News

Red Hat Unveils Virtualization Strategy At Boston Summit

June 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Today at Red Hat Summit in Boston, two of Red Hat’s emerging technology engineers, Dan Barrange and Richard Jones, presented the new tool sets that their team has developed for work with Xen virtual machines (VMs). It includes command line utilities, which will become part of the oVirt tool set, a web-based virtual machine management console built using Ruby on Rails.

oVirt uses Red Hat’s open source libvirt management framework that provides hypervisor-agnostic management interfacing, allowing the same tools to manage multiple different hypervisors. Libvirt already supports six hypervisors : Xen, KVM, QEMU, OpenVZ, Linux Containers (LVX) and Solaris LDoms.

The company also announced that its own embedded, lightweight, stand-alone hypervisor and accompanying management console are available in beta right now. Red Hat’s new Linux hypervisor hosts both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Rather than base the software on the open-source Xen hypervisor, Red Hat has chosen the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project, which is already used by the major Linux OSs as the default server virtualization package. Another key difference: while Xen works well with Linux, it’s an add-on. KVM, on the other hand, is an integral part of Linux.

Read more about Red Hat’s virtualization announcements here.

Tresys Ships VM Fortress, Aims To Meet High End Desktop Virtualization Security Needs

June 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and services for customers with high security requirements, today announced (PDF) the availability of Tresys VM Fortress, a patent-pending secure desktop virtualization technology for organizations seeking strong security and operational integrity.

VM Fortress (not to be confused with vFortress, a company recently acquired by Propalms), aims to give organizations with high-end security needs the ability to utilize desktop virtualization without compromising protection by strengthening the guest operations system and the virtualization software itself to withstand the most threatening of compromises.

According to the press release, VM Fortress benefits and market differentiators include:

Strong Endpoint Security: Providing strong, independent control over system resources by leveraging the flexible mandatory access control (MAC) features provided by Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to limit damage caused by exploitable vulnerabilities in virtual machines
Decreased Operational Costs: Removing the barrier of entry to desktop consolidation where security assurance is a high priority; leveraging stronger MAC security reduces the damage and costs to desktop environments should they become attacked
Increased Data Confidentiality & Integrity: Providing separation for the user and the application on a per VM basis, ensuring that data is not leaked across VMs and that applications cannot interfere with each other while sharing the same hardware resources
Increased Operational Integrity: Limiting the effects of attacks and errors, so that vulnerabilities in one VM cannot be exploited to gain access to other VMs or to the host operating system
Ease of Management/Deployment: Systems can be deployed over the network from a central installation server and VMs can be remotely downloaded on demand by the user

Lanamark Launches With Powerful Capacity Planning Software Suite

June 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Lanamark, a provider of software solutions for accelerating virtualization services delivery, today announced limited availability of its flagship software solution Lanamark Suite. The company, a privately held corporation headquartered in Toronto, Canada, also announced a Lanamark Early Access Program (LEAP) for VARs, consultants and system integrators.

Lanamark Suite consists of software applications for discovering, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing heterogeneous IT infrastructure. It allows Lanamark channel partners to deliver virtualization services quickly and consistently across multiple hypervisors, protect customer data captured for analysis and differentiate their offerings by providing customers with “unique, sophisticated and unbiased service deliverables”.

“Lanamark Suite enables service providers to deliver hypervisor-agnostic virtualization services that help their customers accelerate adoption of virtualized environments,” said Mark Angelo, CEO and founder of Lanamark. “Today’s solutions are not designed for services delivery – they are challenging and time-consuming to deploy, use and license. Furthermore, these solutions are very intrusive to customer environments and do not adequately secure and protect customer data. Our software is designed from the ground up to address these challenges and remove non-value-add activities. We enable our channel partners to focus on areas where they can leverage their extensive knowledge of IT infrastructure and add the most value for customers – analysis, design and optimization of virtualized and physical infrastructure.”

Angelo comes from PlateSpin, where he was Product Line Manager for PowerRecon, and recently from VMLogix, where he was Director of Business Development.

Lanamark Suite consists of:

Lanamark Portal – for managing customer accounts, engagements and assessments online. Using the Lanamark Portal, service providers can also administer teams of consultants and acquire individual licenses for workload analysis in Lanamark Studio.
Lanamark Explorer – for truly agent-less collection of inventory and performance data about application workloads and server resources. Lanamark Explorer is a light-weight and easy-to-install application that does not require licenses upfront. The data it captures is stored in a secure snapshot that can only be unlocked by the service provider performing the assessment.
Lanamark Studio – for rich analysis and reporting on application workloads and server resources. Using templates, consultants can identify virtualization candidates and automatically publish powerful charts and reports that map directly onto assessment deliverables, consistently across engagements.

openQRM 4.0 (Beta), Going Strong

June 18, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Matt Rechenburg has just announced the beta version of openQRM 4.0.

Not even that long after Qlusters decided to set the project free, the openQRM team has changed directions in a way Qlusters never would have allowed.

openQRM 4.0 is a major rewrite of the openQRM functionality in PHP. The openQRM team has been listening to the community and learned that contributions will be much easier if the tool would be rewritten in a scripting-based language. They decided to keep the platform as simple as possible.

