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Enomaly Releases New Enomalism Core

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Reuven announced the availability of Enomaly ECP 2.1.1 on SourceForge. Enomaly 2.1.1 is a bug fix and security release, so don’t expect to see a whole lot of new functionality –
2.2 is coming is planned to be released shortly into 2009 with lots of new features.

This maintenance release fixes a potential security exploit in the startup script’s temporary file handling as well as the following bug fixes:

* Randomly generated mac addresses are now written to the machine XML at provision time.
* The available system memory is now checked against the required memory for new machines at provision time.
* Fixed a bug regarding the valet extension module not properly checking the hypervisor type.
* Fixed a bug that disallows a machine’s XML definition to be edited.
* Fixed several misc. bugs in the valet extension module.
* Added messages to the interface stating the required extension modules.

You can download the new release here

ECP is governed by the AGPL, a free open source license

Fujitsu Releases Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition

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Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation announced the North American availability of Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition (RCVE), software that provides enterprise data centers and cloud computing providers with improved management control, rapid reconfiguration capabilities, and fully automated failover for both physical and virtualized blade servers.

Key features include:
— Recovery for high availability – RCVE is more affordable than clustering – enterprises can choose the same lower cost, highly available, highly reliable Fujitsu PRIMERGY(R) blade servers for use in their physical and virtual environments. A single spare can be shared between the two, with RCVE working in concert with VMWare’s VMotion(TM).
— Uniform interface – The single management view of physical and virtual environments simplifies system administration and reduces the number of errors; hierarchical system views help pinpoint hardware problems, enabling faster recovery and minimizing service disruptions.
— I/O virtualization – Leveraging embedded virtualization features in Fujitsu PRIMERGY blades, the software automates SAN reconfiguration when switching over servers, solving a common virtualization recovery complaint. The feature works with nearly all market-leading SAN storage systems.
— Fast provisioning – New blades can be added or recovered faster and automatically, increasing hardware availability and service levels while lowering administration costs.
— Backup and restore capabilities – RCVE increases ease of back-up and recovery for both virtualized and native environments through unified views and storage of three “golden image” versions.
The Fujitsu RCVE software is available now. Pricing starts at $7,600 per PRIMERGY chassis, including management software and agent software for either Windows or Linux blades.

AppSense Releases Environment Manager 8.0 For Personalizing Virtual And Physical Microsoft Platforms

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AppSense, provider of user environment management solutions for large-scale environments, today announced that its newly released Environment Manager 8.0 leverages Microsoft server technologies, providing a scalable and efficient way to personalize both virtual and physical desktops across the enterprise.

The only enterprise solution that enables standardized virtual desktop environments to be fully – and automatically – personalized, AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 accelerates virtual desktop adoption by rapidly configuring desktops and applications with a user’s personal and policy settings without administrator intervention.

By decoupling both policy and personalization data from the desktop, managing them independently and applying them on-demand, AppSense’s user environment management solution lets IT use a combination of desktop and application delivery methods—such as desktop virtualization, presentation virtualization, streamed applications and local and provisioned desktops—and easily and transparently migrate large groups of users from physical to virtual desktops.

vMAN Over At DMTF Is Immune To Kryptonite And Now Powered by OVF Version 1.0

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Like superheroes with a weak spot (remember Superman and green Kryptonite), large providers of green data center technologies and virtualization software had an Achilles’ heel with their vendor lock-in, which scared away quite a few prospects. Today the major players have all agreed to drop their distinct proprietary formats and aim to adopt the Open Virtualization Format 1.0 as soon as possible (most are already compliant upon release). We first learned about OVF during our interview with Ian Pratt and the release of this open standard is a great step forward. The short lead time of ‘only’ one year proves the industry has understood that open standards are the way to go.

Above is our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld in Las Vegas, where DMTF president Winston Bumpus revealed the release of OVF 1.0 and their larger Virtualization Management Initiative (vMAN). vMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. This Initiative delivers much-needed open industry standards to the management of virtualized environments. Ultimately, the group’s goal is to eliminate the need for IT managers to separately install, configure and manage interdependencies between virtualized operating systems and applications, by enabling automated management of the virtual machine lifecycle.

This new specification created by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource is about to become an industry standard and aspires to help ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. We did not have the time to transcribe the interview yet, but already took a few of Winston Bumpus’ quotes from the DMTF press release.

“With the increasing demand for virtualization in enterprise management, the new spec developed through this industry-wide collaboration dove-tails nicely into existing virtualization management standardization activity within the DMTF…
OVF extends the work we have underway to offer IT managers automation of critical, error-prone activities in the deployment of a virtualized infrastructure.”

By collaborating on the development of the OVF specification, the DMTF group aims to make it easier for IT organizations to pre-package and certify software packaged as virtual machine templates for deployment in their virtualized infrastructure and to facilitate the secure distribution of pre-packaged virtual appliances by ISVs and virtual appliance vendors.

Xen 3.3.0 Available For Download

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A recent post on the Xen blog featured a proposed data sheet (PDF) for the (back then upcoming) Xen 3.3 release, which we said was in final testing stage in the beginning of this month. Now Xen 3.3.0 is here and ready for download, as reported by Heise Online.

The new version is also available as part of a package with a 2.6.18 kernel version of Linux as the host system, also known as Domain 0 (Dom0). According to Xen developers, the number of supported guest operating systems has grown and there are improvements in performance, the ACPI power management modes, and security functions such as using PVGrub instead of PYGrub. Xen 3.3.0 also has fewer limitations on moving running virtual machines from one physical system to another. This function, necessary for redundant fail over configurations and practical for server maintenance, has previously only been usable when the processors (and chipsets) running on the physical machines involved supported very similar hardware virtualization functions.

Vizioncore Updates vRanger and vCharter Pro

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Vizioncore has released an upgrade to its backup and restore solution for virtualization environments, vRanger Pro 3.2.4. With vRanger Pro, administrators can schedule regular image-level backups of virtual or physical machines – while the machine is still running.  Images can be stored either locally in the SAN or sent as compressed files over a WAN to remote locations to support disaster recovery strategies. vRanger Pro also enables restore of individual files efficiently with an explorer tree through which users can easily identify and “grab” needed files.

vRanger Pro 3.2.4 is a minor update to the core 3.2 functionality.  There are two key components of this release: VCB Differential Backups and Support for FIPS encryption. Also included in this release are several bug fixes.

In addition, Vizioncore has released a minor dot release to its enterprise-level virtualization monitoring solution, vCharter Pro 3.0.1.  Key improvements include support for external Oracle databases (versions 9i or 10g) and a significant number of bug fixes. The 3.0.1 version of vCharter Pro now also supports installation on the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003.