virtualization.info Editors

PlateSpin and Double Take arranged a new interesting webcast for September 27th:

Traditional backup and recovery tools may not provide the real-time protection and streamlined recovery an organization needs to meet their RPO and RTO goals. Attend this webinar to find out how PlateSpin and Double-Take Software have combined their expertise to provide a solution to this challenge.

In this hour long webcast you will learn how to:

• combine continuous data replication of whole servers and hardware independent recovery to protect your business-critical systems in real-time
• quickly recover to a new server or a even a virtualized system regardless of the hardware differences
• leverage PlateSpin PowerConvert and the replication technology within Double-Take to reduce costs by achieving an unprecedented level of restore flexibility and speed over traditional restore procedures

Register for the webcast here.

Surgient offers a virtual lab automation tool called VQMS (Virtual QA/Test Management System).

Its only competitor, Akimbi, has been acquired in June by the virtualization market leader VMware, and its product, Slingshot, is now rebranded as Virtual Lab Manager, with an expected beta launch for October.

Since Surgient currently is the only virtualization company which doesn’t provide a direct way to download a trial version of its software, virtualization.info asked for an evaluation copy or a webcasted live demo of the company products since 6 months.

So far virtualization.info always received a request to wait for the new product release (5.0), planned for May 2006 (as older versions of the Virtualization Industry Roadmap reported until the delay reached 1 month).

At at today virtualization.info still has never tried any product from the company and it’s still waiting for a communication for the new release, assuming it’s still delayed.
But surprisingly today InfoWorld published a review of the new VQMS 5.0, rating it 8/10 (Very Good).

The appearence of this review is pretty strange also because at the moment of writing Surgient didn’t release an official announcement about the availability of its 5.0 version (a strange behaviour for a company which usually issues an official annoucement for every single webcast it hosts), but already linked the InfoWorld review on its homepage.

The real value of the review is also questionable since InfoWorld hosts since months a virtualization blog completely edited by David Marshall, Senior Architect at Surgient.
The VQMS 5.0 review has been written by another writer but a link between two companies is evident.

If any virtualizaton.info reader has ever seen or implemented Surgient products in his company I invite him to write a comment providing his own experience.

Update: Surgient Vice President of Marketing, Erik Josowitz, has been so kind to promptly comment this article, informing company product’s new release will be officially announced on October 2nd.

Be sure to read his whole comment below.

InfoWorld published a review of recently released vizioncore flagship product, esxRanger 2.0, assigning a score of 8.1 (Very Good) and providing this conclusion:

esxRanger provides a simple, fast method to properly backup and restore VMware virtual servers. The GUI is straightforward and easy to use but lacks some advanced features. The CLI base is a snap to script, however, and the performance of the solution is beyond reproach, delivering fast backups and high compression ratios.

Read it at source.

VNUNet wrote an interesting article where a new implication of virtualization is raised by Richard Curran, Director of Digital Enterprise Group (EMEA) at Intel:

Virtualisation raises questions of politics, such as who owns the servers, who pays for them and who manages them.
…
Curran pointed out that culture changes more slowly than technology and that it will be some time before users accept that they cannot point to ‘their server’ in the data centre…

Read the whole article at source.

I personally don’t think we already are at this point, seeing so far the diffused strategy of allowing 1 (or more) virtualization host per department.

Possibly in biggest, rare environments where virtualization is pervasive and physical servers are already considered as building block of a computing grid, this could happens. But for the large majority of the market such problem would not exist for still some years or would be solvable with a rational provisioning system (like the one VMware is already working at).

SearchServerVirtualization published an interview with AMD executives Margaret Lewis and Tim Mueting.

The interview is interesting because they provide some informations about the Opteron architecture features and how they can impact on virtualization performances.
They also provide some hints to the upcoming AMD I/O Virtualization Technology (IOMMU) and next trend: graphic virtualization (something AMD can control directly now they acquired ATI).

Read the whole interview at source.

After the recent release of IBM Virtualization Engine 2.1 for System z, IBM Redbooks department published another book on the topic:

The concepts of automation and virtualization are fundamental to IT infrastructure simplification. Virtualization is the ability to separate the direct dependency of an application from a physical resource.

