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InstallFree Secures $8.5 Million in VC Funding

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InstallFree, a provider of Dynamic Desktop Computing, today announced (PDF) it has received $8.5 Million in financing to drive the expansion of its product development and go-to-market teams. This round of financing was led by venture capital firms Ignition Partners and Trilogy Equity Partners. Richard Fade and John Connors of Ignition Partners and Peter van Oppen and Chuck Stonecipher of Trilogy Equity Partners will join InstallFree’s Board of Directors. The round follows a first round of financing of $1.7 Million secured in November 2007.

InstallFree launched its first product in April 2008. The company’s solutions improve IT operational efficiency and increase end-user productivity by eliminating the need to install software applications thus overcoming application conflicts and enabling the delivery of incremental changes on-the-fly and on-demand. All of this occurs without changing the organization’s existing infrastructure. With InstallFree, end-users can access their complete set of personal applications from any computer and work anywhere without limitations, while enjoying local application processing and offline availability—without undermining the IT department’s centralized management capabilities.

Dynamic Desktop Computing is a platform that enables organizations to centrally deploy and manage Windows client applications to end-users in a stateless, flexible and cost-efficient manner across a variety of end-user scenarios such as the office, home or on the road. InstallFree presents an elegant solution, changing application and desktop virtualization from a one-off solution to a standard method of deploying and managing software applications throughout a company’s entire corporate infrastructure.

InstallFree

StackSafe Test Center Gets Another Upgrade, Enhances Support for Virtualized Environments

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StackSafe, a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT operations teams, announced today that StackSafe Test Center, which was launched in the beginning of this year and significantly upgraded 2 months ago, now includes automated import of virtual infrastructure components.

Users can easily import virtualized production environments into Test Center, enabling them to stage both virtualized and physical production environments for testing activities. With this upgrade, Test Center provides testing that covers the gamut of potential scenarios, from physical infrastructure stacks to virtual infrastructure stacks to “hybrid” environments that include both physical and virtual components.

With the uses of virtualization becoming more widespread, the IT Operations industry is beginning to see an increasing use of virtual infrastructure stacks in production. Enhanced support for virtualized infrastructure enables users to more easily import virtual workloads into Test Center, making it possible to test against virtual and physical environments for complete end-to-end infrastructure stack testing. This inclusion, along with the product’s existing support for external infrastructure connectivity, gives Test Center a broad view of the entire IT Operations infrastructure, enabling testing across:

  • Physical machines – Production machines equipped with Windows, Red Hat Linux and CentOS Linux
  • Virtual machines – Test Center currently supports virtual machines on VMware ESX 3.x
  • External infrastructure components – Including large databases, mainframes and other network components that cannot be virtualized into Test Center

Organizations choosing to employ StackSafe Test Center can now ensure that their entire software stack is represented in the testing process, enabling for faster change impact analyses and fewer rolled-back changes.

As part of StackSafe Test Center’s subscription licensing model, the updated release of Test Center is generally available to current Test Center users at no charge.

3Leaf Introduces V-8000 Virtual I/O Server 2.0

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3Leaf Systems today announced the general availability of 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server version 2.0, a key component of 3Leaf Virtual Compute Environment. The new software release delivers disaster recovery, streamlined management, and enhanced availability for large x86 server deployments. The company claims the V-8000 version 2.0 software is the first I/O virtualization solution to run on standard off the shelf commodity x86 servers. 3Leaf’s new Virtual Compute Environment solution will be introduced at the Next Generation Data Center/LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Powered by V-8000 version 2.0, 3Leaf’s Virtual Compute Environment solution delivers the following features and benefits to enterprise data centers and server farms:

  • Greatly simplified management and provisioning of large-scale server deployments, with asset hierarchies and separation between infrastructure architecture and ongoing operations, bringing true relief to IT departments.
  • Disaster recovery solution that automates service recovery of production server farms and sites to a consolidated recovery site.
  • Boosted operational agility with accelerators such as building composite servers from modular building blocks, application level provisioning without server reboot, and easy drag-and-drop operations.
  • Improved availability and resiliency, with a novel multi-pathing approach that eliminates operating system dependent setup and brings cost-effective I/O high-availability to every server farm.
  • Ease of solution deployment and investment protection with proven software running on standard x86 servers. The V-8000 Virtual I/O Server software runs on a commodity platform available from 3Leaf or commercial channels.
  • Now with a backbone I/O fabric of up to 40Gb/s, servers running the new release will have a wider data path for I/O-heavy operations, especially for heavily loaded hypervisor hosts and where VM migration such as VMotion requires an uninterrupted path.

3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server version 2.0 is available now. Customers have the option to order a complete system from 3Leaf including hardware and pre-installed software, or purchase the hardware independently and order the software and any installation and deployment services they need from 3Leaf. Pricing begins at US $2,500 per managed server, excluding the hardware platform price.

