Virtualization Articles
New capabilities have been added in Serengeti 0.8.0, which extend the reach of partner-supported Hadoop versions and capabilities. Project Serengeti is an open source project sponsored by VMware. It provides Hadoop users with easy to use management tools to provision, manage, and monitor Hadoop clusters on VMware vSphere.
Posted April 09, 2013
Early bird registration is now open for the Big Data Boot Camp, a two-day intensive dive into the world of big data. The conference, produced by Database Trends and Applications, will be held Tuesday, May 21, through Wednesday, May 22, at the Hilton New York. The agenda of the Big Data Boot Camp has been designed to bring together thought leaders and practitioners who will identify emerging technologies and provide case studies and best practices in big data management.
Posted March 12, 2013
Oracle has announced the general availability of Oracle Database Appliance X3-2, featuring up to twice the performance and supporting over four times the storage as compared to the original Oracle Database Appliance. Oracle Database Appliance is a complete package of software, server, storage and networking designed for simplicity and high availability, helping businesses of all sizes reduce risk and save time and money managing their data and applications.
Posted March 06, 2013
In a new blog, Kelly Beavers, vice president and business line executive, IBM Systems Software, writes about IBM SmartCloud Entry, which now supports the open source KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor. The result, she explains, is that with just one product, customers can support virtual machines that are running on KVM, VMware, and/or PowerVM: Cloud computing is one of those technologies for which people have differing definitions, but SmartCloud Entry does the most basic things that just about everyone expects from a cloud solution: web-based provisioning for a cloud, and a pay-as-you go model. SmartCloud Entry supports those two critical capabilities with a couple of key attributes that decrease risk to organizations. First, it makes it really simple for a company that is new to the cloud to get started with a private cloud safely and behind their own firewall, and second, it does so with pricing that is completely affordable for the mid-market.
Posted February 28, 2013
DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization software, has made enhancements to its SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor. The new capabilities are intended to support customers who are facing high data growth, as well as the need to enable faster response times and provide continuous availability for business-critical applications.
Posted February 27, 2013
Oracle president Mark Hurd and Oracle executive vice president of product development Thomas Kurian recently hosted a conference call to provide an update on Oracle's cloud strategy and recap of product-related developments. Oracle is trying to do two things for customers - simplify their IT and power their innovation, said Hurd.
Posted February 27, 2013
Denodo Technologies, a provider of data virtualization software, has unveiled the Denodo Platform 5.0. This latest version of Denodo´s solution enables data virtualization for both agile business intelligence and agile development of connected application and helps organizations access all of their information sources including big data, cloud and unstructured sources. The new release was previewed at the TDWI conference in Las Vegas.
Posted February 20, 2013
INNOVATION Data Processing is teaming with storage infrastructure vendor EMC to support customers installing or migrating to the EMC Disk Library for mainframe (Dlm) virtual tape libraries. As part of this arrangement, EMC will offer INNOVATION's FATSCOPY Tape Migration Utility.
Posted February 19, 2013
Open-E, a data storage provider, announced that its Open-E Data Storage Software Version 7 (DSS V7) has achieved "VMware Ready" status. This means that after a detailed validation process, DSS V7 has achieved VMware's "highest level of endorsement," the vendor says, and is available through the VMware Solution Exchange.
Posted February 19, 2013
Oracle has introduced Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Oracle VM Templates for several Oracle applications. The Oracle applications have been packaged as ready-to-run virtual machines for deployment in Oracle's Exalogic Elastic Cloud environment, explains Adam Hawley, senior director of desktop and server virtualization product management at Oracle. The templates are now available for the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3, Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1, Oracle's PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.52 and Oracle's Siebel CRM 8.1.1.8 and 8.2.2. These are the first Oracle VM templates built for Oracle Exalogic.
