virtualization.info Editors

Quoting from the Leostream official announcement:

Leostream Corp., the leading provider of heterogeneous server virtualization management software, today announced Leostream P>V Direct 2.0, a tool for the direct conversion of physical servers into virtual machines. P>V Direct 2.0 supports Windows NT4, Windows XP, Windows Server 2000/2003, and conversion targets include Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2.

The Leostream P>V tool can achieve conversion without the need to reboot servers, and without the need to use CD or floppy drivers.

So-called ‘virtual machine’ software carves up large multi-processor servers and divides it into individual and multiple computing units, or ‘virtual’ servers, hence allowing multiple copies of Windows or Linux operating systems to be run simultaneously, and independently, on the same Intel-powered server.

A key challenge when deploying server virtualization technology is quickly and easily converting existing physical machines running today’s operating systems into the equivalent virtual machines. Without making a series of complex changes to the operating system the transplanted system will not work.

With P>V Direct 2.0, Leostream has pioneered the concept of low cost, easy to use, conversion tools by enabling the conversion to be automatically repeated, enabling virtual machine conversions to be scheduled. Applications include creating running virtual machines for patch testing, backup, or disaster recovery.

Nashat Bolis, chief information officer of MacLean-Fogg, a leading provider since 1925 of mechanical and insulation devices for the world’s power and telecommunications companies, said, “Leostream’s P>V Direct tool enables us to provide a low cost disaster recovery solution for production servers spread across 20 sites. We can recover quickly from a hardware failure without the need to deploy a hardware-intensive clustered solution.” Based in Mundelein, IL, MacLean-Fogg runs about 20 factories in Asia, Europe, and North America. (www.maclean-fogg.com)

“Business Continuity is a key benefit of server virtualization and Leostream’s P>V Direct is a true example of this technology in action. Leostream’s work with Microsoft will enable Virtual Server 2005 R2 customers to increase operational efficiency and reduce IT costs through faster backup and recovery,” said Zane Adam, director of marketing, Windows Server Division, Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is the most cost-effective server virtualization technology engineered for the Windows Server System platform. As a key part of any server consolidation strategy, Virtual Server 2005 R2 increases hardware utilization and enables organizations to rapidly configure and deploy new servers. Virtual Server 2005 R2 provides customers improved performance, availability, and scalability in order to increase operational efficiency in server consolidation, application re-hosting, disaster recovery, and software test and development.

“The biggest advantage of using virtual machines for backup and disaster recovery is that you can recover in a matter of minutes, and it is very easy and quick to ensure that you have made a valid copy of the server,” said David Crosbie, Leostream CEO. “Traditional solutions take several hours to recover from tape, are very difficult to validate, and may not run if the image is not restored to identical hardware.”

Pricing & Availability

Leostream P > V Direct 2.0 is priced from $100 per conversion and will be available October 17th. Free trial copies can be obtained from www.leostream.com

Quoting from the Portlock official announcement:

Portlock, a leading provider of backup, storage management and disaster recovery software, today announced three new VMware®-specific offerings based on its flagship Portlock Storage Manager product.
Portlock Storage Manager is software for performing rapid backup, bare-metal restore, server-to-server migration, and disaster recovery on NetWare®, Linux® and Windows® systems, as well as VMware platforms.
Three new products will provide a broad range of support for VMware:

1. Portlock Storage Manager for VMware ESX Server enables Disaster Recovery and backup from boot CD or Native, and supports VMware ESX Server 2.5.2, VMFS2 and EXT2/3 partitions. Offers the option to write to DVD and supports FTP and TCP/IP.
2. Portlock Storage Manager for VMware Hosts is a Windows-based program running on the host managing virtual machines and virtual disks.
3. Portlock Storage Manager designed to run natively inside VMWare Guest, with all of its utility functionality, including Image and Restore, copy, move, etc.

“We are excited to announce support for VMware,” said Leslie T. Giamona, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Portlock. “Portlock will support the leading virtualization product with a variety of solutions designed to help customers reduce risk to their valuable data as it migrates from physical to virtual disk.”
Availability
Portlock Storage Manager for VMware products is available for download and evaluation at www.portlock.com.

Quoting from the BMC Software official announcement:

BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE: BMC], a leading provider of enterprise management solutions, today announced its Service Oriented Resource Management (SORM) solutions, including the new BMC® Virtualizer Suite and the latest version of BMC Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers. The SORM solutions also include both current and planned integration with other BMC products enabling holistic management of IT processes, from the mainframe, through distributed systems, and into a virtualized environment. BMC Software’s SORM solutions provide customers with a predictive and adaptable computing environment that automatically provisions new server and software resources, based on real-time business requirements. With SORM, businesses gain control over the latest virtualization technologies and industry standard servers to reduce infrastructure costs, increase service availability, and respond in real-time to changing business requirements.

