Virtualization.com

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

Archives for January 2009

Quest Buys MonoSphere

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Quest Software has acquired the technology assets of MonoSphere, a privately owned company headquartered in Redwood City, CA. MonoSphere is the creator of Storage Horizon storage capacity management software.

Quest has also hired a substantial number of the former MonoSphere employees.

  • Quest will continue to maintain, enhance, and support the Storage Horizon solution, enabling customers to dramatically increase utilization of storage infrastructure, resulting in significant reductions in storage capital spending.
  • Quest will also integrate Storage Horizon with a number of its existing products, expanding Quest’s leadership in providing complete solutions that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases, Windows infrastructure and virtual environments.

Stealth Memory Virtualization Startup RNA Networks Slated For Launch

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NetworkWorld brings us the news of stealth startup RNA Networks, which says it will “offer technology that aggregates memory and shares it across servers, improving performance of online transaction processing and clustered or grid computing.”

From their websites:

RNA networks brings memory virtualization into the enterprise data center.

RNA delivers the consolidation and dramatic cost savings of virtualization for business critical applications. In addition, RNA’s Memory Virtualization Platform (MVP) delivers breakthrough performance at scale, reliably and efficiently.

Memory Virtualization profoundly changes everything about business aligned IT, from economics to use cases.  RNA transforms the data center into a high performance asset where virtualization is fully adopted.  With RNA, your business performance is accelerated.

RNA is reportedly slated for launch in the beginning of February 2008.

Industry Moves: Glenda Dorchak Is VirtualLogix’ New CEO

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VirtualLogix has announced the appointment of Glenda M. Dorchak as chief executive officer.

Ms. Dorchak comes to VirtualLogix from Intrinsyc Software International, a mobility software company, where she served as CEO and chairman. Prior to Intrinsyc, Ms. Dorchak worked with Intel Corporation from 2001 to 2006, holding positions including vice president and COO of the Intel Communications Group; vice president and general manager of Intel’s Consumer Electronics Group; and vice president and general manager of the Broadband Products Group.

Ms. Dorchak began her career with IBM Canada in Vancouver, BC in 1974; she worked at IBM in both Canada and the United States for more than 20 years, holding positions such as director of marketing for the Personal Systems Group in North America and director of PC Direct. She also worked as a director for two start-up ventures. Ambra U.S., an IBM company based in Raleigh, N.C., and Value America, where she became president as well as chairman and CEO.

CohesiveFT Adds KVM Format To Its Automated Elastic Server Platform

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CohesiveFT today announced support to automate the deployment of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) servers via the Elastic Server web-based factory. Elastic Server is an automated “factory” that allows IT professionals to assemble, deploy, and manage virtual servers using a simple point-and-click interface. Beginning today, customers can assemble custom servers for deployment to the Kernel Virtual Machine format.

KVM is a Linux kernel virtualization infrastructure licensed under the GNU GPL.  It provides a mechanism for splitting a single physical computer into multiple virtual machines.  KVM’s approach differs from other virtualization formats in that it requires no patching of the kernel and takes advantage of performance improvements available on hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V).

The Elastic Server platform is a complement to virtualization and cloud offerings. Users assemble custom servers by choosing from a library of popular components. Once assembled, these custom application stacks can be configured to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats, downloaded and deployed in real-time. Completed server stacks can be distributed through the Elastic Server platform. There are more than two thousand community users contributing nearly five thousand Elastic Servers to the market. The addition of KVM follows CohesiveFT’s recent addition of Virtual Iron, support for Amazon EC2 in Europe, the Ubuntu operating system, and the industry’s first commercial cloud security solution, VPN-Cubed.

Prison Inmate Sues Intel, Steve Jobs For $5 Billion, Claims Theft Of Virtualization Technology IP

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Some guy called Matthew Robert Young has filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in Oregon against Intel Corporation and Steve Jobs personally. His filing (court papers – PDF) demands a jury trial and requests an “extrodinary hearing”. How extrodinary? Very extrodinary.

Young is currently a “State prisoner confined in the Oregon Department of Corrections, Snake River Correctional Institution.” He has brought this civil action suit to court claiming he told Jobs about virtualization technology, and when Jobs passed on the technology he told Intel about it.

In 2003, Young wanted Jobs to help him develop and market his intellectual property and patentable invention, or to buy it from him for $250 million. Young claims Jobs never responded to his requests, but instead forwarded the intellectual property to Intel. This, in turn, allowed Intel to make virtualization technology work with Core 2 Duo.

More about the extrodinary story here, here and here.

Open Source Virtualization Updates

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There is a lot going on in the different Open Source Virtualization projects. From KVM, over OpenVZ , to Xen.

First of all there is the news that Anthony Liguori has included kvm support in the main Qemu development tree. In his blogpost Avi Kivity explains that with the KVM code being merged in Qemu development and integration of new and bigger features will evolve faster.

But now that kvm has been merged, it is possible to make larger modifications to qemu in order to make it fit virtualization roles better. Live migration and virtio have already been merged. Device and cpu hotplug are on the queue. Deeper changes, like modifying how qemu manages memory and performs DMA, are pending.

Then there is some discussion going on about the future of OpenVZ , mainly targeted at licencing and Pete Zaitcev is wondering why Parallels hasn’t officialy modified its COPYING.SWsoft file whic
h mainly tells the world “we’re not serious about going upstream” and which makes him wonder
“Kinda makes LXC more of a fait accompli than it already is or needs to be.” According to the LXH site , the planned Linux kernel version for which LXC should be fully functionaly is 2.6.29.

And last but not least Xen has released 2 minor maintenance releases for their 3.1 and 3.2 branches Xen 3.3.1 and Xen 3.2.3 are now available for download.