Gartner predicts Brazil to widely adopt virtualization in 2007

Quoting from Business News:


Virtualization and open source are the two technologies that are likely to have the most impact on Brazil in 2007, according to US tech consultancy Gartner.

Speaking at Gartner’s annual future of technology conference in São Paulo, analyst Carl Claunch said that virtualization will have a proportionally bigger impact in Brazil compared to other Latin American countries due to the importance of mainframe computers in Brazil…

Read the whole article at source.

Novell, Red Hat looking at OpenVZ adoption

Quoting from CNET News:


Red Hat hasn’t decided whether to use OpenVZ or Vserver, he added.

Xen is the priority for RHEL 5, due to arrive at the end of the year, but after that will come containers, Stevens said. “I’m looking at that as a RHEL 6 thing,” he said.

Novell, which wants to maintain Suse’s reputation as the first place to find advanced new features for Linux, is more eager and is considering adding OpenVZ in Service Pack 1 of SLES 10. “We are still evaluating if this is something we can take into SP1,” said Holger Dyroff, vice president of Linux product management.

If containers don’t arrive with SLES 10 Service Pack 1, Novell will urge SWsoft to work with Linux programmers so that the software can be easily added to SLES 11, Dyroff said…

Read the whole article at source.

LeftHand supports VMware Infrastructure 3

Quoting from the LeftHand Networks official announcement:

LeftHand Networks, the leading provider of complete iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions built using patented network storage clustering technology, today announced support for VMware Infrastructure 3, which includes VMware ESX 3.0 Server and its native iSCSI initiator.

When VMware and the LeftHand SAN are used in concert, complete server and storage environments are protected from hardware failure due to VMware’s ability to restart a virtual server on a different platform and LeftHand’s ability to stripe and mirror data across the cluster using SAN/iQ Network RAID…

Tech: Better timekeeping in VMware ESX Server 3.0

Richard Garsthagen, Technical Marketing Manager at VMware, published on his blog details about a new experimental feature introduced with ESX Server 3.0: the Descheduler Time Accounting (DTA) service.

This service, which has to be installed with a custom setup and has to be manually activated, is an attempt to better control how time is calculated in virtual machines.

The most important point is not the service in itself but the fact erroneous time management impacts on virtualization benchmarks:

Having proper time reporting in a Virtual Machine as always been a challange and there are many ways to solve this. You can use the buildin Time Sync from VMware Tools or use things like Active Directory or NTP. For most applications this works fine, but if you want to run things like benchmark tools this is not sufficient. The more a Virtual Machine get stressed, the worse it’s time sync will go…

Read the whole article at source.

The fact VMware is trying to mitigate issues in performance measurements isn’t a surprise: the company is expected to announce a benchmarking system, dubbed VMmark, at VMworld 2006, in November.

But if time calculation impacts so much on benchmarks then a question raises: assuming every vendor is handling time in its virtualization platform in different ways, how VMmark or any other benchmarking system could really compare performances of different products’ virtual machines?

TeamQuest updates Manager 9.2 to support VMware ESX Server 3.0

Quoting from the TeamQuest official announcement:


TeamQuest Manager 9.2 now provides added support for VMware ESX Server 3.0 extending the company’s performance suite of software for next-generation data centers.

As an example, a company using TeamQuest software in a virtualized environment can better understand utilization rates, discover how to optimize resources for their virtualized environment, and make informed purchasing decisions that align with their customers’ needs…

Tech: Virtual Server 2005 R2 scripting basics

Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine published an introductory article about scripting with VBScript for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, covering:

  • security
  • provisioning
  • networking
  • virtual machines control

Read the whole article at source.

About this topic don’t forget to check tens of articles from Ben Armstrong and the book The Rational Guide to Scripting Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

Thanks to Thincomputing.net for the news.

XenSource CEO doesn’t think Xen is ready for datacenters

CRN interviewed XenSource just before the official launch of XenEnterprise this week.

Despite the imminent launch the company’s CEO, Peter Levine, has surprisingly been very caution in his statements and refused to clearly declare Xen is ready for datacenter deployment in 2 different answers. This partially backs Red Hat denunciation against Novell during last 2 weeks.

Mr. Levine also eluded the question about frequency of Xen code changes in next few months.

Read the whole interview at source.

Apple could grant Mac OS X virtualization to VMware

macosXrumors reports rumors about a possible agreement between Apple and VMware to permit virtualization of Mac OS X when the virtual machine is running on Apple machines.

If true VMware could then decide to support its flagship product ESX Server on Apple Xserve, which would become the only virtualization business plaform able to run any kind of OS.

Read the whole article at source.

Trustware starts BufferZone Pro beta program

One of the newest competitor in the application virtualization area, Trustware, is starting a new beta program for its BufferZone product, with an innovative approach: every admitted beta tester reporting bugs will have chances to ear points and, depending on collected amount, win the product full license, a whole year of support, a USB key or an iPod.

Register for the beta here.