Robin Wauters

Endeavors Partnering Up With Several US Companies

January 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Endeavors Technologies , an application streaming and virtualisation technology provider and its UK-based parent company, Tadpole Technology , have announced a new multi-level partner programme with Blackhawk Technology Consulting , Client-Server Technology Group , and NTAKT7 in the Americas region.

Endeavors develops technologies that enable servers to stream PC-based applications to client computers for execution. Application virtualisation and streaming enables organisations to reduce the total cost of ownership by improving service levels, simplifying the management of computers and improving security and reliability. The company provides its services through licensing, royalty, and technology transfer models.

According to Endeavors, the partner companies will participate at four levels: reseller partners, consulting partners, accredited partners and premier partners.

Reseller partners are service providers, value-added resellers (VARs) and systems integrators that sell Endeavors’s products.

Consulting partners offer products or services that complement Endeavors’s application virtualisation and streaming products and accredited partners are managed service providers, VARs and systems integrators that sell the company’s products and also provide basic, first line technical support.

Premier partners are national or international managed service providers, VARs and system integrators with technical expertise to provide in-depth technical support for the products of Endeavors that they sell.

Peter Bondar, CEO, Endeavors Technologies, said: “Partners form a strategic component of our expansion plans; harnessing their expertise and relationships allows us to leverage our sales resources and engage with a broader set of potential customers, sooner. We are particularly pleased to have attracted partners with considerable expertise in other application virtualisation products.”

Endeavors claims that its partners will reap benefits from joint marketing activities, sales leads, training, technical support and other resources.

Bondar claimed that the company’s partners have shown interest in using its products in enterprise application virtualisation deployments. The products are also useful to partners who offer their software as software as a service (SaaS) model. Application Jukebox, Endeavors’s application streaming and virtualisation product suite, includes both enterprise and SaaS versions. He added that the company was concentrating on developing its distribution channels and strategy.

[Via ]

Patch Management Coming to a Citrix XenServer Near You

January 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Roger Klorese , Product Marketing Manager for Citrix XenServer , wrote a blog post revealing a major upcoming new feature in XenServer: pool-wide Patch Management.

“XenServer has had a relatively small number of patches, and in the case of security advisories, we’ve been consistently able to announce the fix for an issue very quickly, or in one case, even before the vulnerability was publicized.

But it’s true that virtual platforms can add complexity to patch management. While other Citrix technologies — Provisioning Server, for instance — can reduce the impact of patching significantly, the maintenance of the virtualization server platform itself is an major concern.

We don’t talk about future features very often, but here’s one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer — which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now — that is worth crowing about.”

In conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, there will be a possibility for you to:

* Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
* Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
* Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
* Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
* Apply the patches
* Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically

No word on timing for the public beta.

Hat tip to Tarry Singh .

Combell Group Chooses SWsoft For Its Virtual Server Hosting Plans

January 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtualization software company SWsoft is powering a new line of virtual server hosting service plans by the Belgian hosting company Combell Group .

Frederik Poelman, CTO at Combell, noted, ”With SWsoft Virtuozzo, our new virtual server offering delivers exceptional performance and results, and allows our customers the flexibility to work how they want to work. Virtuozzo’s server density ratio, performance response rates, and streamlined administrative management tools allow us to easily manage large numbers of virtual environments without affecting the customer experience.”
Virtuozzo partitions a physical server into multiple, isolated containers to provide customers with an economical alternative to dedicated servers. Combell’s new offering gives customers control over their own virtual environment through root access and empowers them to perform application installation, backup and reboot processes.

Combell’s services are built on a deep commitment to quality and innovation. As the only Belgian hosting company to achieve ISO 9001:2000 certification and an early adopter of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, Combell keeps the customer at the center of its decision-making. Security, customer issue rates and ease of use were key criteria for selecting Virtuozzo to fuel its virtual server offerings.

Nils Hueneke, Hosting Europe, SWsoft added, ”We are pleased that Combell has selected Virtuozzo to power its new virtual sever offering. Combell and its customers will benefit from our ongoing Open Fusion technology initiative to advance an open platform for hosting, as well as a commitment to quality and innovation that matches their own.”

Virtualization Conference + Expo 2008: Call for Papers Deadline Approaching

January 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

As you most probably know, SYS-CON will be holding its annual Virtualization Conference + Expo this Summer in NY City. Just so you know: the deadline for the Call For Papers is approaching its 25 January deadline.

