In March 2009 virtualization.info published an article titled Quest uses Surgient, why not acquire it? suggesting that such acquisition would fit the Quest expansion plans and would be the natural evolution of a pre-existing relationship between the two.

Quest answered today to that question by announcing in fact the acquisition of Surgient for an undisclosed sum.

Surgient is one of the very first startups that populated the (almost empty) virtualization ecosystem in 2003.
The company initially launched a hosted virtual lab automation (VLA) solution. In 2008 it changed its business model, allowing customers to install the product on premises and reshaping its strategy to market the platform as a VM lifecycle solution rather than a VLA solution.
In 2010 Surgient changed again: it dropped the concept of VM Lifecycle Automation entirely and fully embraced the private cloud automation hype.

Quest will include Virtual Automation Platform (VAP) in the Vizioncore portfolio. There, the Surgient technology will be probably merged with another orchestration product that Quest owns: vControl, launched in September 2009.

Both Surgient and Vizioncore brands will disappear in one month from now, as Quest already announced the plan to rename the former as Quest Software Desktop Virtualization Group starting September 1st.

The acquisition is expected to be closed within the Q3 2010.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Acquisitions, Quest, Surgient, Vizioncore

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Yesterday Oracle announced a major deal with Dell and HP: the two OEMs will certify and resell the Oracle VM virtual infrastructure, along with Oracle Solaris x86 and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Those customers that will buy Dell’s and HP’s Oracle solutions will have full access to the Oracle Premier Support.

It sounds odd considering the Oracle’s tagline adopted after the acquisition of Sun, Software. Hardware. Complete., to push the idea of an end-to-end computing stack available from a single vendor. But it’s understandable that this is an attempt to increase the Oracle VM market share.
And, market share or not, Oracle VM Server now officially becomes the fourth hypervisor available out-of-the-box in industry standard servers, side by side with Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.

It will be interesting to see how this will impact the Oracle presence one year from now.

Labels: Alliances, Dell, HP, Oracle

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In April Microsoft announced the beta program for the Linux Integrated Services (LIS) 2.1 for Hyper-V.
Among the many new features, the package introduced support for up to 4 vCPUs inside Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) guest operating systems.

Yesterday Microsoft finally released it.

Besides the 4 vCPUs support for SLES 10 SP3 and 11, as well as for RHEL 5.2-5.5, LIS 2.1 also includes:

• Driver support for synthetic devices
  LIS 2.1 supports the synthetic network controller and the synthetic storage controller that were developed specifically for Hyper-V.
• Fastpath Boot Support for Hyper-V
  Boot devices take advantage of the block Virtualization Service Client (VSC) to provide enhanced performance.

• Timesync
  The clock inside the virtual machine will remain synchronized with the clock on the host.
• Integrated Shutdown
  Virtual machines running Linux can be gracefully shut down from either Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
• Heartbeat
  Allows the host to detect whether the guest is running and responsive.
• Pluggable Time Source
  A pluggable clock source module is included to provide a more accurate time source to the guest.

The first version of Hyper-V was released two years and one month ago. The first version of LIS (formerly called Integration Components for Linux) was released in September 2008.
While Microsoft may have had just a few inquiries for this feature, it’s still true that the company is trying to compete against VMware in the enterprise market where companies need high performance virtual machines for both Windows and Linux guest operating systems. it’s absolutely stunning that Microsoft took two whole years to introduce 4 vCPUs support for Linux VMs. Hopefully customers won’t have to wait another two to have 8 vCPUs support.

Also, Microsoft didn’t provide any update about its plan to submit LIS to the Linux kernel maintainers for inclusion in a future release.

Labels: Microsoft

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A couple of days ago VMware officially validated an end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) hardware configuration provided by Cisco and NetApp.

The solution includes Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches and NetApp FAS3100 and FAS600 series SANs, now included in the vSphere 4.1 hardware compatibility guide.

To be fair, the three companies already presented a hardware configuration that could support end-to-end FCoE n December 2009, with a paper titled Designing Secure Multi-Tenancy into Virtualized Data Centers.
In that document anyway FCoE was suggested as an optional alternative to standard Ethernet or Fibre Channel, which doesn’t imply VMware was supporting the protocol at that time.

Labels: Cisco, NetApp, VMware

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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) just announced the LPI-304 exam, titled Virtualization and High Availability.

The exam is elective for the vendor-neutral Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC)-3 and includes virtualization (Xen, KVM, OpenVZ, VirtualBox), load balancing, cluster management and cluster storage.

Interestingly, LPI has assigned a weight of 10 to the questions about virtualization theory and the ones about Xen, while just 7 to the ones about KVM, and just 3 to the questions about other solutions (OpenVZ and VirtualBox).

Like every other LPI exam, the LPI-304 is available at Prometric and VUE testing centers.