Introductions today include:

• BMC Virtualizer Suite, a new software family that automatically orchestrates the provisioning of resources on-demand. It includes BMC Virtualizer for High Availability and BMC Virtualizer for Capacity on Demand;
• Enhancements to BMC Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers, making it the first comprehensive predictive modeling technology for virtualized server environments;
• BMC Virtualizer integration with existing BMC Performance Manager and BMC Performance Assurance solutions; and
• BMC Virtualizer integration with BMC Configuration Management and Discovery products to ensure resources are synchronized with appropriate software updates and with change management processes.

“St. George Bank saw significant cost savings using BMC’s Performance Assurance solutions to predictively model performance, capacity and consolidation opportunities presented during business mergers,” said Michelle Ruel, senior capacity planner, St.George Bank, Australia. “We were naturally excited to hear BMC would be extending predictive capabilities to Virtual Servers, and asked to participate in development and testing. Based on our experience there, we look forward to leveraging equivalent value as we adopt these technologies.”

“Making sure our freight arrives at its destination on time is one of our most critical business services,” said Tim Hill, distributed systems capacity planner at CNF, a $3.7 billion company that is a leading provider of global supply chain solutions for a wide range of manufacturing, industrial, retail, and government customers. “We rely on the performance analytics and the predictive capabilities of BMC Performance Assurance to increase our utilization rates, save money, and eliminate potential performance and capacity risks for our critical business services. As we are now adopting VMware to virtualize portions of our server infrastructure, we are excited that BMC will be able to provide these same benefits with BMC Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers.”

SORM Solutions Advance Business Service Management Strategy
BMC Software’s Business Service Management (BSM) strategy enables companies to move beyond traditional IT management to better optimize and manage their critical services from a business perspective. By applying business relevance in automating resource management, companies can ensure the most critical business systems are addressed first. The company’s SORM solutions also provide the management capabilities needed to successfully adopt today’s industry standard hardware and virtualization technologies in a utility computing model. BMC’s SORM solutions don’t lock customers into a specific implementation framework, so customers can start with any product, such as BMC Virtualizer, based on their immediate needs and then incorporate other SORM offerings as they go.

BMC Virtualizer Suite allows companies to consolidate and cost-optimize their datacenters and significantly improve application service availability. BMC Virtualizer solutions provide policy-based resource orchestration and provisioning capabilities across enterprise clusters and standalone application servers. Unlike other failover automation products that require one dedicated backup server per production server or cluster, BMC Virtualizer automatically provisions appropriate server resources – whether physical or virtual – for applications based on business need and enables the sharing of the server resources across multiple applications. The shared pools of server resources can be used for both failover and/or providing capacity on-demand. The first products in this family, BMC Virtualizer for High Availability and BMC Virtualizer for Capacity on Demand, are available immediately.

BMC Virtualizer for High Availability eliminates 1:1 server failover requirements by managing a smaller pool of shared failover servers. This automates application server failover and recovery in less than five minutes. BMC Virtualizer for Capacity on Demand includes the functionality of the High Availability product and also allows organizations with server clusters, such as Oracle 10g, Apache, and Microsoft IIS, to improve service availability and performance through datacenter virtualization and the automated provisioning of applications, servers, networks, and storage.

“SORM enables customers to leverage the latest virtualization and industry standard hardware architectures to realize the quickest possible business agility, at the lowest possible price, while mitigating the risks associated with adopting these technologies,” said Mary Smars, vice president and general manager, Distributed Systems Management, BMC Software. “The combination of BMC Performance Assurance, BMC Performance Manager and BMC Service Management solutions allows customers to dynamically provision from a business perspective. Our goal is to reduce business risk and help our customers achieve Business Service Management.”

BMC Software is also working with several partners including Microsoft to bring its SORM strategy to market. “Microsoft and BMC share a common goal to help customers achieve the promise of self-managing dynamic systems, and BMC’s Service Oriented Resource Management solutions, along with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, help customers begin to achieve that promise,” said Zane Adam, director of marketing, Windows Server Division, Microsoft Corp.

BMC Software’s Performance Assurance® solutions provide comprehensive performance analysis and prediction capabilities required to optimize resource acquisition and deployment decisions. BMC Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers includes new predictive capability that shows how key applications will perform during and after transition from physical to virtualized environments. Once the planning and implementation is complete, the solution helps ensure the ongoing optimized performance of Virtual Server environments such as VMware, Microsoft and XEN.