Plugin support now is a lot easier, rather than having to reconfigure and enable plugins from the command line, one can now enable plugins from the webGUI (similar to the Drupal modules)

The old openQRM provided a lot of proprietary libraries and tools that were already available on a typical Linux distribution. From now on, openQRM will use the tools available from the distribution.

The goal of openQRM hasn’t changed , the focus of the project is still on on rapid-, appliance-based deployment, virtualization and storage management.

Still no news from the Qlusters side however, and their site obviously needs an update.

CiRBA Releases Version 5.0 of Its Virtualization Analysis Platform

June 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

CiRBA, provider of Data Center Intelligence software, today announced the release of Version 5.0 of its virtualization and consolidation analysis software. With Version 5.0, CiRBA aims to enable organizations to build dynamic models of their virtual and physical infrastructure to continually identify opportunities to improve performance, optimize VM placements, and minimize operational risk.

“Version 5.0 underscores the fact that all the details that go into planning virtualized infrastructure must also be factored in on a daily basis when managing virtual environments,” said Andrew Hillier, CIRBA CTO and Co-Founder. “All business-level constraints, technical compatibilities, workload personalities, and risk tolerances need to be respected every time an environment undergoes changes. And because virtual environments are constantly changing, CiRBA’s latest release provides the dynamic analysis needed to bring all of this together to optimize utilization and minimize operational risk, while at the same time keeping an eye on minimizing power consumption and maximizing financial returns.”

Using CIRBA Version 5.0, organizations build unique dynamic models of existing IT environments. These models provide a consolidated view of the critical business, technical, configuration, and workload data typically stored in disparate systems. Pre-packaged and customizable analysis templates are applied to these models in order to provide the intelligence required to transform an environment and continually assess the impact of change within virtualized infrastructure.

Because the analysis is rule-driven, the options for analysis are virtually unlimited and are generally categorized according to the type of transformation being considered such as P2P, P2V or V2V, or by the requirements of an individual’s role or focus, such as capacity planning, risk management or compliance reporting.

CiRBA Version 5.0 also introduces integrated financial analysis by enabling the results of an analysis to be directly inserted into any Excel-based financial model. CiRBA 5.0 includes a default model that provides a comprehensive TCO/ROI calculation, factoring in both capital and operational savings, applying hardware, power, facilities and staff costs to analysis results to determine the true financial profile of each strategy being considered.

Microsoft Ships Application Virtualization 4.5 Release Candidate

June 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Fresh after sharing the new short name for Microsoft Application Virtualization (SoftGrid became App-V), the MAV team has released the version 4.5 Release Candidate of the software.

So what’s new?

HTTP streaming. We now support streaming virtual applications from an IIS server (version 6 or 7). This will provide dramatic performance and scalability improvements for customers with large App-V deployments. In addition, the use of a more familiar protocol will make some deployments easier and more straight forward.

New Sequencer UI. We have greatly simplified the use of the Sequencer. There is now a single wizard for creating a new package and advanced settings have been put into an optional screen. In addition, enhancements have been made that will make editing packages even easier.

Dynamic Suite Composition (DSC) for MSI packages. We introduced two great features with our Beta release – Dynamic Suite Composition and the ability to create MSI packages directly from the Sequencer. DSC allows the flexibility to control virtual application interaction. Creating MSI packages directly from the sequencer eliminates the need for a server environment when deploying virtual applications. But, it was a little difficult to use both DSC and MSI together with the Beta release. With the RC release, you can now dynamically suite two MSI packages together by following a few simple steps.

Improved integration with SCCM 2007 R2. With the upcoming release of the Release Candidate version of SCCM 2007 R2, the ability to deploy virtual applications via SCCM will be seamless for SCCM administrators. Virtual applications can now be streamed via HTTP so that deployments can scale. Also, a new wizard will make the process of sending out package upgrades to users simple and straightforward.

Reporting. Application usage information is now recorded locally on each client and then sent to a App-V Management Server during Publishing Refresh. This means that offline usage of applications or usage of applications when streaming from different sources is now all accounted for properly in the App-V database. We are also providing new guidance so that customers can run their own customized reports.

New Manageability tools. We’ve added a OpsMgr 2007 Management Pack to improve the monitoring capabilities of your App-V servers. We’ve added a ADM template to make it simpler to manage common client configurations via group policy. Finally, we’ve created a VSS Writer so that backups of the App-V server can leverage the latest technology.

Client cache improvements. The maximum size of the client cache has been increased to 1 TB. We also introduced a feature that allows for least recently used applications to be removed from cache should it become full and a user is trying to add a new application. Also, we’re created some perfmon counters to make it easier to monitor the state of the cache.

New MSI package capability. As mentioned above, the ability to create MSI packages directly from the Sequencer was introduced in our Beta release. However, the application was required to be used in an “offline” way, such that no connectivity to servers was needed. Customers told us they like the ability to do just the publishing of application shortcuts, icons and file type associations via the MSI, but they wanted the ability to still stream applications to their clients and to deliver package updates this way, too. With the RC release, this is now possible via a new command line parameter that does just this publishing activity.

Accessibility. The product is now Section 508 compliant, bringing App-V in line with other Microsoft products.

Documentation. As part of the RC, we have updated the online help that is included with the product. In addition, we are releasing a Planning and Deployment Guide and a FAQ for Upgrading to Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5.

You can download App-V 4.5 from Microsoft Connect. You need a Windows Live ID.