3Leaf Systems

Veeam Releases Monitor 3.0 Beta

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After releasing Backup 2.0 last week, Veeam has now announced that Veeam Monitor version 3.0 is now available in beta.  Its new features, detailed below, increase the product’s trend analysis and troubleshooting capabilities – equipping IT admins to proactively manage the performance and availability of their VMware infrastructure.

New features in Veeam Monitor 3.0 include:

  • Enterprise scalability and support for multiple VirtualCenters. Is your environment getting too large to be handled by a single VirtualCenter? Veeam Monitor can help. New performance optimization and a special monitoring mode allow for enterprise scalability and provide the ability to gather monitoring information from large VI deployments with multiple VirtualCenters – all from a single console.
  • Multiple new alarm sources. The following new alarm sources are available in Veeam Monitor version 3.0 for even more comprehensive monitoring and alerting:
  • Alarm modeling. No more being flooded with alerts, and no more waiting for weeks to find out that your alarm settings don’t work as intended. With Veeam Monitor 3.0, you can model and test your alarms instantly. Simply use the new Alarm Modeling feature to test your alarm settings against your event history from VirtualCenter for an immediate evaluation. The new Alarm Modeling feature allows you to easily establish better benchmarks and thresholds. Based on the modeling results, you can fine-tune the alarms in case it appears that you will receive too many false positive alarms, or missing something important.
  • Capacity planning and trend analysis. Veeam Monitor’s new Trend Reporting feature allows you to discover trends and do proactive capacity planning. Project how your virtual environment will grow over time; find out how resource usage is changing for a specified host, resource pool or datacenter; and plan upgrades or migrations based on what you learn.
  • Correlation of VI events and performance data. Ever wondered about an unexpected resource consumption spike? Solve resource usage mysteries with new real-time monitoring graphs displaying known virtual infrastructure events, such as snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, directly on the performance graph.
  • Suppression of unwanted alarms. Tired of being slammed with alarms during backup activities? You can now instruct Veeam Monitor to suppress alerts raised during known VI activities, such as backup or snapshot operations.
  • Drill-down into VM. Want to research possible rogue VM activity? Veeam Monitor 3.0 provides you with the ability to drill down to an individual VM and find out what processes are running there, and how much CPU and memory they are consuming.
  • Connect to a VM directly from Veeam Monitor. Need to troubleshoot a VM that is not behaving as expected according to performance metrics? For your convenience, the Monitor 3.0 user interface features a new “Console” tab, which lets you connect to the VM console right from the Monitor interface.
  • Leverage VC history. No more waiting for monitoring data to be gathered before you can start working on it. When you connect to VirtualCenter for the first time, Veeam Monitor 3.0 fetches all historical performance and event data from it, giving you the ability to browse and analyze historical data immediately.

You can download the Beta of Veeam Monitor 3.0 here.

Veeam

VMLogix Also Sells a Lab Manager, Releases Version 3.6

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VMLogix has released VMLogix LabManager 3.6 – not to be confused with VMware Lab Manager 3.0, released on the same day – carrying support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. VMLogix LabManager is hypervisor agnostic and with the introduction of Hyper-V now supports all standard server virtualization platforms.

VMLogix LabManager enables software companies, SMBs and enterprise IT organizations to leverage virtualization to consolidate and automate lab IT infrastructure in order to deliver and maintain software applications more quickly, cost-effectively and reliably. VMLogix LabManager allows development, test and support teams to build, snapshot, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand across Citrix, Microsoft and VMware virtualization platforms.

VMLogix LabManager 3.6 is available starting today and includes the beta version of support for the Microsoft Hyper-V platform. The product will be generally available in September 2008.

VMLogix

VMware Announces Lab Manager 3

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VMware yesterday announced the general availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, a lab automation solution that provides software development and QA engineers with self-service provisioning of multi-VM environments while giving IT departments increased control over policies. With this new release, VMware Lab Manager now offers support for multiple organizational units, advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure.

VMware Lab Manager 3 supports multiple organizations of lab users with a single installation, whether users are local or distributed globally. IT administrators can set up customized user roles and access rights to dedicated or shared resource pools imported from VMware VirtualCenter to provide users with the highest quality of service. Because VMware Lab Manager also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, both user management and resource administration can be centralized to further simplify lab administration and reduce overall resource consumption.

The tighter integration of VMware Lab Manager 3 with VMware Infrastructure 3 allows lab administrators to take advantage of VMware HA, which provides high availability for VMs, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), which continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among the virtual machines based on pre-defined rules. As a result, system configurations in the lab are more resilient against hardware failures and users are protected from unplanned downtime.

VMware Lab Manager is list priced at $1,295 per processor and is available for purchase through VMware’s global network of distributors, resellers and OEMs starting August 7, 2008. There’s a free download available on the VMware website.

VMware