By using BMC Performance Assurance solutions and BMC Virtualizer, provisioning policies can be created and used to automatically deploy exactly the right capacity, just before it is required. This automatic provisioning minimizes the need to purchase and install new computing resources to handle peak loads; it allows customers to pay only for the capacity needed. Through BMC Software’s exclusive methodology, customers also can test resource requirements and deployment scenarios before implementation. Coupled with BMC Performance Manager for Virtual Servers, a solution that discovers all virtual machines and maps those virtual machines to their associated VMware ESX/GSX servers and or VMware Groups, a complete lifecycle performance monitoring, management and optimization solution is realized.

BMC Software’s Configuration Management and IT Discovery – Key Industry Differentiators for Managing Virtual Environments
Using processes orchestrated from BMC Virtualizer, BMC Software Configuration Management (formerly Marimba Server Management from BMC Software) and BMC Software IT Discovery solutions detect, provision and manage specific server configurations. BMC Topology Discovery discovers virtualized environments and records them in the BMC Atrium CMDB (Configuration Management Database) while BMC Software Configuration Management solutions provide automated, closed loop configuration management of those environments and the servers on which they reside. The BMC Atrium CMDB provides an open, common data repository, shared service model, and unified user and reporting interfaces to accelerate attainment of BSM. Virtualized environments change frequently, necessitating the use of “virtual environment aware” configuration management and discovery tools to provide up-to-date configuration information to the CMDB and ensuring that all service management activities are executed based on the most recent configuration information.

For more information including additional customer success stories with BMC Virtualizer and other BMC Service Oriented Resource Management solutions, see: http://www.bmc.com/capacitymanagement.

Quoting from the AppStream official announcement:

AppStream, Inc., today announced a technology partnership with VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems. This partnership provides customers with the ability to distribute virtual images more efficiently enabling users to be operational up to 10x faster and making remote usage over DSL a reality and expanding the potential use of virtual images throughout the enterprise.

Today’s enterprises are more distributed than ever before, consisting of remote sales offices and multiple global locations. At the same time the need to rapidly provision standardized and secure PC environments is as strong as ever. All of this has increased the challenges facing today’s IT organizations. Users in the extended enterprise demand the same level of service as their fixed and local counterparts, and their need for on-demand and immediate access to resources just adds to the complexity of the problem for IT organizations. VMware ACE provides an optimum solution for those connected to the LAN and AppStream extends that advantage to the rapidly increasing number of remote and mobile users.

According to Gartner, worldwide mobile PC shipments are expected to grow 26.5% in 2005, while desk-based units are now forecast to grow 4.6%. Serving this community can be a challenge with the long download times for large image files outside the LAN.

AppStream.NOW technology dramatically increases the speed with which a user can be operational. “We understand that enterprises need to satisfy their users and maintain an efficient, low cost, secure operation.” said Srinivasa Venkataraman, AppStream’s Executive Vice President of Products. “We believe that we have a solution that satisfies these concerns. Our streaming technology can deliver a secure 4.4 GB OS image over a DSL connection and have a user up and running within 15 minutes. That same image distributed without streaming would time out after 4 hours. This has dramatic impact on how and where an enterprise can effectively use VMware ACE.”

With AppStream technology you retain the ability to apply enterprise IT policies to a virtual machine containing an operating system, enterprise applications, and data to create an isolated PC environment in a reduced image file size that is deployed quickly.

The AppStream.NOW platform provides four key benefits to the VMware ACE customer:

1. Increased efficiency of distribution – AppStream technology streams images in blocks delivering what a user needs to get up and running in minutes rather than hours or not at all. Lab tests have shown that a user receiving a 4.4GB image file over DSL can be operational in 15 minutes compared to over 4 hours without AppStream.NOW.

2. Automatic removal of images upon expiration – An image delivered using AppStream is automatically deleted from the user’s hard drive when the expiration date is reached or when the user is de-provisioned. Without AppStream, image removal must be done manually, which can be difficult or impossible for remote users who do not have a local IT resource or technical know-how to remove the file or where security is critical.

3. Preservation of user data and settings when updating images – When IT needs to update an image that has been delivered with AppStream, all of the user’s existing saved documents, personalized settings, etc are maintained, enabling remote users who need a secure environment, and contractors to take advantage of ACE technology without fear of losing all their work or configuration settings.

4. Central management and usage tracking – AppStream.NOW is administered and managed from a central Web-based console and provides comprehensive management tools to configure, manage and monitor the entire AppStream system.

“With the market penetration of VMware ACE rising, we’re seeing increasing interest from customers in our ability to quickly deploy large image files and get users up and running.” commented Dan Udoutch, CEO of AppStream. “Our solution augments ACE beyond distribution offering fine-tuned image management and central control. It truly is a perfect to complement to ACE in real world applications.”

