News

ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced that R Systems, a service provider of flexible, on-demand high-performance computing resources to the commercial and academic research community, has deployed ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation in its data centers.

With vSMP Foundation, R Systems is able to isolate customer systems for security purposes, help customers avoid recoding of applications, eliminate the underutilization of systems, lower costs for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems and ensure that customers only pay for the resources they use within the R Systems cloud, improve data center flexibility and reduce system complexity.

R Systems provides its commercial and academic research community customers with dedicated hosting, shared systems, virtual private clusters and/or support for off-site/remote facilities. A typical researcher requests a hosted SMP system and R Systems provides them with access to the hardware, OS or applications at whatever level they want to take over responsibility. R Systems’ goal was to be able to easily provision SMP systems to meet customer requirements and lower SMP costs.

Additionally, the company wanted to help researchers avoid recoding applications and be able to easily isolate customers to offer them complete security and autonomy. In July 2008 R Systems adopted vSMP Foundation for SMP because it was the only solution that gave them full access to all of the RAM and any processor in a given system. The company has also adopted vSMP Foundation for Cloud for its dynamic virtual SMP provisioning needs.

Since deployment, the company has been able to eliminate the extra months it would generally take customers to recode their applications for a distributed memory system and can provide isolated and secure virtual SMP systems that are tailored to specific customer needs so customers only pay for compute power they use. R Systems has also reduced file system complexity using vSMP Foundation’s ability to pull everything into one operating system. Overall, vSMP Foundation has increased R Systems’ resource flexibility and enabled the company to deliver better customer service.

Red Hat today announced that the Symbian Foundation, a global non-profit organization formed to foster an open source community around its mobile device software, has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide a scalable, high-performance base for its private, cloud-based developer website and server.

By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in their cloud environment, the Symbian Foundation improved its ability to scale with business changes, new requirements and peaks in website traffic without the need to invest more heavily in additional onsite software and hardware resources.

Additionally, performance and manageability have increased with the greater ease of use and improved support delivered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, combined with the solution’s ability to handle heavy, mission-critical workloads.

CA has announced that its virtualization management solutions now support Sun’s Solaris Zones virtualization platform.

The expanded support of CA’s Service Assurance and Business-Driven Automation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization platforms helps enterprise and service provider customers to realize greater cost savings, efficiency and flexibility from their complex virtualized and cloud computing infrastructures.

CA’s highly scalable and enterprise-class virtualization management products fully support Sun’s Solaris Zones virtualization platform, enabling customers to greatly reduce risk by using the same set of tools to centrally manage their virtualized and physical environments.

CA’s proactive performance alerts help customers improve service quality by identifying potential performance issues and quickly pinpointing the root cause of problems. CA’s deep visibility into business transactions and the reliability made innate by the automation of routine activities helps lead to improved operational excellence. The CA solutions also help customers put critical applications into production much faster, leading to much improved agility and faster time to market.

In the battle for the Mac desktop virtualization market, VMware is preparing its latest soldier with the VMware Fusion 3.1 Beta build (release notes).

Currently, this Beta version has 10+ new and improved features and includes 200+ bug fixes.

These include:

• More Powerful Graphics Performance for Games & 3D Apps: OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows Vista and Windows 7, DirectX 9.0 SM3 performance improvements, Windows Aero performance improvements, better OpenGL compatibility for modeling apps
• Improved USB Support: USB “EasyConnect” makes it simple to assign a USB device to a virtual machine or your Mac and then remembers preferred settings for each USB device
• Support for larger virtual machines: 8-way SMP support added, maximum virtual hard disk size increased from 950 GB to 2 TB
• Improved Boot Camp Support: Improved disk performance for your Boot Camp VMs, better handling of disk configuration changes to avoid duplicate entries, option to avoid authentication dialogs when using a Boot Camp virtual machine
• PC Migration Improvements: Migration status displayed on PC, now avoids port conflicts, guest account issues on Mac OS X now resolved
• User Experience Improvement Program: VMware uses information obtained through the User Experience Improvement Program to improve the quality, reliability, and performance of our products and to plan our future development and testing. Participation in the program is voluntary and you can opt out at any time.
• Many Additional UI Improvements and 200+ Bugs Fixed

Elastra Corporation, provider of application infrastructure automation software, today announced the availability of a free trial version of Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server (ECS) for VMware vSphere 4 customers.

In this offering, ECS lets customers compose, orchestrate and deploy application infrastructure to virtualization environments managed with VMware vSphere 4. ECS already supports private clouds based on VMware VCenter or Citrix XEN, as well as the Amazon public cloud. Systems created for one virtualization environment are portable to another. The trial version only supports vSphere 4 environments – no other cloud platforms are supported in the trial version.

Customers interested in using the Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server for vSphere 4 can visit Elastra’s website and complete a short sign-up form to gain access to download location and instructions on using the product.

VMware has launched a Lab site where VMware Engineers can share new tools that they are developing.

They are offering a wide range of tools here, each of which are being offered under a Technical Preview or relevant Open Source License.

Give them a try and provide your feedback to the developers.

These tools are being called “flings”:

A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the applications offered here are intended to be played with and explored.  They are not yet part of any product offering and there is no support for them.  They are, however, totally free. And you don’t even have to fill out a form before downloading them!

These flings include:

Apache Pivot – Apache Pivot is a platform for building rich internet applications in Java. It combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform.

Dynamo RIO – DynamoRIO is a runtime code manipulation system that supports code transformations on any part of a program, while it executes. DynamoRIO gives complete control over the runtime code stream and does not limit transformations to trampoline insertion.

esxplot – The software runs on Linux systems, and generates timeseries graphs for selected esxtop fields (as png graphs). The software will also generate simple statistical measures including mean and standard variation for selected esxtop fields.

Onyx – Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.

SVGA Sonar – SVGA Sonar is a demo application for SVGADevTap. SVGADevTap is a user-level library that communicates with the VMware SVGA guest driver to provide low-latency notifications of changes to the screen.

vApprun – The vapprun command-line tool brings the full vApp model to Workstation and Fusion. It builds vApps that contain multiple VMs or nested vApps. Configure start/stop ordering of child elements of a vApp. Power-on/power-off/shutdown of vApps.Supports OVF Properties and the OVF Environment.

vCMA – Ever wish you could restart a virtual machine or migrate it to another host from the convenience of your mobile phone? With VMware vCenter Mobile Access, you can monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.

VGC – VMware Guest Console (VGC) is an application to manage the Guest Operating Systems installed on a VM. VGC includes a Unified Task Manager, Guest file system explorer, Snapshot Manager and a VM Manager. VGC is supported with vmware server and desktop products like vSphere, Server 2.0 and Workstation and can connect to multiple hosts simultaneously.

VI Java – The VMware vSphere Java API provides a full set of libraries to manage and control VMware virtual machines and servers. Ver 2.0 includes a high performance Web Service engine much faster/smaller than Apach AXIS.

Virtual USB Analyzer – We developed vusb-analyzer at VMware as an efficient way to debug our own USB virtualization stack. We wanted a tool that made it easy to see problems at a glance, and we wanted a way to solve both correctness and performance bugs. As a result, we ended up with what we think is a fairly unique tool. We’re excited to have the opportunity now to release this tool as open source software, under the MIT license.