virtual appliance

Clusterscale Releases ClusterLoad ESX, Virtual Appliance for Traffic Management and Load Balancing

July 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

ClusterScale, provider of load balancing, open source, traffic management and database clustering appliances, today announced (PDF) the launch of its new virtual appliance, ClusterLoad ESX Virtual Appliance.

ClusterLoad ESX VA offers all the functionality of its hardware counterparts, while lowering demands on the data center, with the added environmental benefits that come with this. The virtual appliance manages application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests as it load balances them across the application infrastructure. The product has passed VMware’s VA Certification program. The product has additional management tools to make installation and configuration quick and easy.

ClusterLoad ESX VA allows you to package a fully configured and optimised software stack in a virtual server format that can be quickly deployed on top of VMware ESX. The software is simple to install on Windows, Mac and Linux and does not have any adverse effects on the host operating system, providing greater flexibility and maximum system utilisation by consolidating multiple environments into a single server, workstation, or PC.

With fewer systems required for the same tasks, ClusterLoad ESX VA claims it delivers:

Simplified resource management increasing IT efficiency.
Decreased disaster recovery time.
Greater systems reliability and availability reducing corporate risk and real-time losses from downtime.
Lower hardware acquisition costs with increased utilisation of the machines you already have.

ClusterLoad ESX VA runs on true 64 bit processors with a VT (Virtualisation Technology) extension and is fully optimised for VMware ESX and VMware Server.

Prices for the product start from £3,995 for a single virtual appliance and £5,595 for the pair.

[Source: VMblog]

Clusterscale

LiveTime Software Ships New Service Desk Virtual Appliance for Sun xVM and VMware

July 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

LiveTime Software, a provider of ITIL certified Service Management and Help Desk Software, today released version 2.0 of its integrated virtual appliance consisting of its Java technology based JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) and ITIL Service Management software. The new release features support for both Sun xVM and VMware, and aims to leverage the power of both virtualization architectures at both the desktop and server levels.

The combination of LiveTime’s ITIL based Service Management and Sun xVM gives customers and SaaS providers a way to leverage their existing resources. LiveTime says it has improved the performance of its JeOS by approximately 20% and has decreased the memory overhead to 128Mb, enabling higher concurrency and increasing the number of virtual machines per server. This is particularly important for SaaS providers who deploy separate LiveTime instances per client and for multi-tenant requirements. The appliance also includes support for symmetric multiprocessing for optimal performance across virtualized CPU’s.

LiveTime’s virtual appliance includes built-in debugging, configuration and management utilities. Guided menus provide easy access to networking, upgrades and general system utilities. The LiveTime Virtual appliance currently supports all Sun xVM and VMware virtualization platforms, including Sun xVM VirtualBox, VMware Player, Workstation, Fusion, Server and ESX Server.

The LiveTime Virtual appliance supports Sun xVM VirtualBox, enabling developers to easily build, test and run cross-platform, multi-tier applications on a single laptop or desktop computer.

Organizations can now leverage LiveTime’s ITIL Service Management software with the ease of installation of traditional software. The virtual appliance should provide the necessary scalability and security that is difficult to achieve when deployed on existing hardware and operating systems. Since the system has been hardened at the operating system layer, LiveTime provides Just Enough Operating System for its needs. This makes the system easy to update and maintain and provides a very small footprint and a 160MB download.

VKernel Announces Availability For ESX Virtualization Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer

April 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VKernel Corporation, a provider of virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments, today announced general availability of its Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance. Other than being a mouthful, the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer immediately identifies current and future capacity bottleneck issues in VMware ESX environments, which can lower the cost of each virtual machine while ensuring
higher performance.

From the press release (PDF):

“VKernel’s patent-pending technology continuously monitors CPU, memory, and storage utilization trends in VMware ESX environments across hosts, clusters, and resource pools. VKernel’s quick-to-install virtual appliance model gives users a simple, single-screen management dashboard that displays detailed capacity information to effectively plan for the addition of new hosts, clusters, and resource pools. By customizing capacity thresholds, users can receive alerts via email and SNMP.”

“When properly detecting capacity bottlenecks, organizations can increase performance and reduce downtime problems that lead to escalating business and IT costs and negative perceptions of virtualization within business units,” said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel. “The real challenge for IT staffs is finding a solution that helps them identify capacity bottlenecks without wasting countless man-hours sifting through hundreds of management reports. Within minutes, our Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer can show exactly where capacity bottlenecks are today and where problems are likely to occur to maximize virtual machine utilization.”

The VKernel Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer Virtual Appliance is currently available with pricing starting at $199 per CPU socket. You can download a full production 14-day trial version of the VKernel virtual appliance here.

[Source: Server Virtualization Blog]