Virtualization.com

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

Andrew Kutz

Hyper9 Releases Andrew Kutz’ Virtualization Mobile Manager

by Leave a Comment

Hyper9 released yesterday a browser-based management and monitoring tool that allows Virtualization administrators to control their virtual infrastructures from a mobile device.

The Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM), which was created by Andrew Kutz, a well-known developer in the VMware community, has been in beta for the last month, where hundreds of virtualization administrators have used the product in the field and provided positive feedback to Hyper9.

During the beta period, VMM demonstrated its ability to work with VMware Server 2, VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware vSphere 4, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer 5. The application will also work with almost any mobile device, including the Apple iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android and Windows Mobile Devices.

VMM also offers the ability to monitor host and VM performance statistics (CPU, Memory), control VMs and take action on the go – start, stop, pause, reset and disable network – all of which were important features to the beta users. Hyper9 is doing its part to make VMM a compelling offering, by giving users the ability to manage up to five VMs for free as well as special introductory pricing of $199.00 for up to 1000 VMs.

Hyper9 Introduces H9Labs

by Leave a Comment

Hyper9 announced on Wednesday the creation of H9Labs, an experimental division of Hyper9 that will research, develop and provide VI administrators with an opportunity to experience and evaluate new and emerging innovations and technologies.

H9Labs is unique because it relies on the community of VI administrators for input on the capabilities they need most to effectively do their job, and user feedback will be crucial to help improve these tools before they attain general availability status.

H9Labs recently announced VI administrator tools developed by H9Labs’s own Andrew Kutz, a well known developer in the VMware community who was recently named a vExpert by VMware.

H9Labs GuessMyOS plug-in replaces generic VM icons in the VI3 client inventory tree with OS-specific icons for both Windows and Linux guest and Virtualization Manager Mobile Beta, which allows the user to manage and monitor their virtual infrastructure from their favorite mobile device. The free H9Labs PowerShell Cmdlts, such as the Out-DataSet cmdlet, is an extremely useful and needed cmdlet as indicated by the VI administrator community. VI admins use it to pipe any type of data that can be formatted with the built-in cmdlet, Format-Table, into a typed Microsoft .NET System.Data.DataSet.

Lostcreation’s Virtualization Mobile Manager Reaches Beta 1.5

by Leave a Comment

From VMBlog:

lostcreations‘ Andrew Kutz is moving a mile-a-minute right now working on his Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM) application.  Only a short time since announcing it, he is now ready with Beta 1.5.  The new Beta introduces three important new features thanks to Beta user feedback thus far.

  1. In addition to VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Server 2, VMM now supports the management and monitoring of Citrix XenServer 1.5.
  2. VMM now works on ALL mobile devices via its new Lite Mode. VMM will gracefully degrade itself to a zero-Javascript version if a fully-Ajax capable browser is not detected. You can now manage and monitor VMware and Xen from your BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device, or any phone with a web browser!
  3. Beta 1.5 introduces a feature we are calling Accidental Touch Detection (ATD). ATD prevents users from accidentally brushing up against a power button in full mode (as opposed to the new lite mode) and shutting down a VM. ATD requires an intentional touch (measured by a depression of 500 milliseconds)

Andrew Kutz Upgrades VMware Infrastructure Plug-in SVmotion

by 3 Comments

Andrew Kutz, author, developer and one of the leading experts on x86 server virtualization, has released version 1.0 of his populair VI plug-in SVmotion. The plug-in is available at SourceForge and includes new features like:

  • No longer counts RDM files against datastore size, fixing the bug that plagued the last version.
  • SVMotion operations against templates are not supported since VMware does not support them.
  • Added tool tips that explain why a relocation cannot take place
  • Automatically registers itself upon installation so you don’t have to enable it inside the VI client.
  • All SVMotion events write out a log, enabling better understanding of what went wrong in case of an error.
  • Aside from the library that loads the plug-in, all of VMware’s internal code has been replaced with the VI Toolkit for .NET.
  • The project is now supported by almost 20 unit tests, helping to ensure fewer bugs and greater stability.
  • The unit tests can be expanded to include testing for a system-resource supported number of servers since they use mock testing designed to work with the VI Toolkit for .NET.
  • The project is now built using NAnt, which allows nightly builds of the source, creates distributions, and builds the MSI installer.

SVmotion

Update: also read this Virtualization Admin article, and Andrew’s comment on this post.

[Source: VMBlog]

Reading Tip: Andrew Kutz On the Future Of The Virtualization Ecosystem

by Leave a Comment

Here’s a must-read blog post from Andrew Kutz over on O’Reilly’s On Lamp: Ubiquitous underpinnings and idyllic interfaces – The virtualization ecosystem of the (very near) future.

An excerpt:

The virtualization ecosystem is changing; a division is occurring that is separating the ecosystem into two areas: specialized and commoditized software. Hypervisors are becoming commoditized such that they no longer need to be purchased from a specific vendor. A few years ago when virtualization was starting to heat up, playgrounds across the nation were quickly subject to the VMware-kids and Xen-kids cliques. Either you were down with ESX or you were hip to Xen; there was no middle-ground. However, today we find ourselves in an entirely different predicament. In addition to VMware and Citrix (bye, bye XenSource, we hardly knew ya), we have the soon-to-be released Hyper-V, VirtualIron, KVM, Sun xVM, and even Oracle is getting into the game. The number of available hypervisors on the market has grown drastically in a relatively short period of time. Compare that to when you had only two choices; now there is a plethora of virtualization solutions to answer the demand for reducing physical servers in the data center and consolidating resources. Now that hypervisors are a dime-a-dozen it only makes sense that a virtual machine (VM) should be able to run on any of them.

Read the rest!