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Microsoft Releases System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTM

October 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft has released System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, its enterprise management console for its hypervisor platform Hyper-V. You can download a free trial version here.

From Softie Keith Combs’ blog:

Highlights of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008

Support for VMs Running on Windows Server 2008
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 was designed to fully utilize the foundational features and services of Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V™ Server. This includes Hyper-V’s 64-bit architecture, attack hardened security model, fail-over cluster support (see below) and others.
- Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) supports the management of hosts running Hyper-V and VMM can actually enable Hyper-V remotely from the VMM 2008 console.
- VMM 2008 integrates with new clustering support in Windows Server 2008 to allow for fault-tolerant and cluster aware virtual machines to be created
- VMM 2008 supports all Hyper-V functionality while providing VMM-specific functions, such as Intelligent Placement, the Self-Service Portal, and the integrated Library.
Multi-Vendor Virtualization Platform Support
- In addition to support for Hyper-V, VMM 2008 integrates multi-hypervisor management into one tool with its support for virtual machines running on VMware ESX infrastructure and Microsoft Virtual Server.
- VMM 2008 provides comprehensive support for VMware VI3 including moving virtual machines among virtual hosts with no downtime via VMotion, through integration with VMware’s Virtual Center.
- VMM 2008 specific features such as Intelligent Placement, consolidation candidate recommendations and others can be run against virtualized infrastructure on any supported platform.
- Windows PowerShell™ scripts for customization or automation are also supported across Hyper-V, VMware ESX or Virtual Server implementations
Host Cluster Support for “High Availability” Virtual Machines
- With greatly expanded support for failover clusters, VMM 2008 improves its “high availability” capabilities for managing mission-critical virtual machines. VMM 2008 is now fully cluster-aware meaning that it can detect and manage Hyper-V host clusters as a single unit.
- New in this version of VMM is automatic detection of virtual hosts that are added or removed from the cluster – thus easing the burden on the administrator to manage this function.
- In VMM 2008, creating a high availability virtual machine (HA VM) has never been easier. Gone are the complex multi-step manual processes from before – now, an administrator clicks a simple checkbox which designates a VM as highly available. Behinds the scenes, VMM orchestrates the creation of that HA VA which includes instructing the Intelligent Placement feature of VMM 2008 to recommend only hosts that are part of a host cluster for the newly minted HA VM.
- Improved HA VM management features of VMM 2008 include the Failover Cluster Management Console for various cluster-related tasks such as designation and management of cluster reserves, letter-less disk drives, guest clusters, among others.
- VMM 2008 also supports VMware host clusters in which the nodes of the cluster are VMware ESX Servers.

DataCore Goes After Eastern European Market, Partners With Prosper Intelligence

October 20, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

DataCore Software and Prosper Intelligence have announced a distribution agreement for Austria and Eastern Europe. Prosper will resell and support SANmelody and SANsymphony™as the SAN and virtual storage component of its virtualization portfolio. Prosper will integrate both SAN software solutions into its showcase “Virtualization Consolidation Academy” (VCA) lab in Vienna.

The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is an innovative knowledge transfer and competence center, which focuses on helping partners and customers evaluate and train and understand virtualization and consolidation technologies. With the agreement, Prosper can provide an end-to-end virtualization portfolio – Total Enterprise Virtualization – to its partner base with the addition of DataCore’s advanced storage virtualization, fault-tolerant SAN and disaster recovery solutions. In addition, DataCore obtains a key distribution partnership with the ability to support and resell into the emerging and growing Eastern European market.

Prosper currently supports a growing base of resellers in Austria and Eastern Europe, who are implementing virtualization and consolidation projects for business-critical applications, servers and data storage. With today’s agreement, DataCore’s storage virtualization technology complements the existing portfolio of desktop, server and application virtualization with a hardware-independent, flexible and cost effective storage solution. The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is seen as an independent review platform that can be used to evaluate, test, train and showcase virtualization solutions and technologies.

DataCore’s virtualization platforms improve the utilization and performance of disk storage, enable a new level of flexibility and hardware independence and reduce the overall cost of storage area networking. With SANmelody, DataCore provides a cost-effective, feature rich SAN solution that includes automated storage management, high availability, disaster recovery and thin provisioning. SANsymphony is the enterprise solution that enables Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and meets the advanced needs of larger organizations in terms of capacity, performance and scalability.

VirtualLogix VLX Now Supports Symbian OS

October 20, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VirtualLogix today announced that its virtualization software product, VirtualLogix VLX, is the first to support Symbian OS, the market leading open operating system for advanced data-enabled mobile phones. VirtualLogix will demonstrate a prototype configuration of the Symbian OS running simultaneously with Linux on several mobile platforms at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, on 21-22 October 2008.

The first product to support Symbian OS on a virtualized mobile platform, VirtualLogix VLX provides new opportunities to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and semiconductor vendors to leverage the benefits of virtualization in their phone product designs. As a member of the Symbian Partner Network, VirtualLogix is committed to developing ground-breaking solutions based on the Symbian platform for the benefit of the mobile industry.

