Planet Virtualization

The speaker line-up for Catalyst 2011’s user-centric computing track has been finalized and I wanted to take a moment to share it with you. A prominent CTO has called Catalyst “the most intellectual conference in all of IT,” and if you haven’t attended Catalyst before, there are plenty of great reasons to get there this year. We have extensive coverage of server- and client-virtualization, cloud computing,and many other hot topics. The rundown of sessions in the user-centric computing track is listed below. I hope to see you there!

Application Delivery in a People-Centric World
Chris Wolf
A common theme has (Read more...)

One Convergence today announced fully virtualized intelligent in-line and off-load acceleration platform that takes advantage of powerful multi-core... Read more at VMblog.com.

VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere is a free tool for checking the compliance of your vSphere environment. This tool will help you ensure that... Read more at VMblog.com.

Solarflare, the leader in high-performance, low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) server adapters and software, announced today the extension of... Read more at VMblog.com.

Raxco Software, the leader in disk optimization solutions that improve hard drive performance for PCs, laptops, and servers, today announced that... Read more at VMblog.com.

Shavlik Technologies , a global leader in simplifying the complexity of IT management, today announced a new browser-based security advisory that... Read more at VMblog.com.

Yeah, this year I am not organizing VMworld, so I can finally participate as a normal geek interested into the virtualization life style. I submitted two presentations for VMworld and can now start begging for your votes as the public voting for VMworld 2011 is live. Here the sessions I submitted: 3080 - How To: Central

Eucalyptus Systems , creators of the world's most widely deployed software platform for on-premise infrastructure-as-a-service clouds, today... Read more at VMblog.com.

Quest Software now offers vWorkspace Connector for Android version 1.0. This new connector enables vWorkspace users to securely access virtual... Read more at VMblog.com.

ManageIQ today announced Version 4 of its Enterprise Virtualization Management Suite (EVM) enabling organizations to deploy, manage and optimize... Read more at VMblog.com.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced it has set a record-breaking SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark... Read more at VMblog.com.

Intransa , the VideoAppliance Company, today announced the availability of VMware vSphere integrated with Intransa's Video and Data Management &... Read more at VMblog.com.

NEC Corporation of America (NEC) today released a radically simplified architecture for data center and cloud networks with the introduction of the... Read more at VMblog.com.

CSC today announced CSC Infrastructure Utility (IU), the cloud-based infrastructure utility – in support of SAP solutions – built on Vblock... Read more at VMblog.com.

We got notice that the direct ESX download links were removed from the download page of vSphere: a strong signal from VMware for all those organizations still using the once-flagship hypervisor.
VMware stated multiple times that the future lies in ESXi (or Hypervisor, as it is now named) and tiny hypervisors with very small footprint: ESX will be shifted for ESXi-Hypervisor from the next version of vSphere.

The ESX download page is still reachable from an indirect link in the page, but this is indeed a very strong signal that everyone should start planning for its demise.

VMware is focusing more and more on the high-level centralized management offered by vCenter and the ecosystem, up to vCloud Director: the old-style ESX with its command line switches and fine grained host configuration simply doesn’t fit the new strategy.

VMware already announced shift-out plans, and the removal is a very clear statement in that direction. Quoting VMware:

VMware vSphere 4.1 is the last release to support both the ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures.
Future vSphere releases will only support the ESXi architecture. VMware recommends:

• New deployments of vSphere 4.x are done on ESXi
• Existing ESX deployments of vSphere 4.x or older are migrated to ESXi
• Take a free new training course on ESXi essentials

Enterprises heavily relying on advanced or custom ESX-only features should start evaluating their exit/upgrade strategy from the platform, moving to the lean ESXi line and embracing the philosophy of “light” hypervisors in full.

UPDATE as the comments pointed out, VMware added a direct download option at the bottom of the page. For a quick reference on how the download page changed, compare the page as of the 5th of May – the difference is easily noticeable, with ESX being taken outside the main download tables and having one of its own.

Labels: VMware

One of the most active companies in the Hyper-V ecosystem, 5nine (link to the radar) announced the release of a local management tool for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V Manager, also available in a free version.

