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PHD Technologes “Acq-hires” Xtravirt Co-founder Alex Mittell

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PHD Technologies (previous coverage), provider of the esXPRESS data protection solution for virtualized infrastructures, today announced the acquisition of UK-based Xtravirt’s suite of virtualization products. As part of the transaction, Xtravirt co-founder, Alex Mittell, will join PHD Technologies as Director of Research & Development. Xtravirt will continue to partner with PHD Technologies as a distributor of esXPRESS to existing and new Xtravirt customers in the UK.

The virtualization tools acquired by PHD Technologies’ will benefit managers of virtualization infrastructures. These include VI3 SnapHunter, a virtual machine snapshot reporter; VI3 PatchDownloader, an automated downloader of VMware ESX patches; VISBU, an infrastructure backup utility and KS Quick Config, a tool to speed up the deployment and configuration of VMware ESX 3 servers.

Alex Mittell is widely known as a technical expert and thought leader in the virtualization community. Prior to co-founding Xtravirt, he worked at Oxford University in the UK as a virtual architect, setting up the university’s virtual infrastructure. Mittell will continue to be based in London.

The Virtual Infrastructure Evolves Into The Virtual Datacenter OS

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More and more details on what VMware calls the “Virtual Datacenter OS” are starting to come out of VMworld. The new CEO, Paul Maritz, is expected to elaborate on this new strategy in today’s keynote. (update: check our live blog coverage)

(Update 2: also check the coverage on Between The Lines and Virtually Speaking, both ZDNet blogs)

The VDC-OS is not a new product per se, but an umbrella name for a set of products and features, much like VMware Virtual Infrastructure is composed of ESX server, VirtualCenter and features like DRS, HA and VMotion.

VDC-OS is a natural evolution from the “virtual infrastructure” approach, which no longer only includes the virtualization servers and their shared storage and networking, but also the “next layer” in the virtualization stack, both upwards and downwards: VDC-OS no longer stops at the guest OS level, but provides application services as well, and in the other direction goes beyond the local network and is aware of the bigger picture.

The building blocks that make up VDC-OS will sound very familiar to beta testers of ESX 4.0 and technology partners. They include some new features, recent acquisitions and better integrated versions of the current product line-up, as well as third-party add-ons bearing the VMware Ready logo. All of these are called “vServices”.

The three big areas of vServices VMware identifies are:

  • Application vServices – Availability, Security, Scalability
  • Infrastructure vServices – vCompute, vStorage, vNetwork and vCloud
  • Management vServices – vCenter (the new name for VirtualCenter)

The new and current features in depth:

Application Services
Availability:

  • HA, VMotion, Storage VMotion, NIC/HBA teaming
  • VMware Fault tolerance, formerly known as “Continuous availability” – which allows a VM to run on two hosts simultaneously, using lock-stepping of CPU instructions. (new)
  • vCenter Data Recovery – built-in disk-based backup and recovery of VMs and the files within them, including data deduplication. (new)

Security

  • ESXi, a stripped-down hypervisor in only 32 MB of code, to reduce the attack surface
  • VMware vSafe (first announced at VMworld Europe), with third party support add-ons from IBM, Checkpoint, Radware and McAfee, who will announce their first products today (new)

Scalability

  • DRS
  • Hot add of virtual CPU, memory and PCIe devices like network adapters (new)
  • Very large VMs with 8 virtual CPUs and 256 GB of RAM (new)

Infrastructure Services

vCompute

  • CPU/Memory optimization with hardware assists, page sharing and memory ballooning
  • DRS
  • VMDirectPath – enabling wirespeed network access to VMs (new)
  • Paravirtualized SCSI – providing more iops per second at lower latency (new)

vStorage

  • VMFS
  • Linked clones (first demonstrated at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco) – allows multiple VMs to run from the same base disk (new)
  • Storage VMotion
  • Thin Provisioning (new)
  • APIs to closer work together with storage arrays (new)

vNetwork

  • more offload technologies to reduce virtualization overhead
  • Distributed vNetwork virtual switches (new)
  • Third-party virtual switches – the first one to be announced today by Cisco (new)

Cloud Services (vCloud)

  • VMotion and Storage VMotion (within the “internal cloud”)
  • VMware vCloud (new)
  • Network vMotion – preserving network and security policies when a virtual machine is being migrated (new)
  • vApp – an encapsulation of a VM and its policies and service levels, based on OVF (new)

Management

vCenter replaces VirtualCenter, and integrates the add-on products today known as Stage Manger, Lab Manager and the likes. It integrates withing other management frameworks from the likes of IBM and CA.

