With the introduction of vSpace and N-series, NComputing is taking new steps towards the active adoption of desktop virtualization.

A great number of advantages are present in the portfolio of desktop virtualization, which have not been introduced in the market as yet. NComputing knows the benefits very well, and is now introducing N-series and vSpace desktop systems that will speed up the market adoption of this novel approach.

NComputing has recently made announcements about the release of its latest version end-to-end desktop virtualization platform vSpace and has also restructured its messaging to highlight that. According to the views of company, the arrangement of vSpace and the N series systems can prove to be perfect equipment for the best possible installation and consumption of virtual desktops.

To understand the whole procedure more thoroughly, it should be known that vSpace is a desktop virtualization platform that functions via operating system virtualization and N-series based desktop hardware systems family which is supported by NComptuing’s system-on-a-chip technology. Amazingly NComputing has brought its name in the list of those few vendors that have emphasized more on operating system virtualization and dividing platform rather getting their systems on virtual machine software bandwagon like many other suppliers.

Let’s have a brief look over the NComputing views about vSpace. NComputing has plans of releasing a latest version of virtualization platform which will be meant for desktop computing that develops on its product which is presently under the use of more than 4 million customer enterprises.

vSpace platform facilitates the organizations with flexibility, manageability and improved consumer experience with maximization of technology investments. The platform brings

• NComputing’s patented desktop virtualization software
• New vSpaceManagementCenter
• New vSpace Premium Support and Services.

According to most recent updates from the world of IT, it has been come to forefront that Red Hat has speed up the Open Source Virtualization race.

KVM based Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 can now support extra large virtual servers with improved live migration all over the storage systems. Few days back, Red Hat increased its open source option to VMware and Microsoft, Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 with additional facility to escalate heavy virtual machines and access the goals of live migration all over the storage systems.

Chuck Dubuque, the senior manager of product marketing at Red Hat stated in an interview, Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 lets the development of virtual server by allowing as more as 160 virtual CPUs and memory of 2 TB. This kind of technique is bigger than maximum 1 TB of memory and 64 virtual CPUs, which is supported by Microsoft System Center’s Virtual Machine Manager or VMware’s vSphere 5.1.

According toDubuque, “The meaning of extra large virtual machine that has ability of running under Red Hat’s 3.1 systems is that “Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 can take the largest x86 boxes and virtualize them, those with eight CPU sockets with 10 cores each.”

In addition to above mentioned factors, the extra large virtual machines are supporting the proficient kernel virtual machine hypervisor that consumes the memory manager and along with this, it also uses scheduler within the Linux kernel. This is one of the many reasons why in Hypervisor performance KVM takes 19 out of 27 published SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmarks. This is a broad-spectrum benchmark which ahs been derived from the previous VMware VMware benchmark.

Dubuquefurther said that 3.1 lets the live storage migration of a virtual server’s virtual disks from rack to rack and all over the data center, however right now its stage of technical management does not support shifting from a data center to another data center. He further said in this regard that storage live migration is “within a data center or where there is a significantly high bandwidth/low latency network between data centers.”

According to recent updates from technology, Network Virtualization Upstart Viyatta will be taken over by Brocade.

Brocade has plans of deepening its professionalism in software-design networking or SDN, and for this purpose it has planned to acquire network virtualization startup Viyatta on cash.

Few days back, the financial terms and conditions about the deal were disclosed. However they were not publicized. Basically Viyatta is a new approach and an emerging trend in virtualized networking, which deals in an operating system which is based on open source software that is compatible with both standard x86 hardware and most of the cloud and virtualized platforms to make available the provision of enterprise e-level routing, infrastructure and protection to the clients. Viyatta is of the view that their system has observed as more as 1 million downloads.

Brocade’s departing CEO, Mike Klayko said that Viyatta will make sure that it makes the prefect use of the investments Brocade has made in SDN and Ethernet fabrics.

Klayko also said in a statement, “We are now bolstering these ‘build and partner’ efforts with this strategic acquisition with the goal of being the innovation and thought leader in the software networking category,”

Kelly Herrell, the CEO at Vyatta said in a blog post, “We couldn’t be more proud,” she continued in these words, “All of this excitement has been in pursuit of the next frontier of IP networking. No longer is networking something that happens only outside the server; now it extends into the server itself, creating a new world of virtual topologies that complement the physical ones surrounding them.”

