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Microsoft Deepens Partnership With HP

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Microsoft today announced expanded product, sales and services initiatives with HP aimed at helping businesses more easily adopt and deploy virtualization. Microsoft has expanded its work together with HP to sell and market storage, server and networking consolidation solutions and desktop virtualization solutions to small-, medium-sized- and large-business customers worldwide.

Today’s announcements include the following:

  • In the U.S., Microsoft is working with HP to offer products, training and deployment services for storage, networking and server consolidation that are designed to help customers decrease costs, increase business agility, improve data access and protection, and increase employee productivity.
  • Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Microsoft System Center are supported on the new industry-standard HP Virtual Connect 10Gb Flex-10 module, which works with the Flex-10 NIC on the recently introduced HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server. Together these technologies help enable customers to significantly lower costs with their server and network consolidation, business continuity, and dynamic datacenter projects.
  • The HP and Microsoft Frontline Partner Program in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) has registered 60 percent of eligible partners across 36 countries to receive access to virtualization training, sales tools, marketing materials, workshops, and incentives targeting small and medium-sized businesses.
  • Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) features will be delivered in the HP ProLiant PRO Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, running on HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, in December 2008. PRO is a feature of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that enables dynamic management of virtual machines and the associated host platforms.
  • HP provides comprehensive services, built on Microsoft technologies, for customers to virtualize their desktops and data centers. The services address strategy, design, transition, operation and continual improvement. HP offers virtualization workshops and proofs-of-concept as the first step for virtualization projects. HP also provides education and support for technology staff as well as services to develop a strategic technology road map using best practices to consolidate and manage infrastructure.
  • HP Business Service Automation will enable automation of change and configuration management processes across virtual and physical environments for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments, and will integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 for managing advanced platform capabilities, while decreasing downtime associated with uncontrolled change. HP is scheduled to release a beta in the first quarter of 2009.

Pano Logic Unveils Windows Native VDI Solution

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Pano Logic, developer of a server-based desktop virtualization solution, today announced Pano Virtual Desktop Solution (VDS) 2.5. The new release is the first desktop virtualization solution to optimize the Windows user experience without using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), which eliminates the dependence on Microsoft Terminal Services technology and provides native session support for Windows applications, video, and audio interfaces and native USB device drivers.

These new capabilities are available through Console Direct, a new technology in Pano VDS 2.5 that plugs directly into the Windows OS to deliver a fully native experience. In addition, new capabilities for Pano Manager improve IT’s ability to maintain and support virtual infrastructure through quick and easy role-based access for the help desk.

New features in Pano VDS 2.5 include:

  • Native Console Support — offering the ability via Console Direct to allow the Windows desktop to use its native interfaces for video, audio and USB devices. While other technologies use a Terminal Server Session with RDP, which doesn’t have access to all Windows native interfaces and therefore detrimentally affects user experience and device support, Console Direct enables the use of native drivers such as touch screens and smart boards that must communicate with the console session. Only Pano VDS allows the deployment of these interactive devices while maintaining zero management at the end-point.
  • Internet Video — delivering support of native video, audio and USB device drivers directly from the Windows operating system, ensuring quality video replay with any codec (including Adobe Flash Video) with no tearing and tight audio video synchronization.
  • Quick and easy role-based access through Active Directory — providing help desk staff the ability to have view-only access to the Pano Manager to look at alerts, statistics and connection status to quickly troubleshoot and resolve customer requests.

These new features further enhance the robust capabilities that are already a part of Pano VDS. Purpose-built from the ground up, the Pano Logic approach is to provide a zero management client and leverage a customer’s VMware server virtualization infrastructure to deliver a complete Windows desktop environment. Pano VDS can be installed in less than 60 minutes, and is centrally managed from the data center.

Pano VDS 2.5 is now available with pricing starting at $300 for a single Pano desktop.

Research and Markets Releases “All About Implementing Virtualization” Report

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Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “All About Implementing Virtualization” report to their offering.

Featuring:
Assessing Candidate Servers for Virtualization
This assessment tool provides a high-level view of the current infrastructure in the context of technical, business, and operational readiness. Use this tool to decide which servers are ideal candidates for virtualization as well as which servers should await further planning and development.
All About Implementing Virtualization goes a step further by pairing the assessment tool with tactical and practical research notes so you know what to do next and how to do it.
Also Included:
— Five Pitfalls of Virtualization and How to Avoid Them – The road to server virtualization and consolidation is not without its potholes. Examined are five common virtualization implementation challenges and how they can be mitigated. Very few virtualization challenges are purely technical, but rather stem from shortfalls in planning. Do not take an ad hoc approach to virtualization. Avoid the pitfalls by focusing on application provisioning and capacity planning.
— Virtual Servers Planning Goals: Take a Baby Bear Approach – In a typical scenario, a modest 100-server shop will not be moved to server virtualization by a strategic imperative. Rather, the trigger will be the acquisition of partitionable x86 servers as part of a regular hardware refresh. Planning can make the difference between this implementation being a one-off effort with limited return on investment or the beginning of a new way of managing infrastructure that has significant cost and service benefits.
— Virtualization Scope Analysis Worksheet (Tool) – The most often cited challenges to virtualization are related to people and processes, not technology. Take some time to think about all the people and processes that would be impacted by virtualization. Use this downloadable worksheet to identify goals, dependencies, opportunities, and potential barriers to virtual machine adoption.
— Virtualization Project Definition Template (Tool) – Info-Tech sees the best approach to large scale virtual server implementation as one that combines planning for a foundational virtual infrastructure with careful and incremental adoption. Having employed the ITA Premium “Virtualization Scope Analysis” worksheet to consider who and what will be impacted by virtualization, use this template to develop a long-term project definition for virtualization.
— Business and Operational Assessment for Virtual Server Implementation – Business and operational assessments are as critical for virtual server implementation as is the technical assessment that identifies virtualization candidates. People and process issues are more likely to be an impediment to implementation than technical limitations. Identify and resolve these issues through assessments that establish baselines business and operational measures for virtualization success.
— Technical Assessment of Candidates for Virtual Server Implementation – Technical assessment of current server infrastructure is one of three critical assessments necessary for an effective virtual server implementation. The other important assessments are a business assessment and an IT operational assessment. The important results of the technical assessment will be a list of virtualization candidate servers, and baseline utilization data for capacity planning of the virtual machine infrastructure.
— Just Do It: Server Virtualization without Planning? – The best approach to virtual server implementation combines planning for a foundational virtual infrastructure with careful, incremental adoption. While planning is critical, don’t let external involvement bog down or stall initial implementation efforts. Use a business and operational assessment to define the trigger point for the larger planning effort.

