citrix xenserver

Dell Gets Down & Busy With Virtualization

May 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

As expected, Dell today announced its broadest lineup of dedicated virtualization solutions ever. More than a dozen new servers, tools, and services aim to simplify the deployment and management of virtualization in enterprises of any size.

“Virtualization is quickly moving beyond hypervisors and hardware consolidation,” said Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions, Dell Product Group. “Enterprises are looking for a broad array of servers, storage and services designed specifically for virtualized environments. Having been a leader in the first wave of virtualization, today we are signaling our intent to lead the second.”

Dell comes out with updated on-line tools, new e-commerce capability and expanded factory integration. With the updated Virtualization Advisor tool, customers have more options for building validated configurations online for virtualization deployments before purchase.

Through Dell.com/VMwareNow, customers can now upgrade PowerEdge servers purchased with VMware ESXi 3.5 to full VMware Infrastructure 3 enterprise licensing in a single click. Dell will also offer in coming weeks factory integrated VMware ESXi 3.5 or Citrix XenServer Dell Express Edition across a broad range of PowerEdge servers, including the PowerEdge 2950, R900, 1950, 2900, M600 blade and M605 blade.

The PowerEdge R805 offers 2X the memory and I/O capacity of Dell’s previous generation 2 socket servers. With a choice of VMware ESXi 3.5 or Citrix XenServer Dell Express Edition integrated hypervisors, the PowerEdge R805 and R905 servers can deliver the optimal platform for virtualized environments.

Dell EqualLogic storage arrays offer new advanced SAN-aware integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager for data protection and disaster recovery for virtualized environments at no additional cost in management tools.

Dell and Egenera are making virtualization and data center automation a reality beyond the blade chassis. The Dell PAN system is built on PowerEdge 1950 and 2950 servers and Dell/EMC storage, with Citrix XenServer and factory integrated as a complete, turn-key solution that consolidates and virtualizes server compute-resources into an entire Processor Area Network to be managed like hard drives in a SAN. The Dell PAN system can deliver rapid provisioning and re-deployment “in minutes”.

Dell today announced the expansion of its virtualization services to include:

Virtualization Simplification Workshop – for customers looking to determine which options are the most suitable for their specific business needs today, their technical environment and to meet future growth.
New Virtualization Operational Assessment and Process Automation accelerates selection of the right virtualization technology for their needs and define processes and tools to automate the management of virtualized environments.
New Virtualization Healthcheck – reviews existing virtualized production environments to identify technology, process and people issues impeding virtualization scale out and provides an actionable, results oriented plan.
Expanded Virtualization Assessment – taking into account multi-vendor virtualization considerations, advanced storage options, as well as green IT data center energy efficiency improvements.
Dell PAN Accelerator Service – integrating a full Processing Area Network within the customer environment to help ensure production readiness.
Expanded Design and Implementation Services – which features the latest Virtualization technologies, in addition to best-of-breed disaster recovery tools and techniques.
ProSupport Remote Advisory Services – fast access to technical experts for consulting on virtualization implementations.

These offerings are available today from Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting Services.

Marathon Technologies Releases everRun Software

April 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

We’ve covered the beta launch of Marathon Technologies’ everRun software a little over a month ago, and now the company has officially released the product.

Customers can download a free 15-day trial of everRun VM. The latest version of Citrix XenServer 4.1 is also available as a trial edition. everRun VM suggested retail pricing is $2000 per server (perpetual license) for customers that have Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition. everRun VM with Citrix XenServer 4.1 Enterprise Edition is $4500 per server for a perpetual license.

Smart Marketing: Marathon Technologies Shares Tips On Server Virtualization

April 14, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Marathon Technologies, who recently announced availability of its everRun VM virtualization tool set, has issued a press release today, offering “top tips to know before starting with server virtualization”. Smart marketing as far as we’re concerned; we’ll let you be the judge of the quality.

You can find all 5 tips on Marathon’s blog, so we won’t spoil it for them and only give away the headlines:

Make the business case for server virtualization
Consider the license and support implications
Afford to spend the time to plan
Assess levels of application availability and risk to business continuity
Demonstrate that virtualization won’t impact end users

You can find the whole list with explanation on ‘Are you available tonight?‘, the company’s blog.

Marathon also has a webinar recording available with John Humphreys, Program Vice President, Virtualization Software for IDC, “Making the Case for Server Virtualization,” in which John provides essential guidance in making your business case.

[Source: Marketwire]

Citrix Releases XenServer 4.1, Simplifies Pricing Policy

April 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

This sure took a while: Citrix finally upgraded XenServer yesterday with the 4.1 release, adding some 50 new features for the first major version upgrade since Citrix acquired XenSource last August.

