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Virtual Iron Releases Version 4.4, Introduces LivePower For Power Management

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Virtual Iron Software today announced new power management capabilities in the latest version of its software, Virtual Iron Version 4.4. This release extends Virtual Iron’s virtual infrastructure management capabilities with the addition of LivePower, a new experimental feature that optimizes power usage to deliver significant cost-savings and environmental benefits across the data center.

LivePower, available with Virtual Iron Version 4.4, optimizes data center power consumption by monitoring resource utilization in the virtual data center. When there is excess CPU capacity, LivePower consolidates virtual machines onto fewer physical servers and shuts down the remaining devices based on pre-defined policies. When the virtual machine load increases beyond pre-defined thresholds, LivePower turns physical servers back on and live migrates virtual machines to rebalance the virtual data center and ensure that resource requirements and service levels are met.
Virtual Iron also became the first server virtualization software provider to announce support for Intel Dynamic Power Node Manager, which will be available with Intel Next Generation Platform (Nehalem-EP). Node Manager utilizes processor and platform level instrumentation, controls, and OS features to monitor, report, and control system power. Node Manager, in combination with Virtual Iron’s LivePower, enables users to automatically maintain power budgets, turn servers off and on, and optimize power consumption.

Virtual Iron Version 4.4 will be generally available later this month with LivePower.

Virtual Iron

Virtual Bridges Upgrades Win4VDI Product Family

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Virtual Bridges announced today the release of a major upgrade to its Win4VDI family of products.  The company says the Version 5 release brings Win4VDI on par with the company’s standalone Desktop offerings.

Win4VDI, Virtual Bridges’ Educational/SMB and enterprise product, allows an organization to easily and cost-effectively deliver multiple Windows desktop sessions to PCs, Workstations and thin clients from a non-Windows server such as Linux and Solaris OS.

With this release Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server and Win4Solaris Virtual Desktop Server have been renamed to Win4VDI for consistency with the growing Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) market space that Virtual Bridges founded with their Win4Lin Terminal Server (WTS) products.

Features of Win4VDI Products include:

  • Dynamic Renewable Desktops for instant deployment and centralized software updates and patches
  • Easy to use and install thanks to powerful management console and comprehensive documentation
  • Seamless remote printing over LAN, WAN, or Internet
  • Highly scalable infrastructure, supporting high server density
  • Powerful new architecture improves performance, scalability, security, and reliability
  • Win4DI for Linux: Works on any 32-bit or 64-bit x86 Linux platform running a 2.6.x kernel
  • Supports connectivity from almost any type of client (PC, thin client, workstation)
  • Centralized management and provisioning of users
  • Consistent user access to personal desktop environment from home, office and other network connected locations.
  • Support for multiple remote display choices – Win4Lin client, NoMachine, LTSP, VNC, and X, for example
  • Increased security and reliability by running on Linux and Solaris servers
  • Lock down Windows read, write and other operations with Linux and Solaris permissions – an administrator’s dream!
  • Provide standard application environments to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system – Windows, UNIX, or Linux on the client, but standard application profile served from Win4VDI servers.

Win4VDI allows organizations to standardize the application environment to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system – Windows, UNIX, Linux or Mac can be used on the client, but a common application profile can be created and served from Win4VDI server configurations such as blade servers, rack arrays or large multi-way machines.

Win4VDI for Linux and Win4VDI for Solaris are available immediately. Win4VDI is priced at $125 per user with a minimum configuration of 10 seats. Win4VDI for Workgoups, a 10-seat configuration is being offered at a special price of $699 until September 15, 2008.

Virtual Bridges

LeftHand Networks Reports Impressive Numbers

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LeftHand Networks today announced it has achieved 110 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. LeftHand Networks attributes its notable growth to strong customer demand for iSCSI SANs, larger SAN deployments and significant repeat business from existing customers, as well as its VMware go-to-market partnership and substantial channel expansion.

“Achieving triple digit revenue growth and surpassing key milestones of 3,000 customers and 11,000 systems sold is gratifying and reflects the significant advantages that LeftHand Networks’ SANs deliver to the market,” said Bill Chambers, founder and CEO, LeftHand Networks. “With an annual sales growth rate of 110 percent this year, compared with IDC’s market projection of 50 percent growth for the IP SAN market, LeftHand Networks continues to gain share and drive innovative product advancements.”

