Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

HP today announced the expansion of its virtualized browsing solution across select business desktop products and its plans to introduce Linux as an operating system choice for business desktop customers. The offerings are designed to help small businesses enhance their productivity and ease their management of technology. The first-of-its-kind Mozilla Firefox for HP Virtual Solution was developed with Symantec and Mozilla for HP customers. The solution uses the standard release of Mozilla Firefox with a Symantec Software Virtualization Solution layer that allows customers to use the Internet productively while keeping business PCs stable and easier to support. As customers surf the web, changes made to the PC are contained in a “virtual layer,” separate from the operating system, and do not permanently alter the machine. Customers can therefore reset the browser as needed, instantly returning the PC to its last-known good state. Previously offered on the HP Compaq dc7900 Bus...

Today, the FSF let Cisco Systems know in no uncertain terms that line had been crossed . The complaint centers on the Linksys brand routers, and the firmware used on those products. Brett Smith, the licensing compliance engineer at the FSF said that in 2003, the FSF was notified that the Linksys WRT54G used GPL/LGPL licensed code in its firmware, but customers weren't getting the source code that these licenses required Cisco supply . He said that initially, Cisco seemed willing to work with the FSF to put procedures in place so that its products -- at the time, and in the future -- would comply with the license terms the firmware used. Over the course of five years, a compliance plan never materialized. As the FSF investigated the Linksys WRT54G complaint, it was receiving license violation reports regarding other Cisco products. Smith says that new issues were being brought up before the older ones could be addressed, resulting in "...a five-years-running game of Whack-A-...

With U.S and many other nations in deep recession, we should not fool ourselves and our consumers. We ought to also help them also take a look at the storage management capabilities and strengths of industry leader sponsored initiative. Surprisingly enough, HP and EMC aren't yet on the board. Brocade CA Cisco Emulex Fujitsu IBM LSI Logic NetApp Novell YottaYotta Check out their demos here and here and also the installation demo is here I do see that their blog is not frequently maintained, the project schedule says that it should be going RTM by Jan 2009 .

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – November 4, 2008 – RightScale, Inc ., the leader in cloud computing management, announced that it has partnered with the Eucalyptus Project Team at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to foster cloud computing research, experimentation and adoption. Starting today, the RightScale cloud computing management platform is available for use with the Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC), a cluster of servers at UCSB for testing and evaluating the Eucalyptus cloud infrastructure. RightScale and the Eucalyptus Project Team are also collaborating to deliver a more robust private cloud for organizations whose testing requirements extend beyond those offered by the EPC. The RightScale-Eucalyptus partnership is aimed at making cloud computing simple and accessible to everyone from universities, students and entrepreneurs to enterprises evaluating large cloud deployments. " We are honored to collaborate with the talented UCSB Eucalyptus Project Team to a...

"What drives me crazy is that Jonathan spends a lot of time in the press talking about OpenSolaris and not about the architecture and density of Sun's x86 servers, or what continues to be the world-changing architecture of its Niagara boxes. As a partner I'd like to see him creating increased visibility and attention for those things at Sun that we partners can drive and make money on," said Rob Wolfe, CEO of AvcomEast , a Vienna, Va., Sun solution provider. and Whether or not the vendor is getting the desired traction from this strategy is an open question, however. Several partners said that out of 10 customers looking at OpenSolaris or Linux, maybe one or two end up running either on Sun hardware. But Sun-affiliated partners insist customers will pay for real value, as long as it is communicated clearly and emphatically. "If you look at the cell phone market, the model was historically to give away the handset and make money on the service or annual fees. The...

I am doing a couple of calls with some investors who are suddenly willing to bet on several open source parties or parties who have strong open source offerings. These parties could be open source vendors or could be parties that may have some open source or free hypervisors such as VMware Server, Hyper-V in their offerings. This has several reasons: Past experience : The 90s and .the dot com boom and bust clearly helped many open source companies such as Red Hat to weather the storm. Many perished and then next wave many will perish. Many companies are still stuck in the legacy mode. They are bound to perish ! Many firms are breaking out of the older mode and are facing challenges but will survive to fight another battle. Cloud Computing : More stuff is running on the web and more stuff will be serviced from the web. All will be run as CloudApps. That will be the Killer App. No one would really care how it all is provisioned. That's the way we ran our little websites a couple of y...