While the Microsoft virtualization solution provides a command line tool (SCONFIG) for the basic configuration tasks, it provides no local GUI for its management: this is a space well suited for third party solution providers.
Built by leveraging the public Hyper-V WMI APIs, 5Nine Hyper-V Manager provides yet another way of managing your Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. It supports even the latest features of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1, Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX, missing little of the full fledged command line tool.

For a GUI access, administrators without any third party software have to rely on remote management through Windows Server 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager or Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7.
Manager enables an easier configuration of the the new features in Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1, which are “key factors that you should consider when making a decision for VDI”, as Microsoft spokesman Jeff Woolsey points out.

Labels: 5nine, Hyper-V, Microsoft

The VMware Compliance Checker for vSphere is a free, simple and straightforward tool meant to verify the security of a vSphere environment. It has been developed to compare the detected configuration with the guidelines provided in the VMware vSphere Hardening Guide, and will provide detailed reports representing actionable items and non compliance issues.

Each issue is clearly labeled and a direct reference is provided to fixing instructions and further details, an approach which has proven to be worth the additional work in similar products (the Best Practice Analyzers from Microsoft being a famous example).

The tool can run against multiple ESX and ESXi servers at a time, and is fit for large scale assessments: it can speed up the work of trained security experts or help security conscious system administrators.

As an additional tool for PCI certified organizations, VMware also released a freeware Compliance Checker for the PCI DSS v1.2 requirements. The tool is meant to analyze Microsoft Windows servers and desktops (starting from Windows 2000) for PCI non-compliances, producing a detailed summary of all issues complete with remediation suggestions. It can run on 5 machines a time, providing a small level of parallelism suited for small and medium environments.

While the tool is by no means a complete replacement for careful audits, it can help automate baseline security checks and is a welcome addition for any administrator working in a PCI certified environment.

Labels: Compliance, Tools, VMware

VMware Lab engineers are at it again. This internal group of VMware developers and engineers has been tasked with creating interesting plug-ins,... Read more at VMblog.com.

ActiveState, the dynamic language experts offering solutions for Perl , Python , Tcl and other web languages, has announced today the first... Read more at VMblog.com.

Centrify Corporation, the leading provider of security and compliance solutions that centrally control, secure and audit cross-platform systems and... Read more at VMblog.com.

SolarWinds reported record total revenue for the first quarter of 2011 of $43.0 million, a 25% increase over total revenue in the first quarter of... Read more at VMblog.com.

Dell today expanded its networking, server and storage portfolios for enterprise and small-to-medium customers who require a scalable, flexible and... Read more at VMblog.com.

It has been a record first quarter for the Austin-based software provider SolarWinds, reaching $43 million revenue with a $11.7 million.
The quarter included revenue from the recent acquisition of the virtualization management software developer Hyper9. CFO Mike Berry says:

“We generated higher than expected margins and cash flow and even grew our cash balance despite the acquisition of Hyper9″.

SolarWinds growth is supposed to continue. In Q2, the company expects revenue between $43.2 million and $44.7 million. Last month, a spokesman said they are hiring between 20 and 25 people per month, stressing the high growth rate of the company.

Labels: Revenues, SolarWinds

Mountain View based company Centrify has announced the release of Centrify Express 2011, a major new version of its suite of free solutions.

An interesting product inside the Express Suite is CloudTools, an integration collection of free tools meant to enable organization to extend their Active Directory based authentication and ACLs to Linux systems running on remote clouds, without any doubt a sought-after feature for Microsoft centric organization launching cloud-based Linux-powered services.

Quoting Centrify:

“IT administrators can now rapidly launch and secure Linux servers in the cloud and obtain the operational visibility that enables them to meet their security and compliance requirements”.

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

Labels: Centrify, Cloud Computing, Security

Huawei, the Chinese hardware giant, might enter the cloud computing space, or so thinks Gartner analyst and Research VP Lydia Leong according to The Diplomat.
According to the analyst, Huawei will be developing an Infrastructure as a service system similar to the one proposed by Microsoft and Amazon, the well known Azure and EC2 systems.

If the information turns out to be true, we can easily expect Huawei to apply its business model to the cloud space, with the lowest prices it can manage to accept.

