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

Robin Wauters

Release: MokaFive Suite 2.0

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MokaFive today announced the 2.0 version of its desktop virtualization technology in the form of MokaFive Suite, a Desktop-as-a-Service platform for the enterprise. MokaFive Suite extends the company’s existing cross-platform, self-healing hosted desktop service, giving organizations of any size the ability to host a secure desktop management solution within their premises.

MokaFive’s robust management capabilities make it easy for IT administrators to centrally create, deliver, secure and update a fully contained virtual desktop, called LivePC, to thousands of users. LivePC images run locally, so end users simply download their secure virtual desktop via a Web link, and run it on any computer (Macintosh, Linux or Windows). IT administrators apply updates and patches to the single golden image and MokaFive automatically distributes the differentials to each LivePC.

MokaFive Suite integrates with existing enterprise infrastructure such as Active Directory and software distribution for rapid set up and maximum leverage of current investments. Enterprise companies using MokaFive Suite experience a significantly lower total cost of ownership due to a small datacenter footprint, quick deployment, and simplified management.

Unlike any other desktop virtualization solution, MokaFive enables end users to customize their virtual corporate desktop with personalized data, settings and even applications. MokaFive’s proprietary layered management approach allows IT administrators to create, deliver, patch and update the corporate OS and applications while persisting the user specific customizations. This approach enables IT to define a single image that can be customized for groups and further personalized by individual users, providing all the benefits of central management with the power of mass customization.

MokaFive Suite provides a rich set of capabilities and policy controls, which allow IT administrators to define levels of lockdown based on targeted groups. Organizations are able to protect corporate assets and ensure compliance against regulatory and corporate guidelines, irrespective of where the user is accessing the corporate data from home, work or on the go. In addition to reducing the risk of non-compliance and data breaches, MokaFive can keep business running with instantaneous deployment of corporate environments in the case of a disaster.

Desktop management costs are reduced thanks to a unique self-healing feature that provides users with the ability to recover from failures by simply restarting their LivePC. This reverts the corporate operating system and applications to their original pristine state while persisting user applications, settings and data.

DynamicOps Introduces New Generation Of Automated Virtualization Management Software Suite

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DynamicOps, a venture-funded Credit Suisse spinoff, is introducing a new generation of automated virtualization management software with a unique capability — automated resource reclamation — that identifies and reclaims inactive and abandoned virtual machines to control virtual machine sprawl.

DynamicOps Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) is the first virtualization management software to automate the manual process required to reclaim and recycle unneeded virtual machines. The new VRM 3.2 helps companies use their virtualization infrastructure much more efficiently, reducing the need for IT staff to manually reclaim unused virtual machines and making the best use of IT assets. This improved efficiency results in significant cost savings.

With VRM, companies can easily apply the well-known, eco-friendly “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” theme to virtualization management, Krueger added. The software, in high demand by companies that want to achieve significant cost savings and faster ROI for their virtualization initiatives, provides essential tools to reduce over-provisioning of virtual machines, help companies reuse virtual resources quickly and easily, and identify virtual machines ready for recycling.

VRM automates the planning, deployment and ongoing management of virtual servers and desktops, from the time they’re created until they’re retired. Using VRM, enterprises deliver and manage virtual machines independent of the hypervisor, connection broker, and image deployment technology involved, all through a single console.

DynamicOps has added other new capabilities to VRM, including an enhanced developer’s toolkit, enhanced Linux support, and usability improvements.

The new VRM Software Developer’s Toolkit, used to integrate VRM’s automated virtual machine management processes with existing management ecosystems, makes it easier for companies and resellers to develop plug-in modules to perform a variety of tasks external to VRM; no code changes are required in the core VRM software.

For Linux users, VRM 3.2 goes beyond simple virtual machine cloning to include automated operating system installation and customization capabilities available in either Red Hat Kickstart or Suse AutoYaST. In addition to automating the installation and consistent configuration of machines, these utilities facilitate customization like network, disk, language and keyboard selection as well as optional software installation.

DynamicOps has also added several new features to improve usability, including enhanced discovery, easy install and set up, simple resource reservation, static IP support, global VM Blueprints, multi-step approval, and a resource cost calculator to facilitate the configuration of chargeback cost profiles.

Platform Computing Debuts Software Product For Private Cloud Management

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Platform Computing today announced a new software product for managing private cloud environments from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Conference in New York City. Platform ISF is the first end-to-end cloud management product for enterprises to build and run their private clouds. It is the centerpiece of Platform’s cloud strategy and will be made available for beta in June with general availability planned for the Fall.

Platform Computing is expanding its product offerings to support the needs of mainstream business applications, leveraging its strong technology and experience in deploying large-scale shared compute environments. Platform ISF is computing infrastructure sharing software for private cloud management. Private clouds generally refer to resources pooled together in a shared IT infrastructure to run applications for business users. Platform ISF creates private clouds from physical and virtual resources, delivering application environments according to workload and resource scheduling policies. It incorporates Platform’s production-proven resource sharing technology (EGO) and virtual machine orchestrator (VMO) and includes capabilities for self-service, service-offering definition, contracts, reporting and billing. Private clouds deployed through Platform ISF allow IT departments to be more responsive to the needs of the enterprise by offering IT as services on a pay-per-use basis. This new computing paradigm is expected to drastically reduce the costs of IT as resource utilization levels increase due to resource sharing.