  • vCenter AppSpeed – performance monitoring and remediation to guarantee service levels. (new)
  • vCenter Orchestrator – to automate repetitive workflows
  • vCenter CapacityIQ – proactive capacity planning for entire VI environments
  • vCenter Chargeback – to allow IT departments or cloud service providers to charge based on VM usage
  • vCenter ConfigControl – called “update manager on steroids” by VMware, a central way to configure and update the virtual data center
  • Host Profiles – to standardize the setup of ESX hosts using templates

Watch out for more announcements by VMware and its partners in the coming hours and days.

vMAN Over At DMTF Is Immune To Kryptonite And Now Powered by OVF Version 1.0

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Like superheroes with a weak spot (remember Superman and green Kryptonite), large providers of green data center technologies and virtualization software had an Achilles’ heel with their vendor lock-in, which scared away quite a few prospects. Today the major players have all agreed to drop their distinct proprietary formats and aim to adopt the Open Virtualization Format 1.0 as soon as possible (most are already compliant upon release). We first learned about OVF during our interview with Ian Pratt and the release of this open standard is a great step forward. The short lead time of ‘only’ one year proves the industry has understood that open standards are the way to go.

Above is our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld in Las Vegas, where DMTF president Winston Bumpus revealed the release of OVF 1.0 and their larger Virtualization Management Initiative (vMAN). vMAN provides IT managers the freedom to deploy pre-installed, pre-configured solutions across heterogeneous computing networks and to manage those applications through their entire lifecycle. This Initiative delivers much-needed open industry standards to the management of virtualized environments. Ultimately, the group’s goal is to eliminate the need for IT managers to separately install, configure and manage interdependencies between virtualized operating systems and applications, by enabling automated management of the virtual machine lifecycle.

This new specification created by Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource is about to become an industry standard and aspires to help ensure portability, integrity and automated installation/configuration of virtual machines. We did not have the time to transcribe the interview yet, but already took a few of Winston Bumpus’ quotes from the DMTF press release.

“With the increasing demand for virtualization in enterprise management, the new spec developed through this industry-wide collaboration dove-tails nicely into existing virtualization management standardization activity within the DMTF…
OVF extends the work we have underway to offer IT managers automation of critical, error-prone activities in the deployment of a virtualized infrastructure.”

By collaborating on the development of the OVF specification, the DMTF group aims to make it easier for IT organizations to pre-package and certify software packaged as virtual machine templates for deployment in their virtualized infrastructure and to facilitate the secure distribution of pre-packaged virtual appliances by ISVs and virtual appliance vendors.

INSYSTEK Unveils Cross-Hypervisor Management Solution TotalView

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INSYSTEK is announcing it will demonstrate TotalView, its cross-hypervisor virtualization management solution at VMworld. TotalView delivers centralized cross-hypervisor virtual and physical management, automation, optimization to IT environments. Our integrated guest management is designed to be a seamless feature set, not just an add-on. With its agentless architecture, TotalView is a secure and scalable solution, making management simpler, enabling the use of embedded hypervisors and requirements of corporate security effectively, and not complicating it with agent sprawl.

TotalView allows administrators to easily create, deploy and manage their virtual and physical infrastructures. It is a powerful management framework to consolidate the many administrative functions required for virtual infrastructure management. The TotalView solution simplifies virtualization deployments, enabling IT organizations to manage and control enterprise business continuity while reducing cost. TotalView is the single management console that brings together VM management, inventory, performance, alerting, reporting, guest management, remote control, software distribution and much more.