AppStream.NOW 4.6
The AppStream.NOW platform makes distribution of desktop software and the management of software licenses easier with little to no IT intervention. Unlike traditional models, the ability to distribute applications, monitor usage, and manage licenses is integrated in a single platform. IT retains control over application versioning and provisioning but gains flexibility to give off-line use of applications and the ability to use local graphics cards and other local resources. The AppStream.NOW platform is scalable and hardware investment is minimal with one server handling approximately 1000 users.

With AppStream, application images reside on a server and are delivered on-demand to the desktop. This creates a self-service software environment that enables the end user to access applications when and where they need them without any action from IT. At the same time, AppStream maintains a real-time inventory of the applications that are in use, keeping the number of licenses needed aligned with the true requirements of the organization. When software is not being utilized on a PC it can be re-harvested and made available to others.

Quoting from the official VMware support page:

1. What server products did VMware announce at VMworld?
VMware announced ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 at its VMworld user conference. These releases will be major upgrades to the current ESX Server and VirtualCenter releases.

2. Are ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 available now?
No, ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 are currently in limited beta testing. A public beta program will begin later this year and general release will follow in the first quarter of 2006.

3. What is new in these releases?

• NAS and iSCSI Support
  By supporting lower-cost, more easily managed shared storage, ESX Server 3 lowers the barrier to entry for deploying virtual infrastructure and further reduces total cost of ownership (TCO). Advanced ESX Server features like VMotion and Distributed availability services are fully supported with NAS and iSCSI environments. Virtual machines see identical virtual storage containers regardless of the underlying physical setup, ensuring hardware independence.
• 4-Way Virtual SMP
  Only VMware Virtual SMP allows a single virtual machine to span multiple physical processors. Virtual SMP and ESX Server 3 extend the feature to support virtual machines configured with up to four processors. 4-way Virtual SMP lets ESX Server virtual machines handle the processing requirements of scaled up workloads like databases and messaging servers so applications previously reserved for physical systems can now enjoy the ease of management and flexibility offered by virtualization. Additional service fees and conditions apply.
• 16GB RAM for Virtual Machines
  ESX Server 3 lets you allocate up to 16GB of memory per virtual machine to support the most demanding workloads in virtual machines. The expanded memory capability together with 4-way Virtual SMP truly enable virtualization anywhere in your data center.
• Distributed Availability Services
  An option when used under VirtualCenter 2 management, Distributed availability services detects failed virtual machines and automatically restarts them on alternate ESX Server hosts. Distributed availability services selects a failover host that can honor the virtual machine’s resource allocations so that service level guarantees remain intact. With Distributed availability services, you can deliver high availability for critical applications without the cost and complexity of clustering. Additional service fees and conditions apply.
• Distributed Resource Scheduling
  Built on top of VMotion and VirtualCenter, Distributed resource scheduling intelligently and continuously balances virtual machine workloads across your ESX Server hosts so you can safely operate at 80% utilization or higher. Distributed resource scheduling detects when virtual machine activity saturates an ESX Server host and it triggers automated VMotion live migrations, moving running virtual machines to other ESX Server nodes so that all resource commitments are met. Distributed resource scheduling enables a self-managing, highly optimized compute cluster with built-in resource and load balancing. Additional service fees and conditions apply.
• VMware Consolidated Backup
  An ESX Server 3 option offering improved backup performance and simplicity, Consolidated backup supports host-free, LAN-free, agentless backup of Windows virtual machines. Consolidated backup automatically quiesces a virtual disk before creating an online snapshot with no virtual machine downtime required. A separate physical machine can mount the snapshots and use a standard backup agent to back the data up. Consolidated backup provides the simplicity of backing up an entire running virtual machine in one operation while allowing file-level restores. Additional service fees and conditions apply.
• Large-Scale Management
  VirtualCenter 2 can manage hundreds of ESX Server hosts and thousands of virtual machines. VirtualCenter 2 starts up faster, is more responsive and is designed from the ground up to handle the largest virtual infrastructure deployments.
• Unified User Interface
  ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 share a new VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client accessible from any Windows PC or browser. Remotely access and manage ESX Server hosts, virtual machines and VirtualCenter Management Servers from a single client.
• Improved Virtual Infrastructure Oversight
  VirtualCenter 2 centralizes storage of virtual machine configuration files and VMware licenses for greater deployment flexibility. Finer grained access controls and audit trails support enterprise security requirements. An improved inventory model and interactive topology views help simplify management.
• Expanded ESX Server Hardware Support
  We anticipate ESX Server 3 will be certified with industry-leading rack, tower and blade servers from Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, NEC, Sun and Unisys. ESX Server 3 supports AMD and Intel dual-core processors (a dual-core processor is considered as one processor for licensing purposes).
• Expanded ESX Server Guest Operating System Support
  We anticipate ESX Server 3 will be certified with recently updated Windows, Linux and NetWare guest operation systems.
• Expanded I/O Device Support
  We anticipate ESX Server 3 will be certified with additional PCI-based SCSI, RAID, Fibre Channel, and Ethernet controllers.
• Expanded Storage Area Network Support
  We anticipate ESX Server 3 will be certified with additional Fibre Channel SAN products.

