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Release: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2

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Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2.

In addition to providing the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, the 2.2 update includes new scalability capabilities, migration tools and features to expand the performance and security of the solution.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.1, which introduced Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, was released in November 2009. Designed as an ideal a foundation for the virtualization of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows, with Microsoft SVVP certification, as well as for cloud computing environments, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has gained momentum with customers, including Fujitsu, IBM and NTT Communications, for their cloud deployments.

Additional companies around the world, including Swedish-based Voddler and Sri Lanka-based Etisalat, have also adopted Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a strategic virtualization platform for their datacenters.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, capable of hosting and managing both Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, provides a single infrastructure from which customers can manage their server and desktop virtualization deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, introduced in today’s 2.2 update, allows customers to deploy Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) configurations, also known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), bringing scalable, centralized provisioning and management of their desktop systems. It provides a web-based connection broker that allows end users to access their hosted virtual desktops, coupled with the open source SPICE remote rendering technology, which offers a rich multimedia experience, including multiple monitors, HD-quality video and bi-directional audio/video for video conferences. Other features, such as templating, thin provisioning and desktop pooling, are also included. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops supports Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop.

With the 2.2 release, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization also features industry-leading scalability, supporting guests with up to 16 virtual CPUs and 256 gigabytes of memory per virtual machine. The release additionally provides new virtual machine conversion capabilities through a V2V tool designed to automate the conversion of VMware or Xen virtual machines for use within Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. To further simplify moving virtual machine images between environments, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 also includes the ability to import and export virtual machine images and templates with the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is globally available today.

Citrix Touts New Cloud Solutions

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Last week at Citrix Synergy, Citrix Systems announced seven new turnkey solutions that make it easy for cloud providers to deliver practical business services to enterprise customers.

The new solutions leverage core Citrix virtualization and networking technologies that are used daily to power the world’s largest and most demanding cloud and internet sites. Unlike proprietary solutions from other virtualization vendors, however, the new Citrix Cloud Solution portfolio is based on an open framework that allows cloud providers to add their own innovation to each solution, creating unique, differentiated services that address real business needs.

The new Citrix Cloud Solutions are based on an open technology stack with deep interoperability between layers, enabling enterprises to leverage existing investments, including third-party virtualization technologies and tools. Unique integration of Citrix platform virtualization, edge networking, and desktop delivery services are augmented with targeted capabilities aligned to specific workloads, such as application lifecycle management, migration and regulatory compliance.

By targeting the practical business-oriented scenarios that make the most sense for customers to purchase as a cloud service, Citrix is focusing its strategy on a more pragmatic approach to cloud computing that meets the real-world needs of customers today. Customer choice is built into each solution as a key tenet with technologies designed to transcend traditional datacenter and networking boundaries, providing unfettered mobility of application workloads among multiple cloud providers without requiring forklift upgrades of existing infrastructure. In addition, customers can be confident with the assurance that the solutions have been verified via the Citrix Ready program.

The initial Citrix Cloud Solutions include:

  • On-Boarding – Enables seamless migration of existing applications and workloads into cloud infrastructures, including secure access, optimized network delivery, virtual machine migration and full support for the open virtualization format (OVF). Services based on this solution can dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of datacenter-to-cloud migration.
  • Development and Test – Incorporates on-demand application lifecycle management to help organizations cut both the time and budget required to set-up and allocate new infrastructure for test and development workloads in the cloud.
  • Disaster Recovery – Helps customers prevent unexpected interruptions to applications and data by leveraging virtualization, storage, data replication and orchestration services to support cloud-based delivery of disaster recovery services. Cloud providers delivering services based on this solution can offer customers a compelling alternative to dedicated ‘hot-site’ standby facilities.
  • Compliance – Helps customers in regulated industries meet strict compliance requirements, while providing unparalleled control over sensitive data stored in both enterprise datacenters and public clouds. This approach reduces compliance costs, allowing customers to focus on their core competencies, while bringing proven expertise to industry-specific compliance mandates.
  • On-Demand Applications – Transforms traditional Windows enterprise applications into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that can be delivered over the web as an on-demand service to users anywhere, on any device.
  • On-Demand Desktops – Enables enterprise customers to deliver complete Windows virtual desktops from the cloud, combining the cost and manageability benefits of desktop virtualization with cloud elasticity and capacity-on-demand.
  • On-Demand Demos – Lets software companies make their product demos available to customers and prospects over the web with no setup, downloads or configuration required

Release: eG Enterprise Virtual Appliance

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eG Innovation has announced the immediate availability of the eG Enterprise Virtual Appliance.

Designed to monitor virtual and physical IT infrastructures, the eG Enterprise Virtual ApplianceTM is a fast and easy way to deploy eG’s award winning performance monitoring software as a single pane of glass to gain end-to-end visibility across heterogeneous network, server and applications in an IT infrastructure.

The eG Enterprise Virtual Appliance is a pre-configured version of the full eG Enterprise SuiteTM that includes the eG Manager, a Java Development Kit, an Oracle Express database and an eG agent. Initially offered for and fully tested on VMware vSphere, the eG Enterprise Virtual Appliance was built using VMware Studio and is provided as an OVF file.  The eG Enterprise Suite has been validated as VMware Ready.

Administrators can also use the eG Enterprise Virtual Appliance to monitor their physical infrastructures. With support for monitoring 10+ operating systems, 5+ virtualization platforms, and 85+ applications, the eG Enterprise Suite offers broad infrastructure coverage.

