virtualization.info Editors

In March 2009 virtualization.info published an article titled Quest uses Surgient, why not acquire it? suggesting that such acquisition would fit the Quest expansion plans and would be the natural evolution of a pre-existing relationship between the two.

Quest answered today to that question by announcing in fact the acquisition of Surgient for an undisclosed sum.

Surgient is one of the very first startups that populated the (almost empty) virtualization ecosystem in 2003.
The company initially launched a hosted virtual lab automation (VLA) solution. In 2008 it changed its business model, allowing customers to install the product on premises and reshaping its strategy to market the platform as a VM lifecycle solution rather than a VLA solution.
In 2010 Surgient changed again: it dropped the concept of VM Lifecycle Automation entirely and fully embraced the private cloud automation hype.

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Yesterday Oracle announced a major deal with Dell and HP: the two OEMs will certify and resell the Oracle VM virtual infrastructure, along with Oracle Solaris x86 and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Those customers that will buy Dell’s and HP’s Oracle solutions will have full access to the Oracle Premier Support.

It sounds odd considering the Oracle’s tagline adopted after the acquisition of Sun, Software. Hardware. Complete., to push the idea of an end-to-end computing stack available from a single vendor. But it’s understandable that this is an attempt to increase the Oracle VM market share.
And, market share or not, Oracle VM Server now officially becomes the fourth hypervisor available out-of-the-box in industry standard servers, side by side with Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.

It will be interesting to see how this will impact the Oracle presence one year from now.

In April Microsoft announced the beta program for the Linux Integrated Services (LIS) 2.1 for Hyper-V.
Among the many new features, the package introduced support for up to 4 vCPUs inside Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) guest operating systems.

Yesterday Microsoft finally released it.

Besides the 4 vCPUs support for SLES 10 SP3 and 11, as well as for RHEL 5.2-5.5, LIS 2.1 also includes:

• Driver support for synthetic devices
  LIS 2.1 supports the synthetic network controller and the synthetic storage controller that were developed specifically for Hyper-V.
• Fastpath Boot Support for Hyper-V
  Boot devices take advantage of the block Virtualization Service Client (VSC) to provide enhanced performance.

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A couple of days ago VMware officially validated an end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) hardware configuration provided by Cisco and NetApp.

The solution includes Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches and NetApp FAS3100 and FAS600 series SANs, now included in the vSphere 4.1 hardware compatibility guide.

To be fair, the three companies already presented a hardware configuration that could support end-to-end FCoE n December 2009, with a paper titled Designing Secure Multi-Tenancy into Virtualized Data Centers.
In that document anyway FCoE was suggested as an optional alternative to standard Ethernet or Fibre Channel, which doesn’t imply VMware was supporting the protocol at that time.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) just announced the LPI-304 exam, titled Virtualization and High Availability.

The exam is elective for the vendor-neutral Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC)-3 and includes virtualization (Xen, KVM, OpenVZ, VirtualBox), load balancing, cluster management and cluster storage.

Interestingly, LPI has assigned a weight of 10 to the questions about virtualization theory and the ones about Xen, while just 7 to the ones about KVM, and just 3 to the questions about other solutions (OpenVZ and VirtualBox).

Like every other LPI exam, the LPI-304 is available at Prometric and VUE testing centers.

Duncan Epping at Yellow Bricks yesterday posted a brief but very interesting article about the best approach to pursue when a company is about to replace its SAN arrays: Storage vMotion or SAN Replication.

Epping breaks down the pros and cons of both approaches:

SAN Replication

• Can utilize Array based copy mechanisms for fast replication (+)
• Per LUN migration, high level of concurrency (+)
• Old volumes still available (+)
• Need to resignature or mount the volume again (-)
  • A resignature also means you will need to reregister the VM! (-)
• Downtime for the VM during the cut over (-)

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The US startup Virtual Computer earlier this week announced its new Senior Vice President of Marketing: Andrew McKay.

McKay is the co-founder and former Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing of Attivio, a software company focused on enterprise search solutions.
From 2002 to 2006 McKay has been the Vice President of Sales, Technical Sales and Product Marketing at Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), acquired by Microsoft in early 2008.

Along with the new vShield Edge and vShield App (which apparently is a rebrand for vShield Zones), VMware is preparing a third security product, in collaboration with TrendMicro.

Internally codenamed Seraph, it seems a security framework for agent-less antivirus scanning that leverages the VMsafe API.

ApparentlyVMware originally planned to partner with both TrendMicro and McAfee for this project, but TechTarget recently reporting about the news only mentioned the former. Maybe McAfee is still in, but it’s more likely that VMware decided to drop the partnership after the security vendor announced a big security project with Citrix on XenClient, XenDesktop and XenServer.

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Earlier this month VMware announced two new variants of its vShield Zones (formerly VirtualShield) virtual firewall: vShield App 1.0 and vShield Edge 1.0, both available now as beta.

The company inherited the security product after the acquisition of Blue Lane Technologies, in October 2008. Since that time, VMware updated the product only one time, including it for free in vSphere 4.0 (but only for Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus SKUs).
The new vSphere 4.1 doesn’t bring in any update for the product, or at least there’s no mention of updates in the official release notes (for both vSphere and vShield Zones).

VMware describes vShield App as a stateful inspection firewall, capable to analyze inter-VM traffic and to attach the security policy to the virtual machine itself. It’s not clear if this means that Zones has been renamed in App or not.

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In mid July Quest released a new version of its VMware Management Extensions (QMX) for System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2.
The product has been included in the Vizioncore portfolio, rebranded as  Management Pack for VMware 1.0, even if the internal build actually is 7.0.0.40, and relaunched yesterday.

It’s not clear why Quest decided to leverage the Vizioncore brand in this way: the company in fact already announced the upcoming drop of its subsidiary brand within the end of August.

Anyway, the Management Pack, available for free, allows Microsoft administrators to manage the VMware environments thanks to:

• Alert and event management and trending inside the SCOM console
• Performance monitoring & availability event monitoring
• Out-of-the-box reports for host and guest metrics

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