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The Xen of Oracle, or was it the Oracle of Xen ?

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The Xen Blog has the news that Oracle joined the Xen Advisory Board.

“Having Oracle join the Xen Advisory Board is a significant milestone for the Xen.org community and Xen hypervisor,” said Ian Pratt, founder of the xen project and Chairman of Xen.org. “With Oracle’s industry leadership and enterprise market experience, the Xen.org community is further strengthened, ensuring a continued leadership position as the open source hypervisor of choice.”

“As a leading contributor to the Open Source community, Oracle is pleased to join the Xen Advisory Board,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president Linux Engineering, Oracle. “With development projects such as enhancing Oracle Cluster File System 2 with features useful for virtualization, memory management changes with the hcache and hswap projects and integrating the Linux data integrity project into Xen, Oracle continues to focus on enhancing Xen with enterprise-class features.”

Together with Wim “Seklos” Coekaerts , comes Dan “I’ll replace you with a small shell script” Magenheimer, formerly of HP and the leader of the Itanium Xen port as an Oracle Observer, and Kurt Hackel, who leads the Oracle VM dev team.

Throughout 2008, Oracle has already significantly increased its contribution to the Xen.org community, including a focus on the new Xen debugger, a new implementation effort on the Xen API, timer testing, new memory caching algorithms, and updates to support Oracle software running on the Xen hypervisor. These contributions from Oracle are valuable to the Xen customer base as they provide enhancements to the Xen hypervisor’s capabilities in the enterprise and cloud computing space. These features are also important to the development community as the new Xen debugger delivers greater insight into the hypervisor’s state during development testing, allowing for faster bug identification and fixes.

Simon Crosby comments on Oracle earlier involvement “Whereas Oracle Unbreakable Linux is a derivative of Unfakable Enterprise Linux” (in other words, RHEL) the Xen in Oracle VM comes directly from the upstream Xen.org code base, and not via an intermediate distro. This means that Oracle VM tracks the xen.org upstream code base more closely than OEL can track kernel.org. Oracle has already offered a valuable set of set of patches and contributions to the project, and will host the next Xen Developer Summit.”

Simon also isn’t that keen on the way Oracle has been supporting applications within VM’s in the past but hopes that with Oracle joining the Xen Project Advisory board they will learn about the business of partnering from the community and the ISV ecosystem.

Ulteo Delivers Open Source Virtual Desktop Solution

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Ulteo announced today that they were releasing the first installable version of their Open Virtual Desktop solution for enterprises. Delivering faster deployment times and ease of management for the IT department, this first release can be integrated easily into an existing professional Linux or Windows IT environment. The solution can be up and running in a few minutes, delivering rich desktop applications to corporate users.

Ulteo enters the corporate market as a pure Open Source player, and leverages the experience it acquired during the past two years with virtualization products & services that were previously offered on their own servers.

The Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop is a great solution for corporations who want to reduce the Total Costs of Ownership of the end user desktop, a cost that cripples IT budgets. Moreover, the Ulteo open source business model remove the typical upfront licence fee and replace it with a much more affordable subscription support plan instead.

Ulteo’s solution has been designed with a radical approach: in particular, no installation is needed on the Desktop client, and nothing has to be replaced or modified in the existing infrastructure.
Advanced features include a full administration console, desktop sharing, application server replication and many others. The product has already served more than 140,000 desktop sessions over the last few months.
We’ll have a closer look at the Ulteo platform soon!

IBM Adds VMware Technology To Lotus Foundations

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Looking to steal the limelight from this week’s official launch of Microsoft Essential Business Server, IBM Monday said it is adding VMware’s virtualization technology to its IBM Lotus Foundations hardware/software appliances, allowing customers to run Windows on the Linux-based appliances.

Lotus Foundations competes head-to-head with Microsoft’s Windows Small Business Server and Windows Essential Business Server. This week Microsoft is slated to begin shipping the new Windows Essential Business Server 2008, a pre-configured software bundle targeting mid-size companies with up to 250 PCs. It’s also expected to begin shipping Windows Small Business Server 2008, a new release of the popular package for small businesses.

