Virtualization.com

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

Robin Wauters

Pingbacks Not Suited For Dirty Minds: XenItalia.com

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It’s always nice to get pingbacks on our blog posts, but sometimes they can be confusing, especially to people with a dirty mind. Case in point: Virtualization.com publisher Toon Vanagt saw a trackback on our post featuring a video interview with Amazon’s Werner Vogels, coming from a new blog dubbed Xen Italia, and read something else in the URL (Xenitalia.com), namely Genitalia.com. We’re sorry, but the latter domain name has already been registered too.

To celebrate Toon’s dirty thoughts on the subject, we would like to give one of our readers a free book on Xen (in English). All you need to do is comment on this post with the funniest baseline for Xenitalia.com you could possibly think of.

Good luck!

Diskeeper Offers Complimentary License for XP Mode on Windows 7

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Diskeeper Corporation announced today that their End User Licence Agreement (EULA) has been updated to allow an additional complimentary license of Diskeeper 2009 for Microsoft’s elite and business customers of Windows 7’s XP mode.

The latest Microsoft operating system will use desktop virtualization in its Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions so that customers will be able to run Windows XP compatible applications on their Windows 7 machines. Windows XP mode will be delivered as a free, out-of-band update to encourage users to make the switch to Microsoft’s forthcoming operating system.

Diskeeper Corporation’s recent EULA update signifies additional help to Microsoft and hardware OEMs to support customer upgrades. In the future, Windows 7 customers will be able to purchase Diskeeper Corporation’s products together with a complimentary licence specifically for use on XP Mode only.

VirtenSys Delivers Solution to Virtualize Servers’ Direct-Attached Storage and Disk Drives

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VirtenSys today announced the industry’s first virtualization of storage controllers and disk drives in servers. With this achievement, VirtenSys becomes the first company to consolidate and optimize the most commonly deployed networking and storage connectivity in servers. VirtenSys IOV switches now support Ethernet, SAS/SATA and Fibre Channel, and provide 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). The company has already delivered pre-production units of its switches to leading server and storage customers.

VirtenSys IOV switches now virtualize the LSI MegaRAID Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and share them between multiple physical servers, without introducing any changes to the servers, operating systems, applications, HBAs or device drivers. As a result, SAS/SATA disk drives are also consolidated inside the switches and allocated between the connected servers. The VirtenSys IOV systems dramatically reduce data center operational expense and complexity, improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent, enhance throughput, half equipment cost and reduce I/O power consumption by more than 60 percent.

VirtenSys IOV switches create virtualized I/O Clouds where servers’ I/O resources are pooled, consolidated, and dynamically allocated on demand based on the applications needs. The IOV switches provide servers connected to the I/O Cloud with the full connectivity bandwidth to the corporate network and storage infrastructures, eliminate multiple layers of aggregation switches, I/O adapters, disk drives and cables and extend the data center’s lifecycle. In addition, the switches reduce management expenses by 60 percent by removing the need for physical reconfiguration and minimizing human intervention. Deploying IOV switches and setting up virtual I/O Clouds is totally transparent to servers, networks, and management processes, protecting organizations’ investments in their IT infrastructure while speeding the migration towards new usage models such as cloud computing.

Sun Microsystems Unleashes VirtualBox 3.0, Adds Many Server Virtualization Features

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Sun Microsystems today announced a new version of Sun VirtualBox, its cross-platform virtualization software. VirtualBox 3.0 is capable of creating and running multi-processor virtual machines that can handle heavyweight server-class workloads, and also delivers enhanced graphics support for desktop-class workloads, reinforcing VirtualBox’s position as one of the world’s most popular virtualization platforms.

Many multi-threaded server-based workloads, such as database and Web applications, can benefit from Symmetric Multiple Processing (SMP) systems, which contain multiple CPUs. VirtualBox 3.0 can now support virtual SMP systems with up to 32 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) in a single virtual machine. With this major enhancement, VirtualBox software can be used to run not only desktop workloads on client or server systems, but also demanding server workloads.

A key component of Sun’s industry-leading desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio, VirtualBox software has been rapidly growing in popularity, surpassing 14.5 million downloads and 4 million registrations worldwide, as well as more than 25,000 downloads a day. A mere 50 megabyte download, VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in just a few minutes.