I called up Kelly , Vyatta's CEO, last week as I was curious how the guys were doing. Talking to Kelly is real fun, enjoyable and enriching at the same time. Also it was great to hear that Vyatta was getting nmassively downloaded across the net. Vyatta launched a few years back and trust me in a few years from now, we'll be talking about Vyatta Gear. I am myself beginning to notice a lot more Vyatta communities build up gradually around the globe. NEW REFERENCE GUIDES Along with the final release of VC4.1 (see below), we've posted some additional documentation that segments material according to functional area. These new guides should be helpful for people looking for configuration examples. Command Reference Provides reference material for all Vyatta commands related to routing, QoS, logging and usage of the Vyatta CLI. High Availability Reference Provides command reference material and conf...

Sun on Wednesday also is releasing the second version of xVM Ops Center, a management system for both physical and virtual servers. The new version makes it easier to create virtual machines, manage storage and use xVM’s live migration feature, which makes it possible to move an application running on a virtual server from one physical device to another, Wilson says. Live migration is available in the open source version of xVM Server, but is easier to manage with Ops Center, he says. xVM Server is a software product with an embedded Web server, allowing management through a Web browser, according to Wilson. xVM Server is based on the open source Xen hypervisor, but includes technologies taken from Sun’s OpenSolaris operating system that make it more scalable, fault-resistant and easy to update, he says. Source

Sun is pretty serious about this business. Would Sun be shipping a ESX-like (ep, we all know that xVM is not really taking off) version soon out of all the development experience out of VirtualBox? I know, its a bit too late or that but you just never know! Cloud Computing is coming and whether you like your own hypervisor there or not, desktop is definitely what Sun is poised for! This now adds the ability to run 64-bit OSes on a virtual machine, an improved GUI on OS X and paid support subscription for its customers. This new release comes only a few days after the release of the maintenance release 1.6.6 which already included some important fixes, like improved stability and performance on AMD CPUs that support AMD-V virtualisation, plus better SATA drivers, shared folders performance, improved support for recent Linux kernels, and some fixes for OS-X users as well. A full "change log" detailing the bugs fixed can be found over here . Available in 32-bit and 64-bit e...

ELASTRA’s products are designed for portability across compute clouds and currently provide support for the Amazon EC2 and S3 compute and storage environments. Because Eucalyptus exposes its virtual machines through an EC2-compatible API, ELASTRA’s portability to Eucalyptus was a straightforward addition to its platform offering. “The Eucalyptus team has combined several useful open source technologies, including Mule, VDE, and libvirt, into a compelling service layer,” said Stuart Charlton, chief software architect, ELASTRA. “Work still remains to incorporate richer networking, storage and security capabilities, but we look forward to contributing further to building an open cloud ecosystem.” Eucaplyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is desig...

"A growing number of organizations run their Linux environments on VMware virtualization, and the Linux Foundation gives us a collaborative forum to effectively address the needs of our customers," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and solutions at VMware. "We are delighted to become a member of The Linux Foundation and look forward to making future contributions to the Linux community." According to research firm IDC, revenue for the virtual machine software market may increase by more than four times from 2006-2011 to reach $4.8 billion by 2011*. As adoption of Linux expands as a result of its natural position as a platform for next-generation computing in the cloud and in virtualized environments, companies such as VMware are looking to The Linux Foundation as the forum for collaboration. VMware's participation in the Linux community includes the cont...

Santa Clara, CA – July 15, 2008 – Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced “ Project Kensho ,” which will deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that, for the first time, allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads. These tools will allow application workloads to be imported and run across Citrix XenServer™, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V™ and VMware™ ESX virtual environments. As virtualization becomes a mainstream component of enterprise IT infrastructure, users need ways to automate and secure the lifecycle of their application workloads without being tied to a single hypervisor platform or virtual hard disk format. By implementing the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) OVF standard, Project Kensho will enable ISVs and enterprise IT staff to leverage a hypervisor-independent porta...

