VMware Pioneers New Way to Deploy Software Environments
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Last week, I spoke with VMware Vice President of Marketing Michael Mullany about VMware ACE, a fascinating solution that simplifies and secures the deployment of software environments to mobile workers, contractors, and telecommuters.
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VMware on Monday released a beta version of VMware Converter 3, a tool that takes a physical computer system and transforms it into a virtual machine image to be used with the company's products. The new release combines two previously separate tools: VMware P2V Assistant and Virtual Machine Importer.
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SableVM is a robust, extremely portable, efficient, and specifications-compliant Java Virtual Machine that aims to be easy to maintain and to extend. It features a state-of-the-art and efficient interpreter engine. Its source code is very accessible and easy to understand. It also has many robustness features that have been the object of careful design.     SableVM is a clean-room implementation of the publicly available specifications.    In this version, we added an experimental generational garbage collector, we imported a new GNU Classpath snapshot, we added handling of Jar/Zip files on boot classpath, we added user-friendly failure messages for bootstrap problems, we added added a profiling switch, we made sablevm-classpath install its files in standard locations, we made jikes and gcc be less verbose by default, and we made several important bugfixes and improvements.  You can download the SableVM from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5523&release_id=281502
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Here's a look at how Microsoft's Hyper-V works, its major benefits and when you can expect to deploy this in production environments.
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Dec. 23, 2004. VMware on Thursday rolled out a public beta of its Workstation 5, the newest edition of its desktop virtualization software.
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Hypervisor hype drives sales Virtualisation software giant VMware has pumped out impressive third quarter results with profit up 90 per cent buoyed by strong sales of its hypervisor package.â¦
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Updated guidelines make clearer how to use Windows Server with third-party virtualization tools including VMware -- but that will all likely change before too long.
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Large vendors such as Microsoft and Citrix are expanding into the field of Microsoft virtualization that VMware has long dominated.
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A set of newly discovered flaws in components of VMware Inc.&#39;s virtual machine software has called attention to some of the security risks associated with the practice of running virtual computers on a single system.
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A Linux developer has come up with a virtualized I/O system that allows competing virtualization software to use one mechanism for handling storage and other virtual devices.
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HypervisorShield, a new service of Catbirdâs V-Security suite, extends security protections to the hypervisor layer in a virtual environment.
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Data center management software pulls in more pieces of the infrastructure--virtual machines and virtual networks.
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New .mobi and .jobs, a shift in the ownership of .net
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(InfoWorld) - While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes. On the x86 server side, Nationwide reached 5,000 servers two years ago, running all sorts of departmental applications, notes Scott Miggo, vice president of technology solutions. "We were growing at a steady pace, so we wanted to control the server space and the costs for new development," he says. "A lot of our servers had only a 10 percent utilization rate," he notes, wasting much of the server capacity. Roughly half are production application servers and half are test-and-development servers. Today, there are 3,500 physical servers in operation but still 5,000 instances under management. The VMware servers typically host a dozen instances per physical server. "We assume every new server or application can be virtualized," Miggo says. He expects to have more than 1,000 virtual servers running on 89 physical servers by 2009. His team works to tweak I/O requirements or settings for virtual servers that may have trouble supporting I/O needs in their default state, and it works with vendors to support VMs where possible, before falling back to dedicated servers. Lotus Notes and database applications are examples of where the I/O requirements make virtualization not an option. Although it's easier to deploy servers in a virtual environment by using predefined images, "our staffing has stayed pretty much the same," Miggo says, because the same number of servers must still be monitored. The slight reduction in management overhead is offset by the need for VMware experts to manage the VMware environment, in addition to the server instances. And Nationwide learned the hard way that it needs to monitor both its virtual and physical servers, then correlate the two to identify potential trouble spots, Miggo says. Not doing so can make diagnosis hard, since a VM issue may be caused by a physical issue that a server monitor application running in only the VM won't detect. There's also more overhead needed for Miggo's shared-services group to coordinate all users (such as developers and application managers) of a physical server, as changes to the physical server could affect them all -- and because adjustments to one VM's application mix could affect I/O and other physical server performance characteristics. "We now have to coordinate with 12 users," Miggo says. "People were used to having their own boxes and doing their own thing. Now they're more tightly controlled, which they don't like. But they have to follow control processes like code management and release management since what they do could affect others," he notes. The use of EMC's VMotion software to load-balance and failover VMs across physical servers might reduce management, but the insurer is still exploring that technology. One barrier: Its requirement that all server instances run on physical servers with the same CPU family, requiring a consistent server pool to be in place. Nationwide runs its Web servers in a zLinux environment on IBM zSeries mainframes, supporting 650 guest operating systems (VMs) today, with space for another 650 before additional hardware frames would be needed. Often, using z/VM to support the virtualized Web servers requires a different strategy than using VMware to support virtualized Windows servers, Woeckener notes. For example, you might add memory, CPUs, or network cards to increase I/O on a VMware server. On a zSeries, the CPUs just handle executables, offloading physical I/O (such as network bandwidth and resource scheduling) to dedicated processors, so you don't need to worry about performance-sapping overhead incurred by server resource management. Another difference: Increasing heap size can improve performance in a Windows application but also degrade it in a zLinux application, Woeckener says. That's because Linux steals resources wherever it can find them, so any extra heap space is used by Linux for its own purposes, degrading application performance. When the heap size is reduced, Linux seeks resources elsewhere, giving the full heap to the application and improving performance. In both the VMware and z/VM environments, the ease of deploying new virtual servers has led Nationwide to align demand with real needs, as well as to encourage the use of VMs rather than physical servers. Virtual Windows servers cost a requestor $750 per month versus $2,000 per month for a physical server. And zLinux VMs add a per-MIP rate for weekday usage exceeding 15 MIPs. This overage charge steers batch processing to overnight and weekend periods, when overall demand is less, and forces developers of applications in use during the business day to optimize for performance, saving datacenter resources at the same time. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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Thinstall Virtualization Suite 3.0 -- the first version to be targeted at the broader enterprise IT audience -- brings some fresh ideas to the Windows application virtualization game, InfoWorld's reviewer says.
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Triple your VMs per box Just a few months after de-stealthing, software maker Fastscale has updated the user interface of its flagship product and, more importantly, added a new package for managing VMware virtual servers.â¦
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The need to test packaged applications on virtualised systems could hold up the deployment of server virtualisation software, according to attendees at Gartner&#39;s datacentre conference in Las Vegas this week.