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Cloud.com, a new Open Source Cloud management platform..

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With a domain like Cloud.com you are doomed to deliver something Virtualization related,

And today that plan became visible for the rest of the world, the company formerly known as VMOps , today emerges from stealth mode and announces that it will be rebranding to Cloud.com

We had a chat earlier this week with Peder Ulander who joined Cloud.com as chief marketing officer bringing more than 15 years of experience. Previously, Peter could be found at companies such as Sun Microsystems responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform. but also at other Open Source companies icluding MontaVista Software, the largest distributor of Linux for embedded devices, and Cobalt Networks, one of the early open source for networking companies, Cisco and Symantec.

Next to Peter the company also announced two other new additions to it’s management team

Kevin KLuge joins as vice president of engineering and previously served as vice president of engineering at Zimbra, an open source server software provider for email and collaboration, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and sold to VMware in 2009. Prior to Zimbra, Kluge was vice president of engineering at Corvigo, a leading anti-spam provider. Additionally, Kluge has held leadership positions at Openwave Systems, where he led engineering for multiple innovative products including instant messaging, voicemail and multi-media messaging services (MMS), Sun Microsystems and Portola Communications.

and Kyle MacDonald joins as chief evangelist having most recently served as vice president of corporate development and strategy for Hosting.com / Wachovia Capital Partners. Prior to this position, MacDonald held executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet and next generation service providers sector at Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2009. MacDonald also held the position of corporate technologist for software and strategic technology at AMD where he helped developed AMD’s software strategy and key strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, BEA, Adobe, EMC and Symantec.

The new team members join the team of CEO Sheng Liang, who founded the company in 2008. Liang has extensive experience in the technology industry and has served in a number of both technical and executive leadership roles. Prior to Cloud.com, Liang co-founded and served as CTO of Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Sheng also was a member of the senior management teams at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, and was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

Cloud.com also lets the Virtual world know that it closed a $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million

Apart from its new name, management and funding Cloud.com today also announced their product : CloudStack,
an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of private and public cloud services. They provide an integrated software solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which comes in three distinct versions: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition and CloudStack Community Edition.

CloudStack is the result of work started by VMops in 2008 and is already being used in productions by some key customers.

Next to the expected features such as definition, deployment and management of cloud devices, CloudStack also adds metering to the feature list, so billing can be done based on actual usage of the public , private or hybrid deployments.

About the Open Source release availabel on Cloud.com tells us :
The CloudStack Community Edition is distributed under the General Public License 3 (GPL3). The Community Edition offers a leading open source software stack integrated with the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors, and can be deployed with Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. With its simple to install software package, Cloud.com is a fully integrated binary that enables developers to quickly and easily build, manage and deploy IaaS clouds.

There is a lot of competition in the Open Source Cloud and Virtualization management area, Corporate OpenQRM just being relaunched by Matt Rechenburg, Eucalyptus these days being managed by Marten Mickos and Abiquo just having opened a new office in the US, … and this all seems just like the start

So I`m keen to follow this one … and I’ll be having a closer look at the Cloud.com platform in our lab soon.

NetQoS Launches Network-Based Virtualization Management Offerings

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For all its benefits, server virtualization masks critical data that IT organizations need to ensure optimal delivery of applications across the network to end users. With new virtualization capabilities, the NetQoS Performance Center unearths this data and combines it with network and application performance information from the physical environment to show how well the entire infrastructure is supporting application delivery.

The NetQoS Performance Center bridges the gap between the virtual and physical environments by collecting and analyzing application response times, traffic flows via Cisco IOS NetFlow, and device performance statistics within multi-tiered, virtual hosts as well as into and out of the virtual environment. The new offerings include:

· NetQoS Response Time Virtual Collector: This software only version of the NetQoS Performance Center application response time monitoring capability runs as a virtual machine in VMware, Microsoft or Citrix environments to provide visibility into the communications between each virtual server residing on the same physical machine. In addition, the Virtual Collector monitors the traffic between each virtual machine and the physical infrastructure.

