Search Results for: EC2

Elastra Introduces Free Version of Elastra Cloud Server for Amazon Web Services

October 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Elastra Corporation has announced the availability of Elastra Cloud Server for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is available free of charge to all AWS users.

Elastra’s Cloud Server for AWS enables application architects and developers to create application designs using a graphical canvas and immediately deploy them on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. Users can compose systems that use Apache, JBoss, Tomcat and MySQL components in a variety of user-controlled clustered and load-balanced configurations and deploy multiple instances of these designs onto AWS.

The application designs created and deployed with Elastra for AWS are portable to the customers’ own data centers running VMWare and Elastra’s Enterprise Cloud Server because designs and rules by which components interact are described via declarative markup languages rather than programmatic scripts or configuration files. The Enterprise Cloud Server also features added functionality – more components (Oracle, WebLogic, etc.), sophisticated governance and cloud management rules, and use of Amazon’s new Virtual Private Cloud.

Upgraded: Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS)

October 20, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Nimsoft today announced that it has added a set of firsts to its Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS).

These new capabilities enable Nimsoft customers to extend real-time monitoring and historical reporting beyond the virtualised datacentre to hosted, cloud- and SaaS-based resources and applications. By extending monitoring from the virtualised datacentre to the cloud, customers will gain complete visibility over their entire IT infrastructure, enabling them to measure and improve service delivery, allocate computing resources for maximum performance, and enforce service level agreements (SLAs).

NMS is based on a scalable and extensible architecture that enables complete visibility and monitoring from a single product, eliminating the need to invest in additional products every time IT infrastructures change or expand. By monitoring all computing resources, Nimsoft customers will be able to make better decisions as they transition to a combination of internal and external environments.

New feature set delivers additional capabilities for monitoring both internal and external environments including:

• Cloud and SaaS Probes: Enable users to gain complete visibility over the performance and availability of Google Apps for Business, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, Salesforce.com, and other services. By understanding status and response time, users can determine if outsourced platforms and applications are meeting their service delivery commitments.

• Nimsoft Unified Monitoring APIs: Allow for easy extensions to NMS. This complete set of documented APIs is available to both customers and third-party developers.

• The Nimsoft Unified Reporter: Delivers more than 100 reports out of the box, and allows users to create their own performance and capacity planning reports. Information from these reports can be used to make decisions on how and where to redistribute workloads, to identify problems in the infrastructure, to benchmark performance metrics, and to prove where SLAs are not being met.

• Virtualisation Probes: Provide users 100 percent visibility over virtualisation platforms including Citrix, Microsoft HyperV, IBM Power-V, VMware, and Sun Solaris Zones. Complete visibility enables users to monitor and optimise the performance of all applications and resources running on virtual servers, and enables the optimisation of compute resources across business services.

• RCA (root cause analysis) and Topology Manager: Presents deep discovery and both virtual and physical topology views of the network. When an outage occurs, knowing where the root cause of the problem is dramatically reduces mean time to repair (MTTR).

In addition to providing Unified Monitoring for the broadest range of IT systems and applications in use today, these new features deliver:

• A scalable and extensible architecture that keeps pace with rapid IT infrastructure growth, monitors all internal and external IT systems, and provides a path to extend Unified Monitoring to new metrics such as power consumption

• A customisable management dashboard that enables IT administrators to get a single view of the overall health, performance and availability of their IT infrastructure and business applications irrespective of where they reside

• The industry’s most rapid deployment and shortest time to value, with a total cost of ownership up to 80 percent less than legacy solutions

Ubuntu To Update Linux OS, Touts Private Cloud Capabilities

October 13, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

“Canonical is touting private cloud capabilities in an upgrade to its Ubuntu Linux OS being announced on Tuesday.

Available for free download on October 29, Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition introduces UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud), an open source cloud computing environment based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Businesses can take advantage of private clouds, Canonical said.”

Read the rest of this story on InfoWorld

Eucalyptus Systems Releases Commercial Eucalyptus Edition For Enterprises

September 10, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Eucalyptus Systems, creator of an open source private cloud platform, today announced the company’s first commercial offering: the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE).

EEE enables customers to implement an on-premise Eucalyptus cloud with VMware’s virtualization technologies, including vSphere, ESX and ESXi.

EEE is the only on-premise cloud computing solution available today for vSphere customers, providing a robust, affordable cloud computing solution that leverages their investment in VMware technologies. EEE also supports other hypervisors typically found in a data center, such as Xen and KVM, providing customers the flexibility to configure cloud solutions that best meet their infrastructure needs.

