Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

I quickly uploaded a Excel file to my Zoho account and created a database. The upload of those 500 records went pretty fast. Generation of reports seems to work well and fast. Features are pretty cool: Embedding to site, viewing underlying data, Embedded stuff: (As chart here, you can also do it as image) Viewing underlying data: And here a pie chart on top 10 vendors who got contracts in Nov 2008 Month! And an exported format as a *.png file Data: ButlerGroup Tool: Zoho CloudDB My verdict: I like it! :-)

Get them here . You can also freely upgrade your Fusion 1.x to 2.0. All links here .

The official launch of some cool intel stuff is to be announced coming Monday.

Absolutely! Here's more from ZDnet! Early, pre-release views are ecstatic . You have VPN support, QOS functionality, even traffic-shaping. Download it here . Like many open source companies Vyatta has both community and subscription versions. VC4, in fact, is short for Vyatta Community. This is not just important to Vyatta, but to the market it seeks to serve. Even if phone companies subscribe to open source code, they still want to keep their proprietary tweaks. Most won’t go anywhere near a product with out a sales contract. Vyatta lets them do this. The reality of the carrier market is that today it consists almost entirely of incumbents. Fortunately there remains an immense and growing corporate market, Intranets running telecomm services and Web 2.0 companies offer that market. This is Vyatta’s sweet spot. Whether it can really build a community is less important than whether it can build a sales channel. If it can, Cisco will face its first real market threat in a deca...

MENLO PARK, Calif. – April 14, 2008 – Pano Logic™ today announced a major new software release for its innovative desktop virtualization solution. By leveraging existing virtual infrastructure and integrating hardware at the desktop with software in the data center, Pano Logic provides the most complete and easiest-to-use virtual desktop solution on the market. The new release, Pano Virtual Desktop Solution (VDS) 2.0, can be deployed in new environments and network topologies, providing support for wide area network (WAN) deployments, dual monitor requirements, and offering certified support for wireless bridges and USB devices. Also, as a further extension of the partnership between Pano Logic and VMware, Pano VDS 2.0 fully integrates support for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM), giving users even greater deployment flexibility. “Desktop virtualization solutions that leverage existing server virtualization infrastructure represent an opportunity for IT organizations to extend the...

Barry reporting from Citrix's blog: Peter Blum from the Citrix XenServer team put together a short (37 minutes) product training for XenServer and recorded it using Camtasia. Below the info on the video, I have posted some info on the hardware support for Citrix XenServer (Processors, memory, storage, network) as well as the virtual machine limitations. In this video, Peter covers the following topics - 1.Setting up Xen Enterprise and Xen Center. 2.Creating resource pool. 3.Attaching the remote storage. 4.Creating VM 5.Using some of the features in the product. You can watch (and listen) to this mini product training here. After you watch teh XenServer training video, you may to read about the specific new features in XenServer v4 in this post. If you would like to go through a quick install yourself, you can download XenServer Express Edition for free. Once you have the code downloaded, it takes about 10 minutes to Xen Here are some background requirements for installing Citrix Xe...

Check out those cool specs! At A Glance Intel Xeon Quad-Core processors Four sockets, up to 16 cores per module 32 DIMM memory slots, industry leading 2 DIMMs/core Hardware-level virtualization, VMware and Xen support, cross-platform virtualization between Solaris 10 and Windows Front-accessible SAS and SATA hard drives 160Gbps I/O Manage with ILOM 2.0

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...

I forgot to mention. Last week I had a vendor briefing with StakSafe folks. The news will be released in a couple of hours. Keep watching here and at StackSafe !

Mac virtualization software maker SWSoft will have its latest offering, Parallels Server, on display at Macworld. The product is the first that allows virtualization of Apple's Mac OS Server 10.5 Leopard, and can run more than 50 different operating systems including different versions of Windows and Linux. Link to CRN

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.

Here's the video, all simple and pretty fast install I must say: Quick look via the Virtual Center 2.5 Default root password is none which is not really a good thing!

