Virtualization.com

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

News

Red Hat, HP Optimize RH Enterprise Virtualization for HP BladeSystem Matrix

by Leave a Comment

Red Hat and HP today expanded their collaboration to drive the next generation of converged server, storage and networking infrastructure solutions with the launch of open source software designed to improve administrator productivity, lower costs and maximize resource utilization.

Yesterday, Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, the foundation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is now available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. With this combination, customers can take advantage of an open source, standards-based virtual infrastructure that provides scalability and security capabilities. Additionally, enterprises will be able to leverage management capabilities offered by both companies. In the future, customers can expect increasing levels of management integration between the system and operating environment to further drive administrator productivity.

The HP BladeSystem Matrix is a “cloud infrastructure in a box” that brings the economics, scalability and response times of the cloud to diverse applications across customers` data centers.

Customers can obtain increased performance improvement and cost savings by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware on HP ProLiant G6 platforms. They also can get a single point of accountability for the purchase and support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP systems. With its comprehensive range of world-class support services, HP offers customers complete confidence to grow their businesses while controlling costs.

Vizioncore Offers vConverter SC and vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management as Freeware

by 2 Comments

Vizioncore today announced that vControl’s multi-hypervisor management capability will now be available for free.

Customers who have VMware ESX infrastructures, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer infrastructure can now manage these environments through a single console – helping to reduce administration costs and improve management consistency.

vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management provides a browser-based interface that enables control of multiple platforms, allowing administrators to leverage easy-to-trigger workflows for task-based administration of VMs. Furthermore, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management provides a cost-effective solution for high availability in the data center.

In addition to vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management, Vizioncore offers vControl Self-Service Provisioning for $399/socket. With this product VM consumers can build and provision VMs for themselves through customizable VM templates.

Furthermore, the company has also announced that vConverter SC (Server Consolidation) will now be available for free as well. Customers may use the tool to accelerate towards a virtualized environment, making the most of maintenance windows and reducing downtime on current physical machines.

vConverter SC offers an intuitive GUI to enable rapid simultaneous conversions of single or multiple servers without disruption to the source system. By combining cutting-edge disk and networking technology with extensive automation of pre- and post-conversion tasks, it boasts the ability to successfully migrate more servers per conversion window, saving valuable maintenance time. Furthermore the product is compatible with hypervisors from leading vendors such as VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, making it the perfect fit for almost every environment.

VMware announces VMware vCloud Express, goes head to head with Amazon EC2

by 2 Comments

VMware today announced vCloud Express, a new class of service that will deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing power as a service, much like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Built on VMware vSphere, vCloud Express enables to quickly start using enterprise quality computing platforms based on vSphere. As the vCloud environments are based on vSphere, it is easy to import and export workloads between the internal IT environment and external cloud providers.

VMware vCloud Express will be available through many service providers. Several of them are launching beta releases of these services today. Among those are Terremark, Hosting.com They can be found through the VMware Website.

So far, this field has been dominated by Amazon. The vCloud Express solution will probably kickstart some serious competition, both on price and service levels. Several “big names” announced support for vCloud and vCloud Express today. Since debuting the vCloud initiative at VMworld 2008 last year, more than 1000 service providers have signed up. Today the spotlight is on a few of the bigger “enterprise” cloud providers, that are collaborating closely with VMware on the vCloud API.

VMware submitted the vCloud API to DMTF to get it certified as an open standard, to ensure customers can “get their data out of the cloud” if needed, and to allow interoperability between different clouds.

Enterprise infrastructure providers

Several large infrastructure providers announced their own vSphere based cloud offerings. AT&T, Verizon Business, SAVVIS and Terremark all announced similar offerings.

Software providers
Several software providers already support the vCloud API to automatically provision virtual appliances to vCloud-compatible service providers. This greatly facilitates software distribution. Several of these VM build services like CohesiveFT and rPath have announced support for vCloud.

More open source competition coming up

While VMware only spoke about Amazon EC2, another interesting development is the Xen Cloud Platform, an initiative of the Xen Project to enable completely open source cloud infrastructures. XCP was announced yesterday. The Xen project will build upon the work done by projects like the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula to create what basically is an open source equivalent of the vSphere / vCloud stack.

Citrix, a major contributor to the Xen Project and a major competitor of VMware, is expected to announce a commercial XCP offering soon.