“Eucalyptus Systems’ mission has been to support the open source Eucalyptus on-premise cloud platform while also delivering solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments, and we are proud to launch the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition as our first commercial offering for the enterprise,” said Dr. Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems co-founder, CTO and former director of the Eucalyptus research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). “EEE represents the first step toward broader Eucalyptus-enabled cloud interoperability that leverages multiple virtualization environments and technologies.”

EEE is built on Eucalyptus — an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT. Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.

For EEE, Eucalyptus leverages vSphere, ESXi, and ESX virtualization technologies to provide an on-premise cloud in the data center. EEE also includes an image converter that helps users develop VMware-enabled Eucalyptus applications that are compatible with Amazon EC2. Moreover, Eucalyptus supports popular open source hypervisors such as KVM and Xen, enabling EEE customers to choose the most appropriate software stack for each cloud application while maintaining a single cloud API that is Amazon compatible.

Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is available today and is licensed based on the number of processor cores on the physical host.

Release: VMLogix LabManager Cloud Edition

September 1, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMLogix today announced the general availability of VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition.

The new product enables software teams to run virtual labs within the gold-standard for public cloud computing, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and is the only offering on the market to offer an enterprise-class virtual lab solution with a utility-like pay-as-you-go model. The flexibility of this cost model is ideal for use cases where demand patterns are most variable like software development, testing, training, demonstrations and support. Additionally, VMLogix will offer a free license for LabManager – Cloud Edition beginning September 1. This offer and evaluation license will expire December 1, 2009.

VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition delivers a dynamic, scalable and elastic virtual lab enabling software teams to improve software quality and time to market. The solution works in the Amazon EC2 cloud environment and supports both Windows and Linux guest images as well as ISV-specific Amazon Machine Images (AMI). LabManager – Cloud Edition brings enhanced levels of integration and automation during the Amazon instance deployment including the ability to seamlessly handle the end user access to the guest console from within the browser.

VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition enables:

The creation and management of multi-machine configurations: enabling the combination of multiple AMIs into a single environment and providing capabilities to entirely automate the deployment and re-deployment of multi-machine environments (including software stack customizations) in a policy-governed self-service fashion;
Full virtual lab tool capabilities: tapping into powerful enterprise lab management capabilities including license, lease and user/team management as well as enabling users/teams to share and collaborate with lab artefacts, audit trails and access to a centralized repository of software media;
On-demand access to virtual lab resources: allowing for immediate access to computing infrastructure resources over the web from any location; and,
Pay-for-what-you-use pricing model: leveraging the elasticity of the cloud allows customers to reduce up front capital expenditures by instantly scaling up or scaling down the lab infrastructure when required, and only paying for what is used.

VMworld 2009 keynote – day one

September 1, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 1 Comment

From VMworld 2009, this is the day 1 keynote.

VMworld 2009 has officially kicked off. The first keynote didn’t bring much real news. As usually, the keynote consisted of mostly marketing speak, customer testimonials and demos by sponsors and partners. New developments usually are announced during the CTO keynote, which is coming tomorrow.

Here’s a quick play-by-play recap of the keynote. You can check out the archived and live video streams at the VMworld website.

The keynote room is filling up. Goodbye sleep, hello keynote!

Bloggers ready for the #VMworld keynote

Tod Nielsen, COO takes the stage. Last year, 960 companies out of the Fortune 1000 were using VMware. Nielsen wants to get this up to 1000. At PartnerExchange (VMware’s North American partner event) he held up a sign with the 40 companies that weren’t already using VMware, promising a free VMworld pass to partners who signed up any of those companies.

In the last couple of months, 10 out of those 40 companies became vSphere users. This means there are 30 of the Fortune 1000 companies left that are not using VMware.

President & CEO Paul Maritz takes the stage.

There are 12488 attendees at VMworld this year. Or, as the marketing people would say: nearly 15K attendees.

VMworld regulars already know the drill. 70 % of IT costs are spent just to “keep the lights on”. Moving to a more agile environment can lower this maintenance cost.

Everybody’s talking about the ‘cloud’ that will magically solve all of their IT problems. But there are lots of different definitions of what the cloud actually means.
“Customers want to get to the mythical ‘cloud’ world where everything is simple, works together, is stable, secure, …”

This promised land is not here yet. Virtualization can enable it though.

The key is the encapsulation that’s inherent in virtualization, to add new functionality in a non-disruptive way.

