linux

Microsoft and Novell Announce Joint Virtualization Solution

September 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft and Novell are announcing the availability of a joint virtualization solution optimized for customers running mixed-source environments. The joint offering includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server configured and tested as an optimized guest operating system running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and is fully supported by both companies’ channel partners. The offering provides customers with the first complete, fully supported and optimized virtualization solution to span Windows and Linux environments.

The new offering represents significant progress in the Microsoft-Novell collaboration and business model first announced in November 2006, which delivers seamless integration of SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft Windows, providing a bridge between proprietary software and open source software. The virtualization solution is the first to include technology developed by both companies at their joint Interoperability Lab, including virtual machine adapters built to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as an optimized, or often referred to as enlightened, guest operating system on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, providing optimized performance to SUSE Linux guests.

The new offering represents more than 18 months of technical collaboration undertaken between Microsoft and Novell in response to customer demand for a virtualization solution that provides high performance and ease of deployment, and is tested and supported.

The original November 2006 Microsoft-Novell agreement included four areas of technical collaboration: virtualization, standards-based systems management, identity federation and document format compatibility. Since then, the companies have announced three other areas of collaboration: Moonlight, accessibility and a new SUSE Linux Enterprise Server management pack for Microsoft System Center product. With the new Linux Enterprise Server management pack, Microsoft System Center customers can manage Windows and Linux environments, both physical and virtual, from one common tool. Novell is also a charter member of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a validated operating system in the program.

VMware Fusion Helped CERN Not Destroy The World With Large Hardron Collider Project

September 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware has announced physicists at CERN, the legendary European Organization for Nuclear Research and the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics, use VMware Fusion to share Linux-based computer code via VMware virtual machines running on Apple hardware.

Virtual machines created with VMware Fusion are used by the physicists working on the experiments that run on the world’s largest particle accelerator, Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, the LHC has operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271°C). By studying collisions at higher energies than ever before, physicists will make further progress in understanding the mysteries of how our Universe is made and how it came to be.

With VMware Fusion, physicists use Macintosh hardware to run Linux-based software which links to LHC Computing Grid – a network of more than 150 computing centres with approximately 40,000 CPUs, handling 15 petabytes of new data each year. This Grid, which provides computing power for some of the organization’s most advanced experiments, can be accessed from CernVM, a customized Linux operating system running in a lightweight VMware virtual machine deployed on a range of PC and Mac workstations and laptops.

TOLIS Group Teams Up With Parallels, Its Backup Solution Gets Certification

July 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

TOLIS Group yesterday announced a partnership with Parallels, as its BRU Server network backup solution has been successfully tested for compatibility with Parallels Server for Mac virtualization software. BRU Server is now listed in the Parallels Certified Products Catalog.

“In virtualized system environments, BRU Server’s advanced architecture simply treats the host and guest systems as networked client systems,” said Tim Jones, president and CTO of TOLIS Group. “Both file by file and disaster recovery compatible image backup and restore of guest systems are supported using normal BRU Server operations – no special treatment is needed. BRU Server and Parallels work together seamlessly.”

BRU Server’s agents provide full backup support for all guest systems including: x86 Windows, Solaris, Open and FreeBSD, Linux, and Mac OS X. Additionally, TOLIS’ OFM module allows the proper management of open file environments such as Exchange, FileMaker and Active Directory running on Windows virtualized machines.

New Linux Kernel: More Support for Virtualization

July 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Nearly three months in the making, the new Linux kernel (version 2.6.26) announced by Linus Torvalds through a mailing list, boasts read-only bind mounts, “big-iron” KVM ports, USB webcam support, 802.11s mesh WiFi, built-in support for remote kernel debugging, and a host of embedded architecture improvements, among other enhancements.

Among the most significant improvements are changes to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization software, first included in the kernel in February of last year. KVM normally uses the technique of full virtualization, which simulates all the underlying hardware necessary to run a given client system, with the support of virtualization technologies built into AMD and Intel chips. The latest kernel update adds limited support for paravirtualization, a technique that only partially virtualizes the hardware in order to improve performance.

KVM has also, for the first time, been ported to non-x86 hardware platforms Intel IA64 and IBM PPC and S/390, developers said.

[Source: ZDNet UK]

Parascale Raises $11+ Million In Series A Funding For Linux Cloud Storage

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Parascale, a provider of cloud storage solutions for rich media content in traffic-intensive applications, today announced that it has closed an $11.37 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

Parascale plans to use the funding for product development and marketing initiatives in preparation for the launch of Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS), an application that aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud, accessible via standard file access protocols.

According to the news release, Parascale has developed a new class of storage solutions designed to support the wave of content-intensive applications, including video-on-demand, digital document archiving, scientific data analysis, video surveillance and medical image remote diagnosis among others. The company’s PCS software is patented technology which automatically and transparently migrates and replicates files among storage nodes to balance and optimize performance – without interruption in client access.

“With Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, we have the two premier investors in the storage space supporting our company,” said Sajai Krishnan, Parascale CEO. “In the very specific technology domain where Parascale operates , clustered storage, Charles River’s success with EqualLogic has been the best clustered SAN-storage exit. Menlo’s investment in Spinnaker Networks has been arguably the best clustered NAS-storage exit. It is an honor to have Bruce Sachs of Charles River and John Jarve of Menlo on our board. Their voting with their wallets in leading the Series A round, is an affirmation of Parascale’s team, business model and opportunity.”

[Source: ByteandSwitch]

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst On The Linux Vendor’s Virtualization Initiatives

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

A half-year after becoming president and CEO of Linux vendor Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst was in Boston this week for the annual Red Hat Summit, where a lot of announcements were made about Red Hat’s forray into virtualization. Whitehurst sat down with Network World’s Jon Brodkin to discuss open source, a new patent settlement, and Red Hat’s moves in virtualization, reports PC World.

This is the excerpt of the interview where they talk about virtualization:

The virtualization market is dominated by VMware, but you guys expanded your virtualization portfolio with a Linux-based hypervisor this week. What are your goals in virtualization?

Virtualization is half the operating system. Paul [Cormier, Red Hat president of products and technologies] would actually say virtualization is the operating system in a lot of ways. We feel pretty strongly virtualization needs to be pretty tightly integrated with the operating system.

VMware’s the dominant player in an industry that’s what, like 5 or 10% penetrated? And it’s primarily in development and test scenarios, and primarily to reduce server sprawl.

We come from a different heritage. Our systems usually aren’t running at 10%. Linux workloads are a lot higher. The value from our perspective is less around server consolidation and more about what new functionality or architectures can be enabled by virtualization.

You talk about grid computing, cloud computing, whatever that is. The necessary enabler of that is Linux with integrated virtualization. Because otherwise what are you going to run on a cloud?

Read the rest of the interview on PC World.