CONTINUE READING ON CLOUDCOMPUTING.INFO…

Labels: Cloud Computing, Huawei

Quest Software announced its acquisition of the assets of RemoteScan, a company in the Virtualization Desktop business. RemoteScan focuses on scanning and imaging device connectivity in Windows Terminal, Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp and Quest vWorkspace. The company is based in Missoula, Montana, and until now it has had its main focus on the document management and healthcare markets.

This acquisition enriches the portfolio of vWorkspace, Quest own VDI product, with a base of 20.000 customers, according to Douc Garn, Quest Software CEO. It is clear that a timely announcement has the added benefit of clearing the clouds in Quest’s own sky after the recent revenue drop, stating that the net income drop was due acquisitions and increased leverage of operational costs: with an increase in revenues from $171 M to $188 M year over year this might be a credible assertion.

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ActiveState, a company focusing on dynamic languages well known to developers for its Windows Perl and Python tools, announced Stackato, a Cloud Foundry enterprise cloud platform engineered for dynamic languages.
Currently supported development languages are Python and Perl, and the platform has been designed with developers in mind, enabling an in-depth management of applications written in said languages both in private and public cloud scenarios.

The underlying idea is to provide an easy-to-use framework for scalable applications in VMware infrastructures and Amazon clouds alike, merging the benefit of a Platform as a Service product with the full control a local infrastructure can provide. Of course, migration between these environments is natively supported, and features such as multi-tenancy and auto-scaling are built-in.

The main advantage of the platform seems to be its ability to instanciate databases, frameworks (Django being one of the most well known for the Python language) and their dependencies, but of greater relevance for the virtualization and cloud computing community is its leveraging of VMware’s Cloud Foundry stack which makes it a product to watch.

Stackato is now accepting signups for invitations for a Developer Preview.

Labels: ActiveState, Cloud Computing, Cloud Foundry, VMware

Brian Gammage, VP and Fellow at Gartner, will leave his current company to join VMware: it’s still unclear what his role will be, but he is likely to keep his focus on dekstop and end-user computing.
While Gammage natural place might be helping shape VMware cloud offering for a broad audience, he might also be involved in VMware large desktop virtualization initiative.

Update: VMware has now announced that Gammage has been hired with the newly created role of Chief Market Technologist for the VMware End User Computing team.

Labels: Executive, VMware

Check out this new whitepaper from the folks at Veeam . The paper is a Lab Test paper written by Jack Fegreus, the founder and Managing Director of... Read more at VMblog.com.

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has expanded its relationship with Amazon Web Services... Read more at VMblog.com.

Quest Software, Inc. today announced that it has acquired the assets of RemoteScan , a privately held software manufacturer specializing in solutions Read more at VMblog.com.

It was in the air: with more and more movements in the cloud computing space it was only a matter of time before Red Hat released its own solution.
The (self appointed) World’s Open Source Leader released OpenShift, a Platform as a Service cloud meant for developers of a number of languages, including PHP, Java, Ruby and Python.

OpenShift supports both a light model (Express) and an enterprise grade model (Flex), both currently in beta and scheduled for final launch soon: in the meantime they are both free, their final prices undisclosed.
Red Hat decided to leverage Amazon AWS service as its hosting platform instead of managing its own hardware, but the level of interaction with the actual virtual servers depends on the platform model: Flex will actually run inside the user’s Amazon system, while Express will leverage Red Hat’ shared systems.

PHP, Ruby and Python applications can run in the Express model, a small scale system where the application can be run in the cloud quickly, even through well known and widely adopted tools for version control like Git. One of the demos showcasing the platform is a very interesting deployment of the common and powerful enterprise grade Drupal CMS.

PHP applications can also benefit of the Flex offer, the only one available for the Java language, a powerful, scalable and full fledged platform cloud which brings complete control of the application in the hands of the developer. Applications can be deployed on middleware components such as JBoss and Tomcat, and the platform provides valuable features including versioning, monitoring and auto-scaling: leveraging this enterprise grade components and the tight integration with common development framework can be the winning move here.
Flex also provides shell-level access (i.e. the command line of the hosting server) in a dedicated environment, while Express machines are explicitly multi-tenant: an Amazon AWS account is required to use Flex.

One of the most interesting promises of the platform is the not-yet-released Power delivery model: OpenShift Power can deploy applications to the cloud that are written to Linux (i.e. written in C, or using many binary components) and anything that builds on Linux. This includes custom, legacy applications with no web frontend at all. This is a very peculiar feature which can be very interesting for large enterprises with legacy code, but we will have to wait until its release to see if it keeps it promises.

