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AMD and Microsoft Team Up On Virtualization

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AMD today announced the availability of robust new virtualization solutions powered by a combination of technologies from AMD and Microsoft. This new deployment model uses AMD Opteron processors with AMD Virtualization technology together with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Mid-market companies in particular, which have traditionally been slower to implement virtualization, can take advantage of the combined AMD and Microsoft product offering to help reduce cost, complexity and energy consumption.

Resource consolidation achieved through virtualization can deliver the low energy consumption, and superior utilization and manageability demanded by today’s businesses. AMD Opteron processors and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, a hypervisor-based virtualization feature of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, allow OEMs, VARs and Solution Providers to offer a valuable server virtualization combination to help increase their competitive edge and market opportunity. AMD-V technology and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V also help enable businesses to scale according to demands, boosting the efficiency of workloads.

Advanced Micro Devices

Celio REDFLY Mobile Companion Aims to ‘Revolutionize’ Mobile Virtualization

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Celio‘s REDFLY Mobile Companion provides a larger screen and keyboard enabling workers to expand their smartphones into fully functioning mobile terminals, and the company claims it is revolutionizing the Mobile Virtualization and Remote Access industry with this ability.

The company’s flagship product is a new device that extends the Windows Mobile smartphone platform to a larger display, keyboard, and touchpad mouse using REDFLY’s universal software and hardware technology.

REDFLY gives mobile terminal functionality to the smartphone without increasing Total Cost of Ownership, the security risk of data loss or network access because all data and applications remain on the smartphone. Smartphone users can access a virtualized desktop or applications via their phone using a portable and wireless device with an 800 x 480 pixel screen, full keyboard, touchpad and eight hours of battery life.

Compellent Technologies Adds Support for Oracle VM

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Compellent Technologies today announced support for Oracle VM server virtualization software. Compellent’s advanced virtualization creates a powerful storage infrastructure, delivering high performance, reduced cost of ownership, simplified storage management and an ideal platform for Oracle VM. More information about the partnership can be found here.

Oracle VM server virtualization software supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications, and offers scalable, low-cost server virtualization. Oracle VM’s next generation architecture supports the use of virtualization-aware paravirtualized guest operating systems to allow more efficient, lower overhead operations in areas critical to performance such as memory and I/O management. Oracle VM consists of open source server software and provides an easy-to-use graphical interface for creating and managing virtual server pools across an enterprise. Key Oracle products including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications are certified with Oracle VM.
Compellent is part of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program, and will extend that support to include Oracle VM. Compellent’s innovative software applications, including Thin Provisioning, Remote Replication and Automated Tiered Storage, allow data to be easily accessible, easily replicated and dynamically expanded in less time than traditional storage solutions.

3Leaf Systems Scores $35 Million in Series C Funding

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3Leaf Systems (previous coverage), a provider of virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers, today announced that it has secured new financing from a suite of blue-chip investors led by LSI Corporation with follow on investments by Alloy Ventures, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Intel Capital, and Storm Ventures.

3Leaf Systems says it will use the new capital to accelerate development of the company’s virtualization solutions and to expand sales and marketing activities.

Using 3Leaf’s products, enterprise data centers can dramatically increase their resource utilization and enhance their operational efficiency. The 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server has been named a Best of VMworld award winner at VMworld 2007 for its innovation, value, performance, reliability and ease of use.

3Leaf Systems

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]

PHD Technologes “Acq-hires” Xtravirt Co-founder Alex Mittell

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PHD Technologies (previous coverage), provider of the esXPRESS data protection solution for virtualized infrastructures, today announced the acquisition of UK-based Xtravirt’s suite of virtualization products. As part of the transaction, Xtravirt co-founder, Alex Mittell, will join PHD Technologies as Director of Research & Development. Xtravirt will continue to partner with PHD Technologies as a distributor of esXPRESS to existing and new Xtravirt customers in the UK.

The virtualization tools acquired by PHD Technologies’ will benefit managers of virtualization infrastructures. These include VI3 SnapHunter, a virtual machine snapshot reporter; VI3 PatchDownloader, an automated downloader of VMware ESX patches; VISBU, an infrastructure backup utility and KS Quick Config, a tool to speed up the deployment and configuration of VMware ESX 3 servers.