As virtualization matures and gets commoditized, most of the firms will look at more open and flexible ways of virtualization. Open Source may be the answer to the ones who do not want to get stuck in the rut of who to buy. Our membership is growing everyday and the members keep coming. Click here to join the crowd and start engaging with the community!

I've been thinking a lot lately on the Prairietekism (PrairieTek was a company that almost owned most of the 5 and 10 inch disk drive market before going bankrupt because of some fundamental wrong decisions in their product strategy) and wanted to write up an article and compare it with VMware's fate in the coming years to see. It does not have to go this way but will certainly mean that a sound product still does not guarantee you a sound future, if it is not aligned with the rest of the market's expectations and directions. About Qlusters, we already knew that they were going to go away. It is sad but it has happened. Systems management start-up Qlusters Inc. has closed down after seven years. Management yesterday notified the 30 employees of the move. The company failed to take off even though the sector is a hot one with takeovers at hundreds of millions of dollars. According to IVC Online, Qlusters raised $34 million, including $10 million in a financing round a year ...

Here's the toolkit and here's the reference guide. If its as cool as DTrace (Its is also freely available lately), then I'm in! Good to see Keith come out in the open to talk about it as well ;-) Here's the rest of the information

The lightweight Embedded Linux Hypervisor is based on the open source KVM project, and will support live migration of virtual machines from system to system in real time. Open source virtualisation technology would "deliver what proprietary products can't: open standards, true multi-vendor support and the ultimate in deployment and operational flexibility," said Paul Cormeir, president of products and technology at Red Hat in a statement. Link

What's new? Major re-write of openQRM / porting it to PHP We (the openQRM Team) are happy to announce a major re-write of openQRM ! The great feedback we got from the community over the last 2 years helped us to now implement all those feature requests and suggestions how to get better. This major re-write focus on the following design specifications : - KIS (keep it simple) - run everywhere (support for every linux distribution, especially Debian+Ubuntu) - clean up (remove all not needed code) - reduce code base (less code = less bugs) - using existing components (instead of providing own binaries/libs) - better packaging and dependencies - enabling/disabling plugins via the GUI - support for multiple databases (DB2, Mysql, Oracle, Postgres) - porting from java to PHP - focus on rapid-, appliance-based deployment, virtualization- and storage-management - ease-up installation - ... and some more Go get it now!!!

Their Announcement: We're pleased to announce a new Ulteo product called " Ulteo Virtual Desktop " (Beta) which allows you to use Linux applications on the Windows(TM) operating system. Ulteo Virtual Desktop is a full Ulteo system that runs seamlessly on Windows and offers a large choice of Linux applications, including the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client, OpenOffice.org office suite, multi-IM software such as Kopete and many others. It also offers all Ulteo features that are already available with the Ulteo Application System . This includes automatic system and application updates from the Internet and document synchronization accross all your user's Ulteo systems. It's been designed for individuals and corporate users who want to have Linux and Windows applications together on the same desktop without the hassles of dual booting or virtualization. Once installed, the Ulteo Virtual Desktop offers a special menu that can be used to launch...

While people are watching Parallels and VMware go after the desktop virtualization market on Apple, Sun has a very strong message to the world. The "new-order" is about freedom and open minds. SUN MICROSYSTEMS has unveiled a useful little update to its xVM VirtualBox, open sauce desktop virtualisation, which now has support for both Solaris and Mac OS X. The update means that Sun is now officially the first firm to have launched open source virtualisation for those particular two operating systems. Sun is seeking a niche in the big-business virtualisation market. Its Virtual Box, which was developed by German company Innotek, bought by Sun this February, can run as an application on a host operating system, allowing several guest OSs to run on top of it. L'inq here You can download as many flavors as you want, including Mac OS X intel

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