Some of the most compelling new capabilities:

XenMotion: Seamlessly move virtual machines without downtime
XenCenter: Unified virtualization management interface, including servers, storage and networking
Native 64-bit hypervisor: Scalability and support for enterprise applications
Resource Pools: Efficient configuration, allocation and authentication for virtualization resources
XenAPI: Integration with existing management invesments, infrastructure and processes

But it’s the change in pricing policy, which it dubs ‘groundbreaking‘, that deserves a closer look the most: with the release of 4.1, the company is moving away from counting sockets to charging on a per-physical server basis for all XenServer editions. Citrix claims this should let customers have an unlimited number of virtual machines or guest operating systems running on a server for the same price.

XenServer starts at $ 600 per server for an annual license, and $ 900 per server for a perpetual license. Customers using the old pricing structure will need to wait until their current licenses run out before making the change. The new pricing applies to all industry standard 64-bit servers with up to four CPU sockets.

Curious to see if VMware will change its pricing strategy too, and if Microsoft will adapt accordingly (both VMware as Windows Server 2008 Data Center edition with Hyper-V will be charged on a per-processor basis).

Marathon Technologies Releases Virtualization Tool, Attempts To Simplify Disaster Recovery With everRun VM

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Marathon Technologies made a splash at the fall 2007 VMworld show with a preview of its everRun VM product for high availability and disaster recovery and will formally announce the product today; it’s available in beta and is expected to ship in April, according to the company.

Based on the same everRun automated availability software employed by over 1,800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

Companies can now reliably run production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications
It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies
A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption

With virtualization moving beyond test and dev environments and into the realm of key business applications, more CIOs are looking for high availability (HA) solutions now. If those apps are running in a VM, the last thing IT would want is a slowdown or outage for business users. The higher profile the app, the greater the need for a high availability solution for VMs.

Marathon is betting that its product will appeal in particular to midmarket CIOs, some of whom have had a hard time justifying the cost of traditional high availability/disaster recovery solutions, many of which require the added expense of a storage area network (SAN) and staffers with specialized SAN skills. Marathon’s product can use direct connect attached storage, which is a plus for CIOs who don’t have a SAN and don’t want to pay to install and maintain one.

Marathon’s product works only with the Citrix /Xen virtualized server architecture, not marketshare-leader VMware‘s. Microsoft Hyper-V support is planned at a later date, but no VMware support is on the drawing board, according to Marathon (which cites its ability to get its product to market faster and ensure proper performance with the Citrix/Xen architecture, among the reasons for this decision.).

By the fourth quarter of this year, Marathon is expected to ship everRun VM Lockstep Option, providing system-level fault tolerance, designed for scenarios where you lose a whole server for any reason, for example, if you lose a building in a fire. This will essentially be an add-on solution to everRun VM, the company says. Customers will be able to set the desired level of protection VM by VM, to keep costs down for VMs that don’t need the highest level of protection.

Also check out the interview our occasional guest blogger Tarry Singh did with Marathon’s CTO Jerry Melnick, where he reveals more information about the pricing strategy.

“everRun VM is available in two flavors. For companies that already have XenServer Enterprise, they can buy everRun VM for $2,000 per physical server. If they don’t have a hypervisor installed, they can buy an integrated bundle from us that includes XenServer Enterprise Edition and everRun VM for $4,500 per physical server. That’s for a perpetual license by the way. We’ve briefed a lot of channel partners and potential customers on the product and the pricing and more than once we’ve had them respond, “what’s the catch.” There is no catch. We’re just trying to make this so easy and inexpensive that companies don’t have to think to hard about adding it to XenServer.“

[Source: The Register UK]

Patch Management Coming to a Citrix XenServer Near You

January 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Roger Klorese , Product Marketing Manager for Citrix XenServer , wrote a blog post revealing a major upcoming new feature in XenServer: pool-wide Patch Management.

“XenServer has had a relatively small number of patches, and in the case of security advisories, we’ve been consistently able to announce the fix for an issue very quickly, or in one case, even before the vulnerability was publicized.

But it’s true that virtual platforms can add complexity to patch management. While other Citrix technologies — Provisioning Server, for instance — can reduce the impact of patching significantly, the maintenance of the virtualization server platform itself is an major concern.

We don’t talk about future features very often, but here’s one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer — which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now — that is worth crowing about.”

In conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, there will be a possibility for you to:

* Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
* Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
* Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
* Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
* Apply the patches
* Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically

No word on timing for the public beta.

Hat tip to Tarry Singh .