Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

For those of you with a little more time to spare, let’s take a closer look at what we are starting to see. First off, it’s clear that people are really impressed with the performance and simplicity of para-virtualization. It seems that this is going to drive adoption of virtualization more pervasively and earlier than we anticipated. Basically, there is no reason to not run para-virtualized while the additional flexibility it offers makes it a no-brainer. For any Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or 5 application, para-virtualization will soon be the default deployment. The rest here .

Yeah, I too didn't get it until the PaulDotCom geeks explained what it was. Think of virtualization as a cave, and you are trapped inside (just like the "guest" OS). Outside the cave there is a giagantic monster. Everytime you try to escape from the cave, you get squashed, pushed back in, or even have your legs cut off and re-attached facing the opposite way. No matter what you do, you can't escape the cave, unless of course your name is Tom Liston... He also points to the security doc by a Google employee , which we found in the morning today. (See below). Anyways interesting folks doing interesting stuff, check'em out .

Linux Virtualization is coming of age. You have KVM, Xen to name a few. Yet I have to say that the big blue has been on top of this way back in the late 90s and beginning 2000. Whatever happened to the big blue? I have always wondered and when I saw this nd do check out the links provided by the comment (which is far more interesting). When I read the links it looks like IBM may have just been sitting and watching this to gobble up the whole data centers when they have been virtualized (VMware, Xen, whatever). It is very much possible that they might pull of the big one with the consolidation move my moving all those (20 vms per box, say) into their own mainframe. After, by 2010, would anyone care if my system runs on Windows or Linux, let alone what Virtualization platform. I don't think that they care today either. This news article of IBM running 41400 Linux instances on one server: Ironically, IBM hopes to beat these upstarts at their own game. Thanks to the massive number-c...

Actually I am beginning to get some alerts and all redirecting to this Scribd . You can upload all kinds of formats there. Obviously I cannot tell if these docs are published out there with the prior permission of the author. BTW, this doc is written by Google. Check it out . Or read/download it here:

And infrastructure managers would agree. Why? Just think about the following: Scalability: And you don't have to move to a bigger datacenter, all you need is a few high performing servers and you have your new acquisition neatly aligned. And it won't surprise me if you did have loads of room for scalability within your existing datacenter! Migration (Matter of copy/paste OR do planned P2V) Cost reduction as a default option (Today managers are considered heroes if they can come up by saving some cost here and there by looking for cheaper contracts, if they are not able to setup an internal shop) but in Virtualization cost-reduction comes by default! Logistics (Copy over the net? Think of the Global Service and Delivery model, Today we move our Data Centers to Guatemala, next year we can go to Dalian). Examples here , here . Also feel free to search for any GDM related posts. Measurability : And here could be the danger. If your CIO (imagine an ex-infra guy who knows enough abou...

Cisco, which primarily makes switches and routers that shuttle IP traffic around networks, is interested in VMware because it will help Cisco's corporate customers run their data centers more efficiently. Once the deal is complete, Cisco will have less than one percent of the outstanding voting stock in the company, but VMware has agreed to consider naming a Cisco executive to its board once it goes public. Read the rest of the story here .

The 22,000-square-foot data center, nearly two years old, is built on 30 columns incorporated with vulcanized rubber layers that work as seismic isolators designed to withstand an 8.5-magnitude earthquake. The isolators allow the entire structure to sway 24 inches in any direction horizontally, according to a company spokeswoman. First American offered reporters a tour of its earthquake-hardened data center here yesterday, which will be matched soon by another near Dallas. But even if the building were somehow destroyed, First American could depend on data center virtualization technologies to provide disaster recovery with the Dallas data center, officials said. Virtualization for First American has resulted from a comprehensive $100 million IT upgrade first planned in 2004, which began with a data center consolidation and has led to voice-over-IP technology and other changes, said Evan Jafa, chief technology officer of First American. The company had $8.5 billion in revenues in 2006,...

Check them out!

It said the best way to do that was through responding to the growing shouts and screams coming from the little guys who see virtualisation, alongside power efficiency, as key issues driving their business needs. To underline its interest in the SMB space, AMD has kicked off a new strategy named Common Core, aimed at "simplifying systems management". Opteron product manager Steve Demski claimed that, in contrast to arch-rival Intel, AMD offered a more "stable, consistent roadmap". Read at Register .