Also Ken Cheng, the vice president Routing, Application and Software Networking said, “The Vyatta acquisition brings in considerably more software networking technology and expertise to Brocade. We believe software networking to be a critical component in the next phase of network virtualization as enterprises are becoming increasingly virtualized and actively moving workloads to the cloud,”

Further Herrell made additions to this blog post by saying that by joining with Brocade, Vyatta can attain “the best of both worlds: the solidity of a multi-billion-dollar network infrastructure player with the agility of an innovative software group.”

VMware brings another attraction for SMBs.

VMware, so as to attract more Small and medium sized enterprises, has recently minimized its deal registration verge to facilitate maximum partners that look forward to the space to publicize the advantages of virtualization.

VMware’s Advantage Plus deal registration program is now offering a deal size of $6000 which was previously $10000. A senior director of partner strategy at VMware, Colleen Kapase, in an interview with CRN stated that VMware is particularly targeting companies that have employees number between 250 and 500.

Last week, Kapase said in a statement, “There is still a huge opportunity here in terms of the penetration of virtualization,” he continued, “There are customers just dipping their toes in the water, and the deal registration changes are aimed at these types of organizations.”

According to Kapase, as VMware has started emphasizing more on SMB space, it is giving more time to partner effectiveness. VMware’s vSphere Acceleration Kit, whose price begins at the range of $17,000 plus for as more as six processors, and is meant for the use of customers that have ten servers, clearly signals that VMware is seriously thinking about the space.

Kapase also said that VMware has also increased the limits for Advantage Plus deals to $650,000, facilitating the partners in the Enterprises and Premier program stages to gather further awards from greater client engagements. Small scaled partners that have limited technical resources are not capable of getting financial awards present in the programs; however they are honored by being labeled as partner in the deal.

She further told CRN, “We think this does help profitability in deals with partners that have some technical training,”

In the month of October, VMware released the Enterprise Purchasing Program that allows the customers to obtain tokens and cash them for the product licenses of VMware and support and continuation services all over the three years agreement. The minimum deal size of the EPP program is $250,000.

With the partially or completely virtualized servers of IT or ITeS organizations are likely to board absolute steam on the way of desktop virtualization.

IT and ITeS always plan for future in adaptation of technology. Partially, as they do not go short of in-house ability and completely as them being technical hubs, many times act as driving forces for other companies. These novel developments are mostly associated with these IT/ITeS organizations and then after examination, they easily reach their customers.

There is an unavoidable interest in the IT/ITeS desktop virtualization vertical, the hype is still on the way of being translated into espousal cycle. Deepak Varma, the Regional Presales Head in South India EMC stated about the lower adoption rate of virtualization in India, “Proliferation of virtualization solutions in the Indian market is still at a nascent stage where virtualization is yet to percolate to all layers of IT.” he also said, “Companies are doing prototypes, even in-house ones to test the waters with respect to desktop virtualization. Real deployments (500-1000 computers) are still not happening. Pilots ranging from 1-100 systems, however, are catching up.”

The Vice President Sales at ACG Networks, Arvind Gautam is of the view that the reason behind slow adoption of desktop virtualization as it is lacking clear Rol created around it. He further said, “Off late however, IT/ITeS have started adopting at a good pace. A good reason for this is the drastic savings that an organization incurs because no obsolesce of desktop hardware needs to be taken care of. Once you have adopted desktop virtualization you don’t need to have a very robust hardware infrastructure. The pain point of hardware upgrades is taken away.”

Further Opined Seemant Chaudhry, a Desktop Transformation Evangelist at Citrix India said, “When desktop virtualization took off in India, IT/ITeS companies weren’t sure where to start from. However, now they are confident about taking desktop virtualization out of their training centres and right to their customers. IT/ITeS is amongst the first verticals to be passing on the benefits of desktop virtualization to their customers.”

The VMware vSphere API vulnerability was healed by the latest update in virtualization technology vendor.

Virtualization software vendor VMware has come up with an update recently to patch the security issue in the vSphere API. The update fixes a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability in ESXi andESX, and it also undertook many open-source security patches for the ESX Service Console.

