Virtualization.com

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

News

VMware Debuts Zimbra Appliance, Makes All Zimbra Products Available to Its Customers and Partners

by Leave a Comment

VMware recently launched the Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance, an enterprise-class email and collaboration solution delivered as a virtual appliance.

Designed to run on the VMware vSphere platform, the Zimbra Appliance helps reduce the cost and complexity of infrastructure management.

In addition, VMware announced that Zimbra, which it acquired in February 2010, is now fully integrated within VMware.

All Zimbra products are now available via VMware’s extensive sales and channel partner ecosystem, providing VMware’s 190,000 customers and 25,000 partners full access to Zimbra’s email and collaboration product suite. Zimbra customers are also now supported by VMware’s Global Support Services, the world’s largest virtualization support organization.

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance is currently available starting at USD $ 625/25 mailboxes for a perpetual license. For the latest information on Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance and pricing please visit: www.zimbra.com/products.

The full suite of Zimbra products is now available through the VMware sales and via VMware’s more than 25,000 channel partners. For more information, please visit:  www.vmware.com/products/zimbra/

Virtual Bridges Releases New VERDE Version

by Leave a Comment

Virtual Bridges, provider of desktop virtualization solutions and originator of VDI, disconnected and branch-office use, has announced the immediate availability of VERDE 4.2.

In less than three months since the release of VERDE 4, the new-version capabilities underscore the company’s commitment to meet market needs through rapid innovation, including extending the reach of VERDE to iPad and iPhone users to serve growing mobile workforce markets.

New VERDE 4.2 functionality includes:

iVERDE

Built on the open-source iDesktop client, iVERDE allows iPad and iPhone users to access VERDE Windows 7, Windows XP and Linux desktops. iVERDE is fully integrated with the VERDE distributed connection broker and user console, providing a user experience identical to any other VERDE client. iVERDE has been contributed to the open-source community under the GPL license, and is available through Apple’s AppsStore.

Active Directory integration for dynamic desktop sessions

Combines the benefits of VERDE’s unique dynamic gold master provisioning while fully leveraging the IT department’s investment in Active Directory user, group and machine policies and controls. Unlike legacy solutions that employ technologies like linked clones, now once a desktop becomes part of an Active Directory, it becomes a dynamic, yet unique and personalized desktop instance.

Enhanced security with support for two-factor authentication

Offers customers the ability to use industry-standard, two-factor authentication technologies, including RSA SecureID, Safeword and other RADIUS-based solutions to secure virtual desktop sessions.

Customizable VERDE LEAF (Live Environment Access Format):

Customers can personalize the VERDE Off-line VDI Type 1 client side hypervisor, LEAF, with specific branding and custom login scripts. This allows customers to personalize the login experience for end users using the VERDE client-side hypervisor. Virtual Bridges is the only vendor to provide an integrated VDI and Off-line VDI (client side hypervisor) experience that works from the same gold image. VERDE LEAF also features bi-directional data synchronization that users enjoy a consistent environment whether accessing from VDI or Off-Line VDI.

Skytap Introduces Groups, Better Organizational Management Capabilities

by Leave a Comment

Skytap, provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, recently announced Skytap Groups, a new capability that enables companies to model their organizational structures quickly and easily within Skytap.

With this new capability, managers are empowered to create multiple user groups and assign role-based permissions to each user or user group. As a result, Skytap enables IT managers to gain the highest level of visibility and control over cloud operations.

Most cloud services are designed to support individual users and typically lack functionality to support groups, departments or lines of business with hundreds of users. Skytap Groups breaks the status quo and enables businesses to model their organizational structure in the cloud.

Businesses can now use one cloud platform for multiple user groups such as development, test, training, sales engineering and IT operations — and assign role based permissions to govern cloud usage. By bringing this sophisticated user management capability to the market, Skytap removes a significant barrier to cloud adoption.

Skytap Groups provides a flexible model to organize users based on their specific role in the organization, geographic location, or business unit.

For example, an enterprise IT organization can create multiple groups of users to support a project for a new application launch. Groups of developers, testers, and IT architects can each have their own environment and execute their specific role — developers can build the application; testers can use their cloud environment for functional validation; and IT architects can use their environment to ensure compatibility with the production platform.

