Virtualization Strategies News, Analysis, White Papers and Case Studies on Virtualization Software and Hardware Strategies

How can VMware improve the world’s leading virtualization conference?  Make it a virtual conference, of course!  VMware teamed with Jive Software to take the once-per-year VMworld conference and extended it (online) into a 365-day-per-year, always-on community.

Eric Nielsen, Director of Web Communities, at VMware sums it up like this, “We expanded the VMworld conference from a three day event for 15,000 to a 365 day/year destination for 50,000 virtualization professionals.

By extending the user conference to a year-round event virtualization professional can now access virtualization information and services from IT peers, academics, vendors, and analysts 24/7/365.

Intel

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Posted under Virtualization News, Virtualization Products / Reviews

Cisco Systems is preparing to enter the server market as early as March, according to an article in the New York Times. The article, which claims to have inside sources, said Cisco aims to sell a server combining hardware and virtualization software from Cisco and VMWare Inc.

Speculation on Cisco’s move into the server market has been going on for several months. Many experts agree that this is a logical extension for a company that has a dominate market share in other network products like switches and routers. One interesting thing to watch is how long time allies like HP and IBM will feel about Cisco competing with them in the server market.

Virtualization technology offer business tremendous benefits and a networking company like Cisco see an opportunity to produce a new, potentially disruptive class of hardware and software management systems that span an entire data center. With businesses looking to manage their data centers as a single entity rather than separate units, Cisco’s entrance in the server market could make them the core supplier of data center technologies (Cisco has a minority stake in VMWare – the leading supplier of virtualization software. Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Products / Reviews

EMC to offer strategy, design, implementation services to help customers accelerate the business benefits of virtualization.

EMC Corporation announced this week that it is now a gold-level VMware Authorized Consultant, strengthening its global alliance with VMware. For decades EMC has been a leader in information infrastructure solutions, and this move enables them to better serve enterprise customers around the world via the benefits they can realize by virtualizing their information infrastructures and data centers.

Customers recognize the VMware platform as a well suited environment for information infrastructures and choose EMC’s industry-leading technology because of the breadth of our VMware-integrated products and features.

“EMC’s deep knowledge of enterprise infrastructure, combined with our longstanding engineering relationships with tier-one application vendors and our broad product portfolio of VMware-integrated products make it possible for EMC to deliver high-value services that enable our customers to get to the next level within their VMware adoption curve,” said Howard Elias, EMC’s President, EMC Global Services & Resource Management Software Group. “As a VAC, EMC will be able to actively address all of the requests we receive from our enterprise customers who seek to leverage virtualization technology throughout their information infrastructure to reduce infrastructure and operational costs and gain business agility.”

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Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Storage Virtualization, Virtualization News

VMware, Inc. announced plans to bring virtualization and its many proven benefits to mobile phones through the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). VMware MVP will help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. In addition, end users will benefit by being able to run multiple profiles - for example, one for personal use and one for work use - on the same phone.

“VMware is excited to extend the benefits of virtualization to the mobile phone market,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “By abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, we expect that virtualization will not only enable handset vendors to accelerate time to market but can also pave the way for innovative applications and services for phone users. We look forward to working closely with our partners to bring new mobile solutions to market faster.”

It’s not just VMWare that gets excited about virtualization for mobile phones; Gartner research sees virtualization in the mobile space as a very promising and potentially a fast emerging market.  “We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized.  Read More…

Posted under Virtualization News, Virtualization Products / Reviews, Virtualization Strategies

In today’s business climate, the need to protect critical IT systems is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. Providing a high level of data protection while keeping costs at a minimum can be a challenge for many organizations. Just ask Endocare,  an innovative medical device company, that lost their parent domain controller in July, 2007. The situation was a candid reminder that Endocare needed a real-time way to recover from a disaster.

Endocare solved their disaster recovery problems with two technology vendors, Double-Take Software and VMware, who provided virtualization solutions to consolidate and reduce hardware requirements to solve this exact business problem. VMware provides the virtualization platform while Double-Take Software provides the real-time data replication and recovery software. In this case, using virtualization with Double-Take Software allowed Endocare to implement a real-time disaster recovery solution that would otherwise be cost prohibitive in a non-virtual environment. Read More…

Posted under Storage Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, worldwide virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) increased 53% year over year. The x86 server market led the way with 60% year-over-year growth followed by the EPIC server market with 18% growth.

“Quarterly totals of x86 server virtualization licenses continue to experience healthy growth, although the growth rates have slowed over the last four quarters. The modest decline in growth rates indicates that the market is showing early signs of maturation,” said Brett Waldman, research analyst for System Software at IDC. “Based on our conversations with end users, IDC believes that the high-volume consolidation opportunities – the low hanging fruit in the x86 server virtualization market – is starting to dry up. This is, in turn, resulting in smaller deals overall.”

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Posted under Hardware Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Software

IN addtion to servers, virtualization Software has many valuable applications for desktop PC as well. One example would be, if you’re developing an application under Windows XP and need to test your program on other versions of Windows. Virtualization or virtual machine (VM) software allows you to run Windows 98 or Vista without forcing you to reboot your computer. The best VM software also allows exchanges between the host machine and the virtual one. If you encounter a bug, you can switch back to the host, correct the code, and send an update back to the virtual one for further testing. There are many other applications for desktop virtualization software. Yet, which is the best desktop virtualization software on the market?

There are three packages that come highly recommended. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 offers easy installation and best of all you can free trial download. VMware Work Workstation also offers a free 30 day trial for Windows or Linux. ARS Technica did a review comparing virtualization software for desktop that is very informative.

But what about Parallels desktop virtualization solutions? Read More…

Posted under Desktop Virtualization, Virtualization Products / Reviews

Virtualization is a technology that can benefit just about any business. Thousands of IT executive around the world—including all of the Fortune 100—use virtualization solutions to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of their existing computer hardware. Here are a few of the top benefits to developing your virtualization strategy.

1) Server Consolidation and Optimization: Virtualization makes it possible to achieve significantly higher sever utilization by pooling common infrastructure resources and avoiding the need for one server for each application model.

2) Infrastructure Cost Reduction: With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.

3) Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness: Virtualization offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance. Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies

Industry leader in virtualization VMware announced that they are collaborating with networking heavy weight Cisco to deliver joint joint data center solution designed to improve the scalability and operational control of virtual environments. The Cisco Nexus® 1000V distributed virtual software switch is expected to be an integrated option in VMware Infrastructure. Cisco and VMware will also combine their expertise in networking and virtualization to introduce a new set of professional services and reseller certification training in support of customers’ data center virtualization strategies.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch will simplify the operations of both physical and virtual networking infrastructures to help server, virtualization and networking administration managers accelerate data center virtualization. The solution will help network, virtualization and server teams to gain efficiency in virtual environments and obtain accurate, real-time data for stronger collaboration in troubleshooting. Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Server Virtualization