Virtualization.com

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

News

Racemi Introduces New Versions Of DynaCenter Software

by Leave a Comment

Racemi recently announced new versions of its DynaCenter data center automation software specifically built for rapid server recovery, disaster recovery and server consolidation implementations.

Racemi DynaCenter uses virtualization to automate the movement of server images, including operating systems, storage and network configurations and applications, to dissimilar hardware — reducing infrastructure costs along with the time and risk typically introduced by manual processes.

The new product offerings include:

  • DynaCenter RSR (Rapid Server Recovery), which enables rapid, automated recovery of failed systems to dissimilar hardware within a single data center for a faster return to service at a lower cost.
  • DynaCenter DR (Disaster Recovery), which improves business continuity by restoring critical operations quickly across multiple sites. The software automates recovery across multiple locations in circumstances where it is too expensive to have redundant equipment for e-mail, web servers, and other systems.
  • DynaCenter DCC (Data Center Consolidation), which simplifies complicated data center consolidation and relocation efforts by automating the movement of entire business systems to dissimilar hardware.

The DynaCenter software compares the configurations of the source and destination servers and reconfigures the necessary components and device drivers “in-flight” to ensure that the image can be run on the new hardware. Systems supported include AIX, Solaris (Sparc and x86), Windows, Linux and VMware.

Cloud Company Zimory Adds Support For VMware ESX Server

by Leave a Comment

Deutsche Telekom spinoff Zimory recently announced support for VMware’s ESX Server – extending the company’s advanced cloud technology to enterprise applications.

Zimory Enterprise Cloud combines existing virtual servers into a homogeneous, flexible, computing cloud – enabling data center managers to move applications quickly within single or multiple (on- and off-premises) locations. The technology enables very fast deployments of multiple virtual machines from an on- to an off-premises data center. Zimory now supports Xen and all flavors of VMWare. 

Zimory Enterprise Cloud optimizes data centers by increasing the efficiency of existing resources. Zimory begins where server virtualization ends: Zimory combines virtual servers into a single homogeneous computing cloud. Depending on current resource requirements, users can move applications quickly within a data center as well as between various locations — the optimal choice to temporarily distribute workloads.

Zimory management solutions enable businesses to make server resources available to other internal departments — in a controlled way and a finite amount of time – and allow quantification of this utilization even at the application level.

Announced last month, Zimory Public Cloud provides companies of all sizes instant, easy and flexible access to external computing power worldwide while also enabling businesses with excess server capacity to offer their resources to businesses around the world.

Zimory Public Cloud for sellers aggregates available server computing capacity from around the world and makes it available through an Internet trading platform. Using Zimory Public Cloud, companies looking for computing resources can buy capacity quickly — as needed — without long-term contractual commitment. Zimory handles pricing, contracts, security, virtual machine migration and billing.

Video: Interview Mike Neil, General Manager for Virtualization – Microsoft (VMworld 2008)

by Leave a Comment

During this interview at the Microsoft booth at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, Virtualization veteran Mike Neil recalls his past at Connectix, and his involvement with Virtual PC & Virtual Server and more recently his role in the Hyper-V launch. He discussed planned features such as Hyper-V live migration, VM standards and their planned support of the OVF-format.

Mike also explains why the VM formats are so similar between the Xen & Hyper-V-environment. These architectures were both designed with a thin hypervisor in mind, while using the drivers of the parent partition ecosystem (resp. Xen/Linux; HyperV/Windows). A similar hypervisor architecture is used by Sun with Solaris now. VMware on the contrary has always chosen to build the drivers into the larger ESX hypervisor.

Mike looks forward to VDI through RDP & the Microsoft partnership with Citrix, but also mentions the Calista acquisition and the new protocols this add to their VDI stack.

He firmly declines the rumors on an intensified Citrix – Microsoft relationship and gives his point of view on the industry challenge for virtualization licensing metrics (usage based, physical server based).

He also comments on the Vworld keynotes by VMware executives.
If you are in for a little fun,  you might want to watch this video to the very end to meet Virtual Mike after the credits.

