virtualization

Release: Altor VF 3.0 Virtual Firewall

July 9, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Altor Networks has announced the Altor VF 3.0 virtual firewall with integrated intrusion detection. Developed using VMsafe APIs, the Altor VF offers robust defense-in-depth virtualization security with mission critical reliability and value through breakthrough fast-path performance.

The Altor VF is the first product to be integrated with VMware VMsafe network APIs in fast-path mode, where security inspections are processed in the hypervisor kernel. As a result, customers deploying the Altor VF will benefit from increased performance, achieving approximately ten times greater throughput than virtual firewalls running in a Virtual Machine (i.e., bridge mode), as well as greater security and reduced complexity.

Security policy is applied at an individual-VM level and enforcement of this policy occurs within the Kernel. VMs are protected without requiring security agents on the guest, complicated network reconfigurations, or performance degrading remapping of network flows.

The Altor VF delivers defense-in-depth with virtual-aware intrusion detection for up-to-date protection against emerging threats with a security-signature update service. Purpose-built for the virtual environment, the Altor VF enables secure usage of unique virtualization features, such as vMotion, and provides ease of administration and tight integration with vCenter.

VMware Makes It Easy For Virtual Iron Customers To Migrate To vSphere 4

July 9, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware yesterday announced that it is offering existing Virtual Iron customers an easy way to migrate their Virtual Iron deployments to VMware vSphere 4. In light of news reports that Oracle will discontinue development of existing Virtual Iron products, the VMware offer gives companies a cost-effective way to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4, and provides customers a clear virtualization roadmap that will help meet their needs as their business grows.

The VMware offer gives Virtual Iron end customers who have a current license and support contract compelling savings on VMware vSphere 4 and VMware vCenter Server. More specifically, eligible Virtual Iron end customers receive aggressive discounts off the list price on the below products and services:

VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard
Support and subscription (SnS) on VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard

Proof of a current Virtual Iron license and support contract will be required to qualify for the VMware offer. Promotional pricing is limited to the number of Virtual Iron licenses supported by a current support agreement. The offer is valid through September 30, 2009.

VMware vSphere 4 delivers Virtual Iron customers the unparalleled efficiency and performance required to run critical applications in large scale environments, uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and unmatched flexibility of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

VMware vSphere 4 also delivers “Always On IT” for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) and remote and branch office (ROBO) IT environments. With VMware vSphere 4, smaller IT environments can achieve zero-downtime application availability, enterprise-class data protection, disaster recovery and simplified management at an affordable price point.

5nine Software Tells You How VMware and Hyper-V Stack Up

July 9, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

5nine Software today announced the latest versions of its virtualization migration planning solution, 5nine P2V Planner 2.0 and 5nine P2V Planner Free Edition 2.0. The updated software adds P2V VMware planning to the existing P2V Hyper-V virtualization planning capabilities and now delivers side-by-side comparative analysis of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans from the technology, TCO and ROI perspectives.

5nine P2V Planner offers the following features:

— Automated P2V Hyper-V and P2V VMware Migration Planning — Performs sophisticated analysis of the current data center and provides multiple Hyper-V and VMware migration plans depending on particular customer requirements. Optimized placement of virtualized workloads is based on business requirements, technology (memory, storage and CPU utilization, security), and TCO and ROI.

— Side-by-Side comparison of Hyper-V and VMware Migration plans — Enables creation and side-by-side comparison of VMware and Hyper-V virtualization migration plans. It takes into consideration multiple factors including software licensing costs, memory and CPU utilization, clustering and average consolidation ratios for both virtualization technologies.

— Agentless Data Collection — Automatically discovers and collects hardware inventory, utilization data and application performance metrics in a non-intrusive manner without installing agents. It also allows importing this information from an Excel or XML file.

— Simple-to-Use — The product was designed to be used for projects of all sizes — from small virtualization pilots or SMB projects to large enterprise projects with hundreds of servers, hosts and virtual machines (VMs).

— Integrated TCO and ROI Reporting — 5nine P2V Planner creates a variety of technology assessment, workload, and TCO and ROI reports for each migration plan, for easy comparison of Hyper-V and VMware migration plans and decision making.

— Ongoing Value — Whether your P2V migration project is complete or ongoing, the Planner continues to provide value by optimizing the workloads and resource utilization in a virtualized data center.

5nine P2V Planner Free Edition 2.0 is available immediately and is free for any Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX and vSphere environments 5nine P2V Planner is also available immediately, with North American pricing starting at $59.00 USD per physical server.

Wyse Debuts Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA)

July 9, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Wyse Technology has announced that it will launch a new software product, Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator (VDA). Wyse VDA addresses limitations of existing data centers, which are currently constrained by proximity. Today, an application or service, hosted and delivered from data centers is typically within 100-300 miles of the end-user recipient. Without this proximity, the user experience suffers from network latency, packet loss and other inefficiencies found in longer networks. Because of these issues, businesses are forced to maintain multiple data centers to handle all geographies. Wyse VDA virtually eliminates these geographic constraints by accelerating network protocols up to three times in order to greatly enhance remote end-user productivity and experience in virtualized settings.

Enterprises are able to consolidate data centers, eliminate redundancies, improve ease of management for the IT staff, and significantly reduce overall maintenance costs. The software-only solution is also easy to deploy, requires no hardware or appliances, and is optimized for virtual desktop deployments. The reduction in data center usage also has Green IT implications, as energy consumption and carbon emissions will also be significantly minimized.

Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator will accelerate popular virtualization architectures such as Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View and Microsoft Terminal Services.

