Robin Wauters

The release of the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1 completely replaces version 2.0.

Version 2.1 of the tool now works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2, and Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2. The tool also supports updating the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems.

You can use this Solution Accelerator to help you with business scenarios such as these:

• Your IT organization is converting physical servers to virtual machines to reduce costs, including administrative overhead. How can you regularly update offline virtual machines while minimizing administrative costs?
• Your IT organization has thousands of virtual machines stored for months at a time in a number of libraries. How do you keep the virtual machines reliably up to date?

Linus Torvalds has merged open source data replication solution DRBD into Linux as a fully supported component.

After exactly 10 years of ongoing development work – software developer Phil Reisner wrote the first line of code on December 8, 1999 – Torvalds’ acknowledgment means DRBD has become a fixture on the storage market.

DRBD’s history is quite remarkable. Reisner originally published the Distributed Replicated Block Device as part of his Master’s thesis at the Vienna University of Technology. Originally intended as a means of storing email messages in a redundant fashion, Reisner quickly realized the full potential of the newly developed solution. In November 2001, he co-founded LINBIT, a Vienna, Austria based enterprise focused on advancing the development of DRBD and Linux High-Availability.

In May 2005, Lars Ellenberg joined LINBIT to lead its R&D team with Phil Reisner. His dedication has been a priceless addition to the LINBIT development team. January 2007, DRBD 8 was released which broke previous performance barriers and at the same time introduced active-active clustering capability, allowing simultaneous write access from two cluster nodes. In 2008, LINBIT USA, LLC was founded to offer development, consultancy, 24/7 support, and OEM/ISV integration services in North, Central and South America. Recently, LINBIT attracted considerable attention by open-sourcing DRBD+, a formerly commercially licensed add-on that offered three and four node clustering support.

The 2.6.33 Linux kernel release, of which DRBD will be an integral part, is currently expected for February 2010.

DRBD® is a registered trademark of LINBIT in the United States, the European Union, and many other countries.

CloudShare, formerly IT Structures, has announced it has received $10M in series B financing from Sequoia Capital, Gemini Capital, and Charles River Ventures (CRV). The company plans to use the investment to fund product development and expand its go-to-market capabilities.

CloudShare, a Menlo Park-based startup, has developed what could be revolutionary for solution providers and ISV’s selling software or appliances: A way for organizations to instantly deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing demo or training environments in the cloud. The company says its ability to raise a significant round of funding at a higher valuation than its previous round in a down economy reflects the stability of the company and the value it provides.

User benefits to CloudShare include faster sales cycles, rapid delivery of training, and increased channel visibility.

CloudShare customers, which include VMware, Cisco, SAP and more, have already delivered over one million VM demo, PoC (proof of concept) and training hours to date, representing over six quarters of consecutive double-digit usage growth for CloudShare. This early success demonstrates the practical, revenue-oriented, immediately useful nature of the CloudShare platform.

Notable functionality of CloudShare includes extensive workflow, hierarchical access and analytic monitoring capabilities, which provide sales and training owners with unprecedented visibility into customer use, direct sales, and channel activities. Additionally, CloudShare’s patented high-speed environment creation process lets users create new replicas in minutes, while its built-in collaborative whiteboarding, screensharing, and self-service capabilities enable corporate users to create and share their own prototypes and environments.

Founded in 2007, CloudShare is headquartered in Menlo Park, CA. The team is headed by Zvi Guterman, who previously cofounded Safend, an endpoint security company.

NetApp and Microsoft last week announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide.

Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase datacenter management efficiencies, reduce costs and improve business agility.

As part of the new strategic alliance agreement, NetApp and Microsoft will expand product collaboration and technical integration activities. In addition, NetApp and Microsoft will enable customers to experience firsthand the value of joint solutions at the Microsoft Technology Centers around the world and at industry events. Both companies will participate in engagements with channel partners and industry-leading systems integrators, offering technology solutions that are comprehensive and easy to use.

As further proof to the collaboration between both companies, NetApp, the 2009 Microsoft Storage Solutions Partner of the year, utilizes a variety of Windows Server platform technologies to improve storage system management and streamline backup, recovery and remote replication in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environments.

In addition, integration with the Microsoft System Center family of products and additional application-integrated NetApp products help maximize uptime for a wide variety of application environments, including Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and SharePoint Server.

Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), a provider of integrated performance analysis software for sustainable building design, recently announced that VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop are the preferred virtualization software for Mac installations.

IES now offers full technical support for <Virtual Environment> installations within Apple Mac environments which use VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop or the Boot Camp utility included within the latest Mac OS X.

The IES <Virtual Environment> suite of Windows-only products – VE-Ware, VE-Toolkits, VE-Gaia and VE-Pro – can now be installed and run on Apple Macs, and be eligible for full IES technical support. VMware Fusion and Parallels create a ‘Virtual Machine’ (VM) on which a secondary Windows operating systems can be run. It allows you to run the most demanding Mac and Windows applications side-by-side at maximum speeds without rebooting. Alternatively, Boot Camp allows users to boot up their Mac using a Windows operating system, but does not allow simultaneous access to Mac applications.

The IES <Virtual Environment> integrated suite of building performance software supports energy analysis, energy load calculation, CO₂ emission calculation, solar shading analysis, natural ventilation analysis, and much more – providing a very useful and effective approach to green building design and development. IES’ services and products aid significantly in the provision of healthier and more energy efficient built environments.

Chelsio Communications, provider of 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networking and storage solutions, today announced Virtual Multi-port Software, a new driver that gives users of VMware ESX 4.0 the flexibility for virtual consolidation of existing Gigabit links over Chelsio 10Gb Unified Wire adapters.

Virtual Multi-port Software allows for consolidation of switch ports and cabling by using 10Gb infrastructure while maintaining the existing Gigabit-based ESX setup. The software enables the consolidation by keeping the infrastructure update completely transparent to the ESX hypervisor, enabling a 10Gb adapter to appear to the hypervisor as eight virtual Gigabit adapters. By offloading the tasks performed by the hypervisor, the Chelsio adapters can deliver the best I/O performance for virtualized applications.

An ESX server typically generates four categories of traffic (Virtual Machine I/O, SAN/NAS, VMotion Network, and Console Management). Chelsio’s software segregates all these traffic types across virtual NICs while guaranteeing programmable sustained bandwidth in both transmit and receive directions.

The Chelsio Virtual Multi-port Software runs on all of the N and S class adapters, and is available as a free download from Chelsio and its distributors.