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Icomasoft Breaks Out of Stealth With VI PowerScripter

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Icomasoft, a Swiss pioneer of agent-less software solutions, today announced general availability of its first product: VI PowerScripter. This is a VMware VI Client plug-in with integration of PowerShell scripts into VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 objects.

The plug-in contains some scripts for standard admin tasks. Users can, however, create dozens of self-made scripts and access them through a dynamic context menu in VI Client. At general availability of version 1.0, icomasoft intends to sell a repository of a large number of standard scripts and workflows.

Functionality

  • Execution of PowerShell scripts through a dynamic context menu (usually no customization required)
  • Use of VM or host-based PowerShell scripts
  • Execution of scripts on single and multiple objects(Cluster, Datacenter)
  • Choice between debug and silent mode
  • Use of local scripts or network scripts
  • User-defined and almost unlimited extension of VI Client and VirtualCenter functionality
  • Execution of all PowerShell scripts with correct VirtualCenter permissions
  • Logging of all script executions
  • Use of standard icomasoft® scripts

User’s Benefits

  • Integration of self-created scripts into VMware’s standard management software
  • Reduction of required resources for administrative tasks
  • Easy monitoring and analysis of the virtual infrastructure behavior
  • Sustained permissions structure during the execution of PowerShell scripts
  • Increased security as no users profiles and passwords are being used
  • Mass configuration and individual configuration can be executed with one single script
  • Almost unlimited extension of the basic functionality of VMware infrastructures and free ESXi
  • Use of existing scripts with minimal or no customization

icomasoft VI PowerScripter (Beta 1) is available for free download.

ExaGrid Teams Up With Vizioncore for VMware Backup Solution

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ExaGrid Systems today announced support for Vizioncore’s backup and recovery solution, vRanger Pro (which recently got an upgrade). Both ExaGrid and Vizioncore offer products and solutions that streamline the management of data backup and recovery processes for VMware users.

Vizioncore is a provider of a comprehensive set of solutions that extend and enhance the capabilities of virtualized environments. ExaGrid offers VMware customers using Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro with the industry’s fastest backups and restores, along with high data de-duplication ratios.

Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro solution offers full image level and differential backups of virtual machines to enable faster, more efficient storage and recovery of virtual machines. ExaGrid’s Disk-based Backup systems serve as the backup target for these virtual machine images, using high-performance, post-process data de-duplication to dramatically reduce the disk storage capacity required for backups versus standard disk storage.

VDIworks Virtual Desktop Platform 1.2 To Support HP RGS Protocol

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VDIworks today announced that the latest release of VDIworks’ Virtual Desktop Platform (VDP), version 1.2, will provide connection brokering and management for the HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS) protocol. This integrated offering will allow customers to leverage VDIworks’ virtual desktop management capabilities and HP’s RGS protocol to enable the highest grade visual experience possible in a virtualized environment.

While desktop virtualization solutions have focused primarily on the hypervisor back-end, the end-user experience has not achieved parity with what most users expect from a PC. HP’s RGS protocol provides extremely high-speed transmission of multimedia content from a virtual machine to a remote thin client. VDIworks’ VDP will now be able to discover RGS-enabled devices and provide connection brokering as well as additional management services for HP hardware running RGS. VDP supports all popular hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Server, Xen and VMware ESX. HP and VDIworks will continue to work together to improve the performance and feature-set of the newly announced solution.
VDIworks

Egenera To Offer A Technology Preview Of Its New Capacity-on-Demand Solution at VMworld 2008

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Egenera today announced an upcoming technology preview of its capacity-on-demand solution developed jointly with VMware. Recently, Egenera had already picked VMware’s virtualization technology to power its BladeFrame Systems.

Set to be unveiled for the first time on the show floor at VMworld, the new joint capacity-on-demand solution will provide VMware VirtualCenter users access to PAN Manager by Egenera processing resources directly through VMware VirtualCenter. With capacity-on-demand, customers benefit from the automatic deployment of ESX hosts onto “bare metal” in response to overutilization that can adversely affect virtual machine performance.

With Egenera’s capacity-on-demand solution, new ESX hosts are automatically registered to VirtualCenter as part of the resource pool, while underutilized ESX hosts can be automatically powered off to reduce energy consumption. In addition, VMware features such as Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) and High Availability (HA) will rebalance virtual machine workloads within the changed environment.

Egenera

[Source: VMblog]

Solidcore S3 Control Software Now Supports VMware ESX

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Solidcore Systems, who specializes in change audit and configuration control, today announced its S3 Control software detects and validates change events to VMware environments in real time. Unlike previous methods that relied on multiple scan-based tools to manage change, the S3 Control software reconciles change events in real time from both virtual and physical infrastructures with an enterprise change management process.

Solidcore S3 Control eases the burden of managing the multitude of change events across virtualized systems by tracking changes on VMware ESX servers and virtual consoles in real time, alerting and reporting on change events, and correlating changes to authorization. All change events can be reconciled with an existing change management system, including HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy, CA Unicenter, and IBM Tivoli Service Desk.

Solidcore S3 Control captures “who” is making changes, “what” is being changed, “when” change is occurring, “how” the change was implemented, and “where” the change was made. This enables IT organizations to ensure deployed virtual and physical systems are always in a known and verified state. Solidcore can track changes to user roles and permissions, data stores attached to ESX hosts, high-availability configurations, Virtual Machine (VM) templates, resource pools, scheduled tasks, and guest VMs. Solidcore can also identify new users that have been created, edited or deleted, new hosts added to VMware VirtualCenter, and license server events in virtual systems. S3 Control validates these changes against the change management system, where any changes with a corresponding ticket are marked “authorized” and the change management system is updated with the current change information. Changes that occur without a matching ticket are immediately identified for review.

Solidcore’s support for VMware ESX is available today in the latest release of the Solidcore S3 Control software.

Solidcore Systems

[Source: Businesswire]

DTMF Accepts Draft Specification for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced the acceptance of a draft specification submitted by leading virtualization companies (VMware, Oracle and CA recently joined the task force) targeting an industry standard format for portable virtual machines. Virtual machines packaged in this format can be installed on any virtualization platform that supports the standard simplifying interoperability, security and virtual machine lifecycle management for virtual infrastructures.

The companies behind the collaboration on this specification include Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource. This group of virtualization industry leaders has submitted the specification to the DMTF for development into an industry standard. DMTF is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. DMTF will continue to develop this technology into a successful, open industry standard and promote it worldwide.

The proposed format, called the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform a portable package containing all required installation and configuration parameters for the virtual machines. This allows any virtualization platform that implements the standard to correctly install and run the virtual machines.

(IBM recently announced its open-ovf project.)

Most importantly, OVF specifies procedures and technologies to permit integrity checking of the virtual machines (VM) to ensure that they have not been modified since the package was produced. This enhances the security of the format and will alleviate security concerns of users who adopt virtual appliances produced by third parties. OVF also provides mechanisms that support license checking for the enclosed VMs, addressing a key concern of both independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers. Finally, OVF allows an installed VM to acquire information about its host virtualization platform and run-time environment, which allows the VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for the particular virtualization environment.

In addition to providing portability, integrity, and configurability of existing virtual hard disk formats. OVF is also extensible to support future developments of virtual hard disk formats whose specifications are openly available.