regularly, adding key functionalities like the live migration for KVM, a wide support for storage protocols, and the inclusion of DRBD, which allows storage replication with active/active mode.

Version 1.6 introduces the OpenVZ patch for Linux kernel 2.6.32 and KVM 0.12.5, plus the update for a number of other components.

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A couple of weeks ago Xen.org released Xen maintenance release 4.0.1.
It’s primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces a few new capabilities.

First of all the default pvops kernel is now 2.6.32 (Xen 4.0 used kernel 2.6.31). Secondarily, they pygrub boot loader now support loading para-virtualized guests using GRUB2 configuration files. But more importantly, Xen 4.0.1 introduces Remus support, the Xen fault-tolerance package, for pvops dom0 kernels.

Xen 4.0.1 is expected to be included in the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) as the project further matures. It still uses Xen 3.4.2

A few weeks ago, before the VMworld conference, Veeam released a new integrated monitoring and reporting solution called ONE.

ONE 1.0 includes Veeam Reporter and Veeam Business View, plus a monitoring solution of choice between Veeam Monitor, nWorks Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) and nWorks Smart Plug-in for HP Operations Manager. So basically ONE comes in three editions.

The product is not just a commercial bundle: the company worked to integrate the products together as a single platform. For instance the combination of Monitor, Reporter and Business View is now called Veeam Monitor Plus.
This specific combination is also available as a free edition because Veeam offers free, limited versions of both Monitor and Reporter.

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Last week Quest announced three new products, Cloud Automation Platform 7.5, vFoglight 6.5 and vFoglight Storage 1.0, but just the last one is available right now.

vFoglight comes from the rebranding of the Vizioncore portfolio, completed at the end of August.
The last Vizioncore version of the product is 6.0, released in November 2009. The new 6.5 version introduces a number of new capabilities, including the much expected support for Microsoft Hyper-V, but it won’t be available before Q4 2010.

vFoglight Storage 1.0 leverages the Vizioncore monitoring engine and GUI to control the physical storage layer, providing details about the topology (relation between arrays and datastores) and performance of SAN arrays in the virtual infrastructure.
The product ships with pre-defined alerts and reports helpful to understand when the capacity thresholds are matched.

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Last week VKernel released the second version of its Capacity Management Suite (CMS), a solution that integrates most of the company products.

Specifically, CMS 2.0 includes Capacity Analyzer 5.0, Chargeback 2.0 and the Optimization Pack 2.0, which includes the tools Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory.
Inventory was not included into CMS 1.0 so this is a welcome addition.

Compared to the previous version, this is not just a commercial bundle: VKernel merged all the products above in a single virtual appliance, unified the analytics engine across the board and provided a single management console.
Despite that, licensing remains per-product, so that customers have a modular solution. Pricing starts at $299 per socket.

CMS 2.0 introduces a remarkable number of new features:

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Earlier this week the US startup Virtual Computer announced the availability of NxTop 3.0.
Like Neocleus (just acquired by Intel), Virtual Computer pioneered the use of a client hypervisor to enhance the enterprise desktop management. While Neocleus focused on platform security, Virtual Computer focused on virtual machines software and user management.

The solution includes two tiers: NxTop Center and the actual client hypervisor, NxTop Client.
The marketing investment made by Citrix to promote the upcoming XenClient, and the now-postponed launch of VMware Client Virtualization Platform (CVP), helped to increase a lot the attention for NxTop. So Virtual Computer recently decided to offer a scaled down free version of its platform.
Such free version of NxTop still required the centralized management component, but the interest for a client hypervisor from system administrators pushed the startup to release the NxTop Client as a stand-alone, completely free product: NxTop Workstation.

So the biggest part of NxTop 3.0 is the first, free, general purpose client hypervisor on the market. And quite remarkably, it doesn’t require the Intel vPro technology at all.

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VMTurbo is a new virtualization startup that left the stealth mode in April. 
The company’s technologies was previewed in July, but only last week the actual products were announced and released.

As virtualization.info previously reported, the VMTurbo platform is made of many different modules, to monitor, plan, automate and report about the management of a virtual infrastructure.
The first two pieces of the suite are called Monitor and Host Reporter. Both are available now and come as part of the same virtual appliance.

Monitor, completely free of charge, lists the virtual machines and hosts health status and provides real-time metrics about vCPUs, vRAM, vNICs and vHDs, detecting resources bottlenecks:

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Last week the Canadian startup Embotics released version 3.6 of its VM lifecycle management solution V-Commander. Version 3.0 went out almost exactly one year ago, without groundbreaking new features. But this new V-Commander 3.6 introduces a couple of very interesting additions:

• capacity management
• self-service provisioning web portal

The company claims that this version of the product scales up to 15,000 virtual machines and that the ROI comes after just four months.

Interestingly, Embotics also announced the upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

Earlier this week RingCube announced the availability of its platform wrapper vDesk 3.1.

vDesk, the enterprise version of MojoPac launched in March, features an interesting hybrid architecture which doesn’t use hardware virtualization but acts like other products in that market segment, including VMware ACE, Microsoft MED-V and MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution.

Version 3.1 introduces a few new security-oriented and synchronization features:

• pre-authentication host checking
• granular logging (for regulation compliance)
• virtual environments compression before synchronization
• block-level differencing

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In the last four years PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies) has been solely focused on the VMware market, competing with larger companies like Quest/Vizioncore and Veeam. But in early 2010 the startup decided to extend its support to other virtual infrastructures. This led to an investment from Citrix in May, and to the release of Backup for Citrix XenServer 1.0 last week.

The new product offers the same look & feel of the VMware version but the feature-set is not completely aligned yet.
PHD Virtual clarified to virtualization.info that this doesn’t depend on any technical constrain or lack of R&D resources: simply, the company delivered the XenSource version as soon as possible and so had to prioritize the delivery of certain capabilities. 
In the coming months, the two version will share exactly the same capabilities.

The company published a video of the new product in action:

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