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

Industry Moves: Siki Giunta New Fortisphere CEO

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Fortisphere has hired Siki Giunta as its new CEO, replacing Michael Harper at the helm of the Glenwood company.

Giunta joined the network virtualization firm a month ago. She was hired for her background at Managed Objects, a Northern Virginia firm bought by Novell last year.

Harper led Fortisphere to a $10 million first round of venture capital in 2008 from investors Fairhaven Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners, both of Boston. Giunta built Managed Objects from a pre-revenue startup 10 years ago to its $50 million sale, she said.

VKernel Introduces New Optimization Pack

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VKernel Corporation has announced the new VKernel Optimization Pack to help organizations achieve maximum ROI from their virtualization projects.

VKernel’s new Optimization Pack includes three powerful applets, Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory, that help users improve the efficiency of their virtual infrastructures. The new applets allow organizations to run more virtual machines (VMs) with the same hardware, maximize the utilization of infrastructure resources, reclaim terabytes of wasted storage, reduce VM sprawl and assure optimal VM performance.

A successful virtualization project balances proper resource allocations and utilizations with VM performance and cost per VM. With the Optimization Pack, VKernel enables organization to rapidly achieve their goals by providing a very affordable and simple-to-use toolset. Delivered as a virtual appliance, deployment is instant and users immediately begin solving their critical needs. The VKernel Optimization Pack includes three powerful management applets:

  • Wastefinder – quickly finds where resource capacity (CPU, memory, and storage) are being wasted in the virtual infrastructure. By identifying zombie VMs, expired snapshots, and other wasteful consumers, users can reclaim expensive capacity to optimize virtual environments and achieve a better, faster ROI.
  • VM Rightsizer – a simple tool for tuning your VMs with the right amount of resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to drive maximum VM densities without impacting performance. Rightsizer is unique in its ability to make recommendations and automatically implement changes to find improperly allocated resources and optimally configure VMs.
  • Inventory – automatically collects important information about all VMs in the virtual infrastructure and creates a detailed inventory report showing VM name, created by and when, resource allocations, and much more. The inventory is continually updated to match the dynamic environment and is searchable by different criteria to quickly find specific information.

VKernel currently supports VMware ESX and vSphere and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V (later this year) as well as Citrix XEN Server. The company believes that a heterogeneous capacity management and optimization offering will be increasingly important as the enterprise virtual infrastructure becomes a mix of hypervisor platforms.

The VKernel Optimization Pack is currently available in a bundle with Capacity Analyzer 4.1 for $399 per CPU socket including the first year of maintenance and support. Subscription pricing is also offered at $179 annually per CPU socket including maintenance and support.

KVM News In Short

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Over the past couple of weeks different new releases of KVM and related software saw the light . Virt-manager 0.8.0 was officially announced the most interesting new feature probably being the the Clone VM wizard but also a bunch of system tray icons for smooth desktop integration and CPU pinning support are very interesting.

Daniel Berrange noticed that Redhat has released windows kvm virtio drivers under GPLv2 This means that apart from the paravirtual network drivers that were already available now also the paravirtual block device drivers are available

It shows that RedHat is working towards a much more featureful KVM management framework into their upcoming RHEL release as they also updated their virtualization management layer libvirt 0.7.0. Most interesting new features include initial VMWare ESX driver support, added support for VBox 3 , QEmu hotplug network card support , and improved storage management .

If you have a recent Fedora 11 box and you want to test all these new features, you might want to be enable the fedora-virt-preview repository

[virt-preview]
name=Virtualization Rawhide for Fedora 11
baseurl=http://markmc.fedorapeople.org/virt-preview/f11/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

SpringSource Snapped Up By VMware

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(We’re playing catch-up on news due to holiday, apologies for the late notices)

VMware recently announced a major step forward in its journey to help simplify IT by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.  VMware and SpringSource, itself an acquiring party earlier this year when it purchased Hyperic, plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools.  In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers.  These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future.

Wanova Leaves Stealth Mode With $13 Million In Series A Funding

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Wanova has exited stealth mode and launched a “new era in desktop virtualization” with $13 million in A-round funding from Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures, and Opus Capital.

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs, the company has launched an architecture called Distributed Desktop Virtualization (DDV), which addresses the need for enterprises to improve the management, support and protection of distributed endpoints.

Wanova’s new architecture is designed specifically to address the endpoint management challenges presented by distributed remote and mobile workers. The Wanova DDV solution centralizes the entire desktop contents in the data center for management and protection purposes while distributing the execution of desktop workloads to the endpoints for superior user experience.

The founders of Wanova – Kessler and CTO, Dr. Issy Ben-Shaul – also co-founded Actona, which was acquired by Cisco and became the foundation for Cisco’s Application Delivery Business Unit. Prior to founding Actona, Kessler was vice president and general manager for Qualcomm Israel and a research staff member at IBM in New York.

Ben-Shaul was the CTO of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco and led its technology and vision. Prior to Actona, he was a tenured faculty member at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where he worked on wide area distributed systems.

Wanova is headquartered in San Jose, California with a development center in Netanya, Israel. The company’s solutions are currently in field testing with customers.

(via Venturebeat)

Oracle Dumps Virtual Iron

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When early march this year we talked about Oracle eying Virtual Iron we noted that Oracle needed to fill the VM Management gap that RedHat was leaving on Xen level by moving to KVM.

Turns out that that indeed was their main target, late last month Oracle announced their key virtualization strategy to their old Virtual Iron customers,
Oracle is clear that they want too provide a Xen based next generation Virtualization architecture has zero license cost and zero key management.

They will be providing official application certification , they were already providing their customers with different OracleVM templates which gave them different Oracle based Appliances and earlier this month they announced they will be providing the community with their own Open Source Virtual Appliance builder, based on yet another JeOS, (Just Enough OS) platform, this time one based on Oracle Linux.

But more importantly was their message to the old Virtual Iron customers, Virtual Iron Products sales has been stopped, software download availability will be discontinued , also replacement media won’t be available anymore. there won’t be any more upgrades , support for the different Virtual Iron products will end in February 2010 at last (that’s for the last 4.5.16 release)

Oracle is giving the old Virtual Iron Customers 3 options ..

– When they continue to run Virtual Iron’s existing platform they will get support from Oracle they then can migrate at their own pace with migration tools provided by Oracle, Oracle realizes there will be some effort involved but they will do their best to make it easier.

– Another option is to already start running OracleVM today side by side with Virtual Iron, that way users can gain experience with the platform quickly. Oracle will be providing V2V conversion tools that can convert VHD virtual disks to Oracle VM disk images.

– And the third option is to move to OracleVM today, at no additional license cost, customers only need to pay for OracleVM

Looking at the time Oracle still wants to support the Virtual Iron platform to us that translates to .. you have 12 months to migrate, better do it fast. off course there’s already plenty of VM management frameworks that support Xen around , so Virtual Iron customers can choose to migrate to another platform if they want to.