Virtualization.com

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

News

Microsoft Equips IPTV Platform Mediaroom With Virtualization Support

by 1 Comment

Microsoft today launched Microsoft Mediaroom with virtualization, making it the first Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform to offer virtualization support. Mediaroom with virtualization can deliver up to a sixfold reduction in the number of physical servers required to support a full-featured IPTV service, significantly reducing hardware and management costs and speeding time to market for Mediaroom customers by up to three weeks.

With virtualization support, it is possible to deploy and operate a full Mediaroom-powered TV service for up to 30,000 subscriber homes per market using fewer than 10 physical servers. Even for deployments of greater than 30,000 subscriber homes, a mix of virtualized and dedicated servers can still provide efficiency benefits.

Mediaroom with virtualization offers the full functionality of Microsoft’s award-winning IPTV platform including video on demand, DVR Anywhere for viewing and managing recorded shows in any room, and Mediaroom Anytime for viewing of previously aired programs or restarting currently airing shows without any preplanning or prior digital video recording. Other capabilities include high-definition video for live and on-demand content, multiview, instant channel zapping, and TV applications that support rich interactivity and seamless blending of Web content and services with broadcast TV.

To power virtualization in Mediaroom, Microsoft is using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based server virtualization technology.

David Marshall’s Sneak Peek at Symantec VIBES

by Leave a Comment

Symantec‘s R&D engineers are working on a new virtual machine technology that is focused on protecting users from online attacks while surfing the Web.  It works under the concept of setting up multiple virtual machines on a user’s physical machine.  And then, it enables a user to perform operations of different security levels and different scenario based transactions in each of the different virtual machines.  The so-called VIBES prototype puts a new spin on things to significantly improve browser security.

David Marshall got a sneak peek of VIBES at Symantec’s R&D labs, and you can read the rest of his report here.

Release: Exanodes VM Edition Storage Virtual Appliance

by 1 Comment

Seanodes today announced first official customer shipments of its Storage Virtual Appliance, the Exanodes software for VMware environments.

Exanodes VM Edition Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA) is ideal for designing high-end, clustered virtual iSCSI SANs that leverage the storage resources of VMware ESX servers (internal disks, DAS) and turn them into a powerful virtual SAN in minutes. Users can configure shared virtual storage to maximize capacity, reliability and performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional network storage. Exanodes VM Edition presents a compelling value for SMBs and hosted storage services such as cloud computing struggling to contain storage costs in VMware deployments without sacrificing availability or performance.

Installation, configuration and deployment of Exanodes VM Edition is simple and requires no additional hardware, no external SAN storage or fabrics, and no specific storage competencies. Thanks to a symmetric design where each ESX server participates in storage tasks, Exanodes gives VMs a large number of access points to the storage, I/O controllers and disks to ensure that every VM will get the performance it needs. Exanodes VM Edition is the only SVA inherently scalable and fault-tolerant, and resistant to bandwidth restrictions and I/O bottlenecks. Its clustered design addresses known issues with centralized SVAs, either monoserver or dual-server with one server dedicated to high availability.

As businesses look for greener alternatives that reduce power consumption, capital and operating expenses, virtual infrastructures such as Exanodes VM edition can maximize the network’s wasted disk capacity, and eliminate the need for over-provisioned external RAID storage with its excessive space, power and cooling costs. Users enjoy the full benefits of server virtualization and can leverage VMware features such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware High Availability, and VMware Consolidated Backup without complex, cost-prohibitive storage hardware.

Exanodes VM Edition costs $950 per ESX server and is available now through solution providers in Seanodes’ worldwide network of channel partners.

Vizioncore Already Boasts Support For VMware vSphere 4

by Leave a Comment

Vizioncore yesterday announced that it is already able to support VMware vSphere, made generally available also yesterday by VMware.

The broad product set from Vizioncore including vFoglight (available now), vReplicator (available now), vOptimizer Pro (within 30 days) and its flagship backup and restore solution, vRanger Pro (within 45 days), will continue to extend VMware vSphere 4 and enable organizations to protect, monitor, optimize and automate VMware’s revolutionary new operating system for building an internal cloud.

Sun To Virtualize … Good Old Tape Drives?

by Leave a Comment

Sun Microsystems has reportedly revealed plans to add one of the newest storage technologies into one of the oldest storage methods in use: tape drives. The news comes from VNUnet.com:

The company said on Tuesday that it will update its line of StorageTek tape drive systems with a new virtualisation manager.

Sun said that the latest version of the StorageTek drives would support tape capacities of up to 1TB, and overall system capacity of some 90TB.

StorageTek Virtual Systems Manager will allow companies to manage and operate data stored on tape backup for use in tasks such as archiving and disaster recovery.

The vendor hopes that the systems will appeal to companies looking to handle growing capacity while navigating the economic crisis. Sun’s tape storage units have maintained strong growth rates in recent months.

EMC VP Chad Sakac: “We Want To Leave VMware Independent”

by Leave a Comment

At the EMC annual user conference (EMC World 2009), Chad Sakac, VP of the VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, told IT PRO magazine that the company reaffirms the promise it made to keep VMware as an independent company.

“We are determined to leave them independent. Both EMC customers and non-EMC customers have thanked us. We want everyone to have access to the technology but come to EMC on merit.”

But also:

“No-one knows what is around the corner but it would be short sighted of us to do it as this point. There are no plans [to remove its independence] in the works now and no plans to do so in the future.”

Doesn’t sound all too convincing, agrees VMBlog, who alerted us to the IT Pro article.