Virtualization News Desk

Symantec Acquires nSuite Virtualization

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:00:00 EDT

Symantec is building out its endpoint virtualization widgetry by acquiring nSuite Technologies, a privately held virtual workspace management company that has specialized in hospitals and healthcare, on undisclosed terms. The buy will give Symantec presentation virtualization and connection brokering technologies so users can access a personal Windows workspace running on a remote server as though it were local and move it to any widget.

SYS-CON Media's Virtualization Journal Opens Polls for "Readers' Choice Awards"

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:45:00 EDT

SYS-CON Media's Virtualization Journal announced today that the polls have opened for its first annual Virtualization Readers' Choice Awards. Readers will be casting their votes until November 8, 2008. Winners and finalists will be announced at the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 West, November 19-21, in San Jose, CA.

Virtualization: VMware Joins the Linux Foundation

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

VMware, which seems to be as far from open source as you can get these days, has joined the Linux Foundation, promising to make more contributions to the Linux community. It's cultivating the Linux crowd as adoption of Linux expands as a result of its position as a platform for cloud computing and in virtualized environments.

VMware's New Global Virtualization Services

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:00:00 EDT

VMware, Inc. announced new educational services and certification programs designed to help IT professionals build world-class virtual environments. The programs are designed for varied positions, including systems administrators, design architects, operators and managers who are interested in enhancing their knowledge and skills of VMware Infrastructure for datacenter and desktop environments. New education offerings include the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) and Live Online and Flex Online courses.

Virtualization - Microsoft Prepares for End of Windows with Midori

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:00:00 EDT

With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualization technologies, there will be a day when the Microsoft Windows client OS as it's been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete. Microsoft seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project code-named Midori, which seeks to create a componentized, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived, according to published reports.

Xenocode Releases Postbuild 2008 for Secure .NET Deployments

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:15:00 EDT

Xenocode announced the availability of Postbuild 2008 for .NET, a major update to its code obfuscation and deployment solution for Windows developers.Xenocode Postbuild allows software developers to deploy .NET applications in a single, secure executable that runs anywhere, with or without the .NET Framework. Postbuild uses a range of powerful obfuscation techniques to protect intellectual property against decompilation and integrates directly with the advanced Xenocode application virtualization engine. The 2008 edition of Postbuild includes support for the latest .NET platforms and technologies, including Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.0/3.5, WPF, and LINQ.

Hardware and OS Virtualization: Multiple Solutions May Be the Answer

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:15:00 EDT

Finding the appropriate virtualization technology to fit an organization's requirements depends on the needs of the environment, combined with the feature sets of each virtualization architecture. Oftentimes, organizations find that a single approach doesn't complete the picture and multiple virtualization technologies are required.

Intel Hikes Up Its Skirt

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Ahead of Siggraph next week Intel decided to lift its skirt and pass around the paper it’ll read there describing Larrabee, its new hydra-headed x86 graphics accelerator architecture meant to take on Nvidia and AMD’s graphics arm ATI in late ’09-early 2010. The operative word that is supposed to make Nvidia and ATI quake in their boots is x86.

Amazon Backs Cloud Server Start-up Elastra

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:15:00 EDT

Elastra, a 40-customer SMB-directed start-up that provides a legacy-embracing configuration management service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) – your basic in-a-click virtual deployment, monitoring and accounting beginning with RDBMSes like MySQL, Postgres and EnterpriseDB – has picked up a $12 million second round from – surprise, surprise – Amazon, Bay Partners and existing investor Hummer Winblad.

Cloud Computing: AT&T Joins Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Intel, Dell and HP

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:00:00 EDT

In a May 2008 report, Merrill Lynch estimated that 12% of the worldwide software market would start using cloud technology in the next 5 years and that the annual revenue for cloud computing will increase to $95 billion in the same period. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T has become the latest company to invest in cloud computing.

SYS-CON's "Cloud Computing Expo" Call for Papers Open Through August 15, 2008

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:00:00 EDT

The future model for providing IT infrastructure and services in large organizations is what many today are calling 'Cloud Computing' - a concept popularized by Amazon through its web services efforts. Merrill Lynch analysts for example reckon that by 2011 the volume of Cloud Computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95N in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

How to Adapt Physical, Virtual & Hybrid Infrastructure on the Fly

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:00:00 EDT

As more enterprises embrace virtual infrastructure for part or all of their compute infrastructure, tools are needed to effectively control both physical and virtual. Few large organizations seek to virtualize all of their servers due to the performance hit of virtualization layers. Dynamic provisioning delivers the best of both worlds – high performance plus flexibility. This session will address the issues of server consolidation, virtual & hybrid software infrastructure, and management complexity; it will also review solutions that enable building, deploying and managing software environments with simplicity and flexibility, whether their environment if physical, virtual or both.