The next step is bringing this workloads to external clouds. Later today there will be a press briefing + press release about the new cloud initiatives. (Check Virtualization.com for more news on this announcement as it happens.)

The foundation for this cloud is the platform called vSphere. vSphere is a bigger release in terms of man-years that went into it than any of the Windows releases Paul was involved with at MS in the 90s
(Paul Maritz is a Microsoft veteran)

“vSphere evolved from a “product”, VMware Infrastructure, to a real platform that plugs in to the complete datacenter.”

“The automation and policies helps “Continously defragging the datacenter.” The datacenter becomes a giant computer (the software mainframe)”

A single vSphere cluster can easily (in Maritz’s words) support the complete transaction workload of the Visa network.

Paul’s going over the different components that make up the vSphere platform. Most VMware users will probably know this slide by heart about now.

Now on to the sponsor lovefest. First Tom Brey, sr Technical Staff Manager Power Management from IBM is invited on stage.

VMware and IBM collaborate not only on hardware compatibility (like any other HW partner), but on management and power metering.

Every IBM server contains power meters/sensors. This can be measured and optimized from within vCenter.

The more data we have on power usage, the more we can optimize it. Using this data we can easily measure Performance Per Watt, to see if it’s better to turn off servers (DPM) and let the others run warmer, or distribute the load over several servers.

Brey demoes a server running 8 memtest VMs. As VMs are powered on, the energy consumption is updated in the vSphere client. What’s interesting is that the energy usage is calculated on a per-VM basis.

The energy consumption is updated live. The energy consumption is displayed on a per-VM basis. (See the colored bars at the far right of the graph.)

Demo with the new and old generation of x3650 servers. The new Nehalem-based M2 servers have half the idle power of the previous generation, and support
more VMs per server.

Moving on. A new set of task-oriented management products is being added to the vCenter family of products. Paul Maritz spends a few minutes reviewing the set of vCenter add-ons coming up in the coming months. (CapacityIQ, Chareback, …)

After the full vSphere suite, Maritz moves on to “vSphere essentials”, an edition of vSphere tailored to SMB customers. This “IT in a box” solution is complemented with the new “VMware Go” service announced yesterday.

Maritz is now describing vSphere essentials, the “IT in a box” version of SMB customers. New announcement yesterday: VMware Go.

Of course, he’s not telling there is now way to upgrade the Essentials license to standard if you grow beyond three hosts. Maritz also said Essentials brings “things like Fault Tolerance to SMBs at an attractive price.” This is not correct, as VMotion, Fault Tolerance and other goodies aren’t included in Essentials.

VMware vCloud intro. Enabling mobility between internal virtual datacenters and external clouds through standard APIs and common mgmt tools
The vCloud initiative so far has +1000 service providers signed up.
New announcement: vCloud Express is a new class of self-service services provided by partners.
Another demo of Terremark’s self service portal. Self service signup with just a credit card.
(Note: VMware is an investor in Terremark – and is thus in a way competing with its own partners.)

Amazon EC2 users already know this kind of service for a few years.

Formal announcement of the VMware vCloup API, with connections to inventory, billing, … The vCloud APIs were submitted to DMTF to create an open, standard API.

“Moving on to VMware View. Once again, the story of the “user centric” system instead of the “device centric” environment.”

Steve Dupree from HP ESS, Director of platform virtualization, taking the stage.

In other words, like every year, every sponsor gets his 5 minutes on stage.
HP created a reference VDI infrastructure. Storage is based on LeftHand, a storage company acquired by HP at the beginning of this year.

Funny exchange:
PM: How many customers have you got so far?
SD: We’re just finishing this implementation and putting it out in our services organization.

In other words, zero customers so far…

Tech preview of VMware View with PCoIP demo. This is what Eschenbach was talking about yesterday .

“Maritz referencing “Eating one’s own dog food”, a term he coined and in his words his “only contribution to the IT industry”. Maritz frequently refers to his Microsoft past in his presentations. He’s also known to have said he was responsible for the explosion of the number of servers during the 1990’s (Windows NT and beyond), and is now working on reducing the number of servers (at VMware).

THe keynote was finished with an overview of the SpringSource acquisition.

And that concludes the keynote… Not much news so far. There’s a cloud announcement coming up in a few hours.

Check back tomorrow for more live keynote blogging. In the meantime, follow Virtualization.com on Twitter. Follow @lode for “backstage” news, and @vmlive for live updates.