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

Solidcore S3 Control Software Now Supports VMware ESX

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Solidcore Systems, who specializes in change audit and configuration control, today announced its S3 Control software detects and validates change events to VMware environments in real time. Unlike previous methods that relied on multiple scan-based tools to manage change, the S3 Control software reconciles change events in real time from both virtual and physical infrastructures with an enterprise change management process.

Solidcore S3 Control eases the burden of managing the multitude of change events across virtualized systems by tracking changes on VMware ESX servers and virtual consoles in real time, alerting and reporting on change events, and correlating changes to authorization. All change events can be reconciled with an existing change management system, including HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy, CA Unicenter, and IBM Tivoli Service Desk.

Solidcore S3 Control captures “who” is making changes, “what” is being changed, “when” change is occurring, “how” the change was implemented, and “where” the change was made. This enables IT organizations to ensure deployed virtual and physical systems are always in a known and verified state. Solidcore can track changes to user roles and permissions, data stores attached to ESX hosts, high-availability configurations, Virtual Machine (VM) templates, resource pools, scheduled tasks, and guest VMs. Solidcore can also identify new users that have been created, edited or deleted, new hosts added to VMware VirtualCenter, and license server events in virtual systems. S3 Control validates these changes against the change management system, where any changes with a corresponding ticket are marked “authorized” and the change management system is updated with the current change information. Changes that occur without a matching ticket are immediately identified for review.

Solidcore’s support for VMware ESX is available today in the latest release of the Solidcore S3 Control software.

Solidcore Systems

[Source: Businesswire]

DTMF Accepts Draft Specification for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced the acceptance of a draft specification submitted by leading virtualization companies (VMware, Oracle and CA recently joined the task force) targeting an industry standard format for portable virtual machines. Virtual machines packaged in this format can be installed on any virtualization platform that supports the standard simplifying interoperability, security and virtual machine lifecycle management for virtual infrastructures.

The companies behind the collaboration on this specification include Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource. This group of virtualization industry leaders has submitted the specification to the DMTF for development into an industry standard. DMTF is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. DMTF will continue to develop this technology into a successful, open industry standard and promote it worldwide.

The proposed format, called the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform a portable package containing all required installation and configuration parameters for the virtual machines. This allows any virtualization platform that implements the standard to correctly install and run the virtual machines.

(IBM recently announced its open-ovf project.)

Most importantly, OVF specifies procedures and technologies to permit integrity checking of the virtual machines (VM) to ensure that they have not been modified since the package was produced. This enhances the security of the format and will alleviate security concerns of users who adopt virtual appliances produced by third parties. OVF also provides mechanisms that support license checking for the enclosed VMs, addressing a key concern of both independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers. Finally, OVF allows an installed VM to acquire information about its host virtualization platform and run-time environment, which allows the VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for the particular virtualization environment.

In addition to providing portability, integrity, and configurability of existing virtual hard disk formats. OVF is also extensible to support future developments of virtual hard disk formats whose specifications are openly available.

NetIQ Survey Results Reflect Lack of Virtualization Management Basics

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As the adoption rate of virtualization technology increases, organizations face new management challenges arising from hybrid physical and virtual infrastructures. While companies turn to virtualization to reduce IT expense and increase service capacity, a recent study conducted by NetIQ revealed that very few companies are taking the necessary steps to extend systems management basics to ensure application performance, service availability and end user experience across this complex hybrid environment. As a result, they risk offsetting the many benefits and ultimate cost savings virtualization technology promises.

Comprised of feedback from over 1,000 respondents within more than 800 different government, enterprise and small-to-medium organizations worldwide, only 21 percent of 759 respondents currently deploying virtualization have any kind of systems management solution for their virtual infrastructure. Overall, survey responses demonstrate that:

  • Approximately 27 percent are managing the performance and availability of their virtual systems with the same tools they utilize on their physical servers;
  • Just 17 percent are simply monitoring the virtual hardware or the operating system; and
  • Only 10 percent are proactively gauging end-user response time while 15 percent are simply considering it.