Red Hat announced Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

by Leave a Comment

Today RedHat sent out 2 press releases obviously in an attempt to get Virtual visibility during VMWorld. Europe, The biggest news in those 2 press releases is the announcement of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, or the RHEV . Red Hat announced their new strategy regarding to Virtualization which they call the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products.

First in the Lineup is

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Red Hat’s strategic direction for the future development of its virtualization product portfolio is based on KVM, making Red Hat the only virtualization vendor leveraging technology that is developed as part of the Linux operating system. Existing Xen-based deployments will continue to be supported for the full lifetime of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Red Hat will provide a variety of tools and services to enable customers to migrate from their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Xen deployment to KVM.

Well, we already knew that, given the fact that Fedora is heading KVM-wards and that they have to support Xen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for the full life cycle of RHEL 5, therefore at least till 2014
KVM will enter the RHEL product line as part of RHEL 5.4, due to be released later this year
RedHat is also announcing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers

A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will be the first open source product in the industry to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and virtual desktops, featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers will be able to manage both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 hosts, as well as the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

a framework based on LibVirt and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops ,

A new management system for virtual desktops that will deliver industry-leading VDI cost-performance for both Linux and Windows desktops, based on Qumranet’s SolidICE and using SPICE remote rendering technology.

With confirmation that the Qumranet code will be open sourced just as RedHat has done with all their other products so far.

And last but not least RedHat is launching a new standalone hypervisor : Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

Which is

KVM unbundled from RHEL, in a package dubbed RHEV-H(ypervisor). RHEV-H is a stateless hypervisor, with a tight footprint of under 128MB, which presents a libvirt interface to the management tier. Enterprise servers will no longer need to go through an installation process, and will instead be able to boot RHEV-H from flash or a network server, and be able to immediately begin servicing virtual guests. This stateless model drives down OPEX and enables the scalability required by terascale grids, large datacenters and cloud class compute environments.

RedHat also announced that its broad ecosystem of applications tested and certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are certified to run in a Red Hat virtualized platform with no modifications.

Citrix Open Sources VHD

by Leave a Comment

Simon Crosby just posted a blog announcing that Citrix is Open Sourcing the VHD support , their implementation of the of the Microsoft VHD virtual hard disk format to the Xen community for inclusion in the open source code base.

VHD is what XenServer uses to store file-based images, and according to Simon this code is considerably more robust and efficient than the qcow implementation that is in the tree today.

Simon lists different reasons for doing this

He states

First the various Xen implementations from the Linux vendors vary wildly in their support for virtual hard disk images, and the performance of their implementations.
Thus far we have yet to see any good implementations of VHD in the Linux vendor category. Cluttering users’ storage with raw image files without any of the benefits of the built-in capabilities for snapshotting, cloning etc that are fundamental primitives in any production virtualization environment, is just a bad idea. ,

Second, since the majority of VMs will be in the VHD format in future, we want to enable the ISV ecosystem to adopt the format and quickly deliver a rich set of add-on capabilities that allow users to be more productive in their virtual environments. VHD is more than just a VM format used by Hyper-V – it’s a delivery format from Microsoft for future versions of Windows. The format is documented publicly and the specification is available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise program.

And to finish of he hopes the free implementation of the VHD format will accelerate the adoption of Windows in the cloud, I`m wondering how people plan on manage their Licence sprawl, but that’s just me 🙂

So which Virtualization vendor didn’t announce they would be Open Sourcing anything yet this year ? 🙂

XenServer for Free !

by 1 Comment

With VMWorld Europe coming up,it seems Citrix is trying to get VMWare out of its warm cozy mansion, it seems they plan to announce next week that they won’t charge anymore for XenServer.

Altough the underlying Xen technology is fully Open source , Citrix doesn’t plan on fully opensourcing XenServer itselve yet. So how will they make their money then you’d ask ? By shipping a new managment framwork that will support both XenServer and the Microschoft Hyper-V platform.

It looks like Citrix is also planning to announce a similar agreement with Micro
soft as RedHat already did earlier this week.

So what will VMWare do as a reaction next week ?