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

VMWare surge puts virtualization in the spotlight

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VMWare’s stock soared on its first day of trading yesterday, giving the company a market value upward of $10 billion, showing that virtual machines are starting to add up to real dollars.

Virtual machines, the technology that VMWare helped pioneer, allow one computer to act as many, whether it’s a Mac running Windows and the Mac operating system at the same time or a massive server running multiple instances of Windows and Linux simultaneously. Once a niche technology, virtualization is expanding rapidly as businesses try to get more bang for their server buck.

Investors are betting that virtualization technology is going to have a big impact and that VMWare will profit from its early lead in the field.

More information by Ina Fried at: Cnet

Enomalism Beta-Released Management Console for Xen

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Virtualized Management Console (VMC)

Enomaly, a Canadian innovator in virtualization solutions, announced the Beta deployment of Enomalism Virtualized Management Console , a pre-packaged virtualization infrastructure solution based on Xen 3.0 and available under LGPL open source license. The Enomalism VMC is a powerful web-based systems administrator management tool for XEN hypervisor that enables the management of multiple isolated Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to be managed from a central web based interface. Enomalism brings the performance, stability, security and openness of the Xen hypervisor to the market in a product that emphasizes ease of use, effortless deployment and management of Xen-based virtual infrastructure.

“By using Enomalism, organizations can clearly implement a controlled and easy to manage virtualization environment resulting in increased server utilization, reduced IT cost and improved operational performance,” said Reuven Cohen, CTO of Enomaly. “Enomalism supplies customers with a superior virtualization solution that provides open access to source code and price performance benefits over proprietary offerings. By leveraging Xen virtualization technology and open source standards, Enomalism increases flexibility and reduced total cost of ownership for our enterprise customers”.

Xen is an operating system level server virtualization solution that makes efficient use of your hardware, software and management resources. Xen lets a computer run several operating systems simultaneously, sharing the same hardware and more effectively utilizing its capacity than is typically the case for stand-alone servers. In the Xen virtual environment independent servers perform and execute with their own memory and I/O, configuration files, users and applications running on a single operating system.

Enomalism enables customers from a single interface to start, stop and move virtual machines from one physical computer to another without any interruption in service or availability. Enomalism comes equipped with a provisioning wizard which deploys new virtual machines and centralized user management. Customers can manage memory resources changing virtual machine behavior so priorities are easily met.

Download a free copy of the Enomalism beta or visit their website for more information

Vizioncore esxBasics released

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Quoting from the Vizioncore official announcement:

Vizioncore, Inc., the leader in backup, restoration, and disaster recovery automation for the VMware ESX Server, announced today the release of its free esxBasics starter pack for ESX Server.
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Including free basic versions of both vizioncore’s flagship esxRanger and esxCharter, esxBasics provides a range of dynamic backup and monitoring tools for the ESX Server environment.
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Features of vizioncore’s esxBasics include:

  • esxRanger provides full image backup protection (without interfering with ongoing server operations), full restore capabilities and a centralized Windows interface. esxRanger also enables Windows scheduler support in the GUI, allowing users to schedule esxRanger to perform online dynamic backups of guest operating systems on the VMware ESX Server.
  • esxCharter provides real-time ESX Server monitoring, enabling ESX administrators to monitor in real-time how much of the CPU the VM occupies, as well as how much memory is being used on an active, swapped, or shared basis. esxCharter also offers the ‘At-a-Glance’ view, providing a real-time snapshot of the current performance and specifications of the user’s VM Server-including important service console information.

Download it here.

Cassatt launches first cross-virtualization management solution

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VMware, Xen and Microsoft soon to be constrolled from a vendor neutral solution?

