News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
From VMware Virtualization Evangelist Jason Boche’s blog:
Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next. The new name is VMware vSphere.
Veeam Software, a provider of systems management tools for VMware ESX Server environments, today announced general availability of a new free tool: Veeam Monitor Free Edition. This lightweight version of Veeam Monitor is designed to provide comprehensive real-time monitoring in ESX and ESXi environments, including VMware’s free version of ESXi.
Veeam Monitor Free Edition is built from the ground up specifically for the virtual world, and uses an agentless approach (VMware API) to monitor system health and performance on both VMware ESX and ESXi. Customers can view real-time resource usage data for any virtual infrastructure object or collection of objects, as well as known infrastructure events, all on a single screen. This unified view of the virtual infrastructure improves administrator productivity vs. fragmented views of isolated hosts and guests.
Key features of Veeam Monitor Free Edition include:
This is a cross-post of this blog written by Gregory Ness, former VP of Marketing for Blue Lane Technologies who is currently working for InfoBlox.
In September the discussion started about the concept of Infrastructure 2.0 (or Dynamic Infrastructure) as a response to the rising demands of larger and more complex networks colliding with new IT initiatives including virtualization and cloud computing. I think it caught many by surprise.
A few weeks later a blog entitled The CIO Shell Game made the point that automating systems and endpoints and not the network was merely shifting manual labor demands while increasing network availability and security risks. This theme continued in The Network Industry Needs a New Vision with a focus on the network industry’s overzealous industry focus on speeds and feeds that had ultimately risked making the network irrelevant to computing in the future.
Companies like Cisco, Juniper, F5 Networks, Foundry and Extreme need to invest in automating the rampant manual labor rendering networks static and brittle in the face of more dynamic systems and endpoints. If they do, the cloud computing vision could have a silver lining for those who understand the potential of dynamic infrastructure.
Unleashing dynamic infrastructure will also unleash more powerful business cases for investments in virtualization and cloud computing, which would also impact the fortunes of VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and an emerging community of cloud computing startups. I think the word is getting out rapidly.
January 15 is the Launch of the Dynamic Infrastructure Vision
Since then we’ve seen blogs at Cisco and F5’s DevCentral blog join the conversation and recognize how important the network is to these new initiatives. I think, however, the ultimate sign of the arrival of the network as “the foundation for IT automation” meme is a live streaming event being held at the San Jose Fairmont Hotel on January 15.
Infoblox and Cisco are billing dynamic infrastructure as the biggest thing in networking since TCP/IP, because it transforms the brittle, static and manually managed network into an automated network that enables connectivity intelligence between applications, endpoints and networks. That connectivity intelligence establishes feedback loops, the precursor to an explosion of intelligence in the network, applications and endpoints.
Connectivity intelligence could also take the VMotion genie out of the bottle and drive new levels of scale and security and drive the business case for virtualization skyward. Whichever virtualization platform vendor delivers on the promise of enhanced security with VMotion will win.
Recently a second Cisco speaker has agreed to speak at the breakfast event, alongside Cisco Senior Director Douglas Gourlay and Infoblox CTO and Founder Stuart Bailey and moderator (Infoblox) VP Marketing Richard Kagan.
In May the Dynamic Infrastructure panel at the Future In Review (FIRE) conference in San Diego will also include a VP from F5 Networks among others.
I think these two events will set the stage for a much-needed, broader discussion about the collision between static networks and dynamic systems and endpoints; as well as the drive to automate greater portions of the network in response to increasing velocities of change enabled by increased system and endpoint automation.
You can follow my comments in real time at www.twitter.com/archimedius. You can also read more about dynamic infrastructure in the latest issue of bloxNews (which contains several third party perspectives) and the new Infrastructure 2.0 blog launched last week.
My disclaimer is at: http://gregness.wordpress.com/about/. I am a Senior Director at Infoblox.
Amazon‘s 50-year-old CTO Werner Vogels has emerged as the right person at the right time and place to guide cloud computing – until now, an emerging technology for early adopters – into the mainstream. He not only understands how to architect a global computing cloud consisting of tens of thousands of servers, but also how to engage CTOs, CIOs, and other professionals at customer companies in a discussion of how that architecture could potentially change the way they approach IT.
We would like to congratulate Vogels on being selected by InformationWeek as Chief Of The Year 2008.
The article / interview is well worth a read.
Also, check out our video interview with man, recorded over the Summer.
The Xen Blog has the news that Oracle joined the Xen Advisory Board.
“Having Oracle join the Xen Advisory Board is a significant milestone for the Xen.org community and Xen hypervisor,” said Ian Pratt, founder of the xen project and Chairman of Xen.org. “With Oracle’s industry leadership and enterprise market experience, the Xen.org community is further strengthened, ensuring a continued leadership position as the open source hypervisor of choice.”
“As a leading contributor to the Open Source community, Oracle is pleased to join the Xen Advisory Board,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president Linux Engineering, Oracle. “With development projects such as enhancing Oracle Cluster File System 2 with features useful for virtualization, memory management changes with the hcache and hswap projects and integrating the Linux data integrity project into Xen, Oracle continues to focus on enhancing Xen with enterprise-class features.”
Together with Wim “Seklos” Coekaerts , comes Dan “I’ll replace you with a small shell script” Magenheimer, formerly of HP and the leader of the Itanium Xen port as an Oracle Observer, and Kurt Hackel, who leads the Oracle VM dev team.
Throughout 2008, Oracle has already significantly increased its contribution to the Xen.org community, including a focus on the new Xen debugger, a new implementation effort on the Xen API, timer testing, new memory caching algorithms, and updates to support Oracle software running on the Xen hypervisor. These contributions from Oracle are valuable to the Xen customer base as they provide enhancements to the Xen hypervisor’s capabilities in the enterprise and cloud computing space. These features are also important to the development community as the new Xen debugger delivers greater insight into the hypervisor’s state during development testing, allowing for faster bug identification and fixes.
Simon Crosby comments on Oracle earlier involvement “Whereas Oracle Unbreakable Linux is a derivative of Unfakable Enterprise Linux” (in other words, RHEL) the Xen in Oracle VM comes directly from the upstream Xen.org code base, and not via an intermediate distro. This means that Oracle VM tracks the xen.org upstream code base more closely than OEL can track kernel.org. Oracle has already offered a valuable set of set of patches and contributions to the project, and will host the next Xen Developer Summit.”
Simon also isn’t that keen on the way Oracle has been supporting applications within VM’s in the past but hopes that with Oracle joining the Xen Project Advisory board they will learn about the business of partnering from the community and the ISV ecosystem.
Reuven announced the availability of Enomaly ECP 2.1.1 on SourceForge. Enomaly 2.1.1 is a bug fix and security release, so don’t expect to see a whole lot of new functionality –
2.2 is coming is planned to be released shortly into 2009 with lots of new features.
This maintenance release fixes a potential security exploit in the startup script’s temporary file handling as well as the following bug fixes:
* Randomly generated mac addresses are now written to the machine XML at provision time.
* The available system memory is now checked against the required memory for new machines at provision time.
* Fixed a bug regarding the valet extension module not properly checking the hypervisor type.
* Fixed a bug that disallows a machine’s XML definition to be edited.
* Fixed several misc. bugs in the valet extension module.
* Added messages to the interface stating the required extension modules.
You can download the new release here
ECP is governed by the AGPL, a free open source license