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

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In May Microsoft finally unveiled an upcoming, revamped version of its patch management solution for virtual infrastructures: Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) 3.0 VMST is not a patching tool per se, but rather a connector that allows seamless integration between Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Hyper-V. The first beta introduced much wanted features like the ability to patch offline VMs and templates in the SCVMM library, or the support for Live Migration. The second beta, appeared less than a month after , just fixed an issue with the template VHD update feature. The third beta, which was announced last week, seems just for additional bug fixing. Labels: Microsoft , Patch Management

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VMware’s VMworld 2010 is just two weeks away and, like always, virtualization.info will publish a live report from the keynote stage.  From his Twitter account, Steve Herrod , CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, hinted that this year there will be more announcements than ever , so there will be a lot to cover. But the keynotes are not the only must-see presentations to watch this year. The VMworld’s agenda offers a higher than ever number of interesting break out sessions, and, surprisingly, many of them are about the VMware’s products roadmaps.  In mid July virtualization.info published an early recommendation list but a number of key sessions were published only after the article. So here’s the updated, definitive list of 22 sessions (23 if you are a partner) that readers are encouraged to attend (roadmap sessions have an asterisk): Platform sessions: SS1001 Introducing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware Storage sessions: *TA8218 VMware Storage Vision *TA7805 Tech Preview: Storage DRS PC8051 Infrastructure Technologies to Long Distance VMotion – What Is “VM Teleportation”? Networking sessions: *TA8361 Future Direction of Networking Virtualization Management sessions: MA8030 Saving Time with vCenter Orchestrator MA8181 Optimizing Capacity using vCenter CapacityIQ  Business Continuity sessions: *BC8432 SRM Futures: Host Based Replication *BC8537 VMware Data Protection Roadmap Desktop Virtualization sessions: *DV7281  Virtual Desktop Cloud – The Future Vision of End-User Computing *DV6946 The Future of VMware Workstation and Cloud Development *DV7180 ThinApp : What’s New and Future Vision Private cloud computing sessions: *PC7303 Bridging Application Management Between Public & Private Clouds: A Technology Preview of VMware’s Next Generation Solution MA8940 Self-Service and Workflow Automation for the Private Cloud MA7140 vCloud Architecture Design Strategies and Design Pattern SP9721 How to Use Virtual I/O to Provision and Manage Networks and Storage Resources in a Private Cloud SE7813 vShield Edge & Application Protection – Architecture and Use Cases *SE9600 How to Attest Host Platform Security for Cloud Deployments: A Technology Preview from VMware, Intel, and RSA SE7835 Securing Your Cloud MA8649 VMware vCenter Configuration Manager: Our Foundation for Compliance in the Private Cloud SP8262 Cisco Nexus 1000V Update: Preparing the Virtual Machine Networking for the Cloud  MA8027 Provisioning Cloud Computing on Vblock using VMware vCloud Service Director (for partners only) PA9444 VMware Service Provider Cloud Licensing Programs  While we already know that session TA8361 (Future Direction of Networking Virtualization) will cover a new technology that will be announced on stage, a few additional sessions in the list above are especially interesting. The first one is SS1001 (Introducing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware): this is an extended session (aka Super Session) that will cover VMware plans to leverage SLES as its guest OS of choice for all virtual appliances .   It features a key speaker: Raghu Raghuram , General Manager and Vice President, Server Business Unit at VMware. Raghuram was in the 10-people team that launched VMware and his visibility into the company is really deep. He’s a top executive definitively worth to listen to. Another one is TA7805 (Tech Preview: Storage DRS) for obvious reasons: here VMware is expected to clarify the implementation of the Distributed Resource Scheduling technology to storage arrays. A third one is MA8940 (Self-Service and Workflow Automation for the Private Cloud). This session features an unexpected speaker:  John MacLean , Director of Products, VMware Service Manager. Service Manager is the configuration management database (CMDB) product that VMware acquired from EMC as part of Ionix management portfolio. It’s a key component of the strategy if VMware really plans to become a physical and virtual infrastructure management vendor (and in fact this is the only product that is not included in the “vCenter” porfolio). So it’s significant that the person in charge for this piece is also talking about provisioning and orchestration in the private cloud. Note: If any reader feels generous and wants to submit a  complete report about one or more sessions above for the community, it will be published online on virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info (where applicable), with proper credit. Submit them to  vmworld2010@virtualization.info , including the session code, title, and your full name in the email subject. Labels: Events , VMware