To address the virtualization aspects of the On Demand Operating Environment, the IBM Virtualization Engine was announced in August 2004. Version 1 was then available. A new version, the Virtualization Engine Version 2.1, was announced and made available at the end of 2005. This new version enhances the functions provided in Version 1 and provides new products, new features, and new tools.

This IBM Redbook describes how to install and to use the Virtualization Engine Version 2.1. This IBM Redbook is the companion of IBM Virtualization Engine Platform Version 2 Technical Presentation Guide, SG24-7112 , which describes the functions of the components. This IBM Redbook is suitable for IT Specialists who want to install and use the Virtualization Engine Version 2.1 products and components.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introducing the Virtualization Engine Version 2.1
• Chapter 2 – Planning
• Chapter 3 – Installing management servers
• Chapter 4 – Installing managed servers agents
• Chapter 5 – Applying fixes
• Chapter 6 – Lessons learned
• Chapter 7 – Using Resource Dependency Service to build manageable resources
• Chapter 8 – Using the Virtualization Engine console to visualize the infrastructure environment
• Chapter 9 – Using one single console to manage your environment
• Chapter 10 – Using the Enterprise Workload Manager

Download it here.

Techworld published an interview with the IBM Vice President of Virtualisation, Rich Lechner.

He said a couple of interesting things:

We regularly survey IBM and non-IBM customers, and 54 per cent either have or will implement virtualisation this year. For SMBs — that’s companies with under 1,000 employees — the adoption rate is the same as for big enterprises which is very unusual for a new technology. Sixty per cent of all virtualisation engagements are in SMBs and their pain points are same as those of the big customers: cutting costs, consolidation, and handling storage growth while containing IT admin costs.

and

Bear in mind that total cost of ownership is becoming less important than flexibility, availability, and enabling SLAs.

Read the whole interview at source.

The just released Mandriva Linux Corporate Server 4.0 is the first distribution to include two different virtualization technologies “out-of-the-box”: OpenVZ for OS partitioning and Xen for paravirtualization.

Anyway this notable achievement is dwindled by the fact Mandriva didn’t include any management tool for these products.

Both Xen (version 3.0.1) and OpenVZ (patches for Linux kernel 2.6.12.26) have to be installed from Rpmdrake, the package installer utility, after the mandatory basic installation:

Despite official announcement which is voluntarily vague, the distribution doesn’t integrate any VMware product (so beware of not verified articles like the one from ZDNet).

Invirtus updated its famous virtual machines compressor VM Optimizer, introducing several new features:

• Setting manager
  Settings Manager is an innovative supplemental application for Corporate Edition owners that allows you to create an XML based configuration file that VM Optimizer uses at run-time.
  Create a different settings file for each user type (developer, IT Admin, test), each OS type, etc.
  Deploy settings on the network and run VM Optimizer against centralized settings
• Freespace
  FreeSpace is an included application that integrates into the optimization process and goes sector by sector on your virtual disk thoroughly zeroing out unused space.
• NullBoot
  NullBoot is our proprietary technology for implementing live core OS configuration and not requiring a reboot.
  You simply mount the ISO file and your complete customized optimization takes place without intervention
• VMShrink
  We’ve written an application that integrates seamlessly with your VMware platform software and carries out the vmdk shrinking for you with zero intervention. No more having to mount your vmdk with tools and performing command line switches.

Download it here.

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

Quoting from the Scalent official announcement:

Scalent Systems, the leading provider of server infrastructure repurposing software for large enterprise data centers, today announced that the company has established interoperability between the Scalent Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE) software and the QLogic SANblade Fibre Channel HBAs and SANbox 6000 Series routers.

To achieve this, Scalent has developed two revolutionary software enhancements with Qlogic to improve data center flexibility.
The first, an extension to the HBA driver, lets data centers repurpose servers without changing SAN configuration.
The second, an iSCSI initiator, enables data centers to dynamically link servers and storage over existing Ethernet connections using QLogic SANbox 6140 iSCSI-Fibre Channel routers and any SANblade Fibre Channel HBA…