Network Instruments polled 120 network managers, engineers, and IT executives at Interop to learn how IT organizations are putting server and desktop virtualization technology to use. Fifty-five percent reported they virtualized mission-critical servers, including e-mail and Web servers, and another 50 percent said they run DNS and DHCP servers on virtual
machines. And nearly 40 percent have already extended virtualization to their desktop environments.

Yet 55 percent told the network analysis vendor they experience more problems than benefits with the technology, while the remaining 45 percent said they had realized the
benefits of virtualization. Among the problems were a lack of visibility and tools to troubleshoot performance problems in virtual environments for 27 percent of respondents. More than one-fourth of those polled at Interop cited a lack of training on virtual infrastructure, and 21 percent expressed concern over an inability to secure the infrastructure.

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Xen.org is pleased to announce the latest release of the Xen hypervisor, the open source industry standard for virtualization. Xen.org is a global community of independent and industry developers, university researchers, users, and virtualization gurus who regularly contribute to the shared design, development, support, and improvement of the Xen hypervisor platform.

The new release, Xen 3.4, furthers the vision of creating a powerful, efficient, and ubiquitous virtualization hypervisor. As part of the Xen community’s commitment to continuous improvement, the new hypervisor offers significant enhancements in the following areas:

•    Xen Client Initiative (XCI) Enhancements –Xen.org continues develop industry virtualization standards for desktop and client devices. Xen 3.4 contains the initial XCI code release providing a base client hypervisor for the community to extend and improve. This new version of the Xen hypervisor expands the hardware options for the leading open source virtualization platform.

•    Reliability – Availability – Serviceability (RAS) – In addition, Xen now delivers a collection of features designed to avoid and detect system failures, provide maximum uptime by isolating system faults, and provide system failure notices to administrators to properly service the hardware/software. The combination of these services provide for a robust Xen hypervisor with fault-tolerant and back-up capabilities built-in.

•    Power Management – Xen 3.4 improves the power saving features with a host of new algorithms to better manage the processor including schedulers and timers optimized for peak power savings.

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“With VMware vSphere 4, we are once again raising the bar significantly for businesses that desire to dramatically improve IT performance,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, server business unit, VMware. “The cost savings associated with virtualization are undeniable, and as more customers standardize on VMware to drive 100 percent virtualization, they are realizing the additional benefits that our solutions deliver, including increased flexibility and agility.”

VMware vSphere 4 extends the previous generation VMware platform – VMware Infrastructure 3 – along three dimensions: it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, it provides uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and it preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

VMware vSphere 4 enables transformative capital and operational expenditure cost savings over and above what was previously achievable, including 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, 50 percent storage savings, and 20 percent additional power savings. With VMware vSphere 4, even the most resource intensive business critical applications will benefit from the built-in service level assurance capabilities for availability, security and scalability.

Customers are already harnessing VMware vSphere 4 to bring the benefits of cloud computing to their datacenters, creating a practical approach to their own private clouds – cloud computing infrastructures that span internal IT with external cloud service providers.

“VMware vSphere 4 is the core of our cloud computing initiative because it gives us the cost savings and scalability benefits of cloud computing, with the choice to deploy any application or OS without getting locked into any particular architecture,” said Christopher Rence, CIO, FICO.

Press Release…

3Tera, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, announce the introduction of the 3Tera AppStore – the first
marketplace for cloud components where enterprise users, software vendors and datacenter experts can exchange production-ready, scalable and highly available cloud components on a pay-per-use basis.

3Tera’s AppStore is a globally available portal offering enterprise-class, supported software stacks, packaged for use in public, private and hybrid AppLogic® cloud deployments. The AppStore catalog spans all
types of datacenter infrastructure elements and complete applications, from networking components (such as load balancers, firewalls, routers, traffic managers, content switches), server components (such as Web
servers, directory servers, databases, application servers) and storage solutions, as well as application software stacks, management and monitoring tools.

“We’ve been enabling Cloud Computing for the past three years,” said Barry X Lynn , Chairman and CEO, 3Tera, Inc. “With the introduction of 3Tera’s AppStore, we’re enabling a community of
software providers to make their products easily available in the Cloud and accessible on-demand.” Users of the 3Tera AppStore can find pre-configured, ready-to-use
appliances to add to their 3Tera AppLogic catalogs provided by trusted software vendors.

Many are free or offered on a trial basis, while others are offered on a pay-per-use basis. For ISVs, the AppStore provides a way to publish and distribute enterprise-class, production
ready, cloud components and generate revenue every time users run them in public or private clouds powered by AppLogic. Datacenter architects and consultants can package and publish complete application
infrastructures to the AppStore that are ready to run, complete with value-added capabilities such as clustered solutions, high-availability, disaster recovery, on-demand scalability or automated backups and security.

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With the present economy in its current state, more small business are looking to do more with less. Whether it be job cuts or budget cuts, the small business is looking for more ways to save money just to be able to survive. To support the business they all have some sort of back end computer networking infrastructure that still needs to be supported. But how can business technology now support the business in a fashion where it can actually make a contribution of its own by saving on costs? Its called infrastructure virtualization.

Infrastructure virtualization is the hot new technology in the information technology world that will allow the infrastructure do more with less. Virtualization has been developing mainstream since the early nineties, with one of the more popular companies today known as VMWare. Today there are still quite a handfull of other companies that now offfer virtulization platform including companies suchs as Microsoft and Xen.

So your probably wondering how is server virtualization going to help me in my business? Well, let me try to explain. If for example you have a small Windows based network that is supporting say abuot 50-100 users, you may have few servers that are setup as resources to serve your user community. You may have a couple of domain controllers, an email server, one or two database servers, file server and maybe a print server.

Server virtualization consolidates multiple underutilized physical servers on to one host server that will run all the virtual machines. The virtual host that runs these virtual servers will consume much less power than running 7-8 physical servers. Also any network admin should agree its easier to manage one or two physical servers than it is to manage 10.

So is server virtualization right for you?

If you have servers running at a CPU utilitzation of under 15-20% and if they mostly run idle like domain controllers or other rarely used servers, these would be pretty good candidates for virtualization. Most of the time under utilized servers have about 80-90% of their CPU not being used as well as more than 75% of their memory just sitting there. If you virtualize servers you should be able to easily fit about 20-30 virtual servers on one physical server to attain a CPU utilization of abuot 50-60% and still have room in case a virtual server needs more CPU resources, the same goes for the memory portion.

In essense you could consolidate 10-20 physical servers into one. If you are interested in pursuing virtualization for your small business or would like to comment, please feel free to post below or email me and we can talk!