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Open Virtualisation Format 2.0 lands, world+dog yawns
Anyone contemplating a move to the cloud has, by now, paused for a moment to wonder how to escape from their chosen provider of numinous computing.
They've done so because shunting a virtual machine (VM) and its workloads into the cloud may seem like a fine idea today, but there are any number of reasons one may wish to place it …
VMware execs shake fists at Amazon Web Services cloud
VMware executives have lashed out at Amazon Web Services, warning partners that if they let workloads go to the cloud, they are unlikely to come back.
In a high-octane speech at the virtualization giant's worldwide partner conference, VMware chief Pat Gelsinger warned attendees of the threat posed by Bezos's cloud.
"If a …
VMware sharpens axe for PCs: Horizon boxset brings Windows to iPads
After eighteen months of hints, VMware has unveiled the final version of its “Horizon Suite” end-user computing stack.
VMware has wanted more of a desktop presence for years, shelling out for Zimbra in 2010 in the hope enterprises liked the idea of webified email and calendars operating within their own data centres.
Zimbra's …
VMware promises better security, considers scheduled patches
VMware is thinking about emitting security patches on a fixed schedule, instead of its current just-in-time regime.
The virtualisation giant revealed its thinking in a post for VMware user group members, 1,700 of whom it surveyed for their thoughts on the company's security practices.
The results found “an almost even split …
GreenBytes rips code from virtual-desktop array's chest, serves to small biz
Thin-client accelerator GreenBytes has separated its software from its virtual desktop appliance hardware so customers can use anybody's flash to store machine images.
The company's IO Offload Engine is a dedicated solid-state disk array that stores virtual desktop images and feeds them to users' computers at blistering speed. …
VMTurbo 'invisible hand' control freak grabs more virty servers
There are a lot of tools out there to allow system administrators to monitor the various aspects of virtual computing capacity and help them figure out how to manage its use. But VMTurbo wants to get humans out of the way and automate the allocation of resources using the "invisible hand" of market economics - pushing the admins …
'Let anyone be administrator' bug in VMware snapped shut
VMware has published a security update for its virtualisation software including its ESX, Workstation, Fusion and View products.
A range of applications made by the EMC-owned vendor should therefore be patched to squash a privilege-escalation vulnerability in the VMCI.SYS driver. The flaw affects host machines running Microsoft …
Citrix morphs from Windows app virtualizer to all app mobilizer
In its last quarter Citrix has blasted past analyst expectations and produced a very healthy set of results and predicting that revenues will hit the $3bn mark for the year.
A decade ago, Citrix Systems was a Windows app virtualizer that existed largely at the mercy of Microsoft even though it has plenty of clever technology. …
VMware's growth stalls – layoffs coming, but so are new hires
VMware will lay off a little less than 7 per cent of its workforce and perform a bit of a restructuring in light of the fact that it expects some headwinds in the first half of 2013.
Pat Gelsinger, the new sheriff in VMware town, wants to slim the company down and get it focused on its core server virtualization and cloud …
HotLink punts freebie SuperVisor virty control freak
The SuperVisor control freak that lets VMware vCenter to do unnatural things to non-VMware hypervisors and clouds is getting a 2.0 rev with a bunch of new features. This update comes just as HotLink, the company behind the tool, has decided to make it up in volume and provide a full and freebie version of SuperVisor that we can …
Cisco takes stake in virtualiser Parallels
Cisco has taken an one per cent equity stake in Parallels, a minor virtualisation software vendor.
Best known for desktop virtualisation wares, especially the Parallels desktop for Mac which offers a way to run Windows on Apple PCs, the company also offers a range of data centre virtualisation tools. Most are aimed at service …
VMware CTO Steve Herrod jumps to venture capitalist
VMware’s chief technology officer Steve Herrod has left the company to take up a position with venture capitalist General Catalyst Partners. Herrod blogged the news and says he will remain a technical advisor to the company.
Herrod joined VMware in 2001 and was a critical figure in the development of its first products. For much …
How many VMs can you stuff in that box? How to get into the VDI biz
Greenbytes and Pure Storage are both start-ups well under way with fast and ground-up designed all-flash arrays. Both have a strong VDI focus and say that serving virtual desktop images from their flash arrays is consistently and reliably fast, affordable and secure, and makes hard disk drive arrays look like sluggards.
They …
VCDX: The elite certification just 105 people hold
On 28 February next year in Las Vegas, a group of brave IT professionals will go before a jury of their peers and spend half a day defending themselves and their technical skills. The inquisitors will pull no punches and the process will be brutal. Many of those on trial will be defeated, rejected and fly home chastened. Others …
Convirture finally control freaks ESXi hypervisor
Convirture, one of the early entrants to put out virtualization and cloud management tools, has finally done what it has needed to do for years to break into the big-time with enterprises: Support VMware's ESXi hypervisor with its ConVirt control freak.
