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Dell’s Latest Virtualization Play

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Dell has announced a series of products and updates around their virtualization offering. Here’s the takeaway:

  • New Dell PowerEdge full-height blade servers
  • Pre-installed integration and support of Microsoft Hyper-V for centralized management of virtualized environments
  • Advanced EqualLogic integration across multiple hypervisors
  • New services help customers simplify the design, deployment, security and management of virtualized environments: Infrastructure Consulting Services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) + Lifecycle Management for VMware environments

More information in the press release.

The most exciting news is that the company added to its EqualLogic product line a new, highly-scalable array – the PS5500E – and introduced advanced software features, including the EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware edition to improve data protection for virtual server environments.

The PS5500E builds upon Dell’s EqualLogic family with 24 or 48 terabytes (TB) of raw capacity in a 4U array – more than doubling the density and tripling the capacity of its predecessor model, the PS5000E, with equivalent hard disk drives. With the PS5500E, an EqualLogic SAN can scale up to 576 TB under a single management interface. This new array can be combined in the same SAN group with the existing EqualLogic systems. It provides an ideal solution for consolidating common tiered business data and applications such as file services, moderate I/O email, databases and virtual server environments. It can also be deployed for capacity-intensive near-line storage tiers and for disaster recovery sites.

You may be interested in the fact that Dell has also set up a dedicated section on its website about Microsoft Hyper-V.

Dell

Release: VMware Studio 1.0

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VMware has (quitely) released the first version of VMware Studio.

VMware Studio 1.0 enables software developers and hardware appliance vendors to build customized virtual appliances that can be shipped in industry standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

The OVF specification was originally co-authored by Citrix and VMware, with contributions from Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft. With this release, VMware beat Citrix to the punch.

VMware Studio is available as a free download here.

VMware

Stand By Your Woman: Mendel Rosenblum Leaves VMware Too

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Reporting on the recent removal of Diane Greene as president, CEO and board member of VMware, we wrote:

“We’re wondering how the VMware troops will react on the news, and what will happen with Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist at VMware and Greene’s husband.”

Now IHT / The New York Times has received confirmation that Rosenblum, co-founder and top executive at the company as well as husband to Greene, has resigned from his position (hat tip to Tarry). He announced his resignation and return to Stanford as a full-time professor in a companywide message on Monday night.

The NY Times also offers some insight about the removal of Greene:

On July 7, she found out just how cold it had become. After Greene made a special presentation to VMware’s board, Tucci, who heads VMware’s parent company, EMC, pulled her aside, according to people familiar with the events, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal company decisions.

Inviting Mendel Rosenblum, Greene’s husband and the co-founder of VMware, into the room, Tucci told Greene she was fired, effective immediately. And he said the board wanted Rosenblum, VMware’s chief scientist, to take her seat on the board. Rosenblum declined the offer.

The news comes after the surprising move of Richard Sarwal, former executive VP of research and development at VMware, who returned to Oracle after a brief stint at the company. Another executive to jump ship is Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development at VMware until recently.

Who’s next?

We’ll update the post should new information come to light.

BlueStripe Software Introduces FactFinder

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BlueStripe Software, provider of Application Service Management (ASM) solutions for virtualized data center environments, today announced (PDF) the availability of its flagship product, FactFinder. FactFinder enables enterprises to stage, deploy, and manage business?critical applications in virtual data center environments with the same degree of confidence and control as traditional environments.

FactFinder delivers three critical elements of application service management for virtual environments:

• Application Discovery & Mapping – FactFinder offers automatic discovery and topology mapping of
the application connections, processes, and interdependencies allowing for unmatched visibility into
both physical and virtual environments.
• Application?level Health Measurement – By enabling simple drill down into performance indicators
of connections, usage, and application access times, FactFinder depicts the relative health of a
business’ critical applications.
• Automatic Triage of Application & Server Problems – FactFinder’s easy to understand performance
indicators highlight areas of concern, showing where to focus efforts to solve problems and optimize
the supporting IT environment.

FactFinder is the only application management solution that enables enterprises to confidently deploy business-critical applications in virtualized environments. This makes it easy for infrastructure groups to gain visibility into application management and performance in virtual data center environments, including service response times, virtual machine utilization, and cross?server dependencies.

Unlike OS?based or network?based monitoring products, FactFinder measures performance across multi?tier and service?oriented architecture applications regardless of whether they are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors or a mix of physical and virtual environments. This allows enterprises to measure the impact of P2V conversions on business success and make decisions based on intelligent, accurate, and timely information.

eG Innovations Adds XenServer and Sun LDoms Support to Its VM Monitor

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eG Innovations today announced that its eG VM Monitor now supports Citrix XenServer and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Logical Domains (LDoms).

The enhancements are part of v4.2 of the company’s eG Enterprise Suite, which already supports VMware ESX and ESX 3i servers as well as Solaris Containers. The new software release also strengthens management of VMware environments. eG Enterprise agents can now be integrated directly within VMware’s Virtual Center. This greatly simplifies configuration of the monitoring for VMware server farms.

Also, the eG VM Monitor software now monitors the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager to provide an end-to-end view of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment. A new VM Search capability makes it easier to track the status and performance of virtual machines (VMs) as they move from one physical server to another.

The eG Enterprise Suite monitors Citrix XenServers and Sun LDoms in much the same way it monitors VMware ESX servers. eG Enterprise v4.2 offers agent-based and agentless monitoring of CitrixXen server v4.0 and 4.1. For agent-based monitoring, an eG agent on the control domain of a XenServer monitors the hypervisor and all its virtual machines (VMs).
Administrators can also choose to monitor their XenServers without agents, with either a Linux or a Windows system being used to host the remote data collector. Citrix XenMotion activity is tracked to determine when, how often, why and where VMs migrate to.

eG Enterprise v4.2 provides many other improvements and new features. These include: tracking and reporting uptime of individual VMs, ability to share customized views and reports among all or specific administrators, allowing administrators to select a console display “skin” (color) of their choice, providing selectable alert modes (e.g., email and SMS) to accommodate preferences of administrators who work in shifts; and custom monitoring of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The eG Enterprise v4.2 will be available at the end of September. Pricing for any virtualization platform supported is per server monitored, regardless of the hardware capabilities (e.g., CPU, memory, socket) of the server, or the number of virtual machines or virtual desktops it supports. Pricing for a 25-node environment starts at $50,000.

Microsoft Announcements: Hyper-V Server To Compete With ESXi, Windows Server 2008 R2 Will Sport Live Migration Feature

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Microsoft is doing a big virtualization splash today with their much-hyped ‘Get Virtual Now’ event in Washington. The Hyper-V 1.0 hypervisor was officially released, but that wasn’t much of a surprise, unlike the launch of a new version (free of charge) dubbed Hyper-V Server 2008. It’s a standalone server virtualization tool that enables firms to consolidate Windows and Linux workloads onto a single physical server.

You guessed it: it’s direct competition to VMware ESXi, and it’s going to make waves. The new product will be supported by the upcoming System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, to be released within 30 days as well.

Another surprise: the next version of Hyper-V which will be included with Windows Server 2008 R2, will have a live migration feature, something Microsoft was often criticized for because it lacked it. According to Mary Jo Foley, the release is slated for 2010.

Microsoft