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Hyper9, which recently lost his founder and CTO , just announced a new add-on for its management product Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) 2.5 The product continues to evolve: it started as a search engine for virtual infrastructure and then morphed into what seems an articulated management framework with a pluggable architecture. According to the public documentation, Hyper9 has the ambitious project to release a plug-in for pretty much every need a virtualization administrator may have: from capacity planning to change management, from performance monitoring to chargeback.   As part of this master plan, the company yesterday released a new lens: the Cloud Cost Estimator. The plug-in calculates how much it would cost to run an existing, on-premises virtual infrastructure on the Amazon Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform EC2. The tool may be really useful and Hyper9 hopefully will extend it to support other public IaaS clouds. Cloud Cost Estimator also introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.1 and the capability to integrate 3rd party collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint. Labels: Hyper9 , IaaS , Releases

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In January 2010 VMware announced the acquisition of Zimbra , the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration suite owned by Yahoo! at that time. Zimbra also includes a free and open source mail client that can be installed on-premises and that works with the mail server or with any other POP3 and IMAP4 server. As virtualization.info published in the original article, Yahoo! was reportedly trying to sell it since September 2008 without success. VMware bought it going far, far away from its core domain that is hardware virtualization. Yesterday VMware relaunched the product with the name of Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance, claiming a full integration with vSphere. This basically means that Zimbra now comes as an OVF virtual appliance that can be imported inside a vSphere virtual infrastructure and that it is fully supported in “special” configurations like the ones that may involve the HA, vMotion, Storage vMotion and DRS features. The VMware channel and the vCloud hosting partners can now resell the product. It will be interesting to see how challenging will be for them to sell a mail server to the customers that usually buy hypervisors. Mostly because VMware certainly is an undisputed leader in virtualization but it definitively has no credibility in the PIM market yet. CONTINUE READING ON cloudcomputing.info… Labels: SaaS , VMware

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The analysis firm Forrester just released a cost analysis of XenDesktop 4.0 used for VDI, commissioned by Citrix in March. For the analysis Forrester used the San Jose Campbell Union High School District case study, which had 2,500 physical desktops and 500 laptops. The school replaced this environment with only 500 virtual desktops and 200 virtualized applications, accessed by 2,500 students and hosted on 40 physical server along with another 100 virtual servers for the back-end. Interestingly, the virtual desktops boot up and down every 90 minutes, according to the classes schedule. This makes the case study slightly different than the average corporate environment where the workforce mostly uses its virtual machines non-stop. The Citrix solution, inclusive of software licenses, hardware equipment, implementation costs and administrative costs, costed $1.03M (risk-adjusted present value). Forrester says that the school achieved a Return of Investment (ROI) of 170% in just five months, equal to more than $1.7M in cost saving: The analysis includes detailed financial assumptions (like the cost of staff salary) to model the cash-flow trend. While sponsored, the work is very interesting and worth a read. Labels: Citrix , Forrester , Papers , VDI

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virtualization.info is a publication about technology. On these pages you’ll find information just about vendors and products. Today I’ll make an exception for a person that has made a piece of the virtualization history. Today I’d like to honor Alex Vasilevsky , who died yesterday of cancer. Alex Vasilevsky co-founded Katana Technology in 2003, with Scott Davis, who now is the CTO of the Desktop Virtualization business unit at VMware. Alex Vasilevsky was the Chief Scientist of Katana Technology, which was rebranded as Virtual Iron in January 2005, and officially launched one month later.  Virtual Iron has been acquired by Oracle in May 2009. After Virtual Iron, Alex Vasilevsky founded another virtualization company in December 2007: Old Road Computing. The stealth startup was rebranded as Virtual Computer in September 2008 and officially launched three months later. Virtual Computer launched one of the first client hypervisors in the market. As a very promising company, it attracted the interest of many investors, including Citrix. With both his companies, Alex Vasilevsky greatly contributed to the development of the open source hypervisor Xen, which now is a leading virtualization engine, powering virtual infrastructures and public cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon EC2. I wrote about Katana for the first time in December 2004 , quoting an article from ARNnet. I’ve met Alex for the first time in June 2007: we were both speaking at the same virtualization conference in NYC. In the early days of virtualization, the biggest competitor of Virtual Iron was XenSource. Simon Crosby, founder and former CTO at XenSource and now CTO at Citrix, just published some words about Alex Vasilevsky. Labels: Leadership , Virtual Computer , Virtual Iron