Posted February 13, 2013
Veeam Software Group, a provider of backup, replication and virtualization management solutions for VMware vSphere and Windows Sever Hyper-V, has released Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition. According to the vendor, the solution turns public storage cloud into a data repository for backups, enabling an alternative to tape and traditional offsite backup storage.
Posted February 12, 2013
Oracle VM Release 3.2, a key component in Oracle's desktop to data center virtualization portfolio, is now available. There are two main themes to the new release, Adam Hawley, senior director of desktop and server virtualization product management at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. One main area of emphasis is to provide a richer, more diverse set of deployment options for customers. The second major collection of enhancements is around allowing users to more easily and efficiently manage larger environments.
Posted February 06, 2013
Server virtualization will remain a top priority for many IT organizations and vendor go-to-market strategies 2013, writes senior analyst Mark Bowker in a blog on the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) website. However, organizations will not be relying on a single hypervisor, says Bowker, who points to an ESG research brief, Multiple Hypervisor Usage Trends, in which nearly-two thirds (65%) of respondent organizations report using more than one hypervisor,
Posted January 24, 2013
Kroll Ontrack, a provider of information management tools, has announced a software tool that enables overwrite erasure of data on hard drives within VMware environments to ensure security and that drives can be repurposed. Version 4.0 of Ontrack Eraser provides expanded drive wiping capacity, VMware eraser capabilities, and new reporting and security management functionality. "The industry is struggling with being able to confirm that VMDKs (virtual machine disks) are wiped securely," Abhik Mitra, data recovery product manager at Kroll Ontrack, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It is a very manual, mundane process today."
Posted January 22, 2013
Red Hat, Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ManageIQ for $104 million in cash. ManageIQ is a provider of enterprise cloud management and automation solutions that help organizations to deploy and manage private clouds, virtualized infrastructures and virtual desktops. With the addition of ManageIQ technologies to its portfolio, Red Hat says it will expand the reach of its hybrid cloud management solutions for enterprises.
Posted December 28, 2012
At OpenWorld, Oracle's annual conference for customers and partners, John Matelski, president of the IOUG, and CIO for Dekalb County, Georgia, gave his perspective on the key takeaways from this year's event. Matelski also described the user group's efforts to help the community understand the value of Oracle's engineered systems and deal with the broad implications of big data, and how the IOUG is supporting Oracle DBAs in their evolving roles.
Posted December 12, 2012
VMware, Inc., a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure products, announced it is shipping two sets of management toolsets intended to better simplify and automate the management of clouds and applications. VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 and VMware vFabric Application Director 5.0 are included in the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1. "With the VMware vCloud Suite, we bring together what customers need to build and manage a cloud infrastructure, as well as new and existing applications by automating infrastructure operations to help IT evolve into a broker of services to the business," says Ramin Sayar, vice president and general manager of cloud infrastructure and management for VMware.
Posted December 10, 2012
I was privileged to deliver a session entitled Managing SQL Server in a Virtual World at the PASS Summit 2012, the largest annual conference for Microsoft SQL Server. It was a packed house, literally at standing-room-only capacity. I delivered the session with my friend David Klee and we were swarmed by attendees after the session wrapped up. With almost 600 people in the room, we conducted one of those informal polls that speakers like to do along the lines of "Raise your hands if …" and the informal findings were very telling. Probably around 90% of the attendees used VMware and SQL Server in some capacity and at least 60% used it in production environments. Another important fact was that only 10% of the attendees were actually able to get information on the performance of the actual VMs themselves. Most had to get all of their information and support from the VM / System administration staff.
Posted November 13, 2012
For years, data warehouses and extract, transform and load (ETL) have been the primary methods of accessing and archiving multiple data sources across enterprises. Now, an emerging approach - data virtualization - promises to advance the concept of the federated data warehouse to deliver more timely and easier-to-access enterprise data. These are some of the observations made at Composite Software's third Annual Data Virtualization Day, held in New York City. This year's gathering was the largest ever, with nearly 250 customers and practitioners in attendance, Composite reports.
