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IBM Adds More Virtualization Capabilities to Power Systems, Eyeing Sun and HP

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IBM, which combined its System i and System p server product lines earlier this year, is revamping its Power Systems to offer more systems for enterprise and midmarket customers. The enhancements include additional processors based on the IBM Power Architecture as well as more virtualization capabilities. These IBM Power Systems compete against both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems in the Unix market.

IBM is looking to widen its offering for the Unix market with new Power Systems that support more processing cores based on IBM’s Power Architecture as well as new management and virtualization features.

IBM Power Systems were introduced in April as a new set of offerings that combined the older IBM Systems i and System p under one product portfolio. The combination of these two systems gave IBM a set of offerings for enterprises and midmarket companies that not only can run AIX—IBM’s version of Unix—but also Linux and the i OS—the renamed version of the i5/OS operating system.

While the overall Unix market pales in comparison to servers based on x86 processors, this market remains important for three major OEMs: IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. According to Gartner, while shipments of Unix-based servers fell in the second quarter of 2008, worldwide revenue increased nearly 10 percent year over year to about $4.2 billion for the quarter. Not surprisingly, IBM, which has been pushing its Unix platforms beyond the enterprise into the midmarket and even the small and midsize business, saw its revenue increase 29 percent in the second quarter for a total of $1.5 billion.

By combining the two systems into one product portfolio, IBM is looking to further strengthen its position in the Unix market. It was also a way to absorb some losses for IBM, which had seen its System i revenue slip in 2007, while System p continued to grow.

HP has its Integrity Systems that use Intel’s Itanium processors, while Sun, which has been struggling selling its high-end servers, offers its SPARC-based products and Solaris operating system.

IBM listed the starting price of the Power 560 Express with the AIX operating system at $47,216. There was no pricing information for the updated version of the Power 570.

In addition to the new hardware, IBM also rolled out several management and virtualization features of its Power Systems. These include an update for IBM’s PowerVM—the company’s virtualization software for Power Systems—called Active Memory Sharing. While only in beta now, Active Memory Sharing allows the system to access more memory in virtual environments by pooling compute resources between the partitions.

IBM is also offering a new management console called Systems Directory. This management tool works across all three operating systems—Linux, i, and AIX—and allows IT managers to control and check the resources both in the physical hardware and within virtual environments.

Finally, IBM is rolling out an Enterprise version of the AIX operating system, which includes the OS itself plus Tivoli and PowerVM software.

Sun Announces xVM Server, xVM Ops Center 2.0 — Public Release Coming Soon

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Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of Sun xVM Server software and Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0, key components in its strategy. Sun also announced the addition of comprehensive services and support for Sun xVM Server software and xVM Ops Center 2.0 to its virtualization suite of services . Additionally, Sun launched xVMserver.org, a new open source community, where developers can download the first source code bundle for Sun xVM Server software and contribute to the direction and development of the product.

Sun xVM Server software and xVM Ops Center 2.0 join Sun’s xVM product portfolio, which includes Sun xVM VirtualBox software for desktop virtualization and Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) software for virtual desktop consolidation and management.

Sun offers standalone subscriptions for Sun xVM Server software and Sun xVM Ops Center, as well as additional options that offer the combined benefits of the two products. Commercial subscriptions are priced annually in four-socket increments and provide premium 24X7 support, access to the latest, up-to-the-minute patches and updates, as well as installation and training.

Available pricing options include:

  • Sun xVM Server software: Priced at $500/year per physical server.
  • Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription: Priced at $2000 per physical server per year, the enterprise subscription is designed to simplify the management of large scale virtualized environments and includes advanced features, such as management of live migration and of multiple network storage libraries.
  • Sun xVM Infrastructure Datacenter Subscription: Priced at $3000 per server per year, this option includes all the features in the Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription in addition to physical server monitoring, management and advanced software lifecycle management capabilities.
  • Sun xVM Ops Center: Available from $100 per managed server up to $350 a year, depending on customer selected features, along with a required $10,000 Satellite Server annual subscription for Sun xVM Ops Center.

Good news also for licensing, straight from ‘Virtual’ Steve Wilson’s blog:

“xVM Server is comprised of several open source components, and some have different source licenses, but the bulk of the code specific to xVM Server (including the all-new management UI) is being distributed through xvmserver.org under GPL v3.”

As for actual public availability:

Sun started early access testing with a limited number of customers last month. The company will now be increasing the number in the EA program and selected several additional customers already from those who have registered.  For those who’ve registered for the early access, more details on the program will be informed shortly.  Sun is aiming for a generally available binary EA release from xvmserver.org in about 30 days and a release candidate within 60 days.