The survey also revealed that 40 percent of respondents are not reporting on the performance of their virtualized applications, hardware, operating systems, or their virtual machines in any measurable way. This prevents them from managing capacity, avoiding impending outages and collecting additional critical data that can help ensure business continuity.

By not extending application and end-user response time monitoring to virtual systems and hybrid environments, organizations have little visibility into IT service performance and limited accuracy in gauging an end users’ experience with those services. This limits the ability of IT to fulfill service level agreements (SLAs), threatens process continuity and minimizes the potential return on virtualization investments.

NetIQ

INX’ Virtualization Book Release Scheduled For VMware VMworld 2008 (Las Vegas)

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INX today announced the release of “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” at VMware VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

With the recent acquisition of AccessFlow in June, INX has made an aggressive move into the data center virtualization space by acquiring some of the most expert minds in the business. Those minds belong to Steve Kaplan and Gary Lamb, INX’s VP of Datacenter Virtualization and Senior Director of Data Center Virtualization Practice, respectively.
Steve and Gary have collaboratively written a book titled “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” and will be releasing the book at this year’s VMware World trade show, September 15 through the 18th in Las Vegas.
“Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” provides a starting point for understanding the VMware Infrastructure and deploying it for cost reduction, quicker deployments of systems, and better control of resource utilization, as well as datacenter management and high availability.
Kaplan and Lamb have started a national book tour to promote and discuss the book this month and will continue to tour until VMworld. Steve Kaplan is founder of AccessFlow and formerly ran an ROI consulting firm. He has helped organizations around the globe quantify their IT costs, written scores of published IT articles and white papers on virtualization, power savings and has spoken at many venues across the globe including delivering the keynote address at Thin Power 2006 in Norway.

Surgient To Use IBM Jazz Platform To Enable More Efficient Application Development

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Surgient today announced it will offer integrated solutions with products built using IBM Jazz collaborative technologies. As a result, IBM quality assurance users can use Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform to allocate IT resources and set up and tear down virtual labs on-demand for software testing and quality assurance, introducing new efficiencies to the application development lifecycle.

IBM Jazz provides an open and extensible platform on top of which IBM, business partners and clients are building new development tools that integrate collaboration, team awareness and project health into every aspect of the software development lifecycle. Later this year, Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform will include an integration with IBM Rational Quality Manager, comprehensive test planning and process software that provides a single view into all aspects of a quality plan. Surgient’s product currently integrates with IBM’s Rational BuildForge.

By implementing the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform, development and QA organizations will benefit from Surgient’s self-service IT solution for virtual lab management. IBM Rational customers using IBM Rational Quality Manager can request and build a live application testing environment with specific configurations without manual administration from a company’s IT department, freeing up IT personnel to address additional business critical initiatives. Surgient was a visionary behind virtual lab management beginning in 2003 and now serves many of the world’s largest companies.

Surgient, meanwhile, is still being rumored to be either planning an IPO or serving as high-profile acquisition target.

Surgient

Terremark Completes Infinistructure Deployment

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Terremark Worldwide today announced the completed deployment of the Infinistructure utility-computing platform at its facilities in Madrid and Amsterdam. The platform will benefit Terremark’s European and American customers and has been met with high demand from current customers and prospects.

Infinistructure’s server and storage infrastructure combines Terremark’s proprietary service-management platform with virtualization technology from partners including VMWare, Cisco, and IBM, providing a highly scalable and flexible high-performance computing platform.

Infinistructure’s on-demand network, storage and computing architecture allows customers to precisely match their infrastructure to their business needs, while leveraging a fully managed solution with plug-and-play access to network connectivity from multiple carriers. The Infinistructure platform is connected to the ESpanix exchange point in Spain and the AMS-IX exchange point in The Netherlands, the largest internet connection point in Europe with over 400 Gb/s in peak traffic.

terremark