The company gave details in an advisory, “The VMware vSphere API contains a denial-of-service vulnerability,” it further explained, “This issue allows an unauthenticated user to send a maliciously crafted API request and disable the host daemon. Exploitation of the issue would prevent management activities on the host but any virtual machines running on the host would be unaffected.”

These days virtualization has become the foremost target for the attacks and infringements, especially for the managers and administrators, at that stage it is most convenient to exploit a virtual based environment and attain the “keys to the kingdom” according to Eric Chiu, the founder and president of virtualization security vendor Hy Trust.

He further said, “This really shows how vulnerabilities can be exploited, and how important it is to secure today’s virtualization and cloud environments; after all, this is the new [operating system] of the data center and provides access to the virtual machines, the virtual network and mission-critical enterprise applications, and the virtualized storage resources as well,”

Along with the API patch, VMware’s update also includes issue fixing in the ESX Service Console’s expat, nss packages, python and nspr. This undertakes heal for the Network Security Services RPMs and ESX Service Console Netscape Portable Runtime to editions nspr-4.9.1.4.el5_8 and nss-3.13.5.4.9834.

Also Mulholland wrote in its November 4 statement, “It is possible that more related files will be posted in the future. We take customer security seriously and have engaged our VMware Security Response Center to thoroughly investigate. As a matter of best practices with respect to security, VMware strongly encourages all customers to apply the latest product updates and security patches made available for their specific environment.”

ADTRAN’s Network Virtualization Solution for Wireless Networks has been awarded with Triple Crown of Awards because of its innovation.

A renowned name in providing virtual mobility, cloud connectivity and business communications, ADTRAN®, Inc, has recently made announcements that its product Bluesocket virtual Wireless LAN (vWLAN®) solution has been awarded with several industry honors for showing novelty and innovation along with a remarkable approach to provision of end-to-end management of wireless and wireline networks. The solution was awarded by TMC, achieving an Internet Telephony Excellence Award along with Communication Solution Product of the Year Award. vWLAN has also been recognized by the American Business Awards with Gold Stevie® in the category of Best New Telecommunication Hardware Product/Service category. The main purpose behind these three awards is to appreciate the originality in the development of product and trend setting behavior in the industry of telecommunications.

Mads Lillelund, the general manager for ADTRAN’s Bluesocket Business Group said in an interview, “ADTRAN’s Bluesocket vWLAN is the first and only solution on the market with hypervisor-based control and management, enabling enterprises and large campuses to truly realize unprecedented scalability and simplified operations across their facilities with building-to-building, wireless and wired connectivity,” he further said, “The solution allows customers to continue utilizing their current network access points while also deploying ADTRAN’s Bluesocket access points. As a result, customers are able to protect previous investments but also offer a migration path from older access points.”

Michael Gallagher, the founder and president of Stevie Awards said, “We’re delighted to recognize so many innovative companies, new products, technical achievements and technology executives inABA’s new product and tech awards categories.”

Also Erik Linask, the Group Editorial Director of INTERNET TELEPHONY said, “The editors of INTERNET TELEPHONY were pleased to grant ADTRAN with an INTERNET TELEPHONY Excellence Award for its innovation in IP communications. vWLAN has demonstrated outstanding quality and delivered exceptional solutions for its customers.”

To make the cloud installation easier, Comstor Teams are helping the SMBs in collaboration with CISCO and NetApp.

A renowned name in unified communications, data center, network infrastructure and security solutions, Westcon Group, has recently announced that its Comstor business unit is working with CISCO and NetApp to help the open markers for the deployment of cloud platforms, ExpressPod. By making sales of architecture to partners and via CISCO and NetApp distributors over EMEA, the originations are facilitating the SMBs to make the cloud installation easier.

Basically ExpressPod is a client-examined solution that has been created by NetApp and CISCO to help the accomplishment of next generation server, network resources and storage. Merge an IT infrastructure and apps collection to strengthen virtualization, the inexpensive platform lowers down the dangers attached with deploying novel resources, while making offers of bigger efficiencies and lessened complexity.