4. What is the pricing for ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2?
VMware will announce pricing for ESX Server 3, VirtualCenter 2 and related components such as Distributed availability services, Distributed resource scheduling, Consolidated backup, 4-way Virtual SMP and VMotion at a later date.

5. I currently own licenses for ESX Server and VirtualCenter. How will I upgrade to the new releases?
VMware ESX Server, VirtualCenter, Virtual SMP and VMotion customers with active Support and Subscription contracts are entitled to the new releases at no cost. Virtual SMP upgrades provide current Virtual SMP customers with the new 4-way version of Virtual SMP. The new Distributed availability services, Distributed resource scheduling and Consolidated backup options will be available for purchase by existing customers with pricing for those options to be announced at a later date.

6. Are ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 compatible with earlier releases?
VirtualCenter 2 can manage mixed ESX Server 2 and ESX Server 3 hosts. The final releases of ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 will support in-place upgrades of ESX Server 2 and VirtualCenter 1 servers. ESX Server 3 will be capable of running older ESX Server 2 virtual machines, but those virtual machines should be upgraded using tools provided with ESX Server 3 to permit them to use all the new capabilities in ESX Server 3.

7. Is there a beta program I can join?
VMware will be announcing a public beta program for ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 later in the fourth quarter of 2005. To sign up for our beta program, please see this Web page: http://www.vmware.com/betarequest

If you have designed hardware availability and enough time to spend (and you are in very need of upcoming ESX and VC features) you can try to apply for the new beta program starting in the 4Q 05: http://www.vmware.com/betarequest

Good luck!

Quoting from CRN:

The imminent launch of XenSource’s first commercial open source solutions will kick off commoditization in the virtualization software market and threaten VMware’s bread-and-butter revenues, observers predict.

XenSource, the Palo Alto, Calif. startup that also oversees the open source Xen project, will launch its first management and automation solutions based on the open source Xen 3 virtualization engine in two weeks, said Simon Crosby, founder and vice president of strategy for Xensource.

For XenSource, the Xen virtualization engine is a free platform service on which other value-added solutions can be built. Microsoft has the same notion and also announced plans earlier this year to integrate a virtualization hypervisor into the Longhorn Windows Server R2 in 2008.

Crosby said more servers aren’t running virtualization because VMWare’s flagship ESX product is too costly. “We can rapidly accelerate adoption of the virtual enterprise if we have the best hypervisor that is freely available,” he said. “It will create a huge market for solutions offerings around it, commercially supported offerings that we can build can build an ecosystem around.”

To that end, XenSource plans to build a strong channel program for ISVs and service firms and will try to avoid the portability problems Linux distribution vendors have encountered by offering a certified single Xen code base upon which all development will take place, Crosby said.

Commoditizing the virtualization engine is good news for customers but not necessarily for VMware, whose ESX server, introduced in 2001, transformed the tiny firm into a multi-million dollar empire acquired by EMC for more than $600 million early last year.

XenSource announced its formation and $6 million in funding from last January. Its co-founders are Crosby and Ian Pratt, who is the Xen project leader and a senior faculty member at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

“Xen is the biggest challenge to VMware coming over the next year, the first real challenge to VMware in the hypervisor market in the x86 market,” said Tom Bittman, a vice president and fellow at Gartner Group. “I don’t think Xen will take over the world, as it will be less mature initially, but it will be on the table.”

Xen is having broad repercussions across the industry. Since going public earlier this year, VMware has responded by pushing forth a platform based on open standards.

Microsoft formed a pact with VMware competitor SWSoft and last week announced significant licensing changes that address how virtual workloads will run on Windows, even as it prepares to integrate hypervisor technology into the Windows server by the end of the decade.

The introduction of XenSource’s commercial solutions puts VMware’s OEM partners in an uncomfortable position, said sources who declined to be named.

While Linux backers IBM and Hewlett-Packard have embraced Xen publicly, executives from the server and services divisions from those companies don’t want to disrupt the lucrative flow of revenues that come from their respective VMware practices, analyst and partners agree.

