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Archives for 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

IBM announces virtualization management tool

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Virtualization Manager

Stephen Shankland at CNET  reported on IBM announcing a new management software to govern many types of virtual machines. IBM’s Virtualization Manager is a dashboard that lets administrators take actions such as allocating computing resources to virtual machines. The software can control IBM’s own System p and System i servers as well as x86 servers running VMware, Xen and Microsoft virtualization foundations.It’s part of the Tivoli Systems Director package. One customer is Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, a German engineering and science research group, which is using the software to manage 2,000 servers, some using Xen and VMware.

Read more at source CNET 

VMWare surge puts virtualization in the spotlight

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VMWare’s stock soared on its first day of trading yesterday, giving the company a market value upward of $10 billion, showing that virtual machines are starting to add up to real dollars.

Virtual machines, the technology that VMWare helped pioneer, allow one computer to act as many, whether it’s a Mac running Windows and the Mac operating system at the same time or a massive server running multiple instances of Windows and Linux simultaneously. Once a niche technology, virtualization is expanding rapidly as businesses try to get more bang for their server buck.

Investors are betting that virtualization technology is going to have a big impact and that VMWare will profit from its early lead in the field.

More information by Ina Fried at: Cnet

Enomalism Beta-Released Management Console for Xen

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Virtualized Management Console (VMC)

Enomaly, a Canadian innovator in virtualization solutions, announced the Beta deployment of Enomalism Virtualized Management Console , a pre-packaged virtualization infrastructure solution based on Xen 3.0 and available under LGPL open source license. The Enomalism VMC is a powerful web-based systems administrator management tool for XEN hypervisor that enables the management of multiple isolated Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to be managed from a central web based interface. Enomalism brings the performance, stability, security and openness of the Xen hypervisor to the market in a product that emphasizes ease of use, effortless deployment and management of Xen-based virtual infrastructure.

“By using Enomalism, organizations can clearly implement a controlled and easy to manage virtualization environment resulting in increased server utilization, reduced IT cost and improved operational performance,” said Reuven Cohen, CTO of Enomaly. “Enomalism supplies customers with a superior virtualization solution that provides open access to source code and price performance benefits over proprietary offerings. By leveraging Xen virtualization technology and open source standards, Enomalism increases flexibility and reduced total cost of ownership for our enterprise customers”.

Xen is an operating system level server virtualization solution that makes efficient use of your hardware, software and management resources. Xen lets a computer run several operating systems simultaneously, sharing the same hardware and more effectively utilizing its capacity than is typically the case for stand-alone servers. In the Xen virtual environment independent servers perform and execute with their own memory and I/O, configuration files, users and applications running on a single operating system.

Enomalism enables customers from a single interface to start, stop and move virtual machines from one physical computer to another without any interruption in service or availability. Enomalism comes equipped with a provisioning wizard which deploys new virtual machines and centralized user management. Customers can manage memory resources changing virtual machine behavior so priorities are easily met.

Download a free copy of the Enomalism beta or visit their website for more information

Vizioncore esxBasics released

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Quoting from the Vizioncore official announcement:

Vizioncore, Inc., the leader in backup, restoration, and disaster recovery automation for the VMware ESX Server, announced today the release of its free esxBasics starter pack for ESX Server.
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Including free basic versions of both vizioncore’s flagship esxRanger and esxCharter, esxBasics provides a range of dynamic backup and monitoring tools for the ESX Server environment.
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Features of vizioncore’s esxBasics include:

  • esxRanger provides full image backup protection (without interfering with ongoing server operations), full restore capabilities and a centralized Windows interface. esxRanger also enables Windows scheduler support in the GUI, allowing users to schedule esxRanger to perform online dynamic backups of guest operating systems on the VMware ESX Server.
  • esxCharter provides real-time ESX Server monitoring, enabling ESX administrators to monitor in real-time how much of the CPU the VM occupies, as well as how much memory is being used on an active, swapped, or shared basis. esxCharter also offers the ‘At-a-Glance’ view, providing a real-time snapshot of the current performance and specifications of the user’s VM Server-including important service console information.

Download it here.