New server features of VirtualBox 3.0 software include:

  • Up to 32 vCPUs per guest to accommodate heavyweight data-processing workloads.
  • Hypervisor enhancements for SMP to enable optimum performance.
  • Updated API platform designed to be the basis of the community-driven VirtualBox Web Console project, which is coming soon to allow IT administrators to manage their datacenters from a Web console. This project is based on the popular Python language.

New desktop features of VirtualBox 3.0 software include:

  • Microsoft Direct3D support for Windows guests, which enables graphically intensive Windows applications, like computer modeling, 3D design and games software, to run in a virtual environment.
  • Support for version 2.0 of the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) standard. As a result, high-performance Windows, Linux, Solaris(TM), and OpenSolaris(TM) graphical applications, which typically use graphical hardware acceleration, are able to run applications like Google Earth and CAM-based software on VirtualBox software.
  • Support for a wider range of USB devices, including storage devices, iPods and phones.

VirtualBox software is free of charge for personal use. For wider deployments within an organization, Enterprise subscriptions are also available, starting at $30 (USD) per user per year, which includes 24/7 premium support from Sun’s technical team. Discounts are available based on volume.

Red Hat Launches Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program

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Red Hat today announced the Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program, designed to simplify and expand the adoption of cloud computing by enterprise customers. The program enables industry leaders in cloud computing to become certified to offer Red Hat technology solutions. Premier Cloud Provider Partners will collaborate with Red Hat on technical support, security updates, hardware certification, sales and marketing and business models. As part of the announcement today, cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services will extend its technology relationship with Red Hat to become the first Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Partner.

The Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Program has been established to address the increased interest in cloud computing from Red Hat customers, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications into the clouds. Red Hat customers seek the flexibility to transfer and use Red Hat subscriptions on premise and/or in cloud environments, with support and compatibility. Red Hat customers have also requested the ability to rent elastic computing by-the-hour with access to consistent, technical support, security updates and compatibility with existing IT resources. This program aims to provide more flexibility for Red Hat customers when developing and deploying their applications.

In addition to customers, Red Hat has witnessed growing ISV partner interest in providing cloud offerings based on their applications certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and/or JBoss Enterprise Middleware. As part of its new program, Red Hat will work with customers to identify secure, optimized and supported cloud providers, and will work with ISVs to help enable delivery of cloud offerings with an on-ramp program that spans technology, business and support models.

Building on the experience of delivering the first supported operating system and first supported middleware offering for Amazon Web Services, Red Hat is now growing its relationship by choosing Amazon Web Services as the first member of the Premier Cloud Provider Program.

ScaleMP Completes vSMP Foundation Certification For HP ProLiant BL280c G6 Server Blades

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ScaleMP completed certification of vSMP Foundation for HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blades offering the new Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series. vSMP Foundation coupled with the HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blade solution delivers excellent performance and energy savings to reduce overall datacenter spending in power constrained scale-out environments.

vSMP Foundation aggregates multiple industry-standard off-the-shelf x86 servers into one single virtual high-end system for the High-Performance Computing (HPC) market. vSMP Foundation provides customers with an alternative to traditional expensive symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) systems and also offers simplified clustering infrastructure with a single operating system. It supports aggregation of up to 16 servers into a single virtual SMP system, providing:

  • Up to 4 terabytes (TB) of shared memory for large memory requirements
  • Up to 128 cores virtual SMP, proven scalability and record-breaking memory bandwidth
  • Ease of use and lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for applications, with simplified cluster management and storage architecture
  • Improved utilization through a centralized and consolidated architecture

The new HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blade has been designed for high performance and scale-out datacenters. With outstanding dual-processor performance and price per watt, the HP ProLiant BL280c helps reduce overall datacenter power consumption while maintaining high performance. The new Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors provide significant performance improvements and faster I/O throughput. The new DDR3 memory technology is more energy efficient and has better cooling than existing memory options. Overall, the HP ProLiant BL280c offers customers the latest technology for improved power efficiency and performance optimization. These blades feature up to 96 GB of ECC DDR 3 DIMMS, two PCI-express expansion slots, and support both SA and SATA HDD drives.