History

Surgient delivering on-demand business applications for VMware environments

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Quoting from official announcement:


Surgient, the leading provider of on-demand applications that automate the provisioning of virtual labs for testing and training, today announced that it has been utilizing VMware Virtual Infrastructure to dynamically manage and deliver applications for software sales, marketing, training and testing. Surgient also announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Software Alliance Program.

Surgient packaged applications leverage VMware virtual infrastructure?s scalability, manageability; security and efficiency to cost effectively automate delivery of enterprise applications on-demand.

?Companies like Documentum and Starwood are realizing the strong benefits that Surgient can provide by orchestrating virtual resources to deliver applications which solve real problems?, said Sameer Jagtap, Surgient Director of Product Management. ?We are pleased to leverage the very latest advances in virtual infrastructure technology from VMware.?

?Surgient applications are an excellent example of how VMware virtual infrastructure can be utilized to deliver applications that automate and enhance business processes?, said Brian Byun, Vice President of Alliances for VMware.

?Surgient infrastructure partners are instrumental in enabling us to deliver value to our customers?, said Erik Josowitz, Vice President of Marketing for Surgient. ?VMware enables us to deliver a powerful self-service infrastructure model for automating business processes.?

Microsoft releases a free tool for templating Virtual Server 2005 virtual machines

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Nelson Araujo demonstrated one year ago at TechEd 04 a tool, called Virtual Server Deployment Manager (VSDM), for simplying VM management under Virtual Server 2005:


The original Virtual Server administration is very powerful, yet very complex to use. Along with all the power it provides, it is complicated to manage to a regular user (not acquainted with administration processes) and therefore suitable to mistakes. One of the most critical mistakes this infra-structure provides support to avoid is when a user inadvertently modifies or damages other user?s machines.

After that, the system started evolving to include other features. It ended being transformed to a system that deploys Virtual Machines for users based on a newly developed concept of templates. To run this infrastructure, you?ll need just an IIS Web Server, .NET Framework 1.1 and Virtual Server installed. No extra hardware or software is required.

The user interface is clean and simple, providing power to the user and reducing the learning curve to use the infrastructure. Some knowledge of Web browsing and minimum knowledge of the hardware you need for your VM and type of machine is enough to create your own Virtual Machines on it with simple.

The system also includes a client-side system service which runs inside the Virtual Machine. It is used to pass information from VSDM to the Virtual Machine and perform maintenance tasks, like renaming the machine. This a very important task because if you create Virtual Machines based from some image and they startup, Windows network will crash because another name already exists on the network. The VSDM Client prevents that by keeping the virtual machine name in sync with the VSDM database, avoiding network name collisions.

There is no limit on the solution or number of user?s supported. If a restriction exists, it should be on the system that runs the Virtual Machines. As long as the system can support the Virtual Machines execution, VSDM will support it.

VSDM is now available for download directly from Microsoft here.

Microsoft will not embed virtualization in Longhorn

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Jim Allchin, Microsoft vice-president for platforms, during an interview answered questions about company strategy about virtualization for its upcoming new operating system, codename Longhorn.
At least not as expected.

Quoting from ComputerWorld:


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ComputerWorld: Which Longhorn features will help most in your competition against Linux?
Jim Allchin: We are working on partitioning. And that’s the ability to add processors and add memory while the system’s running. There’s a whole set of availability. The ability for fewer reboots. Componentization, I think, will be appreciated as well — and the role-based approach.

CW: To what extent will virtualization capabilities be built into the operating system?
JA: I hope everyone understands that virtualization is sort of a native part of an operating system from ground zero. We’ve virtualized the CPU to give processing. That’s what we do. And we’ve virtualized memory. That’s what virtual memory comes from. So all that’s happening now is, as the hardware progresses with more capability for virtualization, the OS is going to take advantage of it. Today we have stuff for products that are there because the hardware really doesn’t do everything we need it to do. But as the hardware does do it, it’s just a natural for the OS to support it.
On our current path, [there’s] some isolation that we do in Longhorn. Virtualization is not planned for Longhorn; well, that’s not true — some parts of it we are considering. But we won’t make it because the hardware won’t be ready. For example, virtualizing the I/O, it’s not there from the hardware, and that’s something that we would really like. So we will progressively extend the virtualization in the OS to take advantage of the hardware virtualization that’s there.

CW: Will you take features from your Virtual Server product and fold them into the operating system?
JA: What we want to do is take more advantage of the hardware as we move ahead.

CW: Will the Virtual Server product eventually go away?
JA: I can envision the path that there would be no Virtual Server product at some point. However, I could also envision the path that says there’s a thin hypervisor-level system and that there’s a separate virtualization stack that is sold separately. That’s also a possibility. So I don’t know. I think the world will evolve here, and I don’t think that necessarily anybody’s products today will necessarily stay the same in the future, because the hardware’s going to change this.
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Said so it’s really probable will see a stand alone Virtual Server 2007 product for Longhorn server OS timeframe and a Longhorn R2 Virtualization Edition, including a native hypervisor as OS feature. I think Virtual Server will not disappear until codename BlackComb timeframe.

Microsoft acknowledges software support on other virtualization platforms

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Until now a big issue VMware customers needed to manage was that Microsoft refused support for any software running on virtualization platforms but Virtual PC and Virtual Server.
This just changed: as stated in this new Knowledge Base article, Microsoft will grant reasonable commercial support for any Premier level support agreement when its products will generate issues on third parties virtualization platforms.

Probably Microsoft management recognized the previous position wasn’t blocking customers from adopting VMware products, and choosed to turn this trend in a valuable money source.
From now a virtualization project including VMware and Microsoft will mean buying a Premium Level support agreement. Which customer will not accept such a requirement?

Microsoft too preparing a consolidation metering tool

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Like just released PlateSpin PowerRecon, Microsoft too is working on its tool for server consolidation projects.
Megan Davis informs that two technology specialists are developing a new report for Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) 2005, monitoring physical servers performances and highlighting candidates for physical to virtual (P2V) migration.

Here you can read the instructions, see some screenshots and grab the report.

Microsoft releases its first eLearning course about virtual products

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When Virtual Server 2005 was released a large amount of customers stared asking for a Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) classroom course about it to be teached on the worldwide CTECs network.
After months from release date Microsoft finally decided to produce a learning material but preferred the eLearning online course format instead of standard classroom MOC.

So here we have the brand new online Course 2288: Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005:


This course prepares students to migrate legacy applications and consolidate server functions by using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.
At the end of the course, students will be able to:

– Install and configure Virtual Server 2005.
– Configure virtual machines on Virtual Server 2005.
– Migrate applications and servers to virtual machines

The product, available for 90 days from buy is priced $99.

PlateSpin launches consolidation needs metering tool

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PlateSpin, famous for the best P2V tool available on the virtualization market, PowerP2V, extends now its products portfolio introducing PowerRecon 1.0.

PowerRecon lets administrators misuring corporate physical servers key resources as CPU, disk, memory and network, calculating utilization and performance trends. This will simplify the task of discovering what servers can be consolidated and will help moving them within the virtual environment, since PowerRecon integrates with PowerP2V.

PowerRecon aims to be a must tool for every virtualization project, even if you choose another P2V solution or you choose to reinstall every physical server in a virtual machine.

The pricing model is subscription based and the starting price is $995 for monitoring 25 servers during 1 month as stated in official press release.