Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Bridget reporting... Houston-based BMC Software introduced several new virtualization management products today, including nine new integrated offerings designed to eliminate the risk and operational expenses associated with management of virtualized data centers. BMC’s new virtualization management products are fully integrated with virtualization products from Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and VMware Inc. The new BMC software is based on an automated set of closed-loop change and configuration management (CLCCM) process workflows that reduce the latency, cost and risk associated with change management. All of the new offerings support both virtual and physical infrastructures. The nine new offerings support goals for performance, compliance and enterprise visibility by addressing the challenges created by virtualization. Some of the issues addressed include the following: *Planning a virtualization/consolidation initiative: BMC Virtualization Capacity Management and Planning Serv...

And what does it do? Secure and Agentless Inventory The Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool provides secure, agent-less and network-wide inventory that scales from small business to large enterprises. It collects and organizes system resources and device information from a single networked computer. Assessment tools often require users to first deploy software agents on all computers to be inventoried, but this tool does not. MAP uses technologies already available in your IT environment to perform inventory and assessments. These technologies include Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Remote Registry Service, SNMP, Active Directory Domain Services, and the Computer Browser service. Assessments can be completed on the following Windows platforms: Windows Vista Windows XP® Professional Windows Server 2003™ or Windows Server 2003 R2 Windows 2000 Professional or Windows 2000 Server Windows Server 2008 Comprehensive Data Analysis The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solu...

Getting up and talking about "alive and breathing" data center is not just a dream but is something a CIO so desperately needs for his business. When VMware first debuted or spoke about the record and replay, I though to myself: "Hmmm...the agile data center is not far away!" These tools will make us do a lot of root cause analysis and eventually there won't be a hiaat between the business and the IT folks. It will all be one. That is what I have been calling about the great convergence of the business and the often misunderstood and even mischevious IT domains. Anyways check this out: VAssert is a new API, debuting in Workstation 6.5 , that uses the Record and Replay functionality that we've been talking about for some time now. As you can tell by its name, VAssert is a relative of your standing programming ASSERT debugging tool, but by delaying assert-checking until later when the exact machine instructions are replayed, it can be very fast. That's so...

See them all here.

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!!!

This just in... Santa Clara, Calif., February 20, 2008 – FastScale Ò Technology, Inc., provider of next generation software virtualization and provisioning solutions, today announced the newest release of its flagship product, FastScale Composer™ Suite. FastScale Composer Suite is the first technology of its kind that fully automates the process of building, deploying and managing server software environments and delivers an end to end server software management solution for enterprise class data centers and Web farms. The latest release, FastScale Composer Suite 2.0, adds new capabilities and enhancements focused on scalability and configuration management of large, multi-thousand server installations. FastScale Composer Suite completely automates the labor-intensive, error-prone task of building, streamlining and managing server software environments throughout the lifecycle. With FastScale Composer Suite, software environments average 99% smaller than traditional golden image...

This just in... CLEVELAND , Ohio , Feb. 18, 2008 – Veeam Software, innovative provider of systems management tools for VMware ESX Server environments, today announced the Veeam Management Suite for VMware, a comprehensive suite designed to address many of the common challenges faced by ESX administrators. The Veeam Management Suite for VMware works with and extends VMware VirtualCenter to help simplify the management of virtual environments – thereby reducing costs, increasing productivity and mitigating risk. “Virtualization technology offers an opportunity to dramatically improve the flexibility and manageability of enterprise systems,” said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam Software president and CEO. “On the other hand, fast virtualization adoption by medium and large enterprises creates new systems management challenges. These new virtualized environments call for different approaches, as well as new management tools. Traditional physical systems management tools simply aren’t...

Early release customers gain efficiencies Early-release customers have been using the new module in production environments, reclaiming terabytes of over-allocated virtual storage, eliminating unused storage hardware, capturing ESX server performance data, avoiding hundreds of thousands of dollars of unnecessary IT purchases and deferring maintenance expense. “Profiler for VMware showed us that we could take many of our physical hosts and convert them to Virtual Machines, saving us space and cost in our datacenters and helping us centralize over eight terabytes of storage,” said Ed Delgado, Storage Administrator, Risk Metrics. “It is a welcome addition to the Profiler Suite. Now I can look across the entire IT infrastructure – physical and virtual -- from a single console. At a glance from the Profiler console I can see how servers are performing, how much storage is available, the status of backup operations and application availability. Plus, I can drill down in any area for more in-...

I did call David a few days back while I was testing his ESX DVD, which he sent out to me for a review, so we spoke for quite sometime and shared some ideas. A decent and soft spoken guy, David leads a team of IT admins and is happy doing what he does. David has some important pointers around this. I have not tested VCB yet but according to him it is a bit too simple to put a VCB in your enterprise that has a handful of CLI to go with. VDI and the supported offering VDM 2.0 is still a new offering, it is a new market and although I am a big fan of it myself and have tested the Silverstone beta (not extensively but well enough to configurev it and run it), I prefer to advice clients to be cautious about doing the "traditional math on pumping VMs on each box" before going for a typical set and end up buying hardware to pack it all in just a handful machines. Take enough room to house the VMs in your enterprise, watch out for the price tag and please don't ignore the price f...

