vmware

VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Released

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware has announced its new tool for disaster recovery management and automation of a virtual infrastructure, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0 (build 97878).

VMware SRM 1.0 is part of VMware’s suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery.

“Effective disaster recovery has been a significant challenge for many organizations,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. “With the delivery of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware removes hurdles associated with disaster recovery planning and implementation. Through our innovative disaster recovery testing, management, and automation capabilities, we bring predictability back into the hands of IT and help eliminate risks associated with human error.”

Site Recovery Manager works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation. It provides:

Integrated management of disaster recovery plans. Create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter.
Non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Execute automated tests of recovery plans in an isolated testing environment using the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems.
Automated failover and recovery. Automate execution of the recovery process, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery.

VMware’s parent company, EMC, is one of the first vendors to officially announce support for Site Recovery Manager. Other vendors showing support for the product include 3Par, Dell, FalconStor Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, LeftHand Networks, and NetApp.

Pricing for Site Recovery Manager is based on the number of processors in the servers. SRM can be purchased as a standalone product or purchased as part of VMware’s Management and Automation Bundle which includes two-processor versions of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Lab Manager or VMware Stage Manager. There’s also a trial version available for download.

Release: VmwAROS 0.8 Beta

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VmwAROS is a pre-configured AROS Research Operating System environment for VMware.

A new version of this AROS distribution has been released. VmwAROS is available in two flavours: a virtual environment for VMware, and a live-cd that runs on top of real hardware, which can be installed on the hard drive as any other operating system. The new beta version includes lots of new games and applications for AROS, includes a complete C, C++ environment and E interpreter, and fixes an annoying compatibility problem that plagues current nightly builds on some hardware, by using a second “emergency” kernel.

[Source: OSNews]

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.”

openQRM 4.0 (Beta), Going Strong

June 18, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Matt Rechenburg has just announced the beta version of openQRM 4.0.

Not even that long after Qlusters decided to set the project free, the openQRM team has changed directions in a way Qlusters never would have allowed.

openQRM 4.0 is a major rewrite of the openQRM functionality in PHP. The openQRM team has been listening to the community and learned that contributions will be much easier if the tool would be rewritten in a scripting-based language. They decided to keep the platform as simple as possible.

Plugin support now is a lot easier, rather than having to reconfigure and enable plugins from the command line, one can now enable plugins from the webGUI (similar to the Drupal modules)

The old openQRM provided a lot of proprietary libraries and tools that were already available on a typical Linux distribution. From now on, openQRM will use the tools available from the distribution.

The goal of openQRM hasn’t changed , the focus of the project is still on on rapid-, appliance-based deployment, virtualization and storage management.

Still no news from the Qlusters side however, and their site obviously needs an update.

VMware Releases Stage Manager 1.0

June 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Almost a month after its original due date, VMware has released Stage Manager 1.0.

From the news release:

With VMware Stage Manager pre-production server sprawl, configuration drift and failed or delayed production releases are a thing of the past. VMware Stage Manager allows IT operations, service administrators and application owners to:

Visualize services, system configurations and release processes
Transition applications across the stages of the release process with a single mouse click
Accelerate the completion of change requests to production systems
Reduce server sprawl and resource requirements in pre-production
Enforce IT policies and regulatory compliance
Create and deploy clones of production systems for patch testing
Archive and restore any environment at any stage for auditing purposes.

Download the data sheet (PDF) for more information or try it for yourself by downloading an evaluation copy of VMware Stage Manager.

[Source: Virtual Enthusiasm]

Andrew Kutz Upgrades VMware Infrastructure Plug-in SVmotion

June 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

Andrew Kutz, author, developer and one of the leading experts on x86 server virtualization, has released version 1.0 of his populair VI plug-in SVmotion. The plug-in is available at SourceForge and includes new features like:

No longer counts RDM files against datastore size, fixing the bug that plagued the last version.
SVMotion operations against templates are not supported since VMware does not support them.
Added tool tips that explain why a relocation cannot take place
Automatically registers itself upon installation so you don’t have to enable it inside the VI client.
All SVMotion events write out a log, enabling better understanding of what went wrong in case of an error.
Aside from the library that loads the plug-in, all of VMware’s internal code has been replaced with the VI Toolkit for .NET.
The project is now supported by almost 20 unit tests, helping to ensure fewer bugs and greater stability.
The unit tests can be expanded to include testing for a system-resource supported number of servers since they use mock testing designed to work with the VI Toolkit for .NET.
The project is now built using NAnt, which allows nightly builds of the source, creates distributions, and builds the MSI installer.

Update: also read this Virtualization Admin article, and Andrew’s comment on this post.

[Source: VMBlog]