Bladewatch.com

VMware

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 23, 2009 – Today at RSA Conference 2009, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, announced that the VMware VMsafeTM APIs will ship with VMware vSphereTM 4 when the product becomes generally available later in the second quarter of 2009, with security vendors expected to deliver integrated solutions this year. These solutions combined with the unique new protection features in VMware vSphere 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, will help provide customers with integrated, “better than physical” security of their IT infrastructures.

VMware VMsafe enables partners to monitor and protect at the hypervisor layer, providing visibility and introspection into machine activity that can be deeper and more comprehensive than the physical locations where network and endpoint security solutions traditionally enforce policy. Multiple vantage points into virtual hardware such as disk, network and memory enable a diverse range of security technologies delivered as virtual appliances to benefit from better protection and greater performance and efficiency, including firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, and anti-virus engines.

“We are excited to see security partners taking advantage of VMware VMsafe technology in VMware vSphere 4 to build solutions that help our mutual customers protect their environments better than they could with an all-physical infrastructure,” said Dr. Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer, VMware. “VMware vSphere 4 equipped with VMware VMsafe™ uniquely offers customers an advanced platform to run applications securely within private clouds and, when combined with added functionality from our partners, a broad choice of security solutions.”

Securing the virtual platform remains just as important as you would the physical environment. That we can have further integration of security tools within this virtual world has to be a good thing, I’ll need to read up more later today. 

When we talk of securing the virtual infrastructure this covers, physical access, management of the ESX servers and the virtual machines including the anti virus, firewall software etc. Managing the need to secure the infrastructure whilst at the same time managing the need to limit any performance overhead will always be a challenge, I wonder if this will assist in any way?

http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/index.htm

    *  Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Large Scale Virtualization Project

    * Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You

    * Lessons from the Real World: Storage in Virtualized Environments

    * Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro: The Complexity and Insecurity of the Cloud

    * Simplifying Virtualization Management Using New Industry Standards

Very cool, it sounds like a great event, and I love the concept of the new start-up, there are some interesting sessions and the keynote looks cool. I note with interest that NetApp, Dell and HP are sponsoring the event amongst others. I wonder if there will be any talk about these vendors’ solution for virtualization projects?

Business Wire

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) announced the integration and certification of its storage platforms with VMware® vSphereTM 4 in conjunction with VMware’s announcement of vSphere 4 at a press conference held today at VMware headquarters. VMware vSphere 4 is the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud and enables the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services. Combined with NetApp® storage solutions, vSphere 4 provides customers the foundation to run their data centers in a more flexible and cost-effective way.

VMware vSphere 4 is a platform for building out cloud infrastructures that aggregate CPU, networking, and storage resources into a seamless, flexible, and dynamic cloud that delivers maximum efficiency, control, and choice to customers. NetApp provides the storage foundation for VMware customers to transform their storage into a highly efficient pool of resources that can scale and adapt to any need. Now customers can take advantage of the following benefits in their VMware vSphere 4 environments:

    * Improved efficiency. NetApp storage technologies such as deduplication and thin provisioning help customers achieve greater than 50% infrastructure savings in their virtualized server and storage environment. Now VMware customers can take advantage of NetApp’s Virtualization Guarantee* Program that will enable them to use 50% less storage in their environments with NetApp storage compared to traditional storage arrays.

    * Better control. NetApp provides secure separation of network and storage resources in multitenant environments to enable hosted IT services. Customers can receive a real-time view of their entire VMware vSphere 4 environment—from virtual machine to volume—using VMware vCenterTM Server and optimize their utilization. Additionally, customers can simplify management with automated cloning, provisioning, and backup and recovery for virtualized servers and storage. Together, these capabilities dramatically improve control of the data center environment through better availability, security, and manageability.

    * Greater choice. The NetApp unified architecture gives customers the flexibility to match the right performance and price point using any storage protocol to address their changing business needs. Customers who invested in other storage solutions can use NetApp V-Series to unify their existing infrastructure under a common storage architecture and take full advantage of the benefits of the powerful features of Data ONTAP® to improve storage efficiency and dramatically simplify data management. Customers now have the flexibility and choice to do what best suits their needs, now and in the future.

Business Wire

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced the “Switch it On” program to help customers derive more efficiency out of their environments by improving the optimization of their storage assets. As part of the program, Hitachi Data Systems is offering *free storage virtualization software which enables customers to consolidate all externally attached, third-party storage under common management and optimize with advanced capabilities such as transparent data movement, dynamic provisioning, intelligent tiering and disaster recovery.

“Programs that promote storage efficiency are endemic right now and deservedly so,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, the Enterprise Strategy Group. “Heterogeneous support and virtualization are extremely valuable approaches both operationally and financially; however with ‘Switch it On’ Hitachi Data Systems strikes a new and welcome chord – it is not only exposing inefficiency and talking about what it can offer, but is actually helping its customers to do something to address it, without them having to get out their checkbooks.”

