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

Symantec Acquires nSuite Technologies, Moves Into Endpoint Virtualization Management

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NetworkWorld is reporting that Symantec has agreed to acquire nSuite Technologies, a small firm specializing in virtualization solutions for the healthcare industry, for an undisclosed amount in cash. Symantec aims to build out its portfolio of virtualization security and management technologies.

nSuite makes software called PrivacyShell Virtual Workspace Management, which is primarily used by hospitals for secure desktop management on behalf of physicians and medical staff. The nSuite software works to create a container around an individual’s authorized applications and data. When a user is authenticated, the user’s applications and data can quickly be ported to the Windows-based desktop where the individual is working, and later removed. PrivacyShell Virtual Workspace Management balances centralized control with the flexibility needed to provide tailored user environments. It leverages virtualization and authentication technologies to optimize the way hospitals deliver and manage end user workspaces.

After the nSuite acquisition is completed, which is expected this month, Symantec anticipates integrating the nSuite software with its Altiris SVS and AppStream management consoles in the future. It will announce product updates at ManageFusion, a hands-on lab and training event held in various cities worldwide.

nSuite Technologies

Monitor Your Citrix XenServer Environment With Hyperic HQ

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Open source Web infrastructure management provider Hyperic today announced Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer management and monitoring software for Citrix XenServer. The new software allows XenServer administrators to quickly and correctly assess IT decisions within their XenServer environment.

“Our customers manage some of the world’s biggest Web environments where every second of downtime can mean losing revenue, users or both. Virtualization software such as Citrix XenServer delivers these organizations the necessary tools to be ultra-responsive to changes in user patterns and application performance,” said Doug MacEachern, CTO for Hyperic HQ. “By adding support for XenServer, we are once again taking the guesswork out of the management side of the equation. In providing management support for all virtualized and non-virtualized systems from one central location, we continue in our mission to make Web-based applications more manageable.”

Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer combines performance metrics, log data, configuration and security events in a single view correlated by time. These events can be used to link errors reported in the XenServer logs with other performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment, generate alerts or trigger automated control actions to remediate the current problem. Additionally, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer allows users to suspend, shutdown, start and reboot directly from the HQ interface and record the action in the event history for future reference.

Currently, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer is available on Hyperic’s community Hyperforge. Hyperic will incorporate this new plugin directly into the core distribution in the upcoming Hyperic HQ 4.0 release, due out later this summer.

Hyperic

InstallFree Secures $8.5 Million in VC Funding

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InstallFree, a provider of Dynamic Desktop Computing, today announced (PDF) it has received $8.5 Million in financing to drive the expansion of its product development and go-to-market teams. This round of financing was led by venture capital firms Ignition Partners and Trilogy Equity Partners. Richard Fade and John Connors of Ignition Partners and Peter van Oppen and Chuck Stonecipher of Trilogy Equity Partners will join InstallFree’s Board of Directors. The round follows a first round of financing of $1.7 Million secured in November 2007.

InstallFree launched its first product in April 2008. The company’s solutions improve IT operational efficiency and increase end-user productivity by eliminating the need to install software applications thus overcoming application conflicts and enabling the delivery of incremental changes on-the-fly and on-demand. All of this occurs without changing the organization’s existing infrastructure. With InstallFree, end-users can access their complete set of personal applications from any computer and work anywhere without limitations, while enjoying local application processing and offline availability—without undermining the IT department’s centralized management capabilities.

Dynamic Desktop Computing is a platform that enables organizations to centrally deploy and manage Windows client applications to end-users in a stateless, flexible and cost-efficient manner across a variety of end-user scenarios such as the office, home or on the road. InstallFree presents an elegant solution, changing application and desktop virtualization from a one-off solution to a standard method of deploying and managing software applications throughout a company’s entire corporate infrastructure.

InstallFree

StackSafe Test Center Gets Another Upgrade, Enhances Support for Virtualized Environments

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StackSafe, a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT operations teams, announced today that StackSafe Test Center, which was launched in the beginning of this year and significantly upgraded 2 months ago, now includes automated import of virtual infrastructure components.

Users can easily import virtualized production environments into Test Center, enabling them to stage both virtualized and physical production environments for testing activities. With this upgrade, Test Center provides testing that covers the gamut of potential scenarios, from physical infrastructure stacks to virtual infrastructure stacks to “hybrid” environments that include both physical and virtual components.

With the uses of virtualization becoming more widespread, the IT Operations industry is beginning to see an increasing use of virtual infrastructure stacks in production. Enhanced support for virtualized infrastructure enables users to more easily import virtual workloads into Test Center, making it possible to test against virtual and physical environments for complete end-to-end infrastructure stack testing. This inclusion, along with the product’s existing support for external infrastructure connectivity, gives Test Center a broad view of the entire IT Operations infrastructure, enabling testing across:

  • Physical machines – Production machines equipped with Windows, Red Hat Linux and CentOS Linux
  • Virtual machines – Test Center currently supports virtual machines on VMware ESX 3.x
  • External infrastructure components – Including large databases, mainframes and other network components that cannot be virtualized into Test Center

Organizations choosing to employ StackSafe Test Center can now ensure that their entire software stack is represented in the testing process, enabling for faster change impact analyses and fewer rolled-back changes.