Posted November 13, 2012
When virtualization was first born, IT departments went gangbusters using this revolutionary change to get better performance out of their servers. In all the excitement of implementation, something not so very small was overlooked — backup and recovery. The lack of proper planning forced jobs and recovery to fail, and backup admins started feeling backed into a corner. Thankfully, times have changed, and IT departments, now very aware of these issues, have gotten savvy at avoiding the potential pains of virtualization infrastructure. But a new challenge has emerged.
Posted November 13, 2012
Oracle has announced general availability of Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1. Oracle Solaris 11 is the first operating system built for cloud, Charlie Boyle, senior director of Solaris product marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "We have taken lessons learned from our customers and feature requests and built those into Solaris 11.1 to enhance our cloud platform." In addition, Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 extends high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of Oracle Solaris and includes virtual cluster features supporting efficient application consolidation.
Posted November 07, 2012
At SAP TechEd 2012 in Las Vegas, SAP unveiled its plans for SAP HANA Cloud, a next-generation cloud platform based on in-memory technology. As part of SAP HANA Cloud, the company also announced the general availability of SAP NetWeaverCloud, an open standards-based application service, and SAP HANA One, a deployment of SAP HANA certified for production use on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, as the first offerings based on SAP HANA Cloud.
Posted October 24, 2012
Application performance management (APM) software provider Precise has announced the availability of Precise 9.5, a major product release designed to help organizations deliver a better experience for customers using their cloud and mobile applications. Precise 9.5 rapidly detects and analyzes application problems resulting from server and storage virtualization resource contention, and also addresses the challenge of managing mobile traffic growth. The new release focuses on three key themes, all with the common goal of identifying and resolving potential problems before they can affect the customer experience or cause an outage, Sherman Wood, vice president of product at Precise, tells DBTA.
Posted October 24, 2012
Data management vendor Delphix has released a new version of its database virtualization platform, Delphix 3.0. Featuring new support for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Microsoft SQL Server, the latest version expands the power of virtualization across the enterprise database landscape. Virtual databases powered by Delphix 3.0 have capabilities that cannot be duplicated on physical infrastructure, the company contends. "The big benefit of our product is we help companies change their data management SLAs," Jed Yueh, CEO of Delphix, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted October 18, 2012
Composite Software introduced version 6.2 of the Composite Data Virtualization Platform at Data Virtualization Day 2012, its data virtualization conference in New York City. The new release contains additional analytics enablement capabilities including support for more analytic data sources, additional analytic platform optimizations, and expanded data governance. "High-performance access to big data, analytic appliances and data warehouses is far simpler and faster with Composite's data virtualization solution," says Kevin Ott, Composite Software senior VP of product development.
Posted October 10, 2012
CA Technologies launched a new book called "Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated" at Oracle OpenWorld. Co-authored by CA CTO John Michelsen and CA LISA director of product marketing Jason English, the book explains how deploying service virtualization to simulate the behavior, responsiveness and data of dependent systems can help remove constraints in the existing software environment, and help increase the speed, performance, and agility for the development of enterprise application software.
Posted October 10, 2012
ExtraHop Networks, a provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, has introduced ExtraHop Discovery Edition, a new 60-day, free trial version of the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system, and the EH2000v, a more powerful version of its EH1000v virtual appliance. The ExtraHop Discovery Edition is aimed at helping IT teams to easily explore the benefits of network-based APM, while the EH2000v supports enterprises' increasingly virtualized and distributed IT environments, providing up to a sustained 3Gbps throughput capacity and support for over 1,000 hosts or VMs.
Posted October 08, 2012
Oracle announced the availability of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2, the latest enhancement to the world's most popular, open source, cross-platform virtualization software. Making it easier and more efficient to manage larger numbers of similar virtual machines, Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2's new VM Group feature enables grouping of VMs so that administrators or users can operate on any number of VMs all at once, through a graphical user interface, APIs, and command line tools. In addition, VMs that don't need user interaction can now be started within Oracle VM VirtualBox the same way as standard VMs. Virtual machines of all types can be set to start automatically after the host system is booted, allowing virtual machines to be managed similarly to other host services.
