One of the new features coming from VMware is High Availability with Fault Tolerance. Traditionally, High Availability has meant that if a physical piece of hardware a virtual machine is running on has a failure, the virtual machine will be *restarted* on a different physical host. This will cause down time (albeit a small amount of down time) for the end user. Fault Tolerance addresses this situation by providing a mechanism that will cause no downtime in the case of a hardware failure. The way Fault Tolerance achieves this is by running a secondary virtual machine in lockstep with a primary virtual machine on a different host. All instructions sent to the primary virtual machine are sent to the secondary virtual machine in real time. In fact, if you view both virtual machine consoles at the same time, you will see the secondary virtual machine console mirror everything going on on the primary virtual machine (for example, playing a movie on the primary VM shows up on the secondary VM). VMware has posted a video of this technology.

Check out the video here…

For more information about Fault Tolerance, check out VMware’s website.

Technorati : Fault Tolerance, High Availability, VMotion, VMware
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I have written in the past that Microsoft was planning a release of just the Hyper-V components of Windows Server 2008. This release would be a super thin bare metal hypervisor called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. What’s more, Microsoft announced that the release of Hyper-V Server 2008 would be free. Well, the day has come. Microsoft released Hyper-V Server 2008 as a free download on their website. Keep in mind you need x64 hardware with virtualization technology processors in order to utilize Hyper-V Server 2008.

See a demo of Hyper-V Server 2008 here…

Download Hyper-V Server 2008 from Microsoft…

For a list of supported Guest Operating Systems, check out this article…

Technorati : Bare Metal, Hyepr-V, Hyper-V server, Hypervisor, Microsoft
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A large number of the production data centers running virtualization technology use VMware ESX. To this end, a lot of the knowledge base out there encompasses the VMware ESX product - this makes sense. So, when a new virtualization technology comes along, it naturally gets compared to ESX. One such virtualization technology that is new to the arena is Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Aaron Delp, a seasoned ESX engineer, has put together a few nice bullet points that will help an ESX engineer get more familiar with Microsoft Hyper-V. Following is an excerpt from Aaron’s points:

• Hyper-V is paravirtualized - paravirtualized means the virtual machine is “aware” (Microsoft uses the term enlightened) that it is virtualized. If the machine isn’t enlightened, it will run in emulation mode. Emulation mode requires a lot of context switching between user mode and kernel mode. This will understandably slow down performance.
• The Hyper-V “Service Console” is referred to as the Management Partition. This is a Windows VM with privileges into the kernel that other VMs do not have. This (at least on the surface) is similar to ESX’s Service Console.
• It is recommended to run Hyper-V on Windows Core (stripped down version with no GUI). The core version will consume less resources, require less patches, etc.
• Server 2008 has “roles” that determine the functions on the server. Hyper-V is recommended to be the only role on the server for production
• Hyper-V does not share memory pages
• Hyper-V has quick migration instead of VMotion

Continue at source…

Technorati : ESX, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware, Virtual Server
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Microsoft announced during their “Get Virtual Now” tour that they would release a version of Hyper-V (called Hyper-V Server 2008) that would be free. Hyper-V Server 2008 is a bare metal hypervisor and only a bare metal hypervisor. Think of it as the Hyper-V role of Windows Server 2008 without the Windows Server 2008 part. Another cool feature of Hyper-V that was announced was the ability to do live migrations of virtual machines. This is similar technology to VMware’s VMotion or Citrix XenServer’s XenMotion. Microsoft’s live migration uses some of the new clustering improvements in Windows Server 2008. This is all really cool technology and is probably better explained via screen shots or video. Luckily, Microsoft TechNet posted a short video showing both of these upcoming technologies.

Demo - Hyper-V Server and Live Migration

Technorati : Clustering, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Live Migration, Microsoft, VMotion, Virtualization
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eG VM Monitor^TM judged the best solution for application and infrastructure management at VMworld 2008

ISELIN, N.J., Sept. 18, 2008 - eG Innovations, Inc., a global provider of business service monitoring and triage solutions for both virtual and physical IT infrastructures, was chosen as the Gold level winner in the Application and Infrastructure Management category in the Best of VMworld 2008 Awards. VMworld, taking place from Sept. 15-18 in Las Vegas, is the virtualization industry’s largest annual conference and exposition.

