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

Available In Beta: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2

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It’s been four months since the November 2009 release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, the company’s new virtualization product that includes a standalone hypervisor based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology and comprehensive server virtualization management tools.

Recently, Red Hat  released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, featuring a range of new capabilities.

The highlights of this release include:

Virtual desktop support
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is designed to support both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.

Import and export
With the 2.2 beta release, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager can now import and export virtual machine images and templates using the industry-standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF). With this feature, customers can more easily move virtual machine images between environments, publish templates or simply create backups of their environment.

V2V : Virtual machine conversion
V2V is a tool designed to automate the conversion of VMware or Xen virtual machine images into an OVF file for use within Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With V2V incorporated into the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta, customers are able to take Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 or 5 virtual machines created in VMware or Xen environments and automatically convert them into Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtual machines. We expect V2V to be extended in a future beta release to support conversion of Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 virtual machines images.

Data warehouse
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now includes a data warehouse that collects monitoring data for hosts, virtual machines and storage, allowing customers to analyze their environment and create reports using any query tool that supports SQL.

Performance
The maximum allowable memory for a virtual machine has been increased from 64GB to 256GB in the beta, which we believe should allow even the most memory-intensive enterprise workloads to be virtualized.

The hypervisor has also been updated to use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 kernel with the aim of allowing customers to take advantage of the latest hardware, such as the Intel Nehalem-EX and AMD Opteron (TM) 6000 Series platform (formerly code named “Magny-Cours”).

Today’s beta also features improved disk I/O performance for virtual machines using thin provisioning or snapshots to deliver performance within a few percent of raw/thick provisioned disks.

All current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers can download the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta via Red Hat Network today.

Dell Launches, Touts Open Solutions for the Virtual Era

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Dell today announced open, standards-based solutions that let customers of all sizes integrate new technologies without sacrificing performance or their existing IT investments.

Dell’s new solutions and flexible services free customers to capitalize on the ‘Virtual Era’ of the technology industry and realize new levels of efficiency, with a goal of reducing data management costs by up to 50 percent and making room in budgets for the strategic investments they need to make now.

More than ever, customers are dealing with two fundamental pain points – storing and sorting the explosion of data, and managing and operating the infrastructure and applications needed to run the business. Dell today announced solutions targeted at these pain points through an innovative end-to-end approach that leverages new and existing technology assets, including the Perot Systems and KACE acquisitions, and Dell’s industry-leading partner ecosystem.

Dell will deliver these solutions to customers the way they want them – in business-ready configurations or via the cloud as a service.

The need for Dell’s new approach is great, given the explosion of data companies face today. According to IDC, at nearly 500 exabytes – or 500 billion gigabytes – the “Digital Universe,” if converted to pages of text and assembled into books, would stretch to Pluto and back 10 times. IDC estimates that the Digital Universe will double every 18 months.

Products & Solutions for the Virtual Era:

  • Dell today announced Intelligent Data Management solutions that utilize the company’s leadership in storage hardware, software and data management services to help customers facing unprecedented challenges storing and managing data transform that information into a strategic asset, including:
    • Next-Gen Object Storage – The new Dell DX Object Storage Platform will use a self-managing peer-scaling architecture that enables customers to access, store and distribute billions of files or other digital content, from archiving all the way to the cloud.
    • Deduplication – Dell’s new deduplication offerings include the Dell/EMC DD Series and the PowerVault DL2100. Dell offers deduplication consulting services that can help customers leverage these technologies.
    • Unified Storage – Today Dell introduced Dell|EMC NS Series, an efficient platform for consolidating a wide array of environments and applications.
    • Data Archiving Consulting – Dell services reduce the cost and complexity associated with inefficient data management and help effectively align storage assets with business requirements. Precipitated by an explosion of digital data in healthcare created by Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Picture Archiving Communications Systems (PACS), digital pathology and genomics and regulatory requirements dictating its management and archiving, hospitals around the world are facing mounting data-storage challenges.
  • A Comprehensive Approach to IT Operations from the Datacenter to the Cloud – Dell’s Efficient Enterprise Architecture utilizes virtualization, application provisioning and automation to help reduce operational costs by delivering a flexible platform for the delivery of business services.
  • Dell’s Cloud Infrastructure Solutions utilize Dell’s leadership in cloud infrastructure and years of experience and customer collaboration as the infrastructure partner of the world’s largest cloud service providers and hyperscale environments. Dell is delivering new integrated solution stacks, services and hardware that simplify the deployment and management of computing environments:
    • New Solutions: tested and supported cloud solution stacks made up of hardware, software and services, put customers on the fast track to efficient, easy-to-deploy and manage cloud computing environments.
    • New Certified Partners: certified offerings, accompanied by blueprints, from leading cloud independent software vendors (ISVs) that help customers deploy infrastructure and data Clouds.
    • New Services: consulting, deployment and support services that help customers plan, implement and manage cloud computing solutions.
    • New Systems: the Dell Power Edge C-Series servers are hyperscale-inspired and purpose-built for cloud computing, HPC, Web 2.0 and gaming environments, with features designed to offer high density compute power with reduced energy consumption and low operational cost.
  • Last week Dell announced nine new PowerEdge blade, rack-mount and tower servers updated with Intel’s new Xeon 5600 “Westmere-EP” series of processors. With these systems customers can realize better overall system performance increases of up to 69 percent1 and energy efficiency improvements of up to 47 percent2 compared to Dell PowerEdge servers with Xeon 5500 processor technology. Dell will also be rolling out new high-performance, high-density PowerEdge solutions based on Intel “Nehalem EX” processors.
  • In addition, Dell today announced enhancements to its Intelligent Infrastructure and Management products and services to help customers build a solid foundation for theEfficient Datacenter.
    • Intelligent Infrastructure – Dell is driving intelligence into its server platforms with the inclusion of Lifecycle Controller, the industry’s only embedded systems management, which provides IT administrators with the means to deploy and remediate servers quickly. Independent tests show that with Dell embedded management that the Dell PowerEdge R710 delivered up to 58 percent faster pre-OS deployment than the HP ProLiant DL380 G63.
    • Simplified Infrastructure Management – The latest release of the Dell Management Console includes a new power monitoring feature that provides greater awareness of server power consumption which can lead to lower energy use and cost savings.
    • Remote Support Services – Dell Remote Support services with Proactive Systems Management enables customers to make actionable, proactive decisions about their IT environment. Automated Diagnostic Capabilities allow for faster resolution of hardware issues. This Software-as-a-Service offering comes at no additional cost to current Dell support customers.
    • Remote Management Services – Dell Remote infrastructure Monitoring allows IT departments to monitor critical remote systems for hardware and software faults, performance degradation, missing patches and security vulnerabilities, and remotely remediate problems.

Reflex Systems Introduces vProfile

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Reflex Systems, a pioneer in virtualization systems management solutions, today introduced vProfile, a new configuration management tool that enables IT managers to visually map configuration variances in their virtual infrastructure and enforces compliance with internal or external configuration standards.

A fully integrated component of the Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC), vProfile provides a highly flexible framework for IT teams who aim to scale the virtual infrastructure while ensuring consistent configuration, meeting compliance and audit requirements and implementing IT automation for management tasks. With vProfile configuration management, Reflex customers can see their virtual infrastructure visually expressed as a “heatmap,” enabling them to quickly identify configuration differences, remediate as needed and set configuration baselines.

Reflex VMC tracks thousands of properties associated with hosts, virtual machines and virtual management servers like VMware’s vCenter. vProfile configuration management utilizes networking, storage and operational configuration types for hosts running hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and ESXi.

Virtual Machine profiles may contain configuration properties such as CPU, memory, storage, networking and advanced properties. vProfile also extends to the configuration of multiple vCenters to manage folders, resource pools, permissions, roles, access control, high availability and DRS.

By recognizing these properties in the virtual infrastructure, storing them in the Virtualization CMDB, and surfacing them through its patent-pending Virtualization Query Language (VQL), Reflex can provide true integrated systems management, encompassing security, configuration management, compliance and policy enforcement throughout the virtualized data center.

PHD Virtual Debuts New esXpress VM Backup Solution

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PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of esXpress VM Backup, today announced the latest release of esXpress, a multi-VM backup and restore solution.

With the unique architecture of esXpress, customers have access to the only backup and restore solution available that was custom built for large virtualized deployments.

