Virtualization.com

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

KACE Introduces Virtual Kontainers

by Leave a Comment

KACE today announced KACE Virtual Kontainers to help companies dramatically simplify the distribution and management of applications. This announcement comes on the heels of new Forrester Business Data Services (BDS) research that reported a whopping 74 percent of small- to medium-sized businesses are looking to desktop and application virtualization to solve their costly PC management challenges.

Application virtualization solutions are notorious for their high cost and complexity. KACE Virtual Kontainers, the first technology innovation resulting from KACE’s acquisition of Computers in Motion, provides users with an easier, faster, and significantly less expensive alternative for creating, deploying, and managing virtual applications. What’s more, KACE offers all these functions via a single, integrated Web-based console. KACE Virtual Kontainers is the newest addition to KACE’s award-winning KBOX family of systems management and deployment appliances and the latest technology innovation that saves customers significant time and money.

With KACE Virtual Kontainers, KACE pushes traditional application virtualization technologies to a new level by extending the benefits beyond the features typically associated with these solutions. Some of the new features of KACE Virtual Kontainers include:

  • Application Isolation – isolated applications eliminate the need for traditional application installation and removal to avoid the decay that occurs when installing and removing application files over time;
  • Simple and Fully Automated Creation – KACE Virtual Kontainers are easily created without the need of specialized skills so experienced (and more expensive) personnel need not waste time learning yet another way of doing business;
  • Centralized Appliance-Based Management – centralized management provides an intuitive Web-based console that allows management of the entire application lifecycle from anywhere via an easy-to-deploy appliance;
  • Active Metering and Control – in order to better manage the use of applications across a corporate network, active metering enables complete control of where and when applications may be executed based on location, hours used, and even on the number of available licenses to enforce concurrent license limits.

KACE Virtual Kontainers will be generally available in April.

Citrix Project Satori Sees Light Of Day

by Leave a Comment

From the Xen blog:

Citrix Project Satori is the result of a collaborative agreement between XenSource and Microsoft, and was carried forward after XenSource was acquired by Citrix Systems. The base Satori components are released by Microsoft as the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V, and provide support for paravirtualized XenLinux guests running on Hyper-V. The Linux Integration Components can be downloaded here.

The complete source code and license information (GPL version 2) on this project is now available here.

Sun Microsystems Releases Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 3

by Leave a Comment

Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 3, which provides new enhancements and features to help companies maximize their IT infrastructure utilization and improve manageability of desktop deployments. Sun VDI Software 3 offers VDI storage economics, built-in virtualization capabilities, and support for a wide variety of virtual desktop operating systems.

The open architecture of Sun VDI Software 3 now gives users access to a broader choice of client devices and virtualization hosts — increasing flexibility, management efficiency and data security. Sun VDI Software 3 is available for purchase immediately and a free trial of the software can be downloaded here.

Sun VDI Software 3 represents a seamless solution, leveraging core open source technologies including Sun’s Open Storage, OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL. With Sun VDI Software 3, customers can deploy a number of virtual desktop operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu, and access these operating systems from a variety of client devices — such as traditional PCs or Macs, energy-efficient Sun Ray thin clients, or thin clients from other vendors. In addition, to host virtual desktop environments, IT architects can opt to use the improved integration with VMware Infrastructure, leverage Sun built-in virtualization, or use a mixture of the two.

Sun VDI Software 3 has exceptional management capabilities, resulting in lower equipment costs, less energy consumption, reduced system cooling requirements, simplified system administration and reduced e-waste. Since desktops are centrally hosted, only the display is sent to the client device; critical data never leaves the corporate network and can be managed and backed up by IT. Moreover, built-in Sun Ray technology support takes advantage of the excellent performance and inherent security features of Sun Ray thin clients, which contain no resident operating system or applications — making them virtually immune to client-side viruses.

Sun VDI Software 3 is available today and offers subscription-based pricing starting from $40 per user/per year, as a discounted price off the U.S. list price for pre-pay and multi-year purchases.

AMD demonstrates live migration across three generations of CPUs

by 1 Comment

AMD today released video and images of Live Migration (VMotion) across three generations of processors. Thanks to AMD-V Extended Migration instructions in the latest generations of CPUs, combined with VMware’s Enhanced VMotion Compatibility feature (released with ESX 3.5 Update 2 last summer) AMD is able to migrate machines running on 65-nm hardware from yesteryear to the latest six-core Opteron “Istanbul” line of processors, yet to be released. VMotion/live migration compatibility is a key in creating future-proof computing clusters running VMware or other virtualization software.

Check out the YouTube video:

AMD Istanbul live migration demo

Intel provides the same functionality under the moniker “FlexMigration”, that allows VMotion to the latest Nehalem CPUs from Xeon 5200 (“Wolfdale/Penryn”) and newer.