Platform ISF is a technology-agnostic platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines. It also supports third-party system management tools for security and provisioning. This allows organizations to leverage existing resources while conforming to corporate standards. It does so while supporting

IT’s obligation to oversee corporate requirements, including governance, compliance, business continuity, and cost and risk management. While public clouds can offer infrastructure and computer resources on a pay-per-use basis, most of the benefits of cloud computing are not realized by enterprises through the use of public clouds alone. Private clouds can leverage both internal and public cloud resources. Platform ISF acts as the management layer for pulling resources into a unified environment and its value is independent of location or ownership of resources.

Oracle To Terminate Virtual Iron Business

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Oracle recently acquired Virtual Iron, even if it wasn’t exactly generating spectacularly good financial results (to put it midly). Now The Register claims Oracle is discontuining Virtual Iron’s business. More specifically, Oracle intends to “suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.”

Oracle aims to fully integrate Virtual Iron technology with Oracle VM, the company’s server virtualization and management product, although it has not specified when the new combined product will arrive. Former Virtual Iron people are also being laid off.

Full report at The Register.

Wind River Releases Its Own Type-1 Hypervisor

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Wind River today announced the immediate availability of Wind River Hypervisor, a key pillar of Wind River’s comprehensive Multicore Software Solution for device development. Wind River Hypervisor is a high-performance Type-1 hypervisor, which supports virtualization on single and multicore processors. It provides integration with Wind River’s industry leading operating systems (VxWorks and Wind River Linux) and supports other operating systems. The Wind River Workbench development tools suite has been extended to support developing software that runs on the Wind River Hypervisor.

Wind River Hypervisor enables virtualization for devices across a broad range of market segments, including aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer devices, industrial, and networking. Within these markets, embedded developers are adopting hypervisors to enable the replacement of multiple boards or CPUs with a single board and/or a single CPU, create innovative new devices that leverage multiple operating systems, and reduce complexity when integrating multicore processors. The benefits of using the Wind River Hypervisor include reduced hardware costs and power consumption, opportunity for innovation, and accelerated time-to-market.

Wind River makes it easier for customers to consolidate their systems and adopt multicore technology in devices by using key features in Wind River Hypervisor, including:

  • Support for single and multicore processors;
  • Focus on real-time aspects such as performance, latency, determinism and minimal footprint;
  • Protection between operating systems and cores, including starting, stopping, reloading operating systems to increase reliability; and
  • Highly optimized silicon-specific hardware support.

The introduction of Wind River Hypervisor enhances Wind River’s comprehensive Multicore Software Solution, which consists of three pillars:

  • Operating system choice including a high-performance integration with the industry’s leading real-time operating system VxWorks and commercial-grade Linux platform Wind River Linux, and the ability to integrate other operating systems into the same system;
  • A broad and flexible set of multicore software configurations with support for Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP), Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) and supervised AMP, and virtualization; and
  • A unified development environment based on Wind River Workbench for configuring, building, diagnosing, and analyzing the software for hypervisor-based systems, including the VxWorks and Wind River Linux operating systems and the applications running on these operating systems.

Earlier this year, Wind River introduced VxWorks 6.7, which allows system designers to select the optimal multicore design configuration, AMP or SMP, to deliver next-generation devices with higher performance while maintaining or reducing power consumption. Now, Wind River Hypervisor enables systems designers to use a supervised AMP configuration that makes an AMP system easier to configure.

Separately, Wind River also announced today VxWorks MILS Platform 2.0, the latest addition to the industry-leading VxWorks product portfolio, which leverages Wind River Hypervisor technology to provide virtualization. The virtualization provided by the hypervisor, coupled with the security properties of the entire VxWorks MILS separation kernel, results in a MILS architecture designed to provide a high level of assurable security.

VMware And HP Enhance Partnership

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VMware announced that it signed an OEM agreement to integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter suite and is also working with HP on new datacenter management initiatives.

In addition, HP has integrated VMware ThinApp with the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform. Both of these initiatives will help customers seamlessly and cost-effectively manage their physical and virtual datacenter and desktop initiatives. Today’s announcement expands on the companies’ existing strong relationship designed to provide customers with complete solutions that help them build and manage dynamic datacenters for delivering IT as a service.

In the first area of collaboration, VMware will OEM the HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter management suite. VMware will integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software as a virtual appliance into VMware vCenter ConfigControl in 2010 after ConfigControl becomes available to further enable customers to maintain visibility and ensure compliance of configuration states in their VMware vSphere 4 environments. A combined solution will give VMware vCenter administrators “single pane of glass” visualization of how business services running in VMware virtual machines map to the physical infrastructure. This will enable customers to simplify management of their heterogeneous infrastructures through comprehensive discovery and dependency mapping as well as automation of common management tasks including change detection, configuration updates, provisioning, patching, and enforcement of compliance and security policies.

VMware has also worked with HP to extend the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform to support VMware ThinApp. This enables customers to standardize on a single client management solution to publish, deploy, track and report on virtualized applications along with physical applications. Customers can use the distributed infrastructure and preconfigured templates available in HP Client Automation software to manage VMware ThinApp’s new management functionality, decreasing infrastructure requirements and simplifying overall manageability. Customers can also use reports generated by HP Client Automation software to track virtual and physical applications for tighter asset management.

As a result of this enhanced collaboration and co-development, the two companies plan to jointly develop go-to-market and sales programs that leverage both companies’ direct and channel sales forces.