Virtualization.com

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

Robin Wauters

Salesforce + VMware = VMforce?

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Software powerhouses Salesforce.com and VMware will debut a cloud computing product later this month. The companies have created a website VMforce.com to tease customers about their upcoming collaborative effort, but they are saying very little else until 27 April.

From The Register:

Salesforce.com is the world’s biggest software-as-a-service provider, while VMware is at the top of the virtualisation pack. So such a marriage between the two companies is hardly surprising.

But what’s less clear is what we can expect from VMforce. It could of course be a straight virtualisation-as-a-service offering, or something less obvious. Or it could simply be that one is using the other’s products. And/or vice versa.

Either way, Salesforce.com and VMware are staying quiet until later this month.

VMware’s SpringSource Buys Rabbit Technologies

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SpringSource, a division of VMware, yesterday announced the acquisition by VMware of Rabbit Technologies, an open source software company based in the United Kingdom.

SpringSource will add the RabbitMQ open messaging system into its suite of technologies that reduce the complexity associated with development, deployment and management of enterprise applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As organizations increasingly build and deploy applications in a cloud environment, the infrastructure to support this new model is evolving. A new type of lightweight, reliable, scalable and portable messaging system is required to support the routing of user requests to the appropriate resources regardless of where they may reside. RabbitMQ is a leader in this field and with this acquisition, SpringSource will employ the principal contributors to RabbitMQ, the open source standards-based messaging system that enables applications or components of applications to more effectively communicate with each other.

Providing clear integration with the Spring Framework will also allow a significant community of Spring developers to leverage RabbitMQ as they evolve their applications from traditional datacenters into private and public cloud deployments. RabbitMQ will continue to be open source software, and SpringSource plans to continue full support for the RabbitMQ developer community.

Pano Logic Releases Zero Client Platform, Pano System 3.0

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Pano Logic, provider of zero client desktop virtualization solutions, today announced Pano System 3.0, a major product release with support for the Windows 7 operating system and closer integration with VMware View.

Pano System 3.0 also enhances the end user computing experience by providing new user controls over virtual desktops, and further simplifies centralized administration for IT managers. The newest release from Pano Logic meets a growing demand within organizations of all sizes for a true zero client alternative to costly PCs and thin clients, particularly as they plan their migration to the Windows 7 operating system and begin overdue replacements of desktop infrastructures.

Closer integration with VMware View Manager in Pano System 3.0 will extend Pano Logic’s zero client value propositions by making it even easier to manage a heterogeneous desktop environment. IT administrators can now use a single seamless and comprehensive console through VMware View for managing small to large-scale virtual desktop deployments or infrastructures comprising a mix of both Pano Logic virtual desktops and PCs or thin clients. Pano Logic has grown rapidly, with sales tripling in 2009, particularly in mid-sized organizations and departmental deployments within large organizations.

Pano Logic solves major challenges inherent in the current PC-based, client-server computing model, while providing end users with the same, familiar PC-like Windows experience. Its technology radically reduces computing total cost of ownership by as much as 80 percent by completely eliminating endpoint device management, support and obsolescence. Instead, end users connect to their virtual machine with a zero client that contains no processor, no operating system, no memory, no drivers, no software and no moving parts. This represents a major shift from highly complex and costly PC and thin client computing solutions.

With Pano System 3.0, companies migrating onto the new Windows 7 operating system now have the option of deploying the zero client hardware and software platform that was purpose-built for desktop virtualization. The Pano Logic platform now supports Windows 7 Enterprise, Professional and Ultimate editions with no change in price. To ease the transition for end users, the Pano System 3.0 enables individuals to maintain both a Windows 7 and an XP desktop.

Windows 7 support comes as analysts are predicting expanded adoption of virtual desktop deployments to ease the transition to Windows 7 and realize dramatic cost savings and efficiency gains.

Pano System 3.0 incorporates end-user functionality that users enjoyed with individual PCs, as well as functionality required but not captured by PCs. End users have the power to reboot their virtual machines as well as lock their desktop and access a new one in the event of a problem. This enables users to continue working and preserves the original for IT to examine and diagnose. Pano System 3.0 also enables users to maintain multiple virtual machines. End users have the option to transition between various virtual machines assigned to them by simply clicking on the environment of their choice, further freeing IT from desktop support demands.

VM6 Software Scores $4 Million in Financing

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VM6 Software, provider of the only all-in-one IT virtualization infrastructure software, today announced that it has closed a $4 million series A round of investment with RBC Venture Partners and Ignition Partners.

The investment will further accelerate VM6 Software’s customer expansion, future software development and marketing and sales efforts worldwide. Additionally, industry veteran Stephen Pollack has joined VM6 Software’s board of directors, along with Richard Fade from Ignition Partners and Jean-David Begin from RBC Venture Partners.