Preparing Your Enterprise for Virtualization

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:30:00 EDT

Virtualization carries the promises of flexibility, lower costs, ease of deployment and simplified server management. However, when condensing the physical resources of your enterprise, are you considering how to make applications easily accessible to the growing number of remote users within your enterprise? IT managers rushing toward virtualization within the data center are finding that virtualization and consolidation do not address remote access performance issues experienced by remote branch users in today's distributed d d enterprises. This presentation will explore the advantages and potential pitfalls of virtualization and how its impact will shape the future of the virtual enterprise.

Using Virtualization to Secure Your Users' Desktops

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:30:00 EDT

Currently most desktop productivity software including browsers, mail clients, Office suites, IM, and media players make direct connections to the Internet and/or run untrusted content. As a result, these applications, which are core to office productivity, are also the primary vector of infections from Internet-borne malicious software. This session will describe how desktop virtualization can be deployed within an organization to secure users' desktop applications against Internet-based threats and untrusted content.

Cloud Computing Expo - Deploying Into the Clouds: Concepts, Benefits and Experiences

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Cloud Computing offers significant benefits over traditional solutions for deploying production systems as well as for conducting development and testing activities. This session will distill the unique characteristics of clouds and describe how to best think about deployments in the clouds. Case studies and real experiences from Thorsten von Eicken’s two years of cloud computing experience will illustrate the pros and cons of today's cloud offerings.

Cloud Computing Expo - Clouds Are No Substitute for Competence

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:45:00 EDT

Just as people begin to understand the difference between web ops and IT, we are entering a period where clouds promise "Ops-Free" computing. Because it’s easy, scalable, available and disposable, the cloud is well on its way to becoming “technology’s next big thing.” However, with recent outages from Amazon and Google Apps, the question of the cloud’s competence, security and reliability have come into play.

Cloud Computing Expo: Getting Ready for the Cloud

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

With the transition to online services, unexpected peak loads can lead to system failure, loss of data, performance issues and more. Cloud computing aims to address these challenges by providing on-demand compute resources. However, the current infrastructure of existing applications was not built for such flexible environments. This session will demonstrate how to transition your applications to run on the Cloud without needing to completely re-architect them. Included is a 10-minute demo on turning an existing tier-based application into a tierless scaled out application running on the EC2 Cloud.

Startup Opportunities in the Virtualization Services Market

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

While the hypervisor market is dominated by VMware and other large companies, Opus Capital believes that startup opportunities abound. For example, several companies have enjoyed some early successes in desktop virtualization. Since no dominant player has emerged, this market still shows plenty of promise due to the undisputable benefits of the approach. Security is another area of opportunity: as the numbers of virtual machines grow, so too do the concerns of security stakeholders. We believe that the rapid adoption of EC2 and other cloud computing environments presents prospects for innovation as well.

Enterprise Virtual Management for Next-Generation IT

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Virtualization enables strategic benefits, but significantly impacts infrastructure, operations and configuration management. Virtualization’s additional complexity and new management challenges can adversely affect TCO, reduce service levels, threaten security and pose compliance issues, as well as introduce new problems like VM sprawl. In this session, you'll learn how virtualization impacts traditional management disciplines, and their supporting people, processes, and technology. Participants will learn about the next generation of Enterprise Virtualization Management, and how it dramatically simplifies the management of growing virtual environments. Topics include eliminating sprawl, reining in snapshots, effectively dealing with offline VMs, and virtual appliances. You will also learn how to support distributed provisioning, delegated administration and self-service operations for enterprise virtual environments.

Virtualization: Beyond Hypervisors to Complete IT Infrastructure Managment

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

This session describes how the wave of virtualization technology in the data center can be extended beyond hypervisors to embrace complete IT infrastructure management resulting in significant business value. It will commence by summarizing the fundamental problems that are holding back scale, flexibility and asset utilization in the data center. It will then describe an innovative approach to data center optimization that addresses the fundamental problems through virtualization of the complete IT infrastructure. This approach delivers “Services Oriented IT Infrastructure” (SOI) that can be fully exploited by evolving management systems to enable service providers and enterprises to more efficiently deliver service differentiation, business continuity, disaster recovery and opex reduction. The session will be complemented by examples of how Liquid Computing is delivering on this vision today along with other technology leaders in the industry.

