virtualization.info Editors

These days Microsoft Powershell seems the driving force behind all attempts to automate virtual infrastructures:

• Citrix released an orchestration platform, Workflow Studio, built on Powershell
• VMware released version 1.5 of its VI Tookit (aka Powershell SDK)
• Quest released its PowerGUI PowerPack 2.0 for VMware (aka VMware multi-host management through Powershell)
• icomasoft, a Swiss startup, released its VI PowerScripter Professional (aka VMware vCenter plug-in to execute Powershell scripts)

Last week Citrix validated Powershell once again by releasing its Powershell SnapIn for XenServer.

Ewan Mellor, Principal Software Engineer at Citrix, posted some basic examples (here and here) of what can be done with the Microsoft scripting language on XenServer.

The US company Leostream is slowly awaking from the long sleep: after securing $3 Million in May 2008, the company appointed a new Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, secured a couple of partners (through a reseller agreement with IBM and a technology partnership with eG Innovations), and even redesigned its website.

The company also dropped its P2V migration tool, P > V Direct, to fully focus on its current flagship product, a VDI connection broker.

Despite all of that, the Leostream progress really seems slow: Connection Broker 5.0 was released in September 2007 and last week, after almost one year and a half, the product reached version 5.3.

This minor update introduced support for Citrix XenApp 4.5 and the capability to remotely upgrade the Leostream Connect client.

Virtual machines live migration capabilities offered by technologies like VMware VMotion, Citrix XenMotion or Virtual Iron LiveMigration are one of the wonders of virtualization. But it’s not a secret that these protocols require dedicated, high-performance networks.

So it’s good to know that BreakingPoint, a leader in the network equipment testing space, is now offering an appliance able to simulate VMware VMotion traffic.

Two weeks ago the company announced this new feature on top of their NFS/SMB/CIFS simulators.
Their appliance can reproduce the traffic above up to 40GBps.

It would be nice to know if the upcoming vCenter 4.0 will change the characteristics of VMotion, and if so when BreakingPoint will support the new protocol.

Idealstor is a a US vendor focused on disk to disk backup solutions. Their flagship product, iBac, offers a continuous data protection (CDP) approach and it’s available for Windows only.

In December 2008 the company extended the iBac capabilities to support VMware Infrastructure.

The new iBac Virtual Infrastructure Proxy (VIP) interacts with vCenter through the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework to backup virtual machines.

The original iBac licensing mode was based on the number of ESX hosts involved in the backup/recovery operation.
Two weeks ago Idealstor added a second licensing mode based just on the number of vCenters.

As most readers may know, exactly two years ago virtualization.info and its partner Kybernetika announced the availability of a data center facility that can be rented and accessed online.
We called it virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab, the on-demand data center for virtualization professionals.

Over the months this facility was scaled up and upgraded, at a point that now Rent-A-Lab is split into two independent data centers, offering a grand total of 28 enterprise servers (HP DL 380 G5, each with 2 x Quad Core Intel E5420 2.5GHz) and over 35TB of storage, distributed in multiple arrays from the leading vendors in the market.

Today we are happy to announce that availability of two EMC Celerra NS20 machines as part of the Rent-A-Lab equipment, featuring

• 45 disks with 146GB each
• 6 Fibre Channel interfaces (4GB)
• 8 Ethernet interfaces (1GB) that can be accessed through iSCSI, NFS and CIFS protocols

With EMC, NetApp, Dell EqualLogic, HP and Pillar storage side by side, virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab is the perfect playground to test how the hypervisors perform with different back-ends.

To demonstrate the value (and the speed) of this infrastructure we are preparing something special for our readers. Stay tuned!

hint: this has something to do with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

Meanwhile you may want to take a look at the actual configuration of Rent-A-Lab.

One of the biggest enhancements expected with the next version of VMware Infrastructure (possibly called vSphere 4.0) is the new pluggable virtual infrastructure, which will allow customers to replace the standard VMNet virtual switch with 3rd party software switches.

The first company to offer such product will be Cisco, which announced the Nexus 1000V at VMworld 2008 last September.

After seeing the virtual switch command line for in action and its architectural diagram, we now have extensive details about its features, thanks to an exclusive virtualization.info interview with Paul Fazzone, Product Manager of Nexus 1000V at Cisco.

Fazzone also provided a key information about the release date of the virtual switch: H1 2009.
This date makes very likely that both ESX 4 and Nexus 1000V will be released at the imminent VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes.

Continue reading…

Yesterday EMC and Microsoft signed a 3 years extension of their strategic alliance (now ending in 2011).

Part of the agreement involves virtualization, which is pretty odd considering that EMC owns 80% of VMware and that VMware can be seriously impacted by the endless amount of free virtualization products/technologies that Microsoft released and will release in future.

The thing is rather comic as part of the agreement (published by both companies PR departments) includes:

Microsoft offers one of the fastest-growing and most cost-effective virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server.
EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a thousand-person strong team with deep Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions.

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While VMware is busy releasing an open source client for its connection broker, Citrix is busy updating its end-to-end VDI platform.

The new XenDesktop 3.0, released just two months since version 2.1, introduces some important updates and new features:

• Includes XenServer 5.0 rather than 4.1 (which implies a higher consolidation ratio – Citrix claims that XenDesktop 3.0 can now host twice the number of virtual desktop of XenDesktop 2.x)
• Includes Provisioning Server (formerly Ardence Provisioning Server) as an integrated component rather than a bundled package
• Includes additional features from XenApp ICA (SpeedScreen multimedia redirection, USB devices support)
• Includes a brand new set of remote desktop rendering enhancements called HD-X
• Includes User Profile Manager 2.0
• Supports SmartCard authentication

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After entering the market in June 2008 (read the virtualization.info coverage here) and releasing its first product in September of the same year, the Canadian startup Lanamark is ready to hit the market with the second version of its hosted capacity planning solution.

Lanamark Suite 2009 introduces the capability to monitor virtualization hosts (both Citrix XenServer 4.1/5.0 and VMware ESX 3.0/3.5 are supported today, Microsoft Hyper-V will come soon).

The feature is interesting as it allows the product to develop a capacity plan with more information than just the resources consumption of physical servers candidate for virtualization.

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After a development period of ten months, Virtual Iron updates today its virtualization platform to version 4.5.

The upgrade introduces a key feature for customers with high-security requirements, the role-based access control, a long overdue capability, the internal network switches (aka switches not binded to physical NICs), and the support for Windows Server 2008.

Along with the new features, Virtual Iron 4.5 comes with a new packaging, as the company seems to have renamed the Enterprise Edition in Extended Enterprise Edition.
No chances to the Free Edition which is still capped as follow:

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