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

Build Your Own Cloud!

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Given enough hardware, you can now build your own Amazon Elastic Cloud or similar platform. And all in Open Source.

A group of developers from the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara has recently released a tool that can make your personal Cloud dreams come true!

EUCALYPTUS – Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems – is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus has been developed in the MAYHEM Lab within the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, primarily as a tool for cloud-computing research. It is distributed as open source with a FreeBSD-style license that does not restrict its usage much. Eucalyptus 1.0 targets Linux systems that use Xen (versions 3.*) for virtualization.

Eucalyptus is based on the Rocks cluster management platform. In the future, the EUCALYPTUS team will offer a source release along with other methods of deployment.

Being API compliant with Amazon EC2 means you can reuse the tools you already wrote for Amazon and effectively build your own while not having to change your applications. EUCALYPTUS also opens the door for other organizations with spare CPU cycles to offer Virtual Machines instances at a competitive price.

Eucalyptus 1.0 was just released last month and the ISO iso available for download.

See also the report on Ostatic.

If you’re interested in this topic, you should check out Structure 08, an upcoming conference on cloud computing, infrastructure and virtualization (we’re a media partner for this event).

Virtual Bridges Upgrades Win4Lin Desktop, Releases Win4Solaris Desktop 5

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Virtual Bridges announced today the release of a major upgrade to its Win4Lin Desktop product and a specially priced edition for Ubuntu users. Version 5 of its desktop virtualization system features performance increases that it claims beat the likes of VMware Workstation and other competitors in the growing desktop virtualization market.

VirtualBridges

Win4Lin Desktop 5 is based on code that has been re-engineered since 2005, when the assets of the former company NeTraverse were acquired to form Win4Lin, now renamed Virtual Bridges. The new verison includes support for 64-bit Linux and its architecture capable of interfacing with KVM.

Virtual Bridges has created a special Win4Lin Desktop 5 Ubuntu Edition, which they are offering for $29.99.

These are the major Features of Win4Lin Desktop Products, according to the news release:

  • Runs virtually all Windows applications from Microsoft, Intuit, Adobe, and most others, including in-house developed applications
  • Compatible with the latest Linux desktops (Ubuntu, Fedora, Open SuSE, Mandriva, and more)
  • A new Win4Lin Console for easy installation, backup, and management of Windows sessions
  • Share files and documents between Windows and Linux applications
  • Seamless printing from Windows
  • Easy access to files on flash drives, memory sticks, and digital photo cameras from Windows
  • Run Windows as a “desktop-in-a-box”, full-screen, or as “floating applications”
  • No need to understand complex virtual machine technology – Win4Lin does all the work for you

Win4Lin Desktop is being offered to users in two editions, Win4Lin Desktop 5 Ubuntu Edition and Win4Lin Desktop 5 Pro Edition. It is a no-cost update for Win4Lin Pro 4.5 users and is available here.

The company has also released Win4Solaris Desktop 5, also in two editions; Win4Solaris Desktop 5 Home Edition and Win4Solaris Desktop 5 Pro Edition.

Virtualization Picking Up More Steam in Asia Pacific

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Research from Springboard had already estimated the virtualization software and services market in Asia Pacific to reach $ 1.35 billion with CAGR of 42 % by 2010, here’s another indication that Asia is poised to become the biggest growth market for virtualization in the future, particularly with financial institutions.

According to The Asian Banker, the Asia Pacific region is now adopting virtualization technology at a faster rate than the U.S. -14 percent of companies in Asia plan to implement virtualization in the next 12 months, compared with 12 percent of companies in America says Forrester.

According to Jim Lenox, VMware’s South Asia general manager, the motivation for adopting virtualization has varied significantly across Asia’s banking sector, with consolidation and cost savings as the “first-step” goal.

“After the organization achieves some experience running virtual machines, we generally see them expanding their usage of virtualization largely due to the agility and flexibility that comes with running applications inside of easy-to-create virtual machines.”

Virtualization is often cited as one of the solutions to improve banks’ disaster recovery capabilities, an issue that has come into the spotlight following recent trauma in China and Myanmar.

Virtual Iron Teams Up With Quantum

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Virtual Iron today announced full qualification across Quantum’s DXi-Series disk backup family of de-duplication and replication solutions and its Scalar line of intelligent tape libraries. The announcement coincides with the recent general availability release of the DXi7500, Quantum’s flagship disk backup system.

Virtual Iron

Virtual Iron provides server virtualization capabilities on an infrastructure-friendly architecture. The platform combines an open source hypervisor with virtualization services and policy-based capabilities for intelligent failover and dynamic workload management. Quantum specializes in backup, recovery and archive, providing a comprehensive portfolio of integrated disk, tape, de-duplication and multi-site replication solutions under common management.

More information about the joint solutions offered by Virtual Iron and Quantum are available on this website.

[Source: Businesswire]

Kroll Ontrack Lets You Recover Data From VMware Systems

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Kroll Ontrack, a provider of data recovery and legal technologies products and services, today issued a news release claiming it is the first company able to perform data recovery services on VMware systems.

Kroll Ontrack

In essence, Kroll Ontrack conceived and developed capabilities specifically designed to recover folders and files on all types of virtual systems. This capability provides businesses with a viable resource when data loss occurs in these environments.

Specifically, Kroll Ontrack can successfully recover lost data on the following VMware systems:

* VMware Infrastructure 2 & 3 (ESX Server, VMFS)
* VMware Server – http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/server-recovery/
* VMware Workstation (all versions)

[Source: iTWire]

Video: Vinod Khosla On His Green Tech Investment Strategy

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The video below features the legendary entrepreneur turned venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, interviewed briefly by Om Malik at the recent D6 Conference. Khosla shares some insight in his investing strategy, as well as some info on his recent data center plays. Xsigo Systems, a startup we mentioned on Virtualization.com before, is lucky enough to have him not only as an investor, but also as one of their board members. Khosla explains why he decided to back the company, which makes both hardware and software to create and manage virtual servers.

[Source: Earth2Tech]