Quoting from the Cassatt official announcement:

Cassatt Corporation, an innovator in providing enterprise software and services to enable agile IT infrastructures, today announced general availability of the Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM).
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XVM helps customers rein in the growing problem of “virtual machine sprawl,” using a vendor-neutral architecture to automate control across virtual servers from multiple sources, including VMware, Xen, and Microsoft.
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XVM allows customers to host any combination of virtual machines, including VMware ESX, VMware Server, Xen, and Microsoft Virtual Server. In addition, customers can manage their physical servers from a range of vendors including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and others.
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XVM provides an array of control and automation capabilities including:

* Automated software deployment for both physical and virtual servers – including the ability to run the same software image on either a virtual server or directly on a bare-metal server.
* Automated responses to failures of both physical and virtual servers, enabling high availability for applications.
* Automatic scaling of applications by creating additional virtual servers on physical machines that have available CPU and memory capacity…

The Cassatt Collage Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM), with support for VMware ESX and VMware Server is now generally available. Support for Xen will be available in June 2006. Support for Microsoft Virtual Server is planned for the second half of 2006…

InfoWorld reports on their pricing:

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The XVM software costs $1,250 per physical node. Pricing for the Collage platform starts at $100,000 for a 40-node environment, and the WAM module adds an additional $5,000 per node…

Read the Infoworld article at source.

Server Virtualization Goes Mainstream

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Latest Forrester study on virtualization.

According to a recent Forrester study, server virtualization has quickly surpassed other forms of infrastructure virtualization, including techniques for virtualizing storage and networks.

Globally, 75% of 1,221 enterprises surveyed by Forrester say they are aware of server virtualization technologies, 26% have implemented it, and 8% more will pilot it by the summer of 2006.

The rapid adoption of server virtualization can be attributed to its near- and long-term advantages, which allow firms to reduce costs while making their infrastructures more flexible over time. Unlike compute grid technologies, which require architectural changes, server virtualization allows firms to easily encapsulate existing applications into containers that can be moved between physical servers. Forrester believes that this basic capability will prime firms’ data centers for more advanced Organic IT technologies, including automated configuration and distributed workload management.

This Forrester report provides some interesting figures:

* Worldwide Enterprise Awareness Of Server Virtualization Hits 75%
* North American Firms Lead In Adoption Of Server Virtualization
* More Than Half Of The Largest NA Firms Use Or Will Pilot Server Virtualization
* Europe Lags In Awareness But Is Second Overall In Adoption
* In Asia Pacific, Awareness Of Server Virtualization Ranks Second Overall
* VMware Dominates In North America But Microsoft Leads In Europe
* Microsoft Gets More Consideration From Large Enterprises Than Other Enterprises

You can read the full executive summary or order this study at the Forrester source.

Dell touts ‘disposable desktop’

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Computer maker brings virtualisation to the desktop

Tom Sanders from vnunet.com at Linuxworld in Boston on 06 Apr 2006.

Virtualisation technology will enable the creation of dedicated environments for desktops that can be tailored to optimise characteristics such as security or gaming, Dell chief technology officer Kevin Kettler said in a keynote presentation at LinuxWorld in Boston.

Virtual systems on a desktop system could allow a browser to run in a dedicated environment that can be killed entirely if it became infected by a virus.

The user experience would be the same as if they had only closed the browser, but under the hood the underlying operating system would be terminated as well.

“If you have virus problems or spam problems, it would be great to just step back and say: ‘I’m having trouble with my machine. Let me just kill this secure browser,'” Kettler told delegates.

Virtualisation can also be used to run media servers, offer support for legacy applications when switching operating systems, and make for easier system maintenance, Kettler argued.

The technology lets users run several operating systems on a single physical server with each operating system acting as though it is running on dedicated hardware.

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According to Dell, the trend is driven by the rise of multi-core processors, the integration of virtualisation technology into processors from AMD and Intel, and moves towards storage virtualisation.

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This could allow developers to tailor Linux towards special applications, for instance creating a Linux version that is designed to deliver good gaming performance.

“Think about these encapsulated environments and the opportunity to develop around these things. The opportunity is pretty powerful,” he said.

Read full story at source