El Reg goes virtual with e-Symposium on virtualization
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VMware impressed Site News Upon discovering a respirator at his father's retirement home, Homer Simpson let out a natural reaction. "And here I am using my own lungs like a sucker."â¦
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New BladeSymphony models can be linked into multiprocessor systems or subdivided with virtualization.
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Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software, will be a featured solution provider at the 2007 HP Technology Forum &amp; Expo in Las Vegas this week.
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The Massachusetts site will research cross-platform virtualization and document format translation.
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Passerella multimediale col clone virtuale di Renzo Rosso
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Another Tuesday in Belgium O'Reilly held EuroOSCON, the European Open-Source Convention, on 18-21 September in central Brussels. El Reg's technical department had the opportunity to turn up and see what the fuss was about.â¦
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Blog: A developer writes that virtualization represents a threat to Microsoft's control of the desktop and licensing restrictions are one way to try to maintain its grip.
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Hosted desktop firm, Nivio, hopes to expand its ability to offer virtual Windows XP desktops and software accessible from any desktop or mobile browser.
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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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InfoWorld - Virtual Iron Software, a small startup, will formally debut its virtual computing environment that enables administrators in a corporate IT shop to link Linux-based servers into a network and allow them to function more like a mainframe.
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Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!   We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?   He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.
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The latest version of the server includes built-in virtualization technology.
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LIVE WEBCAST(Source: Network Appliance) Join us for a live Webcast as a panel of industry experts discusses ways to consolidate IT infrastructures while increasing utilization, lowering application management costs, increasing uptime, and reducing backup windows. The panel will also evaluate virtualization solutions and discuss what it takes to deploy them.
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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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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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Hoping to keep the heat on archrival Microsoft, VMware on Wednesday will give developers a glimpse of an early version of its Virtual SMP product that allows a single virtual machine to work with as many as four processors, which in turn can more effectively drive mission-critical applications.
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Autonomy&#39;s ZANTAZ division said Wednesday its e-discovery software can now find information stored in virtual environments.The functionality comes in the form of a new module for the company&#39;s Introspect product, according to Nicole Eagan, Autonomy&#39;s chief marketing officer. The module can search multiple virtual file servers running a number of operating systems, freeing up IT shops from doing the work manually, according to the company.Given the &quot;extreme&quot; type of rulings that have occurred in the e-discovery realm, such as one court&#39;s order that a company preserve its RAM data, virtualized information should undoubtedly factor into companies&#39; efforts to comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure concerning electronically stored information, Eagan said.The company said it supports the product&#39;s use in a range of virtual environments, including VMware, Microsoft, Parallels, VirtualBox, Virtual Iron, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, and VirtualLogix VLX.Guy Creese, an analyst with Burton Group, said the new capability holds value but perhaps only for customers with more drastic needs.&quot;Basically, if you&#39;re going through e-discovery, you want to &quot;wall off&quot; the relevant data (put it &#39;on hold&#39;),&quot; he said Wednesday. &quot;Virtualization is a good way to do this as you can put a virtual machine on a server and prevent others from getting to it.&quot;An IT shop could also put data in a secured repository and add yet another layer of security by putting the repository in a virtual setting, he added.&quot;Autonomy says they can make these different virtual machines look like one environment,&quot; he added. &quot;This is a valuable feature, but this is a niche capability as few companies would have this complex an e-discovery infrastructure.&quot;Eagan acknowledged that the new capability might find its first adopters among larger enterprises. &quot;That&#39;s where it will start, that&#39;s where litigation is most prominent,&quot; she said.She declined to provide specific pricing information.