How to Find and Resolve Capacity Bottlenecks in Virtual Server Environments

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:15:00 EDT

Currently, an overwhelming majority of organizations are migrating and consolidating servers from physical to virtual environments. While the savings of the virtualized data center are extremely compelling, there is a new set of challenges that IT staffs didn’t have to deal with in the physical world. One of the challenges is getting used to the fact that all hardware resources: CPU, memory, storage, and network utilization are shared between virtual machines. This means that applications and users can impact each other and therefore resource monitoring becomes extremely important. If you don’t closely monitor resource consumption by each virtual machine and simply keep adding more virtual machines without doing analysis on how this will impact all four core resources, the result will be bad performance and even system downtime. Ultimately, this means unhappy users, dissatisfied managers, and a negative impact on the virtualization project. So, you need to find a way to prevent this problem.

Cloud Computing Expo - Walking Freely Among the Clouds

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:00:00 EDT

As a solution provider it is vitally important you don't get locked into a specific vendor’s solution. This couldn't be truer in the world of on-demand or cloud computing. The way Amazon works is vastly different from Google, and different from Flexiscale. So how do you utilize the strengths of them all without compromising your own requirements? This session will take a look at a real world application, which spans across a number of different cloud hosts, providing redundancy, self-healing and self-scaling solutions without the fear of dancing to one vendors tune.

Shunra Software Joins the VMware Virtualization Technology Alliance Partner Program

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Shunra Software announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver timely, joint solutions to mutual customers.

Cloud Computing Expo - Elastic Computing vs. Cloud Computing: What's the Difference and When Do You Use Them?

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:45:00 EDT

Cloud Computing, in its current incarnation, falls short on its promise to make computing as a whole as simple as plugging an application into a utility service. The “cloud” model initially has focused on making the hardware layer consumable as on-demand compute and storage capacity. This is an important first step, but for companies to harness the power of the cloud, complete application infrastructure needs to be easily configured, deployed, dynamically-scaled and managed in these virtualized hardware environments.

Virtualization - AMD Loses Share

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

According to Mercury Research by way of Lehman Brothers AMD lost share in both desktops and notebooks in Q2 measured in both units and revenue. Intel was up two points to 87.5% in notebook units aided and abetted by AMD's slower-than-expected Puma ramp, which took 6% off of AMD's notebook units while Intel's pushed up 11%.

The Critical Role of Automation in a Virtualized World

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:45:00 EDT

Virtualization is today's "green" knight in shining armor, drastically slashing power, hardware and real estate costs. However, with all this efficiency comes a vast increase in complexity that threatens mission-critical business processing. Is there a way to slay that dragon as well? Enterprise schedulers provide automation capabilities that provide a solution.

Cloud Computing Start-Up Creates PowerPC-Based Cloud Desktop

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:15:00 EDT

There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based desktop that's about the size of a dime store paperback built around the 2W MPC5121e mobileGT PowerPC chip that Freescale usually sells to Detroit for navigation devices.

Cloud Computing Expo: On the Path to Cloud Nirvana

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:00:00 EDT

Today, offerings such as Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are providing a new model for on demand compute resources based on virtual machines. Virtual appliances are a natural deployment vehicle for this type of infrastructure, allowing a clean separation between the memory, compute, and storage resources managed by the appliance provider and the complete software stack managed by the end user. Virtual appliances also allow a simple transition from internal virtualization clusters to outsourced providers, enabling capacity spikes to be handled. This session will showcase the tremendous flexibility, scalability, and financial savings that result from leveraging virtual appliances and cloud computing. Billy Marshall, CEO and founder of rPath will present a real life case study on KnowledgeTree, a document management provider, to examine the implementation of this strategy.

Desktop Virtualization Company Qumranet Announces Vice President of Sales and Channel Chief

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:45:00 EDT

Qumranet announced that Craig Bauman has joined the company as the vice president of sales and channels. Bauman will be responsible for launching the Qumranet Partner Program and leading the sales organization through its recent growth stage.

Merrill Lynch Estimates "Cloud Computing" To Be $100 Billion Market

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:45:00 EDT

What do the following companies all have in common: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, EMC, VMware, IBM, Sun, Dell, Akamai, SalesForce.com, NetSuite, and Activision. Answer: Cloud Computing. Merrill Lynch analysts reckon that by 2011 the volume of cloud computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95BN in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

Cloud Computing: The Clouds Are Coming

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:45:00 EDT

The last talk by Alan Williamson was the most interesting for me. His main message was that with cloud infrastructures problems don't magically go away, they just shift. You don't have scalability or storage problems any more, but you need constantly monitor the cloud and your application in it. Alan pointed out examples when Amazon's cloud failed and their applications got cut off from the Internet. As a solution, he proposed deploying the application on more than one cloud so that you have resilience.

Cloud Computing - The User-Friendly Version of Grid Computing

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:30:00 EDT

Cloud computing is said to be the user-friendly version of grid computing. We know grid computing brought together the high performance computers, the middleware, and strategies to utilize hundreds and thousands of computers linked by advanced networks. We know this took place in universities, research labs and medical schools around the world over many years.

