SWsoft Reborn 'Parallels,' Seeks Broader Virtualization Future
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TechWeb - The company is expected next year to launch its own hypervisor product that will work in conjunction with its Virtuozzo server software.
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Startup firm Fortisphere on Monday plans to launch a product suite aimed at managing virtualization &quot;sprawl.&quot;&quot;We spent nine months talking to [data center professionals],&quot; said John Suit, Fortisphere&#39;s CTO. &quot;What was apparent to us was that typically, how these guys are tracking their virtual machines is with an Excel spreadsheet.&quot;The company&#39;s offering, Virtual Essentials, is based on two products. The first is Fortisphere Virtual Insight, a toolset for tracking, tagging, and monitoring virtual machines as they move throughout their lifecycle, from preproduction to production.Users get a visual representation of a virtual machines&#39; parent, sibling and child relationships. There is also a reporting engine and an auditing function for recording changes and transactions. Fortisphere Virtual Foresight is the other half, dealing with policy enforcement.Policy rules are embedded within virtual machines, meaning the information will remain with each one, as well as any clones and copies, according to Fortisphere. There is also a repository component, and an analytic engine that monitors risk and compliance violations by crunching data from virtual machines and hypervisors.Fortisphere&#39;s product uses kernel-level drivers, rather than other means of interacting with virtual machines, such as agents. Fortisphere contends this approach affords a great deal of control, while remaining lightweight.The company is competing with a number of other startups, such as Embotics. Fortisphere said it has a number of beta customers, but company officials declined to name any or make one available for an interview.Pricing for Virtual Essentials starts at &quot;little bit over $10,000,&quot; including maintenance, according to Fortisphere executives, who declined to be more specific.The software was built with a mid-market customer in mind, in terms of its ease of use, according to Fortisphere.Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said one strength of Fortisphere is its ability to manage virtual machines across multiple hypervisors -- VMware, Citrix&#39;s XenServer and Microsoft&#39;s Hyper-V. &quot;This is a something end-users are asking for as they deploy more than one solution for server virtualization,&quot; he wrote in an e-mail message.Dan Kusnetzky, principal analyst with Kusnetzky Group, predicted that within five years, Fortisphere and its peers will either be absorbed into larger companies or those firms will develop software with similar capabilities.&quot;It&#39;s likely in my view that these people are going to be acquired by the management framework players, because they are doing something different but also complementary,&quot; he said.Kusnetzky noted, however, that Fortisphere&#39;s tools have a limited focus, aiming on the management and tracking of virtual machines and not other areas of virtualization, such as virtual storage. &quot;If you&#39;re working in the environment they&#39;re targeting, this might be interesting,&quot; he said.
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The first candidate for the final version of Microsoft's next server operating system is imminent, including a test version of the 'Viridian' virtualization software.
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It's JeOSy VMworld Canonical has busted out yet another version of Ubuntu â this time taking aim at the much hyped and loved virtualization market.â¦
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As competition for the virtualization space heats up, Parallels -- the software firm known until Wednesday as SWsoft -- sees itself as a sort of Switzerland. How does that work for a company that bases its development in Siberia?
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A new beta version of Parallels Desktop for Mac, the software that lets Intel Mac owners run Windows without having to first reboot their machines, is now out.
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Rent-A-VM In a clear shot at rival SWsoft, VMware has started hyping a new pricing model for its VMware Infrastructure software suite aimed at hosting service providers.â¦
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Parallels Server is an enterprise version of the software that lets x86-based hardware, such as Apple Macs, run the Windows OS.
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New version comes as competition looms from VMWare, which plans to release the latest beta of its Fusion product on Friday.
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New dual-core processors will make conventional software licensing models obsolete. What's next?
