Last week Quest announced three new products, Clout Automation Platform 7.5, vFoglight 6.5 and vFoglight Storage 1.0, but just the last one is available right now. vFoglight comes from the rebranding of the Vizioncore portfolio , completed at the end of August. The last Vizioncore version of the product is 6.0, released in November 2009. The new 6.5 version introduces a number of new capabilities, including the much expected support for Microsoft Hyper-V, but it won’t be available before Q4 2010. vFoglight Storage 1.0 leverages the Vizioncore monitoring engine and GUI to control the physical storage layer, providing details about the topology (relation between arrays and datastores) and performance of SAN arrays in the virtual infrastructure. The product ships with pre-defined alerts and reports helpful to understand when the capacity thresholds are matched. vFoglight Storage provides Latency, I/O / sec and MB / sec, number of read and writes as performance metrics, as well as size, used/committed and number/amount of entities as capacity metrics. The data history is limited to just 30 days. Customers can expand that only by integrating the product with vFoglight. First version of the product doesn’t support all kind of storage vendors. NetApp filers (both Fibre Channel and iSCSI), through the DataOnTap API, and EMC CLARiiON CX3 and CX4 SANs (both Fibre Channel and iSCSI) are supported. During the whole 2011 Quest will extend support to HP, Dell, IBM, Hitachi and other EMC SANs. Support for fabric switches is limited too: only Brocade and Cisco Fibre Channel switches are supported right now. Quite interestingly, while the product can be installed on any VMware virtual machine, Quest recommends to run it on physical hosts when it has to monitor large virtual infrastructures (e.g.: 4 clusters with 6 ESX hosts each). Quest sells vFoglight Storage at $499 per CPU socket. Labels: Platform Monitoring , Quest , Releases , Vizioncore

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Just one day before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix managed to distract the audience with a major announcement: the acquisition of VMLogix for an undisclosed sum. VMLogix entered the virtual lab automation (VLA) market in October 2006 , in competition with a really short number of companies. In February 2009 the company signed a deal with Citrix to OEM its flagship product in the Essentials management package, which is available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. As Citrix has to enrich its virtual infrastructure to better compete against VMware, this acquisition was largely expected. The acquisition is expected to complete during the Q3 2010. The VMLogix technology will be fully integrated in the next version of XenServer (6.0?) as well as in the just announced OpenCloud platform. With VMware owning Akimbi ( June 2006 ), Quest owning Surgient ( July 2010 ) and StackSafe out of business ( March 2009 ?), there are no more virtual lab automation startups out there, except Skytap and the just born CloudShare. But both companies only offers a hosted business model, and this restricts the range of potential bidders. According to this, in the attempt to become more desirable acquisition targets, both Skytap and CloudShare may want to offer soon a version of its platform for on-premises deployment. Labels: Acquisitions , Citrix , Virtual Lab Automation , VMLogix

