Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Archives for June 2008

VMware, Oracle and CA Newest DMTF Board Members

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today announced the addition of three new companies to its board of directors. VMware, Oracle and CA step up to the board level – joining industry heavyweights like AMD, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and othrs – to help drive the overall direction, strategy and activity of DMTF.

DMTF logo

Together, the board of directors will collaborate to set cross-industry priorities, promote interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments, foster alliance partnerships, and lead the organization’s committee work.

Winston Bumpus, director of standards architecture for VMware will join DMTF as board representative.

Get A 10% Discount For Structure 08, And Start Putting Cloud Computing To Work

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In about 3 weeks, one of the world’s most popular tech blogs, GigaOm, is hosting what is likely to become one of the must-attend events in the storage, hosting, cloud computing and virtualization industry for this year.

The conference is dubbed Structure 08, and features a slew of kick-ass speakers like Werner Vogels (VP & CTO Amazon), James Crowe (President and CEO Level 3), Mendel Rosemblum (Co-founder VMware), Albert Esser (VP, Data Center Infrastructure, Dell), Greg Papadopulous (CTO, Sun Microsystems and many others.

Structure 08 logo

The event takes place on June 25 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.

Tickets are selling out quickly, so sign up fast! As one of Structure 08’s media partners, we can offer our readers a 10 % discount on the registration fee. Simply click the event logo above and the discount will automatically calculated.

We’ll attend the event ourselves, so expect lots of reports and video interviews!

If you’ll be there too, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to hook up.

Microsoft Releases Windows Server 2008 Images For Hyper-V and Virtual Server

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Microsoft has released Windows Server 2008 images for both Hyper-V and Virtual Server (thanks to Andrew Dugdell for pointing that out).

VHD Images for Microsoft Virtual Server:

  • WS08_RTM_x86_EnterpriseVHD.zip (single file)
  • WS08_ServerCorex86_EnterpriseVHD.zip (single file)
  • or download the multi-part image: 2008 VHD Images for VS2005

VHD Images for Microsoft Hyper-V:

Tool: Check VMware ESX Security Configuration With Tripwire ConfigCheck

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Tripwire ConfigCheck is a free utility that rapidly assesses the security of VMware ESX hypervisor configurations compared to the VMware Infrastructure 3 Security Hardening guidelines. Developed by Tripwire in cooperation with VMware, Tripwire ConfigCheck ensures ESX environments are properly configured—offering immediate insight into unintentional vulnerabilities in virtual environments—and provides the necessary steps towards full remediation when they are not.

Tripwire Configcheck

Tripwire Configcheck lets you:

  • Ensure recommended ESX configurations
  • Discover possible vulnerabilities
  • Deploy virtualization safely and securely
  • Increase security posture of the entire enterprise
  • Easily implement security and compliance best practices
  • Reduce configuration drift

Get it here!

[Source: Run-Virtual]

VMware Seals New Partnerships with Original Design Manufacturers

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At Computex Taipei 2008, VMware announced new relationships with original design manufacturers (ODMs) ASUS, Gigabyte, Inventec and Tyan, adding to VMware’s current relationship with Supermicro announced in February 2008.

VMware logo

The relationships aim to enable channel partners and system builders to make virtualization available to a broader range of customers by certifying a wide range of one-, two- and four-socket server systems as well as blade servers for the VMware virtualization platform. The vendors are certifying their server systems for the VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor, with certified systems expected to be available later this year.

“Working with the ODM community, we are helping our channel partner and system builder ecosystem bring new options for offering the transformative business advantages of VMware virtualization to a broader range of customers. Organizations of all sizes will benefit from these new relationships, particularly small and medium businesses looking for cost-effective ways to get more value from their investments, better protect their systems and data, and improve staff productivity,” said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware.

VMware ESX and ESXi are certified on server systems from Supermicro and available immediately. VMware ESX and ESXi are expected to be certified and available on server systems from ASUS, Gigabyte, Inventec and Tyan by the end of the third quarter of 2008.

[Source: ChannelWeb]

StackSafe Upgrades Test Center

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StackSafe, a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT Operations teams, announced today the external infrastructure connectivity upgrade to its staging and testing solution, StackSafe Test Center, which it recently unveiled at the DEMO 2008 Conference.

StackSafe

The solution creates a virtual copy of the software infrastructure, and thanks to this upgrade, the virtualized Test Center environment can now be extended to interact with non-virtualized system components that reside outside of the Test Center environment.

“Virtualization technology offers the potential to deliver time-stressed, resource-thin IT operations staff a low risk way to test and assess the impact of making changes to the IT production environment,” commented Richard Ptak, Founder and Analyst, Ptak Noel & Associates. “StackSafe’s Test Center provides a validation environment that resolves a number of existing application deployment issues.”

According to the company, complex software infrastructure environments may include components that cannot be virtualized into StackSafe Test Center. These include physical storage tiers, large databases, hardware-based network topologies, or distributed components not owned by the IT Operations team. By enabling the inclusion of these components in the test scenarios, users can now have a more complete view of the impact of changes across the entire end-to end IT service.

The addition of external infrastructure connectivity adds the following features:

  • Enabling inbound connectivity from external infrastructure components and services into Test Center
  • Enabling outbound connectivity from Test Center to external infrastructure components and services
  • Customized control of connectivity options

As part of StackSafe Test Center’s subscription licensing model, the updated release of Test Center is generally available to current Test Center users at no charge.