The company also claims demand has grown for LeftHand Networks’ Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) for VMware ESX Server, a VMware certified solution that provides highly available applications and storage without requiring an external SAN. The VSA is available for purchase as a standalone solution or as part of Virtualization Solution Kits consisting of LeftHand Networks’ VSA software combined with VMware virtualization software.

LeftHand Networks

Major Bug Kills VMware Powered Virtual Servers

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Today’s a black day for VMware, and also (and maybe especially) VMware customers who upgraded their virtual servers with the new Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2. As of this morning, many could not power on VMotion or any of their Virtual Machines. The VI Client threw the error “A general system error occurred: Internal Error”.

This was first reported by a customer in a thread on VMware Communities. You can find the Knowledge Base article on this problem here.

The problem apparently exists within the software licensing code, rather than the functional part of ESX software.The license code falsely identifies many implementations as being out of license, prevents new virtual machines from launching, or existing VMs from migrating to new hosts.

Big oops indeed.

“An issue has been uncovered with ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi 3.5 that causes the product license to expire on August 12,” says a statement from VMware’s public relations company in response to press inquiries. “VMware is alerting customers and partners of this issue. Updated product bits with correct licensing will be made available for download as soon as possible. VMware regrets any inconvenience to customers. VMware is working on an immediate patch for customers in production. VMware expects to fix the issue in code in the next 36 hours once QA testing has been completed,” the statement concludes.

A work-around has been offered whereby customers should manually set the date of all ESX 3.5u2 hosts back to 10 August as a temporary fix. Brian Madden has more on the actual glitch and the workaround, as does Matthew Marlowe.

It looks like ESXi 3.5 and even some versions of Infrastructure 3.5 Update 1 with some patches have been affected. New downloads of all affected products has been disabled, and according to VMware patched products will be made available starting tomorrow.

This will hurt VMware in any event, even if we don’t really know how many customers have already downloaded Update 2, and how many of those were using it in a live environment.

VMware

Statelesx Looking For A Home

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If you’ve been following the Vinternals blog too, this will be no news to you, but the guys behind it have been busy building a virtual appliance, and they are now releasing version 1.0.0 of the app called Statelesx (placeholder page for now).

From the blog post:

“The architecture of the app is something like this:

1) A python script on your fat ESX boxes that runs on startup
2) A Java app that listens for requests and acts via the VirtualCenter SDK
3) A minimal web interface for managing XML cluster configuration files

In a nutshell, you create a cluster configuration file that contains cluster options (DRS,DPM,HA) and network info (vSwitches, portgroups, vmkernel interfaces) and then associate hosts to the cluster config file by their FQDN and UUID. The python script on the ESX host sends the UUID to the statelesx listener, which searches the cluster config files for a match on the UUID. If it finds one, it goes to work. If it doesn’t, nothing happens.”

It runs on Ubuntu 8.04 JeOS with the Sun Java 6 package and Tomcat 6. VI 3.5 is required, although if they get enough requests they may also backport to VI 3.0.

The team has created a couple of demo videos to show off the app: the first one giving an overview and basic configuration demo, and the second one going into much more detail around the XML config files and demoing an advanced configuration being applied to some hosts.

Unfortunately, the app isn’t available for download yet, as they haven’t yet found a hosting provider who can host the 200 MB zip file for free as well provide the necessary bandwidth. If you can help them out, get in touch! (vinternals at gmail dot com)

Xenocode Releases Postbuild 2008 for .NET

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Xenocode (previous coverage) today announced the availability of Postbuild 2008 for .NET, a major update to its code obfuscation and deployment solution for Windows developers. Xenocode Postbuild allows software developers to deploy .NET applications in a single, secure executable that runs anywhere, with or without the .NET Framework.

Postbuild uses a range of powerful obfuscation techniques to protect intellectual property against decompilation and integrates directly with the advanced Xenocode application virtualization engine. The 2008 edition of Postbuild includes support for the latest .NET platforms and technologies, including Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.0/3.5, WPF, and LINQ.

Postbuild 2008 for .NET incorporates the latest Xenocode application virtualization technology, allowing developers and ISVs to deploy applications in pre-configured virtual executables that run instantly on any Windows desktop via intranets, the Internet, USB keys, or existing desktop management infrastructure.

Postbuild’s integrated code optimization capabilities – including metadata reduction, transparent compression, dead code pruning, and dead and duplicate literal elimination – maximize application performance and minimize disk footprint.

Deploying applications processed by Postbuild does not require any per-end-user licensing fees or royalties. For more information on Postbuild, or to download a free evaluation copy, click here.

Xenocode