The company’s eG VM Monitor^TM was selected over products from 30 other vendors entered into the Application and Infrastructure Management category. An independent team of judges consisting of experts and editors from TechTarget, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:TTGT) SearchServer Virtualization.com, and its sister site, Search VMware.com^TM, reviewed and evaluated all entered products according to innovation, value, performance, reliability and ease of use. Overall, nearly 200 products were entered into eight categories that comprised the awards program.

“We spent hours and hours discussing and arguing over who should win these awards, and in many cases they were close calls,” said Jan Stafford, the editorial director for TechTarget’s Data Center Media Group.

“It’s a distinct honor to be recognized as best-in-class in such a fast growing and competitive marketplace,” said Srinivas Ramanathan, founder, president and CEO of eG Innovations. “The eG VM Monitor, part of the eG Enterprise Suite^TM, helps to ensure optimum performance of business services that run on today’s increasingly complex virtual and physical infrastructures. It is easy to use, and highly cost effective, so we are delighted that industry experts have joined our growing list of customers in recognizing the value of our solution.”

About eG Innovations

eG Innovations, Inc. (www.eginnovations.com) is a global provider of performance monitoring and triage solutions for both virtual and physical IT infrastructures. The company’s patented technologies provide proactive monitoring of every layer of every tier in the infrastructure, thereby enabling rapid diagnosis and recovery in enterprise and service provider networks. By ensuring high availability and optimum performance of mission-critical business services, eG Innovations’ solutions help enhance customers’ competitive positioning, lower operational costs and optimize the performance of their infrastructures. The company has customers in 14 countries, including organizations of all sizes in government, banking/finance, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing and service industries.

Technorati : Application Management, Infrastructure Management, VMware, VMworld, eG Innovations
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During VMWorld 2008, VMware demonstrated their vClound initiative. This technology stems out of the Beehive acquisition. The demo showed how a local cloud could interoperate with an external cloud. First, the presenter downloaded a virtual appliance from the virtual appliance marketplace. Next a 4 second metric SLA was defined for the virtual appliance. If the SLA is exceeded, a new instance of the workload is brought online to bring SLA compliance. This entire demo was captured on video by Michael Keen and posed on Brian Madden. It is a short video (6 minutes) to give you a good idea of what the technology is about.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Cloud Computing, SLA, VMware, Virtual Appliance, vCloud
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Microsoft has been busy spreading the virtualization message via product releases and the “Get Virtual Now” launch tour. I noticed that Microsoft is further pushing the virtaulization message through its publications as well. I have a subscript to TechNet and MSDN magazines. The October issue of TechNet is all about virtualization with articles like:

• An introduction to Hyper-V
• Manage Your Virtual Environments with VMM 2008
• Getting Started with Microsoft Application Virtualization
• Achieving High Availability for Hyper-V
• Backup and Disaster Recovery for Server Virtualization
• Essential Tools for Planning Your Virtual Infrastructure

In a place I didn’t necessarily expect to find an article about server virtualization, I found one in MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) magazine. This article titled “Configuration Testing With Virtual Server” isn’t quite as in depth as the TechNet ones, but it is still a pretty good read.

You can read both of these magazines on line.

TechNet can be found here…

MSDN can be found here…

Technorati : App-V, Application Virtualization, Hyper-V, MSDN, Microsoft, TechNet
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eG Innovations makes some cool monitoring products. I was first introduced to eG Innovations with their Terminal Services/Citrix solutions (they have some pretty cool marketing - you know the beat up guy in a line up with a tag line of “Prove its Not Citrix”). Anyway, eG Innovations has a lot more products. One of those products is eG VM Monitor. eG Innovations just announced that eG VM Monitor now supports Citrix XenServer and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Logical Domains (LDoms) in addition to VMware.

Press Release
============================================

ISELIN, N.J., Sept. 8, 2008 - Continuing to deliver on its strategy to become the industry’s leading single-source supplier of management software for all popular virtualization platforms, eG Innovations, Inc., today announced that its eG VM Monitor^TM now supports CitrixXen Server^TM and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris^TM Logical Domains (LDoms). eG Innovations, a global provider of business service monitoring and triage solutions for both virtual and physical IT infrastructures, will be demonstrating many of the enhanced capabilities at its booth (#1419) at VMworld 2008, Sept. 15-18 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

The enhancements are part of v4.2 of the company’s eG Enterprise Suite^TM, which already supports VMware^® ESX and ESX 3i servers as well as Solaris Containers. The new software release also strengthens management of VMware environments. eG Enterprise agents can now be integrated directly within VMware’s Virtual Center. This greatly simplifies configuration of the monitoring for VMware server farms. Also, the eG VM Monitor software now monitors the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager to provide an end-to-end view of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment. A new VM Search capability makes it easier to track the status and performance of virtual machines (VMs) as they move from one physical server to another.

