February 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
VMware woos SMBs with VirtualCenter Lite
VMware Server runs on Windows or Linux, supports Windows and Linux and Solaris guests, and it's free. These are all nice qualities. About the only knock against it has been the absence of a centralized management system, and VMware filled that hole today.
VMware VirtualCenter for VMware Server is a stripped down version of the management system in VMware's enterprise platform, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3). In addition to host and VM resource monitoring, and the ability to start, stop, and suspend VMs across the network, VirtualCenter for VMware Server provides a VM library and cloning for rapid provisioning, and it allows you to set alerts on predefined events such as a CPU utilization threshold or a VM failure. It does not include the live VM migration capability found in VI3.
Of course, licensed at $1,500 for three physical, dual-processor servers (plus $400 per each additional host agent), VirtualCenter for VMware Server weighs in at about one-tenth the cost of VI3. The price point is more in line with Xen-based server virtualization offerings from Virtual Iron and XenSource.
According to VMware's Ben Matheson, director of product management, the new bundle is aimed at SMBs running 10 physical servers or more. Matheson said that, among the 1.2 million downloaders of VMware Server, about 70 percent have been SMBs -- companies with fewer than 1,000 employees or fewer than 100 servers.
The new offering suggests that VMware Server management tools might be integrated into VI3 soon. "We do recognize we need to get that functionality available," Matheson acknowledged. "We know when we plan to deliver it, but I don't know if I can talk about that."
Posted by Doug Dineley on February 5, 2007 03:00 AM
October 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Preview: Egenera BladeFrame EX looks sharp
After a rather nice fall drive to Egenera's headquarters in Marlboro Mass. (nice, with the exception of Rt 495, which is never nice, yet always a uniquely Massachusetts experience), I spent the day in their labs taking a good look at the new BladeFrame EX and PAN Manager 5.0.
Egenera's digs have all the hallmarks of a company growing very fast; crowded hallways, a literally overflowing parking lot, and the ever- present rattle and hum of a serious engineering firm. Egenera's new BladeFrame EX is the latest installment of the company's flagship product, representing the efforts of the six-year-old company very well.
The BladeFrame EX is relatively difficult to describe. It's a blade system, but not really. It's a virtualization platform, but well, not really. Grid computing? Well, not really. It's the marriage of all three in a sense, with stateless blades that have CPUs and RAM, but no disk, NICs, HBAs, or any other form of connectivity other than a backplane connection, coupled with controllers and switching modules that deliver the missing pieces. All of this is wrapped up in a chassis that looks like a standard server cabinet.
The key is the management software, and a connection to a SAN. All together, a single BladeFrame EX represents 24 servers that can be sliced and diced to run any single server instance (called a pServer ) at any given time, with disk delivered by way of the SAN, and all other connections flowing through the backplane.
A few clicks can turn any individual blade from a Windows 2003 server into a RedHat EL 4 server. A blade failure results in the server instance running on that blade moving to a spare blade in a matter of a minute or so, no imaging required.
Stay tuned for the first official review of Egenera's BladeFrame EX, once I figure out how to put the full solution into words. Barring that, my preliminary opinion can be distilled into one word: Cool.
Posted by Paul Venezia on October 4, 2006 02:27 PM
September 22, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Test Center Tracker: The promise of virtualization
All virtualization, all the time:: The se-cret word in the Test Center this week has been virtualization. (So has the word exclusive, for that matter.) Paul Venezia got an exclusive opportunity to try out Scalent Virtual Operating Environment, a solution the company claims to be a truly adaptive datacenter. A bold promise? Perhaps, but the company has come pretty darn close. "Combined with a very attractive and usable Flash-based GUI, V/OE 2.0 is a glimpse of what a truly adaptive datacenter could look like."
Security at an unbeatable price:There may not be such a thing as a free lunch, but there such a thing as a free security tool, according to security-meister Roger A. Grimes. In fact, there's a bunch, and they're well worth the price of downloading (and more). You may not be seeing any nifty new freebies from Sysinternals, since Microsoft bought it a while back. However, Foundstone remains a great source. "Many of Foundstone's tools became instant computer security classics, such as Superscan (an excellent port scanner), Fport (a port enumerator), stress testing tools, and all sorts of malware scanners. These are programs and tools that Foundstone's own expert consultants and penetration testers use during security audits."
Live from Interop NYC: Geek-out-of-paradise Brian Chee isn't the only InfoWorld Test Center contributor at Interop NYC this week. Enterprise Windows columnist Oliver Rist couldn't resist the call of the network gear, either. Check out his Emerging Enterprise podcast from the event in which he talks about the state of the WAFS standard and shares some tips on hooking together near-remote sites with more than just T1 lines.