Noticeably, while VMware Cloud Foundry is entirely Open Source, some parts of OpenShift are not (like the user interface): this is however well in the tradition of Red Hat and not a big surprise in itself.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Java, PaaS, PHP, Red Hat, Ruby

eG Innovations is a performance monitoring and triage solutions provider. Today, eg Innovations announced the release of eG Enterprise-on-Tap, a SaaS performance monitoring solution for applications and business services. eG Enterprise-on-Tap supports physical, virtual and cloud based infrastrucures, covering 10 different operating system versions and more than 120 applications.

Initially announced for use by Citrix XenDesktop users, eG Enterprise-on-Tap includes all the capabilities of the eG Enterprise Suite and has expended to support multiple virtualized server and desktop platforms of common adoption in private cloud and standard virtualization infrastructures:

• VMware’s vSphere and VMware View
• Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Virtual Server
• Citrix XenServer, XenApp and XenDesktop.
• IBM AIX LPAR
• Sun Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms)

The presence of Solaris Containers and an IBM solution is notable and a welcome addition, as only a few number of products currently support these platforms.

Srinivas Ramanathan, founder, president and CEO of eG Innovations, provided the standard pitch for performance monitoring solutions:

eG-on-Tap provides unparalleled visibility into the performance of hybrid cloud infrastructures for cloud providers and consumers alike, thereby eliminating blind spots.

A feature eG Enterprise-on-Tap is heavily pushing on is the correlation analysis of configuration changes with performance changes, which should empower administrators to track and modify misconfigurations which led to performance degradations – the so-called root cause differential analysis which is becoming more and more standardized in the market sector.

A relevant feature of the product is its usage of WEB protocols: all communications happen over HTTP or – better – HTTPS: this can greatly ease deployment in complex environment, also helped by the fact that only agents can connect back to the server, which is a purely passive monitor.

Enterprise-on-Tap natively supports multi-tenancy with multiple private networks, with multi-user and multi-login support built-in in the product from the beginning, including a powerful scraping system which will never leak business sensitive data in performance analysis and logs.

Labels: eG Innovations, Performance, Performance Monitoring, Tools

VMTurbo announces the release of a new product, VMTurbo Performance and Efficiency Reporter, which joins VMTurbo Monitoring to build a complete solution for the virtualized data center, focusing on VMware technologies.
Available for free, Performance and Efficiency Reporter enables real time, fine grained analysis of resources consumption both for physical and virtualized hosts.
As the name of the product suggests, the information gained covers two different categories.

Performance Reports
The Host/VM Utilization Heat Map contains utilization indexes (UI) for both physical hosts as well as virtual machines. This data enables both an “at-a-glance” indicator of workload as well as useful information for provisioning.

Host Top CPU Ready Queue provides a detailed breakdown of the metric surrounding CPU ready states. Comparing the physical host wait times with the virtual machines wait times (for each multiple of vCPUs), the report provides insights into how either a re-allocation of vCPUs or the re-location of a VM would impact this raw performance metric.

Storage Access IOPS delivers information useful to evaluate the suitability of the datastore against the applied workload and potentially make a better allocation.

Efficiency Reports

VM Over/Under Provisioning looks at the resources consumed (taking into account historical peaks) to make meaningful recommendations as to right-provisioning.

Storage Wasted Allocations provides immediate visibility into data stored on the managed drives that is not associated with any VM. With this ranked data, users can quickly free up potentially vast amounts of unused storage at a considerable cost saving.

Storage Allocated to Dormant VMs both identifies dormant VMs and enables the reclamation of their disc space. This can yield significant cost savings through resource reclamation and the ability to subsequently host additional VMs on the same hardware.

VM Rightsizing Recommendation is based on configurable thresholds as well as analysis of specific time ranges for each VM to make intelligent configuration recommendations based on the actual resource demands of the VM.

Labels: Freeware, Performance, Tools, VMTurbo, VMware

Certeon , the application performance company, today announced the launch of aCelera Cloud , its software cloud optimization and application... Read more at VMblog.com.

