Virtualization.com

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

Robin Wauters

HP upgrades virtualization features of Integrity servers

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Quoting from the HP official announcement:

HP has enhanced its HP Integrity server line and HP-UX 11i operating environment with significant capacity, virtualization and management upgrades.

The enhancements offer customers greater server capacity as well as faster deployment of enterprise software within an HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) running on the HP-UX 11i operating system – some virtualization projects can be brought online in less than half the time.
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The next-generation chipset for Integrity servers delivers significant enhancements to performance and availability. The chipset enables customers to get 30 percent more work done across multiple workloads, while using the same number of Intel Itanium 2 processors. Featured and available today in the cell-based HP Integrity rx7640, rx8640 and Superdome servers, the chipset delivers single system availability features to improve memory availability, interconnectivity and fault tolerance…

Enhanced security and availability

HP is extending its business continuity and availability solutions by providing more disaster-tolerance offerings for HP-UX 11i customers. The capabilities include intercontinental failover of Oracle® 10g environments and support of SONET, a low-cost networking option for disaster recovery. New HP Serviceguard Extensions for SAP improve the speed and simplicity of high-availability solutions for HP-UX 11i and Linux on HP Integrity servers. …More information about HP Integrity systems is available at www.hp.com/go/integritymarch06.

Webcast: Demonstration of the VMware VirtualCenter SDK

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Richard Garsthagen produced a video (13.4 Mb WMV-file) to demonstrate how VMware VirtualCenter API can be programmed to develop usefull applications for managing virtual infrastructures. Richard focuses on his Virtual Machine Order HOTLINE application.

Could somebody please inform Richard that a shaved head in front of a blue screen results in a egg-shaped performance, that seem to come straight from Star Trek 🙂

Have a look at his otherwise clarifying performance here.

Microsoft starting the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 TAP

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Jeff Alexander is calling for Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) :

This TAP program has two goals:

1. Product Validation

2. Help customers deploy this product in production scenarios and get case studies

The production scenarios that are of high interest are:

1. Production Server consolidation in datacenters

2. Disaster recovery

3. Server consolidation in Branch offices

TAP is a very special program giving access to particular benefits like direct interaction with product team engineering and product education from Microsoft, and is reserved for a very small amount of critical customers, able to dedicate a serious amount of time for testing and usually providing information to create case studies for a new product launch (for more details about TAPs you should check this blog entry). So it’s really hard to get it.

Thanks to Dugie at Virtualserver.tv  and Jeff Alexander for this news.

VMware pushing its standard virtualization interface in Linux kernel

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Fraser Campbell tracked VMware effort to introduce several patches in Linux kernel to make it compliant to what it’s called Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), or Paravirtualization API 2.0

The Fraser article features an interesting comment from Zachary Amsden:

Zach was asked “Why can’t vmware use the Xen interface instead?” and he responded: “We could. But it is our opinion that the Xen interface is unnecessarily complicated, without a clean separation between the layer of interaction with the hypervisor and the kernel proper. The interface we propose we believe is more powerful, and more conducive to performance optimizations while providing significant advantages – most specifically, a single binary image that is properly virtualizable on multiple hypervisors and capable of running on native hardware.”

Read the full article at source.

Red Hat announces Integrated Virtualization

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Quoting from the Red Hat official announcement:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today formally announced its ‘Integrated Virtualization’ strategy. During a launch today in San Francisco, company executives detailed plans for creating a Red Hat virtualization environment and working with partners such as AMD, Intel, Network Appliance and XenSource to simplify virtualization deployment for customers.
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Red Hat will tightly integrate virtualization capabilities with its operating system and ensure all aspects of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, from management tools and installation to software management, will enable customers to deploy virtualized environments easily and effectively.
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This month Red Hat will make Fedora Core 5 available, which will contain a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology. In the summer of 2006, Red Hat will make Virtualization Migration and Assessment Services available along with an Enterprise Virtualization beta. Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 5, scheduled for general availability by the end of 2006, will feature fully integrated virtualization…

There also is a 1-hour-long recorded webcast of this press event available here.

Significant improvements forecasted for virtualization

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iReach Research published a report, Virtualization as an Enabler of Knowledge Management, claiming a quarter of European firms are currently using server virtualization and 67% of them plan to increase their usage over the next year.

This report seems to totally disagree with the 1 week ago news Techworld reported: Users fail to grasp virtualization benefits.

Based on my personal experience and after collecting several feedbacks from virtualization professionals around Europe, I find rather difficult to believe iReach report.
I would believe a whole quarter of them is evaluating virtualization technologies and testing them in limited environments. I absolutely don’t believe they are using virtualization in production.

Since the report doesn’t explain how firms are working with virtualization, and which kind of industries are involved (it would be easier to believe a quarter of all european IT companies statement) I don’t find it very useful.

Thanks to VMblog for the news.