Virtualization.com

Novell and Tencent recently announced the establishment of a research laboratory in Shenzhen, China to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform.

Tencent, China’s largest Internet service portal with more than 480 million active users, is adopting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system.

As part of the agreement, Tencent will also utilize intelligent workload management solutions from Novell, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create a flexible and easy-to-expand IDC cloud platform that will allow users to build, purchase and run business applications in a faster and more convenient way.

Typically, IDC vendors lease resources from solution providers and make a profit by then leasing space, bandwidth and other resources to customers. With the rise of Web 2.0 and bandwidth-intensive multi-media sites, as well as increased business usage, demand for the IDC solutions has grown.

Because of this rapid development, the IDC industry and a number of Tencent’s operations have met with considerable challenges. To address these challenges, Tencent built its virtualization and data center engine using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Xen Virtualization and Novell PlateSpin Orchestrate. To date, the engine has achieved significant results including more efficient utilization, operational flexibility, improved productivity, lower costs and greater compatibility and security.

Diskeeper Corporation has officially shipped V-locity 2.0, a new virtual platform disk optimizer designed to deliver invisible background optimization of all Windows Guest operating systems running on the VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms.

New to V-locity 2.0, is the addition of the breakthrough IntelliWrite fragmentation prevention technology originally introduced with Diskeeper 2010. Utilizing IntelliWrite technology, V-locity writes files to the disk to prevent up to 85 percent of fragmentation from occurring before it even happens.

Already a VMware and Microsoft partner for its Diskeeper performance software, V-locity was made to create a virtual-specific product that not only performs defragmentation functions, but also synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems in a virtualized environment.

Diskeeper Corporation’s proprietary technology, IntelliWrite writes files in a non-fragmented condition. Copy on write solutions (e.g. as used by Snapshots) take action on changes to data at a block level. Moving data, as is done in a defragmentation job to consolidate file fragments in a logical file system, can trigger copy on write solutions to take extra actions such as using more storage capacity, unnecessarily. Writing a file contiguously eliminates the need to defragment it after it has been created.

InvisiTasking technology, another Diskeeper Corporation proprietary technology, is specifically engineered to allow “background” applications to operate with zero impact/overhead on a system. With V-locity 2, the InvisiTasking technology has been “enlightened” to operate across a virtual platform. Even as more VMs are added to a host platform or dynamically migrated to new hosts (e.g. vMotion, Live Migration), the enlightened InvisiTasking will continue to dynamically adjust to changing environments, providing V-locity 2.0 users with “Set It and Forget It”  optimization of their virtual disk platforms.

V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating virtual disk “bloat”.

This is the wasted disk space that takes place when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don’t then shrink when users or applications remove data. V-locity actually compacts the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT Managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

Estimated Street price begins at $199.95 per CPU-core.

Quest Software has announced the addition of several enhancements to Foglight, its application performance monitoring product.

Enriched features in the latest version of Foglight simplify application support and IT operations roles and drastically shorten time-to-value across mixed physical and virtual systems, multiple datacenters, third-party tools and complex deployments.

In this new edition of Foglight, the expanded User Experience Management capabilities provide businesses with the ability to manage online revenue and conversion rates in real time, analyze trends in customer buying patterns and understand how application usability, performance, functionality and content affect conversion rates.

New Foglight features include the following:

• Enhanced management visibility: Get the job done quickly with dashboards for every stakeholder – including executives, line-of-business, IT operations and support – coupled with role-based workflow support and drag-and-drop features.
• Service-based alert subscription: Streamline your day by only subscribing to critical services that impact your business and your responsibilities. Become instantly aware of any condition within the monitored enterprise that impacts that service.
• Simplified installation, deployment and maintenance: Shorten time-to-value with a wizard-based, common user interface that helps users and administrators configure and install Foglight within hours.
• Greater user productivity: Easily transition Foglight metrics into information that all business stakeholders can understand with wizard-driven scheduling and reporting.
• Integrate with your existing monitoring tools for faster time-to-value: Implement Foglight as an application-centric monitoring console to complement an existing framework or as a single enterprise console. Foglight can seamlessly integrate inbound alerts and host data from other monitors, or export them to other management consoles that organizations might be using.