VMware Infrastructure 3

Shunra Software Releases Shunra VE for VMware Infrastructure 3

October 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Shunra Software, provider of network emulation and application performance testing solutions, and VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program member, today announced it has released Shunra VE for VMware Infrastructure 3.

Both Shunra and VMware have already established close collaboration as members of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, which provides a hands-on working environment for SAP, its customers and partners. This environment leverages partner technology, from companies including Shunra and VMware, to accurately simulate real-world application performance in a secure environment.

Egenera To Offer A Technology Preview Of Its New Capacity-on-Demand Solution at VMworld 2008

August 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Egenera today announced an upcoming technology preview of its capacity-on-demand solution developed jointly with VMware. Recently, Egenera had already picked VMware’s virtualization technology to power its BladeFrame Systems.

Set to be unveiled for the first time on the show floor at VMworld, the new joint capacity-on-demand solution will provide VMware VirtualCenter users access to PAN Manager by Egenera processing resources directly through VMware VirtualCenter. With capacity-on-demand, customers benefit from the automatic deployment of ESX hosts onto “bare metal” in response to overutilization that can adversely affect virtual machine performance.

With Egenera’s capacity-on-demand solution, new ESX hosts are automatically registered to VirtualCenter as part of the resource pool, while underutilized ESX hosts can be automatically powered off to reduce energy consumption. In addition, VMware features such as Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) and High Availability (HA) will rebalance virtual machine workloads within the changed environment.

Egenera

[Source: VMblog]

VMware Releases Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2, ESX and VirtualCenter Get Upgrades, ESXi Now 100% Free

July 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

VMware has released Update 2 for Infrastructure 3.5, listing a whole set of updates and features. At the same time, the company has made the license for ESXi completely free, as announced last week during the earnings call.

These are the highlights of some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware Infrastructure 3 (free evaluation here):

Windows Server 2008 support – Windows Server 2008 (Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions) is supported as a guest operating system. With VMware’s memory overcommit technology and the reliability of ESX, virtual machine density can be maximized with this new guest operating system to achieve the highest degree of ROI. Guest operating system customizations and Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) are not supported with Windows Server 2008.
Enhanced VMotion Compatibility – Enhanced VMotion compatibility (EVC) simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations by automatically configuring server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. Once EVC is enabled for a cluster in the VirtualCenter inventory, all hosts in that cluster are configured to ensure CPU compatibility for VMotion. VirtualCenter will not permit the addition of hosts which cannot be automatically configured to be compatible with those already in the EVC cluster.
Storage VMotion – Storage VMotion from a FC/iSCSI datastore to another FC/iSCSI datastore is supported. This support is extended on ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 1 as well.
VSS quiescing support – When creating quiesced snapshot of Windows Server 2003 guests, both filesystem and application quiescing are supported. With Windows Server 2008 guests, only filesystem quiescing is supported. For more information, see the Virtual Machine Backup Guide and the VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5 Release Notes.
Hot Virtual Extend Support – The ability to extend a virtual disk while virtual machines are running is provided. Hot extend is supported for vmfs flat virtual disks without snapshots opened in persistent mode.
192 vCPUs per host – VMware now supports increasing the maximum number of vCPUs per host 192 given that the maximum number of Virtual Machines per host is 170 and that no more than 3 virtual floppy devices or virtual CDROM devices are configured on the host at any given time. This support is extended on ESX 3.5 Update 1 as well.

As for the hardware enablement and management:

8Gb Fiber Channel HBAs – Support is available for 8Gb fiber channel HBAs. See the I/O Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i for details.
SAS arrays – more configurations are supported. See the Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i for details.
10 GbE iSCSI initiator – iSCSI over a 10GbE interface is supported. This support is extended on ESX Server 3.5 Update 1, ESX Server version 3.5 Update 1 Embedded and ESX Server version 3.5 Update 1 Installable as well.
10 GbE NFS support – NFS over a 10GbE interface is supported.
IBM System x3950 M2 – x3950 M2 in a 4-chassis configuration is supported, complete with hardware management capabilities through multi-node Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) driver and provider. Systems with up to 32 cores are fully supported. Systems with more than 32 cores are supported experimentally.
PMI OEM extension support – Execution of IPMI OEM extension commands is supported.
System health monitoring through CIM providers – More Common Information Model (CIM) providers are added for enhanced hardware monitoring, including storage management providers provided by QLogic and Emulex. LSI MegaRAID providers are also included and are supported experimentally.
CIM SMASH/Server Management API – The VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API provides an interface for developers building CIM-compliant applications to monitor and manage the health of systems. CIM SMASH is now a fully supported interface on ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
Display of system health information – More system health information is displayed in VI Client for both ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
Remote CLI – Remote Command Line Interface (CLI) is now supported on ESX Server 3.5 as well as ESX Server 3i. See the Remote Command-Line Interface Installation and Reference Guide for more information.

