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Archives for August 2009

Parallels Debuts Switch to Mac Bundle

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Parallels today unveiled a complete solution designed to simplify the process of “switching” from a PC to Mac. Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition empowers users to effortlessly make the move to Mac without the risk of losing familiar and important data and applications on their Microsoft Windows-based PCs.

The product combines a set of easy-to-use tools and interactive tutorials with Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac to help “Switchers” understand how to operate Mac OS X, transfer all PC data and applications, and seamlessly run their Windows applications on their new Macs.

Switching from PC to Mac is on the rise: analyst reports on operating system market share show that Mac OS X market growth comes at the expense of Windows’ market share. While the overall PC industry saw declines of 3% for the quarter ending in June 2009, Apple sales were up 4% year over year. According to Apple’s Q309 report, half of the Macs sold were to customers who had never owned a Mac before.

Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition is an industry-first solution that addresses the challenges facing prospective PC-to-Mac Switchers:

  • Learning Mac OS X — The Switch to Mac learning tools are designed to specifically address any questions or concerns associated with the transition from Windows to Mac. More than two hours of interactive video tutorials help users learn the new interface and functionality of the Mac platform step-by-step, starting with the Mac equivalent of tasks performed on Windows. A quick reference card identifies the most common Windows and Mac command/function differences and puts the correct keystrokes at users’ fingertips.
  • Making the Move — Also important to new Mac users is getting files and media from their old computer to their Mac. Parallels recognizes that many people need help with this process, and developed a “plug and click” method that moves the entire PC (licensed operating system, applications, files and data) to the new Mac. This includes the Parallels High Speed USB Transfer Cable that connects the two machines and the Enhanced Parallels Transporter: simple, wizard-driven software that walks the user through the move in a few easy clicks. The seamless Mac user experience now starts on the PC side.
  • Running Windows and Mac side-by-side — Parallels Desktop Switch to Mac Edition includes Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0, the number one Mac system utility, currently used by more than two million people to run Windows side-by-side with Mac applications. This award-winning virtualization software provides a fully integrated seamless experience, offering users the greatest stability and performance available for running Windows on a Mac, as recognized in 3rd party industry benchmarks³. Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac incorporates a range of security, backup and power saving features to give Mac users the easiest way to run Windows on a Mac.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 Switch to Mac Edition is available from today at Apple stores, at Apple.com and through other preferred retail partners in English, German and French. The suggested retail price (SRP) of the product is $99.99.

VirtenSys Introduces Its Flagship I/O Virtualization Switches

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VirtenSys has announced the general availability of its flagship I/O virtualization switches, the VirtenSys VIO 4000 Series based on its Virtual Connectivity Cloud platform.

With this announcement, VirtenSys became the first company to release production units of I/O virtualization switches based on PCI Express standards. The VIO 4000 switches are the first products on the market to consolidate, virtualize and share the major types of server networking and storage connectivity, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), SAS/SATA, and Fibre Channel, without requiring any changes be made to the servers, networks, or I/O adapters. The switches are available through the VirtenSys worldwide partner network, and the products’ full capabilities will be demonstrated at VMworld 2009, booth #2231, in San Francisco, Calif.

The VIO 4000 switches reduce rack and blade server management complexity and costs by more than 60 percent, improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent, deliver full connectivity bandwidth to servers, halve equipment cost, and reduce I/O power consumption by more than 60 percent. This results in providing servers with the best price/performance and lowest energy consumption for accessing not only the local area networks (LAN), but also the storage infrastructures, including direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area networks (SAN).

PrimaCloud Taps Xsigo I/O Director For Cloud Strategy

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PrimaCloud announced today that it has deployed the Xsigo I/O Director as the foundation of its data center interconnect strategy.

The Xsigo I/O Director enables PrimaCloud to break the barriers of I/O throughput seen in existing cloud computing offerings, allowing end customers to experience application performance levels that would previously have been achievable only in purpose-built private datacenters. Additionally, Xsigo’s virtual I/O infrastructure allows PrimaCloud to automatically provision cost-effective virtual private datacenters for its customers within minutes.

With three years of experience providing cloud computing under the ENKI name, PrimaCloud management was seeing an increasing number of enterprise clients running database and transaction-intensive applications — such as Oracle — which required multi-gigabit connections to the vLAN and NAS storage to avoid I/O contention. In these applications the bandwidth required per virtual machine exceeded 3Gb/sec, which meant that a single cloud server running ten virtual machines required over 30Gb/sec total I/O bandwidth. Only Xsigo virtual I/O, with dual redundant 20Gb/sec I/O connections per server, provided the required performance. The Xsigo I/O Director’s low-latency bandwidth also serves to take maximum advantage of PrimaCloud’s SSD-cached NAS systems to delivery outstanding application throughput.

