News

Shavlik Technologies Releases NetChk Protect 6.5

September 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Shavlik Technologies, provider of solutions that accelerate and improve security and compliance readiness, today announced (PDF) the availability of Shavlik NetChk Protect 6.5. Shavlik NetChk Protect 6.5 is a virtual machine management solution that provides continuous patch assessment and remediation of your complete virtual world, including Offline Virtual Images.

Mark Shavlik, CEO, Shavlik Technologies:

“Shavlik’s market leading agentless technology makes it uniquely capable of reaching and securing offline virtual images, thereby allowing customers to simplify the entire security management process. This technology edge is why VMware selected Shavlik to license and integrate into its own solutions offering. Now we are bringing our full solution into our main product line, a key to the continued simplification of complex network security solutions we provide to our customers.”

NetChk Protect 6.5 extends Shavlik’s Any Patch/Any Where assessment technology to offline virtual images and fully automates continuous patch assessment and deployment which cuts costs and eases time constraints on overburdened IT staff. NetChk Protect 6.5 provides more powerful security through continuous identification and remediation of security gaps and redundant overlaps.

BMC Software Launches Virtualization Management Solutions In Partnership with Microsoft, Sun and VMware

September 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

BMC Software today announced nine new, integrated solutions specifically designed to help customers eliminate the rising risk and operational expenses associated with inadequate management of virtualized IT environments.

The new solutions are grounded in a BMC-invented, highly automated set of Closed-Loop Change and Configuration Management (CLCCM) process workflows that reduce the latency, cost and risk associated with change management by as much as 75 percent.

BMC virtualization management solutions give customers a holistic, unified approach to IT planning, control, automation and management for today’s virtualized, multi-vendor IT environments.

BMC has extended its Service Assurance and Service Automation portfolios — key components of its leading Business Service Management (BSM) platform — to deliver virtualization-specific capabilities. The nine new offerings have been optimized to support goals for performance, compliance and enterprise visibility by addressing some of the most pressing challenges created by virtualization.

All of these new offerings are architected to support both virtual and physical infrastructures, further reducing cost and complexity by allowing IT operations organizations to use a single set of management solutions across their entire IT infrastructure.

As part of this new virtualization management offering, BMC has completed full solution integration with long-time partners Microsoft, Sun and VMware.

Icomasoft Breaks Out of Stealth With VI PowerScripter

September 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Icomasoft, a Swiss pioneer of agent-less software solutions, today announced general availability of its first product: VI PowerScripter. This is a VMware VI Client plug-in with integration of PowerShell scripts into VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 objects.

The plug-in contains some scripts for standard admin tasks. Users can, however, create dozens of self-made scripts and access them through a dynamic context menu in VI Client. At general availability of version 1.0, icomasoft intends to sell a repository of a large number of standard scripts and workflows.

Functionality

Execution of PowerShell scripts through a dynamic context menu (usually no customization required)
Use of VM or host-based PowerShell scripts
Execution of scripts on single and multiple objects(Cluster, Datacenter)
Choice between debug and silent mode
Use of local scripts or network scripts
User-defined and almost unlimited extension of VI Client and VirtualCenter functionality
Execution of all PowerShell scripts with correct VirtualCenter permissions
Logging of all script executions
Use of standard icomasoft® scripts

User’s Benefits

Integration of self-created scripts into VMware’s standard management software
Reduction of required resources for administrative tasks
Easy monitoring and analysis of the virtual infrastructure behavior
Sustained permissions structure during the execution of PowerShell scripts
Increased security as no users profiles and passwords are being used
Mass configuration and individual configuration can be executed with one single script
Almost unlimited extension of the basic functionality of VMware infrastructures and free ESXi
Use of existing scripts with minimal or no customization

icomasoft VI PowerScripter (Beta 1) is available for free download.

VMware Releases Server 1.0.7, Workstation 6.0.5, Player 2.0.5 and ACE 2.0.5

September 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Closely following the recent release of a number of RC versions for a number of products, VMware has put out several versions with minor updates: VMware Server 1.0.7, Workstation 6.0.5, Player 2.0.5 and ACE 2.0.5.

The updates are expected to solve a number of security vulnerabilities. More information on this can be found here.

VMware

VDIworks Virtual Desktop Platform 1.2 To Support HP RGS Protocol

August 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VDIworks today announced that the latest release of VDIworks’ Virtual Desktop Platform (VDP), version 1.2, will provide connection brokering and management for the HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS) protocol. This integrated offering will allow customers to leverage VDIworks’ virtual desktop management capabilities and HP’s RGS protocol to enable the highest grade visual experience possible in a virtualized environment.

While desktop virtualization solutions have focused primarily on the hypervisor back-end, the end-user experience has not achieved parity with what most users expect from a PC. HP’s RGS protocol provides extremely high-speed transmission of multimedia content from a virtual machine to a remote thin client. VDIworks’ VDP will now be able to discover RGS-enabled devices and provide connection brokering as well as additional management services for HP hardware running RGS. VDP supports all popular hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Server, Xen and VMware ESX. HP and VDIworks will continue to work together to improve the performance and feature-set of the newly announced solution.

VDIworks

Egenera To Offer A Technology Preview Of Its New Capacity-on-Demand Solution at VMworld 2008

August 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Egenera today announced an upcoming technology preview of its capacity-on-demand solution developed jointly with VMware. Recently, Egenera had already picked VMware’s virtualization technology to power its BladeFrame Systems.

Set to be unveiled for the first time on the show floor at VMworld, the new joint capacity-on-demand solution will provide VMware VirtualCenter users access to PAN Manager by Egenera processing resources directly through VMware VirtualCenter. With capacity-on-demand, customers benefit from the automatic deployment of ESX hosts onto “bare metal” in response to overutilization that can adversely affect virtual machine performance.

With Egenera’s capacity-on-demand solution, new ESX hosts are automatically registered to VirtualCenter as part of the resource pool, while underutilized ESX hosts can be automatically powered off to reduce energy consumption. In addition, VMware features such as Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) and High Availability (HA) will rebalance virtual machine workloads within the changed environment.

Egenera

[Source: VMblog]