“As an industry, we’re moving from the first phase of virtualization into what is being called Virtualization 2.0, where production deployments are becoming more prevalent,” said Srinivas Ramanathan, founder, president and CEO of eG Innovations. “Phase one of virtualization primarily involved staging and development of the environments, and virtual infrastructures typically were over-provisioned to ensure acceptable performance.

“But Virtualization 2.0 is all about manageability,” Ramanathan said. “The emphasis is shifting from over provisioning to right provisioning. Many of the core monitoring and management challenges we have faced in the physical infrastructure will be relevant in this phase. We’ve made eG Enterprise ‘Virtualization 2.0 Ready’ by supporting multiple virtualization technologies and by providing an integrated view of the physical and virtual infrastructures. These new capabilities allow customers to track usage and performance across applications running inside VMs and quickly identify the true root cause of any performance issue.”

Support for Citrix XenServer and Solaris LDoms

The eG Enterprise Suite monitors Citrix XenServers and Sun LDoms in much the same way it monitors VMware ESX servers. eG Enterprise v4.2 offers agent-based and agentless monitoring of CitrixXen server v4.0 and 4.1. For agent-based monitoring, an eG agent on the control domain of a XenServer monitors the hypervisor and all its virtual machines (VMs). Administrators can also choose to monitor their XenServers without agents, with either a Linux or a Windows system being used to host the remote data collector. Citrix XenMotion activity is tracked to determine when, how often, why and where VMs migrate to.

Used with Solaris LDom environments, besides revealing how effectively each logical domain utilizes the allocated resources, the eG agent on the control domain of the Solaris host also measures the impact of the resource usage of the LDoms on the physical resources of the host. With minimal configuration, this agent can auto-discover the IP address and current state of each LDom executing on a Solaris host, and automatically map the applications executing on the LDoms to the corresponding Solaris server. This automatic mapping facilitates quick and accurate root-cause identification of problems.

“eG Innovations’ decision to integrate its software with Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Logical Doms technology is a testament that Solaris Logical Doms is the most open virtualization technology available,” said Gan Boon San, president, Asia South, Sun Microsystems. “By working together, eG Innovations and Sun Microsystems enable businesses to reduce costs and maximize assets to optimize their IT infrastructure.”

Regardless of the virtualization platform being monitored, eG’s patent-pending In-N-Out Monitoring^TM technology allows an eG agent to provide not only an “outside” view of all the VMs showing the physical resources consumed by the VMs, but also provides an “inside” view of the VMs, highlighting the resources used by the applications running inside the VMs. No other monitoring tool provides this combination of views using a single-agent architecture.

“The more companies deploy critical business services through virtualized IT infrastructures, the more they realize the importance of monitoring the performance of all the component parts to ensure optimum service quality,” said Cameron Haight, a research VP with Gartner. “Because of the increasing number of individuals involved in the support of their organization’s virtualization initiatives, these IT departments should look for tools that can provide the insight to meet the needs of a variety of stakeholders — including the application of analytics as well as automation to address both growing complexity and continuing skills limitations.”

eG Enterprise v4.2 provides many other improvements and new features. These include: tracking and reporting uptime of individual VMs, ability to share customized views and reports among all or specific administrators, allowing administrators to select a console display “skin” (color) of their choice, providing selectable alert modes (e.g., email and SMS) to accommodate preferences of administrators who work in shifts; and custom monitoring of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Availability and Pricing

The eG Enterprise v4.2 will be available at the end of September. Pricing for any virtualization platform supported is per server monitored, regardless of the hardware capabilities (e.g., CPU, memory, socket) of the server, or the number of virtual machines or virtual desktops it supports. Pricing for a 25-node environment starts at $50,000. For more information: visit http://www.eginnovations.com/web/vmware.htm.