Whether monitoring a virtual or physical infrastructure, the eG Enterprise Virtual Appliance is priced at $2,000 for each physical server to be monitored, regardless of the number CPUs/sockets, or operating systems.  No agents are needed on the virtual machines or virtual desktops being monitored.

There is no time limit for the eG Enterprise Virtual Appliance, which is installed as a download from the eG Innovations website. However, a separate license key is needed to activate the eG Manager.  For small infrastructures (up to 10 physical servers), the eG Manager can be configured to store performance metrics using the built-in database within the virtual appliance.  For larger installations (10 servers or more), the eG Manager can be configured to use any external database server to store performance metrics.

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.

VMware Debuts Lab Site, Shares New Tools

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VMware has launched a Lab site where VMware Engineers can share new tools that they are developing.

They are offering a wide range of tools here, each of which are being offered under a Technical Preview or relevant Open Source License.

Give them a try and provide your feedback to the developers.

These tools are being called “flings”:

A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the applications offered here are intended to be played with and explored.  They are not yet part of any product offering and there is no support for them.  They are, however, totally free. And you don’t even have to fill out a form before downloading them!

These flings include:

Apache Pivot – Apache Pivot is a platform for building rich internet applications in Java. It combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform.

Dynamo RIO – DynamoRIO is a runtime code manipulation system that supports code transformations on any part of a program, while it executes. DynamoRIO gives complete control over the runtime code stream and does not limit transformations to trampoline insertion.

esxplot – The software runs on Linux systems, and generates timeseries graphs for selected esxtop fields (as png graphs). The software will also generate simple statistical measures including mean and standard variation for selected esxtop fields.

Onyx – Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.

SVGA Sonar – SVGA Sonar is a demo application for SVGADevTap. SVGADevTap is a user-level library that communicates with the VMware SVGA guest driver to provide low-latency notifications of changes to the screen.

vApprun – The vapprun command-line tool brings the full vApp model to Workstation and Fusion. It builds vApps that contain multiple VMs or nested vApps. Configure start/stop ordering of child elements of a vApp. Power-on/power-off/shutdown of vApps.Supports OVF Properties and the OVF Environment.

vCMA – Ever wish you could restart a virtual machine or migrate it to another host from the convenience of your mobile phone? With VMware vCenter Mobile Access, you can monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.

VGC – VMware Guest Console (VGC) is an application to manage the Guest Operating Systems installed on a VM. VGC includes a Unified Task Manager, Guest file system explorer, Snapshot Manager and a VM Manager. VGC is supported with vmware server and desktop products like vSphere, Server 2.0 and Workstation and can connect to multiple hosts simultaneously.

VI Java – The VMware vSphere Java API provides a full set of libraries to manage and control VMware virtual machines and servers. Ver 2.0 includes a high performance Web Service engine much faster/smaller than Apach AXIS.

Virtual USB Analyzer – We developed vusb-analyzer at VMware as an efficient way to debug our own USB virtualization stack. We wanted a tool that made it easy to see problems at a glance, and we wanted a way to solve both correctness and performance bugs. As a result, we ended up with what we think is a fairly unique tool. We’re excited to have the opportunity now to release this tool as open source software, under the MIT license.

Abicloud announced 1.0.0, funding, and a new CEO for Abiquo

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Abiquo , the Open Source Cloud company from Barcelona, has been busy the last couple of weeks. Last week they announced two important milestones in their existence.

First of all a round of 1.5M euro Series A funding was announced
€1 million comes from Nauta Capital, another 441.000 Euro comes from Caja Navarra
and another 100.000 Euro comes from their new CEO, Pete Malcolm .

The bio of their new CEO, Pete Malcom reads as follows “Pete joined Abiquo in 2009 to boost the international expansion of the Company, thanks to his extensive experience in making companies with a strong technical profile successful. He is a British serial entrepreneur and technologist, best known as the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Orchestria Corporation, which was acquired in January 2009 by CA Inc.. for an undisclosed sum. Previously, Pete was Benchmark Capital Europe’s first Entrepreneur In Residence, and prior to that, Senior Vice President of Business Management with CA. He is the inventor of more than 150 patents in the field of software.”

Abiquo lets us know that with this fresh money they will be able to strengthen the commercial efforts for their solutions on both national and international level.

Apart from the organizational updates Abiquo yesterday also announced the first formal release of abiCloud 1.0.0 together with this first formal release it has also changed it’s license from a
combination of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Common Public Attribution License (CAPL) to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 3.

The change of license was inspired by simplicity, the community is much more at ease with a familiar license such as the LGPL for everything then with a mixture of 2 lesser known licenses for different modules.

Diego Mariño co-founder and VP Community Solutions at Abiquo says that the change to LGPL gives the community greater flexibility ““the LGPL license keeps the Cloud open and keeps the organizations that promote it in the black. Proprietary software can use abiCloud as a component without losing the proprietary nature of that software.”

With a couple of big key european players integrating abiCloud in their cloud strategy abiquo is set for growth.

AbiCloud is sill vendor neutral, providing concurrent support of all major hypervisors, as well industry standards such as the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

When asked how their product differentiates from the other open source cloud platform vendors there are two remarking features that stand out, they offer an impressive gui for their end users while not neglecting the skilled sysadmins by giving them a CLI that can connect with the API.

Secondly they claim really easy management of users, organisations , datacenter resources, virtual-datacenters and virtual apps. So easy that you can define a hierachy of resources and users rights in minutes .

AbiCloud 1.0.0 is available for immediate download at www.abicloud.org.