Anything the vendors can do to aid in the energy efficiency of their products whether it’s the server, the network or the storage has to be a good thing for the end user community.

VMware

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 21, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today heralded a new era in virtualization performance with the introduction of  VMware vSphere 4, extending scalability limits for servers and virtual machines. (See press release, “VMware Unveils the Industry’s First Operating System for Building the Internal Cloud— VMware vSphere 4.”) With industry-leading support for new hardware virtualization assist features and a highly-optimized I/O system, VMware vSphere 4 is the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud.  These new architectural enhancements enable even the most business-critical, transaction-heavy applications, such as SAP, Microsoft Exchange together with their SQL and Oracle databases, to be run on a 100 percent virtualized internal cloud powered by VMware vSphere 4.

“VMware vSphere 4 is setting new records in virtualization performance as the result of continuous improvements to the software and years of diligent work with hardware vendors,” said Dr. Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer of VMware. “This translates into higher consolidation ratios and application performance that meets, and in some cases exceeds, that of physical deployments. VMware vSphere 4 helps take performance objections off the table for even the highest-end applications, allowing the virtualization benefits of higher availability, security, and automation to shine in the cloud.”

VMware has demonstrated new record performance results and new performance maximums with VMware vSphere 4 including:

• Record number of transactions per second. New performance throughput record of 8,900 database transactions per second, as demonstrated on Oracle database with an OLTP workload modeled after TPC-C*.
• Lowest demonstrated virtualization overheads with respect to native.  New performance efficiencies with resource-intensive SQL Server databases utilizing up to 8 CPUs per VM and running at up to 90 percent of native or better as tested by an OLTP workload modeled after TPC-E*.
• Record I/O throughput. 3x increase in the maximum recorded I/O operations per second. VMware vSphere 4 triples the maximum recorded I/O operations per second to more than 300,000. For comparison purposes, according to data from VMware Capacity Planner, most demanding databases that are on Intel architecture servers usually require a few tens of thousands of I/O operations per second. VMware vSphere 4 also includes a newly rewritten storage stack that demonstrates full wire speed on 10 Gbps iSCSI connections.
• Record network throughput. Improved virtual machine networking and support for NetQueue that shows up to 100 percent improvement in network throughput and fully saturating hardware bus limits of 30 Gpbs.
• Demonstrated 30 percent improved efficiency for Citrix XenApp.  An improved architecture and support for new hardware can drive consolidation ratios much higher for this and similar applications.

AMD blog

This week AMD launched the new AMD Opteronâ„¢ EE processor, ushering in a new level of power efficiency.

Have you ever seen one of those movies where the heroes realize that they don’t have enough fuel to make it to their destination? In the mad panic they start throwing everything out of the vehicle to try to lighten up the load so they can get better fuel efficiency and hopefully make it to the finish line.

Yes, some people actually approach processor design that way. They build a big, fat die, and then as an afterthought, to get any efficient processor, they “dumb down” the design. Strip out features. Restrict the performance. Reduce the capabilities.

We don’t do this.

The new AMD Opteron EE processors have all the features and capabilities of our other processors. As a matter of fact, if you were to run the same benchmark on the 2.3GHz standard power, 2.3GHz HE and 2.3GHz EE, they will all perform exactly the same; except at the wall.

The HE will draw less power that the standard and the EE will draw even less than the HE.

How do we drive such low energy consumption without compromising features? It’s in the genes. A great silicon design, combined with a very well-behaved 45nm process allows us to yield enough ultra-efficient EE parts that we can build a business on it. 

Very cool, choosing the energy efficient processors, combining them with energy efficient power supplies, can help reduce the power requirements of your infrastructure significantly. It’s great to see AMD continuing to innovate their processors, I’m off to check out more, I wonder when they will be available in blade servers?

VMware

SAN JOSE, Calif. and PALO ALTO, Calif., April 21, 2009 - Cisco and VMware today announced that the Cisco Nexus® 1000V virtual switch will be supported in VMware vSphereTM 4, which is being announced today. The combined solution is designed to help customers simplify virtualization and network services management for cloud environments. VMware vSphere 4 is the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service in the data center to help reduce IT costs while increasing IT responsiveness.

