virtualization.info Editors

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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There’s a lot of interest around the just announced Dynamic Memory feature that will be included in Hyper-V as soon as Microsoft release the Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 (rumored to arrive no earlier than Q4 2010).

For a lot of time Microsoft downplayed the VMware’s memory overcommitment techniques, suggesting that they are the solution for every problem and that even the competitor recommends to not use them. Now this Dynamic Memory, which was originally planned for a 2009 release, seems exactly a memory overcommitment feature.

James O’Neill, IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft, shares some concrete details about the feature for the first time, trying to explain why Dynamic Memory is not about overcommit memory: 

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After teasing the customers for weeks, Veeam introduces today SureBackup, a set of technologies that greatly improves its backup/restore product for VMware vSphere.

First of all, SureBackup is not the name of a single new capability. It’s an umbrella for existing and upcoming features of Veeam Backup & Replication. And while this may sound like a typical marketing operation to turn old things into something new, the reality is that SureBackup includes at least a brand new, remarkable technology.

Dubbed Recovery Verification, this is the Veeam attempt to solve one of the most challenging problems when dealing with virtual machines live backups: testing that each guest operating system and its application will work properly after recovery.

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Last week Microsoft announced some remarkable changes in its VDI strategy, including new licensing options and the upcoming integration of Calista technology in Remote Desktop Services (RDS) under the name of RemoteFX.

The announcement, and the fact that Microsoft highlighted a stronger-than-ever partnership with Citrix in this effort, will impact the VDI ecosystem and, by some degrees, the customers adoption of desktop virtualization technologies.
The first reactions already came in: VMware, Quest and WYSE already published some comments on RemoteFX.

VMware, threatened by the “Rescue for VMware VDI” promotion, has a lot to say of course and lists the downsides of the offering:

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