virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the Cassatt official announcement:

Cassatt Corporation, an innovator in providing enterprise software to enable dynamic IT infrastructures, today announced a partnership with XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the Xen open source hypervisor, under which Cassatt will be able to sell XenEnterprise alongside Cassatt’s products.
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The Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM) is built using a vendor-neutral architecture, which will allow customers to host any combination of virtual machines. XVM will support XenEnterprise in the next release of the product later this calendar year…

Surgient released its new version of the management platform for Microsoft and VMware virtualization product.

Among new features:

• Support for heterogeneous virtual lab environments
  Lab configurations often require support from multiple virtual infrastructure technologies and can include virtual machine images of different types and versions. With Surgient v5.0, the deployment requirements for each image in a lab configuration become invisible to the end-user
• Advanced management capabilities and tools
  Version 5.0 of all Surgient Virtual Lab Management Applications include an entirely revamped management console with new capabilities for managing pooled servers and how those systems are dynamically allocated
• Enhanced reporting tools and data
  New reports in version 5.0 deliver information on lab usage, server usage, historical user activity, future reservations and predicted usage
• Enterprise virtual lab scalability
  Enterprise organizations can require hundreds or thousands of virtual servers to be deployed concurrently across multiple pre- and post-production functions
• SOAP XML Web services interfaces for advanced integration
  Version 5.0 includes a Web services API for advanced integration of virtual lab management capabilities with enterprise test management, learning management, live virtual classroom and other systems

Surgient prices the Workgroup edition beginning at $35,000.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Surprisingly VMware just published a new beta program enrollment page for a new product able to do physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migrations: VMware Converter.

The new tool seems to merge 2 existing solutions from the company: P2V Assistant, aimed at P2V operations, and Virtual Machine Importer, aimed at V2V operations.
But the most interesting thing is VMware Converter will feature live conversion capability (no need to shut down source machine to perform conversion), a feature at today offered only by PlateSpin with its PowerConvert 6.0.

The product is expected to support all VMware products as destination, including VMware Infrastructrure 3:

The beta is expected to begin in early October: enroll for it here.

Update: InternetNews revealed VMware will offer a free version of this new product, able to perform a conversion at a time.

The Enterprise edition, able to perform multiple migrations at the same time, will be aslo free but only for customers already purchasing VirtualCenter.

The product is expected to ship within 6 months.

Finally PlateSpin could have a serious competitor to front.

The long rumored minor update for VMware Infrastructure 3 is finally in shipment: the company Vice President of Technology Development, Steve Herrod, published on his corporate blog a long introduction to benefits of new 64bits support for several guest OSes:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Standard and Enterprise Server R2)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 64-bit (UP7, UP8)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit (UP2, UP3)
• SuSE Linux Server (SLES) 10 64-bit
• Sun Solaris 10 (U2)

As already reported in several previous posts this new build (32039 for ESX Server, 32042 for VirtualCenter) also introduces no downtime migration from ESX Server 2.x and new ESX Server 3.0.1.

Read the whole Release Notes here. Download it here.

Richard Garsthagen. Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, published on his blog an interesting statistics about raise of requests for virtualization jobs.

Richard mention an average increase of demand up to 68%, counting North America countries but also UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Norway.

As far as I can see the most notable absent is Germany, one of the most active european countries for virtualization since the very beginning.
But apart this missing it’s true the interest for virtualization professional figures is rising. You can check from yourself looking at published job announcements in the brand new virtualization.info Job Board.

Jase McCarty, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), published on his blog a notable trick to achieve on-the-fly modification of Microsoft Windows virtual machines templates in a VMware ESX Server with VirtualCenter infrastructure at deployment time:

What is my objective:
To be able to take a standard Clone, or Template, and deploy it with a root partition size greater than the original Clone, or Template, without using any third party tools.

Why is this useful:
By giving the ability to deploy Windows VM?s with variable sizes, less templates will be necessary, while being more flexible with regards to virtual disk space…

Read the whole paper at source.

Richard Garsthagen. Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, unofficially announced on his blog licensing strategy VMware will adopt since November about upcoming quad-core processors:

Effective November 1st VMware will update their licensing policy to define a ?processor? as up to four cores. Meaning if you buy a 2 way Quad Core server, you will only need a 2 processor license from VMware.

PHD Technologies released the third version of its backup solution for VMware ESX Server: esXpress.

The new product introduces support for VMware Infrastructure 3 and the new concept of Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA): all backup tasks are moved inside a virtual machine instead of running at ESX console level.

Among other new features of esXpress 3.0:

• Multi-threaded processing of backups allows multiple simultaneous backups with minimal system impact
• Multiple backup transports and targets; ftp, sftp, scp, iSCSI, SAN, local storage and more
• VMware DRS aware and Vmotion compatible (VMs can be Vmotioned while backups are in progress)
• Virtual Center and Virtual Infrastructure Client aware
• Backup target failover combined with DRS mean no single point of failure
• Simple integration with VI3 client and VC (get feedback and issue backup commands)

The free version of the product, esXpress LE, still doesn’t work with VI3 but the new version is coming.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Altiris published on its community site, Juice, an interesting article describing benefits of combined use of its application virtualization product, Software Virtualization Solution (SVS), with application streaming technology from AppStream:

AppStream’s technology was originally developed specifically to deliver applications to desktops in such a way that there is no difference in behavior, interaction or performance compared to an application that is installed conventionally by CD. This includes normally installed registry entries, dlls and other system and shared files.

Now, when streaming an application virtualized with SVS, it behaves in exactly the way Altiris designed virtualized applications to run. That is, registry entries, etc. remain contained in the appropriate layers, as do any changes to these files. The full functionality and benefits of SVS layers are combined with the instant delivery and license control of streaming…

Read the whole article at source.

Quoting from the CommVault official announcement:

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CommVault, a leading provider of Unified Data Management solutions, today announced that it has increased its support for customers using virtualization, completing certification with VMware ESX 3.0 and extending its support for the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) feature in the CommVault QiNetix 6.1 Unified Data Management Suite.
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Advanced VMware support highlights include:

• CommVault integration with VMware enables unified, point-and-click management of virtual machines and physical systems
• LAN-free backup capabilities deliver simple restores
• Integrated support for VMware VCB to support consolidated backups in virtualized environments
• Robust Disaster Recovery support by protecting the VMware physical system and capture of crash-consistent disk file images
• Support for VMotion, which provides continual recovery of data, allowing administrators to move virtual servers among physical servers, speeding upgrades and enabling automatic load balancing in a server farm
• CommVault ProxyHost links VCB backups to client virtual machines and includes easy point-and-click restores of VCBs

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