virtualization.info Editors

With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is Studio.

VMware Studio has been launched in September 2008 as a free authoring tool to create and maintain OVF packages.
Exactly one year later VMware launched Studio 2.0, introducing support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) 1.0 specifications and the ability to manipulate its next-generation virtual appliances (VAs): the vApps.

Studio 2.1 (build 1318-268792) introduces a boatload of enhancements:

• Capability to digitally sign an OVF (vSphere 4.1 verifies the certificate before importing)
• Capability to create VAs from VMs that were not originally created with VMware Studio, based on a discovery phase
• Capability to run concurrent builds
• Capability to analyze the list of RPM and DEB packages to locate unused items and reduce the VM’s footprint

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At the end of July VMware published an interesting benchmark about its new vSphere 4.1 platform: over 171,000 concurrent users for a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server environment hosted by a single physical server.

The virtualization host was a Dell PowerEdge R710 2U rack server, powered by two Intel Quad-Core Xeon X5570 CPUs and 96GB RAM.
The SAN was an EMC CX3-40 SAN with two storage processors and 60 146GB hard drives (15K RPM).

vSphere 4.1 hosted five virtual machines: three Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition R2 IIS web servers, a SQL Server 2008 SP1 and SharePoint Server 2007 SP2.
The SQL Server VM was configured with 2 vCPUs and 16GB vRAM, the other VMs with 2 vCPUs and 4GB vRAM.
The workload, a mix of 80% read, 10% search, and 10% modify transactions, was generated by Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Agent.

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In mid April the Microsoft Dynamics division published an interesting internal benchmark: CRM 4.0 deployed on 20 Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtual machines able to serve up to 100,000 concurrent users.

The virtual infrastructure was built on top of two Dell PowerEdge R9100 4U rack servers, each with two Intel Quad-Core Xeon 7560 CPUs.
The first host, featuring 256GB RAM, served 5 virtual machines loaded with SQL Server 2008 R2. The second one, featuring 192GB RAM, served 5 VMs loaded with IIS and 10 VMs loaded with CRM Asynchronous Service.

This system handled 100,000 concurrent users, divided in five organizations, each with four VMs (one web server, two asyncronous servers and one database server).
The users’ activity, generated by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit, was equal to 5.1M web requests per hour, and 778,000 business transactions per hour. The average response time was 0.29 seconds.

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Today VMware/SpringSource released the first update of Hyperic (formerly HQ) since the acquisition of SpringSource in August 2009.

Hyperic was an infrastructure management firm that offers products (HQ and IQ) for every major operating system (from Microsoft Windows to IBM AIX), every major application platform (from LAMP to Microsoft .NET) and every major enterprise service (from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle Database) on the market. 
The Hyperic solution also monitors VMware and Citrix virtual infrastructures and the Amazon implementation of Xen. 
For each supported product Hyperic can do a wide array of activities, from auto-discovery to real-time health monitoring, from capacity planning to event tracking and alerting, up to granular reporting.

SpringSource acquired Hyperic just three months before announcing the deal with VMware.

Easy to expect, the new version introduces a tighter integration with vSphere through a new plug-in for vCenter that uses built-in java plugin classes, the HQ API, and the vCenter SDK.

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After the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008, Red Had decided to offer its SPICE remote protocol for free, under the open source GPL license.
It’s unclear if this will accelerate the development of SPICE or not: at the moment SPICE 1.0 hit the market before the second half of next year

The company plans to deliver it on non-x86 architectures and today we have the first taste: a SPICE client is now available for the N900, the first Nokia device based upon the TI OMAP3 microprocessor with the ARM Cortex-A8 core.

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VMware recently lost another very high profile executive: Dane C. Smith, its former Global Vice President of Systems Integration and Outsourcing.

Smith has been Vice President of Field Operations for Americas region for just three months in 2008, and then he moved in his last position for almost two years.
He just landed at ClearEdge Power as Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development.

In early June virtualization.info reported that Hyper9 (formerly InovaWave) lost its founder and CTO Dave McCrory. McCrory first founded Surgient (just acquired by Quest) and then co-founded InovaWave, which started from scratch as Hyper9 in February 2008, working at both companies as CTO.

McCrory just landed at Dell, as he confirms on his personal blog, with the role of Cloud Solutions Architect or similar.
Considering the Windows Azure appliances that Dell is about to use and resell for Microsoft, McCrory will be really busy for the time ahead.

In preparation for the 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the North Carolina State University and IBM presented a new project called HyperSentry: a system to measure the integrity of a running hypervisor that address the shortcomings of other solutions like Copilot, HyperGuard, HyperCheck and Flicker.

Unlike existing solutions for protecting privileged software, HyperSentry does not introduce a higher privileged software layer below the integrity measurement target, which could start another race with malicious attackers in obtaining the highest privilege in the system. Instead, HyperSentry introduces a software component that is properly isolated from the hypervisor to enable stealthy and in-context measurement of the runtime integrity of the hypervisor. While stealthiness is necessary to ensure that a compromised hypervisor does not have a chance to hide the attack traces upon detecting an upcoming measurement, in-context measurement is necessary to retrieve all the needed inputs for a successful integrity measurement.

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Virtual Bridges just announced the release of VERDE 4.2. The features provided in this new minor update are significant.

First of all Virtual Bridges developed a VDI client for the Apple iOS: called iVERDE, the application should appear shortly on the AppStore for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices.
The company built iVERDE on the open source iDesktop project. iVERDE, which has been released under the GPL open source license too, supports remote connection to Windows XP, 7 and Linux virtual desktops.

VERDE 4.2 also includes a new way to provision virtual machines from a so-called gold master image by leveraging Microsoft Active Directory.

VERDE 4.2 also includes support for two-factor authentication products, including RSA SecureID, Safeword and other solutions based on RADIUS.

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With the launch of vSphere 4.1, VMware announced a new “per-VM” licensing model that will take effect starting September 1.

The new licensing will be applied to most management products, including vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vCenter CapacityIQ.
It won’t extend to vCenter Server for now but there’s no reason to believe that VMware will make this exception forever.

iTnews published an interesting piece earlier today about how the per-VM model is impacting the VMware Service Provider Program: while most providers already switched to it, some of the smaller ones are in trouble.
The key point is that the new licensing may negatively affect those companies that have very high consolidation ratio.

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