TotalView VM management provides hypervisor agnostic support for all major hypervisor technologies, including Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware ESX, ESXi and Server as well as Citrix Xen Server. TotalView integrates with hypervisor management APIs to deliver power management, inventory, rapid provisioning with deployment wizard and virtual machine templates reducing the time and effort for creating and deploying Virtual machines regardless of which hypervisors you choose.

TotalView is the agentless inventory, software distribution and performance monitoring solution for the corporate Windows environment, delivering extensive data on all installed hardware and software components on the remote system. Deploy full applications, security updates and more. Determine license compliance status, software usage, software tracking. Monitor servers and desktops for real-time performance and availability data.

TotalView provides real time performance and availability monitoring for servers, desktops, hosts and guests. Real time monitoring data is retrieved, processed, and stored in a central data repository for historical reporting and analysis. Assets can be monitored individually or grouped, utilizing user-defined collections. Capabilities including utilization graphs of CPU and memory provide performance data of physical servers, and the virtual machines they are running. Customize alerts that trigger notifications via email, or messages.

Optimize Your Virtual Data Center: Radware Announces VirtualDirector

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Radware, provider of integrated application delivery solutions for networking, today announced its new optimization solution for the virtualized environment, VirtualDirector, as part of a larger initiative – Radware’s Business-Smart Data Center strategy – designed to ensure the alignment of key business drivers for the next generation data center.

The core of Radware’s Business-Smart Data Center strategy is providing its customers with tailor-made application infrastructure solutions for next generation data centers to help them overcome IT complexities and ensure cost effective procurement and full investment protection.

The launch of VirtualDirector is the first in a series of announcements that will be made over the next 18 months. VirtualDirector is an optimization solution for the virtualized data center – providing adaptive and dynamic allocation of resources based on business events, to guarantee SLAs and improving response time of applications. VirtualDirector aligns data center operations with business policies by dynamically allocating resources on demand to automatically serve customer’s best needs for SLAs in a virtualized
environment, a key area of investment for companies today. In addition, to save costs, VirtualDirector optimizes the use of data center resources to further generate energy and cooling savings.

Moving forward and with the arrival of more cloud-based services, VirtualDirector’s tight integration with Radware`s ADC solution provides a comprehensive set of features that enable companies to optimize all of their virtualized datacenters, globally. In cases where the local resources cannot provide the desired QoE for specific applications, the solution redirects the traffic of the specific applications to a cloud based service provider or to a secondary data center. By redirecting traffic to a remote location, local resources are freed to serve the rest of the applications while remote resources are utilized, as needed, to add capacity and support the desired QoE.

VirtualDirector, integrated with VMware VirtualCenter, is available now for ordering. Pricing is available upon request.

SteelEye Brings Disaster Recovery Solution to Hyper-V

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SteelEye Technology (previous coverage), a provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for multi-vendor IT infrastructures, recently announced SteelEye DataKeeper support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

DataKeeper is a highly optimized data replication solution for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The product is sold in two versions: DataKeeper delivers data replication services as an extension to Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 while DataKeeper Cluster Edition further extends the capabilities of Windows Server Failover Clustering. Both editions support real-time replication of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines between physical servers across either LAN or WAN connections.

By keeping a running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machine in sync with a standby VM in an alternate location, DataKeeper enables disaster recovery without the data loss typically associated with traditional backup and restore technology. Real-time continuous replication of active Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V VMs helps ensure that in the event of a disaster, the standby server can be activated with minimal to no data loss.

DataKeeper Cluster Edition allows administrators to build “shared-nothing” and geographically dispersed Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters. By eliminating the requirement for shared storage, the administrator can protect against both planned and unplanned downtime of servers and storage. The use of DataKeeper in tandem with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V VMs allows for non-disruptive disaster recovery testing. By simply accessing the replicated VMs in the disaster recovery site, the administrator can segment a virtual network separate from the production network and start the replicated VMs for disaster recovery testing. Complete disaster recovery testing can be performed without impacting the production site at all.