· NetQoS NetFlow Reporting for Virtualized Environments: The NetQoS Performance Center network traffic analysis capability now supports NetFlow statistics exported from the Cisco Nexus 1000v and the VMware vSwitch to help network groups monitor how virtual application traffic is impacting network performance.

· NetQoS Performance Center Integration with VMware vCenter: The NetQoS Performance Center retrieves device health information from the VMware vCenter API to report data such as the number of virtual machines running on a host, CPU utilization, disk usage, and memory utilization.

By integrating the performance data from these three sources in one management console, the NetQoS Performance Center is uniquely positioned to help IT organizations understand how applications are performing across the infrastructure and better manage virtualization. For instance, the ability to measure the before and after impact of infrastructure changes, isolate the source of latency to the network, application or server, and predict bandwidth consumption will help IT organizations solve problems faster and make more informed decisions about which applications to virtualize. In addition, correlating device health information alongside response time and traffic flow information in the NetQoS Performance Center is important as network groups troubleshoot latency and other performance issues in real time.

ASG Debuts New Virtualization Management Solution, Aims To Eliminate Virtual Sprawl

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ASG Software Solutions, the originator of ASG’s Business Service Portfolio (BSP), today announced the immediate availability of ASG’s BSP Virtualization Management, a new solution that monitors the real-time performance, health, and efficiency of both virtual and physical IT environments.

Today, businesses are hastily deploying virtual machines (VMs) throughout their enterprises to achieve cost benefits and performance improvements. However, the difficulty in tracking and monitoring the performance of rapidly propagating VMs across the enterprise has resulted in few organizations realizing the long-term cost savings and IT performance benefits of virtualization. This lack of insight into VMs, coupled with a growing and more complex IT systems infrastructure, intensifies the need for both physical and virtual environments to be monitored, managed, and coordinated to maximize IT performance and efficiency across the enterprise.

By providing complete visibility of all virtual and physical environments in a unified dashboard view, ASG’s BSP Virtualization Management allows organizations to continuously monitor the health of their entire infrastructure in real time. Using the solution, IT Operations directors can discover and map application dependencies between virtual systems and the underlying physical infrastructure, which, in turn, enables them to identify and eliminate areas of actual or potential virtual machine sprawl.

ASG’s BSP Virtualization Management

  • Optimizes the three key phases in the virtualization lifecycle
  • Capacity planning: Equips organizations to virtualize physical systems by logically discovering, mapping, and assessing the current IT environment
  • Real-time performance monitoring: Enables the optimization of both physical and virtual systems at all times using a single solution
  • Asset planning: Recognizes system resources to properly assess retirement of physical servers and unneeded VMs to reduce sprawl while maximizing data center efficiency
  • Offers immediate root cause analysis of problems, bottlenecks, and trending to optimize the performance of physical and virtual systems
  • Regularly generates on-demand reports, a central feature of all ASG’s Level 2 BSP solutions, and addresses performance issues for incidents, uptime, saturation, and utilization
  • The flexible and scalable solution is classified as a Level 2 solution in ASG’s Path to Optimization, a program designed to help IT executives leverage their current IT investments, complemented by ASG’s BSP solutions and best practices, to progress towards improved IT service delivery and proactive Business Service Management (BSM).
  • ASG’s BSP Virtualization Management is offered both as a standalone solution and as a core component of ASG’s BSP Enterprise Performance Management, which monitors the entire IT environment, including mainframe, distributed, and virtualized systems, databases, and applications.

DynamicOps Introduces New Generation Of Automated Virtualization Management Software Suite

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DynamicOps, a venture-funded Credit Suisse spinoff, is introducing a new generation of automated virtualization management software with a unique capability — automated resource reclamation — that identifies and reclaims inactive and abandoned virtual machines to control virtual machine sprawl.

