News

Veeam Software, provider of data protection, disaster recovery and systems management solutions for VMware virtual datacenter environments, has launched a customized partner program for service providers and cloud computing providers that specifically aligns to the way they do business.

Veeam’s ProPartner Service Provider (PSP) program will help these providers create new revenue opportunities and provide their clients with additional service offerings. In addition, Veeam’s solutions will help PSP partners better protect and manage their VMware environments and reduce their infrastructure costs through management automation.

Most management tools for VMware only offer an IT-centric view of the virtual infrastructure and don’t allow virtual resources to be managed or prioritized by business needs, such as customer or SLA. However,

Veeam gives service providers a clear view of their multi-tenant infrastructures and enables them to:

• Perform capacity planning and provide chargeback reports on resource allocation and utilization per client or per application (Veeam Reporter Enterprise plus Veeam Business View)
• Offer different SLA data protection and disaster recovery (DR) with different recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs and RTOs) (Veeam Backup & Replication)
• Monitor performance by customer or application, as well as deliver on SLAs by customer or server type (Veeam Monitor plus Veeam Business View)

One of the first service providers to participate in Veeam’s PSP program is iland™, a leading cloud computing provider. iland enables organizations to realize tangible business benefits by delivering cloud-based IT solutions for disaster recovery, desktop virtualization, production server environments and hybrid cloud co-location for enterprises of all sizes.

Sourcefire, the creators of Snort and a provider of cybersecurity solutions, today announced the expansion of the Sourcefire 3D System to support the Xen 3.3.2 and 3.4.2 virtualization platforms.

Now supporting the two leading virtual environments – Xen and VMware – Sourcefire is enabling customers with diverse virtual platforms to further protect these investments, while also leveraging these resources to increase intrusion prevention capabilities.

Sourcefire’s Virtual 3D Sensor and Virtual Defense Centre now provide Xen environments with all the functionality originally available for VMware. Users can deploy Virtual 3D Sensors to inspect traffic between two or more Xen or VMware virtual machines, while also using physical Sourcefire 3D Sensors to inspect traffic going into and out of a virtual environment.

With this support for both Xen and VMware, Sourcefire is making it easier to deploy and manage virtual sensors at remote sites where physical resources may be limited, such as retail stores and branch offices, or where little rack space remains in the datacenter. This release also provides additional flexibility to enterprises and cloud computing companies, which rely on a variety of virtualisation platforms to support specific requirements.

The Virtual 3D Sensor provides simultaneous execution of Sourcefire IPS, RNA (Real-time Network Awareness) and RUA (Real-time User Awareness) functions. Customers can deploy the Virtual Defense Centre to monitor any combination of up to 25 virtual or physical 3D Sensors. They can also opt to monitor their Virtual 3D Sensors from the same physical Defense Center they use to monitor their physical 3D Sensors.

FastSoft announced its Desktop Virtualization Acceleration solution earlier this week for remote workers.

It accelerates Citrix Remote Desktop, Microsoft RDP, and other leading thin client applications up to 500%, significantly improving end-user experience and productivity for remote workers. Like other FastSoft solutions, it is deployed on the server side and does not require client software on the remote side, giving FastSoft’s customers fast and scalable deployments.

ReSource Pro, a leading business process outsourcing provider to the insurance industry, has seen a 10% increasing in remote worker productivity using FastSoft’s thin client acceleration solution.

The solution employs FastSoft’s patented FastTCP algorithm developed at the California Institute of Technology. It eliminates long pauses during remote desktop sessions, ensuring that thin clients are not starved for bandwidth and that they recover quickly from packet loss.

It’s been four months since the November 2009 release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, the company’s new virtualization product that includes a standalone hypervisor based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology and comprehensive server virtualization management tools.

Recently, Red Hat  released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, featuring a range of new capabilities.

The highlights of this release include:

Virtual desktop support
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is designed to support both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.

Import and export
With the 2.2 beta release, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager can now import and export virtual machine images and templates using the industry-standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF). With this feature, customers can more easily move virtual machine images between environments, publish templates or simply create backups of their environment.

V2V : Virtual machine conversion
V2V is a tool designed to automate the conversion of VMware or Xen virtual machine images into an OVF file for use within Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With V2V incorporated into the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta, customers are able to take Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 or 5 virtual machines created in VMware or Xen environments and automatically convert them into Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtual machines. We expect V2V to be extended in a future beta release to support conversion of Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 virtual machines images.

Data warehouse
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now includes a data warehouse that collects monitoring data for hosts, virtual machines and storage, allowing customers to analyze their environment and create reports using any query tool that supports SQL.

Performance
The maximum allowable memory for a virtual machine has been increased from 64GB to 256GB in the beta, which we believe should allow even the most memory-intensive enterprise workloads to be virtualized.

The hypervisor has also been updated to use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 kernel with the aim of allowing customers to take advantage of the latest hardware, such as the Intel Nehalem-EX and AMD Opteron (TM) 6000 Series platform (formerly code named “Magny-Cours”).

Today’s beta also features improved disk I/O performance for virtual machines using thin provisioning or snapshots to deliver performance within a few percent of raw/thick provisioned disks.

All current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers can download the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta via Red Hat Network today.

Reflex Systems, a pioneer in virtualization systems management solutions, today introduced vProfile, a new configuration management tool that enables IT managers to visually map configuration variances in their virtual infrastructure and enforces compliance with internal or external configuration standards.

A fully integrated component of the Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC), vProfile provides a highly flexible framework for IT teams who aim to scale the virtual infrastructure while ensuring consistent configuration, meeting compliance and audit requirements and implementing IT automation for management tasks. With vProfile configuration management, Reflex customers can see their virtual infrastructure visually expressed as a “heatmap,” enabling them to quickly identify configuration differences, remediate as needed and set configuration baselines.

Reflex VMC tracks thousands of properties associated with hosts, virtual machines and virtual management servers like VMware’s vCenter. vProfile configuration management utilizes networking, storage and operational configuration types for hosts running hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and ESXi.

Virtual Machine profiles may contain configuration properties such as CPU, memory, storage, networking and advanced properties. vProfile also extends to the configuration of multiple vCenters to manage folders, resource pools, permissions, roles, access control, high availability and DRS.

By recognizing these properties in the virtual infrastructure, storing them in the Virtualization CMDB, and surfacing them through its patent-pending Virtualization Query Language (VQL), Reflex can provide true integrated systems management, encompassing security, configuration management, compliance and policy enforcement throughout the virtualized data center.