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Branching out in the SOA space, MuleSource will introduce Tuesday its Mule Galaxy software, an open source SOA governance platform with an integrated registry and repository.The company also will refresh its Mule open source ESB (enterprise service bus) and offer Mule Saturn, a lightweight BAM (business activity monitoring) tool that works with the ESB.Mule Galaxy 1.0 stores and manages SOA artifacts and provides governance and lifecycle management. MuleSource is positioning Galaxy, Mule, and Saturn as products that make SOA infrastructure software more accessible to enterprises. The Community edition of Galaxy is available now, and a fully tested enterprise edition is due in the second quarter of this year."Basically, [Galaxy] makes services? available through kind of a subscription, like an RSS feed, and it allows you to define [service levels]," Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource CEO, said.Working with Mule software or as a stand-alone component in an SOA infrastructure, Galaxy features a RESTful Atom Pub interface to simplify integration with frameworks such as Apache CXF and Windows Communication Foundation, MuleSource said. Support for artifact types is provided for Mule configuration, WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), policies, and custom artifacts. Enterprises can set their own policies.Governance, MuleSource said, will become increasingly important as the number of in-use services grows. Galaxy increases reuse and lowers application development costs, improves collaboration, and enables centralized control of policies and management, the company said.A Mule ESB user, while not planning to adopt Galaxy, nonetheless applauded its release."I think that's a great idea because the fact that it's open source allows a lot more transparency into what the code is doing and how it is doing it," said the user, Eugene Ciurana, director of systems infrastructure at LeapFrog Enterprises, makers of LeapFrog educational toys. LeapFrog has no plans to use Galaxy because its transactional systems do not leverage its Mule software.In the ESB space, MuleSouce is offering Mule 1.5 Enterprise Edition, a subscription-only enterprise packaging of the company's ESB integration platform. "This is the first time that we're splitting the community and enterprise versions," Rosenberg said.Mule's ESB moves and manages data between disparate systems. It supports multiple transport protocols, including Java Message Service, MQ Series, FTP, and HTTP. The ESB, MuleSource said, can process as many as 30 million messages per minute."We have higher performance at this point, we believe, than anybody," Rosenberg said. The enterprise-level product features remote diagnostics, patch management, and provisioning via the MuleHQ tool as well as support for BPEL and streaming of very large files. Remote diagnostics capabilities allow MuleSource support personnel to assess a system.Nested routers in the ESB decouple service implementations from service interfaces. Multiple models are supported to manage runtime behavior, including SEDA (staged event-driven architecture), pipeline, and streaming.LeapFrog has based its integrations on Mule."It?s the backbone for all the integration for all the Web platforms that LeapFrog has," said Ciurana. "LeapFrog is planning to do over 10 different Web sites and Web applications, and the Mule ESB ties all of them together across different environments and different countries, and it also ties [to] our third-party service providers," Ciurana said.Saturn, meanwhile, can track transactions that go through Mule. It works with Version 1.5 of the enterprise ESB. Saturn is a BAM tool for business processes and workflow. It complements SOA infrastructure by providing detailed logging and reporting on transactions.To provide visibility into transaction flows, developers and operations staff can drill down on transaction details and set message-level breakpoints for deep log analytics, according to MuleSource.Other features of Saturn include process visualization, root-cause analysis, and reporting on service-level agreements.Other companies, such as Iona, also have offered open source ESB technology. The open source ESB market, Rosenberg said, has made ESB more accessible by lowering the barrier to entry.LeapFrog has found that, even though it must pay for support for open source software, it still saves money on it compared to commercial software. The company last year spent almost $400,000 in open source subscriptions, but this figure would have risen to $1.6 million if commercial licenses were required, he said.Support for open source software also is superior to support on commercial software, Ciurana said. "That's the only way these guys can make money. They tend to be more customer oriented," he said.Mule 1.5 Enterprise and the beta version of Saturn are available Tuesday. Mule 1.5 prices start at $7,000 per year. Galaxy 1.0 Community, the untested version, will be offered Tuesday at no cost. The supported Galaxy 1.0 Enterprise product expected in the second quarter will feature subscription support, but no price has been set yet.
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TechWeb - IBM ponders how enterprises can be rewired to be more like games, particularly massively multiplayer online games like fantasy-themed World of Warcraft.