As part of StackSafe Test Center’s subscription licensing model, the updated release of Test Center is generally available to current Test Center users at no charge.

3Leaf Introduces V-8000 Virtual I/O Server 2.0

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3Leaf Systems today announced the general availability of 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server version 2.0, a key component of 3Leaf Virtual Compute Environment. The new software release delivers disaster recovery, streamlined management, and enhanced availability for large x86 server deployments. The company claims the V-8000 version 2.0 software is the first I/O virtualization solution to run on standard off the shelf commodity x86 servers. 3Leaf’s new Virtual Compute Environment solution will be introduced at the Next Generation Data Center/LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Powered by V-8000 version 2.0, 3Leaf’s Virtual Compute Environment solution delivers the following features and benefits to enterprise data centers and server farms:

  • Greatly simplified management and provisioning of large-scale server deployments, with asset hierarchies and separation between infrastructure architecture and ongoing operations, bringing true relief to IT departments.
  • Disaster recovery solution that automates service recovery of production server farms and sites to a consolidated recovery site.
  • Boosted operational agility with accelerators such as building composite servers from modular building blocks, application level provisioning without server reboot, and easy drag-and-drop operations.
  • Improved availability and resiliency, with a novel multi-pathing approach that eliminates operating system dependent setup and brings cost-effective I/O high-availability to every server farm.
  • Ease of solution deployment and investment protection with proven software running on standard x86 servers. The V-8000 Virtual I/O Server software runs on a commodity platform available from 3Leaf or commercial channels.
  • Now with a backbone I/O fabric of up to 40Gb/s, servers running the new release will have a wider data path for I/O-heavy operations, especially for heavily loaded hypervisor hosts and where VM migration such as VMotion requires an uninterrupted path.

3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server version 2.0 is available now. Customers have the option to order a complete system from 3Leaf including hardware and pre-installed software, or purchase the hardware independently and order the software and any installation and deployment services they need from 3Leaf. Pricing begins at US $2,500 per managed server, excluding the hardware platform price.

3Leaf Systems

Veeam Releases Monitor 3.0 Beta

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After releasing Backup 2.0 last week, Veeam has now announced that Veeam Monitor version 3.0 is now available in beta.  Its new features, detailed below, increase the product’s trend analysis and troubleshooting capabilities – equipping IT admins to proactively manage the performance and availability of their VMware infrastructure.

New features in Veeam Monitor 3.0 include:

  • Enterprise scalability and support for multiple VirtualCenters. Is your environment getting too large to be handled by a single VirtualCenter? Veeam Monitor can help. New performance optimization and a special monitoring mode allow for enterprise scalability and provide the ability to gather monitoring information from large VI deployments with multiple VirtualCenters – all from a single console.
  • Multiple new alarm sources. The following new alarm sources are available in Veeam Monitor version 3.0 for even more comprehensive monitoring and alerting:
  • Alarm modeling. No more being flooded with alerts, and no more waiting for weeks to find out that your alarm settings don’t work as intended. With Veeam Monitor 3.0, you can model and test your alarms instantly. Simply use the new Alarm Modeling feature to test your alarm settings against your event history from VirtualCenter for an immediate evaluation. The new Alarm Modeling feature allows you to easily establish better benchmarks and thresholds. Based on the modeling results, you can fine-tune the alarms in case it appears that you will receive too many false positive alarms, or missing something important.
  • Capacity planning and trend analysis. Veeam Monitor’s new Trend Reporting feature allows you to discover trends and do proactive capacity planning. Project how your virtual environment will grow over time; find out how resource usage is changing for a specified host, resource pool or datacenter; and plan upgrades or migrations based on what you learn.
  • Correlation of VI events and performance data. Ever wondered about an unexpected resource consumption spike? Solve resource usage mysteries with new real-time monitoring graphs displaying known virtual infrastructure events, such as snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, directly on the performance graph.
  • Suppression of unwanted alarms. Tired of being slammed with alarms during backup activities? You can now instruct Veeam Monitor to suppress alerts raised during known VI activities, such as backup or snapshot operations.
  • Drill-down into VM. Want to research possible rogue VM activity? Veeam Monitor 3.0 provides you with the ability to drill down to an individual VM and find out what processes are running there, and how much CPU and memory they are consuming.
  • Connect to a VM directly from Veeam Monitor. Need to troubleshoot a VM that is not behaving as expected according to performance metrics? For your convenience, the Monitor 3.0 user interface features a new “Console” tab, which lets you connect to the VM console right from the Monitor interface.
  • Leverage VC history. No more waiting for monitoring data to be gathered before you can start working on it. When you connect to VirtualCenter for the first time, Veeam Monitor 3.0 fetches all historical performance and event data from it, giving you the ability to browse and analyze historical data immediately.

You can download the Beta of Veeam Monitor 3.0 here.

Veeam