Virtualization.com

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

Robin Wauters

Quest Releases PowerGUI PowerPack for VMware 2.0

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Quest Software announced the release of version 2.0 of its PowerGUI PowerPack for VMware, expanding the company’s leadership in Windows and Virtualization Management along with the technology provided by Vizioncore.

The new updates for Quest’s PowerGUI PowerPack for VMware includes a full featured PowerShell script library for VMware, to provide enhanced virtualization management capabilities for VMware admins.  It enables virtualization domain experts to take advantage of managing their virtual infrastructure using Quest PowerGUI and the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit for Windows.

PowerGUI is a free download which simplifies management via Microsoft Windows PowerShell with an intuitive user console, powerful script editor and platform specific PowerPacks.  PowerGUI with the VMware PowerPack version 2.0 enables administrators to quickly and easily automate management tasks common to virtual infrastructures.  Together, Windows PowerShell, PowerGUI, and the PowerGUI PowerPack for VMware provide the ability to manage not only the applications organizations depend on but also the virtual infrastructure that power them, all from a single console.

rPath: Cloud Computing In Plain English (Video)

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rPath recently announced “Cloud Computing in Plain English,” an animated short video (YouTube) which takes a lighthearted look at cloud computing while bringing clarity to what has become a somewhat confusing concept.

rPath plays a key role in this trend by providing an approach that reduces the cost and complexity of deploying and maintaining enterprise applications that run in the cloud and other virtualized or traditional environments.

“Cloud Computing in Plain English” touches on cloud’s foundational technologies — virtualization, utility computing, and software as a service — explaining each in terms that are easily understood by laypeople. The video goes on to clearly yet simply differentiate cloud computing from its component technologies, and finally, underscore cloud computing’s business benefits.

VMware Will Name Next Generation Of Virtual Infrastructure “VMware vSphere”

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From VMware Virtualization Evangelist Jason Boche’s blog:

Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next.  The new name is VMware vSphere.

Veeam Offers Free Version Of Monitor 3.0

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Veeam Software, a provider of systems management tools for VMware ESX Server environments, today announced general availability of a new free tool: Veeam Monitor Free Edition. This lightweight version of Veeam Monitor is designed to provide comprehensive real-time monitoring in ESX and ESXi environments, including VMware’s free version of ESXi.

Veeam Monitor Free Edition is built from the ground up specifically for the virtual world, and uses an agentless approach (VMware API) to monitor system health and performance on both VMware ESX and ESXi. Customers can view real-time resource usage data for any virtual infrastructure object or collection of objects, as well as known infrastructure events, all on a single screen.  This unified view of the virtual infrastructure improves administrator productivity vs. fragmented views of isolated hosts and guests.

Key features of Veeam Monitor Free Edition include:

  • Consolidated view with drill-down in VMs – find out at a glance which components of the VMware infrastructure are the largest resource consumers, drill down to an individual VM to see how much CPU and memory it is consuming, and even connect to the VMware Virtual Machine Console – all right from the Veeam Monitor user interface.
  • Correlation of event and performance data – known virtual infrastructure events, such as VMotion, snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, are shown directly on the performance graphs.
  • Advanced alerting and flexible alarms – set up to ten e-mail notifications or SNMP traps for important events such as a given number of running VMs is exceeded, VM heartbeat is lost, or a specific event is generated by VirtualCenter.
  • Scalable architecture – client/server architecture supports multi-admin access to performance data without affecting ESX server or VirtualCenter performance.
  • Ease of deployment – takes just minutes to install, configure and begin using.

Guest Post: Infrastructure 2.0 – The San Jose Fairmont on January 15

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This is a cross-post of this blog written by Gregory Ness, former VP of Marketing for Blue Lane Technologies who is currently working for InfoBlox.

In September the discussion started about the concept of Infrastructure 2.0 (or Dynamic Infrastructure) as a response to the rising demands of larger and more complex networks colliding with new IT initiatives including virtualization and cloud computing.  I think it caught many by surprise.

A few weeks later a blog entitled The CIO Shell Game made the point that automating systems and endpoints and not the network was merely shifting manual labor demands while increasing network availability and security risks.  This theme continued in The Network Industry Needs a New Vision with a focus on the network industry’s overzealous industry focus on speeds and feeds that had ultimately risked making the network irrelevant to computing in the future.

Companies like Cisco, Juniper, F5 Networks, Foundry and Extreme need to invest in automating the rampant manual labor rendering networks static and brittle in the face of more dynamic systems and endpoints.  If they do, the cloud computing vision could have a silver lining for those who understand the potential of dynamic infrastructure.

Unleashing dynamic infrastructure will also unleash more powerful business cases for investments in virtualization and cloud computing, which would also impact the fortunes of VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and an emerging community of cloud computing startups.  I think the word is getting out rapidly.

January 15 is the Launch of the Dynamic Infrastructure Vision

Since then we’ve seen blogs at Cisco and F5’s DevCentral blog join the conversation and recognize how important the network is to these new initiatives.  I think, however, the ultimate sign of the arrival of the network as “the foundation for IT automation” meme is a live streaming event being held at the San Jose Fairmont Hotel on January 15.

Infoblox and Cisco are billing dynamic infrastructure as the biggest thing in networking since TCP/IP, because it transforms the brittle, static and manually managed network into an automated network that enables connectivity intelligence between applications, endpoints and networks.  That connectivity intelligence establishes feedback loops, the precursor to an explosion of intelligence in the network, applications and endpoints.

Connectivity intelligence could also take the VMotion genie out of the bottle and drive new levels of scale and security and drive the business case for virtualization skyward.  Whichever virtualization platform vendor delivers on the promise of enhanced security with VMotion will win.

Recently a second Cisco speaker has agreed to speak at the breakfast event, alongside Cisco Senior Director Douglas Gourlay and Infoblox CTO and Founder Stuart Bailey and moderator (Infoblox) VP Marketing Richard Kagan.

In May the Dynamic Infrastructure panel at the Future In Review (FIRE) conference in San Diego will also include a VP from F5 Networks among others.

I think these two events will set the stage for a much-needed, broader discussion about the collision between static networks and dynamic systems and endpoints; as well as the drive to automate greater portions of the network in response to increasing velocities of change enabled by increased system and endpoint automation.

You can follow my comments in real time at www.twitter.com/archimedius. You can also read more about dynamic infrastructure in the latest issue of bloxNews (which contains several third party perspectives) and the new Infrastructure 2.0 blog launched last week.

My disclaimer is at: http://gregness.wordpress.com/about/.  I am a Senior Director at Infoblox.

InformationWeek’s Chief of the Year for 2008: Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO)

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Amazon‘s 50-year-old CTO Werner Vogels has emerged as the right person at the right time and place to guide cloud computing – until now, an emerging technology for early adopters – into the mainstream. He not only understands how to architect a global computing cloud consisting of tens of thousands of servers, but also how to engage CTOs, CIOs, and other professionals at customer companies in a discussion of how that architecture could potentially change the way they approach IT.

We would like to congratulate Vogels on being selected by InformationWeek as Chief Of The Year 2008.

The article / interview is well worth a read.

Also, check out our video interview with man, recorded over the Summer.