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Sun Microsystems Releases Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 3

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Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 3, which provides new enhancements and features to help companies maximize their IT infrastructure utilization and improve manageability of desktop deployments. Sun VDI Software 3 offers VDI storage economics, built-in virtualization capabilities, and support for a wide variety of virtual desktop operating systems.

The open architecture of Sun VDI Software 3 now gives users access to a broader choice of client devices and virtualization hosts — increasing flexibility, management efficiency and data security. Sun VDI Software 3 is available for purchase immediately and a free trial of the software can be downloaded here.

Sun VDI Software 3 represents a seamless solution, leveraging core open source technologies including Sun’s Open Storage, OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL. With Sun VDI Software 3, customers can deploy a number of virtual desktop operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu, and access these operating systems from a variety of client devices — such as traditional PCs or Macs, energy-efficient Sun Ray thin clients, or thin clients from other vendors. In addition, to host virtual desktop environments, IT architects can opt to use the improved integration with VMware Infrastructure, leverage Sun built-in virtualization, or use a mixture of the two.

Sun VDI Software 3 has exceptional management capabilities, resulting in lower equipment costs, less energy consumption, reduced system cooling requirements, simplified system administration and reduced e-waste. Since desktops are centrally hosted, only the display is sent to the client device; critical data never leaves the corporate network and can be managed and backed up by IT. Moreover, built-in Sun Ray technology support takes advantage of the excellent performance and inherent security features of Sun Ray thin clients, which contain no resident operating system or applications — making them virtually immune to client-side viruses.

Sun VDI Software 3 is available today and offers subscription-based pricing starting from $40 per user/per year, as a discounted price off the U.S. list price for pre-pay and multi-year purchases.

Dennis Hoffman Joins Neocleus’ Board of Directors

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Neocleus today announced that Dennis Hoffman has joined the Neocleus Board of Directors.

Hoffman has worked in both entrepreneurial and general management capacities at numerous information technology companies and is an executive at EMC Corporation where he leads the company’s global sales engineering organization.

Hoffman’s leadership experience spans more than 20 years in the high technology industry. He boasts a strong track record of building and growing companies and motivating teams. He has successfully cultivated strong client and investor relationships. In his most recent role he was responsible for the strategy development, execution and financial performance of RSA’s Data Security business unit, as well as strategic planning, strategic partnerships and business development for the greater RSA Division.

“The client computing environment has become increasingly complex to manage and secure,” said Dennis Hoffman, vice president and general manager, EMC. “Neocleus’ innovative approach in applying client-hosted virtualization to address IT hassles is at the forefront of the software industry. I look forward to working with the company to help them expand their industry leadership.”

Before starting his role at RSA, Hoffman led the team at EMC that developed and initiated the execution of the company’s information security strategy. In his prior position at the company he led product marketing for EMC Software Group. Previously, he served as CEO and co-founder of Storigen Systems, a pioneering developer of distributed storage networking software that was acquired by EMC in October 2003. Hoffman also spent six years at Avid Technology, where he was responsible for the marketing and business development of its storage and networking products. He has held strategy consulting and engineering roles at companies including Marakon Associates, Eastman Kodak and Polaroid Corporation. Hoffman received an MBA from Harvard University and holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

Exclusive – Cisco’s Unified Computing Platform: The Details

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Today Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) will unveil its long-awaited server line, one of the building blocks that was still missing from their Unified Computing vision. This announcement is bound to shake up the IT industry in general, and the x86 server market in particular. Even though this market has several well established players like IBM, Dell, HP and to a lesser extent Sun, Cisco is determined to extend its already impressive datacenter footprint to this market as well.

What Cisco CEO John Chambers called “Datacenter 3.0” during his keynote at VMworld back in september 2007 has now been rebranded as “Unified Computing”. Different name, same concept.

Cisco emphasises that this is a big new concept, where the most important part is the (unified) network and the integrated management. We suppose the traditional server manufacturers beg to differ.