Alex Mittell is widely known as a technical expert and thought leader in the virtualization community. Prior to co-founding Xtravirt, he worked at Oxford University in the UK as a virtual architect, setting up the university’s virtual infrastructure. Mittell will continue to be based in London.

The Virtual Infrastructure Evolves Into The Virtual Datacenter OS

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More and more details on what VMware calls the “Virtual Datacenter OS” are starting to come out of VMworld. The new CEO, Paul Maritz, is expected to elaborate on this new strategy in today’s keynote. (update: check our live blog coverage)

(Update 2: also check the coverage on Between The Lines and Virtually Speaking, both ZDNet blogs)

The VDC-OS is not a new product per se, but an umbrella name for a set of products and features, much like VMware Virtual Infrastructure is composed of ESX server, VirtualCenter and features like DRS, HA and VMotion.

VDC-OS is a natural evolution from the “virtual infrastructure” approach, which no longer only includes the virtualization servers and their shared storage and networking, but also the “next layer” in the virtualization stack, both upwards and downwards: VDC-OS no longer stops at the guest OS level, but provides application services as well, and in the other direction goes beyond the local network and is aware of the bigger picture.

The building blocks that make up VDC-OS will sound very familiar to beta testers of ESX 4.0 and technology partners. They include some new features, recent acquisitions and better integrated versions of the current product line-up, as well as third-party add-ons bearing the VMware Ready logo. All of these are called “vServices”.

The three big areas of vServices VMware identifies are:

  • Application vServices – Availability, Security, Scalability
  • Infrastructure vServices – vCompute, vStorage, vNetwork and vCloud
  • Management vServices – vCenter (the new name for VirtualCenter)

The new and current features in depth:

Application Services
Availability:

  • HA, VMotion, Storage VMotion, NIC/HBA teaming
  • VMware Fault tolerance, formerly known as “Continuous availability” – which allows a VM to run on two hosts simultaneously, using lock-stepping of CPU instructions. (new)
  • vCenter Data Recovery – built-in disk-based backup and recovery of VMs and the files within them, including data deduplication. (new)

Security

  • ESXi, a stripped-down hypervisor in only 32 MB of code, to reduce the attack surface
  • VMware vSafe (first announced at VMworld Europe), with third party support add-ons from IBM, Checkpoint, Radware and McAfee, who will announce their first products today (new)

Scalability

  • DRS
  • Hot add of virtual CPU, memory and PCIe devices like network adapters (new)
  • Very large VMs with 8 virtual CPUs and 256 GB of RAM (new)

Infrastructure Services

vCompute

  • CPU/Memory optimization with hardware assists, page sharing and memory ballooning
  • DRS
  • VMDirectPath – enabling wirespeed network access to VMs (new)
  • Paravirtualized SCSI – providing more iops per second at lower latency (new)

vStorage

  • VMFS
  • Linked clones (first demonstrated at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco) – allows multiple VMs to run from the same base disk (new)
  • Storage VMotion
  • Thin Provisioning (new)
  • APIs to closer work together with storage arrays (new)

vNetwork

  • more offload technologies to reduce virtualization overhead
  • Distributed vNetwork virtual switches (new)
  • Third-party virtual switches – the first one to be announced today by Cisco (new)

Cloud Services (vCloud)

  • VMotion and Storage VMotion (within the “internal cloud”)
  • VMware vCloud (new)
  • Network vMotion – preserving network and security policies when a virtual machine is being migrated (new)
  • vApp – an encapsulation of a VM and its policies and service levels, based on OVF (new)

Management

vCenter replaces VirtualCenter, and integrates the add-on products today known as Stage Manger, Lab Manager and the likes. It integrates withing other management frameworks from the likes of IBM and CA.

  • vCenter AppSpeed – performance monitoring and remediation to guarantee service levels. (new)
  • vCenter Orchestrator – to automate repetitive workflows
  • vCenter CapacityIQ – proactive capacity planning for entire VI environments
  • vCenter Chargeback – to allow IT departments or cloud service providers to charge based on VM usage
  • vCenter ConfigControl – called “update manager on steroids” by VMware, a central way to configure and update the virtual data center
  • Host Profiles – to standardize the setup of ESX hosts using templates

Watch out for more announcements by VMware and its partners in the coming hours and days.