News

Fortisphere, a Virtual Service Management software company, today announced the availability of Fortisphere Virtual Service Manager (VSM), which proactively manages workloads and allocates virtual resources according to business priorities.

Fortisphere VSM is the only solution to enforce service tiers based on the correlation of uptime, performance, utilization and granular guest-level configuration data giving IT the confidence to maximize density and ROI without compromising service levels. A free, fully functional 14-day trial of VSM is available for download here.

Fortisphere VSM enables IT to make better decisions and move up the maturity curve from maintaining the virtualized infrastructure to managing it. VSM is an easy-to-use, quick-to-install virtual appliance with a thin client interface customized for each stakeholder. Its unique architecture enables VSM to gather the detailed VM configuration information needed to provide full visibility across the entire virtual environment and deliver optimal service to the business.

The free, downloadable trial is complete with all the key features and capabilities of VSM including:

• Configuration Management: Proactively find, triage and notify administrators of the root cause of VM issues before users even open a trouble ticket
• Virtual Service Tiers: Set alerts on different resource levels for each application and correlate performance to VM changes.
• Intelligent Inventory: Isolate and view real-time detailed data on specific VMs, categorize VMs and apply customer business tags.
• Density and Capacity Management: Quickly identify resource-starved VMs and consolidation candidates and accurately estimate infrastructure investments.
• Role-based Dashboards and Reporting: Give application owners and IT executives customized portals to filtered VM data and extensive reports customized to meet their needs.

The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever, as worldwide IT spending is on pace to decline 5.2 percent, according to Gartner.

Worldwide enterprise IT spending will struggle more with IT spending dropping 6.9 percent. The IT industry will return to growth with 2010 IT spending forecast to total $3.3 trillion, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009. While IT spending will increase next year, Gartner cautioned IT leaders to be overly optimistic.

The computing hardware market has struggled more than other segments with worldwide hardware spending forecast to total $317 billion in 2009, a 16.5 percent decline. In 2010, spending on hardware spending will be flat. Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4 percent in 2009 with revenue of nearly $1.9 trillion. In 2010, telecom spending is forecast to grow 3.2 percent. Worldwide IT services spending is expected to total $781 billion in 2009, and it is forecast to grow 4.5 percent in 2010. Worldwide software spending is forecast to decline 2.1 percent in 2009, and the segment is projected to grow 4.8 percent in 2010.

On a regional basis, emerging regions will resume strong growth. “By 2012, the accelerated IT spending and culturally different approach to IT in these economies will directly influence product features, service structures, and the overall IT industry. Silicon Valley will not be in the driver’s seat anymore,” Mr. Sondergaard said.

From a budget perspective, there are three important items that IT leaders must consider in 2010:

1. A Shift from Capital Expenditure to Operational Expenditure in the IT Budget — Concepts such as cloud services will accelerate this shift. IT costs become scaleable and elastic. CIOs need to model the economic impact of IT on the overall financial performance of an organization. For public companies, they must show how IT improves earnings per share (EPS).
2. Impact of the Increased Age of IT Hardware — With delayed purchases of servers, PCs and printers likely to continue into 2010, organizations must start to assess the impact of increased equipment failure rates, and if current financial write-off periods are still appropriate. Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3 percent of the global installed base. In 2010, it will be at least 2 million. “If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10 percent of the server installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement be 2011,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “That will impact enterprise risk. CFOs need to understand this dynamic, and it’s the responsibility of the CIO to convey this in a way the CFO understands.”
3. IT Must Learn to Build Compelling Business Cases — 2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.

Mr. Sondergaard said three additional topics that were important in 2009 will continue to dominate IT leaders’ agendas in 2010. These three topics include

• Business Intelligence — Users will continue to expand their investments in this area with the focus moving from “in here” to “out there”
• Virtualization — IT leaders should not just invest in the server and data center environment, but in the entire infrastructure. In 2010, users will create the cornerstone for the cloud infrastructure. They will enable the infrastructure to move from owned to shared.
• Social Media — Organizations are starting to scale their efforts in this space. The technologies are improving and organizations realize this is not only about digital natives. It’s about all client segments including the most significant: the population in the next 10 years, the above 60 year old generations.

While those topics are key to IT agendas today, Mr. Sondergaard highlighted three themes that will become important going forward. They include:

• Context-Aware Computing — This is the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction. Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions.
• Operational Technology (OT) — OT is devices, sensors, and software used to control or monitor physical assets and processes in real-time to maintain system integrity. The rapid growth of OT is increasing the need for a unified view of information covering business process and control systems. OT will become a mainstream focus for all organizations.
• Pattern-Based Strategy — This is a new model about implementing a framework to proactively seek, model, and adapt to leading indicators, often termed “weak” signals, that form patterns in the marketplace, and to exploit them for competitive advantage. A Pattern-Based Strategy will allow an organization to not only better understand what’s happening now in terms of demand, but also to detect leading indicators of change, and to indentify and quantify risks emerging from new patterns rather than continuing to focus on lagging indicators of performance.