Posted September 19, 2012
Composite Software third annual Data Virtualization Day will take place October 10 in New York City. Data Virtualization Day 2012: The Logical Next Steps represents the world's largest gathering of data virtualization experts and implementers, expected to draw more than 200 Composite Software customers and prospects. Attendees will hear from leading authorities on data virtualization, data warehousing, data integration and business intelligence discussing "Data Virtualization: Why it's Logical for Business and IT."
Posted September 18, 2012
VMware, Inc., a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced the general availability of the new VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, a complete, integrated cloud infrastructure solution that integrates VMware's leading virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into a single SKU, simplifying the adoption of cloud era technologies. "By bringing together everything customers may need to build and manage agile, reliable cloud infrastructure, the VMware vCloud Suite simplifies and automates IT operations and delivers on the promise of cloud computing," says Mike Clayville, vice president of product marketing for cloud infrastructure products for VMware.
Posted September 17, 2012
Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) member company Abyres has successfully transitioned several Malaysian government agencies to open virtualization environments running Microsoft Windows applications powered by KVM. As a result, the agencies have a cost-effective, user-friendly platform that is easy to manage and maximizes utilization, reliability and availability of the high-performance virtual machines Abyres delivers.
Posted August 24, 2012
Shelter Mutual Insurance Co., an insurance company with a presence in 14 states, was facing out of control server sprawl and difficulties with air flow and rack space, writes Jim Utsler in the August issue of IBM Systems Magazine. To deal with the problem, Shelter opted to move many of its applications to IFL processors running on its mainframe, slowing the growth rate of the existing Intel technology-based boxes. As an added bonus, the company's applications are now running faster on its zEnterprise 114 (z114) platform than they had in the past, notes Utsler.
Posted August 24, 2012
Oracle has announced Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0. According to Oracle, customers in 43 countries across 22 industries have already adopted Oracle Exalogic, and it is the fastest growing Oracle engineered system with 3x Y/Y sales bookings based on the last two quarters of FY 2012. The second generation of Exalogic is raising the bar even further, with a single integrated system that addresses the key business goals of application owners - to seize market opportunities, lower business risk and reduce cost and complexity, noted Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president for product development at Oracle, who spoke during a webcast presentation to launch the new release.
Posted August 23, 2012
Seriously chronic geeks like me usually were raised on a strong diet of science fiction that shaped our expectations of the future. Reading Heinlein and Asimov as a boy led me to expect flying cars and robot servants. Reading William Gibson and other "cyberpunk" authors as a young man led me to expect heads-up virtual reality glasses and neural interfaces. Flying cars and robot companions don't seem to be coming anytime soon, but we are definitely approaching a world in which virtual - or at least augmented - reality headsets and brain control interfaces become mainstream.
Posted August 22, 2012
Quest Software has announced that vRanger 6.0, the latest version of its virtual data protection solution which provides backup, replication, and recovery for VMware, now also enables customers to back up and restore physical Windows servers. Providing a single source of protection for both virtual and physical environments, vRanger 6.0 is VMware Ready certified for vSphere 5, provides OS support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and also will support Windows Server 2012 upon its release to market. "We feel that we can reduce the complexity and reduce the number of tools used in a Windows environment that is using VMware," Greg Davoll, senior director, product marketing, data protection business, at Quest, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Posted August 21, 2012
VMware, Inc., a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, says it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nicira, Inc., a network virtualization vendor. VMware will acquire Nicira for approximately $1.05 billion in cash plus approximately $210 million of assumed unvested equity awards. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The parties expect the acquisition to close during the second half of 2012, according to VMware. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both VMware and Nicira and the stockholders of Nicira.
Posted August 20, 2012