Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Ed Walsh wonders why VMware introduced yet another layer called VMFS into the storage.

"We deployed VI in January and migrated 12 of our servers onto the platform. In the past four months, each node has locked up once, taking the virtualized servers on it down, as well, with no automatic move to a different node - VI is still trying to figure out what happened.. Aside from that, I have been very pleased, and certainly appreciate the much lower price tag." I followed up with Tanya and asked if the lockups resulted in any lost data. Here's what she said: "No, we didn't lose anything except uptime. As soon as I identified that a node was down, I was able to migrate the VMs to a different node and bring them right up. I haven't lost any data; I think my issues are actually with the Virtual Manager, but that is by no means an expert opinion." Link

All of the ecosystem partners will continue to help further VMware’s success because it is a symbiotic relationship—right now, everyone is making money. But in so doing, there is a big risk that over time, VMware will marginalize most, if not all, of its ecosystem partners. VMware is in a position to deliver more and more functionality that will increasingly impact the very ecosystem that is complicit in making it successful. Since VMware today is fundamentally an infrastructure company, it will build concentric circles of capability from that point outward. That is why its proprietary file system is so important—it enables VMware to manage and control data. It gives VMware the keys to the kingdom and they know it. Microsoft never quite got this and still doesn’t today. In the meantime, VMware is in a position to create more software that will impact storage, backup and replication. Many of the ecosystem partners – the server, storage, backup, data protection and operating system vendo...

”We are very excited about working with Virtual Iron to enable the Australian channel to greatly expand their market opportunity in the server virtualization market,” said Gavin Lawless, general manager, Avnet Technology Solutions, Australia. “Working with Virtual Iron gives us a foundation vendor for our server virtualization and storage practice. While we have just signed with Virtual Iron for virtualization, we have also announced a new relationship with Data Domain for storage. In essence, we are building a solution practice that will enable business partners to leverage the rapid growth in these markets.” A recent IDC Australia report titled Consolidation, Virtualisation, and Storage Strategies in Australia Small and Medium-Sized Business: The Quiet Revolution notes that "Cost considerations continue to be the strongest driver to the adoption of consolidation and virtualisation in Australian SMBs. This is due to operation costs decreasing as the ratio of personnel to number ...

This one was an interesting interview. You'd love to sit down, have a cup of coffee or beer, get your comfy headsets and listen to our conversation. You'll love it! More at Virtualization.com

Virtual Iron Software (http://www.virtualiron.com) , the leading provider of enterprise server virtualization made easy, recently announced outstanding results for its second half 2007. The announcement comes on the heels of $20M in new equity financing for the company and dramatic growth in revenue, channel and customers, as well as the broad expansion of its product platform and partner ecosystem. The announcement was made at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum, taking place today in San Francisco. Virtual Iron president and CEO Ed Walsh will be delivering a keynote address at the conference where he will discuss the emergence of server virtualization and its growing impact on the entire data center ecosystem. Two of Virtual Iron's end-user customers will also address the conference. "The server virtualization market is exploding and Virtual Iron continues to outpace the market and every one of its competitors,"said Ed Walsh, CEO of Virtual Iron. "This mom...

Funny, I speak to many IT folks in the past and have heard the same news around the IT manager circles. People are scared to get into to complex locks while the road to freedom and the flight to the Clouds is the shining light at the end of the tunnel. The "transitional vehicle" that virtualization is today, should not be a place where you want to get you ass glued too. But actually the decoupling of the app stack from your hardware layer does make it easier to make that move to the "Query 3.0" architecture which the clouds will try to help you with eventually. The battle to move on from one vehicle to another is pretty much ,rather primordial, the same. Today we are getting people excited because they spent all their time discussing and talking and now they are willing to budge. Same challenges will be there tomorrow...this is also called the fear of Change. Anyways, I am sure Ed didn't get too conceptual or philosophical with all this, he simply said: "S...

Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), the leading provider of enterprise server virtualization made easy, today announced outstanding results for its second half 2007. The announcement comes on the heels of $20 million in new equity financing for the company and dramatic growth in revenue, channel and customers, as well as the broad expansion of its product platform and partner ecosystem. The announcement was made at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum, taking place today in San Francisco. Virtual Iron president and CEO Ed Walsh will be delivering a keynote address at the conference where he will discuss the emergence of server virtualization and its growing impact on the entire data center ecosystem. Two of Virtual Iron’s end-user customers will also address the conference. “The server virtualization market is exploding and Virtual Iron continues to outpace the market and every one of its competitors,” said Ed Walsh, CEO of Virtual Iron. “This momentum is a direct resu...

Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software, today announced that it has achieved advanced partner status within IBM’s PartnerWorld program. The membership advancement reflects Virtual Iron’s continued sales, marketing and product development contributions to IBM and the optimization of Virtual Iron’s solutions for IBM's computing platforms including the certification of its software as IBM Server Proven, IBM System Storage Proven, and most recently, IBM Ready for Grid and IBM Ready for DB2. PartnerWorld, the IBM Business Partner program, delivers valuable benefits to help ISVs succeed in the marketplace and strengthen their relationship with IBM. Advanced level Business Partners like Virtual Iron have committed to maintaining a prosperous business relationship with IBM and are recognized and rewarded for that commitment with enhanced levels of marketing, sales, technical enablement and skill development support. IBM Ad...

So what will VMware release to get this up again? Q4 results coming soon and should they be any less than expected (I'm sure the investors are expecting more than ever) may be yet another blow to the NYSE run. But do also note the markets are terribly volatile and not to forget that competition from Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's XenServer, Sun's xVM, Oracle's VM, Virtual Iron etc is getting hotter in 2008. Microsoft has 8 Million customers and they all will get the Hyper-V in their shops on CD/DVDs. Here the live coverage at Google Finance. , Link Graph here

Server virtualization has quickly become a key area of investment for IT organizations worldwide. Its well-documented benefits involve minimal risk and provide a rapid payback. The clear return on investment combined with a broadening set of virtualization use cases has created the potential for mainstream customer adoption. This Webcast will look at some of the emerging hardware and software solutions and how they are fundamentally changing the economics of virtualization - facilitating dramatic gains in price performance and enabling the benefits of virtualization for a whole new set of users and business applications. In this webcast presentation, you will learn about: New advanced virtualization software tools priced for mainstream adoption The late...

Bridget covers this story, quoting searchservervirtualization: Having tried software from VMware and Microsoft, Bakerman looked at Virtual Iron and was attracted by the price. "The cost difference between Virtual Iron and VMware was about $35,000 for the features I wanted," Bakerman said. "We are a small firm with 35 attorneys, and I couldn't justify [the cost of] moving to Infrastructure VMware ESX Server ." Virtual Iron's lower price and ease of use Based on the Xen open source hypervisor, Virtual Iron software proved to be more than a good value; installation was a cinch and the support is good, Bakerman said. "I did the entire software installation on my own, where with VMware ESX, I would have had to hire a contractor for a few days to show me how to manage it," he said. Full coverage here.

I get occassionally comments from users, one such comment prompt me to write this little post: " Wow! It's a news-worthy event when Virtual Iron actually convinces someone to buy their software? " My answer to that is yes! Why? It tells about Virtualization adoption and that we are adopting Virtualization all the time. It tells us that we need to look at parties like Virtual Iron as well because we are looking at virtualization solutions. This is a blog, I develop strategies based on the amount of virtualization adoption that is taking place. I would even like to contact or be contacted by Virtual Iron clients to learn about their best practices. We cover virtualization on a broader scale; should Sun, Oracle, IBM, XenSource, VMware, Citrix, Parallels or any other virtualization vendor, open source or proprietary, deploy their solutions on their client base. 95% of the customer base is yet to be virtualized and we are very curious which vendor is "truly" working...

