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DSA Research Group Launches OpenNEbula Technology Preview

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The dsa-research group has announced that a new Technology Preview (TP2) of the OpenNEbula (ONE) Virtual Infrastructure Engine is available for download under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.

ONE enables the dynamic deployment and re-allocation of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources, so extending the benefits of existing virtualization platforms from a single physical resource to a pool of resources, decoupling the server not only from the physical infrastructure but also from the physical location.

ONE Technology Preview 2 extends the functionality for management of both physical resources and virtual machines, and provides resources for developers, making public the Trac web interface.

More details are available here.

HP And VMware Tighten Partnership With Deeper Software Integration

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HP today announced it is expanding its strategic collaboration with VMware to introduce new integrated software offerings that help customers seamlessly automate the management of heterogeneous environments.

New integrations of HP business technology optimization (BTO) software for the VMware virtualization platform aims to allow customers to seamlessly manage across both physical and virtual environments.

The offerings include:

  • HP Business Service Management – monitoring of physical and virtual environments. Products include HP Business Availability Center, HP Operations Center and HP Network Management Center.
  • HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping and HP Universal CMDB – discovery of virtualized environments and accurate tracking and reporting of changes.
  • HP Business Service Automation – automation of change processes across virtual and physical environments. Products include HP Server Automation Center, HP Client Automation and HP Operations Orchestration.

In addition, HP has worked with VMware to make software bundles available that combine the VMware Infrastructure 3 software suite and additional automation products with HP Insight Control Environment. These bundles offer customers comprehensive and seamless physical and virtual platform management.

HP also announced that its VMware Authorized Training Center (VATC) is the first to train more than 10,000 students on VMware certifying courses required for the VMware Certified Professional exam. All VATCs offer education programs using VMware-certified instructors and course materials. With the combination of HP’s global presence, remote training delivery infrastructure and expertise with the VMware platform, HP Education Services offers effective education programs for the broad range of VMware products.

“VMware and HP are working together to make virtual environments easier to manage and to get more professionals trained to implement our joint solutions,” said Brian Byun, vice president, Global Partners and Solutions, VMware. “We’re embracing and extending management and automation products from both companies to provide comprehensive solutions for managing the reality of customer environments with a mix of both virtual and physical systems. By collaborating with HP, we hope to bring to market additional management solutions that simplify these environments for our customers.”

Red Hat Unveils Virtualization Strategy At Boston Summit

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Today at Red Hat Summit in Boston, two of Red Hat’s emerging technology engineers, Dan Barrange and Richard Jones, presented the new tool sets that their team has developed for work with Xen virtual machines (VMs). It includes command line utilities, which will become part of the oVirt tool set, a web-based virtual machine management console built using Ruby on Rails.

oVirt uses Red Hat’s open source libvirt management framework that provides hypervisor-agnostic management interfacing, allowing the same tools to manage multiple different hypervisors. Libvirt already supports six hypervisors : Xen, KVM, QEMU, OpenVZ, Linux Containers (LVX) and Solaris LDoms.

The company also announced that its own embedded, lightweight, stand-alone hypervisor and accompanying management console are available in beta right now. Red Hat’s new Linux hypervisor hosts both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Rather than base the software on the open-source Xen hypervisor, Red Hat has chosen the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project, which is already used by the major Linux OSs as the default server virtualization package. Another key difference: while Xen works well with Linux, it’s an add-on. KVM, on the other hand, is an integral part of Linux.

Read more about Red Hat’s virtualization announcements here.

VirtualLogix Hooks Up With Freescale Semiconductor To Secure Mobile Commerce

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VirtualLogix today announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Freescale Semiconductor to create a trusted environment for mobile devices and other terminals that can be used in particular to ensure security of mobile commerce (m-commerce) transactions.

VirtualLogix VLX for Mobile Handsets virtualization technology will be incorporated into the Freescale Semiconductor i.MX31 multimedia applications processor to create an isolated Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), independent of the main application open operating system (open OS), which protects mobile devices from m-commerce security threats.

