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Baseline: 10 Free Virtualization Tools You Should Know

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Baseline published an interesting list of “10 free virtualization tools you should know” on its website.

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The list in full:

  1. OpenVZ (Parallels) – also check out our video interview with Werner Fisher from Thomas-Krenn.AG on OpenVZ
  2. FreeVPS (Positive Software)
  3. Sun xVM (Sun Microsystems, who wants to equip Web 2.0 startups with “SAMP”)
  4. VirtualBox (innotek, recently acquired by Sun)
  5. PlateSpin Power Recon (PlateSpin, recently acquired by Novell)
  6. Vizioncore vOptimizer Free Ware (Vizioncore, recently acquired by Quest)
  7. Virtual Iron Single Server Edition (Virtual Iron)
  8. Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard – VMD (Enomaly)
  9. Microsoft Virtual Server Migration Toolkit – VSMT (Microsoft) – also check out our video interview with Mike Neil, Virtual Machine Technologies Product Unit Manager at Microsoft
  10. Moka5 LivePC Engine (Moka5)

Novell Picks Up PlateSpin For $ 205 Million in Cash

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Today, Novell announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin for $205 million using current cash. The acquisition is expected to close during Novell’s second fiscal quarter 2008 subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions.

PlateSpin will be integrated into Novell’s Systems and Resource Management business unit. As part of this business unit, PlateSpin will continue to develop and market its solutions to a global customer base. This will be done through the continued operation of PlateSpin’s Toronto facility as well as through a combination of PlateSpin and Novell offices and facilities around the globe.

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All key PlateSpin management are staying through FY08 and many have accepted permanent employment at Novell. PlateSpin founder and CEO, Stephen Pollack, will take on the duties of VP, Business Development for the SRM business unit.

From the official release:

“The combination of Novell’s platform and automation management with PlateSpin’s leading solutions for workload relocation, protection and provisioning will give customers the agility to cross physical and virtual boundaries so IT can work together. Both organizations are focused on helping customers maximize the strategic value of the heterogeneous data center. Novell and PlateSpin will deliver products for complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Linux, UNIX, and Windows operating systems in the physical and virtual data center.”

[Source: CNN Money]

Video: Interview with Frank Kohler, Virtualization Project Manager at Suse – Novell

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The interview below is part of our Virtualization Video Series, a recurring theme we want to implement on Virtualization.com featuring interviews with key players from the industry, event reports, etc.

This interview was recorded at the Profoss 2008 event on Virtualisation and features Frank Kohler, Virtualization Project Manager at Suse (Novell) being interviewed by Toon Vanagt on what he saw his clients do with virtualization technology and how you can avoid making those mistakes. Shortly after the interview, Frank was hired by XenSource (Citrix).

Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe Outlines Technical Strategy for 2008

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Jeff Jaffe , Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer for Novell, published a blog post 2 days ago outlining the company’s technical strategy for 2008. This is what he had to say about its focus on virtualization:

We see agility and customer focus as key in our progress on virtualization – one of the hottest areas in the industry. In SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, we introduced open source virtualization into a commercial Linux distribution before anyone else did. Once we introduced this, we spoke to customers. We spoke to partners. We spoke to analysts. We spoke to everyone! By listening, we discovered that we had not yet nailed it. In 2007 we listened, and in a very short time we became a leader in virtualization.

Our Open Enterprise Server customers told us that they wanted NetWare virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server – to take advantage of all of the drivers provided by Linux. And it needed to perform. After all, file and storage performance for NetWare is critical. A unique partnership between our Workgroup team and our Open Platform Solutions team has resulted in virtualization capability in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 that is higher performance and more manageable than any other open source solution. This is the basis for OES 2.

We talked to other customers. They did not want virtualization as a bare technology. They wanted it to be managed. Novell quickly turned around and built technology to manage workloads and provision virtual machines. ZENworks Orchestrator. The best managed open source virtualization solution.

And we listened to customers and partners some more. They said get a tight partnership with Microsoft to optimize Windows on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Build a joint lab for testing – so customers have the confidence that our solution works best with Microsoft. We did all of that!

Here is the totality. From a barebones hypervisor in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, we now have an industrial strength hypervisor, supporting the demanding NetWare workload, optimized for Microsoft, SAP and others, with a joint lab for testing. It is manageable with ZENworks and will address low latencies.

