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Citrix “Opens Up The Cloud” For VMware Customers

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Citrix Systems today announced a new edition of CloudStack, which will feature enhanced support for both the VMware vSphere and Oracle VM hypervisors, enabling VMware and Oracle customers to manage their virtualized servers as a highly available, scalable cloud computing environment.

Citrix CloudStack is not just a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud management layered on top, it is a production-ready, free and open source cloud infrastructure platform that helps providers of all types deploy and manage simple, cost-effective cloud services that are scalable, secure, and open by design.

The new release is based on the same CloudStack solution that has been used by some of the world’s largest and most successful public clouds to roll out new cloud services up to 50 times faster and at one-fifth the cost of alternative solutions.

This is the first release of the product since Citrix acquired Cloud.com in July.

Citrix CloudStack with support for VMware vSphere and bare metal provisioning is available today as a free download from CloudStack.org or as a commercially supported solution from Citrix. Oracle VM support will be available in October, followed by Microsoft Hyper-V later in Q4.

CloudStack can be deployed on-premise or as a hosted cloud service.

VMware Announces Availability Of VMware vSphere 5

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VMware today announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 5, delivering nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities to help customers transform IT by driving greater efficiency from existing investments and improving operational agility.

The foundation of VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite, VMware vSphere 5, includes new features and enhancements to deliver better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications. It also introduces advanced automation capabilities to free IT from manual processes and allow it to be more responsive to changing business requirements.

VMware vSphere 5 supports virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions — VMs can now be configured with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs. When combined with VMware vSphere 5’s enhanced High Availability, these gains in VM scalability and performance enable customers to virtualize any business-critical applications with confidence in the application’s continued performance and availability.

VMware vSphere 5 and the cloud infrastructure suite are supported by more than 25,000 partners, including technology partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), solution providers, service providers, and systems integrators, as well as every major global hardware manufacturer.

VMware vSphere 5 is currently available in packages and prices that address the widest range of customer requirements, starting at $83 per processor.

Hitachi, VMware Enter Strategic Cloud Partnership To Deliver IT As A Service

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Hitachi and VMware have announced a strategic partnership enabling Hitachi to deliver new cloud services to financial institutions in Asia. The new solution, Private Cloud for Finance Institutes, is based on VMware vSphere and the VMware vFabric cloud application platform and will help Hitachi deliver IT as a Service to customers.

The new Private Cloud for Finance Institutes combines VMware’s virtualization and cloud infrastructure expertise with Hitachi’s experience in providing vertically integrated solutions to deliver cloud services for customers.

As part of the new partnership, Hitachi and VMware will also work together on continued technology collaboration and joint marketing initiatives.

VMware Launches An Official Publishing Entity With A Little Help From Pearson

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Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, and VMware have announced VMware Press, a newly created technical imprint that will serve as VMware’s official publishing entity.

The newly formed press will provide a suite of virtualization technology and certification products in multiple languages and formats, and will focus on three types of content:

– Technical books, ebooks and videos that concentrate on specific applications of virtualization.
– Decision Maker books, ebooks and videos that focus on the business aspects of virtualization.
– Official certification materials that support VMware’s complete certification program.

The majority of the new products will target VMware technology, primarily VMware vSphere, VMware View, VMware vCenter and VMware vCloud, which comprise the basic platform for all of VMware’s products and services.

Working in conjunction with VMware, Pearson plans to leverage the user group community programs and social channels to further engage the VMware community and offer exclusive promotions and access to the certification and technology products endorsed by VMware.

Virtustream Teams Up With VMware To Run SAP Applications On The xStream Enterprise Cloud Platform

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Virtustream, a provider of cloud services and infrastructure solutions, today announced a partnership with VMware to demonstrate the viability and efficiency of running SAP applications in a secure, multi-tenanted enterprise cloud environment.

Through a new program offered by Virtustream, qualified SAP customers can test drive running their SAP applications on Virtustream’s enterprise cloud platform, xStream, with resources optimized by VMware vSphere.

VMware Acquires Shavlik Technologies

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Virtualization software juggernaut VMware this morning announced that it has agreed to buy Shavlik Technologies, a provider of cloud-based IT management solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Financial terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed later this year, were not disclosed, but Mark Shavlik was ‘happy‘ to announce the agreement: “I want to thank all Shavlik employees past and present as well as our partners. Because of your hard work and dedication, we were able to build a great company…Our two companies have a long-term relationship built upon VMware GO™, our joint SaaS based IT Management solution. VMware GO assists SMBs with rapid deployment and management of VMware vSphere, the VMware Hypervisor and general IT management of both physical and virtual computers. VMware GO has attracted over 200,000 registered users creating more than 20,000 VMware Hypervisors and 120,000 Virtual machines. Shavlik and VMware share a vision of IT Management for now and the future. A vision of delivering solid, easy to use IT solutions to SMBs to enable customers to take full advantage of the efficiencies gained with the latest technologies. ”

Shavlik Technologies was founded in 1993 to offer a new approach to security application design and development that enabled us to take big steps in the simplification of computer security while at the same time creating a very trustworthy product. Since then, we have grown to help thousands of customers simplify their IT management.

Shavlik Technologies provides on-premise and SaaS-based management solutions that enable SMBs to manage, monitor and secure their IT environments when moving to virtual and cloud computing IT deployments.

Some view this acquisition as a way for VMware to ‘shield’ their customers from popular configuration management and deployment tools, such as Puppet, Opscode’s Chef, and even Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM).

According to VMware’s press release, Shavlik currently has more than 3,500 customers using their on premise IT management products.