Accentuating the ease of software delivery in large enterprises, VMLogix, a global provider of virtual infrastructure management technology to streamline the software development lifecycle, today announced the general availability of its flagship product, LabManager 3.0. With improved scalability, usability and broadened support for heterogeneous virtualization platforms and operating systems through product enhancements and strategic partnerships, VMLogix LabManager enables developers, testers and IT operations staff to deliver enterprise software quickly, reliably and cost-effectively. With the deployment of virtual labs expanding beyond the individual and group level, LabManager substantially streamlines processes across globally distributed application development and test teams by ensuring rapid, highly repeatable, resource-optimized deployments of complex, multi-machine build and test environments. VMLogix is the first to market with support for VMware ESX Server, Microsoft Virtu...

Atleast till 2010, as most of the analyst firms say. Ultimately, VMware will retain its hold because, "As firms convert from tactical to strategic virtualization, only VMware will have the goods." Gartner concurs that VMware will dominate for the remainder of the decade. It puts some caveats in place, however. Thomas Bittman in his address, "Virtualization and the New Computing Architecture" at last month's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. noted that although VMware will lead, "price (and EMC's dependence on VMware revenue) will be a major issue, unless VMware rapidly expands into higher levels of operations automation." And as for desktop virtualization, I am betting on a typical heterogeneous virtualized desktop environment. There are enough vendors out there. This article mentions Provision Networks but there are a lot more folks on desktop virtualization than on Server Virtualization. Read the rest...

In order to produce the benchmark, VMware has avoided the relatively easy approach of measuring the performance of virtual applications software running on specific machines. Instead, the benchmark measures the scalability of heterogeneous virtualised workloads. According to VMware: "It provides a consistent methodology so benchmark results can be compared across different virtualisation platforms." The result is that, by using the benchmark, companies should be able to "make appropriate hardware choices, and compare the performance and scalability of different virtualisation platforms", VMware says. Nice stuff this benchmarking. But will the clients really benchmark their stuff. Or lwetm e put it more bluntly, how the heck are you going to tell a client/customer to benchmark if they just have no clue of why a benchmark is done in the first place. Now that will not mean that all the clients are that way. I am pretty sure that besides silencing folks who have run tes...

EMC Corp. reported a 20 percent increase in second quarter net income Tuesday on a 21 percent increase in revenue, driven in part by the success of its VMware subsidiary, a portion of which soon will be spun off in an IPO. EMC reported net income of US$334.4 million, or $0.16 per share on revenue of $3.12 billion, for the three months ended June 30, compared to net income of $279 million, or $0.12 a share, on revenue of $2.57 billion in the same quarter of 2006. Contributors to EMC's results included its VMware Inc. subsidiary, a provider of virtualization software, which reported a revenue increase of 89 percent to $298 million. EMC is planning to sell off 10 percent of VMware in an IPO (initial public offering) of stock this quarter. EMC said July 9 that VMware stock would be priced between $23 and $25 a share when it goes on the market. Well there's a lot more milking to come. Article here .

Will blog soon!

Well that's what this MS server division had to say to their 8000 partners. "The recent press has been inaccurate to say we don't do migration - we do migration: quick migration," Lees said Wednesday. Live migration is a memory-to-memory system while quick migration is machine-to-machine and disc-to-disc. "We had to make a trade-off to hit shipment date," Lees continued, explaining the decision to yank live migration. "The time when you really want to move something fast is when you are in a disaster recovery situation. Geo-clustering in Windows Server 2008 lets you set up a cluster over a wide-area network. If the virtual machine fails you can immediately flip over to another machine with zero down time. VMware doesn't offer anything like that," he said. Lots of talk but we're curious!

Veeam Configurator integrates with and extends the capabilities of VMware VirtualCenter, maintaining and building on VirtualCenter’s centralized view and associated benefits, such as VirtualCenter partitioning to simultaneously configure all ESX Servers in a cluster. Veeam Configurator offers GUI-based centralized control over ESX settings and subsystems not accessible from the VirtualCenter interface, freeing administrators from reliance on the service console. "The VMware ESX Server service console offers tremendous power for virtual server configuration," said Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO of Veeam Software. "Unfortunately, the console only allows you to configure one server at a time. In addition, for administrators who come from a Windows background, the open-source command line syntax takes time to research, learn, try and test. With this new product, we’ve done the learning and testing, so our customers can quickly configure multiple servers without having to...

A powerhouse with all the smartest folks on board. Sure everyone wants a stake in VMware. As Wall Street underwriters prepared to launch the much-anticipated IPO for EMC's VMware subsidiary, Intel Capital and VMware announced Monday that the processor manufacturer will invest $218.5 million for a 2.5% stock ownership in the software virtualization company. VMware announcements came fast and furious Monday as a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealed that VMware expects to raise $741.4 million on a $24-a-share offering price. Also Monday, VMware announced the availability of its Lab Manager 2.5, the company's virtual lab automation system. Original article .

