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Archives for December 2006

BEA to run Java sans operating system

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C|Net reports that BEA Systems has created a version of its Java application server designed for virtualization technology, using an approach that cuts the operating systems out of the picture. At the company’s customer conference in Beijing this week, BEA will give details of a forthcoming product called WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and of related products, including an administration application.

WebLogic Server is a Java application server used to run Java programs, such as high-volume Web sites. The virtual edition is a break from BEA’s current offering in that it was written to run on VMware’s hypervisor, which is the basis for VMware’s virtualization software.

Some virtualization software uses a hypervisor that lets a single computer run several instances of an individual software package.

In BEA’s case, it created software called Liquid VM. Liquid VM is an addition to the company’s JRockit Java virtual machine, which runs directly on VMware’s hypervisor.

That virtual machine allows Java programs to interact with hardware servers without the need for an operating system, according to Stephen Hess, director of product management for the WebLogic Platform.

The goal of the virtualization push at BEA is to give IT administrators a set of tools to consolidate several Java applications on a single server and to optimize their performance, he said. Typically, virtualization is used in corporate data centers to improve the utilization of existing servers by putting several workloads on a single machine.

“Our goal was to double the utilization by running natively,” said Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic products, “and to double the performance.” The setup will allow companies to create new instances of Java applications to meet spikes in demand in a few seconds, compared with 45 minutes, as is the case now, he said.

WebLogic Server Virtual Edition is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of next year. An accompanying management console for administrators, called Liquid Operations Control, is due in the summer of 2007.

The company intends to create editions of its WebLogic virtualization software to run on virtualization packages from Xen and Microsoft, executives said…

Read more on this article by Martin LaMonica at source

Hitachi elbows into the Virtualization Game

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VMware, Xen and Microsoft Look Out!

Jave Developer’s Journal reports that Hitachi is claiming to have a mainframe-derived firmware approach to virtualization that’s better than VMware or Xen or Microsoft.

The approach has been built into a new species of Hitachi’s blade servers called BladeSymphony with Virtage, Virtage being the so-called “breakthrough” embedded widgetry that bakes virtualization into the hardware as an alternative to third-party virtualization software.

Virtage

Being firmware, Hitachi says, Virtage can decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance. The box runs both Windows and Linux.

IDC group VP Vernon Turner, the head of the researcher’s Enterprise Computing practice, says BladeSymphony with Virtage is a “leap ahead in the virtualization game” and will fuel the proliferation of blades.

The machine has been out in Japan since August. Hitachi America Ltd, the company’s year-old server unit, will start offering the Itanium version of the box here in January. The company is wholly unclear when it will have an advertised Xeon unit and be able to mix and match Xeon and Itanium blades in the same chassis.

…As an Intel account, Virtage exploits Intel’s VT extensions in Itanium and Woodcrest. Applications never have to be changed to be virtualized, it said, like they sometimes have to be with VMware. …Hitachi claims the BladeSymphony server is the industry’s first real enterprise-class mission-critical blade server and Hitachi chief systems architect Paul Figliozzi says the box deserves that distinction because of its multi-blade SMP interconnect architecture, hot-swap capabilities, high performance, 16 PCI slots and native virtualization.

Hitachi positions it as the place to consolidate all three data center tiers – the edge, the application and the database – into a single chassis and hence lower TCO. Hitachi marketing VP Steve Campbell says that for rival IBM to do that would take a combination of both Intel servers and p Series iron for the back-end, a less elegant solution that takes up more real estate.

BladeSymphony’s SMP architecture lets up to four blades be lashed together into a single system. Since the 10U chassis holds eight blades altogether that’s two 16-way SMP systems to a chassis. Each Itanium blade holds two dual-core processors for a total of 32 cores per chassis, reducing footprint and power consumption.

Hitachi has been peddling the BladeSymphony line for the last two years and owns 20% of Japanese blade market.

Read more at source