A cynic would say that this is when VMware will swoop in to buy Convirture. …
TPC kicks out quick-and-dirty virty server test
For the past two and a half years, the members of the Transaction Processing Council consortium, which creates and audits transaction processing and data warehousing benchmarks for systems, has been working on a virtualization benchmark. The new test, called TPC-VMS, has finally made it out of committee and is ready for use. …
Juniper snaps up SDN startup before it even uncloaks
Struggling switch and router supplier Juniper Networks, smacked around in the hardware business by a recovering Cisco Systems and surrounded by a bunch of upstarts who want to virtualize networks and thereby suck all the profits out of hardware, is fighting back by acquiring Contrail Systems.
Contrail, which was working on its …
SoftLayer fires up MongoDB database service
Privately held hosting and cloudy infrastructure peddler SoftLayer is tag-teaming with 10gen, the creator of the MongoDB NoSQL data store, to sell preconfigured MongoDB setups to park your big data on its 100,000-server data centers.
The addition of a MongoDB service is just the latest in a line of infrastructure and platform …
Red Hat marries RHEV 3.1 hypervisor to Gluster storage
Red Hat rules Linux and has its fifth of the server racket, and it wants to rule clouds and get more than that share. In fact, Red Hat needs to do that if it hopes to compete against Microsoft and VMware and remain relevant in the data center and the public cloud alike.
To that end, Red Hat has put out updates to its KVM-based …
EMC mashes up big data, clouds, coders into SECRET crack team
The rumor mill has been buzzing that EMC and its virtualization and cloud minion VMware and its much smaller big data and programming sidekick Greenplum would be mashed up into some kind of new company group. And it turns out the rumors were right.
In a blog post from Terry Anderson, vice-president of corporate communications at …
VMware ships embiggened vCloud Suite after price brouhaha
VMware suffered a cacophony of complaints over its pricing for its software in 2011, and as part of the latest round of product launches this summer the company moved away from per-VM or VRAM capacity pricing as customers wanted. But to get the more attractive pricing, you have to buy a whole bundle of cloudy tools, called the …
AWS fattens EC2 cloud for big data, in-memory munching
re:Invent Werner Vogels, the Amazon CTO who also knows a thing or two about the Amazon Web Services cloud, kicked off the second day of the re:Invent partner and customer conference in Las Vegas with a long lecture about how cloud computing enables people to think about infrastructure differently and code applications better. Interspersed …
Red Hat takes OpenShift platform cloud private
With the the rollout of its OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat wants to put programmers and system administrators on an assembly line. And not just its own people, but you and your colleagues in the IT department – and it's for your own good. Well, for the good of your bean counters, at least.
That, in a nutshell, is the message …
Network giants want software-defined network standards
Software-defined networking (SDN), the concept that's so hot VMware spent $US1.05 billion buying market leader Nicira, is on the way to becoming a standard for telecommunications networks.
SDN is the networking world’s equivalent of server virtualisation. The latter made it possible to treat a single physical server as several …
Big Switch uncloaks, fires virty network wares at VMware/Nicira
Big Switch Networks, the stealthy startup spun out of the Stanford University labs that developed the OpenFlow software-defined networking protocol that's reshaping the stodgy and crufty networking business, has uncloaked – and it's taking direct aim at VMware's Nicira acquisition, which also spun out of Stanford.
Speaking to El …
VMware wants to play 'Server Tetris' in your data centre
VMware chief technology officer Steve Herrod wants to play Tetris with your data centre, in the hope that if he can get your workloads lined up just right some of your costs will disappear.
Herrod explained his new game at a press lunch in Sydney today, where he outlined some of VMware's future plans.
While he never strayed far …
Boffins foul VM sandboxes with CPU-sniffing hack
So much for your sandbox US researchers at RSA, the University of Wisconsin and the University of North Carolina have used a malicious virtual machine to extract a cryptographic key from another virtual machine running on the same hardware.
The finding, published here (PDF), will not be welcomed by virtualisation companies or …
Stratus load balances virty machines across Avance clusters
On the heels of its acquisition of high-availability server maker Marathon Technologies at the end of September and the revamping of its ftServer fault tolerant servers earlier that month, Stratus Technologies is tweaking its Avance clustering software for server hypervisors and their virtual machines to allow load balancing …
Amazon fattens up EC2 compute cloud, chops prices
Cloud computing juggernaut Amazon Web Services has cut prices and fattened up its offerings.