The space is heating up...duh, actually it never cooled down, isn't it? Virtual Iron Software ( www.virtualiron.com ), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software, today announced that Owen Bird, a law firm in Vancouver, British Columbia, is deploying its virtualization solution across its Windows computing infrastructure. The firm expects significant benefit from the software, including reduction of its server environment by almost two thirds, streamlined management of its computing environment and easy provisioning and set-up of systems for new users. “We tested out pretty much all of the virtualization offerings before settling on Virtual Iron,” said Stephen Bakerman, IT manager at Owen Bird. “Even if we had the money to go with VMware, I would still go with Virtual Iron. Their feature set is very competitive with VMware. The support is phenomenal and the technology capabilities continue to improve. If you’re looking for something that’s simple to use and easy ...

Virtual Iron 4.2, which becomes available Dec. 10, adds several new features to the company's virtualization suite, including a new management tool called LiveSnapshot, which allows user to take a snapshot of a virtual image and then apply a patch or a change to that image without shutting down the entire virtual server. Other tools include a multipathing feature for virtual server Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks that will provide better support for redundancy and business continuity. Multipathing is a relatively new technology that separates data and then divides the data into separate paths, which speeds up the I/O process. The latest version of Virtual Iron's software also includes new operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. PR of Virtual Iron says: Virtual Iron Version 4.2 is the first Xen®-based server virtualization solution to include: * Multi-pathing for virtual server Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks to s...

Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com) president and CEO Ed Walsh will present at the Storage Decisions Conference taking place this week in San Francisco. The event provides practical insights for storage-focused IT professionals on designing and managing storage systems more efficiently and aligning storage operations with their organizations' strategic initiatives. Storage Decisions takes place Tuesday, December 4th through Thursday, December 6th at the Hilton San Francisco. Read the rest here.

Virtual Iron is definitely up to something! Here the link to Venture Database

Both Dell and Virtual Iron have a CEO on a war-footing. That helps companies define their "next-level" strategy much faster than the ones who aren't ready for change. The news snippet: Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure software, announced a new worldwide authorized reseller agreement with Dell Corporation. Dell will work through Virtual Iron's distribution channel and resell the software to end-users as part of an extensive portfolio of server virtualization and storage offerings. Dell servers provide an ideal platform for Virtual Iron and virtualization is a key component of Dell's scaleable enterprise strategy that aims to help customers cost-effectively scale, improve utilization and simplify IT operations. Virtual Iron simplifies enterprise server virtualization with a comprehensive solution that is easy to use and easy to afford. Many of Virtual Iron's existing cust...

“Microsoft has worked with industry partners, such as Virtual Iron, to create a technical support model that will meet customers’ growing demands,” said Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization at Microsoft Corp. “As more customers deploy and virtualize Windows-based applications on Windows Server 2008, Virtual Iron or other server virtualization software, this program ensures that customers receive a joint support experience for their virtual infrastructure deployments.” Currently, the vast majority of Virtual Iron customers are virtualizing Windows Server workloads in their data centers. The Virtual Iron platform supports most Windows operating systems, including Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista. Virtual Iron recently announced its participation in the Interoperability Vendor Alliance. It is also a licensee of Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Image Format, which allows Virtual Iron users to easily patch, recover and manage their virtual s...

TheStreet.com carrying the article after Goldman Sach's analyst wonders if VMware can continue the streak. Stock in the Palo Alto, Calif., virtualization company fell $13.25, or 12.9%, to $89.25 in late trading. That makes for a 27% drop in the high-flying stock since Nov. 1. In a discussion on virtualization Wednesday, Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar posed the question of whether VMware, the "big gorilla," has an unbreakable hold on the market. "It's not a foregone conclusion that they're the gorilla forever," said Edward Walsh, CEO of privately held virtualization competitor Virtual Iron. But we shouldn't forget that its been a bad day (in fact I've been glued to the Bloomberg, or should I say Gloomberg given the laast couple of gloomy days) and consumer spendings, including corporate spendings are not going to shoot up anytime in the coming weeks. A lot of firms are sensitive to "sensitive" statements, like that of Oracle losing it...