VKernel is offering VMware administrators yet another free tool to add to their tool belt, CapacityVIEW , a freeware diagnostic tool to help with... Read more at VMblog.com.

Private cloud providers and consumers looking for an affordable, all-encompassing subscription-based performance monitoring solution for their... Read more at VMblog.com.

An excellent starting point for an organization looking at cloud computing platforms is to examine its IT architecture. Only by aligning the... Read more at VMblog.com.

Next generation cloud hosting company StratoGen has today launched a self-service system for hosting VMware virtual machines in the cloud. In an... Read more at VMblog.com.

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced its participation in the Virtualisation User Group event,... Read more at VMblog.com.

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced its sponsorship and participation in BriForum Europe, the only European Read more at VMblog.com.

Symantec Corp. today announced a new approach to help small and mid-sized organizations protect data through new delivery models including Backup... Read more at VMblog.com.

During the Red Hat Summit, Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, announced that Nimbula Director will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and... Read more at VMblog.com.

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announces new solutions, tools and technologies that are integrated... Read more at VMblog.com.

VKernel , the number one provider of capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, today announced another way to Read more at VMblog.com.

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced Red Hat CloudForms, a product for creating and managing... Read more at VMblog.com.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced “Red Hat Cloud, HP Edition,” a private cloud design and... Read more at VMblog.com.

To provide customers with added choice for virtualization and cloud-based solutions, BMC Software and Red Hat, Inc. today announced an expanded... Read more at VMblog.com.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards... Read more at VMblog.com.

Abiquo, the leading Enterprise Cloud Management software company, today announced the launch of the global Abiquo Partner Program (APP) to address... Read more at VMblog.com.

Organizations globally are suffering from the high cost and complexity of acquiring, deploying and managing distributed developer collaboration... Read more at VMblog.com.

VMTurbo, provider of software to analyze, optimize and control the virtualized data center , today announced free, immediate availability of VMTurbo... Read more at VMblog.com.

Organizations of all sizes have been embracing the notion of virtualization within their environments over the past decade, and they've implemented... Read more at VMblog.com.

Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection , disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter... Read more at VMblog.com.

Citrix Systems, Inc. today announced its compelling lineup of speaker engagements at the 2011 Interop IT Expo and Conference (Booth #1639). Citrix... Read more at VMblog.com.

Quest Software, Inc . (Nasdaq: QSFT) today reported financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2011. Total revenues were $188.2 million, a... Read more at VMblog.com.

Predictive Analytics for IT vs. BI... What's the Difference? A Contributed Article by Daniel Heimlich, VP Marketing & Strategic Alliances at... Read more at VMblog.com.

Both PHD Virtual and Quest announced yesterday their results for Q1.
This has been a good quarter for PHD virtual, with bookings growing 55% year on year and 70% of them being from new customers. According to Thomas Charlton, CEO, the growth has been led by their VMware and Citrix products.

While news are good for PHD Virtual, Quest Software stock lost 5% when the company announced it missed the objectives for Q1. It should be noted, however, that these are company wide results, not directly related to the virtualization division, and that the increase in costs is mostly due new acquisitions and new hires.

UPDATE: as a result of the announcement, JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered their price target on shares of Quest Software from $30 to $28 – analysts Stifel Nicolaus also cut their price target from $30 to $27, with a “buy” rating on the stock.

Labels: PHD Virtual, Quest, Results

The Register broke the news of a very relevant information leak on one of HP’s VP linkedin profile.
According to The Register and a screenshot it published supposedly from Scott McClellan‘s Linkedin profile, HP is going to launch a number of new, dedicated cloud computing services:

• HP “obect storage”, a storage environment built from scratch designed for scalability and reliability.
• HP “compute”,”network” and “block storage” cloud services.
• The future HP “cloud” website
• Common and shared services for authentication and so on in the cloud

A “person familiar with the matter”, reported The Register, said that HP is going to unveil its plans at the VMware’s VMWorld conference in August.
The linkedin profile has been updated, removing the information leak, and HP declined to comment.

The absence of Azure or the .NET platform is notable, expecially considering HP said it would have had eventually offered both an “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS) cloud and “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS) cloud.



Labels: Cloud Computing, HP, Leaks

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced momentum for the adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization... Read more at VMblog.com.