Robin Wauters

Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), global provider of embedded virtualization software for mobile phones and broadband Internet devices, today announced publication of a “teardown” white paper providing a peek inside the world’s first virtualized mobile phone and detailing the impact of mobile virtualization on wireless devices.

The white paper will be released during ARM techcon3, where OK Labs will also demonstrate the company’s OKL4 mobile virtualization technology powering the Motorola Evoke QA4 smartphone.

The white paper comes from the pen of industry analyst Bill Weinberg, Principal of Linux Pundit and Mobile Practice Partner at the Olliance Group. Weinberg examines how developing and deploying devices with mobile virtualization directly impacts the bottom line for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) by reducing manufacturing costs. The publication also spells out incremental benefits of mobile virtualization, including performance and power management, as paths to both cost reduction and differentiation in a dynamic marketplace.

The OK Labs demonstration highlights the hosting of multiple complementary “guest” operating systems (OSes) on a single low-end ARM processor, combining applications and baseband processing. The hardware consolidation not only results in significant bill of material (BOM) savings, but also enables richer interaction among software components, in particular, between the Linux application OS and the BREW® environment for baseband and legacy application execution. The demo illustrates two applications running on separate OSes, working seamlessly together on a single low-cost ARM processor, with no performance degradation.

Elastra Corporation has announced the availability of Elastra Cloud Server for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is available free of charge to all AWS users.

Elastra’s Cloud Server for AWS enables application architects and developers to create application designs using a graphical canvas and immediately deploy them on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. Users can compose systems that use Apache, JBoss, Tomcat and MySQL components in a variety of user-controlled clustered and load-balanced configurations and deploy multiple instances of these designs onto AWS.

The application designs created and deployed with Elastra for AWS are portable to the customers’ own data centers running VMWare and Elastra’s Enterprise Cloud Server because designs and rules by which components interact are described via declarative markup languages rather than programmatic scripts or configuration files. The Enterprise Cloud Server also features added functionality – more components (Oracle, WebLogic, etc.), sophisticated governance and cloud management rules, and use of Amazon’s new Virtual Private Cloud.

5nine Software today announced 5nine Optimizer 1.0, a powerful and easy-to-use software solution for virtual environment analysis and optimization.

The new product helps customers reduce cost of over-provisioned multi-hypervisor virtual environments, and increase hardware utilization utilizing advanced trend analysis and “What If” modeling.

5nine Optimizer continuously analyzes virtualized data center environment including hosts, physical and virtual machines, and provides trend reporting, automated workload optimization as well as “What If” modeling. “What If” modeling includes the analysis of “What if I add a VM(s)” and “What if I add a host” scenarios further facilitating planning and optimization.

5nine Optimizer is integrated with 5nine P2V Planner, and two products together represent a comprehensive solution for P2V migration planning and optimization of a virtual environment. 5nine P2V Planner provides P2V VMware and P2V Hyper-V virtualization planning and delivers side-by-side comparative analysis of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans from the technology, TCO and ROI perspectives.
5nine Optimizer offers the following features and benefits:

• Continuous proactive analysis – of your data center and virtual environment
• Workload and utilization reports – for virtualization hosts, virtual and physical machines
• Long and short-term utilization trends
• Real-time workload and utilization alerts – to reduce virtualization administration costs and receive early notifications about potential performance problems
• “What-If” analysis and reports
• Automated P2V Hyper-V and VMware P2V / V2V wizards – to optimize your Virtual environment providing suggested migration plans for under and/or over-utilized hosts, and integrated TCO/ROI Reports
• All of the 5nine P2V Planner functionality – which includes easy-to-use automated P2V migration planning and side-by-side comparison of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans

VMware today announced the availability of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, a new product in the VMware vCenter Product Family that provides complete capacity management for VMware virtualized environments.

VMware CapacityIQ empowers IT administrators with the necessary intelligence to be able to right-size capacity in a dynamic virtual environment. It provides unprecedented visibility into past, present and future infrastructure capacity in order to analyze what is available and what is being used; forecast what is needed; and plan when capacity will run out. As a result, VMware CapacityIQ helps eliminate infrastructure waste, reduce operational overhead and minimize business risk of outages, failures and disasters.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables customers to proactively monitor capacity at multiple levels, analyze the impact of changes and forecast future needs based on consumption patterns. VMware CapacityIQ is critical for VMware customers who are interested in growing their virtual infrastructure cost-effectively –supporting server applications or virtual desktops – enabling them to:

• Reduce cost by reclaiming unused capacity. CapacityIQ proactively analyzes resource usage patterns and automatically generates a list of virtual machines that have been over-provisioned. Armed with this information, virtual infrastructure administrators can reclaim unused resources instead of purchasing additional capacity.
• Mitigate risk by modeling the effect of capacity changes. CapacityIQ helps customers avoid potential business and service disruptions by proactively modeling the impact of a planned change such as an acquisition or new application or an unplanned outage, failure or disaster.
• Deliver the right capacity at the right time. CapacityIQ keeps track of a dynamic VMware virtual environment by helping customers monitor capacity and forecast future capacity needs, helping to ensure capacity is always available to meet required service levels.