AWS was founded to sell raw compute and storage like any other kind of retail item like a CD or a can of beans, and as a subsidiary of the world's largest e-tailer it takes very seriously an ever-expanding shelf of products and price …
Big Switch Networks stuffs $25m more down its trousers
Quasi-stealth virtual networking startup Big Switch Networks has bagged its second pile of cash from venture capitalists, who hope to rake in the big bucks from the software-defined networks (SDN) craze – particularly after they missed the money train that was Nicira, which server-virtualization juggernaut VMware shelled out $1. …
VMware helps Hadoop roam the Serengeti a little easier
Hadoop World VMware wants every workload to be virtualized, even high performance computing, data warehousing, and Hadoop data munching workloads. The server virtualization juggernaut will get around to HPC and data warehousing at some point, but it already has a start on Hadoop with Project Serengeti. That project got some tweaks this week …
Riverbed Cascade appliances peek into VDI, SDN, CIFS
Riverbed Technology's Cascade network monitoring appliances, which come in physical and virtual form, have been flying a bit blind on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and software-defined networks (SDN), but with the Cascade 10.0 software stack, the network busybody is being tweaked so it can peer inside of the protocols …
Citrix lowers sword, will take more time on 'Project Avalon' virty PC broker
Citrix Systems is hosting its Synergy partner and user conference in Barcelona this week, and has done a core dump on them with a barrage of announcements intended to demonstrate that Citrix, too, is down with the modern, post-PC, cloudy world.
More than anything else, the announcements are trumpeting that the firm has made a …
Rackspace touts OpenStack private cloud prowess
The OpenStack Design Summit kicked off today in San Diego, California, and Jim Curry, who had been managing the development effort for the OpenStack cloud control freak for the past two years, tells El Reg that he is enjoying not frantically running around running the show, and instead participating, along with the entire …
Cisco rolls up its own OpenStack distro
Cisco's software engineers have rolled up a distro of the open source OpenStack cloud controller for its "California" Unified Computing System blade and rack servers and related Nexus converged switches.
Cisco Systems might be very tight with storage juggernaut EMC and its VMware server virtualization minion, but that doesn't …
Tintri's VDI flash disk mix: The kit that booted 1,000 virtual desktops
VMWorld Barcelona Tintri and VMware showed the virtualisation players how it's done at VMWorld today when they tested a Tintri hybrid storage array booting 1,000 virtual desktops in two-and-a-half hours – nine seconds per desktop.
Tintri hybrid flash and disk drive arrays are purpose-designed to support virtual server operations.
The test set up …
VMware crams more cloudy calories in vCloud Suite's cakehole
VMworld Europe VMware's vCloud Suite is not even two months old and just started shipping a month ago - yet the virtualisation titan is already stuffing more wares into its cloudy tool suite, which does not have the vRAM memory tax but rather simple per-socket pricing.
At the VMworld Europe shindig in Barcelona, Spain today, the updated …
VMware brings out new madly complicated enterprise buyer plan
VMware wants to leverage its dominance in server virtualization inside of corporate data centers into juggernaut status for enterprise private clouds, and to help that process along the company is rolling out a new enterprise purchasing agreement that will presumably get some grease to the skids and the palms as companies look …
I can't wait for Pano to thrust some hard 3D love into size-zero models
Sysadmin Blog Around this time last year I reviewed Pano Logic's Zero Client Solution, a sort of super-thin-client set of kit. I was test-driving the company's first-generation hardware and a software suite two versions behind the latest release. I've now had a chance to review the second-generation hardware with its latest software, and I …
Red Hat stalks VMware in field sport ambush
Pic Giant Red Hat shadowman logo in field, with message, "Calling all enterprisers" Red Hat, you cheeky, cheeky monkeys
Red Hat wants to grab the attention of delegates to VMworld Europe in Barcelona with a guerrilla marketing stunt that deploys the biggest hashtag we have seen.
For its "Red Hat welcome", the vendor daubed the …
HP previews OpenFlow virty network controller
Everybody has their own twist and take on software-defined networks, or SDN, these days as virtualization moves on from servers and storage and into the still crufty world of networking. Server vendors who bought into networking to bolster themselves are now scrambling to be players in virtual networks when all they thought they …
Cisco fluffs up freebie Nexus virtual switch
Cisco is poised to begin beta testing of the latest version of its Nexus 1000V virtual switches, including a new Essential Edition which it will offer for the low, low price of nothing at all.
The reasoning behind this pricing policy is simplicity itself: if you are trying to take on VMware in the market for virtual switches, as …
