VMTurbo is a new virtualization startup that left the stealth mode in April.  The company’s technologies was previewed in July, but only last week the actual products were announced and released . As virtualization.info previously reported , the VMTurbo platform is made of many different modules, to monitor, plan, automate and report about the management of a virtual infrastructure. The first two pieces of the suite are called Monitor and Host Reporter. Both are available now and come as part of the same virtual appliance. Monitor, completely free of charge, lists the virtual machines and hosts health status and provides real-time metrics about vCPUs, vRAM, vNICs and vHDs, detecting resources bottlenecks: VMTurbo Host Reporter instead provides offline charts and graphs that display virtual infrastructure trends over time, including: CPU, memory and network bandwidth utilization CPU % ready, memory ballooning and swapping Workload demand per VM This module costs $30 / socket. In the near future VMTurbo will introduce the key piece of the whole suite: the Automate module. Once statistics are collected and information about under and over-utilization provided, the product will offer a number of capacity management recommendations. At that point the user will be able to just read them, or to automatically apply them, just by pressing a button on the interface. Labels: Platform Monitoring , Releases , Reporting , VMTurbo

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Arkeia Software is a US vendor focused on disaster recovery. It’s flagship product, Network Backup, is a backup/restore engine that features agents for multiple applications, databases, file servers and storage arrays in the physical world. Arkeia also supports all the three major virtualization platforms: Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX. The company just updated the product to introduce support for vSphere, by leveraging the vStorage API. While Network Backup is only capable to perform a full backup for Hyper-V virtual machines (through the Volume Shadow Service), on vSphere it can also do a block-level incremental backup thanks to the

In the last few weeks VMware confirmed multiple times that a major new release of vSphere is due this year. virtualisation.info has a detailed list of features that will appear in the next vSphere release, tentatively named 4.1, but it’s unclear if this is the major update that the VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz mentioned during the last earnings call . It’s important to clarify that while the features below, partially unveiled in March , are already part of the current beta builds, there’s no guarantee that VMware will keep all of them before reaching the GA status. Additionally it’s important to note that the list below may be incomplete: Storage I/O can be shaped by I/O shares and limits through the new Storage I/O Control quality of service (QoS) feature Network I/O can be partitioned through a new QoS engine that distinguish between virtual machines, vMotion, Fault Tolerance (FT) and IP storage traffic. Memory compression will allow to compress RAM pages instead of swapping on disk, improving virtual machines performance. Distribute Resource Scheduling (DRS) now can follow affinity rules defining a subset of hosts where a virtual machine can be placed Virtual sockets can now have multiple virtual CPUs. Each virtual CPU will appear as a single core in the guest operating system. A team physical network interface cards in a vNetwork Distributed Switch can now dynamically load balance traffic. Health check status and operational dashboard are available for HA configurations. vSphere Client is no more part of the ESX and ESXi installation packages. At the end of the installation process administrators are redirected online to download the client. ESXi installation can be scripted. The script can start from a CD or over a PXE boot source, and can install the hypervisor on local or remote disks. ESX can boot from iSCSI targets (support for iBFT) NFS performance stats are included in esxtop and vCenter Server, as well as through the vSphere SDK. Virtual machines serial ports redirection over the network Support for up to 4 vMotion concurrent live migrations in 1GbE networks and up to 8 concurrent live migrations in 10GbE networks Support for USB pass-through (virtual machines can use ESX/ESXi local USB devices) Support for administrator password change in Host Profiles Support for FT in DRS clusters with with Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) Support for iSCSI TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) network interface cards (both 10GB an 1GB) Support for 8GB Fibre Chanell HBAs Support for IPsec on IPv6 network configurations Support for multiple Data Recovery virtual appliances Support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) in Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 guest operating systems for vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) Update Manager (VUM) can now patch additional 3rd party modules for ESX (like EMC PowerPath) Virtual to Virtual (V2) migration for offline Hyper-V virtual machines in vCenter Converter ESX and ESXi direct support for Microsoft Active Directory through Likewise technology integration Support for Intel Xeon 7500 / 5600 / 3600 CPU series (this includes EVC support) Support for AMD Opteron 4000 / 6000 CPU series (this includes EVC support)

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This Monday Leostream released version 6.4 of its VDI connection broker. The new build introduces a number of interesting features: a new skinnable web interface (for both the client and the administration consoles) resource assignment by policies and authentication threshold metrics tracking by SNMP support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Previous version of the Connection Broker was released in early February. It seems that Leostream is back with a rapid development lifecycle like in summer 2009.

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Last week Reflex Systems ( formerly Reflex Security ) introduced a new module called vProfile as part of its virtualisation Management Center (VMC) 2.0 launched in September 2009. The company published an extensive explanation of how the new component works on its corporate blog: vProfile is built entirely on top of the VQL language developed by Reflex. VQL provides a layer of abstraction from the database and the virtual infrastructure which makes it very simple to provide configuration management capabilities for anything that VQL can represent. … In the initial release of vProfile we support three major types of targets: VMS – A virtualisation Management Server such as the VMware vCenter product. Host – A physical Host running a hypervisor such as the VMware vSphere ESX or ESXi product. VM – A guest virtual machine running in a hypervisor For any target (vCenter, Host, or VM) of configuration, some common capabilities are supported. The user Interface provides the ability to: Compare and visualize differences between targets, profiles, or both Manage Profiles for those targets Edit Masks for visualizing configuration differences Schedule changes to the configuration For each of these major target types we support configuration visualization, baselines/profiles, scheduled & ad-hoc remediation, and extensive enterprise reporting… By “configuration visualization” the company means an interesting heatmap like the following:

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Convirture has launched ConVirt 2.0, calling it the next major step up in open source virtualisation management. The ConVirt 2.0 generation combines a flexible, open architecture, the highest level of management capabilities, and the industry’s most flexible pricing model. Built on a brand-new, 3-tier architecture, ConVirt 2.0 includes a highly interactive, web-based user interface, a new data… [[ This is a content summary only.

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During its annual Summit ( see virtualisation.info live coverage here ) Parallels announced the upcoming availability of Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition (PSfMBME ???). The name is a little confusing: PFfMBME is a type-1 hypervisor which doesn’t need any host operating system to run. So the “for Mac” in the title just means that this specific version of the product supports Apple Xserve hardware, and thus allows customers to run Mac OS X Server virtual machines. Parallels offers a version of this hypervisor that supports other enterprise class x86/x64 hardware since October 2009 but of course the Apple EULA prohibits to run Mac OS X Server guest OSes on it.

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As most readers know, Microsoft offers three Hyper-V editions: the one coming with the full version of Windows Server 2008 R2, the one included in a stripped down version of Windows called “Server Core”, and the stand-alone Hyper-V Server. The Server Core edition of Windows lacks the well-known GUI, has a limited .NET support and many other OS components are completely missing. It’s done so to reduce the OS surface attack, mimicking minimal Linux distribution that are popular among security professionals. Problem is that this turns the local management of Hyper-V hosts into a real nightmare.

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A lot of discussion is going on these days around some performance issues that Amazon customers are suffering with the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). The discussion was triggered by Alan Williamson , a prominent voice in the Java community, who posted an interesting description of his 3-years experience with EC2.