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

Dell Services Partners With Liquidware Labs For Virtualized Desktop Deployments Easy and Fast

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With desktop virtualization rapidly becoming a means to empowering the next generation workforce, Dell Services today announced a strategic agreement with Liquidware Labs to enable simplified and accelerated customer migrations to virtualized desktops within customer environments both onsite and in the cloud.

In this alliance, Liquidware Labs will provide virtual desktop assessment software as well as migration and monitoring tools to enable Dell Services to transition tens of thousands of customer desktops into virtual desktop environments.

Dell Services will use Liquidware Labs Stratusphere and ProfileUnity software to assess existing customer desktops, migrate user data and documents to virtual desktop environments, centrally configure the new desktops and provide service-level assurance through detailed user experience reports. This gives integrators and administrators an “on-ramp” and ongoing user management of new desktop platforms.

The software also will enable Dell Services to speed adoption and help lower the cost of rolling out new desktop technologies such as VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft Windows 7.

Dell Services guides customers through the complete lifecycle of virtual desktop services including: consulting, implementation, transformation and operations. With its deep industry expertise, Dell Services helps customers make the most beneficial use of cloud and virtual technologies, enabling customers to achieve the level of virtualization that best meets their needs.

By offering cloud, virtual and dedicated environments designed to meet security and regulatory compliance requirements, Dell Services enables customers to focus on achieving business success. In a virtualized desktop environment, an end user’s data and applications are delivered from a centralized server, giving customers outstanding flexibility to centralize and control desktop management while enjoying the experience of a full PC. This service can ease administration, help improve both productivity and security controls and help customers lower costs.

Veeam Adds Support for VMware vSphere 4.1

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Veeam Software, innovative provider of data protection, disaster recovery and systems management solutions for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today announced support for VMware vSphere 4.1.

The first Veeam product to leverage the new functionality in vSphere 4.1 is Veeam Monitor 5.0, an easy-to-deploy, framework-independent solution for real-time monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning of VMware environments.

A beta version of Monitor 5.0 is available today for download.

All commercial Veeam products will support vSphere 4.1 this quarter.

Key features in Monitor 5.0 include:

  • Full support for vSphere 4.1: Not only is Monitor 5.0 compatible with vSphere 4.1, it also makes use of the new performance metrics in vSphere 4.1 and monitors new vSphere 4.1 capabilities such as memory compression.
  • Built-in intelligence: Monitor 5.0 provides more than 100 pre-defined thresholds and alarms to alert VMware administrators of potential performance problems. It also includes a comprehensive knowledge base that explains each alarm, with possible causes, suggested resolution and links to external sources of additional information.
  • Dashboards: Monitor 5.0 includes a dashboard for each object in the virtual infrastructure tree, proving an at-a-glance view of the most useful information for any object, with easy drilldown to more detailed information, as required.
  • Other new features include monitoring of logical disk space, snapshot monitoring and Infrastructure Overview reports that provide management-level reports for any part of the virtual infrastructure. Monitor 5.0 also includes streamlined alarm management, enhanced scalability and architecture improvements.

The beta version of Veeam Monitor 5.0 is available immediately for download. A trial license key is required and is provided at no charge. The software will be generally available this quarter, with North American MSRP unchanged at $250 per socket. A free version of Monitor is also available.

Release: VMware Studio 2.1

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VMware Studio is an integrated development tool that takes existing software applications and packages them into virtual machines and vApps that are ready to run and optimized for VMware platform products.

VMware Studio can build Linux-based VMs, Windows-based VMs, and vApps running single tier or multitier applications.

The company has released a new version today, VMware Studio 2.1.  An with it, a number of new improvements, enhancements and security fixes:

VMware Studio improvements:

  • Additional Linux OS support is provided for SLES 11.2, CentOS 5.4, RHEL 5.4, and Ubuntu 8.04.3 and 8.04.4.
  • Unlike previous versions, VMware Studio 2.1 can create virtual appliances from virtual machines that were not originally created with VMware Studio, based on a discovery phase.
  • The CLI offers the –newos option so you generate a build profile for any RPM-based or DEB-based Linux OS.
  • You can run concurrent builds with Studio 2.1. After a configurable limit is reached, builds wait in a queue.
  • The generated virtual machine always reboots before your application installs. Some applications expect a full installed working system before they themselves will install. Rebooting after OS installation provides the real environment in which to install, instead of an artificial post-installation environment.
  • You can now specify the order of application package repository installation.
  • VMware Studio 2.1 optionally analyzes the list of RPM and DEB packages to locate unused items and generate a small-footprint virtual machine. It can also reduce the footprint post-installation with a file removal list.
  • VMware Studio 2.1 can generate a discovery report showing contents of a virtual appliance.
  • You can now import vApp profiles.
  • You can translate your EULA into multiple languages, and vCenter Server will display it in the language of the prevailing locale.
  • You can digitally sign an OVF file, so VMware vSphere 4.1 can verify the signed certificate during OVF import.
  • VMware vSphere 4.1 also supports OVF with thin provisioned disk, and the vmw:Config option.
  • You can associate network labels with specific NIC cards by modifying the XML profile.

