2virtualize blog

On July 28th 2008 VMware started offering ESXi for free. ESXi download

This is great news for customers of all sizes, not only will they be able to try ESXi they can use it for free, and if you want support you can buy it per incident or 24×7 or 8×5

No longer will customers need to worry about what product to use, the choice is simple VMware and start with ESXi.

Now if you need more advanced features like managing multiple esx servers form one pane of glass you can buy Virtual Center in two flavors, Foundation limited to 3 hosts, or Enterprise.

If you would like HA, this is automatic fail over if their is a hardware failure or other unexpected outage, you can upgrade to HA

VMotion is a killer feature and has been around for a few years now, this allows you to move live running vm’s from one esx host to another, you can add this feature as well

The other feature I will point out is DRS, DRS will look at the load on you esx servers and move vm’s around and place them on the least bound host, you can add on this feature.

Their are many other features of the Enterprise product for a full list: More Information

Happy Virtualization

2Virtualize.com strongly believes Consolidation & Virtualization is a key role in reducing energy usage in the Data Center, we have been following the EPA very closely, In fact we were one of the first company’s to add Green Data Center Assessment to our Server Consolidation and Virtualization Assessment, and expose how many ton’s of harmful greenhouse gases are produced to generate the power need to run a server. We are excited to see further developments.

As part of the the voluntary National Data Center Energy Efficiency Information Program, the EPA and DOE has release two pdf document that describe the program in a long version and a short version.

The documents gives some background on the problems as well as what the different departments and volunteer organizations are doing about the problem.
Key point’s
In 2006 data centers representing 1.5% of all U.S. electricity consumption, this doubled the amount consumed in 2000. Further to say Data Center usage growth by 12% per year.
If state-of-the-art technology were adopted then energy efficiency could be improved by as much as 70 percent
A reduction of 10% = 10.7 Billion KWh per Year = 1 Million House holds & about $740 Million Dollars
Consensus energy efficiency metrics and benchmarking
Energy saving tools and training
Certification of data center energy efficiency experts
Equipment performance specification and labeling
Recognition of Best-in-Class data centers
Energy Star for Servers and IT Equipment
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ON DATA CENTER ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Industry Associations and Research Organizations

Here is the link to the documents

Fact sheet for the National Data Center Energy Efficiency Information Program PDF (225KB)

# Short fact sheet for the National Data Center Energy Efficiency Information Program PDF (85KB)

VMware has just released a beta for Thinstall project “North Star”

We have been an active proponent of Thinstall and application Virtualization for many years.

The 2Virtualize team will be actively testing this beta, and we will share our feedback.

Link to the Beta

We had a great time at Citrix Ifourm 2007 in Las Vegas last week.

The key take away VMware watch out Citrix is brining Sexy back.

Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop are the next generation of Virtualization products that will drive IT forward over the next decade.

I think we should see Citrix XenServer product parity with VMware as soon as Q1, Product parity is achievable today with Xen Server and a third party products.

Here are a few recent articles that might be of interest.

Dell and Citrix Partner to Simplify Virtualization Technology
Dell expects to begin shipping servers embedded with Citrix XenServer OEM Edition in Q1 2008.
http://citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=683297

Citrix Teams with HP to Accelerate Server Virtualization Adoption
HP to qualify and sell Citrix XenServer™ Enterprise Edition (formerly XenSource XenEnterprise) on industry-standard HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers.

Citrix Unveils End-to-End Virtualization Strategy
End-to-End Virtualization: From the Datacenter to the Desktop
http://citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=683173

Bake-off: 4 Virtualization Suites (In One Review!)
XenSource earned kudos for its ease of use and is doing an admirable job of adding features to catch up to VMware. Still, XenSource’s offering lacks the software life-cycle management features that VMware has built, landing it in second place.
http://www.crn.com/software/201400070?pgno=3

iForum 2007 Keynote
http://www.citrixevents.com/English/news/videoset.asp?eventID=6084&cID=7913&section=News

Well there was some news last week that made the rounds in a white paper and on dabcc.com and brianmadden.com, but who would think Citrix would pull this off.

It is great news for the industry and virtualization, there will be allot more innovation to come, This will also keep VMware on their toes.

Citrix link http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/lp/lp_680809.asp

Well I just had to get in on some of the VMware stock, I was hoping to get in as it went up and buy more but got stuck getting in high so I did not buy more. I know others that got in at higher.

So I watched it all day to see what it was doing an hour from close, thier was a rally mid afternnoon that took the stock back up to $55 and then I wached it fall back down to Low $50’s and to close at $51 and change.

What a day! But wait thats not it thiers more to the day on my next post.

The stock ticker is VMW

Wow very impressed with the Xen Source Enterprise 4.0 Beta

XenEnterprise 4.0 New Features

* XenEnterprise Resource Pools – up to 16 servers plus shared NFS and iSCSI SAN storage
o Shared authentication, authorization, resource and configuration management
* Storage Flexibility
o Shared and private storage, volume and file-based (VHD), over multiple (DAS, SAN, NAS) connections
o Thin provisioning, copy-on-write, snapshot for file-based VMs
* XenMotion™ Live Relocation – move running guest VM within resource pool with virtually no service interruption
* Increased Scalability
o Memory: 128GB/host, 32GB/guest
o CPUs: 1-32 physical, 1-8 virtual
o Networking: 1-8 physical NICs, 1-7 virtual NICs
o Storage: 1-128 Storage Repositories, 16TB/SR
* 64-bit Hypervisor – 64- and 32-bit Guests
o 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and Windows SBS 2003
* Enhanced Resource QoS Control
* Hotplug for virtual disk and NICs
* Secure, remoteable XenAPI upward-compatible from OSS Xen – XML-RPC and language bindings
* Enhanced ‘xe’ CLI for fine-grained system control
* XenCenter – new Windows graphical administration console
o Guided wizards
o Configuration of multiple XenServer hosts and multiple resource pools
o VM lifecycle management
o Storage configuration and management
o Guest templates

Here is a link to a video
http://bits.xensource.com/demo/XE40BetaDemo/XE40BetaDemo.html

Well yes it is true we are geeks, But wait I only had to stand inline for an hour and a half.

Any way here is a picture of the phone in it’s package.

We updated our website to include our Green Data Center and Virtualization emissions analysis, it is amazing to me that a single server carbon footprint is the same a vehicle that gets 23mpg over 15,000 miles.

Check it out at http://www.2virtualize.com/index_files/greendatacenter.htm

We are interested in doing some PR so I had a talk with Tim Cox who operates a PR company called zingpr.com, Tim sound like a great guy and also was kind enough to recommend some books on PR

http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Conversations-Changing-Businesses-
Customers/dp/047174719X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-3434962-1246413?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183053145&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Cluetrain-Manifesto-End-Business-Usual/dp/
0738204315/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-3434962-1246413?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183053176&sr=1-1

Thanks for your time Tim