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The Computer Security Division of the US National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) published last week the first draft of a new paper titled Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies . By “full virtualization” the authors mean what the Industry calls “hardware virtualization”: a virtualization platform based on a type-1 (bare-metal, or hypervisor) or a type-2 (hosted) virtual machine monitor (VMM) that hosts virtual machines (VMs). The document also refers to “server virtualization” meaning “hardware virtualization for server consolidation” and to “desktop virtualization” meaning “hardware virtualization executed on a consumer desktop” and not “hardware virtualization for client consolidation”. The 35-pages paper has three sections: the first one introduces the concept of full virtualization and its implementations. the second one presents the security recommendations for virtualization components, and the third one introduces to the discipline of secure virtualization planning and deployment. The security recommendations are divided in specific sections: one for the hypervisor, one for the guest operating system, one for the virtual infrastructure and one for the hosted desktop virtualization platforms. The recommendations are pretty generic. The ones about the hypervisors for example are: Install all updates to the hypervisor as they are released by the vendor. Most hypervisors have features that will check for updates automatically and install the updates when found. Centralized patch management solutions can also be used to administer updates. Disconnect unused physical hardware from the host system. For example, a removable disk drive might be occasionally used for backups, but it should be disconnected when not actively being used for backup or restores. Disconnect unused NICs from any network. Disable all hypervisor services such as clipboard- or file-sharing between the guest OS and the host OS unless they are needed. Each of these services can provide a possible attack vector. File sharing can also be an attack vector on systems where more than one guest OS share the same folder with the host OS. Consider using introspection capabilities to monitor the security of each guest OS. If a guest OS is compromised, its security controls may be disabled or reconfigured so as to suppress any signs of compromise. Having security services in the hypervisor permits security monitoring even when the guest OS is compromised. Consider using introspection capabilities to monitor the security of activity occurring between guest OSs. This is particularly important for communications that in a non-virtualized environment were carried over networks and monitored by network security controls (such as network firewalls, security appliances, and network IDPS sensors). Carefully monitor the hypervisor itself for signs of compromise. This includes using self-integrity monitoring capabilities that hypervisors may provide, as well as monitoring and analyzing hypervisor logs on an ongoing basis. Nonetheless this guide can be used as good starting point to secure virtual infrastructures and should be paired with specific hardening guides released by the virtualization vendors, like the new VMware vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide . Labels: NIST , Papers , Security

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Immediately after the release of VMware vSphere 4.1 , Veeam announced opened a public beta program for its new Monitor 5.0. The company released version 4.0 exactly one year ago , introducing storage, hardware and process monitoring. The new version sports a new dashboard, over 100 pre-defined thresholds and alarms linked to a knowledge base, the capability to monitor logical disk space and snapshots, and of course the support for vSphere 4.1. This last thing means that Monitor is now able to report about completely new things like: NFS usage Storage paths and storage adapters (including load balancing status, I/O, latency, and read/write rates) Virtual disks: including I/O, latency, and read/write rates Power usage of ESX/ESXi hosts Memory Compression Veeam plans to release Monitor 5.0 later this quarter at the prices of $250 per socket. And exactly like for the previous versions, there will be a free edition. An interesting detail is that the product is now called Monitor for VMware, meaning that Veeam is probably preparing to offer a version for other virtual infrastructures. The move wouldn’t surprise too much considering the potential threat that VMware Data Recovery represents and the past issues between Veeam and VMware around support for ESXi.

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