VM6 VMex software offers small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) an all-in-one IT infrastructure solution that is designed to fully leverage the benefits of virtualization to manage, provision, consolidate and protect distributed servers and desktop environments at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. The VM6 VMex solution eliminates the need for SMBs to centralize the infrastructure, hire and train specialized experts, and integrate expensive multi-point solutions for server and desktop virtualization, high availability, storage and management.

Pollack is a seasoned entrepreneur and industry expert with more than 25 years of experience in the high-technology market.  His most recent success started in 2003 with the founding of PlateSpin Ltd., a recognized industry leader in the virtualization market, which was purchased by Novell.

In addition to recently joining the Microsoft BizSpark One program, VM6 Software also announced the general availability of its VM6 VMex Enterprise Edition, which leverages Microsoft Hyper-V™ to combine virtualization with shared storage, advanced clustering, and intuitive management and monitoring. Customers using VM6 VMex are managing the network, desktops, applications, and physical and virtual servers as objects within their environments, all without the need for any external shared storage.  With a single console to manage the entire enterprise or each site individually, administrators can easily manage up to 65,000 distributed objects.

Release: Xen 4.0 Hypervisor

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Xen.org, the home of the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced the immediate availability of Xen 4.0, the most advanced open source hypervisor software available.

The release is the collective effort of a global development team representing more than 50 leading technology vendors, universities, and virtualization experts. Leveraging the latest network cards optimized for virtualization, Xen 4.0 provides users substantial performance and scalability gains for any level of enterprise or cloud application workload.

Xen 4.0 adds significant memory and security optimizations that will drive virtualization infrastructure to an entirely new class of performance. As a result, virtualization is made suitable for all workloads, even network intensive and high performance computing applications that would have previously experienced compromised performance on any hypervisor. Xen 4.0 enables virtualization to be deployed ubiquitously, across every server in a datacenter, bringing ease of management, secure architecture, high availability, agility and efficiency to all applications.

Key Facts and Highlights

  • Fault Tolerance – Xen 4.0 now supports live transactional synchronization of VM states between physical servers as a basic component, enabling administrators to guarantee a high degree of service reliability without requiring additional software solutions.
  • High Availability – Xen 4.0 leverages the advanced reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features in new Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors.
  • Netchannel2 – Xen 4.0’s NetChannel2 takes full advantage of significant advancements in networking hardware such as SMART NICs with multi-queue and SR-IOV functionality, which provides virtualization infrastructure with superior data processing capabilities.
  • Blktap2 – A new virtual hard disk (VHD) implementation in Xen 4.0 delivers high performance VM snapshots and cloning features as well as the ability to do live virtual disk snapshots without stopping a VM process.
  • PVOps Domain 0 – Xen 4.0 is the first release from Xen.org to formally support PVOps in the Domain0 (Dom0) Linux kernel; this new kernel option allows administrators access to the most recent devices supported by the Linux kernel.
  • Memory Enhancements – New algorithms, such as Transcendent Memory and Page Sharing have been introduced in Xen 4.0 to enhance the performance and capabilities of the hypervisor memory operations.
  • A full list of features can be found on the Xen Community web site

Xen 4.0 is available for immediate download from the Xen community site: http://xen.org/.

Gartner: Global IT Spending to Grow 5.3 Percent in 2010

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Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $3.4 trillion in 2010, a 5.3 percent increase from IT spending of $3.2 trillion in 2009, according to Gartner.

The IT industry will continue to show steady growth with IT spending in 2011 projected to surpass $3.5 trillion, a 4.2 percent increase from 2010.

“Following strong fourth quarter sales, an unseasonably robust hardware supply chain in the first quarter of 2010, combined with continued improvement in the global economy, sets up 2010 for solid IT spending growth,” said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner. “However, it’s important to note that nearly 4 percentage points of this growth will be the result of a projected decline in the value of the dollar relative to last year. IT spending in exchange-rate-adjusted dollars will still grow 1.6 percent this year, after declining 1.4 percent in 2009.”

Worldwide computing hardware spending is forecast to reach $353 billion in 2010, a 5.7 percent increase from 2009 (see Table 1). Robust consumer spending on mobile PCs will drive hardware spending in 2010. Enterprise hardware spending will grow again in 2010, but it will remain below its 2008 level through 2014. Spending on storage will enjoy the fastest growth in terms of enterprise spending as the volume of enterprise data that needs to be stored continues to increase. Near-term spending on servers will be concentrated on lower-end servers; longer-term, server spending will be curtailed by virtualization, consolidation and, potentially, cloud computing.