By adding VLX realtime virtualization on the i.MX31 applications processor, the open OS is securely isolated from a closed TEE where m-commerce transactions safely occur on the mobile phone or device. These measures protect against m-commerce security threats such as keystroke logging and phishing attacks.

Tresys Ships VM Fortress, Aims To Meet High End Desktop Virtualization Security Needs

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Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and services for customers with high security requirements, today announced (PDF) the availability of Tresys VM Fortress, a patent-pending secure desktop virtualization technology for organizations seeking strong security and operational integrity.

VM Fortress (not to be confused with vFortress, a company recently acquired by Propalms), aims to give organizations with high-end security needs the ability to utilize desktop virtualization without compromising protection by strengthening the guest operations system and the virtualization software itself to withstand the most threatening of compromises.

According to the press release, VM Fortress benefits and market differentiators include:

  • Strong Endpoint Security: Providing strong, independent control over system resources by leveraging the flexible mandatory access control (MAC) features provided by Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to limit damage caused by exploitable vulnerabilities in virtual machines
  • Decreased Operational Costs: Removing the barrier of entry to desktop consolidation where security assurance is a high priority; leveraging stronger MAC security reduces the damage and costs to desktop environments should they become attacked
  • Increased Data Confidentiality & Integrity: Providing separation for the user and the application on a per VM basis, ensuring that data is not leaked across VMs and that applications cannot interfere with each other while sharing the same hardware resources
  • Increased Operational Integrity: Limiting the effects of attacks and errors, so that vulnerabilities in one VM cannot be exploited to gain access to other VMs or to the host operating system
  • Ease of Management/Deployment: Systems can be deployed over the network from a central installation server and VMs can be remotely downloaded on demand by the user

Lanamark Launches With Powerful Capacity Planning Software Suite

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Lanamark, a provider of software solutions for accelerating virtualization services delivery, today announced limited availability of its flagship software solution Lanamark Suite. The company, a privately held corporation headquartered in Toronto, Canada, also announced a Lanamark Early Access Program (LEAP) for VARs, consultants and system integrators.

Lanamark Suite consists of software applications for discovering, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing heterogeneous IT infrastructure. It allows Lanamark channel partners to deliver virtualization services quickly and consistently across multiple hypervisors, protect customer data captured for analysis and differentiate their offerings by providing customers with “unique, sophisticated and unbiased service deliverables”.

“Lanamark Suite enables service providers to deliver hypervisor-agnostic virtualization services that help their customers accelerate adoption of virtualized environments,” said Mark Angelo, CEO and founder of Lanamark. “Today’s solutions are not designed for services delivery – they are challenging and time-consuming to deploy, use and license. Furthermore, these solutions are very intrusive to customer environments and do not adequately secure and protect customer data. Our software is designed from the ground up to address these challenges and remove non-value-add activities. We enable our channel partners to focus on areas where they can leverage their extensive knowledge of IT infrastructure and add the most value for customers – analysis, design and optimization of virtualized and physical infrastructure.”

Angelo comes from PlateSpin, where he was Product Line Manager for PowerRecon, and recently from VMLogix, where he was Director of Business Development.

Lanamark Suite consists of:

  • Lanamark Portal – for managing customer accounts, engagements and assessments online. Using the Lanamark Portal, service providers can also administer teams of consultants and acquire individual licenses for workload analysis in Lanamark Studio.
  • Lanamark Explorer – for truly agent-less collection of inventory and performance data about application workloads and server resources. Lanamark Explorer is a light-weight and easy-to-install application that does not require licenses upfront. The data it captures is stored in a secure snapshot that can only be unlocked by the service provider performing the assessment.
  • Lanamark Studio – for rich analysis and reporting on application workloads and server resources. Using templates, consultants can identify virtualization candidates and automatically publish powerful charts and reports that map directly onto assessment deliverables, consistently across engagements.