VirtualLogix VLX for mobile handsets separates hardware management and application management on mobile platforms, allowing an application running on the Symbian OS to access a peripheral device managed by another operating system kernel, such as Linux. With additional security for financial and other high-risk transactions, VirtualLogix VLX for Symbian permits handset manufacturers and wireless operators to deliver more reliable mobile phones with advanced features to the mass market.

IDC Confirms: Virtualization Still On The Rise

October 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

According to IDC‘s Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, worldwide virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) increased 53% year over year, compared to a 72% year-over-year increase the previous quarter. The x86 server market led the way with 60% year-over-year growth followed by the EPIC server market with 18% growth. Worldwide CISC and RISC server virtualization licenses declined 15% and 7% year over year, respectively.

Worldwide new server shipments virtualized increased 52% year over year in the second quarter, compared to 70% growth in 1Q08.

Worldwide virtualization software revenue grew 15% year over year in 2Q08, compared to 32% growth in the first quarter of 2008. The growth in virtualization software revenue primarily came from the x86 server market, which grew 39% year over year. EPIC virtualization software revenue also increased year over year, albeit at a slower pace of 9%.

Hewlett-Packard held onto its number 1 spot for worldwide new server shipments virtualized with 34% market share and 52% year-over-year growth. This growth was driven by a solid performance in sales of Intel-based processors. Dell solidified its position as the number 2 vendor with its market share growing from 25% in 1Q08 to 29% in the second quarter, powered by 110% year-over-year growth. Dell’s strong performance was driven by solid growth of Intel-based processors and a very strong performance from AMD-based sales. IBM remained in the third position with 16% market share. IBM achieved 32% year-over-year growth driven by a solid performance from its Power Systems servers. This was the first quarter in the last year in which IBM saw positive growth in its new RISC-based server shipments virtualized.

VMware grew its x86 server virtualization software business 27% year over year and maintained the number 1 position in the market with 78% revenue share in 2Q08. When looking at new x86 virtualization licenses, VMware continues to hold on to its strong position in the x86 market with a combined market share of VMware ESX and VMware Server at 44%. However, in its first quarter of general availability Microsoft Hyper-V delivered a strong showing, and when combined with Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft’s market share is 23% of new shipments.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global server market on a quarterly basis. The Tracker includes quarterly virtualization license shipments, new server shipments virtualized, virtualized server revenue and virtualization software revenue, segmented by region, cpu type, vendor, form factor, sockets, virtualization platform, and primary guest operating system.

VIRTERA Says It Gave Open Solutions A 165% ROI On Virtualization

October 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VIRTERA, a services and consulting firm that specializes in maximizing virtualization Return on Investment (ROI), announced today that Open Solutions, a provider of integrated technologies for financial services providers, has realized a nine-month, 165 percent return on investment from virtualizing their global data center.

Open Solutions turned to VIRTERA, which specializes in ensuring enterprise organizations’ successful and rapid adoption of multi-vendor virtualization technologies, while optimizing the return on their IT investment. Ryan Marsee, Director of Corporate Networking for Open Solutions and his team leveraged VIRTERA’s unique professional services and consulting methodology, vSpectrum, to streamline the company’s virtualization deployment and to ensure their many vendor technologies worked seamlessly together.

As a result of VIRTERA’s experience and expertise, Open Solutions’ server compression was dramatically reduced to a 14:1 ratio (140 servers supported by 10 hosts) with server utilization plummeting by more than 50 percent from its prior 98 percent capacity.

In addition, VIRTERA also virtualized a portion of Open Solutions’ desktops. Currently, Open Solutions’ bandwidth-intensive, offshore development efforts require up to 12 hours for moving data from the company’s Cherry Hill, NJ and Glastonbury, CT data centers. With VIRTERA’s help, offshore developers can now tap into both U.S. locations and access on-demand data.

VMware and Patent #6397242 Go Back About 10 Years

October 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Nice catch by Andrew Dugdell: it’s about 10 years ago that Scott Devine, Edouard Bugnion and Mendel Rosenblum filed patent #6397242, “Virtualization system including a virtual machine monitor for a Computer with segmented Architecture”.

Filing date: Oct 26, 1998
Issue date: May 28, 2002
Inventors: Scott W. Devine, Edouard Bugnion, Mendel Rosenblum
Assignees: VMWare, Inc.
Primary Examiner: Majid Banankhah
Attorney: Jeffrey Slusher
Application number: 9/179,137

Abstract
In a computer that has hardware processor, and a memory, the invention provides a virtual machine monitor (VMM) and a virtual machine (VM) that has at least one virtual processor and is operatively connected to the VMM for running a sequence of VM instructions, which are either directly executable or non-directly executable. The VMM includes both a binary translation sub-system and a direct execution sub-system, as well as a sub-system that determines if VM instructions must be executed using binary translation, or if they can be executed using direct execution. Shadow descriptor tables in the VMM, corresponding to VM descriptor tables, segment tracking and memory tracing are used as factors in the decision of which execution mode to activate. The invention is particularly well-adapted for virtualizing computers in which the hardware processor has an Intel x86 architecture.