VMware Inc., a subsidiary of data storage provider EMC Corp., expects to raise $741.4 million after expenses from its initial public offering, according to a regulatory filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Check the news article .

VMware's lab manager is here! Customers worldwide across 35 industries have adopted VMware Lab Manager since its release in December 2006. Building on the product's early success, leading quality management suites now integrate with VMware Lab Manager and the product offers new features designed to further automate its administration and use. VMware today also unveiled a VMware Lab Manager ROI calculator to help IT teams better quantify and communicate the product's potential value to their organizations. The ROI calculator is free of charge and available today at http://www.vmware.com/go/lm_calculator. "We were reaching our limit in space, power and data drops needed to support the amount of equipment required by our software developers and test teams," said Jay Leone, lab manager at Avaya. "With VMware Lab Manager we not only curbed server sprawl, but we were able to reduce power and data drop usage by 50 percent -- and also freed up more than 1,000 square...

Honestly, when you're Data Center is Virtualized, its time to hand it over to some really professional shops instead of handling the shoddy IT department which you probably are making a mess of. Anyways it won't come as a surprise to me if VMware itself starts offering its data centers for data center hosting and provisioning. Or partner with Google and run the data centers of (mainly) SMBs in your park. This post makes interesting points on the developments. Provisioning. Image-based deployment of virtual machines is much simpler and less error-prone than an installation process requiring many steps in the configuration. Virtuozzo, with extremely compact images, makes provisioning a snap. Density. Most existing applications were not designed for SaaS and only support a single tenant (user hierarchy) per environment. Virtualization allows multiple instances of such applications to run on the same machine, greatly improving efficiency without the need to redesign the application...

These developments are going to make VM a standard and default option. Very unfortunate for the OS as it becomes part of a stack but thw world's in a hurry and we can't waste time on the OS issues anymore. "Our goal is to reduce that overhead further," said Mueting. In the long run, the chip manufacturers say, they want to make the difference between physical and virtual server operation negligible. The original x86 instruction set that is used by both Intel and AMD chips had no way of recognizing a virtual machine. But since the two firms added virtualization hooks to their chips last year, known as AMD's Pacifica and Intel's Virtual Technology, the instruction set can run a virtual machine hypervisor -- a sort of thin, guest operating system talking directly to the hardware -- much more efficiently. In effect, instructions have been added to the x86 set, such as VRun, which tell the processor to treat a hypervisor as a privileged guest with direct access to ...

Exec shuffle continues. The Palo Alto-based company said Peek has more than 25 years of industry experience, including as Seattle-based Amazon.com's (NASDAQ:AMZN) chief accounting officer and senior vice president. Read the rest here .

Honestly, why on earth would you need Vista. It just has cool colors and nothing else. I really don't have that kind of time to test it on Virtualization platforms. Randy apparently did have some time and this is what he had to say... As with Vista under Windows-based VMware, the Vista-on-Ubuntu VM was slower than it should have been. But whereas the former configuration was as much as 50% slower than its equivalent native performance delta – as measured between Windows XP and Vista on bare hardware – indicated it should be, the Vista-on-Ubuntu scenario showed a 93% slower result. In other words, if the delta between XP and Vista running natively is ~2x, and the delta for the same OS configurations under Windows-hosted virtualization is ~2.5x, then the delta under Ubuntu is ~3x. Go figure or better yet like david Letterman would say "don't go there"

This is cool. I just hope it ain;t a hoax. Update 1: Still nothing from Steorn yet, but Irish RTE News has also "confirmed" the impending announcement. Moreover, a "very simplified version" of the technology will be viewable by streaming media over the Intertubes. So get ready kids, they say you'll be able to watch janky video of a prototype "lifting a weight" from four different angles starting at 6pm London time. Otherwise, you can view the device live at Kinetica from Thursday 5 July to Friday 13 July. Update 2: First picture of the mystical device! [Thanks, Jordy] Update 3: CEO Sean McCarthy tells SilconRepublic how it works. Namely, the time variance in magnetic fields allows the Orbo platform to "consistently produce power, going against the law of conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed." He goes on to say "It's too good to be true but it is true. It will have such an impact on everything...

//Slashgeo// A one man effort. It was a great thing. Although it saddens me but indeed dude its time to go ahead and take a break. And congrats on having your first baby! Here's the post!

We'll soon find out though. VESO, according to a large Dell customer who was briefed on the product, will be available in the second half of this year, and will have extended memory and I/O capabilities, simplified iSCSI boot functionality, physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration services, and an embedded hypervisor, most likely ESX Lite. VESO's promise is that it would be incredibly easy to set up, the source said. "Just plug it in to the network, configure it through a Web browser and you're done," he said. This is interesting. Michael Dell is indeed shaking things up real good. Read on...

