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

Sun Microsystems Unleashes VirtualBox 3.0, Adds Many Server Virtualization Features

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Sun Microsystems today announced a new version of Sun VirtualBox, its cross-platform virtualization software. VirtualBox 3.0 is capable of creating and running multi-processor virtual machines that can handle heavyweight server-class workloads, and also delivers enhanced graphics support for desktop-class workloads, reinforcing VirtualBox’s position as one of the world’s most popular virtualization platforms.

Many multi-threaded server-based workloads, such as database and Web applications, can benefit from Symmetric Multiple Processing (SMP) systems, which contain multiple CPUs. VirtualBox 3.0 can now support virtual SMP systems with up to 32 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) in a single virtual machine. With this major enhancement, VirtualBox software can be used to run not only desktop workloads on client or server systems, but also demanding server workloads.

A key component of Sun’s industry-leading desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio, VirtualBox software has been rapidly growing in popularity, surpassing 14.5 million downloads and 4 million registrations worldwide, as well as more than 25,000 downloads a day. A mere 50 megabyte download, VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in just a few minutes.

New server features of VirtualBox 3.0 software include:

  • Up to 32 vCPUs per guest to accommodate heavyweight data-processing workloads.
  • Hypervisor enhancements for SMP to enable optimum performance.
  • Updated API platform designed to be the basis of the community-driven VirtualBox Web Console project, which is coming soon to allow IT administrators to manage their datacenters from a Web console. This project is based on the popular Python language.

New desktop features of VirtualBox 3.0 software include:

  • Microsoft Direct3D support for Windows guests, which enables graphically intensive Windows applications, like computer modeling, 3D design and games software, to run in a virtual environment.
  • Support for version 2.0 of the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) standard. As a result, high-performance Windows, Linux, Solaris(TM), and OpenSolaris(TM) graphical applications, which typically use graphical hardware acceleration, are able to run applications like Google Earth and CAM-based software on VirtualBox software.
  • Support for a wider range of USB devices, including storage devices, iPods and phones.

VirtualBox software is free of charge for personal use. For wider deployments within an organization, Enterprise subscriptions are also available, starting at $30 (USD) per user per year, which includes 24/7 premium support from Sun’s technical team. Discounts are available based on volume.

Red Hat Launches Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program

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Red Hat today announced the Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program, designed to simplify and expand the adoption of cloud computing by enterprise customers. The program enables industry leaders in cloud computing to become certified to offer Red Hat technology solutions. Premier Cloud Provider Partners will collaborate with Red Hat on technical support, security updates, hardware certification, sales and marketing and business models. As part of the announcement today, cloud computing pioneer Amazon Web Services will extend its technology relationship with Red Hat to become the first Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Partner.

The Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Program has been established to address the increased interest in cloud computing from Red Hat customers, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications into the clouds. Red Hat customers seek the flexibility to transfer and use Red Hat subscriptions on premise and/or in cloud environments, with support and compatibility. Red Hat customers have also requested the ability to rent elastic computing by-the-hour with access to consistent, technical support, security updates and compatibility with existing IT resources. This program aims to provide more flexibility for Red Hat customers when developing and deploying their applications.

In addition to customers, Red Hat has witnessed growing ISV partner interest in providing cloud offerings based on their applications certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and/or JBoss Enterprise Middleware. As part of its new program, Red Hat will work with customers to identify secure, optimized and supported cloud providers, and will work with ISVs to help enable delivery of cloud offerings with an on-ramp program that spans technology, business and support models.

Building on the experience of delivering the first supported operating system and first supported middleware offering for Amazon Web Services, Red Hat is now growing its relationship by choosing Amazon Web Services as the first member of the Premier Cloud Provider Program.

ScaleMP Completes vSMP Foundation Certification For HP ProLiant BL280c G6 Server Blades

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ScaleMP completed certification of vSMP Foundation for HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blades offering the new Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series. vSMP Foundation coupled with the HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blade solution delivers excellent performance and energy savings to reduce overall datacenter spending in power constrained scale-out environments.

vSMP Foundation aggregates multiple industry-standard off-the-shelf x86 servers into one single virtual high-end system for the High-Performance Computing (HPC) market. vSMP Foundation provides customers with an alternative to traditional expensive symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) systems and also offers simplified clustering infrastructure with a single operating system. It supports aggregation of up to 16 servers into a single virtual SMP system, providing:

  • Up to 4 terabytes (TB) of shared memory for large memory requirements
  • Up to 128 cores virtual SMP, proven scalability and record-breaking memory bandwidth
  • Ease of use and lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for applications, with simplified cluster management and storage architecture
  • Improved utilization through a centralized and consolidated architecture

The new HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blade has been designed for high performance and scale-out datacenters. With outstanding dual-processor performance and price per watt, the HP ProLiant BL280c helps reduce overall datacenter power consumption while maintaining high performance. The new Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors provide significant performance improvements and faster I/O throughput. The new DDR3 memory technology is more energy efficient and has better cooling than existing memory options. Overall, the HP ProLiant BL280c offers customers the latest technology for improved power efficiency and performance optimization. These blades feature up to 96 GB of ECC DDR 3 DIMMS, two PCI-express expansion slots, and support both SA and SATA HDD drives.

Release: Virtual Computer NxTop 1.1 (Introducing System Workbench)

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Virtual Computer today announced the availability of NxTop 1.1.

Since it was first released for sale in April 2009, NxTop has differentiated itself with its ability to deploy a single, centrally managed Windows desktop environment to all users while maintaining user-specific personalization on each PC. Release 1.1 brings further innovation in this area by introducing System Workbench.

This new element of NxTop’s management system employs file system layering to isolate elements of the system to improve backup performance, retain end-user installed programs and settings and provide desktop IT managers with tools to manipulate the file system and registry. NxTop 1.1 is available immediately through the company’s NxTop Now! program which provides early adopters access to the product prior to general availability.

Since its inception, NxTop has allowed IT administrators to build a single, Windows virtual image that can be shared across their entire organization. Updates to this shared image are performed centrally on the NxTop Center management console. At boot time, NxTop presents a Windows desktop to the end-user that is a composite of the latest shared system image, user-specific profiles and settings, and any non-permanent PC data such as caches and index files.

With System Workbench, IT administrators can now control which aspects of their “gold” operating system image may be customized and retained by the end-user. Through a policy-based interface with a simple XML-based authoring language, System Workbench provides powerful new capabilities, such as:

  • A framework for whitelisting applications that can be installed into a shared image by an end-user into a persistent layer that survives a self-cleaning reboot or IT-generated system update.
  • Granular, policy-based control to map files and directories onto different layers of the virtual file system. This allows, for example, the ability to exclude large but non-essential user files such as Outlook OST cache files and Windows index files from being included in NxTop’s automated user data backups. It also allows the system to retain customized user settings for poorly designed programs that store such information in system folders instead of the user’s profile area.
  • Manipulation of programs, data files and settings for system features such as offline folders, file sharing, and antivirus databases to survive patching of shared operating system images.

In addition to System Workbench, the NxTop 1.1 release includes:

  • NxTop Engine performance enhancements, including near-native network speed via paravirtualised networking.
  • Simplified Microsoft Active Directory configuration and testing, easing integration into Microsoft environments.
  • Enhanced user backup capabilities, including optimized data transfer, management of restore points, and compression of virtual hard disks to improve performance and disk utilization.
  • Improved wireless support, including WPA/WPA2 Personal across all major wireless chip sets.
  • Improved scalability and performance in NxTop Center, including background task processing and a 50 percent reduction in image preparation time.

ASG Debuts New Virtualization Management Solution, Aims To Eliminate Virtual Sprawl

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ASG Software Solutions, the originator of ASG’s Business Service Portfolio (BSP), today announced the immediate availability of ASG’s BSP Virtualization Management, a new solution that monitors the real-time performance, health, and efficiency of both virtual and physical IT environments.

Today, businesses are hastily deploying virtual machines (VMs) throughout their enterprises to achieve cost benefits and performance improvements. However, the difficulty in tracking and monitoring the performance of rapidly propagating VMs across the enterprise has resulted in few organizations realizing the long-term cost savings and IT performance benefits of virtualization. This lack of insight into VMs, coupled with a growing and more complex IT systems infrastructure, intensifies the need for both physical and virtual environments to be monitored, managed, and coordinated to maximize IT performance and efficiency across the enterprise.

By providing complete visibility of all virtual and physical environments in a unified dashboard view, ASG’s BSP Virtualization Management allows organizations to continuously monitor the health of their entire infrastructure in real time. Using the solution, IT Operations directors can discover and map application dependencies between virtual systems and the underlying physical infrastructure, which, in turn, enables them to identify and eliminate areas of actual or potential virtual machine sprawl.

