virtualization.info Editors

The storage vendor, which is owned by giant EMC, is expanding its Virtual Partner Network with a new Premier Enterprise tier, it said at the VMWorld annual conference, last week.

This level comes in addition to its Enterprise and Professional partner tiers.

The vendor will offer Premier-level partners new marketing, financial and support benefits customised for each geographic region, according to Mike Mullany, vice-president of marketing at VMware.

The programme is designed for partners that have VMware Certified Professionals on staff and are members of the VMware Authorised Consulting Programme.

“The Premier Enterprise tier is designed for firms investing in VMware expertise at higher levels,” Mullany said. “Many are already authorised consultants.”

Simon Gay, consultancy practice leader at Computacenter, said increased numbers of VMware resellers will not have a huge impact on his business. “VMware has always worked in close partnership with its channel. Setting different partner levels is an excellent move,” he said.

“It enables partners to demonstrate their skill level and helps customers select the most appropriate partner for their particular needs.”

VMware claims to have 5,000 corporate customers and 2.5 million users. Still, the company is a big fish in a small but growing pond and is going up against Microsoft, which last month launched its Virtual Server 2005.

The virtual machine software business has become popular as customers try to eke out as much performance as possible from their data centres.

Jane Rimmer, VMware’s UK director of marketing, said: “The proposition is pretty simple. Companies have a dedicated server for every business process. A lot of the time those servers are idle. Our systems allow firms to pool these resources and make more efficient use of them.”

VMware originally sold this technology to test and development environments but found ‘virtualisation’ utilities could be employed by corporate IT departments.

It has never been so easy to come to an acceptable video resolution in Solaris in VMware. For me, it took a little while to find out how to configure Xorg, so in case someone needs an idea:

– Leave the VGA mode Xserver by selecting “Command Line Login” from the “Options” menu.
– According to docs.sun.com, you can’t use kdmconfig
– You could run “/usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg -configure”, but it does not work for me (screen turns black and hangs)…
– Instead, run /usr/X11R6/bin/xorgconfig

This is what I have answered (1024×768/24, US keyboard):

Enter a protocol number: 1
Do you want to enable Emulate3Buttons? n
Mouse device: [ENTER]
Enter a number to choose the keyboard: 7
Enter a number to choose the country: 1
Please enter a variant name for ‘us’ layout: [ENTER]
XKB options: [ENTER]
hsync: 10
vertical sync: 2
identifier for your monitor: [ENTER]
Do you want to look at the card database? y
Enter a number to choose the corresponding card definition: 29
video memory: 8
identifier for your video card definition: [ENTER]
list of modes (resolutions): 3
Which modes? 4
virtual screen that is larger than…? n
list of modes (resolutions): 4
default depth: 5
Shall I write it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf? y

Leaving the command line console should restart the Xorg server in full color mode.

There is still one problem: The Java Desktop is not starting and puts me back to the login screen. Starting “gnome-session” form the failsave terminal ends in a core dump. Okay, it’s still a beta…

IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., is growing its virtualization offerings in its Intel Corp.-based xSeries systems by making it easier to deploy and manage virtual machines. The moves are intended to continue driving the adoption of virtual machines in the data center, said Rob Sauerwalt, global brand manager of software and services in IBM’s Systems Group.

“IBM doesn’t view virtualization as simply partitioning,” Sauerwalt said. “We really see it as a better way of getting better utilization in the data center.”

Brad Day, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc., said companies running Windows or Linux on x86 hardware are beginning to recognize the server consolidation benefits of virtual machines.

“In the last three [fiscal] quarters, for every level of administration, when they talk about system consolidation relative to x86, 30 to 40 percent plan some sort of virtual machine policy,” said Day, in Cambridge, Mass.

Virtual machine technology has been widely used in the Unix space to consolidate back-end applications, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.

