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Symbio Adds Ericom’s Virtualization Solution To Boot Appliance and Boot Stick

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Symbio Technologies, provider of what they call “green” stateless computing, announced today that it has added Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect client to its Symbiont Boot Appliance and Symbiont Boot Stick after signing technology licensing and reseller agreements with Ericom Software.

Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect provides secure local and remote access to enterprise mission-critical applications running on a broad range of Microsoft Windows Terminal Servers, Virtual Desktops (VDI), Blade PCs, and legacy hosts. PowerTerm WebConnect is a platform and hypervisor agnostic solution that enables organizations to standardize on one solution for the management and delivery of server-based applications and virtual desktops.

Symbiont Boot Appliance and Symbiont Boot Stick users can deploy Ericom – or any other software loaded on their server. The Symbiont boot products, which are available from Symbio Technologies’ global network of value-added resellers, support virtually any type of computer, using their own operating system to power the hardware and connect users to terminal servers.

Symbio Technologies

Ericom Software

Update On ESX 3.5 Issue: A Letter from Paul Maritz

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New VMware CEO Paul Maritz has issued an official statement about the major bug plaguing customers who had updated to ESX / ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and experienced a serious problem yesterday due to a mistake in the licensing code.

The letter in full:

“Last night, we became aware of a code issue with the recently released update to ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2).

When the time clock in a server running ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2 hits 12:00AM on August 12th, 2008, the released code causes the product license to expire.  The problem has also occurred with a recent patch to ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.  When an ESX or ESXi 3.5 server thinks its license has expired, the following can happen:

  • Virtual machines that are powered off cannot be turned on;
  • Virtual machines that have been suspended fail to leave suspend mode; and,
  • Virtual machines cannot be migrated using VMotion.

The issue was caused by a piece of code that was mistakenly left enabled for the final release of Update 2.  This piece of code was left over from the pre-release versions of Update 2 and was designed to ensure that customers are running on the supported generally available version of Update 2.

In remedying the situation, we’ve already released an express patch for those customers that have installed/upgraded to ESX or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.  Within the next 24 hours, we also expect to issue a full replacement for Update 2, which should be used by customers who want to perform fresh installs of ESX or ESXi.

I am sure you’re wondering how this could happen.  We failed in two areas:

  • Not disabling the code in the final release of Update 2; and
  • Not catching it in our quality assurance process.

We are doing everything in our power to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  VMware prides itself on the quality and reliability of our products, and this incident has prompted a thorough self-examination of how we create and deliver products to our customers.  We have kicked off a comprehensive, in-depth review of our QA and release processes, and will quickly make the needed changes.

I want to apologize for the disruption and difficulty this issue may have caused to our customers and our partners.  Your confidence in VMware is extremely important to us, and we are committed to restoring that confidence fully and quickly.

Thank You,

Paul Maritz
President and CEO
VMware”

LinMin Releases Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2, Includes API

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LinMin, makers of the LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning solution, today unveiled Release 5.2, featuring a new API, single-command installation, numerous feature enhancements and support for the provisioning and imaging of additional platforms. The API is designed to allow customers and partners to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning into environments that presently cannot do bare metal provisioning of Microsoft Windows, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines.

“Having a best-of-breed provisioning and imaging solution was a great starting point, but being a standalone product didn’t maximize the potential of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning. Now, with the new LinMin API, customers can optimize IT resources (physical, virtual and human) around business processes, not the other way around,” said Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin Corp. “LinMin’s ability to install applications and management agents during the provisioning process is even more valuable with the API, bringing a closed loop process to customers’ existing environments: automatically select an appropriate and available physical or virtual system, invoke the LinMin API, and after the system is provisioned, these agents identify themselves to their respective management, monitoring, policy enforcement, availability, compliance and other applications that then take control of the system. This is IT application integration at its best.”

The API offers both a graphical user interface that can be integrated into other Web-based applications, and a traditional programmatic interface, giving customers maximum flexibility.  The example GUI can also be used as a “teaching mechanism” with the option to view in real time the API-compliant commands that get issued to and the responses received from the LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning server.  This enables software developers to quickly develop API calls with real-time debugging, reducing implementation times.

Once integrated with LinMin via the API, third party, internally-developed or open source software can create, maintain and delete system provisioning roles (e.g., Red Hat application server, Novell SLES database server, Windows Web server or Ubuntu office desktop) and assign them to specific physical systems or virtual machines, along with pre-determined networking and security settings based on business rules unique to each customer.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 also introduces a fully automated installation process. With a single command, LinMin detects all networking attributes, then downloads, installs and configures a database, network services and other required software components, and presents to the administrator a fully configured provisioning and imaging server in about 5 minutes.  LBMP 5.2 also supports the provisioning of additional platforms, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, Novell SLES10 SP2, CentOS 5.2, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04.1 release.  LinMin provisions over 50 different versions and architectures of Linux and Windows.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning is priced at $250 for up to 10 client systems, $1,000 for up to 100 client systems and $1,875 for up to 250 clients systems. Annual subscriptions are also available for $100, $400 and $750 respectively.

LinMin Corp.

Defragmentation Software Maker Diskeeper Certified for Hyper-V

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Diskeeper Corporation today announced that its flagship product Diskeeper 2008 automatic defragmenter achieved Certified for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V status from Microsoft, making it one of the first three applications, out of 175 applications currently certified for Windows Server 2008, to earn the Hyper-V designation.

All systems suffer from file fragmentation. Servers suffer even more so due to their heavy multi-user traffic. And virtual servers yet further since fragmentation takes place on three separate levels–the virtual, the physical disk and the mapping in between them. Without a professional grade defragmenter designed to address the virtual issues, server performance is going to crawl to a slow.
Thanks to recent developments in transparent processing technology (known as InvisiTasking, defragmentation of such systems with Diskeeper 2008 has now become a fully automated process. This speeds up server response time, ensures the level of virtual disk performance is optimal and saves time by taking the guesswork out of defragmenting.
Diskeeper

Sun Microsystems Inks Bunch Of New OEM Agreements To Expand xVM VirtualBox Reach

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Sun Microsystems today announced new multi-year OEM agreements with Avanquest Software, Q-layer and Zenith InfoTech to expand the reach of Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Sun xVM VirtualBox is available via the OEM program or in a free, open source version here. Since its release in January 2007, Sun xVM (VirtualBox) has surpassed 5 million downloads, and the company boasts about it being the first free hypervisor to support all major host operating systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Sun xVM VirtualBox software, which it acquired through its maker innotek earlier this year, is a key component of Sun’s broader xVM virtualization and management software portfolio, which includes Sun xVM Ops Center, Sun xVM Server and the Sun VDI Software.

Avanquest will produce and publish Sun xVM VirtualBox bundled with OpenSolaris and sell it via retail outlets in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and France. Beginning this fall, Avanquest will provide Mac users with a solution to run the Windows operating system through Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Q-layer is leveraging Sun xVM VirtualBox to deliver complete datacenter virtualization capabilities for its customers.

Zenith InfoTech has built its network attached storage appliance for small and medium-sized businesses using Sun xVM VirtualBox.

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