Without further ado, we’ve got the scoop on the juicy details:

  • Cisco California blade servers come in a new chassis (unlike for example Intel, whose now defunct Enterprise Blade Server line consisted of rebranded IBM kit).
  • The chassis has 8 slots, that can fit 8 half-width or 4 full-width blades. At the bottom of the chassis there are 4 power modules, on both sides there are two “FEX”es, or Fabric Extenders.
  • Each of the 8 slots has got a 10 Gb connection to one of the two Fabric Extenders.
  • The blades come in two models, both with two sockets, populated with Intel Xeon CPU’s based on the Core i7 (“Nehalem“) microarchitecture. The half-width blades have got 12 memory slots, the full-width have a whopping 48 memory banks. By leveraging the next generation Intel architecture, this allows for an unmatched memory density, which has traditionally been the bottleneck in virtualized environments. (Providing 384 Gb requires crazy expensive 8 Gb dimms. Using cheaper 4 Gb dimms still allows for an impressive 192 Gb of memory per blade.)
  • There are no dedicated management or switching modules in the chassis. The FEXes connect to the UCS 6100 (UCS = Unified Computing Switch), which is based on the Nexus 5020 switch. The UCS6100 is a “top of rack” switch that will carry the TCP/IP data, block level data (through FCoE) and the management of the system. By externalizing this management and switching, Cisco makes it easier to upgrade their chassis to new technologies later on, and it keeps as much of the environment as possible close to the network core, their traditional turf, treating the server as a commodity. The UCS communicates with a management chip on each blade to manage and monitor the server components. This management solution was co-developed with BMC.

Cisco will undoubtedly emphasise how this is a solution, based on a network architecture. As Christopher Hoff puts it at his Rational Security blog: It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but it’s a solution.

Now, how will the market react to this announcement is unknown. HP, IBM and the likes pretend to be unimpressed by their new competitor, but it’s worth noting Cisco might be on to something:

  • The more customers use virtualization, the more they need central management whereas the underlying servers become interchangeable building blocks. By integrating the management in the network switching, Cisco can reinforce their stronghold in the heart of the datacenter.
  • Cisco is a new player. They arent’ experienced in the server market, but they also could start designing their solution from the ground up, learning from mistakes made by their competitors. Expect them to try to silence potential criticts with a global service organisation (in partnership with Accenture and local partners), reference customers (Savvis is named to be a beta customer) and certifications by the likes of VMware, Oracle and SAP.
  • Fiber Channel and Ethernet are on a path to convergence. Storage vendors are preparing or shipping FCoE-capable arrays. (It’s likely EMC and/or NetApp will show up at the announcement later today.) Brocade, Cisco’s biggest competitor in the SAN market, knows this as well, but their aqcuisition of Foundry Networks was delayed by some shareholders. Their product lines will likely stay separate for several quarters to come, whilst Cisco is shipping a unified product line today.
  • Cisco is alienating their current partners like IBM and HP. This was inevitable however, as HP was already moving into Cisco’s market with their ProCurve switches, IBM has always courted multiple brides, and is now intensifying its relationship with Juniper. In a down economy, it’s everyone to himself. It is also the opportunity for challengers to enter new markets. Cisco has got a $30 billion piggy bank, a result of their average 65% margins. They can afford a fight, and we’re likely to see one, no matter how hard IBM, HP and even Cisco want to downplay the significance of this announcement.

It’s obvious VMware is involved in this play as well. They’ve been talking about the “software mainframe” for quite a while now, Chambers introduced “Datacenter 3.0” at VMworld in 2007, and Cisco is a minority shareholder in VMware.

Update: VMware has already put out its press release and a YouTube video in which CEO Paul Maritz talks about Unified computing.
Update: The Cisco press release is out as well.
Pictures are over at Flickr, and in the data sheet.

Cisco has published a full list of partners:

Stay tuned for the Cisco announcement later today. The webcast starts at 10:30 AM Pacific Time, 18:30 CET. You can tune in at Cisco.com.

Dell To Resell Reflex Systems’ Virtual Management Center

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Reflex Systems, provider of virtualization management and security solutions, yesterday announced a global reseller agreement that authorizes Dell’s worldwide direct and channel sales forces to sell Reflex VMC (Virtual Management Center).

