Virtualization.com

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

VMLogix Also Sells a Lab Manager, Releases Version 3.6

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VMLogix has released VMLogix LabManager 3.6 – not to be confused with VMware Lab Manager 3.0, released on the same day – carrying support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. VMLogix LabManager is hypervisor agnostic and with the introduction of Hyper-V now supports all standard server virtualization platforms.

VMLogix LabManager enables software companies, SMBs and enterprise IT organizations to leverage virtualization to consolidate and automate lab IT infrastructure in order to deliver and maintain software applications more quickly, cost-effectively and reliably. VMLogix LabManager allows development, test and support teams to build, snapshot, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand across Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtualization platforms.

VMLogix LabManager 3.6 is available starting today and includes the beta version of support for the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. The product will be generally available in September 2008.

VMLogix

VMware Announces Lab Manager 3

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VMware yesterday announced the general availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, a lab automation solution that provides software development and QA engineers with self-service provisioning of multi-VM environments while giving IT departments increased control over policies. With this new release, VMware Lab Manager now offers support for multiple organizational units, advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure.

VMware Lab Manager 3 supports multiple organizations of lab users with a single installation, whether users are local or distributed globally. IT administrators can set up customized user roles and access rights to dedicated or shared resource pools imported from VMware VirtualCenter to provide users with the highest quality of service. Because VMware Lab Manager also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, both user management and resource administration can be centralized to further simplify lab administration and reduce overall resource consumption.

The tighter integration of VMware Lab Manager 3 with VMware Infrastructure 3 allows lab administrators to take advantage of VMware HA, which provides high availability for VMs, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), which continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among the virtual machines based on pre-defined rules. As a result, system configurations in the lab are more resilient against hardware failures and users are protected from unplanned downtime.

VMware Lab Manager is list priced at $1,295 per processor and is available for purchase through VMware’s global network of distributors, resellers and OEMs starting August 7, 2008. There’s a free download available on the VMware website.

VMware

How to … spend your weekend

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Virtualization is obviously becoming a better and better documented topic.

Over at UbuntuGeek.com is a fresh HOWTO on installing VirtualBox 1.6 in ad Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron setup, including USB Support.

Over at the other side of the Linux Distribution Spectrum, Falko Timme at How to Forge documents how to install and use OpenVZ on Centos 5.2.

So if you don’t feel like playing outside this weekend, you know what to do 🙂

Denali Bundles I/O Virtualization Technology Solution With PureSpec PCI Express Verification IP

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Denali Software, provider of electronic design automation (EDA) software and intellectual property (IP), today announced that its PureSpec PCI Express (PCIe) verification intellectual property (VIP) product, supports the complete PCI-SIG I/O Virtualization (IOV) specifications, now including Multi-Root IOV (MR-IOV).

The PCI-SIG IOV suite of specifications minimizes system hardware and software requirements, allowing the simultaneous sharing of peripherals across multiple microprocessors and operating systems, increasing the performance of virtualized systems and enabling significant power savings. Denali’s PureSpec VIP allows verification engineers to verify their next-generation designs, ranging from server processors and network chipset to communication systems, for compliance to the latest PCIe standard, and take advantage of the newest set of IOV technologies.

Denali Software

Citrix Announces Public Beta of XenServer 4.2

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Yesterday, Citrix released the public beta of the next version of XenServer, which may or may not be called XenServer 4.2 but is still being referred to as ‘Project Orlando’. Judging by the comments on the Citrix forum, the release was indeed scheduled for end of July, with a final version coming in September.

Citrix XenServer 4.2 comes with Xen 3.2, with Xen 3.3 remaining in final testing stage. On to the Xen.org blog, you can already post feature requests for Xen 3.4.

Virtualization.info broke the news about the release and lists the following additional new features:

  • Automated high availability
  • VM grouping, searching and tagging
  • Real-time and persistent performance monitoring
  • Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, XP SP3, Vista SP1 guest OSes
  • Support for Novell SLES 9 SP4 / 10 SP2, Red Hat RHEL 4.7 / 5.2 guest OSes
  • Support for Fibre Channel / iSCSI multipath (configurable through XenCenter)
  • Support for alerts as email

You can enroll for the public beta program here.

Citrix Systems

Virtualization.com Contest: Guess What’s on Werner Vogels’ Mind and Win A Book

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Aside from interviewing Werner Vogels at the GigaOM Structure 08 conference, we asked him to dedicate an O’Reilly book on the Amazon Web Services, which we will give away in the contest we’re introducing today. First, watch the video below.


Win O’Reilly’s Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS and SimpleDB

Second, follow these simple rules for our summer contest: up until the 15th of August, you can guess what Vogels has written in this book and provide your answer in the comments below. You don’t necessarily have to get it right, but the funniest, most original, most in-depth or closest comment on this post will be picked out by our editors on the 15th of August 2008. The lucky winner will get a free copy of O’Reilly’s Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB (Programming), with the hand-signed note from Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels inside!

If you are really creative, we throw in a second freeby, for the funniest fake job title. Get inspired by “Werner Vogels, System Admin at a Small Bookshop (aka CTO Amazon)”

Make your educated guess or just be funny and don’t forget to include your e-mail address (not shown) so we can contact you afterwards and get your book delivered.