Labels: LPI, Training

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On the iPad…

When talking about Microsoft’s answer to the iPad, Ballmer does seem to acknowledge Microsoft’s need to be urgent in its answer to the popular tablet from Apple, “They’ll be shipping as soon as they are ready,”… “It is job one urgency. No one is sleeping at the switch.” Ballmer also stated the obvious when referring to the strong sales numbers of the Apple iPad, “they’ve sold certainly more than I’d like them to have sold.” He also likened Microsoft’s current tablet place in the tablet market with the netbook market a few years prior. Like Linux, Apple has a head start, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft cannot come in and sweep up a nice percent of the share.

Ballmer also set the record straight for anyone who thought we might see a Windows Phone tablet anytime soon, “We’re coming,” he said. “We’re coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows.”

On the XBox…

Ballmer noted that the XBox took a very long time to turn a profit because of setbacks, R&D and a massive recall, but he believes that the popular console is coming into its own, especially with Kinect. “Kinect really is kind of a ’wow’ thing,” he said. “I like where we are. I think it’s going to be a very exciting Christmas.”

On Bing…

It doesn’t look like Bing is a profitable area of Microsoft’s consumer division just yet, but it’s getting there. Jumping from 8 to over 12 percent in the last year and adding all kinds of new functionality, including Zune integration, Bing is starting to shape up to be a relevant Google rival. On Bing, he noted, “We’re not confused,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

It sounds like Ballmer is planning to be even more aggressive in the consumer market than Microsoft has been in past years, which is always good for us consumers. For a more detailed view of Ballmer’s address to those at the company’s financial analyst meeting, you can you can visit CNET’s coverage here.

Source: CNET News

Related posts:

1. Where Are Microsoft Going Next?
2. Gates Vs Ballmer
3. Can Someone Please Explain Microsoft’s Consumer Strategy?
4. Apple Tops Microsoft in Market Cap Value
5. Ballmer To Partners – Microsoft Committed to Tablet PC

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Specifically, Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, outlined a four-point plan to the 200-odd financial analysts for increasing profits:

1. Cloud computing – Emphatically and repetitively, we have heard Microsoft say they are “all in” on cloud computing. Turner believes that Microsoft not only can be, but is “by far the market leader” of the cloud. Microsoft has been quietly developing cloud support for its business solutions, and only now in 2010 has been busting them out.

2. Windows 7 and Office 2010 – in the meantime, Microsoft’s standard software product line will be chugging along. The steadfast popularity of both of these products will drive predictably massive sales.

3. Customer satisfaction. Simple enough of a business objective.

4. Grow market share. Similarly simple.

Microsoft gives every impression of utmost confidence in its IT goliath standings. They believe in their edge over every other cloud competitor out there: Salesforce and Google fall “far short of what [Microsoft is] doing from an Azure perspective” (Google also has laughable productivity applications in comparison to Office), Amazon provides only “a limited set of platform as a service capabilities,” and VMWare is losing to Microsoft’s “better and less expensive virtualization offering.” Turner also noted that the shares for Microsoft servers and databases are growing faster than those of Linux, IBM, and Oracle. Clearly, these are children among one large-headed man.

Microsoft still views itself as a spry, innovative corporation. In regards to cloud computing, the company is in it for long term development. Turner says, “This is going to be a multiyear journey. We’re not going to accomplish this in the next twelve months.”

New Microsoft products are also rolling out: the Windows Phone 7 OS and the Kinect video game motion sensor for the Xbox. Now my tongue may be stuck in cheek, but one will enter the market outclassed by Apple and Google, and the other is foiled by gamers who enjoy lying down.

But don’t mind me. You go win those investors, Microsoft.

A webcast of the whole affair is available at Microsoft’s website.

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New spectacular images of the universe are now at your fingertips and will be waiting for you everytime you boot up your Windows 7 machine, complete with Aero theme settings. As usual these themes are available for download via the Windows Personalization Gallery, along with many more themes.

“Roam the far corners of the universe—distant galaxies, dying stars, and the echoes of the Big Bang—with this NASA theme for Windows 7,”

How does that sound? There’s no less than 14 magnificent images of far away galaxies, places we could only dream of ever visiting. You can see some of the incredible images that have been captured by some of the most famous telescopes from around the world, including the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra.

Check out the images below and try it out for yourself

Click here to Download the Windows 7 NASA Spacescapes Theme

Related posts:

1. New NASA Theme For Windows 7 Is In A Whole Other World
2. EA Sports World Cup 2010 South Africa Theme For Windows 7
3. Windows 7 Surreal Territory Theme From Designer Of New Windows Logo
4. Download Official Windows 7 Taiwan Theme & Wallpaper
5. Windows 7 Theme for Windows Vista

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