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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
Richard Garsthagen, Senior Evangelist for VMware in EMEA (see the interview we did with him at the last VMworld Europe), has announced in a blog post that VMworld Europe 2009 will again be held in Palais de Festivals in Cannes (the same pace of where the film festival is) from Feb 24 till 26.
The pre-registration page has already been opened up, in case you’re interested in enrolling quickly and getting regular updates about upcoming announcements.
Xiotech today announced Virtual View, a new add-on for its ICON Manager user interface that aims to simplify storage monitoring, management and provisioning tasks in virtual environments. Virtual View enables administrators to manage storage in their VMware infrastructure environments from a single interface. Users can have a global view of the three storage layers (array, VMware ESX and virtual machine) from a single console and then automate configuration across all layers.
The Virtual View plug-in expands the Xiotech’s ICON Manager interface, enabling administrators to explore and map all VMware ESX hosts, storage relationships and properties in a unified view. As a result of Virtual View’s tight integration with the VMware APIs, it can automate the creation and expansion of virtual disks; logical unit number (LUN) assignments; and datastore creations for ESX systems and clusters.
You can watch a Flash demo of the capabilities of Virtual View here.
Xiotech’s development platform for storage management is based on Web services. As a result, Xiotech says it can add new management capabilities faster using industry-standard technology and more easily integrate storage services from other vendors.
Xiotech announced the latest version of ICON Manager in October 2007 with the release of its Magnitude 3D 4000 storage system. ICON Manager is built on a Web services platform and features capabilities as Server View, which simplifies storage provisioning for servers, and Intelligent Provisioning, which enables automatic storage provisioning without the risk of over-subscription.
VMware has released a minor update for its connection broker Virtual Desktop Manager, technology it aquired by snapping up Propero about a year ago. VDM – download a trial here – has now reached version 2.1 (build 596) and includes the following addition features:
Also, the company expects to ship ThinApp 1.0 (former Thinstall, of which the beta 2 was announced recently) as well as Server 2.0 (currently also in beta 2) during the course of this Summer.
VMware today announced (PDF) it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive Networks, a privately-held application performance management software company with headquarters in San Mateo, California and principal R&D facilities in Herzliya, Israel.
With this acquisition, VMware intends to leverage the B-hive team and technology to offer proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within VMware virtual machines – on both servers and desktops.
In addition, B-hive’s R&D facility and team will form the core of VMware’s new development center in Israel.
The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed during the third quarter of 2008, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.
“As customers increasingly standardize on the VMware platform to run their business-critical applications, it is critical for virtual infrastructure administrators to ensure the performance of applications from an end-user’s perspective,” said Stephen Herrod, Ph.D., chief technology officer, VMware. “B-hive’s agentless, virtual appliance-based approach goes beyond traditional monitoring approaches to proactively manage application performance to specified levels. These capabilities, combined with VMware’s proven virtualization platform, can allow our customers to consistently deliver on their application service level objectives. For example, if B-hive identifies degradation in application response time, it can remediate the problem by automatically instructing VMware Infrastructure to adjust the resources allocated to the application or provision an additional virtual machine with an additional instance of the application. In conjunction with VMware’s automated IT service delivery and business continuity capabilities, B-Hive’s service level management capabilities further deliver on the vision of an automated, always-on, virtual datacenter.”
Founded in 2005, B-hive has a solution that gives infrastructure groups visibility into application performance in virtual environments such as end-user transaction response time, virtual machine utilization and cross-virtual machine dependencies. According to the press release, the B-hive solution is designed to measure performance across multi-tier or service-oriented architecture applications that are distributed across clusters of ESX hypervisors and virtual machines.
Its flagship product, B-hive Conductor, monitors end-user performance and issues service level reports, but can also proactively resolve application performance problems by automatically triggering actions such as dynamically allocating more resources, migrating the application to a different server, provisioning additional VMs, changing transaction routing, or system re-boots. B-hive Conductor is agent-less, packaged as a virtual appliance and provides open, standards-based interfaces.
[Source: Globes]
eG Innovations announced the immediate availability of version 4.1 of its eG Enterprise Suite with support for monitoring of VMware ESX 3i and Solaris Containers. Later in the year, eG Enterprise plans to include monitoring of servers and desktops running the Citrix XenServer virtualization platform, and is also planning to support virtual environments from Microsoft, IBM, and others.
eG Innovations first announced its eG Monitor for VMware InfrastructuresT (eG VM MonitorTTM technology, the eG VM Monitor provides a comprehensive view of ) at VMworld 2007 in September 2007. eG VM Monitor is a monitoring solution that provides real-time “inside” and “outside” performance views of a virtual infrastructure.
With version 4.1, eG Enterprise supports both agent-based and agentless monitoring for VMware ESX 3, 3.5 and 3i servers. Complete inside and outside views of the VMs are available with either approach. The guest VMs being monitored can even be in different Microsoft Windows domains, and can be monitored without requiring agents on the guest VMs. Agentless monitoring is performed either from a Windows or a Linux system, and a single system can monitor several ESX servers running versions 3, 3.5, or 3i.
For Sun virtualized environments, an eG agent on a Solaris server can be configured to monitor all the zones on the server. Using the metrics collected, administrators can easily compare resource usage levels across zones on a server.
The eG Enterprise v4.1 is available immediately. Pricing is per ESX server monitored, regardless of the hardware capabilities (CPU, memory) of the ESX server, or the number of virtual machines or the virtual desktops it supports. Pricing for a 25 node VMware-based environment starts at $50,000.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers recently announced it will be shipping PRIMERGY BladeFrame (powered by Egenera) combined with VMware Infrastructure 3.
Here’s how the company explains the move:
“The virtualization boom has revolutionized data centers, accelerating the shift from fixed, unresponsive, locked-down server resources to dynamic data centers of the future, where server resources are allocated according to demand and are reconfigured on-the-fly to guarantee that they always provide the best-possible levels of availability.
Introducing the market leading data center software virtualization platform to the highly-versatile PRIMERGY BladeFrame line means that Fujitsu Siemens Computers and VMware are delivering the industry’s ultimate platform for data center virtualization, bar none.”
[Source: MySolutionInfo]