Force10 Networks Unveils Exascale E-Series Switch / Router Family

by Leave a Comment

Force10 Networks today introduced the ExaScale E-Series family of switch/routers to meet the requirements of today’s virtualized data center and cloud computing environments. As enterprises transition to virtualized data centers and adopt cloud-based services, the network is increasingly required to be more dynamic and responsive to changing resource demands. The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is designed to deliver the performance, availability, resiliency and flexibility essential to power these new dynamic environments while significantly lowering total operating and management costs.

With support for the industry’s leading line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities, the Force10 ExaScale E-Series reduces capital costs and simplifies management to reduce ongoing operational expenses.

The ExaScale E-Series also extends Force10’s history of enabling cost-effective network ownership with an energy-saving, eco-efficient power and cooling design that provides the industry’s lowest power consumption per line-rate port. Patent-protected advances in backplane and chip design as well as custom designed power components reduce overall system power consumption and lower per port consumption by as much as 70 percent versus comparable competitive platforms.

Enabling Force10’s Virtualization Framework to Fuel Competitive Advantage
The ExaScale E-Series is the foundation for Force10’s Virtualization Framework and provides the multi-terabit platform required to power advanced data centers and cloud computing environments. As budgets have come under pressure, enterprises are turning to virtualization technologies that increase business critical application availability while lowering the total cost of IT infrastructure ownership.

Utilizing the management flexibility of the ExaScale E-Series, Force10’s virtual technology suite, including VirtualScale, VirtualControl and VirtualView, enterprises and service providers can build, manage and monitor network and application performance as well as automate business processes. These technologies enable organizations to build more agile virtualized environments that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements, increasing process efficiencies and fueling a sustainable competitive advantage.

The Force10 Virtualization Framework utilizes open, standards-based data center automation and orchestration technology to promote greater efficiency and agility within the data center. By integrating standards-based technology for real-time network traffic analysis and management, enterprises can maximize existing networking resources while building in the flexibility they require to rapidly respond to changing application requirements.

Force10 also partners with leading vendors to provide complete solutions that optimize data center infrastructure. For additional information on the Force10 data center partner ecosystem, please visit the company’s Technology Alliance Partner Program web page, including its computing alliance with IBM.

The ExaScale E-Series delivers an industry-leading total throughput of more than two billion packets per second across a switching fabric capacity of up to 3.5 Tbps or 250 Gbps full duplex per slot. Utilizing the capacity of the switching fabric, the ExaScale E-Series delivers continuous non-blocking, line-rate throughput that eliminates network bottlenecks, regardless of packet size or enabled features.

Leading Technology for Next Generation Environments
The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is purpose-built for demanding network environments, including:

  • Virtualized data center and cloud computing networks with multiple switching or routing domains in local or geographically disparate environments
  • High-performance computing networks with non-blocking and deterministic management and storage I/O requirements
  • High-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing in high-performance Layer 2 and IP core or aggregation networks

The ExaScale E-Series also provides the key technologies and functionality to facilitate seamless interoperability for tomorrow’s converged fabric and MPLS-ready networks, including:

  • IPv4 unicast and multicast routing for advanced services networks
  • IPv6 ready for native and dual stack next-generation IP networks
  • MPLS ready with P router and VPN functionality
  • 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ready

The half-rack Force10 ExaScale E1200i chassis bundle starts at $89,000 and is available today.

Network Instruments Upgrades Observer Monitoring Platform, Supports Analysis Of Virtualized Environments

by 1 Comment

Network Instruments announced today that its Observer monitoring platform now provides complete visibility and in-depth analysis of application performance and traffic within both virtualized and physical environments. The Observer platform is the first analysis solution to close this visibility gap and extend the power of real-time and retrospective network analysis to virtualized environments.

Observer’s expanded virtual monitoring capabilities go beyond traditional analysis tools which provide limited views of virtualized networks. Network teams using Observer can now access a complete, integrated view of virtual traffic traversing physical networks, between different virtual machine hosts, and between virtual machines on the same host. Further, all virtual traffic and communications flowing within the virtual machine host can be copied and sent to a GigaStor appliance for back-in-time analysis or the Observer Reporting Server for enterprise-wide performance reports.

Complete Performance Tracking
Central to any performance monitoring effort is the ability to monitor seamlessly across physical and virtualized environments. Using the Observer platform, organizations obtain enterprise-wide views of virtualized resources and performance within virtualized and physical environments.

Availability
The Network Instruments Virtual TAP is a key component within the expanded Observer virtualized offering. To obtain this functionality, a user installs a Network Instruments software probe into their VM host environment, where they can copy and send the data to their retrospective analysis device, analyzer console, or a third-party purpose-built device. Current maintenance customers gain these capabilities at no charge.