DynamicOps Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) is the first virtualization management software to automate the manual process required to reclaim and recycle unneeded virtual machines. The new VRM 3.2 helps companies use their virtualization infrastructure much more efficiently, reducing the need for IT staff to manually reclaim unused virtual machines and making the best use of IT assets. This improved efficiency results in significant cost savings.

With VRM, companies can easily apply the well-known, eco-friendly “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” theme to virtualization management, Krueger added. The software, in high demand by companies that want to achieve significant cost savings and faster ROI for their virtualization initiatives, provides essential tools to reduce over-provisioning of virtual machines, help companies reuse virtual resources quickly and easily, and identify virtual machines ready for recycling.

VRM automates the planning, deployment and ongoing management of virtual servers and desktops, from the time they’re created until they’re retired. Using VRM, enterprises deliver and manage virtual machines independent of the hypervisor, connection broker, and image deployment technology involved, all through a single console.

DynamicOps has added other new capabilities to VRM, including an enhanced developer’s toolkit, enhanced Linux support, and usability improvements.

The new VRM Software Developer’s Toolkit, used to integrate VRM’s automated virtual machine management processes with existing management ecosystems, makes it easier for companies and resellers to develop plug-in modules to perform a variety of tasks external to VRM; no code changes are required in the core VRM software.

For Linux users, VRM 3.2 goes beyond simple virtual machine cloning to include automated operating system installation and customization capabilities available in either Red Hat Kickstart or Suse AutoYaST. In addition to automating the installation and consistent configuration of machines, these utilities facilitate customization like network, disk, language and keyboard selection as well as optional software installation.

DynamicOps has also added several new features to improve usability, including enhanced discovery, easy install and set up, simple resource reservation, static IP support, global VM Blueprints, multi-step approval, and a resource cost calculator to facilitate the configuration of chargeback cost profiles.

Release: Karesansui 1.0

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The Karesansui project has released version 1.0 of its open source virtualization management application.

While version 1.0 only supports the Xen hypervisor, the developers plan to support KVM and other virtualization systems in the future.  Administrators can install a virtual guest OS, boot VMs, shutdown VMs, and reach the virtual console directly through a Web browser interface.

The application is licensed under the GPL and LGPL and uses open source components such as: Python, libvirt, webpy, flup, lighttpd, psycopg2, tightvncviewer, jquery, jquery.form.  The web interface also has a RESTful architecture allowing for other applications to interact with it over HTTP.

Karesansui is available to download and you can also find an installation tutorial as well.  If you are looking for screenshots, you can find them here.

Hyper9 Unveils Virtual Infrastucture Management Tool

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Hyper9 announced today the general availability of Hyper9, a product that leverages Internet and virtualization management technologies to manage change, configuration and performance issues in a modern, efficient way.

Built for VI administrators by VI administrators, Hyper9 is a simple, yet powerful enterprise-class product that is ideally suited for managing virtual server infrastructures. It enables monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting on virtual infrastructures like nothing else in the marketplace. It accomplishes this without agents, tree views, spreadsheets, or multiple tools.

Among the key product features are:

  • Search: Search across your entire virtual universe, from the hypervisor to inside the guest.
  • Alert & Monitor: Build queries to monitor your environment from inside the guest and across your virtual infrastructure. Set up alerts to track changes and keep on top of problem solving.
  • Compare: Analyze historical data about your virtual machines, such as how they’ve changed over time, with Hyper9 VMDNA™.
  • Report: Slice and dice data, generate performance charts and reports for management and colleagues.
  • Collaborate: Store and manage your searches, lists and reports and invite colleagues into your workspace.
Pricing for Hyper9 starts at $25 a month.

In addition to the Hyper9 product being made available at the web site, the H9Labs Search Plug-in for VI Client is also ready for download. This software was developed by a well known developer in the VMware community, Hyper9’s own Andrew Kutz, who was recently named a vExpert by VMware. H9Labs’ Search Plug-in gives the VMware VI Client 2.5 auto-complete search capability from inside the guest across your virtual infrastructure.