virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the UltraBac official announcement:

UltraBac Software today released UBDR Gold v3.0, bringing true dissimilar hardware restore to market. UBDR Gold end-users will no longer need to buy and maintain identical hardware spares as part of their disaster recovery readiness plan, which can help cut expenses. Other significant enhancements to the company’s award-winning software include expanded virtual machine restore support and Online Index based restore capability.
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In 2005, UltraBac Software broke new ground with UBDR Gold v2.0 by providing the first Windows backup software to offer physical-to-virtual (P2V) based disaster recoveries. Version 3.0 expands on P2V to also include virtual-to-virtual (V2V) and virtual-to-physical (V2P) restores. With V2V and V2P, administrators literally have every virtual disaster recovery option at their disposal. Restoring and emulating a failed machine virtually can be executed in as little as 15 minutes.
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Further expanding on its virtual machine support, UBDR Gold v3.0 also integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. Users of VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server have a new and affordable option for disaster recovery protection from either natural or man made disasters that can incapacitate or destroy a computer facility. To restore a physical server virtually, an administrator need only create a new target virtual environment on the host for the server to be restored. Restores can be 100 percent scripted or an administrator can boot from the universal UBDR Gold CD and run the recovery wizard. Quick and easy restores can be performed from tape, disk, libraries, UNC path, SAN, NAS, USB/FireWire devices, FTP, or TSM servers. No special setup or other considerations are required when recovering to a virtual environment.

Virtual Strategy Magazine interviewed Tom Edwards, Founder and CEO of Invirtus, about its new product VM Optimizer.

Read all here.

Quoting from the SWsoft official announcement:

We are opening a new development kernel branch, based on 2.6.15 vanilla kernel. This branch allows OpenVZ users to benefit from upstream Linux kernel abilities and makes OpenVZ kernel patches to be more in line with the latest Linux kernel.

The Linux kernel 2.6.15 provides the following benefits in comparison with 2.6.8 (which our stable kernels are based on):

• better hardware support, including AMD dual-core fixes and improved x86_64 support;
• I/O schedulers, which makes it possible to assign different I/O rates to virtual private servers (VPSs);
• ext3 online resizing;
• improved memory management, such as 4-level tables support and performance enhancements;
• new extended bind mounts;
• improved locking scheme, better scalability for big SMP systems;
• support for filesystems in userspace (FUSE)

Thanks to OSNews for the news.

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in virtual lab applications for automating software demo, test and training labs, today announced that its applications had been named by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) as finalists in the 2006 CODiE Awards for the second consecutive year.

Surgient’s Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS), which automates the provisioning and management of software testing labs, has been selected as a finalist for the award “Best Application Management Solution.” Surgient’s Virtual Training Lab Management System (VTMS), which automates the provisioning and management of hands-on software training labs, has been named as a finalist for the award “Best Technology Solution, Corporate Learning.”…

Thanks to David Marshall for the news.

As you at beginning of January Microsoft released Virtual Server 2005 R2 for MSDN subscribers, but only the Standard Edition.

The expected April 2006 shipment will contain also the Enterprise Edition (x32 and x64) in multiple languages:

• French
• German
• Italian
• Korean
• Simplified Chinese
• Spanish
• Traditional Chinese

Quoting from CNET News.com:

The launch of the system, confirmed by sources familiar with the plan, is scheduled to take place at a press event in New York. The blade server upgrade is key to Big Blue’s attempt to stay ahead in the strategically important and fast-growing market. Blades are clearly a priority for Big Blue
…
IBM declined to comment for this story. However, Big Blue said last year that it planned an overhaul expected to improve the BladeCenter’s networking and flexibility. In particular, the communications “backplane,” which links the blades to each other and to an external network, is expected to increase data transfer capacity tenfold to 40 gigabits per second. Earlier blade models will fit into the new BladeCenter chassis, and new blade servers will fit into the older chassis…

Read the whole story at source.

Qui Hong, Chris Huss and Mike Laverick produced a free physical to virtual (P2V) application, a must-have in your virtualization toolbox:

Ultimate-P2V is a free plug-in that allows you to clone a physical machine to virtual machine – and perform the neccessary “system reconfiguration” required to make it bootable. Without this tool or a commerical P2V tool the virtual machine would just give a blue screen of death.

Read the manual and download it here.

Thank you guys!

Quoting from The Register:

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We recently sat down with VMware CEO Diane Greene and asked her to discuss how the virtualization market will evolve in the coming years. How will VMware fend off these attacks and defend its pricing?
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El Reg: So you have Microsoft and Xen attacking you with relatively immature products, and meanwhile, you’re building out your tools arsenal. Is that the immediate plan – to focus on the tools?

DG: We are doing two things.

We are moving the platform forward, which is a huge job. In the last year, there has been Intel’s VT, AMD’s Pacifica, multi-core chips and 64-bit. That was just moving with the industry.
Internally, we added SMP support and performance enhancements and all the different devices. And then we are spending millions and millions of dollars on our labs for certification and testing.
That is a huge effort that we are going to continue.

Then, the solutions we are definitely moving forward. We are adding distributed availability services where you can failover and then you get distributed resource management where you get load balancing across a cluster. Then, we have consolidated backup and single console monitoring and security controls across the cluster of virtual machines.
And then we are also exploring really interesting areas in the labs where we are pushing virtualization to see what it’s going to do. We did the Player, which is incredibly exciting for us.
It’s over 400,000 downloads now. All these people are building interesting virtual machines.

El Reg: I know you wouldn’t dare reveal a future, unannounced product, but could you give us a flavor for something in the labs?

DG: On the high-level, what we see is that the data center will transform to where you can manage your hardware separately from your software, and you can think about them as more aligned with what is going on in the business.
We also see really hard security problems that can be solved by using virtualization…

Read the whole interview at source.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

A new patch just went out from VMware for its mainstream product.

This patch fixes just one bug:

This patch fixes a timing issue in the LSI Logic MegaRAID driver shipped with ESX 2.5.x. This issue causes ESX Server systems using LSI Logic MegaRAID controllers to become unresponsive when storage management agents are installed on the service console.

VMware has seen this problem on Dell non-blade systems when storage management agents are installed on the service console. However, the issue may also be triggered by other applications that communicate directly with internal MegaRAID firmware.

Donwload it here.

Thanks to David Marshall for the news.

Mike Healan, from SpywareInfo, wrote a four-part article about VMware Player and the Browser Appliance, the pre-installed virtual machine VMware offers to everybody for safe browsing.

The Browser Appliance, based on Ubuntu Linux and powered by Firefox, is good but needs some adjustments if you plan to use it frequently. So Mike explains how to tweak it for package updates, how to save environment changes, how to exchange files with the host OS, and so on.

It’s worth to read if you are not a VMware and Linux expert.

Thanks to VMTN Blog for the news.