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Virtual Computer Teams Up With Xenocode

September 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtual Computer and Xenocode today announced a partnership to automate delivery of Xenocode applications through NxTop Center, Virtual Computer’s one-to-many PC Management platform.

Available immediately, the new feature allows for point and click assignment of Xenocode applications to any combination of NxTop users or groups. In addition, desktop IT managers gain a powerful tool to allow for variability of applications at the end-point while maintaining a single “golden” image of the operating system for their organization.

Virtual Computer customers can take advantage of the new Xenocode integration immediately through an upgrade to the latest release of NxTop which features support for Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V. Current Xenocode customers can pull their existing virtualized applications into NxTop Center in minutes through a new import wizard. In addition, Virtual Computer will be distributing a set of free, prepackaged Xenocode applications along with discounted pricing on Xenocode Virtual Application Studio.

Release: Catbird vCompliance, A Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Service for Virtual and Cloud Environments

September 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Catbird today announced the immediate availability of vCompliance, a comprehensive automated monitoring and enforcement solution that ensures security and regulatory compliance for virtualized and cloud-based data centers.

Based on Catbird’s vSecurity platform, vCompliance’s real-time continuous monitoring service instantly detects compliance violations and quarantines offending assets to ensure ongoing compliance with leading regulatory standards, such as DIACAP, SOX, HIPAA and PCI.

With the increasing presence of VMware virtualization in regulated industries such as financial services, government, retail and healthcare, comes the attendant need to ensure that these deployments meet or exceed existing compliance requirements. vCompliance is designed specifically for these environments. It unites an automated, 24×7, network monitoring service with information from the hypervisor, including a full vulnerability management solution and network access control. These critical services are mandated by regulatory specifications. Catbird vCompliance provides numerous controls required by the leading regulatory standards organizations and the most common security frameworks.

Catbird vCompliance can actually make virtualized assets more compliant than physical, providing yet another incentive for businesses to move to cloud-based and virtualized environments, in addition to the inherent cost savings and provisioning ease. Designed for deployment as a cloud-based service, vCompliance provides a comprehensive and integrated virtualized compliance product, including:

Continuous and automated audit and enforcement to meet the requirements of PCI, HIPAA, SOX, DIACAP, etc.
Policy driven automated controls for auditing, inventory management, configuration management, change management, access control, vulnerability management, and incident response
Vulnerability scanning from inside the virtual subnets, with 100% visibility of all virtual machines
Automated enforcement and quarantine of out of compliance assets
Detailed statistics on compliance status for each individual asset, zone, virtual host or physical host
Automated, customizable reports (per compliance specification, per asset or per zone) geared for the appropriate organizational audience (management, operations, etc.) that provide a quick overview or deep-dive to help resolve compliance issues, ease remediation and restore full compliance
Web-based management

Via Catbird’s integrated security control console, Catbird vCompliance provides a compliance view of virtual systems in the vSphere management application. This integration brings real-time visibility and management of virtual and cloud security to a single web-based management interface, accessible from anywhere. The drag-and-drop dashboard supports automated discovery and hyperlink drill-down for intuitive management and ease of use. The multi-tenant portal provides more flexible administration options to meet the needs of multi-departmental organizations and service providers.

Seamlessly incorporated into the VMware vSphere 4 and VMware vCenter management workflow, VMware administrators can instantly monitor system compliance against standard or customized policies defined by corporate security or governance. Continuous status updates are delivered to the VMware vCenter console by “Catbirds” – stateless, non-invasive appliances deployed on the virtual subnets which act as the eyes and ears of the virtual environment.

In the event of an attempted policy violation, designated personnel are instantly alerted via an array of mechanisms and the offending activity blocked — preventing a compromise of the integrity and compliance of the system. Detailed reporting, accessible directly from the console, provides automated event logs to ease troubleshooting and remediation.

vCompliance is specifically designed to enhance overall data center performance with a minimal footprint and a flexible, fully XML and Web-services based architecture that allows for seamless integration with 3rd party reporting tools, trouble-ticketing and other enterprise-class services in a heterogeneous environment. In addition, Catbird is integrated with McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) management console, providing customers with a single administrative interface for both virtual and physical security, and both network and end-point security.

VMware ready for “war” with Citrix

September 1, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 1 Comment

Yesterday at “VMworld day 0” (the partner and developer day) at the partner briefing, VMware VP of Field Operations Carl Eschenbach was sounding pretty confident about the future of desktop virtualization.

