virtualisation

VirtualLogix Now Supports Windows Vista

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VirtualLogix yesterday announced support for Microsoft Windows Vista to operate side-by-side with real-time operating systems (RTOS) for performance critical systems.

“VirtualLogix VLX now offers support of Windows Vista, offering high-performance, simple designs and an immediate return on investment to a wide set of real-time systems, in applications such as automotive, industrial and medical equipment,” said Peter Richards, CEO, VirtualLogix. “Key customers have asked that we provide Vista on our VLX roadmap and we have delivered. This enables VLX to support a wider spectrum of systems using Microsoft’s operating systems as a core solution component.”

Windows Vista is now supported on Intel processors for VLX Embedded and VLX for Network Infrastructure —all of which maintain the time-sensitive control and signal processing functions that communications devices demand.

CohesiveFT And FlexiScale Partner Up For On-demand Cloud Computing

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

CohesiveFT, providers of the Elastic Server Platform, an on-demand service for dynamic assembly and deployment of virtual machines, and FlexiScale, a provider of on-demand Cloud computing, today announced a technology partnership to enable deployment of CohesiveFT’s Elastic Servers to FlexiScale’s Cloud.

The integration of technologies from CohesiveFT and FlexiScale aim to enable true on-demand application stack assembly and deployment on a pay-as-you-go Cloud. This partnership will also allow ISVs, application developers and QA teams to dramatically increase their productivity throughout the development lifecycle. These teams will not be dependent on resource constrained operations departments to provision development and testing environments and will be able to change their application stack definitions with the click of a mouse.

Initially, Elastic Server-branded virtual machines will be available from FlexiScale’s Control Panel as templates built in a Xen virtual format for deployment into Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS) in FlexiScale’s Cloud. The Elastic Server templates will feature application stacks as prebuilt virtual machine images of popular components . Users will have access to these custom images on demand, eliminating the typical administrative overhead of assembling virtual machine images “by hand”.

FlexiScale’s and CohesiveFT’s collaboration intends to enable full dynamic connectivity between the Elastic Server platform and FlexiScale’s Cloud in the near future.

Release: VMware Workstation 6.5 Beta 2

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMWare has released Beta 2 of Workstation 6.5, expected to be released during Q3 2008.

Here are the highlights of the new release:

Virtual Machine streaming – download VM’s from a web server and power it on before it’s even finished downloading
Installer for Linux
Record/Replay Debugging functionality (proclaimed b VMWare as “experimental”; be a bit skeptical at this stage)
Unity enhancements
Clipboard enhancements
Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) improvements
enhancements to “vmrun”
more features

Read the release notes here, enroll for the beta here.

[Source: VMHero]

Xcedex Agrees To Resell VKernel Suite of Virtual Appliances

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VKernel today announced a partnership with Xcedex, a North American VMware premier partner. Under the agreement, Xcedex becomes a VKernel Gold Partner that will resell VKernel’s Suite of Virtual Appliances for analyzing and monitoring capacity, implementing chargeback, and gaining cost visibility in VMware ESX environments to its growing customer base.

The VKernel Virtual Appliance Suite for Systems Management is a set of “plug-and-play” virtual appliances designed to quickly address real world systems management challenges as organizations migrate to VMware virtual environments.

Xcedex’ X-Factor solution set enables its customers to quickly and cost-effectively take virtualization from concept to production. Based on IT lifecycle principles, X-Factor has been custom developed to accelerate virtualization deployments for Xcedex’ client and ensure the projects are successful. X-Factor consists of four phases (prove, plan, build, and maintain) that include custom services and vendor products.

“We have strategically aligned ourselves with industry innovators specializing in virtual infrastructure solutions. Working very closely with their sales and technical teams, we bring complete, robust solutions to our clients,” said Steve Audette, director of professional services at Xcedex. “VKernel’s products fit perfectly into our X-Factor solution set and enable our customers to experience the benefits of virtualization throughout the deployment lifecycle.”

[Source: Trading Markets]

Hitachi Moves Forward With Virtage Embedded Virtualization

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Hitachi yesterday announced that it would add Intel’s 9100 series Itanium chips to its high-end BladeSymphony 1000 systems, as well as its lower-end BladeSymphony 320 servers. Additionally, Hitachi will begin offering the latest dual-core Intel Xeon 5200 series processors along with Intel’s quad-core Xeon 5400 chips with both sets of BladeSymphony systems.

Hitachi is looking to leverage its legacy mainframe technology, especially virtualization, to offer an alternative in a crowded field that is full of systems aimed at data center consolidation projects.

What Hitachi is offering is called Virtage, an embedded hardware virtualization technology that provides an abstraction layer that decouples the physical system from the operating system to provide utilization and additional flexibility. Since the virtualization is built into the hardware itself, it is more reliable and secure than virtualization based on a hypervisor, according to Hitachi.

Hitachi doesn’t have a lot of market share though. In the latest survey by IDC (confirmed by Gartner as well), HP was first in overall server revenue with more than $3.7 billion in global sales, and the company also controlled 46.9 percent of the worldwide $1.2 billion blade market during the first quarter of 2008.

Meanwhile, Hitachi did not finish in either the top five in the United States or in the worldwide market, where HP, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens all dominate.

[Source: eWeek]

VMware Eyes Chinese Market, Signs OEM Agreement With Inspur

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware and Inspur today announced an OEM agreement to further accelerate the adoption of VMware virtualization in China. Starting today, Inspur is selling, distributing and fully supporting VMware’s datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure, on Inspur server systems.

The two companies will collaborate on market development, product sales, professional training and customer acquisition as well as technical services.

“China’s rapid economic growth and increased focus on conserving energy have spurred the need for customers to adopt the best solutions for meeting business demands while enabling a green datacenter,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “VMware virtualization addresses this need with solutions that not only consolidate servers, but also jump ahead to the next stages of virtualization: aggregating IT resources in virtualized pools and automating the management of these resources. VMware virtualization combined with Inspur’s expertise in local customer requirements offers a way to quickly cut operating and capital costs by as much as half, deliver applications faster and more reliably in virtual machines, improve information security, and run a more flexible and eco-friendly IT environment.”

Customers can now purchase Inspur servers bundled with VMware Infrastructure 3, provided with full support from Inspur.

[Source: Welt Online]