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In February, CA hired Andi Mann , the former Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) in February. In his new role as Vice President of Product Marketing for Virtualization Management, Mann helped to reorganize the go-to-virtualization-market strategy. virtualization.info also received a tip that CA hired Mike O’Malley , the former Director of Analyst Relations and Market Intelligence at VMware. O’Malley is the Vice President of Product Marketing since January. The two guys probably worked together at a plan to refresh the company’s image and credibility as a virtualization player. The process culminated with the relaunch of the CA’s virtualization portfolio, which now includes five products, officially released yesterday : Virtual Assurance Virtual Assurance is an event and performance monitoring solution. It tracks several components of the virtual infrastructure, like the application traffic response time (even for multi-tier applications), and performs root-cause analysis to help isolate and remediate faults. Virtual Assurance, shipping as a physical appliance, currently supports VMware VI3 and vSphere 4.0. CA already announced upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V. Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers While Virtual Assurance is a stand-alone solution, Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers acts as a sort of gateway to the virtual world for the other CA’s management products, including eHealth Performance Manager, Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, NSM, and Spectrum Automation Manager. The product supports VMware VI3 and vSphere 4.0, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and 5.5, Oracle Solaris Containers 10 (for both SPARC and Intel architectures), and IBM LPAR P5 and P6 systems. Virtual Automation Virtual Automation is a VM lifecycle management solution, offering provisioning through a self-service portal, an approval workflow, library templates automated configuration, resource pool management, VM tracking, cost accounting, and scheduled de-provisioning. The product supports VMware VI3 and vSphere 4.0, as well as Amazon EC2. CA already announced upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V. Virtual Configuration Virtual Configuration is a configuration management solution that provides configuration discovery, including discovery of server and application dependencies, configuration baselines and validation, detection and remediation of configuration drift, and virtualization dashboards to facilitate change tracking and review, compliance audits, and reporting on environmental status. The product supports VMware VI3 and vSphere 4.0, and Citrix XenServer. CA already announced upcoming support for Microsoft Hyper-V. Virtual Assurance, Virtual Automation, and Virtual Configuration are also available as a bundle called Virtual Foundation Suite. The last product, Virtual Privilege Manager , doesn’t seem available yet as the CA’s website completely lacks of any literature about the product. The only details about this piece of the portfolio comes from the press announcement: CA Virtual Privilege Manager is designed to control privileged access to virtual environments by securing console access to the hypervisor and managing privileged access to all of the virtual images running on the virtualization server as well as the service console. Key capabilities of the solution include privileged user password management for the virtual machines and service console, fine-grained administrative access controls to the hypervisor service console, service console hardening, and original user activity monitoring in virtual environments. Solely judging from this description it seems that Virtual Privilege Manager is going to compete against HyTrust. The other products mentioned above instead compete with a wide range of well-established players, including Quest/Vizioncore, Veeam, VKernel, VMware and several others. CA is a big company with a solid position as infrastructure manager in the physical world, but a leadership in that space doesn’t automatically translates into a leadership in the virtualization market. The company will have to demonstrate a renewed commitment and a more effective capability to execute if it wants to stay competitive against the more agile virtualization startups that it’s attacking. Labels: CA , Configuration Management , Platform Management , Platform Orchestration , Security

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UC4 Software, a provider of Intelligent Service Automation and IT process optimization solutions, today announced its board of directors has appointed Jason Liu as UC4’s chief executive officer, effective immediately. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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As expected , VMware has launched a new classroom course about the automation of the vSphere virtual infrastructure through the Microsoft PowerShell implementation called PowerCLI. The course objectives are: Automate VMware ESX configuration Automate the provisioning of virtual machines Automate changes to virtual machine configuration Automate cluster operations Automate reporting As we previously noted, this course doesn’t cover at all the other approach to automation offered by VMware vCenter Orchestrator, the orchestration framework acquired from Dunes Technologies in September 2007 and included free of charge in most vSphere editions. VMware says that the audience skills and profiles are too different to aggregate both topics on a single course.

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Parallels, the global leader in automation and virtualization software, announced recently that it is offering VMware Fusion users a free trial of Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac and a limited-time opportunity to upgrade to for $39.99 until June 15. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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While waiting for VMware to release its much awaited vCloud Service Director (formerly project Redwood), and possibly to invest much more resources in its existing vCenter Orchestrators, customers are coming out with their own solutions to bridge the gap between a virtual infrastructure and a private cloud through automation. It’s the case of Peter Rudolf , at Mightycare Solutions, who just released an interesting plug-in for VMware vCenter called vCOPlugIN. The idea is to define a number of actions workflows, called Services, that can be executed against one or more virtual machines in the vCenter inventory with a single click. These services include things like the creation of new VMs following predefined templates configurations (virtual servers, virtual desktop, development workstation, etc.), the VMs deployment using different techniques (cloning, PXE delivery, etc.), the deployment of certain application packages, the VMs backup, and more. Thanks to NTPro.nl for the news.