More gluing going on as StorageCraft partners with Programmer's Paradise and VMware . "Our strategic partnerships with VMware and Programmer's Paradise will help customers easily use StorageCraft ShadowProtect solutions to manage their virtual environments," said Curt James, vice president of marketing and business development for StorageCraft. "As an industry-leading reseller, Programmer's Paradise is in a unique position to effectively sell StorageCraft solutions to the IT community." Sure we all wanna glue to the leader. But seriously, eventually we are looking at all shops with their enterprizes "in the cloud". It really won't matter any more where you are running your services, who's servicing. VMware is indeed going to kick some real ass. When I see Gartner and other folks talk about underestimation , I can just giggle. Same thing as Google, you just won't know what VMware is going to come up next month.

People come , people go. Right? Prior to joining Proofpoint, Auvil spent six months with Benchmark Capital as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, where he evaluated investments and advised portfolio companies. Prior to Benchmark, he spent four years serving as the chief financial officer at virtualization leader VMWare, where he played an important role in helping the company to evolve from a promising start-up to one of the fastest growing companies in the history of the software industry. Greatest thing is, if you are joining VMware or quitting now, it is already looking good on your resume. Read the details here.

Globalization is driving all of us nuts. From having companies from the east setting their o ffices in Europe No figure has been released on the total investment by Tech Mahindra in the Belfast centre but Invest Northern Ireland is putting £2.2m towards the total project costs. The centre has already opened with 60 staff and recruitment for a variety of IT and telecoms development roles is ongoing. The move brings the number of people employed by Indian tech companies in Northern Ireland to more than 2,500. Other Indian companies to open operations in Northern Ireland include FirstSource, HCL and Polaris. to firms backing off and taking off-shoring deals away from India But in his company blog, Riya chief executive Munjal Shah, said: "Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy. To give you an example, there is an employee of ours who took the first five years of his career to get from 1 percent to 10 percent of his equivalent U.S. counterpart. "He then jumped from 10 ...

Nope, I ain't writing any long story and won't be wasting my time using SmartDraw to make some nice pictures for you. Not today. What this user shows is what our desktops will look like. They will be thick. They will be coherent or united ;-) and they will host multiple apps, multiple OSs (if they still will matter, by then). eventually applications will be hosted directly on hardware. Check out this user's tale, in all its glory .

Obviously customers don't matter, right? "Let's say you have 10 four-way quadcore hosts for a big site like Big Brother or NineMSN," he said. "To use all the power of the machines, each core counts as a CPU. The downside is you end up with 40 virtual servers, which is hard to manage. Hostworks thus tends to only use virtualisation on smaller one- and two-way servers for smaller clients or those with low throughput paths. Hostworks' server consolidation is somewhat unique in that they are deploying virtualisation tools from both VMware and Microsoft. Most of Hostworks' customers choose VMware, but NineMSN insists on using Microsoft. "The reason we are deploying both is that NineMSN is half-owned by Microsoft," Gauvin said. Anyways waiting for a product that will be first class when ready for production in 2008 or 2009, is not really smart. Maybe by then we won't be doing virtualization the way we are today. Read the rest .

VMware has , in many ways, the culture that resembles Google. I personally love warm lunches (people in Holland don't do warm meals) and loved the free WARM lunch buffet when I visited this Makerere University in Uganda. I am leading a International Virtualization project there. Anyways I love the culture that these places encourage. A lot of participation. A lot of synergy. I love that! Anyways check out this intern's story.

well why would you need it if you have a Virtual Center, I may ask. Check it out if you have some time to spare to read it.

This interview with an HP exec. Of those who are in that 75%, how are they deploying it? I’ve heard people say they’re more likely to try virtualisation in a part of their IT system, like software testing and development, than in production. Are you finding that? I’ve seen lots in production. When we ask for a show of hands in customer meetings of how many are using virtualisation, 75% of the hands go up. And when we ask how many are using it in production, of the 75% who put their hands up, only about 25% of them put their hands down. Check out the rest of the interview.

Nimsoft Inc., an emerging leader of Service Level Management (SLM) solutions, today announced that Nimsoft is leading the industry by providing end- to-end, service level monitoring and reporting for VMware environments. Nimsoft’s signature in-depth and real-time reporting brings enterprise customers and managed service providers central management of multiple VMware Virtual Centers and 360 degree monitoring for all levels of the VMware stack, including hosted business applications. Nimsoft comprehensive data collection and intelligent reporting delivers clearer visibility for ongoing management and helps protect service level agreements in dynamic VMware environments. NimBUS for VMware is available today. article here.