Zoho Partners with VMware to Bring Private Cloud Software-as-a-Service Solutions To Enterprise Customers

by Leave a Comment

Zoho today announced a relationship with VMware designed to give customers a streamlined approach to running Zoho applications in their own data centers, leveraging the industry-leading VMware platform, which has been adopted by thousands of customers.

For enterprises that want to run Zoho online applications on-site, Zoho historically delivered its applications as appliances, via racks of servers that were exact replicas of the hardware running in Zoho data centers. The rack solution, however, forced companies to use Zoho’s unique hardware configuration if they wanted to run Zoho on-site.

The VMware platform will minimize the hardware limitations of the Zoho rack, while increasing the availability, resilience and flexibility of the underlying infrastructure. Customers who want their Zoho applications to execute locally will have the choice of running Zoho applications on their internal cloud based on VMware vSphere 4, which runs on a broad range of hardware and is widely deployed in enterprises today.

The VMware relationship will give enterprises an improved approach for running Zoho on-site as an internal cloud and keeping their data behind the firewall, which has been a concern of customers. Zoho applications can also be integrated with a company’s existing applications. Users get the best of both worlds — data stays in-house, and cloud applications are deployed with complete control.

Vizioncore Debuts vOptimizer WasteFinder as Freeware

by 1 Comment

Vizioncore today announced that vOptimizer Pro’s space and alignment scanning and reporting capabilities will now be available as a new freeware product called vOptimizer WasteFinder.

VMware customers will be able to use vOptimizer WasteFinder to search for over-allocated virtual storage and to immediately see the potential savings available from reclaiming this space.

Vizioncore customers worldwide have been using vOptimizer Pro to drastically reduce wasted virtual storage, typically an area in which businesses have little or no transparency or control. Once found, over-allocated storage can be reclaimed and reused by other virtual machines or other physical infrastructure. Businesses that have never considered themselves at risk of excessive storage waste can now easily and quickly download vOptimizer WasteFinder for free and reveal the true picture.

The tool also detects problem areas such as virtual machines that are not 64k aligned, which leads to poor I/O performance. Vizioncore’s initiative to offer free tools that accelerate virtualization adoption started earlier this year with the launch of the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI). Virtualization EcoShell focuses on script-based VM administration, providing a powerful personal productivity solution to VM administrators.

With a download and set-up time of approximately 15 minutes, vOptimizer WasteFinder can be run by any VMware customer. vOptimizer WasteFinder can be downloaded for free here, and additional product information is available here.

Release: VMLogix LabManager Cloud Edition

by Leave a Comment

VMLogix today announced the general availability of  VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition.

The new product enables software teams to run virtual labs within the gold-standard for public cloud computing, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and is the only offering on the market to offer an enterprise-class virtual lab solution with a utility-like pay-as-you-go model. The flexibility of this cost model is ideal for use cases where demand patterns are most variable like software development, testing, training, demonstrations and support. Additionally, VMLogix will offer a free license for LabManager – Cloud Edition beginning September 1. This offer and evaluation license will expire December 1, 2009.

VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition delivers a dynamic, scalable and elastic virtual lab enabling software teams to improve software quality and time to market. The solution works in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment and supports both Windows and Linux guest images as well as ISV-specific Amazon Machine Images (AMI). LabManager – Cloud Edition brings enhanced levels of integration and automation during the Amazon instance deployment including the ability to seamlessly handle the end user access to the guest console from within the browser.

VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition enables:

  • The creation and management of multi-machine configurations: enabling the combination of multiple AMIs into a single environment and providing capabilities to entirely automate the deployment and re-deployment of multi-machine environments (including software stack customizations) in a policy-governed self-service fashion;
  • Full virtual lab tool capabilities: tapping into powerful enterprise lab management capabilities including license, lease and user/team management as well as enabling users/teams to share and collaborate with lab artefacts, audit trails and access to a centralized repository of software media;
  • On-demand access to virtual lab resources: allowing for immediate access to computing infrastructure resources over the web from any location; and,
  • Pay-for-what-you-use pricing model: leveraging the elasticity of the cloud allows customers to reduce up front capital expenditures by instantly scaling up or scaling down the lab infrastructure when required, and only paying for what is used.