While catching up on my reading backlog I ran into an article over at Ostatic titled, “Linux and Virtualization will March Forward Together” ,

Bob Sutor from IBM is quoted in that article stating

“I think Linux is such a natural for virtualization, both as a host and as a guest, and this will drive Linux even deeper into datacenters. Why? Linux and virtualization increase efficiency, allow consolidation, help reduce power and heat generated, and reduce server footprint. When you combine this with the quality of service offered by mainframes, you get even more benefits. When you open all this up to new ways of scheduling and managing applications, clouds emerge. So I think virtualization is key to what will foster greater use of Linux in the next decade.”

Apparently some study figured out that there are even better TCO savings for Linux virtualization as compared to Windows Virtualization and that Linux users Virtualize more . Obviously the license issues with other platforms make it much easier to deploy , and that’s what makes it the default platform in the cloud

Now the really strange thing is that the Linux platform is probably the platform that thad didn’t need Virtualization in the virst place.
All the claims for security, isolation , dll conflicts, finer process isolation etc might be relevant on different platforms but Unix and Linux already had chroots, cpu locking, nice, ionice and others. Good practice can get you pretty far in creating an strict and managable isolated environment, don’t get me wrong there are lot of valid reasons to virtualize on Linux, but the number of reasons not to is probably equally long

As @Beaker also realized adding the extra os layer each time add another factor , a potential performance penalty, another layer to manage, secure and update

So are Bob Sutor and Matt Asay right on their future of Linux Virtualization ? Will it continue to grow, will Linux Virtualization grow bigger than any other platform ?

Off course it will , Linux is the ideal open source platform in the cloud, it’s the perfect light JeOS on a thin Bare Metal Hypervisor , or even Linux as the Hypervisor ? But the average user won’t notice, just as he doesn’t notice now . Virtualization will become invisible again it will become a part of your infrastructure like a CPU or a Switch ,Typical Virtualization management platforms will disappear, or blend in with platforms that manage your infrastructure as a whole.
By then it’s time for a new hype.

Symantec Workspace Virtualization (SWV) 6.1 Service Pack 1 (build 6.1.5104) is now available to the public.

For existing customers (if you already have a license key) you can download the update here – public download site.

For new Customers (those that don’t have a license key) can download it from the trial ware site.

New features include:

• Windows 7 Support – Support has been added for 32-bit versions of Windows 7.
• Increased Streaming Performance – Several enhancements were made to increase performance when streaming virtual packages.
• Workspace Profiles Support – New profiles exclude feature has been added to support excluding all files from a user’s profile.  This lets Workspace Virtualization integrate with Workspace Profiles.

Vizioncore announced an updated version of its free Virtualization EcoShell tool, a freeware desktop application that enables IT administrators to unlock the full potential of their virtual infrastructure and reduce the daily operating costs of managing multi-platform environments.

Fostered and supported by The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) – an online community-driven Web site sponsored by Vizioncore – the Virtualization EcoShell is enhanced by the participation of community members through the exchange of new ideas, value-add services and extensible scripts. The tool is used in conjunction with Microsoft Windows PowerShell and Quest Software’s PowerGUI application.

It can be used to develop and execute complex scripts within a VMware VI 3.5 and vSphere 4.0 environment.

But with the latest version, the tool is expanding to add additional support for virtualization – specifically, VMware’s competition – support has been added for Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform.

Version 1.2.0 includes the following new features:

• Charts Tab allowing users to graph any information presented in the grid view using various chart formats
• Best Practices Filters allow customers to easly perform daily checks of common misconfigurations
• Custom Attribute Manager allows users to view all custom attributes and quickly modify custom attribute values against multiple entities
• Hyper-V PowerPack allowing administrators to manage indivdual Microsoft Hyper-V installations using PowerShell

To learn more and to download, visit: The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative Downloads Page.

vePortal, a provider of Virtual Private Server (VPS) management software, has released version 2.0 of its flagship productvePortal.

vePortal is a management interface for the open-source sever virtualization project called OpenVZ, with additional platforms, including Xen, currently under development.

vePortal enables dozens to hundreds of virtual environments to leverage and share server hardware resources, resulting in exceptional data-center efficiency from administrative, ROI, and energy-consumption perspectives. Each individual virtual environment (VE) contained within can run any different operating system from a wide variety of available and pre-created templates. A full list of features is available here.

vePortal 2.0 is now publicly available worldwide from VePortal or any of its Resellers, Partners, or Distributors.

Retail license pricing is listed at $14.95/month, $149.95/yearly, or $499.95/one-time, licensed on a per server-basis.