Highlights / Key Facts:

•  
  • VMware will resell the Cisco Nexus® 1000V virtual switch with Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) capabilities as an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4. 
  • VMware vSphere 4 is the first virtualization platform that will enable the Nexus 1000V to extend Cisco’s security, policy enforcement, automated provisioning and diagnostics features into dynamic VMware cloud environments, scaling to support thousands of active virtual machines.
  • With a wide range of groundbreaking new capabilities, VMware vSphere 4 will bring cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, non-disruptive way – delivering uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving customer choice.
  • The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch with VN-Link technology is designed to integrate with VMware vSphere 4 to create a logical network infrastructure enabling network, virtualization and server teams to gain efficiency in the following ways:
• •  
    • Set and enforce connection policies for each virtual machine across a data center.
    • Dynamically and easily apply policy-based configuration and operation of network services (traditionally available in Cisco physical hardware switches) to each virtual machine.  
    • Obtain accurate, real-time data for stronger collaboration in monitoring and troubleshooting.
    • Easily manage virtual machine connectivity across physical servers during routine hardware maintenance or to balance server workloads for optimized application performance and availability.
  • Cisco and VMware are also collaborating to support their shared channel partner communities by developing Cisco Nexus online training and demonstration labs that feature the Cisco Nexus 1000V, VMware vSphere 4 as well as the Cisco Nexus 5000 and 2000.
  • Cisco and VMware have teamed to offer education services and certifications for individuals and channel partners in support of customers’ data center virtualization strategies.
  • Cisco has become a VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) partner and will offer the full suite of VMware consulting services.  Cisco and VMware have also combined their expertise in networking and virtualization to deliver a joint set of consulting services to help customers rapidly assess, plan and design server, network, and storage virtualization solutions across their data centers.  These joint services provide an end-to-end architecture roadmap to a virtualized data center and can help customers reduce costs by provisioning new applications quickly and more securely, while providing high levels of application performance. 

That the Cisco Nexus switches are supported and ready for VMware vSphere has to be a good thing for the end user community. The more options and opportunities there are in the virtualization space, the more chances that end users can find the right combination of products and services to achieve their end goal, which I’ve always supported. I’m off to check it out.

HP

HP today announced the integration of VMware vSphere™ 4 into its HP Adaptive Infrastructure (AI) portfolio.

The integration includes a broad range of related products and services designed to enable customers to change the economics of their technology infrastructures.

Offering the most comprehensive support of VMware vSphere 4, HP is chosen most often by organizations deploying virtual environments and has more servers running VMware ESX technology than any other vendor.⁽¹⁾

Virtualization can reduce hardware and power costs, but employing separate management strategies for virtual and physical environments, as many organizations do, can increase costs. The HP AI portfolio enables customers to manage both environments simultaneously, deliver dynamic capacity planning and automate provisioning and deployment.

Designed to deliver a business-ready infrastructure, HP AI with VMware vSphere 4 can be delivered across various delivery models – on-premise, as an outsourced offering or via cloud computing – providing customers with improved efficiency, greater control and flexibility of choice. HP customers also benefit from the many years of development between HP and VMware.

That HP are integrating VMware vSphere into their Adaptive Infrastructure range of products and services has to be a good thing for those looking at vSphere in terms of options and opportunities. I’m off to check out more.

IT Pro Portal

In a move that is likely to give Cisco’s Unified Computing System a serious run for its money, Hewlett-Packard has launched a sophisticated data-center system that includes storage, networking and computing capacities all within a single unit.

The new offering which has been christened as the BladeSystem Matrix is aimed at providing a single adaptive infrastructure that can be setup with effortless ease.

HP claims that it’s new offering which ships with the Matrix Orchestration Environment management software goes a long way in simplifying data center tasks and can significantly bring down the operating costs. 

It goes onto claim that companies can look forward to a potential 300 percent return on investment in a period of 3 years or more and safely hope to save nearly 80 percent in operational costs. 

Explaining the reason behind the introduction of the BladeSystem Matrix , Mark Potter a senior vice president at HP mentioned “Increasingly, customers are looking for data-center solutions with Adaptive Infrastructure properties such as superior economics, application-based cost tracking, and true dynamic capacity management” 

Check out this article which is talking about HP’s BladeSystem Matrix, an interesting read, it’s always good to see what others are thinking and talking about in the blade space. I wonder if we’ll see more announcements like this from the other vendors/service providers?

SD Times

Forget VMware: Think vSphere. The virtualization company’s flagship software, VMware, is no longer going to be described as a virtual data center operating system. Instead, the company’s suite of virtualization software was rebranded and updated this morning. The software will now be known as vSphere 4.0, and it is being positioned as a cloud operating system.

Jon Bock, group product marketing manager for VMware, said that “there are a couple different ideas of cloud computing floating around. One is this notion that [the] cloud is basically something provided by service providers. But what we’re really talking about is broader than that. It’s the ability to pool your resources to be able to rapidly provision those resources while still being able to maintain service levels.”

Thus, vSphere 4.0 includes revised management tools for provisioning and monitoring virtual machines. Bock said that security and compatibility were also points of improvement for this release.

“A lot of people who talk about cloud talk about it as requiring you to rewrite your applications. We’re working with software providers to develop APIs to allow customers to run their own internal cloud without changing applications,” said Bock.

An interesting article talking about VMware’s vSphere announcement, do check it out.