Virtualization.com – Page 344 – News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Elastra Makes Cloud Computing More Accessible For Enterprises

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

San Francisco-based startup Elastra seeks to “unlock the value of the cloud” with a new service that lets enterprises quickly create database applications on utility computing platforms like Amazon Web Services. The company says its Elastra Cloud Server offers an easier way to deploy applications on Amazon’s infrastructure, providing customers with two markup languages that can be used to create database-driven services. The Cloud Server uses a metered, pay-per-use software pricing model, and will be available in April.

Elastra’s tools include the Elastic Computing Markup Language (ECML) and Elastic Deployment Markup Language (EDML), and system management dashboards to scale deployments. Available databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB, an Oracle-compatible database which just raised $ 10 million in Series C financing.

Dana Gardner at ZDNet notes:

In general the Elastra approach provides onramps to compute clouds based on descriptive tools that help reduce complexity for IT departments. This should encourage experimentation and ultimately lead to ramp ups in the use of public clouds, as well as the build-out and use of home-grown, so-called private clouds. Less attention has been given of late to the promise of private clouds, which are really a natural extension of current datacenter consolidation, clustering, application modernization, ITIL and virtualization initiatives.

…

Part of Elastra’s DNA is putting more data in the cloud, where it can be used assiduously to support apps, services and business processes. And once the data layer makes its way to the cloud (private, public or both), can the rest of the support infrastructure be far behind? We’re already seeing a lot of talk around integration as a service, and infrastructure as a service. And we’re also increasingly seeing tools and development as a service.

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]

Marathon Technologies Releases Virtualization Tool, Attempts To Simplify Disaster Recovery With everRun VM

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Marathon Technologies made a splash at the fall 2007 VMworld show with a preview of its everRun VM product for high availability and disaster recovery and will formally announce the product today; it’s available in beta and is expected to ship in April, according to the company.

Based on the same everRun automated availability software employed by over 1,800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

Companies can now reliably run production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications
It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies
A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption

With virtualization moving beyond test and dev environments and into the realm of key business applications, more CIOs are looking for high availability (HA) solutions now. If those apps are running in a VM, the last thing IT would want is a slowdown or outage for business users. The higher profile the app, the greater the need for a high availability solution for VMs.

Marathon is betting that its product will appeal in particular to midmarket CIOs, some of whom have had a hard time justifying the cost of traditional high availability/disaster recovery solutions, many of which require the added expense of a storage area network (SAN) and staffers with specialized SAN skills. Marathon’s product can use direct connect attached storage, which is a plus for CIOs who don’t have a SAN and don’t want to pay to install and maintain one.

Marathon’s product works only with the Citrix /Xen virtualized server architecture, not marketshare-leader VMware‘s. Microsoft Hyper-V support is planned at a later date, but no VMware support is on the drawing board, according to Marathon (which cites its ability to get its product to market faster and ensure proper performance with the Citrix/Xen architecture, among the reasons for this decision.).

By the fourth quarter of this year, Marathon is expected to ship everRun VM Lockstep Option, providing system-level fault tolerance, designed for scenarios where you lose a whole server for any reason, for example, if you lose a building in a fire. This will essentially be an add-on solution to everRun VM, the company says. Customers will be able to set the desired level of protection VM by VM, to keep costs down for VMs that don’t need the highest level of protection.

Also check out the interview our occasional guest blogger Tarry Singh did with Marathon’s CTO Jerry Melnick, where he reveals more information about the pricing strategy.

“everRun VM is available in two flavors. For companies that already have XenServer Enterprise, they can buy everRun VM for $2,000 per physical server. If they don’t have a hypervisor installed, they can buy an integrated bundle from us that includes XenServer Enterprise Edition and everRun VM for $4,500 per physical server. That’s for a perpetual license by the way. We’ve briefed a lot of channel partners and potential customers on the product and the pricing and more than once we’ve had them respond, “what’s the catch.” There is no catch. We’re just trying to make this so easy and inexpensive that companies don’t have to think to hard about adding it to XenServer.“

[Source: The Register UK]

Dell and VMware Looking For Sustainable Growth in South Asia

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

South Asia is a booming market, and with the US seemingly tumbling into a deep, long-term recession, it’s no surprise to see a lot of companies aiming for growth in both market share & revenue in the Far East.

