virtualization.info Editors

Avian Flu is influencing virtualization sells

by

Quoting from Byte and Switch:

Hurricane season might be grabbing the headlines, but firms are quietly preparing for the potential ravages of another major threat: an Avian Flu pandemic. The threat has prompted a flurry of activity from vendors such as VMware and IBM.

Speaking during a keynote at yesterday’s EMC analyst day, VMware president Diane Green said pandemic preparations are well underway, with many businesses already making plans for staff to work from home.

Many firms, she said, are using VMware products to secure their workers and centrally manage remote desktops and laptops. “An area where we have seen a lot of growth is in hosting desktop environments.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Altiris SVS vs Softricity SoftGrid impressions

by

Devil Mountain Software CTO provided his personal experience in using his own technology, Clarity Suite 2006, with both Altiris Software Virtualization Solution and Softricity SoftGrid:

As a developer of performance management and load testing software for the financial services industry, I was intrigued by the possibilities of application virtualization. After hearing good things about both SVS and SoftGrid, I took it upon myself to become familiar with both products and their implications for my own solutions.

Several installations and a whole lot of testing later, I’ve come to the conclusion that SVS has the superior implementation of a “pure” virtualization model. Its “layered” architecture is more reliable and compatible than the “virtual environments” model used by SoftGrid.
…
During testing with SVS we found the application “recording” phase to be incredibly simple. Both of our applications – Studio and Tracker – installed cleanly and ran correctly when enabled in their respective SVS layers.
…
By contrast, SoftGrid’s sequencing process was a real nightmare for us. In the beginning, we couldn’t get Tracker to install at all during the recording phase. Later, after providing the MSI (Microsoft Installer) package to Softricity for analysis, we were provided with a working OSD. Still, there was the matter of how to launch our services. Tracker is headless – it runs as a Windows service and has no local UI. Fortunately, we were able to tie the service startup to the launching of our tray control applet (cfwtray). Still, it’s not a perfect solution since the user will need to log in to the system before our services will be enabled.

Bottom Line: You can’t deploy agents/headless services reliably with SoftGrid…

Read the whole article at source.

NextIO and Denali team to enable first I/O virtualization designs for PCI Express

by

Quoting from the NextIO official announcement:

Denali Software and NextIO today announced the availability of verification intellectual property (IP) products that support NextIO’s virtual I/O design IP and Shared PCI Express Switch.

Virtual I/O technology is the hardware complement to software server virtualization products, like VMware, enabling more virtual servers to share a single physical I/O controller…

VMware users want more for storage

by

Following a similar article of last month here another very interesting one about storage needs VMware customers need to address.

Quoting from SearchStorage:

In the wake of VMware Inc.’s Infrastructure 3 announcement this week, beta testers and users say the addition of native iSCSI capabilities, clustering and a centralized backup option are a step in the right direction, but they also want to be able to manipulate data more easily with virtual machines.

VMware also boosted the number of LUNs that can be assigned to a virtual disk from 128 to 256 and added distributed journaling inside the file system for faster recovery. The product already allows snapshots of the OS and VM settings. But mirroring virtual disks, striping VM data across physical disks, adding LUNs on the fly to virtual disk and snapshots of data are “things we don’t do just yet that we may get around to doing,” said Patrick Lin, technical director of product development for VMware.

“I hope they’ll think seriously about it,” said Tom Becchetti, a VMware user who asked that his company not be named. “People want to be able to do serverless, networkless backups. They want to do block-change maps.”
…
Becchetti added that three months ago, VMware opened up APIs to other vendors, such as Double-Take Software to make replication more efficient. “Why haven’t they done this with backup vendors?” he asked. “The pieces are all there.”

VMware also announced the ability to support high-availability (HA) dual-node server clusters using what Becchetti termed a “half-done VMotion,” which he said was a good development. But it led him, he said, to question even further why capabilities like mirroring hadn’t yet been made available.

“They’re at the layer in the code to do that, at least mirroring at the virtual disk level.”

Becchetti also said that volume management was so tricky for him with ESX that he would often use GSX instead with his Symantec NetBackup tool. “It works better, especially with Linux, to do volume management that way,” he said. “But then we don’t get the benefits of ESX, like shared memory.”…

Read the whole article at source.

Event: Microsoft TechEd 2006

by

The newest edition of highly expected conference from Microsoft, the TechEd 2006, arrived.

The event, taking place in Boston from 11th to 16th June, will feature several sessions about virtualization:

  • SVR003 – Introduction to Virtual Server 2005 R2
    This session will encourage discussions of the many innovative methods that sofware developers, QA testers and technical professionals have used virtualization technologies to enhance the application development lifecycle.
  • SVR302 – Virtual Server R2 SP1 Beta: Introduction
    This session focuses on the new features of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 such as Intel VT and AMD VT support, Volume Shadow Services support and how to use the features to provide additional solution capability. The session also covers the roadmap for virtualization technologies from Microsoft.
  • SVR335 – Virtual Server Solution Scenarios
    This session focuses on the three main solution areas for Virtual Server: Branch Office solution, high availability with clustering, disaster recovery, and test and dev environments. The session provides best practices on how to evaluate the requirements for a specific virtualization solution and some key tips and tricks for effective deployment of Virtual Server.
  • SVR216 – Virtual Server: Customer Success Stories
    This session focuses on customer success stories of how customers evaluated and selected Virtual Server over competing technologies/vendors. This session provides you with best practices on how to evaluate a virtualization solution and an example of how a customer actually deployed virtualization in their environment.
  • BOF41 – Creative Uses for Virtualization in the Development Lab
    This session will encourage discussions of the many innovative methods that sofware developers, QA testers and technical professionals have used virtualization technologies to enhance the application development lifecycle.
  • BOF21 – Using Intel Virtualization Technology with Microsoft Windows
    The attention on virtualization as a capability on client and servers has been growing recently. With the rise of new use models and the introduction of hardware technologies such as Intel VT, the reliability and usability of the virtualized system has entered the mainstream. This session will be an open discussion on the uses for virtualization for clients and servers. Developers should come prepared to discuss ideas around potential new revenue streams using virtualization. IT Pro customers should be ready to discuss the way virtualization deployments are and will be changing the way the industry does business.
  • MGTTLC03 – Virtual Machine Management with System Center
    This chalk talk presents the opportunity for an open Q & A regarding Microsoft’s approach and tools for virtual machine management. In particular, this chalk talk provides the opportunity to learn the various tips and tricks for management of a virtual data center.
  • SVRTLC11 – Virtual Server Solution
    Abstract pending

Check the whole agenda here.