virtualization.info Editors

Webcast: Altiris Software Virtualization Solution 2.0 Overview

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Altiris created a 1-hour webcast to introduce its new Software Virtualization Solution technology and demo the product.

After the live broadcast of 5th April, the recording is now available here.

Agenda:

  • Software Management Issues
  • What is Virtualization?
  • Software Virtualization Solution
    • Overview
    • Demo
    • A Look Under the Hood
  • The Future of Software Virtualization
  • Tying it All Together

Release: Vizioncore esxBasics released!

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As virtualization.info readers already know since Saturday.

Quoting from the Vizioncore official announcement:

Vizioncore, Inc., the leader in backup, restoration, and disaster recovery automation for the VMware ESX Server, announced today the release of its free esxBasics starter pack for ESX Server.
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Including free basic versions of both vizioncore’s flagship esxRanger and esxCharter, esxBasics provides a range of dynamic backup and monitoring tools for the ESX Server environment.
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Features of vizioncore’s esxBasics include:

  • esxRanger provides full image backup protection (without interfering with ongoing server operations), full restore capabilities and a centralized Windows interface. esxRanger also enables Windows scheduler support in the GUI, allowing users to schedule esxRanger to perform online dynamic backups of guest operating systems on the VMware ESX Server.
  • esxCharter provides real-time ESX Server monitoring, enabling ESX administrators to monitor in real-time how much of the CPU the VM occupies, as well as how much memory is being used on an active, swapped, or shared basis. esxCharter also offers the ‘At-a-Glance’ view, providing a real-time snapshot of the current performance and specifications of the user’s VM Server-including important service console information.

Download it here.

Cassatt launches a cross-virtualization management solution

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Quoting from the Cassatt official announcement:

Cassatt Corporation, an innovator in providing enterprise software and services to enable agile IT infrastructures, today announced general availability of the Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM).
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XVM helps customers rein in the growing problem of “virtual machine sprawl,” using a vendor-neutral architecture to automate control across virtual servers from multiple sources, including VMware, Xen, and Microsoft.
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XVM allows customers to host any combination of virtual machines, including VMware ESX, VMware Server, Xen, and Microsoft Virtual Server. In addition, customers can manage their physical servers from a range of vendors including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and others.
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XVM provides an array of control and automation capabilities including:

  • Automated software deployment for both physical and virtual servers – including the ability to run the same software image on either a virtual server or directly on a bare-metal server.
  • Automated responses to failures of both physical and virtual servers, enabling high availability for applications.
  • Automatic scaling of applications by creating additional virtual servers on physical machines that have available CPU and memory capacity.

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The Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM), with support for VMware ESX and VMware Server is now generally available. Support for Xen will be available in June 2006. Support for Microsoft Virtual Server is planned for the second half of 2006…

InfoWorld reports pricing:

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The XVM software costs $1,250 per physical node. Pricing for the Collage platform starts at $100,000 for a 40-node environment, and the WAM module adds an additional $5,000 per node…

Read the whole article at source.

Vizioncore expected to launch a free suite on Monday

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The emerging virtualization start-up Vizioncore, offering several products focused on VMware ESX Server simplified management, is expected to launch a free starter pack on Monday.

With this product, actually dubbed esxBasic, Vizioncore hopes to attract the large amount of VMware customers which embraced ESX Server but still have a limited need of advanced management features missing from VMware offering.
Many of them chosen ESX Server for performances but could lack of Linux know-how to work with scripts virtualization community has produced when needs will arise.

esxBasic will be a feature-limited bundle of Vizioncore famous products esxRanger and esxCharter.

VMware launches a Virtual Appliances Directory

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After just 3 months the amount of so-called virtual appliances (pre-made virtual machines which anybody can download and run with the free VMware Player and soon with the free VMware Server) is impressive and tracking all of them is a huge effort (this is the reason why virtualization.info doesn’t announce new virtual appliances availability).

Luckily VMware rationalized the list available on the VMTN site and created a special Directory, with advance filtering capabilities.

Double-Take drives disaster recovery solutions built on VMware virtual infrastructure

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Quoting from the Double-Take Software (formerly NSI Software) official announcement:

Double-Take Software today showed the continued success of its Double-Take for Virtual Systems product by announcing a complementary solution for joint Double-Take Software and VMware customers.

By using the two products simultaneously, customers achieve real-time data protection for virtual machines at an affordable cost. VMware products allow customers to build a flexible server infrastructure optimized for disaster recovery with the freedom to mix physical and consolidated virtual systems at primary and recovery sites. Double-Take Software solves disaster recovery challenges in this VMware environment by replicating business critical data offsite and providing failover capabilities.
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By purchasing one license of Double-Take for Virtual Systems, customers can deploy up to five instances of Double-Take on the same VMware ESX Server…

Release: VMware ESX Server 2.5.3 released!

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VMware updated its flagship product, ESX Server, reaching the 2.5.3 version (build 22981).

At the same the company provided updates for older versions reaching versions 2.1.3 and 2.0.2 (which will be available on 5th May).

The 2.5.3 update resolves several bugs and introduces support for the following guest OSes:

  • Microsoft Windows 2003 R2
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Update 6
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Update 2
  • SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP 3

Download it here.

Vizioncore names Scott Herold as Director of R&D

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Quoting from the Vizioncore official announcement:

Vizioncore, Inc., the leader in backup, restoration, and disaster recovery automation for the VMware ESX Server, announced today the addition of Scott Herold as Director of Research and Development at Vizioncore, Inc.

A veteran member of the VMware community and co-author of VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide, Herold will work with Vizioncore in order to develop new virtualization solutions that cater directly to the current and future needs of enterprise businesses…

Tech: Monitoring Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 virtual machines network statistics

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Ben Armstrong provided another interesting script. This one helps gathering network statistics for virtual machines in a VIrtual Server 2005 environment:

Set vs = CreateObject(“VirtualServer.Application”)
set vms = vs.VirtualMachines

For Each vm in vms
Wscript.Echo “Virtual machine: ” & vm.Name
Wscript.Echo “Network bytes sent: ” & vm.Accountant.NetworkBytesSent
Wscript.Echo “Network bytes received: ” & vm.Accountant.NetworkBytesReceived
Wscript.Echo
Next

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