VMware is investing $ 100 million by 2010 to expand its Bangalore, India-based research and development (R&D) operations, as announced today by VMware president and CEO Diane Greene at a news conference in Bangalore. VMware already has a strong presence across India with offices in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai.

VMware plans a brand new, state-of-the-art 82,000 square foot development center in Bangalore (including a 4,000 square foot computer lab) and aims to double its India-based engineering organization to more than 1,000 people in the next two years.

Meanwhile, Dell is also readying itself for a decline in sales from the US, historically its most prolific revenue base. Since its Chinese consumer sales last year were up 54 %, three times the industry average, Dell plants to cultivate this new audience and feed the retail stores. Dell India plans to launch low-cost desktop and notebook computers that are customized for India in the second week of April.

“Today we are a $700 million business in India,” Dell India Vice President and General Manager Rajan Anandan said at a news conference. He added the company will soon announce plans to establish retail operations in the country. In India, Dell follows its traditional model of selling computers over the Internet or by telephone. “At present, we are not into retail operations in India, but that’s going to change,” Mr. Anandan said.

Dell has two factories in China and a design center in Shanghai and it’s planning on increasing the amount of components it buys in China by 27 % this year to $ 23 billion. The company is also reportedly planning on increasing the number of laptop models it produces by 50 %.

Live Virtual Machine Migration Vulnerability

March 24, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Anthony Liguori has a good summary of the Blackhat paper by Jon Oberheide, Evan Cooke and Farnam Jahanian of the University of Michigan about Xensploit .

The idea of Xensploit is to use a Man in the Middle attack between 2 hosts performing a Live migration. The fundamental flaw is that by default Live migration of virtual machines is unencrypted or often even unauthenticated. Of course good network security practice isolates this kind of traffic in it’s own VLAN, but it shows that security is becoming a bigger issue day by day.

The vulnerability seems to be present with VMWare and Xen versions prior to 3.1 but according to Anthony not with KVM.

Enomalism 2.0 Available For Download, Beta Testers Wanted

March 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Enomaly just announced the Alpha release of the Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform. The Enomalism v2.0 Alpha is said to have been completely redeveloped from the ground up and builds on the concept of ” Elastic / Cloud Computing”.

The company hopes to move to a stable beta within a couple weeks. The current release is considered “Alpha” and should be used at your own risk.

New Enomalism Features include:

Web Services API – RESTful
Automated VM Deployment with Elastic Valet
Multi-Server Support
Virtual Cluster Engine
Extensible system monitoring integration
Flexible business process management with SOA (jBPM)
Integrated appliance / module repository
Extended User / Group Management
Elastic Dashboard / Portal Framework
System Metering (Utility / Chargeback)
Increased Virtual Machine / Hypervisor Support
Xen, KVM, Qemu, OpenVZ, Amazon EC2 * (Ec2 Module)
Support for installation in Linux & Windows
New Open Source License (AGPL)

For installation Documentation and core distribution download, you can go to http://trac.enomalism.com/enomalism/

Enomaly is looking for early testers to assist them with the following tasks:

Interface Debugging CSS, JS (IE7,Firefox)
Platform Testing (Linux,Windows,BSD,OSX)
Cluster Testing
Amazon EC2 Testing
Repository / Appliance Testing
Module Testing
User Management Testing
REST API Testing
Anything else that needs fixing

If you are interested in lending a hand, please visit the Enomalism forums at
http://www.enomalism.com/resources/community-center/

[Source: Open Management Consortium blog]

Ubuntu Releases “Hardy Heron”, OS Version 8.04 In Beta

March 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

After four Alpha releases, Ubuntu has now released version 8.04 of the popular Operating System, code-named “Hardy Heron”, in beta. Apart from the boat load of new features, libvirt and virt-manager have been integrated in Ubuntu. They allow for easy guest creation and basic management of virtual machines out of the box. Virt-manager can be used to administer guests on a remote server.

The kernel also includes virtio, greatly improving I/O performance in guests.

The beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 also comes with the following new features:

Xorg 7.3

The latest Xorg, Xorg 7.3, is available in Hardy, with an emphasis on better autoconfiguration with a minimal configuration file. This Beta brings a new Screen Resolution utility that allows users to dynamically configure the resolution, refresh rate, and rotation of a second monitor. This will be particularly handy for laptop users that connect to a projector or external monitor.

Linux kernel 2.6.24

This Beta includes the 2.6.24-12.13 kernel based on 2.6.24.3. This brings in significant enhancements and fixes that have been merged in the last few months into the mainline kernel.

GNOME 2.22

Hardy Heron Beta brings you the latest and greatest GNOME 2.22 with lots of new features and improvements, such as a new Nautilus that uses GVFS as its backend. GVFS makes it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and will make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.

PolicyKit

PolicyKit is now integrated in the administrative user interfaces. PolicyKit allows fine-grained control over user permissions and enhances usability and security, by allowing administrative applications to be run as a normal user and gaining extra privileges dynamically only for privileged operations instead of requiring the whole application to run as root.

PulseAudio

PulseAudio is now enabled by default. Some non-GNOME applications still need to be changed to output to pulse/esd by default and the volume control tools are not yet integrated.

Firefox 3 Beta 4

Firefox 3 Beta 4 replaces Firefox 2 as the default browser, bringing much better system integration including GTK2 form buttons and common dialogs. and icon theming that matches the system.

Transmission

The GTK version of the popular Transmission BitTorrent client comes preinstalled in Ubuntu, replacing the Gnome BitTorrent downloader.

Vinagre

The new Vinagre VNC client is installed by default in Beta, replacing xvnc4viewer. Vinagre allows the user to view multiple machines simultaneously, can discover VNC servers on the network via Avahi, and can keep track of recently used and favorite connections.

Brasero

The Brasero CD/DVD burning application, which will complement the CD/DVD burning functions of Nautilus and replace the Serpentine audio CD burning utility, is installed by default in Beta.

World Clock Applet

Integrating the features of the intlclock applet, the GNOME panel clock in Beta can display the time and weather in multiple locations.

Inkscape

Inkscape 0.46 introduces native PDF support, providing an easy, open source solution to editing text and graphics in PDF documents. Users will appreciate being able to draw up flyers, posters, and other docmuents, save them as PDF in inkscape, and send them to a print shop for printing without ever leaving Ubuntu or loading a proprietary tool.

ActiveDirectory integration

Likewise Open, available from the universe repository, enables seamless integration of Ubuntu within an Active Directory network. Users can use their AD credentials to log onto Ubuntu machines and access any kerberized services provided by an Ubuntu Server.

iSCSI support

iSCSI Initiator has been fully integrated in the kernel, allowing Ubuntu to mount iSCSI targets as a block device. iSCSI is available in the Ubuntu Server installer if iscsi=true is passed on the kernel command line at the beginning of the install process.

Firewall

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta includes ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall), a new host-based firewall application configurable from the command line which is designed to make administering a firewall easier for end users while not getting in the way of network administrators.

Memory Protection

Additional access checks have been added so that /dev/mem and /dev/kmem can only be used to access device memory. These changes will help defend against rootkits and other malicious code.

The lower 64K of system memory is no longer addressable by default. This will help defend against malicious code that attempts to leverage kernel bugs into security vulnerabilities.

Applications compiled as Position Independent Executables (PIE) are now placed into memory in unpredictable locations, making it harder for security vulnerabilities to be exploited.

Wubi

There is a new installation option for Windows users. Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation. Wubi works with a physical CD or in stand-alone mode, by downloading an appropriate ISO to install from. It can be found on the root of the CD as Wubi.exe. A full installation within a dedicated partition is still recommended, but Wubi is a great way to try Ubuntu for a few days and weeks before committing dedicated disk resources.

umenu

WinFOSS and the Windows open source software have been replaced by umenu, a simple launcher that lets the user install Ubuntu from Windows using Wubi, install Ubuntu to a partition without having to make their CD-ROM the first boot device.

To download the Ubuntu 8.04 Beta check out this page. The full and final OS is expected to be released next month.

[Source: TechConnect Magazine]