ASG’s BSP Virtualization Management

  • Optimizes the three key phases in the virtualization lifecycle
  • Capacity planning: Equips organizations to virtualize physical systems by logically discovering, mapping, and assessing the current IT environment
  • Real-time performance monitoring: Enables the optimization of both physical and virtual systems at all times using a single solution
  • Asset planning: Recognizes system resources to properly assess retirement of physical servers and unneeded VMs to reduce sprawl while maximizing data center efficiency
  • Offers immediate root cause analysis of problems, bottlenecks, and trending to optimize the performance of physical and virtual systems
  • Regularly generates on-demand reports, a central feature of all ASG’s Level 2 BSP solutions, and addresses performance issues for incidents, uptime, saturation, and utilization
  • The flexible and scalable solution is classified as a Level 2 solution in ASG’s Path to Optimization, a program designed to help IT executives leverage their current IT investments, complemented by ASG’s BSP solutions and best practices, to progress towards improved IT service delivery and proactive Business Service Management (BSM).
  • ASG’s BSP Virtualization Management is offered both as a standalone solution and as a core component of ASG’s BSP Enterprise Performance Management, which monitors the entire IT environment, including mainframe, distributed, and virtualized systems, databases, and applications.

Lenovo’s Latest Servers Well Suited For Virtualization

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Lenovo today announced its latest line of servers, the ThinkServer TD200 and TD200x tower servers as well as the RD210 and RD220 rack servers. The new servers offer small to mid-sized businesses the latest in performance with several choices of Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors and vastly expanded memory and storage. These ThinkServers are also equipped for virtualization and several power saving features to help customers cut their energy usage without sacrificing performance.Equipped with the latest Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors, the new ThinkServers are up to three times faster than their predecessors. With high-speed DDR3 memory up to 128GB, the latest models offer more memory than previous Lenovo servers. These highly scalable, dual processor servers also offer increased storage capacity with up to 12 hard drive bays in the rack models and up to 16 in the tower models.

Lenovo’s new ThinkServers are virtualization-ready and are equipped with several time and cost saving features that help customers seamlessly transition to a virtual environment. The latest ThinkServers come with an onboard connector for an embedded hypervisor. With the expanded memory and storage capacity on the new models, customers can consolidate several legacy servers onto a single new ThinkServer to save on hardware costs and energy usage while boosting their return on investment. Lenovo supports a variety of virtualization solutions from Microsoft, Novell, VMWare and Red Hat.

The ThinkServer TD200, TD200x, RD210 and RD220 are the most energy efficient servers from Lenovo yet, featuring low wattage processor and memory options, and small form factor hard drives. Select models are compliant with Energy Star for Servers 1.0, finalized in May 2009, which provides a 30 percent reduction in power usage compared with other x86 servers that do not meet the standard. In addition, the ThinkServers’ power supplies are more than 92 percent efficient, meaning more energy is translated into usable power.

The new ThinkServers come with the Integrated Management Module (IMM), which provides complete, “always-on,” out-of-band server management capabilities via an easy-to-use Web interface. With IMM, users can remotely access and manage their ThinkServer from anywhere, anytime, even if the server has crashed or is turned off.

Select models come with IMM Premium, giving users full control of their ThinkServer (including the mouse, keyboard and video) from remote locations, as well as the ability to connect local drives remotely to their ThinkServer through virtual media.

Servers are a critical IT mechanism at the heart of many businesses. That’s why Lenovo’s server solution provides total support for both hardware and software to help customers without IT departments quickly set up, update and manage their servers.

In addition to its standard warranty, Lenovo offers ThinkServer customers a 90-day trial of ThinkPlus Priority Support services so customers have the complete support they need during the critical first days after their server purchase. This provides services such as next business day warranty service, 24×7 hardware and software phone support as well as priority call routing to advanced technicians. For customers who need on-site hardware installation and online training, Lenovo also offers the ThinkPlus Productivity service plan.

The RD210 and RD220 are available immediately, and TD200 and TD200x will be available starting July 2009. The ThinkServer RD210, RD220 and TD200x are available worldwide through business partners and Lenovo sales representatives. The TD200 is available through Lenovo sales representatives for special bid. Pricing for the RD210 starts at approximately $1,699 and $2,199 for the RD220. The TD200x starts at approximately $2,699.