How did we do this? We listened!

Virtualization clearly is a key topic for the industry, and with the 2007 results we have both staked a claim and demonstrated our agile processes. Look for this to continue to be an area of significant investment in 2008.

Are Grid Computing & Virtualization Blending?

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The synergy between Grid computing and virtualization is becoming more and more apparent and is starting to find common ground in Linux.

At Novell’s Brainshare conference, virtualization is taking the spot light.  In fact, Dell made an announcement that it will offer Novell ZENworks for Linux servers.

Adam Fineberg’s (Levanta) view was reported by InfoWorld

Adam Fineberg (Vice President of Engineering at Levanta) sees specific technical reasons why Linux has become the most widely used OS for Grid environments:”Some of the key aspects of an operating system that you really need take advantage of in a Grid computing environment are the networking and file systems. The networking side is very important because of the large number of nodes, the need to quickly / easily add more nodes, exchange information between the nodes with low latency, as well as access shared storage systems and devices. Linux does very good ‘zero copy’ networking, meaning that once the data reaches the network stack, it doesn’t have to be copied again all the way through the rest of the operating system. That really keeps the networking efficient in Linux systems. With respect to file systems — because of the very strong interface that’s defined within Linux, there are a great number of file systems that are available for you. And that’s something that’s fairly unique to the Linux OS. Most of the operating systems don’t actually have a large number of file systems available for them, other than some standard ones like NFS. That makes it relatively easy to pick a file system that’s well-suited for your particular application. So having access to, for instance, XFS or JFS — which are two very high performance file systems that have good characteristics, but by the same token have very different implementations and therefore very different operating characteristics — you can optimize by choosing the file system that’s best suited for your application.”

The embracing of Linux by the Grid / Virtualization community boils down to being able to understand the boundary values of this set of complex use-case equations. Linux, being open source, lets you get at the raw OS kernel code. This gives you access to the “boundaries” of the OS, the way it interfaces to applications and the hardware. An intimate understanding of these boundary conditions are critical to Grid and Virtualization…

Read this full article at source.

Novell Announces Support for Xen 3.0 in SUSE Linux Enterprise v10

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Press Release from Novell at BrainShare® 2006

SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 delivers new features for mission-critical operations, including Xen virtualization, improved performance and the industry’s easiest-to-use application security

SALT LAKE CITY —20 Mar 2006—Novell today introduced its next-generation platform for the open enterprise, SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10. Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise is a secure and reliable foundation for enterprise computing from the desktop to the data center. It will be first to deliver fully supported Linux* innovations such as Xen virtualization, exceptional performance and scalability, application-level security, and improved desktop usability. As a result, organizations will be able to experience the flexibility, power and reliability of the best-engineered Linux, backed by Novell’s industry-leading support, services and training.

“Novell has a broad vision for open enterprise computing, and no other Linux vendor has a comparable lineup of enterprise-class solutions that address the pressing needs of today’s IT executives,” said Jack Messman, chairman and CEO of Novell. “SUSE Linux Enterprise is the platform for the open enterprise. It delivers powerful solutions built on open standards for all of the most important technology arenas within today’s enterprise – data center, workgroup, desktop, security and identity, and resource management.”…

Virtualization

SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is the first enterprise platform to include a fully integrated and supported version of Xen 3.0, the emerging open source standard for virtualization services. Xen 3.0 lets organizations consolidate multiple workloads on a single server. With Xen 3.0, customers can configure applications and systems for maximum efficiency. According to Gartner, the average data center server runs at 20 percent of capacity. With Xen virtualization on SUSE Linux Enterprise, customers will have the ability to increase server utilization to nearly 70 percent.
“SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is the first enterprise Linux distribution to offer full commercial support for the industry’s fastest and most secure virtualization technology, the open source Xen 3.0 hypervisor,” said Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource. “With Xen 3.0, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 can take full advantage of Intel and AMD hardware support for virtualization, delivering bare-metal virtualization performance to enterprise customers. Novell is a trusted partner to XenSource, and we look forward to working closely with Novell to deliver compelling virtualization solutions to enterprise customers.”…

Read the original press release at Novell.com