Cloud Computing Expo - Cloud Storage: A Paradigm Shift In IT

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:15:00 EDT

The demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current "in house" storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs. Factoring in pressures of power, space, large capital expenditures, global performance, and availability issues, companies are faced with an exploding challenges and costs to go with the exploding storage demand. Bottom line, companies must take a new approach to storage. Companies need to move from the old and out-dated storage 1.0 model of "do everything yourself" to a new storage 2.0 cloud model. This session will show how Cloud storage delivers persistent storage on demand to applications regardless of location and pre-defined boundaries and meets the performance and scalability characteristics of the web applications and enterprise users.

Cloud Computing: Making Analytics in the Cloud a Reality

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:15:00 EDT

There will soon be a myriad of announcements of DBMS offerings in the cloud. Many of these will NOT be marriages made in heaven. However, the most innovative new DBMS software combined with new cloud computing services are here today and truly take advantage of the cloud architecture in order to change the economics and the responsiveness of business analytics.

Cloud Computing Expo - Cloud Adoption: Deploying Your Existing Applications to the Cloud

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:15:00 EDT

Virtualization has fostered a new generation of cloud services, enabling organizations to run a wide range of applications in the cloud. However, the value of cloud services will only be fully realized when organizations can take their existing application workloads, easily deploy them on standards-based cloud infrastructure and benefit from the increased scalability and lower costs of a utility model. Some workloads, such as application testing and training, are prime candidates for early deployment to a cloud provider due to their transient nature and high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This session will outline the key requirements to look for in a cloud provider that can support existing application workloads, important considerations for integrating a cloud service into your existing IT infrastructure and real-world ROI case studies from customers who have already transitioned some of their IT portfolio to cloud providers.

Cloud Computing Expo - Trusting the Cloud: Timing and Adoption of Cloud Technologies

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:45:00 EDT

Cloud technologies offer many benefits over traditional IT systems, especially when managing the size and vastness of unstructured data and unpredictable growth in IT environments. But when does it make sense to adopt cloud technologies and migrate a set of your IT services to the cloud? The movement of information and services out of the data center and into the cloud can unleash fear in many of us. Trusting that your information is secure, accessible and protected is important, and deciding what information remains inside and outside of the cloud can be critical to the success of your business. In this session, Mike Feinberg, Senior VP of EMC’s Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division will discuss how to optimize the deployment of cloud technologies and the options that exist for migrating information to the cloud.

Cloud Computing Expo - The World Wide Cloud: Bridging the Data Center and The Cloud

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

As cloud computing becomes more commonplace, creating a secure method to bridge the gap between existing data centers and remote sources of compute capacity is being more and more important. The ability to efficiently and securely tap into remote cloud resources is one of the most important opportunities in the cloud computing today. In this session Reuven Cohen will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities to deploying across a diverse global cloud infrastructure. Location, security, portability, and reliability, he will explain, all play critical roles in a scalable IT environment.

Cloud Computing Expo: Marketing A Paradigm Shift

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Cloud Computing is the new buzz word in the technology industry. But even industry insiders don’t agree on exactly what the term means. We shouldn’t be surprised that mainstream business is approaching it with caution. Businesses have many concerns about moving their data to the cloud, some legitimate and some irrational. All these concerns need to be overcome in order for a widespread adoption of Cloud computing to occur. This session will discuss the obstacles to getting customers to embrace the concept of cloud computing and how to over come them. This session will cover topics such as the dangers of preaching to the converted, why “better” isn’t good enough when moving customers away from the familiar, and communicating the benefits without getting lost in the technical details.

VMware Lab Manager 3.0 Released

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:00:00 EDT

Prior to this version, physical hosts running VMware ESX had to be configured for either VirtualCenter or Lab Manager, but not both. This also meant that Lab Manager couldn’t take advantage of VMotion, VMware DRS, VMware HA, etc., as all these functions were managed by or configured by VirtualCenter. With that barrier now removed, software development environments can now utilize these functions in conjunction with Lab Manager, and there is no longer a need to segregate VMware ESX hosts into separate farms based on whether they were being managed by Lab Manager or by VirtualCenter.

Open Cloud Computing: OpenNebula Engine for Data Center Virtualization Released

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:30:00 EDT

Virtualization has opened up avenues for new resource management techniques within the data center. Probably, the most important characteristic is its ability to dynamically shape a given hardware infrastructure to support different services with varying workloads. Therefore, effectively decoupling the management of the service (for example a web server or a computing cluster) from the management of the infrastructure (e.g. the resources allocated to each service or the interconnection network).