Yesterday CA announced the release of a new version of IT Client Manager (ITCM), its systems management software. ITCM integrates multiple other CA products, including Asset Management, Software Delivery, Remote Control. Patch Management Desktop DNA and Asset Intelligence. As result, it offers asset discovery, OS migration, patching, remote control, and software delivery capabilities. Version r12.5 becomes much more virtualization-friendly with the support for hardware virtualization platforms VMware ESX (both 3.5 and 4.0) and Oracle Solaris Containers (aka Zones, for both SPARC and Intel architectures) as well as application virtualization platforms Microsoft App-V and VMware ThinApp. For hardware virtualization, ITCM r12.5 provides full virtual assets inventory capability, while for application virtualization the product integrates virtualized packages in the software delivery lifecycle. CA plans to further extend virtualization support in ITCM r13, scheduled somewhere in 2011, by adding presentation virtualization profile management capabilities and a full set of capacity planning tools for VDI deployments. Labels: CA , Microsoft , Oracle , Platform Management , Releases , VMware

See the article here:
virtualization.info

In June Oracle released version 3.1.1 of the VDI solution inherited from Sun along with several other virtualization products. At that time the company introduced support for Microsoft Hyper-V as back-end hypervisor but not yet support for its own hypervisor: Oracle VM. Version 3.2, released yesterday , doesn’t change things: Oracle VM remains unsupported and the company continues to recommend its other virtualization platform, VirtualBox, as replacement. Oracle believes so much that its type-2 (aka hosted) virtual machine monitor (VMM) can work for virtual desktop infrastructures that it’s bundling it with Oracle VDI. Interestingly, the only version bundled is the 32bit one for Solaris 10. It’s striking that, after more than one year since day Oracle moved to acquire Sun, and the release of Sun xVM VDI 3.0, there’s still no support for Oracle VM. During a pre-briefing with virtualization.info, Oracle clarified that support for Oracle VM is coming but that VirtualBox is absolutely qualified for VDI, and in fact some customers are using it in production. At this point there’s no doubt that Oracle is committed to become a relevant player in the virtualization space, but the company has to provide benchmarks and customer references to support its statement, so to understand critical details like the VirtualBox VMs / core ratio or the scalability limits. Without them customers have no capability to understand if the product can fit their needs: excluding Red Hat and Virtual Bridges, both using KVM, in fact there’s no other virtualization vendor that is using a type-2 VMM for VDI in the market at the moment. Even in Oracle VDI 3.2 the architecture remains open to 3rd party hypervisors and presentation virtualization platforms, including Microsoft Hyper-V and Remote Desktop Services (RDS) as well as VMware ESX. Despite that, Oracle significantly limits its support when one of these 3rd party hypervisors is used.  As shown in the diagram below, all Linux guest operating systems are supported only when VirtualBox is used. This may be not a big deal for most customers as most virtual machines run Windows, but it’s still true that if Oracle wants to compete with VMware and Citrix, it has to provide a similar feature set. Nonetheless, Oracle VDI is progressing and this 3.2 release introduces a number of new interesting features, including: Memory over-commitment with Shared Memory and Memory Paging The version of VirtualBox bundled with Oracle VDI 3.2 introduces memory ballooning (called Shared Memory) and memory de-duplication (called Memory Paging) over-commitment techniques. Support for Generic Desktop Providers Oracle VDI Manager 3.2 can broker any virtual or physical desktop that has an RDP connection. Global hot-desking Oracle VDI Centers across multiple geographically separated sites can be federated, allowing a user to access his remote desktop everywhere after a single initial authentication (available only with a global user directory infrastructure). Support for multi-company environment Enable multiple user directories to be configured for one Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure environment. This feature provides privacy between multiple groups within the same Oracle VDI environment. Active/Active Clustering and iSCSI networking when used with Oracle OpenStorage Support for Auto-Logon and Rapidly Changing Area (RCA) Video Redirection (VRDP) Labels: Oracle , Releases , VDI

Excerpt from:
virtualization.info

At the end of the last week Oracle released another maintenance build for its desktop virtualization platform VirtualBox. VirtualBox 3.2.8 primarily introduces a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements. The only new feature  seems the support for remote installations in the Solaris Installer. Labels: Oracle , Platform , Releases