Just heard from the VKernel folks: PORTSMOUTH, N.H., February 4, 2008 – VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments, announced today the company has raised $4.6 million in its initial institutional round of funding. The round was co-led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners. VKernel will use the funds to advance product development, increase sales, and expand market awareness. Additionally, Mitchell Kertzman of Hummer Winblad and Dave Barrett of Polaris will join VKernel’s Board of Directors. “The server virtualization market is growing explosively,” said Mitchell Kertzman, managing director at Hummer Winblad. “This has us very excited about VKernel’s vision as it is providing the essential tools for IT staffs to virtualize their environments faster, more cost-effectively, and with greater confidence.” “We believe organizations will see VKernel technology as a vital component of...

Startup VMLogix has launched LabManager, a product for conducting software builds and testing new software as it comes out of the development process. VMware, the dominant virtualization vendor, has a similar product by the same name, VMware Lab Manager, first introduced in November 2006. VMLogix was a few months behind, launching LabManager in July 2007. In the current 3.3 version release announced Jan. 28, VMLogix LabManager can conduct software quality assurance and testing in virtualized environments under VMware's ESX Server orCitrix (NSDQ: CTXS) XenServer, "the only virtual lab automation solution on the market to support XenServer." "We are finally presenting an alternative to VMware," said Sameer Dholakia, CEO, in an interview. Support for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Hyper-V hypervisor will soon follow, as well as Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) hypervisors, both based on XenSource's Xen hypervisor, Dholakia said. VMLogix seeks...

We are seeing a lot of complementers are turning to Citrix. Citrix channel partners are growing by huge numbers and we are seeing a massive build-up for toolkits in that direction. VMlogix announced it, Reflex Security announced it , and many more will follow suit!

I spoke to our good friend and entrepreneur Ratmir, the founder of Aelita (which he sold to Quest for over $100M) some time back. When Ratmir started with this new idea on this newer turf, he was entering a "stage battlefield"where he has learned to master the game during the Microsoft-Novell battle and eventual migration abilities. This seems to be repeating itself with a possible Microsoft Citrix acquisition. I am personally advising that this should better happen at a later stage, like 2009 Q2, but any other developments and an aggressive push from a third party can make this happen this year as well. Anyways, you know what I am getting at. Microsoft has a different challenge today and on a different turf (horizontal, flatter, blogomaniacal age) and we are very curious how the "new middle" will be situated established in this game. Anyways, here is the (summarized) chat I had with Ratmir : 1. Hi Ratmir, what has changed at Veeam Software since we last s...

AUSTIN, Texas—January 23, 2008 — Surgient, the market leader in virtual labs that power solutions for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that it has been awarded three new patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Reinforcing its technical leadership in the virtual lab management market, the three new patents cover technologies that enable Surgient customers to better allocate, manage and organize virtualized resources used to accelerate the software development and delivery lifecycle. The three patented technologies are key components of the Surgient virtual lab management platform, providing organizations with enhanced efficiency for all software delivery processes. Specifically, the patented technologies help organizations better manage and coordinate the use of virtual labs across both their physical and virtual infrastructures, ensuring that IT resources are utilized to their fullest capacity. “Since pioneering the virtual lab manag...

We will do our RTA (Real-Time Analysis) on the community blog of CEB and talk about the future (Near-Future to be precise) developments with such "implosive black-holing"phenomena. The trillion dollar question is: Where does the consumer stand in all this hyper-disruptive era). I may also be writing for the cool domain owner Toon Vanagt of the one and only Virtualization.com soon. You'll be hearing from me soon on that one. “We see virtualization as the next great frontier within IT,” said Vinny Smith , Quest CEO , “and the completion of the Vizioncore acquisition along with the recent additions of Provision Networks and Invirtus to the Quest family combine to position us as one of the leading pioneers in this emerging market space. As virtualization grows in importance for organizations, the demand for the kind of management products we’ve delivered for years in the database, application and Windows infrastructure areas will increase. Seeing this as the next logical...

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What is virtual network intelligence? It's a new category of virtual system management tools that provides extensive reporting, analytics and alerts on all network activity within your virtual environment. And that means improved IT accounting, visibility for IT planning and information for IT compliance. Get the basic edition free here, I was downloading the product and found the download to be extraordinarily large (550MB!), I guess it's a VM which you need to load to your ESX or VMware Server environment.

This firm is called fortisphere. Embotics is already working on its V-commander. I personally want to see a product before I can say about a firm, but you can go to their site and see what's there. They have a couple of TMs out there, I too have some, BTW, on my Avastu. I am kind of tired of this "over explosion" of too many start-ups. Too many products are coming in before clients can barely even understand what Virtualization is. I will be talking to Embotics people next week Tuesday to get a real idea of what their VMLM is all about. When we have a better idea of their product, we can then advice the readers if its a good fit within their portfolio.

I don't need to do an executive summary or even point you to that report which I got from Symantec about how crucial the backup is. Without a robust backup, you could have the best systems in place and the coolest software running under the hood, but your data is as good alive as long as it is running. With the advent of virtualization, backup is suddenly getting a lot of attention. And rightly so, many of us have seen it happen before our eyes: A backup that could not be recovered! We all have gone through this and looking to your SAN or System Admin in despair is not going to help. Business driven organizations have this very carefully planned and even have drills to check that the backups are really working! Anyways, if you don't have the power or the capacity to have someone be held accountable for that backup, you could have it done by someone else. That is where the CRC folks come in. So I went ahead and inteviewed the CEO, Robert Gerace, who leads a firm that does it al...

Just spoke to the VP Product Strategy and got a better idea of what Surgient VQMS product can do. I've downloaded the latest version and will be trying it out in the weekend! Go get it here and join the forums here to resolve your technical issues with the product.