Sun Microsystems

VirtualBox 2.0 Hits The Wire

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Sun just announced the availability of Sun xVM Virtual Box 2.0.

The biggest change in xVM VirtualBox 2.0 is the new support for 64-bit versions of operating systems like Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in addition to all other major host operating systems. VirtualBox also offers a new user interface for the Mac platform, improved networking for the Mac OS X and Solaris OS, as well as improved performance, especially on AMD chips.

Customers who purchase an enterprise subscription will also receive a Right-to-Use License, allowing them to deploy the xVM VirtualBox platform using their own software deployment tools.

The following major new features were added:

* 64 bits guest support (64 bits host only)
* New native Leopard user interface on Mac OS X hosts
* The GUI was converted from Qt3 to Qt4 with many visual improvements
* New-version notifier
* Guest property information interface
* Host Interface Networking on Mac OS X hosts
* New Host Interface Networking on Solaris hosts
* Support for Nested Paging on modern AMD CPUs (major performance gain)
* Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)
* Added SATA asynchronous IO (NCQ: Native Command Queuing) when accessing raw disks/partitions (major performance gain)
* Clipboard integration for OS/2 Guests
* Created separate SDK component featuring a new Python programming interface on Linux and Solaris hosts
* Support for VHD disk images

BMC Software Launches Virtualization Management Solutions In Partnership with Microsoft, Sun and VMware

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BMC Software today announced nine new, integrated solutions specifically designed to help customers eliminate the rising risk and operational expenses associated with inadequate management of virtualized IT environments.

The new solutions are grounded in a BMC-invented, highly automated set of Closed-Loop Change and Configuration Management (CLCCM) process workflows that reduce the latency, cost and risk associated with change management by as much as 75 percent.

BMC virtualization management solutions give customers a holistic, unified approach to IT planning, control, automation and management for today’s virtualized, multi-vendor IT environments.
BMC has extended its Service Assurance and Service Automation portfolios — key components of its leading Business Service Management (BSM) platform — to deliver virtualization-specific capabilities. The nine new offerings have been optimized to support goals for performance, compliance and enterprise visibility by addressing some of the most pressing challenges created by virtualization.
All of these new offerings are architected to support both virtual and physical infrastructures, further reducing cost and complexity by allowing IT operations organizations to use a single set of management solutions across their entire IT infrastructure.
As part of this new virtualization management offering, BMC has completed full solution integration with long-time partners Microsoft, Sun and VMware.

Sun Microsystems Nearly Doubles Sun Ray Shipments

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Sun Microsystems today announced the company nearly doubled shipments of its Sun Ray thin clients during the fourth quarter of Sun’s 2008 fiscal year, compared to the third quarter of its 2008 fiscal year.

Sun claims that the Sun Ray unit shipments are growing faster than the thin client industry at large, underscoring the increased appeal thin client and desktop virtualization solutions are experiencing among businesses and organizations. Contributing to this growth is strong market demand for Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 2.0, which now ships on approximately 25% of Sun Ray units since being introduced in March 2008, in addition to enabling customers to display Solaris, Windows or Linux desktops on the same device.

Sun Ray virtual display clients, Sun Ray Sofware and Sun VDI Software 2.0 are key components of Sun’s broad desktop virtualization offering, which are a set of core desktop technologies and solutions within Sun’s xVM virtualization portfolio.

Sun offers a complete desktop-to-datacenter virtualization product portfolio and comprehensive set of virtualization service offerings to help customers deploy new services faster, maximize the utilization of system resources, and more easily monitor and manage virtualized environments. Sun’s virtualization products help to provide unified software management tools and virtualization capabilities across operating systems, servers, storage, desktops and processors.

Sun Microsystems

VMware, Cisco Join Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program

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Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, which was first announced in November 2007, and launched last June with the patricipation of Citrix, Sun, Novell and Virtual Iron, signed up two notable new members.

Cisco has announced its membership and is already included on the SVVP website, and VMware signed up pretty late so they’re not on there yet (but Chris Wolf had already confirmed the news). Microsoft and VMware had been working diligently for several months on the completion of their support agreement and VMware’s inclusion in the SVVP, and this will evidently drive virtualization adoption even further the coming months and years.

The costs associated with joining the program include membership in TSAnet at Mission Critical level, so that the vendor and Microsoft can share support information, incremental costs, if any, to perform the validation tests, and a nominal expense (currently $250) to qualify each ‘configuration’ that is submitted for validation.

Microsoft