Xen is no hollow threat. Over the past year, the Xen open source project, which Xensource founders oversee separately, has received backing from virtually all of the major players in the industry including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, HP, Dell and the entire Linux community.

Linux distribution leaders Red Hat and Novell, for instance, are integrating the Xen engine into their next generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 servers, due to ship in 2006. The kernel.org led by OSDL fellow and Linux creator Linus Torvald is implementing core aspects of Xen into the Linux kernel.

Initially, Xensource will go to market this quarter with Linux and open source solutions but Windows solutions will be offered in the first quarter of 2006, Crosby said. In August, the company demonstrated Windows XP running on Xen using Intel’s Virtualization Technology extensions. XenSource will also run on AMD’s “Pacifica” virtualization technology due in the first half of 2006.

Even as VMware pronounces technical superiority over Xen and a broad ecosystem of more than 1,000 ISVs and service partners, open source offerings tend to catch up fast, observers note.

The availability of Xensource’s new management and automation solutions, for example, will likely force VMware to make pricing cuts on ESX and shift its focus on VirtualCenter and other value-added solutions to stay relevant in the long term, analysts note.

XenSource demonstrated at the fall Intel Developer’s Forum its policy driven workload management solution for transactional enterprise applications, using the Xen hypervisor.

“It will be on the table in the same way that Microsoft attacked VMware’s GSX server and they dropped pricing 44 percent,” Gartner’s Bittman said. “When Xen comes out, VMware will watch carefully and if they see any nip on their heels they’ll be ready to drop the price on ESX.”

VMware appears to be heeding the open source threat.

As it prepares to kick off its partner and user conference in Las Vegas this week, VMware launched on Monday its next generation ESX 3 that includes Virtual SMP and VirtualCenter Agent with VMotion live migration technology starting at a base price of $5,000. Virtual SMP and VMotion are sold separately. Currently, pricing for ESX server starts at $3,750 for a two processor server; $1,200 for Virtual SMP and Virtual Centers starts at $5,000.

In conjunction with partners, VMware also introduced on Monday new services for Capacity Planning and Consolidation that will be delivered from VMware directly and VMware Authorized Consulting (VAC) partners. VMware Capacity Planner is based on AOG’s CapacityPlanner acquired by VMware earlier this year, sources said.

Additionally, the company is also extending its virtual infrastructure with advanced services for the server and desktop. VirtualCenter 2, also announced on Monday, features Distributed Availability Services and Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS).

At the conference, VMware will push the concept of the Enterprise Hosted Desktop using ESX 3 to serve up secure virtual desktops.

Reseller made good margins from ESX sales in the past but VMWare effectively commoditized the server when it authorized Insight and CDW to sell the server, some partners note.

So for many VMware partners, the commoditization has already forced them to shift to VMware’s advanced VirtualCenter 2 and VMotion technologies.

“The virtual engine is being commoditized and if Xen is another way to deliver it, then you need to layer on that and a key part of success is all the additional products being developed,” said Mike Reilly, managing partner at Foedus, a VMware Authorized Consulting partner based on Portsmouth, NH. “The real value of this environment is the virtual ecosystem you can build around it.”

Even as XenSource begins its assult on VMware, a Herndon, Va., firm called Parallel will launch in November a “lightweight” hypervisor for the desktop and early 2006 for the server aimed and priced for SMB customers.

VMware is becoming more channel friendly and plans to build a stronger army of channel partners to fight off incursions into its territory, partners said.

“They’re worried about Xen and even built some para-virtualization into ESX3,” said one VMware VIP partner who declined to be named. “VMware is learning to support their partner base and they have well meaning partner managers but it takes a while to change the culture,” he partner said. “They’re building it up slowly. It’s only a small part of the organization that truly believes they need partners beyond hardware partners.”

I personally believe we’ll not have any war unitl Xen won’t support Windows as guest OS. If this happens a huge number of users will really start using Xen, consolidating platform reliability and aiding enterprise adoption.
I also suppose a Windows-supported Xen will initially spread thanks to consolidated distributions (like SuSE, Red Hat, etc.) including it among standard packages and eventually live cd distributions (like Knoppix), providing a zero-time startup for virtualization infrastructures.

VMware VMTN community forums staff open today a new forum dubbed User Solutions where to collect how-to, scripts and other tools developed by experts and enthusiasts to solve the most common problems VMware technologies still have.

The new forum is already filled with great projects from VMguru follks.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that more than 60 leading operating system, database, application server, enterprise application, management and infrastructure software vendors now support their software applications in VMware virtual infrastructure environments. In addition, a wide range of leading software vendors have commercially available integrations with VMware virtual infrastructure.

