Year: 2010

Yesterday Dell announced a number of initiatives around cloud computing. One of the is the launch of the PowerEdge C Servers, available today globally.

The interesting part of the news is that PowerEdge C machines will be offered with a new software option: the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) platform. 

UEC is the Canonical private cloud computing offering based on Ubuntu Server and Eucalyptus (or Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems), which is an open source management interface for Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) clouds.
Eucalyptus is able to manage both Xen and KVM, but Canonical switched from Xen to KVM for its distributions more than two years ago.

Both KVM and Eucalyptus are integrated in the Ubuntu Server installer since version 9.10.

Dell will provide blueprints to create IaaS cloud architectures based PowerEdge C and Ubuntu UEC.

After exactly a year since its public launch, the startup HyTrust releases today version 2.0 of its access control and change management appliance for VMware virtual infrastructures.

It’s worth to remember that HyTrust sits between the VMware management interfaces (vCenter Client, ESX SSH and web management interfaces, vCenter and ESX APIs) as a transparent proxy that enforces authentication, authorization and corporate policy.

Every time a vSphere administrator tries to issue a command, his request is intercepted by the HyTrust appliance that sits in the network: the engine checks authentication credentials first, it verifies that the administrator is in a user group allowed to interact with the virtual infrastructure entities that he’s trying to manipulate, and then it verifies if the desired action is allowed on those entities.
If not, HyTrust doesn’t move forward the command and returns to the vSphere management interfaces a customizable warning, saying that the desired action is denied.

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PHD Virtual released yesterday version 4.0 of its backup/restore solution for VMware virtual infrastructures.

The new build is primarily about performance: the company claims up to 20x faster backups thanks to the technology called Change Block Tracking (CBT).
By leveraging vSphere Change Tracking APIs, CBT only reads the blocks that have changed inside virtual disks, reducing the time to complete the backup. 
Unfortunately CBT doesn’t work with templates, VMs with snapshots created before the activation of CBT, VMs with independent disks and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) LUNs.

esXpress 4.0 also includes support for IDE and SCSI VMDKs and the capability to restore virtual machines from the management GUI.

The latest esXpress release tracked by virtualization.info was 3.6, announced in July 2009.

Capacity planning has always been a key phase in most virtualization projects. Unfortunately, just a limited number of customers sees a real value in this activity as it requires expensive products, skills to use them and a significant amount of time to produce results that sometimes are only partially useful.

While the adoption of capacity planning tools still is very low, their importance is higher than ever as virtual infrastructures grow in complexity and add more dimensions to be considered.

Virtualization architects don’t have to deal anymore with well-known problems like the virtual machine density per host (VM / core) and proper storage capacity for basic server consolidation vs VDI use cases.
Here’s three good examples: 

• The optimal use of next generation CPUs with six or more cores, which increases the VM density, depends on network capacity, and the adoption of different technologies, like 10GBit Ethernet, should become a fundamental constrain to consider during planning.

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Brian Madden just published a very interesting early report on the requirements and capabilities of the just announced Microsoft RemoteFX enhancement for RDP.

Here’s a couple of key points on VDI scenarios:

• RemoteFX requires a GPU on the server. This GPU is then virtualized (a new capability of Hyper-V in 2008 R2 SP1) and presented to each VM just like any physical hardware component. What we don’t know at this point is how many VMs a single GPU will be able to support. Microsoft has said that they’ll eventually come out with sizing guidance and pointed out that the sizing is not based on VMs but rather the number of screens and pixels a specific GPU can support. And of course you’ll be able to add multiple GPUs to each physical server, either via the PCI riser card in the server chassis or via external PCI chassis that could house lots of cards.

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After introducing a new subscription model for its online capacity planning platform, Lanamark releases today the new version.

Suite 2010 includes three new modules:

• Compatibility Pack for Microsoft Windows 7
  It provides detailed information on applications and hardware compatible with Windows 7. Each application is given a compatibility rating for 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. Information on whether a free or a paid application upgrade is required is also provided. Similarly, all desktops and laptops are checked for compatibility based on hardware configuration and device driver availability.

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The US startup Virtual Computer, launched in December 2008, released yesterday version 2.0 of its enterprise management solution powered by hardware virtualization: NxTop.

The NxTop architecture is based on server hypervisor, hosting a redundant virtual machine with the management engine (NxTop Center) and its console, and a client hypervisor, deployed on corporate users workstations and laptops, which hosts two virtual machines, one with the corporate environment and one with the personal environment.

In version 1.0, Virtual Computer offered the server tier as a pre-configured Microsoft Hyper-V platform with clustered virtual machines. In the new version 2.0 instead, NxTop Center comes as a virtual appliance that can be deployed on existing Hyper-V virtual infrastructures.
Customers may easily deploy the VHD image on a vSphere or XenServer infrastructure instead, but Virtual Computer only supports the Microsoft hypervisor at the moment.

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As virtualization.info increases its coverage of vendors in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) cloud computing market, new startups enter our Radar, which will be soon updated to include a brand new category.

Today we cover a European firm based in Spain, Abiquo, which just relocated its HQ in Redwood City, California, leaving the R&D facility in Barcellona.

The company was founded in 2006 by Diego Mariño,  Vice President of Community Solutions, and Xavier Fernández, Vice President of Engineering.
Mariño comes from a short experience as President of a Spanish consulting firm, while Fernández comes from a consulting experience for a multinational.
The company, counting 25 employees at today, is now led by Pete Malcolm, the founder and former CTO of Orchestria, a data loss prevention firm that was acquired by CA in early 2009.
Malcom covered the role of Vice President of Engineering at CA for less than a year before moving to Abiquo.

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Last week VMware announced an impressive 50% discount for its vSphere Essentials edition to SMB customers, which means companies that want to consolidate no more than 15 physical servers.

The vSphere Essentials edition, which includes VMware vCenter and Update Manager (VUM), supports up to 3 ESX/ESXi hosts, each with up to 2 CPUs, and with no more than 6 cores per processor. Each virtual machine can have up to 4 vCPUs.
The promotion, valid till June 15, includes 1 year software subscription but no support.

This lowers the entry price of vSphere to $495 (plus 15% VAT if you are a European Union customer) and it’s probably one of the most aggressive moves ever taken by VMware to win the SMB market.

Rumors report that vSphere 4.1 currently is in private beta. While it’s unlikely that the new platform will be released before June, any SMB buying this offering should get it for free.

Mike Laverick, well-known VMware vExpert, trainer and author, just announced the release of his new book about VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.0.

394 pages long, the book covers every aspect of the new VMware disaster recovery platform launched in October 2009.
Specifically, the new parts about SRM 4.0 are:

• All graphics updated to vSphere4
• All new theme of the New York and New Jersey – Protected and Recovery Site
• Replication and integration with EMC Celerra and Clariion CX3, NetApp Filers and HP Lefthand VSA
• Coverage of the new “Shared Site” configuration

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