Reflex VMC is designed to provide customers with the essential management capabilities needed to effectively manage the complex, dynamic virtual environment, capitalize on the existing virtualization investment, reduce cost through efficient management, minimize downtime and maintain a reliable virtualized infrastructure running critical business-line applications. The solution boasts innovative performance management features including discovery and mapping, configuration change monitoring, application and services discovery and monitoring, virtual network security, and reporting.

Reflex VMC is available for purchase now through authorized channel partners including Dell.

Cloud Company Zimory Adds Support For VMware ESX Server

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Deutsche Telekom spinoff Zimory recently announced support for VMware’s ESX Server – extending the company’s advanced cloud technology to enterprise applications.

Zimory Enterprise Cloud combines existing virtual servers into a homogeneous, flexible, computing cloud – enabling data center managers to move applications quickly within single or multiple (on- and off-premises) locations. The technology enables very fast deployments of multiple virtual machines from an on- to an off-premises data center. Zimory now supports Xen and all flavors of VMWare. 

Zimory Enterprise Cloud optimizes data centers by increasing the efficiency of existing resources. Zimory begins where server virtualization ends: Zimory combines virtual servers into a single homogeneous computing cloud. Depending on current resource requirements, users can move applications quickly within a data center as well as between various locations — the optimal choice to temporarily distribute workloads.

Zimory management solutions enable businesses to make server resources available to other internal departments — in a controlled way and a finite amount of time – and allow quantification of this utilization even at the application level.

Announced last month, Zimory Public Cloud provides companies of all sizes instant, easy and flexible access to external computing power worldwide while also enabling businesses with excess server capacity to offer their resources to businesses around the world.

Zimory Public Cloud for sellers aggregates available server computing capacity from around the world and makes it available through an Internet trading platform. Using Zimory Public Cloud, companies looking for computing resources can buy capacity quickly — as needed — without long-term contractual commitment. Zimory handles pricing, contracts, security, virtual machine migration and billing.

VMworld Europe Day 2 – Dr. Stephen Herrod Keynote liveblog

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Stay tuned for the liveblog of the keynote by Dr. Stephen Herrod, VMware CTO, live from VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, France.

Stephen Herrod was one of the original developers of ESX predecessor SimOS while at Stanford University (His homepage from the time is still online.). He worked at Transmeta, where he worked on their “code morphing” technology (somewhat related to the binary translation VMware is donig). He has been with VMware for a few years now, managing the ESX group.

Expectations for today’s talk are a bit unclear. Will the focus be on the desktop (VMware View, vClient, …), or will it be another “cloudy” day? Given the fact that there aren’t lots of sessions on vSphere (the next generation of the ESX product), expectations in this area are a bit low. This being said, vSphere 4.0 should still be released in the first half of 2009. (Although, given enough beers, some VMware employees are telling us august/september is a more realistic timeframe.)

Let’s find out…

8:44 The room is filling up for the keynote by Stephen Herrod. Keynote starts at 9.00 AM.

9:10 The introduction video (same as yesterday) is rolling.. Getting ready for the keynote. Dr. Steve Herrod seems fashionably late today.

9:11 Maurizio Carli, general manager EMEA is master of ceremonies again, welcoming the audience.

9:14 Small reminder by Carli that this afternoon there will be a session called “VMware Unplugged”, a Q&A session with CEO Paul Maritz, CTO Steve Herrod, Maurizio Carli and the COO Tod Nielsen.

9:14 Stephen Herrod takes the stage.

9:14 A reminder of the three initiatives – VDC-OS, vCloud and vClient. Today those concepts will be demoed in reality.

9:15 Lots of development done in EMEA. Several hundred engineers here.

9:15 The talk is called “The future of virtualization”. Subtitle: “Technical stuff”.

9:16 Herrod is walking through the different blocks of vSphere. First up: vCompute. ESX scales higher than ever before, to cope with today’s platforms and VM demands. Up to 8 vCPUs, 100K IOPS/sec.