Ed Baker, the director of Data Center and Virtualization Channel, CISCO EMEAR said, “FlexPod was a game-changer in data center technology,” he continued,  ”ExpressPod now takes this vision one step further – offering an easy-to-deploy data center platform for customers with little or no IT experience.  Backed by a successful partnership with Comstor, today’s announcement is a tremendous boost for small- and medium-sized businesses.”
Also Andreas Dohmen, the executive Vice President at EMEA, Comstor said, “ExpressPod opens doors for small- and medium-sized businesses looking to gain new efficiencies through next-generation data center technology,” he further said, “When we began with FlexPod less than six months ago, partners responded with a significant pipeline of activity.  We’re pleased to be working with Cisco and NetApp yet again to further embrace the promise of virtualization.”
Thomas Ehrlich, the Vice President Partner and Pathways EMEA, NetApp said, “Virtual infrastructure deployment is generally too complex and cost-prohibitive for many companies,” he further said, “But ExpressPod changes the rules of the game – permitting more businesses to exploit all virtualization has to offer.  With broad-based data center experience, Comstor is a perfect partner to bring this platform to a broader global audience.”

Mostly the benefits of virtualization are discussed, however this articles tells when NOT to convert your system on virtualization.

Vice President of mobile security at Trend Micro, Cesare Garlati agrees to the fact that there are some situations when shifting to virtualization is not appropriate for a system. In recently held RSA Conference 2012 in London, he gave top most reasons of not converting the servers onto virtualization in accordance with need and situation.

Firstly he said that if you server is perfectly friendly with you and is working the way you want, and then there is no point of introducing complexity by turning the system into server virtualization.

Then there are the legal issues. Not all the applications are licensed to run in virtual servers. You should better not engage yourself in anything that disobeys the licenses your organization settled to. So you simply cannot shift to server virtualization in such cases.

Some apps with high I/O properties for example database, distributed SMP applications or grid that have basic requirements of high speed interconnects, intensive graphics applications or some other apps that have need of hardware cards, with such applications, do not even think of virtualization.

Virtual machines have their own time clocks. This clearly means that their time will deviate from the server host clock. If these small time deviations are critical for the applications you are using, then better keep using the physical systems.

Server virtualization definitely saves money. But the proper system installation and other apps do require money. So if you do not have enough budgets, the better not go for virtualization.

Many developments have been made in the field of virtualization. But still VM that runs on the top of Hypervisor cannot perform as quickly as the physical machine which runs on that very operating system. Yes you can add servers to run the Hypervisor, however shifting to virtualization is done to cut short the number of servers rather keep on adding the servers.

CISCO has recently announced novel approaches to job-role focused data center certifications.

CISCO is coming up with novel approaches in job-role-focused education and certification program for the datacenter architecture. It undertakes a detailed Career Certification portfolio that consists of the CISCO CCNA Data Center, CCNP Data Center and CCIE Data Center along with a strong product training portfolio.

Antonella Corno, the product manager for Data Centre virtualization and cloud product portfolio at CISCO said in an interview, “The key message here is that our career certifications now fully embrace the unified datacenter architecture — unified computing, unified fabric and unified management,” she further said,  ”These announcements focus on the first two  unified computing and unified fabric. Unified management is cloud-focused and isn’t as mature as the others, and so is not ready to receive a full career certification yet.”

Corno also said that with the advancements in technology, more intelligent developments are seen in this area. She said in this regard, “Those tech trends were responding to specific business challenges, and IT organizations had to rethink the way they leverage the infrastructure, which was leading the industry into new roles and skillsets, and we had to address the gaps that were forming in training,”

She further added, “Moving to more complex infrastructures needs better trained people to lower the cost of operations, increase the functional excellence of staff and ensure the network evolves with business.”

Every product of data center is covered by the latest specialist certifications. It was announced in February 2012 that unifying the CCIE Data Center are CCNA Data Center and CCNP Data Center. Most of the thinkers view Cisco Unified Computing and Cisco Unified Fabric as two pillars of Unified Cisco Data Center architecture. These are applied over the design job roles, troubleshooting and implementation.

The certification values a person’s abilities, undertaking troubleshooting a virtualized computing arena which is supported by CISCO Unified Computing System platform emphasizing on network connectivity and storage, deployment, memory, booting issues and adapter connectivity, BIOS, drivers and installation of virtual environment. Corno said, “The CCNP prerequisites are the CCNA and 3-5 years of experience.”