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

Qlusters Shuts Down

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Israel business site Globes Online got the scoop about Qlusters closing shop after seven years in business. The last 30 employees of the company were informed earlier this week of the company’s decision.

Qlusters, the company formerly behind the openQRM project shutters only about a year after it raised $10 million in a Series C round. While the market of Infrastructure Management tools and particularly Virtualization Management frameworks is growing, Qlusters failed to realize its goals and burned through approximately $34 million of capital.

As we reported earlier, Qlusters had no new roadmap after dropping the opensource openQRM project, which recently announced the beta of it’s 4.0 rewrite. It’s always sad to see a company like Qlusters leave the market like this, but fortunately their technology will continue to live on thanks to the open source community.

Microsoft Eats Own Hyper-V Dog Food, Deploys Homegrown Hypervisor In Its Global Datacenters (Video Interview)

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At last week’s GigaOM VIP reception, just before their Structure 08 conference, we bumped into Arne Josefsberg, General Manager Online Infrastructure at Microsoft. He happened to be passing by in San Francisco and kindly agreed to get on record with comments on Hyper-V adoption at Microsoft. As he answered our late night questions, the party was just breaking up (hence the disturbing background sounds).

Update: also check out this article on GigaOM, since Om Malik caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat as well.

Although Arne declined to put exact numbers to the amount of servers at Microsoft, he did confirm he is responsible for dozens of datacenters around the world to support the software giant’s online services. To give you an idea, Data Center Knowledge noted from a Microsoft executive that the company is adding no less than 10 000 servers per month.

Here is a datacenter lesson from Arne:

“As Microsoft obviously deploys a huge amount of processor, compute and storage capacity, [the need for] efficiency and utilization become super important to us. We work very closely with the Windows Operating system division. Hyper-V is actually becoming one of our key-technologies to drive better utilization of the hardware. We have Hyper-V in multiple datacenters in the Live-network, in production environments taking live traffic. It’s going quite quite well. So we are very jazzed about Hyper-V and virtualization as a technology to scale out our infrastructure.”

Arne’s team has been working closely with the Hyper-V development team for over a year and did not limit this collaboration to the hypervisor, but also the management tools and on how to manage hypervisors at very large scale.

When asked about cloud computing, Microsoft refers to its ‘Software plus Services’ strategy which combines software on the desktop (still the major revenue driver for Microsoft) with centralized datacenter-based services. Microsoft seems high on its hybrid flavor of cloud computing and hopes to lead the way in this nascent industry as well.

Virtualization.com, Now Also On Your Mobile

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Just a small announcement about the fact that your favourite resource on virtualization news can now also be checked on your cellphone, smartphone or PDA, at the request of several readers. Thanks to MoFuse, you can now bookmark Virtualization.com Mobile if you want to stay updated even when you’re on the road.

The exact URL for the mobile site is http://virtualization.mofuse.mobi

Don’t hesitate to give us some feedback about what you think, or what you want more!

Microsoft Releases Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator MAP 3.1

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Microsoft has announced that its Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Solution Accelerator is no longer in beta mode, as it has been released to the general public as the MAP 3.1 tool.

As we wrote in previous coverage, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Solution Accelerator is a tool that makes it easy to assess your current IT infrastructure for a variety of technology migration projects. It includes the features previously provided with the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment Solution Accelerator.
The MAP Solution Accelerator is an agentless tool that will find computers on a network and perform a detailed inventory of the computers using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Remote Registry Service, or the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).  Using the inventory data, the tool will assess and report whether computers can run Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Application Virtualization (SoftGrid), and Windows Server 2008.  This includes assessment of device driver availability and recommendations for hardware upgrades that may be required.
This release also includes new features for gathering performance metrics from computers you are considering for consolidation using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2.  Using the performance metrics and a model virtual server host computer, you can generate reports that recommend placement of the physical servers in a virtual server environment.
[Source: VMBlog]

From Virtualization to Cloud Computing: Q-layer Launches Delegation Manager

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Q-layer, enabler of cloud computing through Virtual Private Data Centers (VPDC), today announced the Q-layer Delegation Manager, a solution that turns virtual server environments into a cloud computing platform.

The first release of Delegation Manager provides complete support for VMware Infrastructure 3 environments, including the VMware ESX Hypervisor, with future support for additional Hypervisors including Xen, xVM VirtualBox and Hyper-V. The Q-layer Delegation Manager aims to enable fast browser-based provisioning of data center assets for helpdesk, technical end-users and non-technical end-users, with integrated credit-based charge-back capabilities, reporting and flash-based management controls.

Q-layer’s Delegation Manager is installed through the VMware Virtual Center as a Virtual Appliance and builds on Q-layer’s VPDC and Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL) technology. It enables model-driven orchestration capabilities for data centers, including workflows to cohesively orchestrate virtual servers, networks and storage.

According to the press release, the Q-layer Delegation Manager augments existing data center infrastructure, including hypervisors, networks and storage devices. The system provides complete orchestration of these underlying assets to enable data center agility for cloud computing. To facilitate this ecosystem, Q-layer is also working with leading technology partners to create complete virtualization solutions for the next generation data center.

“With Q-layer’s Delegation Manager, end-users can provision and deploy a complete data center within minutes,” said Paul Speciale, vice president of product management at Q-layer. “Our technology has been proven in leading data centers, and leverages the capabilities of existing data center infrastructures to provide the most simple and extensible cloud computing solution for data center operators.”

The Q-layer Delegation Manager will be generally available in the third quarter of 2008. Pricing starts at $1,995 per node, for any number of Virtual Machines.

SourceLabs Adds Support For Xen In Self-Support Suite

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SourceLabs, provider of technology to support open source software, today announced that its Self-Support Suite now supports the Xen hypervisor.

SourceLabs’ Self-Support technology aims to give developers, corporate IT pros and solution
providers an on-demand way to reduce the complexity of application development, deployment, troubleshooting and software maintenance for open source technologies.

“As data centers are moving toward a more dynamic model, they are increasingly doing so using server virtualization technology and Xen is the leading technology solution in the market today for running virtualized IT environments,” said Byron Sebastian, SourceLabs CEO and Founder. “The SourceLabs Self- Support Suite gives developers the ability to significantly drive down the costs of deploying and maintaining virtualized data centers with technology that seamlessly and effortlessly harnesses the power of Xen and other open source technologies.”

SourceLabs’ Self-Support Suite identifies issues and ranks potential resolutions from across a wide variety of projects in the open source development ecosystem. Indexing, managing, and storing the data, SourceLabs uses advanced pattern matching and predictive analysis algorithms to automate troubleshooting, reduces the time on routine tasks and analyzes data to flag any potential problems before they can impact systems or designs.

SourceLabs’ supports all current and previous releases of Xen technology, including auxiliary projects
such as ‘libvirt.’ SourceLabs’ Self-Support Suite for Xen references solutions from Xen.org as well as
solutions from across multiple Linux distributions that ship with Xen integration including Debian,
RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and OpenSuSE, as well as the Linux Kernel mailing list and bug database,
providing Xen users an exhaustive resource for troubleshooting and analysis of their virtualization
platforms. SourceLabs’ Self-Support Suite supports the most popular open source Java and Linux
technologies including Apache httpd, GCC, MySQL, Sendmail, and the Linux Kernel among others.

Basic support includes 24×7 global coverage and is available from $399 for one developer seat.