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AbiCloud from Abiquo

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Last month Abiquo announced the release of their “abiCloud”, an open source cloud computing platform for allowing companies to create and manage large, complex IT infrastructures (virtual servers, networks, applications, storage…) in a quick, simple and scalable way.

We had a chat with Diego Mariño, Co-founder & CEO of Abiquo , he told us that
one of the key differences of AbiCloud is the the web rich interface for managing the infrastructure. He told us “You can deploy a new service just dragging and dropping a virtual machine. This version allows to deploy instances over VirtualBox, but we support VMware, KVM and Xen too.”

As their first tester had its infrastructure on Virtualbox and because its very simple to have it up and running in different architectures that’s where their first focus is at.

Today they support Xen & KVM through libvirt, and the connectors for these hypervisors will be offered during Q2. Support for VMware, is offered to hosting providers with closed modules.

Basically, Abiquo allows to companies to convert their infrastructure into a service. Other competitors in the field include the recently founded Eucalyptus, Enomaly, and sun via it’s Qlayer acquisition.

Abiquo says it has a different focus and approach , what they are offering is the ability to create private clouds for more complex infrastructures.

The have their own open API which will be released in Q3 , with no plans to support the Amazon’s API

AbiCloud is available for Download from SF.net

Insight Enterprises Named First Reseller Partner In U.S. To Serve VMware Service Provider Program

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Insight Enterprises announced today that it has been named the first U.S.-based reseller partner to offer subscription licenses to serve the expanded VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP). With the addition of Insight, VSPP partners can now expect the licensing flexibility they need in hosting environments leveraging the VMware technology, marketing and training they need.

VSPP partners are part of the VMware vCloud Initiative, which delivers an enterprise-class cloud computing platform. The VMware vCloud initiative offers broad support for existing and new applications, and it enables federation between on- and off-premise clouds. The core technology underpinning of the VMware vCloud Initiative is a set of VMware vServices that provide the APIs and technologies to enable this federation and facilitate business needs such as flex capacity, disaster recovery, or test and development for enterprises. VMware vServices also enable cloud providers to simplify how SMBs acquire compute capacity.

With the growth of cloud computing and VMware’s vCloud initiative, Insight can enable service providers to rent VMware licenses to capitalize on the market opportunity in delivering new on-demand cloud-like services for enterprises and SMBs, while preserving their capital.

CohesiveFT Updates Elastic Server Manager, Includes Open API

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CohesiveFT has announced an update to its Elastic Server Manager service, a lightweight administration and monitoring tool that provides a consolidated view of virtual server-related activities such as logs, configurations, administrator permissions, and the ability to start and stop services. The new release includes an open API for developers who want to connect additional web service-enabled programs to the management features that are automatically built-in to every Elastic Server at time of assembly.

The new Elastic Server Manager API is accessible via SOAP and REST. Utilizing Elastic Server rubberbands, small software components that connect all or part of an Elastic Server to monitoring systems or other enterprise frameworks supporting activities like license or inventory management, organizations can connect their own services to Elastic Server Manager, consolidating control of their application components. In addition to a newly redesigned interface, as well as the open API, the Elastic Server Manager uses the MindTerm secure remote access client for SSH access to the user’s Elastic Server. The Elastic Server Manager tool is free for account holders.

The Elastic Server platform lets users assemble custom servers by choosing components from a library of popular software stacks. Once assembled, these custom application stacks can be configured to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats, downloaded and deployed in real-time. The Elastic Server platform features a dashboard that highlights the most popular user-selected components as well as an overall view of community activity. Users can also distribute their finished servers through the Elastic Server platform. There are currently more than a thousand community users contributing nearly three thousand Elastic Servers to the market.

Cohesive Flexible Technologies

LinMin Releases Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2, Includes API

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LinMin, makers of the LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning solution, today unveiled Release 5.2, featuring a new API, single-command installation, numerous feature enhancements and support for the provisioning and imaging of additional platforms. The API is designed to allow customers and partners to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning into environments that presently cannot do bare metal provisioning of Microsoft Windows, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines.

“Having a best-of-breed provisioning and imaging solution was a great starting point, but being a standalone product didn’t maximize the potential of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning. Now, with the new LinMin API, customers can optimize IT resources (physical, virtual and human) around business processes, not the other way around,” said Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin Corp. “LinMin’s ability to install applications and management agents during the provisioning process is even more valuable with the API, bringing a closed loop process to customers’ existing environments: automatically select an appropriate and available physical or virtual system, invoke the LinMin API, and after the system is provisioned, these agents identify themselves to their respective management, monitoring, policy enforcement, availability, compliance and other applications that then take control of the system. This is IT application integration at its best.”

The API offers both a graphical user interface that can be integrated into other Web-based applications, and a traditional programmatic interface, giving customers maximum flexibility.  The example GUI can also be used as a “teaching mechanism” with the option to view in real time the API-compliant commands that get issued to and the responses received from the LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning server.  This enables software developers to quickly develop API calls with real-time debugging, reducing implementation times.

Once integrated with LinMin via the API, third party, internally-developed or open source software can create, maintain and delete system provisioning roles (e.g., Red Hat application server, Novell SLES database server, Windows Web server or Ubuntu office desktop) and assign them to specific physical systems or virtual machines, along with pre-determined networking and security settings based on business rules unique to each customer.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 also introduces a fully automated installation process. With a single command, LinMin detects all networking attributes, then downloads, installs and configures a database, network services and other required software components, and presents to the administrator a fully configured provisioning and imaging server in about 5 minutes.  LBMP 5.2 also supports the provisioning of additional platforms, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, Novell SLES10 SP2, CentOS 5.2, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04.1 release.  LinMin provisions over 50 different versions and architectures of Linux and Windows.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning is priced at $250 for up to 10 client systems, $1,000 for up to 100 client systems and $1,875 for up to 250 clients systems. Annual subscriptions are also available for $100, $400 and $750 respectively.

LinMin Corp.

VMware Debuts VAssert, A New Workstation API

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VMware just blogged about VAssert (programming guide – PDF), a new API debuting in Workstation 6.5 (beta) that uses the Record and Replay functionality they’ve been talking about for some time now. VAssert (Virtual Assertions) is a relative of your standing programming ASSERT debugging tool, but by delaying assert-checking until later when the exact machine instructions are replayed, it can be “very fast”.

VMware engineers Weiming Zeng and Min Xu demonstrate VAssert within Apache here.