Posted by Ted Samson on September 22, 2006 06:00 AM
September 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Test Center Tracker: Virtualization tech and Interop talk
Fresh from the Test Center: Our exclusive review of Surgient Virtual QA/Test Management System 5.0 is now online, and according to Contributing Editor Andrew Binstock's tests, this powerful test-lab automation software makes good use of virtualization technology. That power is tempered by complexity, however, so be prepared for a steep learning curve.
Interop-a-rama: Test Center Contributing Editor Brian Chee is at the Interop show in New York, working as part of the Interop NOC team to keep the show network up and running -- as well as getting his hands on some spiffy new technologies and seeing the sights on the show floor. He recently chatted with the CTO and vice president of marketing from WildPackets, a company that makes network monitoring and analysis products, and learned more about their open API project and future plans. Check out the Geeks in Paradise blog post for the full story. And stop by the Inside Interop blog if you're curious about what's going at the show and behind the scenes (they have nifty podcast interviews, too).
The password is "data security": There's much ado about data encryption these days, in the wake of so many lost laptops, lost tapes, and other scary instances of data leaks. Mario Apicella figures that the recent Sun and IBM data encryption technology announcements, promising as they may seem, won't plug all the security holes in a company. Jon Udell makes the point that sometimes you, yourself are the best possible data security monitor. That may be true, but IT can't police the entire organization with actual bodies unless your budget suddenly got super-super-sized -- so check out some of our data security reviews, such as Tablus Content Sentinel or these unified threat managment (UTM) boxes.
Posted by Stephanie McLoughlin on September 21, 2006 06:00 AM
September 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Network General digs into app performance
Aiming to better marry network monitoring and application performance management across its product line, Network General today unveiled Network Intelligence Suite, a melding of NetVigil 4.2 and Visualizer 4.2, as well as VoIP Foresnics, the first of several forthcoming Business Container additions to NIS.
Network General bought Fidelia last February, and with that acquired the NetVigil business-service monitoring technology that's now part of NIS. That combination has yielded a solution providing application monitoring integrated with traditional packet-level network and application traffic analysis capabilities.
The end-result, according to Network General, is that IT admins can with NIS enjoy a full view of the overall health of the network, then can drill down and determine specifically what's causing an application to underperform.
"Managing application performance and availability is getting more complex with many architectural styles, such as SOA and others. This introduces a lot more moving parts that can affect application performance and availability, said Milind Govekar, research VP at Gartner. "However, certain IT components, such as the network, are always blamed for poor performance. Thus it is important for IT to invest in application management tools that not only allow them to measure and monitor end user application performance, but also provide root cause analysis capability to proactively identify and rectify application performance problems."
Exemplifying the APM that Network General has melded with Visualizer is the birth of VoIP Forensics, which Network General says gives admins a window for deeply tracking and troubleshooting voice over IP performance, including common statistics such as MOSS score, in real time. It can also send alerts when performance degrades to particular levels.
VoIP Forensics is one of the company's Business Containers, part of the company's Business Forensics solution. Forthcoming containers will deliver drill-down performance views for service level agreements, virtualized environments, and others.
The Network Intelligence Suite, VoIP Forensics, and the 4.2 version of the latest products will be generally available on September 22.
Posted by Ted Samson on September 18, 2006 02:29 PM
September 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Preview: Scalent VOE proves hardware-agnostic
For the past few weeks I've been serving as host to a bevy of servers running under Scalent's Virtual Operating Environment (VOE). The hardware is a mix of HP DL360s, a DL380, a Sun V20, and a Dell PowerEdge 2800 that I threw into the mix. The upshot of all this hardware is that when running under VOE, it doesn't matter which is which, or what's running on it.
Working in the very slick Flash-based GUI, I can create entire application layouts by dragging server persona icons in a Visio-style panel, complete with virtual switches to separate traffic. I can link them together in a logical diagram, then group-select all the personas and watch them boot on either physical servers, or within a VMware host. Of course, these personas are built beforehand, but it's possible to clone them from a base image, then tweak them to spec.
Scalent handles this magic by relying on PXE booting, DHCP, 802.1q trunking at the persona level, and agents installed within each persona. Thus, by trunking all links to the physical switch, it doesn't matter what port a persona is actually talking to; the traffic will be routed correctly. Quite elegant.
There's plenty more to this solution, so look for my full review later this week online, or in the Sept. 25 issue of InfoWorld.
Posted by Paul Venezia on September 18, 2006 12:37 PM