VMware has been banging the VDI drum for a few years now. So far VMware has signed up a little over 7000 customers, good for +1M seats. Yet Citrix still has higher top of mind awareness when it comes to centralized end-user computing environments.

VMware is confident that with upcoming new releases of VMware View and the PC over IP protocol (developed together with Terradici) they can offer a much richer experience than Citrix with XenApp.

A few quotes from this presentation are too good to leave out:

“We started with desktop products 11 years ago. We know more about this field than anyone else.”

The money quote though came right at the finish:

“Citrix better buckle up, because they’re going to war with us, and we’re ready!”

VMworld 2009 keynote – day one

September 1, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 1 Comment

From VMworld 2009, this is the day 1 keynote.

VMworld 2009 has officially kicked off. The first keynote didn’t bring much real news. As usually, the keynote consisted of mostly marketing speak, customer testimonials and demos by sponsors and partners. New developments usually are announced during the CTO keynote, which is coming tomorrow.

Here’s a quick play-by-play recap of the keynote. You can check out the archived and live video streams at the VMworld website.

The keynote room is filling up. Goodbye sleep, hello keynote!

Bloggers ready for the #VMworld keynote

Tod Nielsen, COO takes the stage. Last year, 960 companies out of the Fortune 1000 were using VMware. Nielsen wants to get this up to 1000. At PartnerExchange (VMware’s North American partner event) he held up a sign with the 40 companies that weren’t already using VMware, promising a free VMworld pass to partners who signed up any of those companies.

In the last couple of months, 10 out of those 40 companies became vSphere users. This means there are 30 of the Fortune 1000 companies left that are not using VMware.

President & CEO Paul Maritz takes the stage.

There are 12488 attendees at VMworld this year. Or, as the marketing people would say: nearly 15K attendees.

VMworld regulars already know the drill. 70 % of IT costs are spent just to “keep the lights on”. Moving to a more agile environment can lower this maintenance cost.

Everybody’s talking about the ‘cloud’ that will magically solve all of their IT problems. But there are lots of different definitions of what the cloud actually means.
“Customers want to get to the mythical ‘cloud’ world where everything is simple, works together, is stable, secure, …”

This promised land is not here yet. Virtualization can enable it though.

The key is the encapsulation that’s inherent in virtualization, to add new functionality in a non-disruptive way.

The next step is bringing this workloads to external clouds. Later today there will be a press briefing + press release about the new cloud initiatives. (Check Virtualization.com for more news on this announcement as it happens.)

The foundation for this cloud is the platform called vSphere. vSphere is a bigger release in terms of man-years that went into it than any of the Windows releases Paul was involved with at MS in the 90s
(Paul Maritz is a Microsoft veteran)

“vSphere evolved from a “product”, VMware Infrastructure, to a real platform that plugs in to the complete datacenter.”

“The automation and policies helps “Continously defragging the datacenter.” The datacenter becomes a giant computer (the software mainframe)”

A single vSphere cluster can easily (in Maritz’s words) support the complete transaction workload of the Visa network.

Paul’s going over the different components that make up the vSphere platform. Most VMware users will probably know this slide by heart about now.

Now on to the sponsor lovefest. First Tom Brey, sr Technical Staff Manager Power Management from IBM is invited on stage.

VMware and IBM collaborate not only on hardware compatibility (like any other HW partner), but on management and power metering.

Every IBM server contains power meters/sensors. This can be measured and optimized from within vCenter.

The more data we have on power usage, the more we can optimize it. Using this data we can easily measure Performance Per Watt, to see if it’s better to turn off servers (DPM) and let the others run warmer, or distribute the load over several servers.

Brey demoes a server running 8 memtest VMs. As VMs are powered on, the energy consumption is updated in the vSphere client. What’s interesting is that the energy usage is calculated on a per-VM basis.

The energy consumption is updated live. The energy consumption is displayed on a per-VM basis. (See the colored bars at the far right of the graph.)

Demo with the new and old generation of x3650 servers. The new Nehalem-based M2 servers have half the idle power of the previous generation, and support
more VMs per server.

Moving on. A new set of task-oriented management products is being added to the vCenter family of products. Paul Maritz spends a few minutes reviewing the set of vCenter add-ons coming up in the coming months. (CapacityIQ, Chareback, …)

After the full vSphere suite, Maritz moves on to “vSphere essentials”, an edition of vSphere tailored to SMB customers. This “IT in a box” solution is complemented with the new “VMware Go” service announced yesterday.

Maritz is now describing vSphere essentials, the “IT in a box” version of SMB customers. New announcement yesterday: VMware Go.