In general, data centers typically account for 25% of corporate IT budgets, according to McKinsey(1). In addition, the cost of operating data centers is increasing by as much as 20% per year. By reducing the geographic redundancies required to cover end users locally and globally, Wyse VDA will also contribute to significant reductions in greenhouse gases. Carbon emissions from data centers continue to rise, with data centers expected to quadruple their emissions by 2020 worldwide. Based on the same McKinsey research, the amount of energy used to store and handle data doubled between 2000 and 2006, with the average data facility using as much energy as 25,000 households. A single enterprise-class data center that reduces its number of severs by 50% would potentially save $1.5 million in energy costs and eliminate 14 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

Results from early implementations of Wyse VDA have suggested significant potential cost savings to participating companies. A major global financial services provider engaged in retail and commercial banking, credit cards, investment banking, wealth management and investment management services, deployed early versions of Wyse VDA in an effort to better serve employees working in virtualized environments. The company, which has an extensive international presence in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, wanted to streamline its data center operations in order to reduce costs and minimize the associated maintenance for its IT staff.

Wyse VDA addresses challenges faced by companies attempting to use cloud computing or virtual clients located around the globe but find the user experience unacceptable due to network distance. Working without specialized hardware, Wyse VDA complements existing remote desktop protocols, including Citrix(R) ICA(R), Microsoft RDP, and VMware View, accelerating the experience to LAN-delivered levels. By reducing the impact of network latency, Wyse VDA eliminates the sluggish performance often associated with virtual desktops connected to remote data centers or public clouds. Remote users will, for the first time, experience the same level of network quality as local users.

These benefits also extend to local geographies, whether end users are located only a few miles from a data center, are in the next state or the next country. Latency and packet loss inefficiencies are mitigated without any impact on end user experience.

Wyse VDA also can help enterprises with business continuity and in disaster recovery scenarios. In standard operation scenarios, end users are located close to the data center. With Wyse VDA, if those data centers are in a disaster situation, the enterprise can easily connect the effected end users into alternate data centers without compromising their experience.

Wyse VDA does not interfere with the security and encryption of the underlying remote display protocols. Wyse VDA works standalone or as a compliment to existing hardware WAN accelerator solutions adding value to customer deployments by providing acceleration specific to remote desktop protocols.

Wyse VDA adds to the impressive portfolio of virtualization software already offered by Wyse. Whether it is overcoming the obstacles of audio, video, multimedia, multi-display or USB support, Wyse’s virtualization software solutions are all designed to ensure the best possible end-user experience.

Available built-in to Wyse ThinOS 6.4 devices and select Wyse thin clients, and for PCs running the Microsoft Windows XP Pro operating system, Wyse Virtual Desktop Accelerator will be generally available July 8th.

Veeam Business View Released, Veeam Reporter Enterprise Updated

July 9, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Veeam Software recently made available a new add-on tool that works with other Veeam products to group, view and manage virtual machines based on criteria such as business unit, department, location, server purpose, or service level agreement. This alternate view of the VMware infrastructure supports chargeback and helps control “VM sprawl” by linking every virtual machine to a business service. At the same time, Veeam has updated its Reporter Enterprise product to enhance several reports and to integrate the new Business View capability.

Veeam Business View automates the use of VMware’s native custom attributes to categorize VMs. Business View also allows editing the attributes manually for one or multiple VMs at a time, or automatically based on pre-defined rules. For example, VMware administrators can define an automated rule such as “if a VM has retail in its name, add it to the Retail Banking category.”

Business View is integrated with Veeam Reporter Enterprise, the Veeam nworks Management Pack and the nworks Smart Plug-in. In the near future, it will also be integrated with Veeam Monitor and Veeam Backup & Replication. Business View is available at no extra charge for all current Veeam customers on maintenance.

Key benefits of Business View include:

Manage VMs from a business perspective – Group, view and manage virtual machines based on business criteria.
Prioritize resource allocation and utilization – Business View’s unique dashboard view allows administrators to see at a glance the number of VMs, vCPUs, amount of memory and storage used by each business unit, department, and server type.
Control VM sprawl – Business View helps control VM sprawl by categorizing virtual machines. Unassigned VMs and the resources they consume can be immediately seen on the web-based dashboard.
Define a chargeback model – Together with Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter Enterprise, Business View provides the flexibility to define a customized chargeback model. VM group information can be exported to a Microsoft Excel document for reporting or integration with other chargeback, inventory, or billing systems.
Integrate with existing VM categorization process – Customers already using custom attributes to group VMs by business unit, department, purpose, or SLA can automate and extend what they already have – no need to recreate everything from scratch.
Open architecture – Because Business View integrates with VMware vCenter data, customers can leverage the advantages of Veeam Business View with the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client and other third-party products. To reduce complexity, Veeam Business View comes with a built-in web service that allows any application to quickly query a specific category’s content directly from the Business View server, without putting any extra load on the vCenter server.

Veeam Business View is available immediately at no charge to all Veeam customers on maintenance.

Pingbacks Not Suited For Dirty Minds: XenItalia.com

July 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

It’s always nice to get pingbacks on our blog posts, but sometimes they can be confusing, especially to people with a dirty mind. Case in point: Virtualization.com publisher Toon Vanagt saw a trackback on our post featuring a video interview with Amazon’s Werner Vogels, coming from a new blog dubbed Xen Italia, and read something else in the URL (Xenitalia.com), namely Genitalia.com. We’re sorry, but the latter domain name has already been registered too.

To celebrate Toon’s dirty thoughts on the subject, we would like to give one of our readers a free book on Xen (in English). All you need to do is comment on this post with the funniest baseline for Xenitalia.com you could possibly think of.

Good luck!