You can still submit your speaking proposal on the following topics:

Server Virtualization
Desktop Virtualization
File Virtualization
The Future of the Virtual Enterprise
Hosted Virtualization
Para-virtualization
Virtualization Hardware Support
Hardware-level Virtualization
Storage Virtualization
Virtualization for Server Consolidation and Containment
Windows Virtualization
Utility Computing
State of the Virtualization Services Market
Ideal candidates are i-Technology experts who have first-hand experience in the deployment or implementation of all aspects of virtualization solution in the entreprise.
If you have something substantive, challenging, and original to offer, you are encouraged to submit a proposal. In the proposal, please highlight previous speaking engagements including classroom or course work. Please provide at least three references with respect to speaking ability, as well as contact information that will allow us to reach you to evaluate presentation skills. Past speakers do not need to provide references.
To register, submit this registration form asap!

VMWare’s Newest Blog: Virtual Reality

January 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

VMWare just announced that it’s adding a new blog on Virtual Reality to its blog network . In its debut post, Mike DiPetrillo touts about the 4 reasons why he switched to VMWare Fusion (other than being a VMWare employee). Here goes the list:

1) Stability. At the core of Fusion is the same engine we’ve been shipping with VMware Workstation since 1998. It’s in its 6th generation and just plain works. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve crashed my machine while running Parallels. For example, here’s a neat trick. Go start up your Windows XP VM in Parallels. Run something that uses a lot of CPU. For me that’s usually running MS Flight Sim. Now, go and suspend the VM. BAM! Crashes every time on several different machines. I’ve got 5 other tests I’ll blog on in the future where Parallels just crashes with simple tasks.

2) Battery Life. Even at idle, Parallels still uses about 15 – 20% of the CPU on my Macbook Pro. My battery only lasts about 1 1/2 hours on the road. Ouch! With Fusion it seems to run much cooler – about 0.5% of the CPU. My battery agrees and usually lasts about 4 hours on a single charge.

3) USB just works. Before switching to the Mac I had a HP Scanjet 7800. Great scanner. When I switched to the Mac and ran Parallels I couldn’t see or use the scanner anymore. There were no drivers for the Mac so I had to go to my really old Epson single sheet scanner I had laying around. Urggh. In comes Fusion to save the day. Right away Windows in a Fusion VM recognized the scanner and I became a much happier person (my wife would agree).

4) Performance. According to the CNET Crave Tests we really perform well. I tend to agree with that. I haven’t done any official benchmarks just yet but things are snappier with Fusion. Just do a search for “vmware fusion performance” and you’ll get several other opinions on the matter which pretty much agree that Fusion is faster.

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe Outlines Technical Strategy for 2008

January 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Jeff Jaffe , Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer for Novell, published a blog post 2 days ago outlining the company’s technical strategy for 2008. This is what he had to say about its focus on virtualization:

We see agility and customer focus as key in our progress on virtualization – one of the hottest areas in the industry. In SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, we introduced open source virtualization into a commercial Linux distribution before anyone else did. Once we introduced this, we spoke to customers. We spoke to partners. We spoke to analysts. We spoke to everyone! By listening, we discovered that we had not yet nailed it. In 2007 we listened, and in a very short time we became a leader in virtualization.

Our Open Enterprise Server customers told us that they wanted NetWare virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server – to take advantage of all of the drivers provided by Linux. And it needed to perform. After all, file and storage performance for NetWare is critical. A unique partnership between our Workgroup team and our Open Platform Solutions team has resulted in virtualization capability in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 that is higher performance and more manageable than any other open source solution. This is the basis for OES 2.

We talked to other customers. They did not want virtualization as a bare technology. They wanted it to be managed. Novell quickly turned around and built technology to manage workloads and provision virtual machines. ZENworks Orchestrator. The best managed open source virtualization solution.

And we listened to customers and partners some more. They said get a tight partnership with Microsoft to optimize Windows on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Build a joint lab for testing – so customers have the confidence that our solution works best with Microsoft. We did all of that!

Here is the totality. From a barebones hypervisor in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we now have an industrial strength hypervisor, supporting the demanding NetWare workload, optimized for Microsoft, SAP and others, with a joint lab for testing. It is manageable with ZENworks and will address low latencies.

How did we do this? We listened!

Virtualization clearly is a key topic for the industry, and with the 2007 results we have both staked a claim and demonstrated our agile processes. Look for this to continue to be an area of significant investment in 2008.