This architecture provides customers with scalability to meet their needs along with heightened reliability when compared to other solutions in the marketplace. This new version, developed by the only company dedicated to virtual machine backup technology, runs backups up to 20 times faster through an enhanced, single-click backup interface and simplifies restore processes through a centralized web-based restore engine that offers concurrent use by multiple users.

esXpress creates small virtual machines – virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – which uniquely use the virtual environment itself to perform the backups, eliminating the need for added hardware or software resources. This latest release adds Change Block Tracking (CBT) to this powerful VBA foundation for dramatic backup and recovery performance. By reading only the blocks that have changed, and not scanning the entire virtual disk each time a backup is performed, esXpress shortens the backup window and uses considerably less data I/O while also reducing overall loads on network and SAN resources.

esXpress  delivers:

  • Linear scalability – With its ability to offer 16 concurrent backups, esXpress offers unmatched performance and scalability to meet critical backup windows
  • Verifiable and Measurable Deduplication – esXpress delivers source-side deduplication to reduce network traffic, offer one-pass restores, and deduplicate data across an entire storage target.
  • Reliable Change Block Tracking (CBT) –esXpress is the only virtual backup solution that validates the CBT data for each backup, ensuring data integrity and reliability.
  • Distributed Architecture / Fault Tolerance – esXpress features a distributed architecture which does not rely on Virtual Center or any other single application to run backups, making it the only truly fault tolerant backup solution available.

The new esXpress 4.0 is available now with pricing starting at $1,000 per host for four concurrent backup streams delivering the best price/performance for data recovery and protection in virtual environments. The product supports unlimited sockets and unlimited cores per host and no additional hardware is required.

Virtual Computer Ships NxTop 2.0

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Virtual Computer today announced Version 2.0 of NxTop.

Based on 12 months of development and feedback from hundreds of deployments, NxTop 2.0 provides a mature platform for organizations evaluating or implementing their next generation desktop initiative.

NxTop 2.0 comes with a host of new management and security features designed to increase desktop IT productivity:

  • Deployment of NxTop Center as a virtual appliance: Enables NxTop Center to operate in high-availability mode using Hyper-V’s automated failover and load-balancing features. In addition, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can now share a single hardware platform to manage multiple customers, making NxTop an ideal management platform to lower the cost of managing small and medium sized businesses
  • Staged virtual machine updates: Allows patching of a single shared image and patch delivery to one or more users or groups for testing. Upon testing completion, the patch can be delivered, with the click of a button, to all users.
  • Multi-language support: Most large-enterprise customers have global operations. To aid in international rollouts, NxTop 2.0 now provides the ability to create virtual machines in a dozen popular languages including Spanish, French, German and Japanese.
  • Automated profile migration: Upgrading to Windows 7 can present a major challenge to large organizations. For example, the target PC must be taken out of service and user files and personalization settings must be migrated, and end-users must be trained on new features before they can be productive. NxTop 2.0 simplifies this process with a new tool that can automatically migrate users from their current XP environment to a new virtualized environment based on XP, Windows 7 or both. When combined with NxTop’s existing automated deployment features for Windows 7, and ability to run both XP and Windows 7 side by side, moving a large group of users from XP to Windows 7 has never been easier.
  • Hardware Compatibility Checker: Many of the Intel based laptops shipped in the last two to three years have shipped without Virtualization Technology (VT), a requirement for NxTop Engine. To help IT administrators quickly find compatible machines, NxTop 2.0 provides a tool that can analyze a user’s PC and verify that it will run NxTop Engine.

NxTop Engine now provides an operating system independent control panel with a familiar look-and-feel that blends seamlessly into Windows XP, Windows 7 or Linux.

Enhancements include:

  • Direct access to the NxTop control panel from within Windows
  • Configurable “hot key” shortcuts to control various hardware on laptop machines (multi-monitor switching, volume control, mouse control, platform locking, and others)
  • Better power management and platform sleep functions
  • Intuitive design that avoids the need for end-user training

A free evaluation download of the full NxTop 2.0 software suite is available as well as a cloud-based live demonstration system. Pricing is on a per-PC perpetual licensing model.

VKernel Launches Capacity Analyzer 4.3 for VMware, Hyper-V

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VKernel today announced the release of Capacity Analyzer 4.3 which allows users to manage both VMware and Hyper-V environments from a single console.

VKernel’s latest release of Capacity Analyzer also allows Systems Center users to receive alerts on performance issues in their VMware environment.

Capacity Analyzer now integrates with Microsoft’s Systems Center Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager as well as VMware’s vCenter and ESX. It automatically collects performance and capacity data, profiles each virtualized application and builds an accurate model of available capacity, across servers and storage at every layer of the user’s virtualized infrastructure. Capacity Analyzer’s extensive analyses then identify capacity bottlenecks that are impacting performance, predict where future problems will arise, give specific instructions on how to resolve these issues and tells users where to place new virtual machines to avoid capacity issues.