9:18 Internal benchmark of Oracle 11g on RHEL running on next generation ESX on a development 8-core Xeon.
The numbers:
less than 15% overhead or 8vCPU VM, 24.000 total DB transactions per second. Near-perfect scalability from 1 to 8 vCPUs. 250 MB/sec disk I/O.

9:18 This is the performance of a 2002 Sun Fire 15k, then costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

9:19 Not every application scales as well as Oracle. A reminder that breaking up hardware platforms can give better-than-native performance. Exchange supports about 8K mailboxes natively on a platform, breaking this up with ESX gives 16K mailbox support on the same hardware.

9:21 Record SPECweb2005 performance, also with VMware ESX Server 3.5. 16 Gbit/second throughput. Would server 3 billion page views per day. (By comparison, eBay servers about 1 billion pages in a day).

9:21 Next block: vStorage: aggregating and optimizing disk usage. One example: Thin Provisioning (on VMFS/VMDK level).

9:22 VMware has a software implementation, but if the hardware array supports it natively (read: with higher performance), it plugs in to ESX and the thin provisioning is done by the hardware.

9:23 vNetwork: distributed virtual switches (which everybody’s heard of by now), enabling third party virtual switches. (Cisco Nexus 1000V)

9:25 Important because the ownership of the network can stay with the networking team (same management tools, IOS, …) and new functionalities can be added.

9:25 vCompute, vStorage and vNetwork are the “bottom layer” that make up the “giant computer” – the software mainframe.

9:25 DRS and related technologies take care of distributing the workloads across the physical building blocks.

9:26 Distributed Power Management, today an experimental feature in ESX 3.5, makes this giant computer power thrifty.

9:27 DPM can throttle CPU speed, and turn off hosts that aren’t needed. When bursting, hosts can be powered on as needed.

9:27 DPM is one of the built-in features that make the “giant computer” as self-managing as possible.

9:28 The “top layer” of vSphere is related to management, policies and SLAs.

9:28 One example: attach an SLA policies to vApps (containers of virtual appliances that make up tiered applications), vSphere will allocate the right resources (and chargeback for the usage).

9:30 Maximizing uptime stays important as well. There are features for planned and unplanned downtime: VMotion, Storage VMotion, Maintenance mode, HA, SRM and of course Fault Tolerance (nee Continuous Availability). Nothing new here.

9:31 A reminder of what FT is all about: for some VMs HA isn’t enough, a reboot introduces unacceptable downtime.

9:32 FT runs a “shadow VM” on a separate server, and cuts over to the machine in case the first one goes down. As this is done in software, it can be configured on a per-VM basis, and it uses “off the shelf” hardware. (as opposed to specialized cluster equipment)

9:33 FT works together with HA: if one of the two copies dies, a new shadow VM is booted up, keeping the protection intact.

9:34 Next topic: Security – VMsafe APIs help protect workloads without needing to install agents in VMs. VMware’s partners have been working with this APIs for a year now (VMsafe was announced last year at VMworld Europe 2008), a lot of products should ship together with vSphere.

9:35 The security settings are a part of the vApp policies, the follow the VM as it moves between clouds.

9:36 Another vSecurity-based feature are vShiled Zones. This technology came to VMware with the acquisition of Bluelane. vShield zones encapsulate and firewall VMs, regardless of where they are running.

9:37 To manage all this nice stuff we’re used to VirtualCenter. This will become vCenter, as a central management hub.

9:39 As vCenter becomes an increasingly important part of a virtual infrastructure, VMware introduces vCenter Server Heartbeat. A passive vCenter server can run in the background and take over in case the first one goes down.

9:39 This monitoring/heartbeat mechanism keeps logging, allowing rollback of misconfigurations.

9:42 VMware infrastructure environments become bigger and bigger. vCenter has several limits – 200 hosts and 2000 VMs today, 300 hosts and 3000 VMs tomorrow. Multiple vCenter servers can be linked together to overcome this boundaries. Up to 10 vCenter can be linked in linked mode.

To keep things manageable, the Virtual Infrastructure client now includes a search mode.

First demo on stage of the new VI/vCenter combo, focusing on the search interface.

Anyone who’s ever used a web browser will know how to use this.

