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

How to build a Virtual Private Server (VPS) With Debian 3.1 (Sarge) And OpenVZ

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Till Brehm has released an essential how-to at HowToForge.Com for installing OpenVZ, the open source version of SWsoft Virtuozzo, on a Linux Debian 3.1 32bit operating system.

It starts from the very beginning step, patching kernel, up to the final goal, building a so-called Virtual Private Server (VPS). With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernal patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license. He clearly warns that this is not the only way of setting up such a system and issues no guarantee that this will work for you 🙂

Read how it worked for him.

Novell Announces Support for Xen 3.0 in SUSE Linux Enterprise v10

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Press Release from Novell at BrainShare® 2006

SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 delivers new features for mission-critical operations, including Xen virtualization, improved performance and the industry’s easiest-to-use application security

SALT LAKE CITY —20 Mar 2006—Novell today introduced its next-generation platform for the open enterprise, SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10. Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise is a secure and reliable foundation for enterprise computing from the desktop to the data center. It will be first to deliver fully supported Linux* innovations such as Xen virtualization, exceptional performance and scalability, application-level security, and improved desktop usability. As a result, organizations will be able to experience the flexibility, power and reliability of the best-engineered Linux, backed by Novell’s industry-leading support, services and training.

“Novell has a broad vision for open enterprise computing, and no other Linux vendor has a comparable lineup of enterprise-class solutions that address the pressing needs of today’s IT executives,” said Jack Messman, chairman and CEO of Novell. “SUSE Linux Enterprise is the platform for the open enterprise. It delivers powerful solutions built on open standards for all of the most important technology arenas within today’s enterprise – data center, workgroup, desktop, security and identity, and resource management.”…

Virtualization

SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is the first enterprise platform to include a fully integrated and supported version of Xen 3.0, the emerging open source standard for virtualization services. Xen 3.0 lets organizations consolidate multiple workloads on a single server. With Xen 3.0, customers can configure applications and systems for maximum efficiency. According to Gartner, the average data center server runs at 20 percent of capacity. With Xen virtualization on SUSE Linux Enterprise, customers will have the ability to increase server utilization to nearly 70 percent.
“SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is the first enterprise Linux distribution to offer full commercial support for the industry’s fastest and most secure virtualization technology, the open source Xen 3.0 hypervisor,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource. “With Xen 3.0, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 can take full advantage of Intel and AMD hardware support for virtualization, delivering bare-metal virtualization performance to enterprise customers. Novell is a trusted partner to XenSource, and we look forward to working closely with Novell to deliver compelling virtualization solutions to enterprise customers.”…

Read the original press release at Novell.com

Red Hat Isn’t Exhibiting ‘Xen’-Ophobia

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Quoting Jason Brooks from eWeek:

Red Hat’s announcement March 14 of its integrated virtualization push, starring Xen, didn’t take anyone by surprise: Red Hat, along with just about everybody else, has been tooting the Xen horn ever since the fledgling open-source virtualization technology began grabbing headlines almost a year ago.
…
The trouble is that Xen is somewhat early on in its development, and the high rate of change in Xen’s code base will keep the technology out of the mainstream Linux kernel for some time.

Red Hat has and will continue to chart its own course with respect to the kernel, diverging from the mainstream where and when appropriate, but Xen’s potential will remain somewhat stunted for as long as it remains in heavy flux…

I’d like to see Red Hat add to its virtualization agenda the OpenVZ project—a GPL’d code base born of SWsoft’s 5-year-old commercial Virtuozzo product, which itself is roughly comparable to the containers in Sun Microsystems’ Solaris 10…

 OpenVZ, which also is vying for inclusion in the mainstream Linux kernel, would complement Xen well and has impressed me in the initial testing I’ve conducted.

Ultimately, it might make the most sense for Red Hat to deploy both Xen and OpenVZ. The complementary technologies would be a good counterbalance to the Xen/container combo I expect to see eventually in Solaris…

Read the whole article at eWeek.

HP upgrades virtualization features of Integrity servers

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Quoting from the HP official announcement:

HP has enhanced its HP Integrity server line and HP-UX 11i operating environment with significant capacity, virtualization and management upgrades.

The enhancements offer customers greater server capacity as well as faster deployment of enterprise software within an HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) running on the HP-UX 11i operating system – some virtualization projects can be brought online in less than half the time.
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The next-generation chipset for Integrity servers delivers significant enhancements to performance and availability. The chipset enables customers to get 30 percent more work done across multiple workloads, while using the same number of Intel Itanium 2 processors. Featured and available today in the cell-based HP Integrity rx7640, rx8640 and Superdome servers, the chipset delivers single system availability features to improve memory availability, interconnectivity and fault tolerance…

Enhanced security and availability

HP is extending its business continuity and availability solutions by providing more disaster-tolerance offerings for HP-UX 11i customers. The capabilities include intercontinental failover of Oracle® 10g environments and support of SONET, a low-cost networking option for disaster recovery. New HP Serviceguard Extensions for SAP improve the speed and simplicity of high-availability solutions for HP-UX 11i and Linux on HP Integrity servers. …More information about HP Integrity systems is available at www.hp.com/go/integritymarch06.

Webcast: Demonstration of the VMware VirtualCenter SDK

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Richard Garsthagen produced a video (13.4 Mb WMV-file) to demonstrate how VMware VirtualCenter API can be programmed to develop usefull applications for managing virtual infrastructures. Richard focuses on his Virtual Machine Order HOTLINE application.

Could somebody please inform Richard that a shaved head in front of a blue screen results in a egg-shaped performance, that seem to come straight from Star Trek 🙂

Have a look at his otherwise clarifying performance here.

Microsoft starting the Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 TAP

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Jeff Alexander is calling for Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 Technology Adoption Program (TAP) :

This TAP program has two goals:

1. Product Validation

2. Help customers deploy this product in production scenarios and get case studies

The production scenarios that are of high interest are:

1. Production Server consolidation in datacenters

2. Disaster recovery

3. Server consolidation in Branch offices

TAP is a very special program giving access to particular benefits like direct interaction with product team engineering and product education from Microsoft, and is reserved for a very small amount of critical customers, able to dedicate a serious amount of time for testing and usually providing information to create case studies for a new product launch (for more details about TAPs you should check this blog entry). So it’s really hard to get it.

Thanks to Dugie at Virtualserver.tv  and Jeff Alexander for this news.