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Partnerships

Vizioncore Seals OEM Agreement with Dell

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Vizioncore today announced (PDF) an OEM agreement with Dell, who has been a Vizioncore channel partner for more than 2 years. This strategic announcement furthers the go-to-market relationship between the two companies, enhancing the options available to customers who want to both optimize and safeguard their virtualized environments.

Vizioncore will also be demonstrating a set of technology innovations unrivalled for functionality across the entire lifecycle of virtual servers at VMworld in Las Vegas. Vizioncore will introduce “industry-firsts” with a comprehensive suite for workflow automation and heterogeneous VM administration. These products allow companies to track virtual machines throughout their lifecycle, standardizing processes and streamlining maintenance, providing “cradle-to-grave” management. A new storage optimization product will allow organizations to reclaim storage resources which are unutilized by virtual machines for improved efficiency in their virtual environments.

Vizioncore

Dell

Microsoft and Novell Announce Joint Virtualization Solution

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Microsoft and Novell are announcing the availability of a joint virtualization solution optimized for customers running mixed-source environments. The joint offering includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server configured and tested as an optimized guest operating system running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and is fully supported by both companies’ channel partners. The offering provides customers with the first complete, fully supported and optimized virtualization solution to span Windows and Linux environments.

The new offering represents significant progress in the Microsoft-Novell collaboration and business model first announced in November 2006, which delivers seamless integration of SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft Windows, providing a bridge between proprietary software and open source software. The virtualization solution is the first to include technology developed by both companies at their joint Interoperability Lab, including virtual machine adapters built to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as an optimized, or often referred to as enlightened, guest operating system on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, providing optimized performance to SUSE Linux guests.

The new offering represents more than 18 months of technical collaboration undertaken between Microsoft and Novell in response to customer demand for a virtualization solution that provides high performance and ease of deployment, and is tested and supported.

The original November 2006 Microsoft-Novell agreement included four areas of technical collaboration: virtualization, standards-based systems management, identity federation and document format compatibility. Since then, the companies have announced three other areas of collaboration: Moonlight, accessibility and a new SUSE Linux Enterprise Server management pack for Microsoft System Center product. With the new Linux Enterprise Server management pack, Microsoft System Center customers can manage Windows and Linux environments, both physical and virtual, from one common tool. Novell is also a charter member of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a validated operating system in the program.

VMware Fusion Helped CERN Not Destroy The World With Large Hardron Collider Project

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VMware has announced physicists at CERN, the legendary European Organization for Nuclear Research and the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics, use VMware Fusion to share Linux-based computer code via VMware virtual machines running on Apple hardware.

Virtual machines created with VMware Fusion are used by the physicists working on the experiments that run on the world’s largest particle accelerator, Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, the LHC has operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271°C). By studying collisions at higher energies than ever before, physicists will make further progress in understanding the mysteries of how our Universe is made and how it came to be.

With VMware Fusion, physicists use Macintosh hardware to run Linux-based software which links to LHC Computing Grid – a network of more than 150 computing centres with approximately 40,000 CPUs, handling 15 petabytes of new data each year. This Grid, which provides computing power for some of the organization’s most advanced experiments, can be accessed from CernVM, a customized Linux operating system running in a lightweight VMware virtual machine deployed on a range of PC and Mac workstations and laptops.

Dell’s Latest Virtualization Play

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Dell has announced a series of products and updates around their virtualization offering. Here’s the takeaway:

  • New Dell PowerEdge full-height blade servers
  • Pre-installed integration and support of Microsoft Hyper-V for centralized management of virtualized environments
  • Advanced EqualLogic integration across multiple hypervisors
  • New services help customers simplify the design, deployment, security and management of virtualized environments: Infrastructure Consulting Services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) + Lifecycle Management for VMware environments

More information in the press release.

The most exciting news is that the company added to its EqualLogic product line a new, highly-scalable array – the PS5500E – and introduced advanced software features, including the EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware edition to improve data protection for virtual server environments.

The PS5500E builds upon Dell’s EqualLogic family with 24 or 48 terabytes (TB) of raw capacity in a 4U array – more than doubling the density and tripling the capacity of its predecessor model, the PS5000E, with equivalent hard disk drives. With the PS5500E, an EqualLogic SAN can scale up to 576 TB under a single management interface. This new array can be combined in the same SAN group with the existing EqualLogic systems. It provides an ideal solution for consolidating common tiered business data and applications such as file services, moderate I/O email, databases and virtual server environments. It can also be deployed for capacity-intensive near-line storage tiers and for disaster recovery sites.

You may be interested in the fact that Dell has also set up a dedicated section on its website about Microsoft Hyper-V.

Dell

Ericom Adds VDI support for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers

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After announcing support for Oracle VM last May, Ericom has now added VDI support for with its Parallels Virtuozzo with its PowerTerm WebConnect software solution.

Parallels Virtuozzo Containers is an OS-level server virtualization technology that partitions the underlying operating system into multiple isolated containers, so that many workloads or virtual desktops can be run simultaneously on the same physical box.

Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect enables organizations to centrally manage and deploy virtual desktops based on Parallels Virtuozzo Containers from within the datacenter and hosting facilities – reducing the cost and complexity of traditional desktop PC management. As a comprehensive solution for virtualized desktop environments, Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect increases security and desktop manageability, enables business continuity implementations, and provides a superior, customizable desktop experience.

For PowerTerm WebConnect licensing, Ericom offers both perpetual licensing for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers on-premise implementations and subscription licensing for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers based hosting environments.

Ericom Software

BlueStripe Software Introduces FactFinder

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BlueStripe Software, provider of Application Service Management (ASM) solutions for virtualized data center environments, today announced (PDF) the availability of its flagship product, FactFinder. FactFinder enables enterprises to stage, deploy, and manage business?critical applications in virtual data center environments with the same degree of confidence and control as traditional environments.

FactFinder delivers three critical elements of application service management for virtual environments:

• Application Discovery & Mapping – FactFinder offers automatic discovery and topology mapping of
the application connections, processes, and interdependencies allowing for unmatched visibility into
both physical and virtual environments.
• Application?level Health Measurement – By enabling simple drill down into performance indicators
of connections, usage, and application access times, FactFinder depicts the relative health of a
business’ critical applications.
• Automatic Triage of Application & Server Problems – FactFinder’s easy to understand performance
indicators highlight areas of concern, showing where to focus efforts to solve problems and optimize
the supporting IT environment.

FactFinder is the only application management solution that enables enterprises to confidently deploy business-critical applications in virtualized environments. This makes it easy for infrastructure groups to gain visibility into application management and performance in virtual data center environments, including service response times, virtual machine utilization, and cross?server dependencies.

Unlike OS?based or network?based monitoring products, FactFinder measures performance across multi?tier and service?oriented architecture applications regardless of whether they are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors or a mix of physical and virtual environments. This allows enterprises to measure the impact of P2V conversions on business success and make decisions based on intelligent, accurate, and timely information.