PrimaCloud’s automatically managed, hypervisor-agnostic cloud architecture requires a high level of automation to create and manage virtual private datacenters (VPDCs). The Xsigo I/O Director is able to automatically provision and manage virtual I/O and VLANs associated with virtual instances running VMWare ESX, Citrix, HyperV, and 3Tera’s AppLogic, under the control of PrimaCloud’s implementation of Enigmatec’s EMS, a cross-platform, policy-based automation engine. Using EMS to configure the I/O Director eliminates manual labor in managing VPDCs, as well as permitting automatic scaling of VPDCs to respond to changes in load, resulting in significant end-customer cost savings.

Xsigo virtual I/O is a critical element of the reference datacenter architecture PrimaCloud uses to deliver on the promise of cloud computing: cost-effective, on-demand computing delivered on a pay-as-you-go-basis while meeting enterprise requirements for performance and uptime. The simplicity of deploying Xsigo Virtual I/O has enabled PrimaCloud’s reference architecture to be deployed in any one of its 65 datacenters worldwide for public, or hosted private cloud computing, as well as at customer sites.

Industry Moves: Siki Giunta New Fortisphere CEO

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Fortisphere has hired Siki Giunta as its new CEO, replacing Michael Harper at the helm of the Glenwood company.

Giunta joined the network virtualization firm a month ago. She was hired for her background at Managed Objects, a Northern Virginia firm bought by Novell last year.

Harper led Fortisphere to a $10 million first round of venture capital in 2008 from investors Fairhaven Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners, both of Boston. Giunta built Managed Objects from a pre-revenue startup 10 years ago to its $50 million sale, she said.

VKernel Introduces New Optimization Pack

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VKernel Corporation has announced the new VKernel Optimization Pack to help organizations achieve maximum ROI from their virtualization projects.

VKernel’s new Optimization Pack includes three powerful applets, Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory, that help users improve the efficiency of their virtual infrastructures. The new applets allow organizations to run more virtual machines (VMs) with the same hardware, maximize the utilization of infrastructure resources, reclaim terabytes of wasted storage, reduce VM sprawl and assure optimal VM performance.

A successful virtualization project balances proper resource allocations and utilizations with VM performance and cost per VM. With the Optimization Pack, VKernel enables organization to rapidly achieve their goals by providing a very affordable and simple-to-use toolset. Delivered as a virtual appliance, deployment is instant and users immediately begin solving their critical needs. The VKernel Optimization Pack includes three powerful management applets:

  • Wastefinder – quickly finds where resource capacity (CPU, memory, and storage) are being wasted in the virtual infrastructure. By identifying zombie VMs, expired snapshots, and other wasteful consumers, users can reclaim expensive capacity to optimize virtual environments and achieve a better, faster ROI.
  • VM Rightsizer – a simple tool for tuning your VMs with the right amount of resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to drive maximum VM densities without impacting performance. Rightsizer is unique in its ability to make recommendations and automatically implement changes to find improperly allocated resources and optimally configure VMs.
  • Inventory – automatically collects important information about all VMs in the virtual infrastructure and creates a detailed inventory report showing VM name, created by and when, resource allocations, and much more. The inventory is continually updated to match the dynamic environment and is searchable by different criteria to quickly find specific information.

VKernel currently supports VMware ESX and vSphere and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V (later this year) as well as Citrix XEN Server. The company believes that a heterogeneous capacity management and optimization offering will be increasingly important as the enterprise virtual infrastructure becomes a mix of hypervisor platforms.

The VKernel Optimization Pack is currently available in a bundle with Capacity Analyzer 4.1 for $399 per CPU socket including the first year of maintenance and support. Subscription pricing is also offered at $179 annually per CPU socket including maintenance and support.

KVM News In Short

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Over the past couple of weeks different new releases of KVM and related software saw the light . Virt-manager 0.8.0 was officially announced the most interesting new feature probably being the the Clone VM wizard but also a bunch of system tray icons for smooth desktop integration and CPU pinning support are very interesting.

Daniel Berrange noticed that Redhat has released windows kvm virtio drivers under GPLv2 This means that apart from the paravirtual network drivers that were already available now also the paravirtual block device drivers are available

It shows that RedHat is working towards a much more featureful KVM management framework into their upcoming RHEL release as they also updated their virtualization management layer libvirt 0.7.0. Most interesting new features include initial VMWare ESX driver support, added support for VBox 3 , QEmu hotplug network card support , and improved storage management .

If you have a recent Fedora 11 box and you want to test all these new features, you might want to be enable the fedora-virt-preview repository

[virt-preview]
name=Virtualization Rawhide for Fedora 11
baseurl=http://markmc.fedorapeople.org/virt-preview/f11/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0