Zenoss 2.3 Adds Native VMware Monitoring

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Zenoss, a provider of commercial open source systems and network management software, last week rolled out a new version of its product suite.  The new release adds native VMware monitoring across the full virtualization infrastructure lifecycle.  This latest version, Zenoss 2.3, now enables enterprise IT staff and cloud services providers to monitor their virtual and physical IT infrastructures with a single, integrated product that costs significantly less than traditional offerings.

“Two of the biggest issues currently facing IT are virtualization and shrinking budgets,” said Erik Dahl, CTO of Zenoss. “Zenoss 2.3 addresses both of these head on with a powerful monitoring solution for both physical and virtual environments that not only costs less to acquire, but also saves time and manpower through quick installation, auto-discovery of infrastructure assets, and drop-in performance templates.”

Zenoss Enterprise delivers functionality across the major IT management lifecycle disciplines (such as inventory discovery, configuration detection, network mapping, availability and performance monitoring, and event management) and across the full physical and virtual infrastructure. Integration of Inventory data in a central Configuration Database allows Zenoss Enterprise users to view all performance, availability, and event data with a single web console. The product also includes remediation, allowing Zenoss to take corrective actions automatically when problems occur.

Guest Post: VMware’s Biggest Threat Isn’t Microsoft

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This is a cross-post of a blog article written by Gregory Ness, former VP of Marketing for Blue Lane Technologies who is currently working for InfoBlox.

The tech industry loves great battles between rivals, and it is often tempting to frame challenges within the context of specific competitive battles. Many see the entrance of Microsoft or even Citrix into virtualization as VMware’s biggest threat. I beg to differ.

VMware’s biggest threat is virtualization-lite, or the confinement of the virtualization business case to within hypervisor VLANS. VMware needs to get enterprises to the bigger picture, the full realization of the benefits of virtualization in the data center, including VMotion. If it cannot, then its sheer share of the data center market will be many times smaller than otherwise, with or without Microsoft or Citrix.

Getting beyond virtualization-lite should be VMware’s number one goal. That would involve unprecedented work with related IT eco-system elements. VMsafe was a great step forward, but it didn’t deliver dynamic security solutions capable of protecting moving VMs.

Another area directly impacted and often overlooked is the network itself. That is, can a static network infrastructure manage, protect, maintain and/or deliver dynamic systems and endpoints? If it cannot, then that is a problem for VMware and an opportunity for the network solutions players.

That is why I think the biggest VMware requirement for success is dynamic infrastructure, or Infrastructure 2.0.

There are substantial virtualization and cloud computing initiatives that will also depend upon dynamic infrastructure. We’ve talked about this issue at Archimedius from both the standpoint of virtualization security and cloud computing. Yet I’m discovering that the issue is much bigger than that. Some enterprises get this and are moving to more dynamic infrastructure; yet others are trying to figure it out.

I think this issue is bigger for IT and networking than a weak global economy. It promises to produce an explosion of breakthroughs in network, endpoint and application intelligence.

The End of Neverland, What Neverland ?

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Stop the presses, RedHat and AMD just announced the end of Neverland.

The big News seems to be that RedHat and AMD managed to do Live migration of a virtual machine between 2 different CPU Vendors.

Now given my age and my starting alzheimer, LinuxKongress 2005 in Hamburg seems like ages ago,
As a speaker giving my Automating Xen Deployments talk early on the first conference day , I flew in the day before the conference and I needed some network connectivity so I sneeked into Ian Pratt’s tutorial about Xen. I remember sitting between Heinz Mauelshagen and my colegue Peter Leemans, Heinz was playing with SMP guests on a non SMP host and tried to figure out the limits.

If I recall correctly at the end of his session Ian was explaining Live Migration and demoing it by migrating a small virtual machine around between laptops of people in the front rows of the audience , Laptops from different architectures and from there started a discussion about CPU feature checking.

I asked around and some people actually remember parts of the discussion and the demo.

So for me , when RedHat and AMD claim today they have achieved in something new that was Never going to be implement they are either focusing on nitty details, like migrating from 2 brand new CPU’s to each other and forgetting the fundaments already existed for ages or just trying to get some positive news out of the door. In which they succeeded.

But I`m looking out for the next step in virtualization , not just mashups of things we’ve all been doing before, or things that are really similar to existing things.