About eG Innovations

eG Innovations, Inc. (www.eginnovations.com) is a global provider of performance monitoring and triage solutions for both virtual and physical IT infrastructures. The company’s patented technologies provide proactive monitoring of every layer of every tier in the infrastructure, thereby enabling rapid diagnosis and recovery in enterprise and service provider networks. By ensuring high availability and optimum performance of mission-critical business services, eG Innovations’ solutions help enhance customers’ competitive positioning, lower operational costs and optimize the performance of their infrastructures. The company has customers in 14 countries, including organizations of all sizes in government, banking/finance, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing and service industries.

Technorati : Citrix, Monitor, Solaris, VMware, XenServer, eG Innovations
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One thing is for certain about VDI environments, printing and profiles don’t get any easier. Luckily, there are 3rd party solutions to help ease this pain. One such vendor is UniPrint. UniPrint is already know for their Terminal Services printing solutions, now UniPrint is announcing a universal printing solution for VDI.

Press Release
=======================================================

Toronto, Ontario, September 9, 2008 - UniPrint, the innovative leader in server-based printing solutions, today announced the launch of UniPrint VDI Edition, the ultimate printing solution for virtualized environments.

Developed for businesses that deploy a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to both consolidate their system and minimize their network administration, UniPrint VDI Edition expands the capabilities of advanced VDI computing technologies to include printing. This makes printing a seamless experience for the entire workforce - whether users are working on a fat or thin client from the office, a customer’s boardroom, at home, or any other location.

UniPrint VDI Edition is compatible with virtualization solutions from VMware, Citrix Xen, and Microsoft, as well as both 32- and 64-bit architectures. As a result, UniPrint VDI Edition sets a new benchmark in simple, fast, and secure printing for both local and remote users, irrespective of operating system or client device. Built around a Portable Document Format (PDF)-based universal printer driver, UniPrint VDI Edition greatly simplifies system administration by removing the need for multiple manufacturer printer drivers. This instantly eliminates all printer driver incompatibility issues.

UniPrint VDI Edition compresses print document files by over 90 percent by converting them into PDF. This prevents large PCL print formats sent across low bandwidth connections from slowing the print process or even halting application access. Not only does this significantly save bandwidth consumption, but it also makes it simple for users to benefit from enhanced printing functionality, such as the ability to archive, preview or e-mail printed files in PDF.

“While a virtual desktop infrastructure offers organizations many advantages, it also presents critical printing challenges,” explained Arron Fu, Vice President, Software Development at UniPrint. “At VMworld, UniPrint will show how its VDI Edition makes it simple for organizations to extend the advantages of the virtual desktop environment to include printing by instantly eliminating both major obstacles - the printer driver incompatibility and bandwidth consumption issues,” Fu continued. “Attendees will also see how UniPrint VDI Edition provides true end-to-end print data protection to make printing from outside the office just as secure as printing from within the office.”

UniPrint will demonstrate UniPrint VDI Edition at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, U.S.A. from September 15-18 (Booth 755). For additional information on the complete suite of UniPrint products, or to schedule an onsite meeting with a UniPrint representative, please visit the booth, or contact Marisol Lopez at (416) 436-7578 or marisol.lopez@uniprint.net.

To take advantage of a free 30-day trial download of UniPrint VDI Edition, please visit www.uniprint.net. UniPrint VDI Edition can be purchased through UniPrint’s global reseller network. Please visit www.uniprint.net/HowToBuy.asp for more details.

Technorati : Printing, UniPrint, VDI, Virtual Desktop, Virtualization
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Earlier this year Diane Green, co-founder and CEO of VMware since 1998, was outed by the board at VMware. Ever since this unexpected change at the top level of VMware, there have been worries/rumors of her husband, Mendel Rosenblum (VMware co-founder and Chief Scientist), leaving the company as well. Things were quiet for a while, but now virtualization.info is reporting that Rosenblum resigned. Not only is Rosenblum resigning, but Paul Chan, Vice President of Product Development is slated to leave VMware next month as well after resigning in August. VMware’s stock price has taken a beating after all this news of top brass leaving/resigning. Some speculate that one of the reasons for all of this shake-up is the recent release of a new version of Hyper-V announced by Microsoft that looks like it will directly compete with ESXi.

Continue at source…

Technorati : ESX, Hyper-V, Hypervisor, Microsoft, VMware
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