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The SCO Group Offers Free 1-Year Subscription on New Virtualized Version

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The SCO Group today announced that it is offering a free one-year subscription with the purchase of its new OpenServer 5.0.7V virtualized version of the UNIX operating system. The licensing promotion is available until October 2, 2009.

SCO’s new OpenServer 5.0.7V is a virtualized version of its popular UNIX operating system that is optimized for the VMware environment. OpenServer5.0.7V gives customers a familiar environment while increasing the power and
efficiency of a virtualized infrastructure and extending the life of existing OpenServer applications to run on modern hardware.

OpenServer 5.0.7V is offered as an Enterprise Edition and is licensed under an annual subscription model; however the subscription fee for the first yearwill be waived with this special promotion for all purchases made through October 2, 2009. OpenServer 5.0.7V requires the installation of a time-limited subscription license available from SCO resellers.

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

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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.

Virtustream Raises $25 Million Equity Financing

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Virtustream a privately held infrastructure services firm, today announced the completion of new equity financing with total commitments of $25 million led by Virginia based Columbia Capital and Miami based Blue Lagoon Capital.

Virtustream is an infrastructure services firm committed to helping clients actualize the enterprise cloud by providing strategy, integration and managed services leveraging deep virtualization experience, and its own proprietary platform. The infusion of funding is part of Virtustream’s growth strategy and will be used to continue accelerating its platform development, build international presence and expand domain expertise.

Virtustream also recently completed the acquisition of VirtualizeIT, the premier European consultancy practice dedicated to the advancement and adoption of virtualization technologies, and Brigh Technologies (Brigh), the leading North American provider for the design and deployment of custom solutions in the virtualization space. The union brings together pioneers in enterprise computing including being one of the first VMware professional services partners in North America and the 2008 VMware EMEA Partner of the Year. The stockholders of both acquired companies will have an equity interest in Virtustream, and all employees will continue their employment with Virtustream.

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

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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

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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.