This one is sold on to VMware ;-) VMware Infrastructure 3 is a hard act to follow. When VI3 was released, it not only set the bar for all virtualization solutions to follow, but was so polished that many shops put it into production immediately, with no ill effects. This week's release of VMware Infrastructure 3.5 is intended to continue the trend of stable, function-rich releases from the leader in virtualization. Based on what I've seen in the beta code I've been testing, it'll be a close call. I've been running VI3.5 in the lab for weeks now, using the code provided from VMware Inc.'s beta program. This includes the base products ESX Server 3.5, VirtualCenter 2.5 and the management client, as well as new features such as live storage migration and distributed power management. It also includes a bevy of new add-ons -- for example, an automated patch manager and a tool for capacity planning and physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration. Link

If not yet, then I'd suggest you do it. Try loading it with IE, Firefox issues are being resolved! Asuumptions for the calculator: Server consolidation is conservatively estimated based on the number of servers: less than 50 servers virtualized – 8:1 consolidation ratio between 50 to 200 servers virtualized – 10:1 consolidation ratio 200 or more servers virtualized – 12:1 consolidation ratio Server consolidation ratio is halved for productivity and business critical servers being protected with everRun VM. Downtime costs are based on industry estimates for 350 person company. The ROI model prorates for a bigger or smaller company based on number of servers inputted. While server virtualization improves IT efficiency, the model does not assume any reduction in staff. Additional benefits such as savings from reduced provisioning time and reduced recovery time have been excluded from this model. Design and implementation costs estimates double at 200 servers to account fo...

I plan to talk to the 3PAR folks soon about this, for now here's the Press Statement! Fremont, CA , December 10, 2007— 3PAR ® (NYSE Arca: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage , announced today the introduction of 3cV, an innovative blueprint for the virtual datacenter. First coined by Deutsche Bank, a leading global bank, “3cV” stands for the combination of the 3PAR InServ® Storage Server, HP BladeSystem c-Class, and VMware® Infrastructure. These elements combine to form a complete utility computing offering that can enable customers to halve server, storage, and operational costs and to gain instant agility. “With 3cV, we have achieved remarkable gains in business agility and cost reduction for a broad range of applications including our property management system, databases, messaging, Web servers, and file servers,” said Rich Jackson, Vice President of Technology Operations at Hilton Grand Vacations. “With 3cV, we have quadrupled administrative efficiency a...

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...

Seanodes today introduced a new and revolutionary storage product that enables organizations to make underutilized internal application server storage available for the first time as a high-performance virtualized storage pool. With an architecture designed for high performance computing and enterprise environments, Seanodes' new software architecture gives IT managers the ability to easily avoid the overwhelming cost and complexities of conventional SAN and NAS network storage architectures. Seanodes' new Exanodes(TM) software transforms the storage components inside commodity application servers into high-end virtualized storage pools, enabling businesses to quickly identify and take advantage of underutilized internal storage capacity. Implementing Exanodes dramatically reduces management costs, minimizes the need for additional external network storage arrays, saving data center floor space and reducing power consumption, opening a whole new category in the Storage space: S...

Just got this in from V-Kernel's CEO: As organizations move to virtualized production data centers shared by many departments, providing a painless method for monitoring capacity, resource usage and recovering cost is a pressing issue. VMware identifies chargeback as one of the key impediments to growth of virtualization in the data center. Customers simply don’t know how they will justify, pay for and recover the millions of dollars from business users needed to buy new hardware. VKernel eliminates the pain from the chargeback process. Designed as a “plug and play” virtual appliance, the company’s offering is the first virtual appliance certified by VMware to meter resource usage by departments and automatically generate chargeback and capacity reports. The VKernel virtual appliance requires no installation and becomes operational in minutes after downloading.

This document describes how to set up Xen on Fedora 7. Xen enables the paravirtualization of your hardware for its virtual machines if you have a CPU with Vanderpool (Intel) or Pacifica (AMD) technology. The paravirtualization provides high performance to your virtual machines. Fedora's virt-manager provides an easy to use GUI for setting up and managing your virtual machines. It does not have the extensive features like VMware Server, but the basics are in place. See it all here.

I'll soon do mine as well. (If I ever get time, that is!) but this detailed review from a blogger - who copied all of the content from Linux.com!- says a few things: Interestingly, the interface between the operating system and Xen is “virtualized” as well: all connections to the virtualization system are done via a special library called libvirt. If Red Hat wants to replace Xen in the future with another virtualization technology, the only component to change is libvirt. Any software that depends on libvirt should continue to run unchanged. Xen does place some demands on the system, ranging from almost no overhead for machines running paravirtualization, to about 5 percent of CPU for machines running full virtualization. Given the novelty of virtualization and its possibilities, the technology comes with something of a learning curve. To help end-users ramp up, Red Hat has established a Web site, to educate users. The site is chock full of training videos, case studies, and docume...