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(InfoWorld) - SWsoft, the company behind theÂ Parallels DesktopÂ virtualization software for Macintosh, expects to release a beta version of a server edition of the software in the next four to six weeks. It is also working on new management tools for the datacenter that will control other vendors' virtualization products. The company sees Parallels Server as a product for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) or for departmental use in larger companies, filling the niche between its desktop products andÂ Virtuozzo, its OS-level virtualization systemÂ for datacenters. Where Virtuozzo allows multiple virtual machines (VMs) to run on one machine using a single instance of the same operating system kernel -- either all Windows 2003, or all Linux -- Parallels Server will allow disparate operating systems to run on the same server. While large companies tend to have the power to force standardization on a single operating system, making Virtuozzo's virtual environment approach appropriate for them, SMEs need the flexibility that true virtualization offers, according to Benjamin Rudolph, director of corporate communications at SWsoft. Some of the features of Parallels Server, such as full 64-bit support for host and guest operating systems, and support for multiprocessor VMs, should also appear in the next major version of the desktop edition, due in the first half of next year, said Rudolph. Supporting 64-bit operating systems "is not really necessary on the desktop, but on the server it is," said Rudolph. The feature will take away one of the advantages ofÂ Fusion, a rival desktop product from VMware, which already has the capability. Both products continue to evolve and add features: Parallels offered a downloadable feature update for its version 3 desktop software earlier this month, and VMware began beta testing version 1.1 of Fusion on Tuesday. SWsoft's planned addition of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support in Parallels Desktop will allow Mac OS X users to get the best performance from multiprocessor-aware applications such as PhotoShop running in either operating system. Currently, virtual machines in Parallels Desktop run on (and emulate) just one processor core, with other cores in the system occupied by the host operating system. The company's new datacenter management tools will debut in Virtuozzo 4, now in beta testing, where they will allow management only of Virtuozzo virtual environments. But SWsoft intends to extend the capabilities in future versions to allow management of other virtualization systems, including VMware, Xen, and Microsoft's Veridian, said Rudolph. That move would come as no surprise to IDC research director Chris Ingle. As virtualization technology itself becomes more of a commodity, virtualization vendors will be forced to develop innovative management tools in order to remain competitive, he said recently. An IDC study found that while cost is the prime reason in deciding whether or not to virtualize, it is less important than the availability of management tools when choosing a virtualization vendor. Rudolph also hopes that other vendors will offer management tools for Parallels Server when it is released: SWsoft plans to open up the APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow that, and some of the software tools in its SDK (software development kit) will effectively be open source, he said. SWsoft hasn't yet chosen the license under which it will release that code, he said.
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Parallels has released the Release Candidate of Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0.
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(InfoWorld) - Parallels will add 3-D graphics support to its virtualization software for running Windows programs on Intel-based Macs, the company said yesterday. This will let Mac users play top-tier PC games. Desktop 3.0 for Mac, which the company said would launch "in a couple of weeks," will support both DirectX and OpenGL titles in Windows virtual machines. To prove the point, the company posted a screenshot of Quake 4 running on a Mac. Among other new features or modifications -- Parallels claimed 50 in 3.0 -- is something it called "SmartSelect," which lets users assign a Mac OS X or Windows application as the default handler for any Mac or Windows file type. Clicking on a file designated with SmartSelect then automatically opens the appropriate application, even if the user is currently not in the application's native operating system. "With SmartSelect, I set Word for Windows to be my default application to work with .doc, .rtf and .txt files, so when I double-click a file with that extension in either OS -- even if it is an e-mail attachment in Apple Mail -- the file instantly opens the file in Word [in Windows]," said Ben Rudolph, Parallels' director of communications. Until the new version is released, Parallels is discounting Version 3.0 50 percent from the usual $79.99 full price and is cutting the cost $10 from the normal upgrade fee. Some current Parallels users were disappointed by the sudden announcement, which meant the company had skipped public beta testing. "I would encourage Parallels to extend the beta for immediate release and to be more open on development," said an anonymous commenter on the company's blog. "It worked well in the past and made record sales. Why go another route?" "We were getting overwhelmed by the numbers" of testers in previous rounds of beta and release candidate editions, said Rudolph. "Too many comments were just too general and we weren't getting the focused feedback we needed." Instead, Parallels has moved to an invitation-only beta process that sets tougher guidelines on such things as the minimum time that users are asked to contribute to testing the product. "The reason why [3.0] is coming out so fast is because we stopped doing public betas," he said. Parallels' Desktop for Mac is the only virtualization software tacitly endorsed by Apple and sold through its online store.
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VMware Inc., known for its virtual machine technology for servers and workstations, is turning its attention to the client space. The Palo Alto, Calif.
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Microsoft's in an unusual place in the server virtualization market: second. But Thursday's unveiling of a system management platform for virtualized systems could make a difference as the competition heats up.