See the rest here:
virtualization.info

Just before the end of the week Oracle announced an online virtualization event set for August 19: the Online Virtualization Forum . This is not something uncommon: many vendors arrange day-long online events to market a big number of products all together. And after the acquisition of Sun , Oracle certainly has a big virtualization portfolio to talk about. Anyway, Oracle may use this occasion to announce something big. First of all, the event’s tagline is pretty bullish: “Discover How Oracle’s Virtualization Delivers More Value Than VMware”. Right now the company may have a few issues to justify the statement, considering that Gartner recently recognized VMware as the sole leader in the server virtualization space and Oracle VM is at the bottom of the Niche Players section of the Magic Quadrant. So, unless this is just a typical marketing exercise, either Oracle has a brand new product for server consolidation to announce (Oracle VM 3.0?), or it has something new in a space where VMware is not so ahead of competition (VDI?). The second hint that something big may be announced comes from the speakers that will present at the event: Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, and  John Fowler , Executive Vice President of Systems. It’s remarkable that Oracle wants both top executives to speak at the event. The last hint comes from a post about the event published a couple of days ago on the Oracle’s Thin Client and Server Based Computing Group (our emphasis): … So to the v12n world out there, and specifically the VDI market, watch out .  The “Big Guns” are about to fire a warning shot across the bow of the marketplace. Just in case, virtualization.info will follow the event’s keynote and provide live coverage. Labels: Oracle

Read this article:
virtualization.info

Today VMware/SpringSource released the first update of Hyperic (formerly HQ) since the acquisition of SpringSource in August 2009 . Hyperic was an infrastructure management firm that offers products (HQ and IQ) for every major operating system (from Microsoft Windows to IBM AIX), every major application platform (from LAMP to Microsoft .NET) and every major enterprise service (from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle Database) on the market.  The Hyperic solution also monitors VMware and Citrix virtual infrastructures and the Amazon implementation of Xen.  For each supported product Hyperic can do a wide array of activities, from auto-discovery to real-time health monitoring, from capacity planning to event tracking and alerting, up to granular reporting. SpringSource acquired Hyperic just three months before announcing the deal with VMware. Easy to expect, the new version introduces a tighter integration with vSphere through a new plug-in for vCenter that uses built-in java plugin classes, the HQ API, and the vCenter SDK. The vSphere plugin manages a hierarchy of vSphere resources, from vCenter, to vSphere hosts, to the VMs in the hosts, down to the HQ-managed software running in a VM. The plugin detects the hierarchy, so the vSphere resources automatically support hierarchical alerting – so that you do not need to configure dependency relationships yourself: Hyperic 4.4 automatically discovers ESX hosts, virtual machines and guest operating systems within minutes of their launch, and presents them in a unified topology so users can see which application components are running on which ESX hosts… Additionally, Hyperic detects when virtual machines are moved from one ESX host to another using vMotion, and adjusts topologies accordingly. … Hyperic 4.4 can distinguish between when a guest operating system has shut down unintentionally, and when it has been intentionally powered down or suspended. This prevents false alarms and enables system administrators to elastically scale their application infrastructure without triggering alert storms. The new plugin, which supports also vSphere 4,.1, replaces the VMware Infrastructure Manager plugin available in previous versions of HQ. Apparently, the support for XenServer is still there, even if it only supports version 4.x of the Citrix hypervisor. Also, the open source version of Hyperic monitoring suite  is still available .   Labels: Platform Monitoring , VMware

Visit link:
virtualization.info

Oracle today announced Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Continue reading here:
Virtualization.com

Surprise, surprise.  Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, may have an issue with the (ab)use of the term “cloud computing” (and frankly it’s very hard to not agree with him) but the rest of his company seems busy preparing to embrace the IT-as-a-service model in a big way. To be fair, Oracle announced cloud-ready products in September 2008 , allowing core products like Database 11g, Fusion Middleware and Enteprise Manager to run inside Amazon EC2. Oracle itself acts as a cloud hosting provider, opening its Platform for SaaS (the one where CRM on Demand and Argus Safety run) to external developers. Anyway the company didn’t touch at all the infrastructure layer so far. The corporate FAQ page about the topic simply suggests to look at the Oracle virtualization offering to those customers that are looking to build a private cloud. But the offering is about to become a lot more articulated. CONTINUE READING… Cross-post from: cloudcomputing.info/en/

Read the original here:
virtualization.info

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

View post:
virtualization.info

Oracle released yesterday version 5.0 of its Sun Ray Software, the solution introduced by Sun in 1999 to centrally control and power its Sun Ray thin clients. This release introduces a couple of major new capabilities. First of all, the client part, called Oracle Virtual Desktop Client (formerly Sun Desktop Access Client) can be installed on Mac OS X. On top of that the product now ships with a connector for VMware View 4, allowing the Sun Ray Clients to be used as View thin clients. The server component is available for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 Update 3, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2 and Sun Solaris 10 5/09 for both SPARC and x86/x64 architectures. The software update is available now for download and ships with Sun Ray 270, Sun Ray 2 and the new Sun Ray 3 Plus clients.

See more here:
virtualization.info

Just five days after the release of VirtualBox 3.2.2 , Oracle publishes another minor update. Like the previous one, VirtualBox 3.2.4 is a maintenance release introducing just bug fixes .

More here:
virtualization.info