Updates to virtual appliances have been enhanced:

  • You can generate signed manifests so customers can ensure that patches are coming from a trusted source.
  • Polling for available updates was optimized.
  • The appliance manifest now carries change log information, which can contain information on whether an update is critical or required. You can force reboot of the appliance after an update.
  • You can add your EULA, in any one language, to an update.
  • Extended configuration parameters can be passed through to the manifest.
  • The virtual appliance administrator can create a tarball of log files to help support personnel diagnose failed updates and other problems.

SPEC Releases Vendor-Neutral Server Virtualization Benchmark

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The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has released SPECvirt_sc2010, the first vendor-neutral benchmark to measure the performance of datacenter servers used for virtualized server consolidation. The new benchmark also includes options for measuring power consumption and power/performance relationships.

SPECvirt_sc2010 uses a realistic workload and SPEC’s proven performance- and power-measurement methodologies to enable vendors, users and researchers to compare system performance across multiple hardware, virtualization platforms, and applications. It was developed by the SPEC virtualization subcommittee, whose members and contributors include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Red Hat, Unisys and VMware.

SPECvirt_sc2010 provides an overall workload based on applications that are commonly used for virtualized server consolidation. Workloads of various sizes are injected into the benchmark at different time periods during the benchmark run, representing the typical spikes experienced in real-world server environments. Scaling is achieved by running additional sets of virtual machines (called “tiles”) until overall throughput reaches a peak or workloads fail to meet required quality of service (QoS) criteria.

Three categories of results can be generated by SPECvirt_sc2010:

  • Performance-only results, where the overall score is calculated by taking each component workload in each tile and normalizing it against its theoretical maximum for the predefined load level.
  • Power/performance for the total system (server and storage).
  • Power/performance for the server only.

SPEC’s latest benchmark comes at a time when virtualization is becoming integral to datacenter management: The analyst firm International Data Corp. (IDC) reports that 18.2 percent of all new servers in the fourth quarter of 2009 were virtualized, an increase of three percent over the same period in 2008.

SPECvirt_sc2010 is available immediately from SPEC for $3,000; discounts are available for qualified non-profit and educational institutions.

Release: New Version Of vOptimizer Pro

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Vizioncore, a wholly owned subsidiary of Quest Software, has announced the availability of a new version of vOptimizer Pro.

This storage optimization solution provides broader platform support for virtual machine (VM) storage reclamation and optimization operations, which enables customers to experience greater benefits and additional value from their virtual infrastructure. Additional enhancements include support for both Linux-based and VMware Thin Provisioned VMs.

Since its launch in early 2009, the vOptimizer Pro solution has helped system administrators quickly and easily reclaim over-allocated (wasted) virtual storage, right-size VM storage and optimize VM I/O performance. Organizations with large virtual infrastructures usually experience severe VM storage waste problems and costly storage acquisitions on a regular basis.

Many of these organizations do not realize just how much storage they are wasting and what the actual savings would be if they could free it up for use by other applications.

vOptimizer Pro Benefits:

  • Gain visibility of the total amount and value of over-allocated virtual storage
  • Reclaim wasted VM storage (shrink Virtual Machine Disks or VMDKs) for use by other applications and business units
  • Automate resizing of VMs “up” or “down” to alleviate administration time
  • Prevent VM outages due to storage shortages
  • Significantly improve VM I/O performance by performing 64K partition-block alignments

The latest version of vOptimizer Pro is generally available and priced at $299 (USD) per socket.

Catbird, HyTrust Partner For End-to-End Protection and Compliance for Virtual Infrastructure

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Catbird, and HyTrust have announced integration of the HyTrust Appliance with Catbird’s vSecurity.

HyTrust provides control and compliance for host machines by analyzing, authorizing and creating an audit trail for all virtualization administration operations and enforcing correct host configuration; while Catbird proactively secures the virtual network and guest operating systems by analyzing and responding to network events and attack, and enforcing correct VM configuration.

Together, the integrated solution delivers end-to-end security protection and control for all aspects of the virtualized data center—especially critical for organizations in the public sector and regulated commercial industries.

The combined solution provides centralized access control; network monitoring; granular object-based policy management; hypervisor security configuration; zones of trust and firewalling; IPS/IDS and log aggregation in a comprehensive package that enables total visibility and control for virtual machines and hypervisors.

Incorporating HyTrust data into Catbird’s framework provides broad IT documentation and reporting features on the compliance posture of the virtualized data center. Accessible from a single dashboard interface, the aggregated information provides access to more controls than any other solution on the market. This seamless visibility simplifies auditing and reporting processes for regulators and security directors charged with monitoring compliance changes in the migration from physical to virtualized networks.