9:42 Advanced search capabilities to refine search results.

9:43 Possible business model: ads in the vCenter search results.

9:44 Automation is not a new concept for VMware: Guided consolidation, Update manager, orchestrator have been around for some time now. vSphere takes this to a next level.

One of the major features of vSphere is Host Profiles.

9:45 Host Profiles attach configuration templates to ESX hosts. Hosts can be configured to a certain standard setting with a simple click, and can be monitored for changes. If a change on a single host breaks the template compliancy, Host Profiles can remediate this and fix it automatically.

9:47 vCenter will be shipped as a Windows binary like it is today, but also as a Linux Virtual Appliance.

9:47 Beta available today.

9:47 Applause from the audience. (Have I mentioned already there are less suits in the audience today?)

9:49 Shout-out to Twitter from Herrod.

9:49 Next major chapter: vCloud.

9:51 Standard APIs for VDC-OS management and federation. (Linking “clouds” across datacenters.)

vCloud manages security, network, storage and monitoring.

9:51 First example of federating clouds: Site Recovery Manager

9:51 Storage is replicated on array-base, vCenter is replicated via IP.

9:53 VMware tries to figure out “long distance VMotion” for live migration. Today this requires very exotic setups and the right network environments.

Challenges for long distance VMotion:
Moving the memory
Moving the disk images
maintaining the network connections.

This is an ecosystem challenge (storage replication, dedup, wan optimization, stretching VLANs, …). Lots of work being done by the partner community and VMware.
9:54 Some long distance VMotion applications: DRS accross DCs, datacenter maintenance/move, DC disaster avoidance (eg. when a hurricane is on its way) and “follow the sun” environments.

9:55 All the cloud providers are nowadays creating their own self-service portals. VMware will offer their own base portal, based on Lab Manager.

9:56 Next demo: vCenter vCloud plug-in to manage clouds.

9:58 Bruce adds credentials of external cloud provider (Telefonica in this case).
The capacity offered by the cloud provider becomes available in vCenter.
Applications can be dragged from internal clouds to the external provider, just like between internal esx clusters.

9:58 Personal note: wow!

10:00 VMware wants to open up the vCloud API, to enable a rich ecosystem of clouds.

10:00 I wonder what Amazon thinks about this…

10:00 Last chapter: vClient initiative.

10:01 Another recap of the “follow the user” model/vision.

10:01 Walking through some View features: View Composer (linked clones, central patching), pushing full VMs to “thick clients” to run on top of client-side hypervisor.

10:02 Patching is made easier by using shared base disks, and application virtualization (ThinApp, formerly known as Thinstall).

10:02 Centralized policy management, based on ACE.

10:03 Major focus is the best user experience for all environments. Wan/Lan: PCoIP (PC over IP), local: rich portable desktop.

10:04 Jerry Chen from the View team is going to demo this.

10:04 The WAN technology is based on a co-development with Teradici, supporting CAD/CAM and 3D over WAN through hardware-assisted optimization.

10:06 LAN use case: traditional VDI: Thin clients, high-bandwidth, true pc experience (HD video, multimonitor, …)

10:09 Demo: thin client connected to rack workstation (a standard workstation blade, in other words, no virtualization). Demo with Google Earth working fluidly over a LAN connection.

10:10 vClient summary: Best user experience, central management, partnership with Intel for client-side virtualization (offline VDI).

10:11 “One more thing”: evolution of the mobile phone

10:12 VMware acquired Trango Virtual Processors, maker of mobile phone hypervisor.

10:12 Mobile phones bring familiar challenges: security/manageability, home/work life convergence, persona management, third-party applications.

10:13 VMware’s Mobile Virtualizaton Platform is a hypervisor for ARM-based devices.

10:15 Live demo with a Nokia N800. (If I’m not mistaken this internet device doesn’t include a phone part, but let’s not bicker about that).

10:15 Demo: downloading Windows CE, running productivity apps (Solitaire).

10:16 Another VM is downloaded and running side by side: Android.

10:18 And with that, the keynote is finished.

10:18 Thanks for following!