“The industry continues to rally behind customers’ desires to standardize on VMware virtual infrastructure in their data centers for more flexible and cost-effective deployment and management of their application environments,” said Diane Greene, president of VMware. “We are proud of our broad and growing ecosystem of leading industry partners that support and integrate to VMware virtual infrastructure.”

Among the major software vendors and product groups that have support policies for their customers who run their software applications in and with VMware virtual infrastructure environments are Altiris, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Business Objects, Cerner Corporation, Check Point, Citrix Systems, Commvault, Computer Associates, EMC/Documentum/Legato, HP, Hyperion Solutions, IBM DB2/Domino/Lotus Notes/Tivoli/WebSphere, i2, Internet Security Systems, LANDesk, McAfee, McKesson, Mercury, Microsoft, MySQL AB, NetIQ, Novell/SuSE, Opsware, Oracle/JD Edwards/PeopleSoft, Peregrine Systems, Plumtree Software, Quest Software, Red Hat, SpikeSource, Sybase, Symantec and Teamquest.

“Thanks to the tremendous cost savings and efficiencies of virtualization, our goal is to virtualize as many of our servers as we can using VMware virtual infrastructure,” said Barry Naber, assistant director of IT operations at International Truck and Engine. “We are pleased to see so many major ISVs supporting VMware virtualization technology so we can continue adding to our virtual infrastructure.”

The leading applications, frameworks and software vendors that have integrations with VMware virtual infrastructure include AK Computer Services, Akimbi, Altiris, Aurema, Avaya, BMC Software, Cassatt, Centrify, ClearCentral, Computer Associates, Compuware, Dell OpenManage, Dunes, Enigmatec, Evident Software, Fox Technologies, HP OpenView/ProLiant Essentials, IBM Director/Rational/Tivoli, LANDesk, Leostream, Macrovision, Mercury, Metilinx, Microsoft Operations Manager, NetIQ, nworks, Opalis, Opsware, PerfMan, Platform Computing, PlateSpin, Quest Software/Vintela, Real Enterprise Systems, Segue, Softricity, Surgient, Symantec, Teamquest, Toolwire and Vizioncore. VMware continues to work with these and other partners on integrations with upcoming releases, including the next generation releases of its industry-leading data center products VMware ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2.

VMware, with its strong ecosystem of partners, continues to lead the market in providing innovative virtualization products:

“BMC Software is broadly committed to delivering solutions that leverage and optimize VMware virtual infrastructure environments as witnessed by our announcement this week regarding our Service Oriented Resource Management Strategy,” said Fred Johannessen, vice president and program executive of capacity management and provisioning at BMC Software. “Our customers are aggressively deploying VMware environments and with our new strategy and virtualization solutions, customers now have the ability to automatically provision new server and software resources, based on real-time business requirements.”

“Customers are embracing VMware virtual infrastructure to help them derive maximum business value from their investments in data center infrastructure,” said John Pincomb, vice president of product management at Computer Associates. “By building VMware support into our industry-leading management solutions, CA is uniquely enabling these customers to optimize their virtualized IT environments.”

“In response to increasing customer adoption of VMware virtual infrastructure environments, Hyperion has worked with VMware to qualify Hyperion configurations for VMware environments,” said John L. Kopcke, chief technology officer at Hyperion Solutions. “The combination of industry-leading Hyperion Business Performance Management software and the flexibility, efficiency and availability from VMware virtual infrastructure is a significant value for our joint customers.”

“We’ve had a positive response from customers running IBM Workplace, WebSphere Portal and Collaboration solutions in VMware virtual infrastructure environments, to deploy and manage their applications with increased flexibility,” said Ken Bisconti, vice president of workplace, portal and collaboration software at IBM. “We’re committed to supporting our customers who run IBM Software applications in VMware environments, and we look forward to exploring more ways to work closely with VMware to bring value to customers.”

“Increasingly more and more of our customers have discovered the value of running Internet Security Systems’ host protection solutions in a VMware environment,” said Heath Thompson, vice president of engineering at Internet Security Systems. “We are committed to our partnership with VMware and supporting customers who run our software in VMware environments because of the tremendous value we can offer our joint customers.”

“Novell Open Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Novell eDirectory and other Novell software running on VMware virtual infrastructure offer the flexibility and business value our enterprise customers demand,” said David Patrick, vice president and general manager of Linux, Open Source platforms and services at Novell. “As virtualization becomes a new standard layer in IT infrastructure, Novell is committed to supporting our customers who run Novell software in VMware environments and staying on the forefront of innovation.”