IBM has added Virtual Machine Manager free to its IBM Director management software, enabling users to manage both physical and VMware virtual machines from a single console. Until earlier this year, IBM customers running virtual machines needed Director for the physical IBM server and one VMware ESX console for each virtual system. Then VMware launched VirtualCenter, enabling users to manage all virtual machines from a single console, Sauerwalt said.

Now they have a central place to manage both.

“We got it down from hundreds of consoles to two consoles to one,” he said.

IBM also has rolled out Version 4.2 of its Remote Deployment Manager—an extension of the Director management suite—enabling users to remotely deploy a VMware ESX virtual server onto an x86 system. In addition, IBM at the end of the year will offer a free VMware license for six months with every BladeCenter blade server chassis and will offer VMware’s P2V Assistant—a migration tool for users looking to move images currently on physical servers onto virtual machines.

At its VMworld user show late last month, VMware, of Palo Alto, Calif., gave users a demonstration of the upcoming four-way version of its Virtual SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) server. The new version—an add-on to the company’s ESX Server—will be available in the second half of next year, around the time that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel begin introducing their multicore processors.

The four-way Virtual SMP will enable a virtual machine to work with up to four physical processors, allowing users to run more mission-critical applications on the virtual servers, according to VMware officials.

The four-way capabilities will come about two years after VMware introduced its two-way version.

Vodafone project manager Doug Colvin said his firm will deploy up to 300 new Wintel servers in 2005, and will manage most of them with VMware virtualisation tools.

He added that in the longer term, virtualisation could let Vodafone outsource its server operations. “Why not contract third-parties such as HP to own and operate VMware server farms and pay them to host our virtual server systems?” he said. This new hosting scenario could make it easier for firms to retain control of mission-critical applications and speed up the deployment of new applications.

Vodafone’s research found that virtualisation technology would cut the maximum time to acquire and deploy a new server from 40 days to 32.5 days. It also found that upgrading a single site of 140 servers to run across two sites using VMware’s ESX Server would save £270,000 each year.

This approach would also give firms the flexibility to move between server hosting firms with minimal disruption, because virtualisation insulates applications or operating systems from server hardware.

Dunes VS-O unleashes the value of Enterprise Service Integrators to be applied to solving business problems involving a virtual infrastructure. It is the first integrated development platform, based on open standards, that enables rapid design, validation and integration of business processes into the virtualized data center. Combined with an environment that allows virtualization and automation of the virtual infrastructure, it enables the delivery of IT service on demand.

Version 4.0 allows a single Windows-based software image to be deployed across servers regardless of underlying hardware, instead of requiring a new image for each type of server, said Jeff Hausman, director of strategic marketing for storage and server management at Veritas.

Also new is the ability to remotely install an operating system and to use multiple network cards for failover purposes, Hausman said.

The new software also discovers applications and ensures that updates are made properly regardless of hardware or operating system including, for the first time, AIX. A server change management tool flags application differences between multiple servers.

Keith Trotte, account representative at SSI hubcity, Metuchen, N.J., said OpForce’s support of multiple hardware and operating system platforms is important as customers deploy mixed environments.

SSI hubcity specializes in application development and deployment, and is starting to ramp up to take advantage of OpForce. This will include hiring application performance specialists, Trotte said.

“We want to help customers tune and optimize their applications,” he said. “Go in, pin-point bottlenecks, look at the application layer. Now Veritas [OpForce] can do all that. It gives customers a single way to dig and view multiple parts of their data centers.”

OpForce is part of Veritas’ push to bring utility computing to the enterprise and the channel, which accounts for almost half of OpForce revenue, Hausman said. “Our whole concept is you can use bits and pieces as you move to utility computing,” he said. “You don’t buy utility computing.”

OpForce works not only with multiplatform physical servers but with virtual servers created by software such as VMware’s ESX Server, he said. “If you have VMware and OpForce, you use VMware to define partitions, and then OpForce can discover the partitions, treat them as individual servers and repurpose them.”