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TBD Networks Goes For Full DataCenter Virtualization With TBDVirtualFabric-VME

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TBDVirtualFabric-VMware Edition (VME) provides the missing pieces for companies to realize the full benefits of Datacenter Virtualization by unifying physical and virtual firewalls and network infrastructure. TBDVirtualFabric-VME was specifically designed to provide a virtual fabric of networking, security, and firewall capabilities to scale VMware environments beyond current limitations.

“TBDVirtualFabric-VME naturally extends the benefits that VMware and VMotion create in current virtual environments,” commented Thomas Ludwig, CEO of TBD Networks. “It delivers benefits of full Datacenter Virtualization within minutes of installation. TBDVirtualFabric-VME automatically discovers the entire physical and virtual network (including firewalls, switches and VLANs), and gives administrators an intuitive GUI to define network topologies, high-availability and security policies. The result is a virtualized environment that complies with enterprise standards and scales to large deployments without giving up on the flexibility of datacenter-wide VMotion.”

TBDVirtualFabric-VME helps companies maximize their return on investment from Datacenter Virtualization efforts. It reduces networking bottlenecks, especially in multi vendor networks (supporting leading vendors such as Cisco, Foundry and Juniper), without compromising security by reducing hardware requirements, and improving the utilization of existing hardware and network links. TBDVirtualFabric-VME permits companies to provision, manage, and reconfigure networks at the speed of business. In addition to improved network performance, availability, and QoS, it can simultaneously help companies reduce security risks and network threats.

TBDVirtualFabric-VME is currently available in beta.

Solidcore S3 Control Software Now Supports VMware ESX

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Solidcore Systems, who specializes in change audit and configuration control, today announced its S3 Control software detects and validates change events to VMware environments in real time. Unlike previous methods that relied on multiple scan-based tools to manage change, the S3 Control software reconciles change events in real time from both virtual and physical infrastructures with an enterprise change management process.

Solidcore S3 Control eases the burden of managing the multitude of change events across virtualized systems by tracking changes on VMware ESX servers and virtual consoles in real time, alerting and reporting on change events, and correlating changes to authorization. All change events can be reconciled with an existing change management system, including HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy, CA Unicenter, and IBM Tivoli Service Desk.

Solidcore S3 Control captures “who” is making changes, “what” is being changed, “when” change is occurring, “how” the change was implemented, and “where” the change was made. This enables IT organizations to ensure deployed virtual and physical systems are always in a known and verified state. Solidcore can track changes to user roles and permissions, data stores attached to ESX hosts, high-availability configurations, Virtual Machine (VM) templates, resource pools, scheduled tasks, and guest VMs. Solidcore can also identify new users that have been created, edited or deleted, new hosts added to VMware VirtualCenter, and license server events in virtual systems. S3 Control validates these changes against the change management system, where any changes with a corresponding ticket are marked “authorized” and the change management system is updated with the current change information. Changes that occur without a matching ticket are immediately identified for review.

Solidcore’s support for VMware ESX is available today in the latest release of the Solidcore S3 Control software.

Solidcore Systems

[Source: Businesswire]

DTMF Accepts Draft Specification for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced the acceptance of a draft specification submitted by leading virtualization companies (VMware, Oracle and CA recently joined the task force) targeting an industry standard format for portable virtual machines. Virtual machines packaged in this format can be installed on any virtualization platform that supports the standard simplifying interoperability, security and virtual machine lifecycle management for virtual infrastructures.

The companies behind the collaboration on this specification include Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource. This group of virtualization industry leaders has submitted the specification to the DMTF for development into an industry standard. DMTF is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. DMTF will continue to develop this technology into a successful, open industry standard and promote it worldwide.

The proposed format, called the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform a portable package containing all required installation and configuration parameters for the virtual machines. This allows any virtualization platform that implements the standard to correctly install and run the virtual machines.

(IBM recently announced its open-ovf project.)

Most importantly, OVF specifies procedures and technologies to permit integrity checking of the virtual machines (VM) to ensure that they have not been modified since the package was produced. This enhances the security of the format and will alleviate security concerns of users who adopt virtual appliances produced by third parties. OVF also provides mechanisms that support license checking for the enclosed VMs, addressing a key concern of both independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers. Finally, OVF allows an installed VM to acquire information about its host virtualization platform and run-time environment, which allows the VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for the particular virtualization environment.

In addition to providing portability, integrity, and configurability of existing virtual hard disk formats. OVF is also extensible to support future developments of virtual hard disk formats whose specifications are openly available.

INX’ Virtualization Book Release Scheduled For VMware VMworld 2008 (Las Vegas)

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INX today announced the release of “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” at VMware VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

With the recent acquisition of AccessFlow in June, INX has made an aggressive move into the data center virtualization space by acquiring some of the most expert minds in the business. Those minds belong to Steve Kaplan and Gary Lamb, INX’s VP of Datacenter Virtualization and Senior Director of Data Center Virtualization Practice, respectively.
Steve and Gary have collaboratively written a book titled “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” and will be releasing the book at this year’s VMware World trade show, September 15 through the 18th in Las Vegas.
“Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” provides a starting point for understanding the VMware Infrastructure and deploying it for cost reduction, quicker deployments of systems, and better control of resource utilization, as well as datacenter management and high availability.
Kaplan and Lamb have started a national book tour to promote and discuss the book this month and will continue to tour until VMworld. Steve Kaplan is founder of AccessFlow and formerly ran an ROI consulting firm. He has helped organizations around the globe quantify their IT costs, written scores of published IT articles and white papers on virtualization, power savings and has spoken at many venues across the globe including delivering the keynote address at Thin Power 2006 in Norway.

Terremark Completes Infinistructure Deployment

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Terremark Worldwide today announced the completed deployment of the Infinistructure utility-computing platform at its facilities in Madrid and Amsterdam. The platform will benefit Terremark’s European and American customers and has been met with high demand from current customers and prospects.

Infinistructure’s server and storage infrastructure combines Terremark’s proprietary service-management platform with virtualization technology from partners including VMWare, Cisco, and IBM, providing a highly scalable and flexible high-performance computing platform.

Infinistructure’s on-demand network, storage and computing architecture allows customers to precisely match their infrastructure to their business needs, while leveraging a fully managed solution with plug-and-play access to network connectivity from multiple carriers. The Infinistructure platform is connected to the ESpanix exchange point in Spain and the AMS-IX exchange point in The Netherlands, the largest internet connection point in Europe with over 400 Gb/s in peak traffic.

terremark

Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor Sets New Benchmark for Virtualization Performance on the VMware Platform

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AMD today announced it has achieved the top spot on the VMware VMmark virtualization benchmark for x86 servers with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant DL585 G5. AMD now holds the top three spots on the 16-core VMmark benchmark.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology is designed to offer near-native performance of virtualized applications while enabling fast switching between virtual machines (VMs.) The VMmark 1.1 consolidation benchmark, released by VMware in May 2008, includes several workloads that take advantage of the benefits of RVI.

VMware VMmark 1.1 benchmark measures application performance in virtualized environments on a wide variety of enterprise workloads running simultaneously in separate virtual machines. Complete results for AMD’s latest VMmark score can be found here (PDF).

Bonus link: Forbes interviews Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions and software strategy at AMD.

Advanced Micro Devices