“Virtualization is a game-changing technology for organizations that provides flexibility and cost savings and improves overall productivity,” said Niall Wall, vice president of business development and alliances at Symantec. “Symantec is committed to continue working with VMware to provide customers with best-in-class solutions for high-availability, data protection, system recovery and storage management for their VMware environments.”

In addition, VMware virtual machines are rapidly becoming a preferred distribution vehicle for software vendors. Many software vendors, including BEA Systems, IBM Software, MySQL AB, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat and SpikeSource, distribute their software in downloadable, pre-installed virtual machine environments as part of the VMware Technology Network (VMTN). Software distribution in VMware virtual machines allows these vendors to more easily bring new technology to users for development, evaluation, testing and validation. Instead of spending time installing and configuring applications, developers, QA teams and IT organizations are able to focus their efforts on development and testing.

For more information, please visit www.vmware.com/isvsupport and www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm.

Quoting from the VMware official announcement:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today unveiled major new releases of its data center products: VMware ESX Server 3, virtual infrastructure software for partitioning hardware and consolidating application workloads in mission-critical environments, and VMware VirtualCenter 2, software for managing virtual infrastructure.

With the next generation releases of VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter, VMware offers a powerful enterprise virtualization platform that is providing the foundation for the industry’s next wave of innovative data center management technologies. VMware and its partner community are now delivering a comprehensive set of management technologies based on virtual infrastructure designed to substantially reduce the cost and complexity of data center environments.

“In the last several years since we first introduced virtual infrastructure with our ESX Server and VirtualCenter products and enabled the vast selection of partner solutions built on that platform which have followed, thousands of customers have been able to substantially improve how they build and manage their distributed systems through virtualization,” said Karthik Rau, director of product management at VMware. “With the introduction of ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2, VMware continues to raise the bar by providing customers with the ability to drive even higher availability and better flexibility and to apply the benefits of virtualization throughout the enterprise.”

Building on the success of VMotion technology for live migration of running virtual machines with zero-downtime, VMware is now introducing new transformative virtual infrastructure management technologies:

• Distributed Availability Services
  Infrastructure-wide high availability services for critical applications without the cost and complexity of clustering. Distributed availability services detect failed virtual machines and automatically restart them on alternate ESX Server hosts. Distributed availability services select a failover host that can honor the virtual machine’s resource allocations so that service level guarantees remain intact.
• Distributed Resource Scheduling
  Infrastructure-wide resource optimization enabling a self-managing, highly efficient compute cluster with built-in resource and load balancing. Built on top of VMotion technology and VirtualCenter, distributed resource scheduling intelligently and continuously balances virtual machine workloads across ESX Server hosts so users can safely operate at 80% utilization or higher. Distributed availability services detect when increasing virtual machine activity saturates an ESX Server host and triggers automated VMotion live migrations to move running virtual machines to other ESX Server nodes so that all resource commitments are met.

VMware ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2 provide customers with the option to deploy virtualization in any environment – from the smallest branch office to the largest data center. ESX Server 3 has broader x86 support that unlocks the power of newer dual-core processor hardware and added NAS and iSCSI networked storage compatibility. Expanded virtual machine memory limits and new 4-way Virtual SMP further enable the most memory and processor-intensive server applications to run in virtual machines.

VirtualCenter 2 scales up to control the biggest infrastructures with hundreds of hosts and thousands of virtual machines and it provides enhanced usage reporting and security auditing features to meet enterprise requirements. In addition, VirtualCenter 2 simplifies management with a richer unified client and centralized host configuration tools.

“The new features in VMware ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2 support our plans to further expand our virtual infrastructure,” said Paul Poppleton, senior staff engineer for QUALCOMM. “Using ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 will allow us to optimize efficiency and resource use across the infrastructure, while driving down hardware and operational costs. With distributed availability services, we can bring complete high availability coverage to many of our production applications at minimal cost. Also with 4-way Virtual SMP and the increased 16GB virtual machine memory limits, we can migrate more of our physical servers to virtual machines. We are also looking forward to VirtualCenter’s sophisticated control features, including finer grained access controls and audit trails, as well as the inventory model and interactive topology views. We’ll have an easier time managing our data center with more servers virtualized.”

Pricing and Availability
VMware ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2 are currently in limited beta testing. A public beta program will begin later this year and general release will follow in Q1, 2006.

The current Virtual Infrastructure Node (VIN) for ESX Server combines ESX Server with Virtual SMP and a VirtualCenter Agent with VMotion technology and starts at $5,000. Current ESX Server, Virtual SMP, VirtualCenter and VMotion customers with active Support and Subscription contracts are entitled to the new upgrades for those products at no cost when the new upgrades are generally available. The distributed availability services and distributed resource scheduling will be available as add-on modules when they are generally available.