VirtualCenter 2.5 update 2 adds full support for monitoring individual virtual machine failures based on VMware tools heartbeats. This release also extends support for clusters containing mixed combinations of ESX and ESXi hosts, and minimizes previous configuration dependencies on DNS. It also extends support for alarms on the overall health of the server by considering the health of each of the individual system components such as memory and power supplies. Alarms can now be configured to trigger when host health degrades.

VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 provides the ability of creating a clone of a powered-on virtual machine without any downtime to the running virtual machine. Therefore, administrators are no longer required to power off a virtual machine in order to create a clone of it. Also, you can now automatically authenticate to VirtualCenter using your current Windows domain login credentials on the local workstation, as long as the credentials are valid on the VirtualCenter server.

This capability also supports logging in to Windows using Certificates and Smartcards. It can be used with the VI Client or the VI Remote CLI to ensure that scripts written using the VI Toolkits can take advantage of the Windows credentials of your current session to automatically connect to VirtualCenter.

VMware

Symantec Sets Up Virtualization Lab in Japan

July 28, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Symantec today announced that Symantec Japan has opened its new “Virtualisation Solutions Lab” for customers and partners, as the company continues to deliver on its virtualization strategy.

The Virtualisation Solutions Lab will enable Symantec Japan to test and optimize Symantec’s products for specific virtual environments quickly, and provide customers and partners with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience and see demonstrations of solution deployments for their environments. With this new facility, Symantec Japan claims it can better support its customers and partners who decide to implement virtualization solutions, as market needs for virtualization continue to grow rapidly.

The Virtualisation Solutions Lab is located within the Japan Engineering Center at Symantec Japan’s headquarters (Minato-ku, Tokyo), which is responsible for all technological verification required for Symantec’s products before their release into the Japanese market. With the launch of this new facility, the Virtualisation Solutions Lab will introduce comprehensive virtualisation solutions for data centres in VMware environments.

The line-up of solutions to be provided by the Virtualisation Solutions Lab is as follows:

Comprehensive backup solutions using Veritas NetBackup for VMware environments
Failover solutions with high availability of guest OS and VMware applications using Veritas Cluster Server
Backup and restore solutions for P2V (physical to virtual) system images using Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery
Deployment solutions for virtual servers using the Symantec Altiris platform

Symantec Japan plans to work closely with Citrix Systems and Microsoft to test virtualization solutions for Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments at the Virtualisation Solutions Lab in addition to VMware Infrastructure 3. In addition, Symantec Japan plans to organize regular product familiarization seminars as it continues to expand its range of solutions for its customers and partners.

[Source: ITWeb]

Symantec

VMware Eyes Chinese Market, Signs OEM Agreement With Inspur

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware and Inspur today announced an OEM agreement to further accelerate the adoption of VMware virtualization in China. Starting today, Inspur is selling, distributing and fully supporting VMware’s datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure, on Inspur server systems.

The two companies will collaborate on market development, product sales, professional training and customer acquisition as well as technical services.

“China’s rapid economic growth and increased focus on conserving energy have spurred the need for customers to adopt the best solutions for meeting business demands while enabling a green datacenter,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “VMware virtualization addresses this need with solutions that not only consolidate servers, but also jump ahead to the next stages of virtualization: aggregating IT resources in virtualized pools and automating the management of these resources. VMware virtualization combined with Inspur’s expertise in local customer requirements offers a way to quickly cut operating and capital costs by as much as half, deliver applications faster and more reliably in virtual machines, improve information security, and run a more flexible and eco-friendly IT environment.”

Customers can now purchase Inspur servers bundled with VMware Infrastructure 3, provided with full support from Inspur.

[Source: Welt Online]

HP And VMware Tighten Partnership With Deeper Software Integration

June 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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.”