Of course, he’s not telling there is now way to upgrade the Essentials license to standard if you grow beyond three hosts. Maritz also said Essentials brings “things like Fault Tolerance to SMBs at an attractive price.” This is not correct, as VMotion, Fault Tolerance and other goodies aren’t included in Essentials.

VMware vCloud intro. Enabling mobility between internal virtual datacenters and external clouds through standard APIs and common mgmt tools
The vCloud initiative so far has +1000 service providers signed up.
New announcement: vCloud Express is a new class of self-service services provided by partners.
Another demo of Terremark’s self service portal. Self service signup with just a credit card.
(Note: VMware is an investor in Terremark – and is thus in a way competing with its own partners.)

Amazon EC2 users already know this kind of service for a few years.

Formal announcement of the VMware vCloup API, with connections to inventory, billing, … The vCloud APIs were submitted to DMTF to create an open, standard API.

“Moving on to VMware View. Once again, the story of the “user centric” system instead of the “device centric” environment.”

Steve Dupree from HP ESS, Director of platform virtualization, taking the stage.

In other words, like every year, every sponsor gets his 5 minutes on stage.
HP created a reference VDI infrastructure. Storage is based on LeftHand, a storage company acquired by HP at the beginning of this year.

Funny exchange:
PM: How many customers have you got so far?
SD: We’re just finishing this implementation and putting it out in our services organization.

In other words, zero customers so far…

Tech preview of VMware View with PCoIP demo. This is what Eschenbach was talking about yesterday .

“Maritz referencing “Eating one’s own dog food”, a term he coined and in his words his “only contribution to the IT industry”. Maritz frequently refers to his Microsoft past in his presentations. He’s also known to have said he was responsible for the explosion of the number of servers during the 1990’s (Windows NT and beyond), and is now working on reducing the number of servers (at VMware).

THe keynote was finished with an overview of the SpringSource acquisition.

And that concludes the keynote… Not much news so far. There’s a cloud announcement coming up in a few hours.

Check back tomorrow for more live keynote blogging. In the meantime, follow Virtualization.com on Twitter. Follow @lode for “backstage” news, and @vmlive for live updates.

Pivot3 To Showcase First iSCSI SAN Platform to Include Virtual Servers

August 31, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Pivot3 today announced an enhancement of its Serverless Computing platform to support the Intel Core microarchitecture (codenamed ‘Nehalem’). With integrated server virtualization, each Pivot3 storage appliance can host server applications that have access to the underlying IP SAN and are managed with virtualization management tools.

Pivot3 Serverless Computing consolidates physical servers into a Pivot3 SAN by adding server virtualization into each scale-out SAN appliance. Unlike conventional head-end storage arrays, the Pivot3 solution has ample hardware resources to offer both server and storage virtualization. Pivot3 SAN software aggregates the storage resources of each SAN appliance, and hosted servers have access to the resources of all the aggregated SAN appliances. Both data and applications are protected in the case of appliance failures. The appliance approach is ideal for growing environments, requiring flexibility in both storage and server resources.

The Pivot3 high-availability storage appliances include a free virtual server with failover at a list price of $1,000 per terabyte.

F5 Solution Enables Cloud Connection for Live Application Mobility

August 31, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

F5 Networks today announced that it will be demonstrating a solution that affords businesses seamless flexibility in leveraging both public and private clouds.

During VMworld, F5 will demonstrate how it is possible to perform a secure migration of a live virtualized application, and its associated storage, to and from the cloud with no downtime or user disruption. This solution leverages F5 and VMware products available today.

An agile Application Delivery Network is the fundamental component required to extend virtualization beyond a single data center or VMware vSphere 4 instance. This integration uses F5’s BIG-IP solutions with VMware vSphere 4, VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion, and the VMware vCenter APIs to overcome many of the networking hurdles that previously prevented organizations from migrating live applications to and from the cloud. The integration between VMware vCenter Server, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager, and BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager simplifies global traffic management to enable easier live migrations. The solution also takes advantage of BIG-IP WAN application delivery services to accelerate VMware VMotion and VMware Storage VMotion events over links that are limited by bandwidth, latency, or packet-loss.

Prior to this solution, virtual applications needed to be cloned or suspended and redeployed separately in the cloud. Neither live virtual applications nor their storage could be migrated to the cloud. This integrated solution enables organizations to fully take advantage of the cost savings of the cloud model, while avoiding the hassles and complexities of rerouting global traffic manually or having to terminate live applications in order to reroute traffic.