While Hyper9 continues to build features on top of its search engine for virtual infrastructures, it also keeps R&D resources busy on parallel projects. The last one, released a few days ago, is SimDK , an open source tool able to simulate the vSphere behavior. Users can connect to the SimDK service with VMware clients, like the PowerCLI or the standard vSphere Client. It’s primarily aimed at developers that want to do QA and testing, verify APIs compatibility or perform load and scalability testing, but it can be used to test, for example, 3rd party scripting tools like the Quest/Vizioncore virtualisation EcoShell Initiative (VESI) .

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A new US startup entered the virtualisation market in mid-February: Virsto . Founded in 2007 and sustained by a $8.5M investment led by August Capital and Canaan Partners, the company is managed by Mark Davis , former CEO of Creekpath Systems (acquired by Opsware, which was then acquired by HP ). Davis also served as Vice President of Marketing at Monosphere, acquired by Quest . Davis is leading an interesting team of managers and advisors, which includes the co-founder and CTO Alex Miroshnichenko (former CTO at Acronis), the co-founder and Vice President of Engineering Serge Pashenkov (former Senior Director of technology Development at PowerFile and Veritas – acquired by Symantec), the Vice President of Sales Rafael Santini (former VP of Worldwide OEM Sales at XenSource – acquired by Citrix ), and the advisors Frank Artale (current Vice President of Business Development at Citrix), James Phillips (co-founder and former CEO of Akimbi – acquired by VMware ) and Shaw Chuang (former R&D Executive at VMware).

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At the beginning of 2010 the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) published the first revision of the OVF standard , released for the first time in February 2009. OVF 1.1 includes some clarification and new components: Capability for file system-based images to increase flexibility at deployment time A property attribute to hide password values at the user interface Joliet extensions for ISO transport image DMTF has also submitted OVF to the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) “Fast-Track” process to develop it as an American National Standard at American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Once it is approved as an ANSI standard, OVF will be submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for consideration as an international standardization. The list of contributors to this revision is quite interesting as it includes includes representatives from Citrix (still listed as XenSource), Dell, IBM, Microsoft NEC, Sun (soon to appear as Oracle), Symantec and of course VMware: Simon Crosby, XenSource Ron Doyle, IBM Mike Gering, IBM Michael Gionfriddo, Sun Microsystems Steffen Grarup, VMware (Co-Editor) Steve Hand, Symantec Mark Hapner, Sun Microsystems Daniel Hiltgen, VMware Michael Johanssen, IBM Lawrence J. Lamers, VMware (Chair) John Leung, Intel Corporation Fumio Machida, NEC Corporation Andreas Maier, IBM Ewan Mellor, XenSource John Parchem, Microsoft Shishir Pardikar, XenSource Stephen J.

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The imminent launch of Intel octal-core CPUs (codename Nehalem-EX) and servers with up to 48 cores (powered by AMD codename Magny-cours CPUs) will dramatically increase the virtualisation hosts density but will highlight how the network layer is becoming one of the weakest point of high-capacity virtual infrastructures. Anandtech just published a very interesting article on this topic, testing the performance of a couple of copper cable 10GBase-CX4 network interface cards against the popular quad-port gigabit NICs we use today in most virtualisation hosts. The benchmark measured dual-port Intel PRO/1000 PT Server adapter (82571EB) against a Supermicro AOC-STG-I2 dual-port 10Gbit/s Intel 82598EB and a Neterion Xframe-E 10Gbit/s. Both NICs were tested with VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and CentOS 5.4 guest OSes with appropriate drivers. While NICs tested by Anandtech are not the lastest available on the market, the research still is a valuable reading for most virtualisation administrators.

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The well-know virtualisation professional (and blogger) Eric Sloof just released a tool called vmClient . vmClient is a minimal management console that appears as an empty window frame. It features a menu bar where the virtual machines hosted by any VMware vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi host are listed. Each virtual machine in the list can be powered on/off, suspended and restarted.

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Archipel is a new open source virtual infrastructure management system based on the libvirt libraries and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, formerly Jabber). Still in early stage, the tool supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ and VirtualBox and it’s currently able to operate single virtual machines and VM groups, displaying performance statistics about them. The interesting twist is that, thanks to the XMPP engine, this console provides instant notification about VMs status to any chat client that supports the (almost) standard protocol. This means that virtual infrastructure administrators can query virtual machine status through their IM program of choice (like Google Talk or Gmail Chat for example). To do so, each virtual infrastructure entity, including hosts and virtual machines, appear as an IM contacts,

While Intel prepares to launch its first octal-core CPU (codename Nehalem-EX ) , which will potentially trigger a price increase in vSphere licensing, VMware publishes a new benchmark on current Xeon 5500 servers. This time the company focuses on high throughput web performance, running the SPECweb2005 benchmark against a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 machine equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 CPUs @ 2.933GHz and 96GB memory. The system above, powered by vSphere 4.0, run four virtual machines with 4 vCPUs and 21GB vRAM each, hosting a copy of paravirtualized 64bit Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 plus Rock Webserver and Rock JSP server. Such system, thanks to paravirtualisation drivers, the VMware NetQueue technology, the Intel VMDirectPath technology (part of VT-d) and the Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit AF network interface cards, recorded a benchmark score of 62,296, equal to 85% of native performance. The four VMs were able to serve

At the beginning of January virtualisation.info published a long overview about the VMware’s approach to cloud computing , covering the vCloud APIs, the vCloud Express implementation and the five partners that are currently offering it. One of them, BlueLock, just sent an email to its customers announcing that its vCloud Express offering will (tentatively) move from beta to general availability (GA) on March 25. As far as we know none of the other providers is out of beta yet (this article will be updated if necessary). So, while it’s entirely possible that BlueLock wants to be the first to announce vCloud Express GA, it’s much more likely that all the early adopters will make GA announcements in the same timeframe. And this may mean that VMware is about to release some additional information or bits about its cloud computing platform

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Phoenix Technologies today announced the appointment of Robert Andersen as Interim Chief Financial Officer, effective March 5, 2010. Mr. Andersen replaces Mr. Richard Arnold, who resigned from Phoenix to pursue other opportunities. [[ This is a content summary only

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VMware has launched a Lab site where VMware Engineers can share new tools that they are developing. They are offering a wide range of tools here, each of which are being offered under a Technical Preview or relevant Open Source License. This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]

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