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Diskeeper Debuts V-locity, A Virtual Platform Performance Optimizer

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Diskeeper Corporation has officially shipped V-locity, a new virtual platform performance optimizer designed to maximize server speeds on Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Already a VMware and Microsoft partner for its Diskeeper product line, the upward move to develop V-locity was made to create a virtual-specific product that not only performs defragmentation functions, but also synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems.

V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating VHD “bloat”. This is the wasted disk space that takes place when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don’t then shrink when users or applications remove data. V-locity actually compacts the VHD, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT Managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

Diskeeper was the first ever defragmenter certified for Hyper-V, garnering notable praise from Microsoft* citing that “After independent testing, we found that Diskeeper’s automatic defragmenter not only exploits Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V capabilities but also is designed to meet mission-critical expectations in a virtualized environment.” Now V-locity has taken that technology to an all new level, bringing the first ever virtual platform performance optimizer to the enterprise.

V-locity consists of two components:

  • V-locity Host installed on Windows Server 2008 running Hyper-V
  • V-locity Guest installed on Windows virtual machines

Microsoft Equips IPTV Platform Mediaroom With Virtualization Support

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Microsoft today launched Microsoft Mediaroom with virtualization, making it the first Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) platform to offer virtualization support. Mediaroom with virtualization can deliver up to a sixfold reduction in the number of physical servers required to support a full-featured IPTV service, significantly reducing hardware and management costs and speeding time to market for Mediaroom customers by up to three weeks.

With virtualization support, it is possible to deploy and operate a full Mediaroom-powered TV service for up to 30,000 subscriber homes per market using fewer than 10 physical servers. Even for deployments of greater than 30,000 subscriber homes, a mix of virtualized and dedicated servers can still provide efficiency benefits.

Mediaroom with virtualization offers the full functionality of Microsoft’s award-winning IPTV platform including video on demand, DVR Anywhere for viewing and managing recorded shows in any room, and Mediaroom Anytime for viewing of previously aired programs or restarting currently airing shows without any preplanning or prior digital video recording. Other capabilities include high-definition video for live and on-demand content, multiview, instant channel zapping, and TV applications that support rich interactivity and seamless blending of Web content and services with broadcast TV.

To power virtualization in Mediaroom, Microsoft is using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based server virtualization technology.

HDS Comes Out With Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V

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Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Hitachi and provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced the availability of Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V, a new business continuity and disaster recovery solution for virtualized environments based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.The solution combines Microsoft Windows Server 2008 capabilities such as high availability through Microsoft Multipath I/O, server virtualization and clustering with the proven platform capabilities of Hitachi storage virtualization and system-based replication to create a cost effective, highly available and remotely replicated virtual server infrastructure for organizations looking to reduce business risk and associated downtime costs.

Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V extends Microsoft migration capabilities to remote sites, allowing midrange to enterprise customers to replicate and migrate virtual machines within virtualized environments either locally or across geographically dispersed sites. The solution also features breakthrough automated failover and data resynchronization, as well as simplified failback of virtual machines. Additionally, organizations looking to optimize business continuity can use the quick and live migration capabilities of Windows Server for local protection of virtual machines.

According to a recent report by Enterprise Strategy Group, an estimated 85 percent of organizations who suffer a major disaster and do not have a viable business continuity or disaster recovery solution in place are either out of business one year after the disaster or suffer huge financial losses. In addition to the many benefits that server and storage virtualization can provide separately such as consolidation, improved resource utilization, and improved performance, Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V can help organizations reduce downtime and improve data availability, which have important risk-reduction and cost savings implications.

Hitachi Storage Cluster for Microsoft Hyper-V is immediately available through Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services (GSS).

Surgient Launches Microsoft Virtualization Solution for Lab Automation and IT Operations

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Surgient today announced a number of initiatives in cooperation with Microsoft. The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform integrates with virtualized systems running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, providing IT and Quality Assurance professionals with self-service access to resources for testing IT services throughout the deployment process. Surgient’s approach streamlines VM lifecycle management and automates virtualized infrastructure, reducing capital and operating costs, and increasing user productivity.

Manual or semi-automated processes for deploying IT services are expensive and time-consuming, and create a daunting task for IT operations. The high rate-of-change of testing environments further exacerbates this challenge, creating the need for consolidation of testing infrastructure with virtualization, combined with enterprise-class lab automation, dynamic capacity management and self-service experience. With Surgient and Microsoft software, IT can streamline virtualized infrastructure management, automate resource administration, and provide an easy-to-use self-service interface for virtual resource users.

With lab, lifecycle and stage management, the Surgient Platform, with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, is a comprehensive solution for optimizing virtualized infrastructure.

The solution has been tested in Microsoft’s Enterprise Engineering Center in Redmond, Wash., against a complex, multi-tier SAP NetWeaver Architecture.

For the implementation, Microsoft and Surgient IT professionals were challenged with the traditional issues surrounding test environment deployment: underutilized compute capacity, difficult setup and teardown, and limited cloning and replication. To address these challenges, existing physical infrastructure and content was quickly virtualized using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and then registered with the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform. The combination of Microsoft virtualization and Surgient automation resulted in: a dramatically improved deployment process, further resource consolidation, simultaneous deployment of identical multi-machine SAP configurations, and a self-service experience for end users.

Rack Server Virtualization Add-in For Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Professional

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Microsoft has recently released an add-in for Visio to help you build rack diagrams.

Rack Server Virtualization Add-in provides the capability to pull the rack-server data either from an Excel spread sheet or from the user and render the Visio diagram.  The Add-in from Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Professional helps you plan virtualization and draw a clear picture of your hardware utilization.

This tool auto-generates the diagram of your rack and provides clear server details from a linked Excel template. Analyze your racks and servers using WMI or get the utilization data over time using the Operations Manager connection.

Use the virtualization button to see the before and after detailed diagram of your racks. See clearly where you have the opportunity to save on space and power.