Using Skytap, each group can be invited to a project where role-specific templates and assets are organized. Each group’s usage and access policies can be managed easily and quickly with roles at the account level and at the project level, providing a greater degree of visibility and control.

Skytap has also enhanced its user-based permission model to include more granular access limits with the addition of Account Roles and Project Roles. The Account Roles feature allows administrators to define specific access limits. This can range from user managers who can delegate management privileges down to a restricted user that may only have the ability to start or stop virtual machines.

The Project Roles feature allows even more granularity by enabling owners of individual projects to further limit the access at a project level with roles specific to the project.

For example, a development manager can create specific user groups for local developers, a remote testing team and a localization contractor.

The development manager is empowered to create dev/test environments, and then:

  • Delegate Skytap user management privileges to a senior developer
  • Add the testing team to participate in the project with collaboration privileges
  • Set the localization team with restricted user permission to limit their visibility

Emerson Network Power Introduces New Virtual Infrastructure Management Solution

by Leave a Comment

Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson, recently introduced the Avocent Virtual Advanced Console Server 6000 (ACS v6000), a new tool for secure, remote data center and out-of-band management of virtual assets.

The Avocent ACS v6000 offers a complete, centralized management solution that grants authorized users access to enterprise resources, keeping virtual assets available 24×7 while enforcing strict security measures.

All of the next-generation functionality of the popular Avocent ACS 6000 has been encapsulated in a virtual appliance to enable dependable connectivity and management of virtual IT assets, such as virtual machines running Windows EMS, UNIX, Linux and Solaris.

It also enables the end user to manage these virtual assets in the same manner as physical assets such as routers, switches, public branch exchange (PBX) telecommunications equipment (DSU/CSU) and serial power devices. The introduction of the Avocent ACS v6000 expands this capability for the first time to virtual machines, allowing IT managers to further leverage their virtualization investment while maximizing the existing offering.

Avocent Virtual ACS 6000 is available now.

Zenoss Joins The Linux Foundation

by Leave a Comment

The Linux Foundation has announced that open source enterprise IT management company Zenoss is its newest member.

Zenoss products enable enterprises to assure IT service delivery and manage operations for business services, networks, and servers across physical, virtual, and cloud-based datacenters.

The company uses the open source development model to design and build its products and is joining The Linux Foundation to collaborate with Linux and open source developers and users on requirements for enterprise-level, end-to-end network monitoring.

Zenoss is working with partners such as Cisco and VMware to enable enterprise customers to manage their virtual environments and private cloud datacenters. Linux supports nearly all of the world’s cloud services, including those from Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, as well as 10gen, 3Tera, Elastra, EMC, Enomaly, Flexiscale, IBM, Mosso, Salesforce.com and more.

Profitability.net Selects Extreme Networks for Virtualized Data Center and Cloud Network

by Leave a Comment

Extreme Networks today announced that colocation provider Profitability.net has chosen its virtualized 10 Gigabit data center, cloud and storage networking solutions based on its 4 Pillar Data Center strategy, as it rolls out its Appica.com cloud service.

Profitability.net provides data center, hosted application, and cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services for 450+ emerging to Fortune 1000 companies. Profitablity.net is launching Appica.com to provide public and private cloud servers and storage.

With Appica.com, customers can eliminate costly virtualization projects and simply add and remove servers and storage as needed. Purchasing cloud services enables customers to become profitable earlier in the business lifecycle, enabling them to choose only as much network and storage capacity as they need, rather than under-provisioning or overspending on servers to support their users.

Extreme Networks’ solution to scale and simplify the data center architectures by reducing network tiers and its network-based solutions to address Virtual Machine (VM) lifecycle management were crucial in establishing and rolling out Profitability.net’s cloud based storage and data services.

To assist the performance and uptime of Appica.com cloud services, Extreme Networks developed a customized network solution and data center migration plan based on its 4 Pillar Data Center strategy for transitioning to a highly virtualized data center while simplifying the network.

The migration strategy includes Extreme Networks scalable Ethernet switching platforms and its XNV virtualization lifecycle management solution, providing multivendor support of leading server virtualization platforms to provide visibility, control and automated management of VMs.

This next generation data center architecture accommodates Profitability.net’s evolving technology landscape, supporting integrated SAN storage, and server virtualization.