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Born as a as a spin-out of Credit Suisse, the US startup DynamicOps launched almost two years ago , introducing a very interesting multi-hypervisor management console, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), which merges together VM lifecycle management and virtual lab automation capabilities. After a great start in 2008, when it hired away a couple of key executives from PlateSpin ( now part of Novell ) and Dunes Technologies ( now part of VMware ), the company remained under the radar for a very long time, releasing just one minor update in June 2009 . In December 2009 the company announced integration with BMC BladeLogic Ops Manager , in February 2010 it announced integration with NetApp FlexClone technology , and last week they announced integration with HP Server Automation . Besides that, it’s not clear how much the product evolved in these two years: the company marketing renamed version 1.0 in version 3.0 right after the launch in 2008, one year later VRM just reached version 3.2, and this month Redmond Magazine mentions a version 3.3 , which should be the current one. At the end of December 2008 the company even promised support for VMware View 3 to arrive in early 2009, but the announcement never came. While the support for NetApp FlexClone and the marketing literature let us assume that it’s there, it’s not even clear if VRM supports new version 4.0 or not.

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On April 27 VMware and Salesforce plan to announce a new partnership with a public webcast where both companies’ CEOs will appear. None of them disclosed any information about the terms of the deal, but an evidence spotted in Google Cache suggests that Salesforce may launch a VMware-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing facility, turning into a competitor for companies like Amazon and Rackspace (both powered by the Xen hypervisor). virtualisation.info is now able to disclose exactly part of what the two companies are going to announce. There’s at least one 3rd party company that connects both VMware and Salesforce in some ways: CloudShare . CloudShare is a US startup formerly known as IT Structures, managed by former Check Point, VMware and GE executives. Founded in early 2007, it’s funded with $16 million in two rounds, led by Gemini Israel Funds, Sequoia Capital and Charles River Ventures. The company offers a IaaS cloud computing facility which allows to provision multi-tier applications or entire data centers through a self-service portal. Customers can even import their existing virtual machines and replicate complex networking layout thanks to the fencing technology. The virtual infrastructure can be accessed by a simple browser or through a dedicated VPN connection and RDP access. It can be considered an evolution of hosted virtual lab automation (VLA) solutions like the ones offered by Surgient or Skytap. Designed to facilitate the activity of a sales channel, the platform is specifically tailored for pre-sales and post-sales activity (including demos, proof-of-concepts, training, etc.). This is why it includes uncommon features like campaigns management, customers email invitations, multi-level hierarchical access, web interface branding, integrated webinar and whiteboard facility, usage analytics, etc. In many ways it seems to have a CRM approach to the fruition of the hosted virtual infrastructure and it’s not a case that the platform integrates with Salesforce. So far CloudShare technology has been adopted by a number of customers including VMware, Cisco and SAP. VMware and CloudShare are also business partners. The CloudShare platform is powered by vSphere and already supports the draft vCloud API specifications. At today, CloudShare seems one of the very, very few concrete implementations of a IaaS cloud computing facility. And probably the most tangible one based on VMware technologies. The key of the VMware and Salesforce partnership is in a couple of quotes on the CloudShare website. The first one comes from Paul Maritz, VMware’s CEO: “VMware puts great emphasis on giving customers a significant return on their IT investment and creates strategic partnerships with leading vendors to achieve this,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “With its unique capabilities and support for native VMware virtualisation and the VMware vCloud API, we see the CloudShare platform as an attractive technology that strengthens, supports and extends our ecosystem.” The second one comes from Kendall Collings, Salesforce’s Chief Marketing Officer: “Companies continue to explore how to move more business operations like presenting proofs of concept to the cloud,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com. “The addition of CloudShare to the AppExchange gives salesforce.com customers the ability to simplify how they present proofs of concept with a few clicks.” And this is what VMware and Salesforce are going to announce: the capability for Salesforce customers to create and access on-demand VMware virtual infrastructures, hosted inside the Salesforce cloud, fully integrated in the CRM workflow, shareable across the organization, available 24/7 and accessible through a simple web browser. Sources close to both companies confirmed to virtualisation.info that this is the exactly the content part of the announcement and that CloudShare is the technology behind it. Update: Apparently, there are parts of the announcement that are not covered above. One of them should include SpringSource. This article will be updated with additional details as soon as they are available.

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Today IBM launches version 2 of a new cloud computing platform for technology development and testing. The offering seems similar to the virtual lab automation facility similar to the one that the US startup Skytap offers since April 2008 . CNET reports that this infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud is powered by the new Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation Hypervisor (REVH) , which is based on KVM. If confirmed this would be the biggest and most important case study for the new Red Hat virtualisation platform at today.

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