IBM is adding the VMware hypervisor to the Lotus Foundations server, allowing customers to run Windows and Windows applications on the system. VMware for the Lotus Foundations servers is currently in beta testing. The Lotus Foundations servers run on an optimized version of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with an operating system kernel that’s less than 100 Mbytes.

Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition Focuses On Virtualization

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On Thursday, Ubuntu Linux distribution organization Canonical flipped the switch on free public downloads of Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition, both of which will be supported for 18 months.

Improvements to Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition focus on virtualization, Java development, system management, and email security. It includes a Virtual Machine builder with which developers can construct customized virtual images, which is based on the most recent version of the Just Enough Operating System (JeOS).

Java developers now have the option of using Apache Tomcat 6.0 and OpenJDK, and ClamAV and SpamAssassin have been added to the main repository to handle anti-spam and anti-virus tasks.

Earlier this week in a conference call with reporters, Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu distribution organization Canonical, said the company has yet to turn a profit, but he plans to continue funding it for an additional three to five years.

SteelEye Introduces Protection Suite for Linux Multi-Site Cluster

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SteelEye Technology, provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for multi-vendor IT infrastructures, today announced SteelEye Protection Suite for Linux Multi-Site Cluster at Storage Expo 2008 in London. This solution extends SteelEye’s leading business continuity technology for Linux environments by enabling organizations with shared-storage Linux clusters within a data center to leverage another off-site replicated node for disaster recovery. The unique product offering is ideal for Linux users looking to cost-effectively extend existing high-availability capabilities as well as for those instituting first-time high-availability clustering and disaster recovery technologies.

As the burden of enterprise data grows, heightened emphasis is placed on how to manage, store and, most importantly, secure that data. By adding additional node for disaster recovery, SteelEye is providing data protection whether the server is local or on another continent. It provides additional protection for unforeseen events as well as planned downtime, such as data center moves.

IDC’s recently published Availability and Clustering Software (ACS) forecast shows that ACS products supporting Linux and open-source environments are carving out a significant presence in this worldwide market–with an expected doubling of revenue-based market share from 9.1% of all ACS revenue in 2007 to 18.1%, by 2012.

Specifically, SteelEye Protection Suite for Linux Multi-Site Cluster offers outstanding robustness and flexibility in its optimized host-based data replication technology. It allows for the inclusion of a remote system as part of a local shared storage cluster, extending disaster recovery protection to all file systems as if they are part of a classic shared storage cluster. Similarly, existing shared storage clusters can be enhanced with disaster recovery protection. Armed with SteelEye’s trademark flexibility, the product also integrates easily and automatically with heterogeneous hardware and software environments as well as existing SteelEye product offerings.

Scalent Brings Combined Virtual and Bare Metal Management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

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Scalent Systems, provider of real-time Management & Automation software for large data centers, and Red Hat today announced Scalent’s support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Xen. The combined solution extends virtualization and data center automation beyond hypervisors, to bare metal servers, network and storage connectivity.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 provides IT managers unprecedented levels of operational flexibility, via a comprehensive suite of open source server applications and virtualization capabilities . Scalent V/OE enables IT managers to rapidly provision entire virtual or bare metal servers and associated storage and network topologies, yielding higher asset utilization and dramatically lower costs.

Scalent’s software provides real time data center management, automation, and virtualization across physical and virtual servers, networks, and storage. Highly complementary to Red Hat’s Linux Automation efforts, the Scalent V/OE software enables data centers to react in real-time to changing business needs by shifting workloads and connectivity.

The result: data centers can transition between different configurations – or from bare metal to live, connected servers – in five minutes or less, without physical intervention.

Scalent’s software complements Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Linux Automation capabilities by delivering fully transparent management & automation of software workloads and connectivity across bare metal and virtual environments, including:

  • Simple, transparent deployment, automation, and management of both virtual and physical servers, network connectivity and storage access
  • Cost-effective high availability and server failover solutions, through Scalent’s N+1 technology leveraging existing IT assets
  • Fully-automated disaster recovery across data centers, through Scalent’s disaster recovery technology;
  • Creation of server pools that enable server rightsizing and scalability through dynamic repurposing; and
  • Effective chargeback capabilities, logical, secure partitioning, and named pools of resources for rapid change of operational lab or production environments.