Het feit dat TriNext aan deze eisen voldoet onderstreept de kwaliteit van onze dienstverlening.

 

As of last week we are a Citrix Partner with Silver Solution Advisor level. This means we are authorized to consult on and sell all Citrix virtualization and presentation products such as XenApp, XenDesktop and XenServer.

Adding Citrix Partner certification to our portfolio also further highlights our desire to be a truly independent virtualization consulting firm.

Currently TriNext is a partner of the following suppliers:

• VMware Solution Provider Enterprise
• VMware Authorized Consultant
• Microsoft Gold Partner (in conjunction with our sister Pimarox)
• VEEAM ProPartner Silver
• Citrix Solution Advisor Silver

Visit the TriNext website for more details: http://www.trinext.nl

PALO ALTO, CA, April 21, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced VMware vSphere™ 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service. With a wide range of groundbreaking new capabilities, VMware vSphere 4 brings cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, non-disruptive way – delivering uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving customer choice.

As the complexity of IT environments has continued to increase over time, customers’ share of IT budgets are increasingly spent on simply trying to “keep the lights on.” With the promise of cloud computing, customers are eager to achieve the benefits, but struggle to see the path to getting there.  Leveraging VMware vSphere 4, customers can take pragmatic steps to achieve cloud computing within their own IT environments.  With these “internal” clouds, IT departments can dramatically simplify how computing is delivered in order to help decrease its cost and increase its flexibility, enabling IT to respond more rapidly to changing business requirements.

Read it in it’s entirety over here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2009/04/introducing-vmware-vsphere-4-the-industrys-first-cloud-operating-system.html

Uit de aankondiging van Veeam:

End-user customers wishing to replace the virtualization aware backup product they currently use for VMware ESX and ESXi backup, replication, and recovery can now upgrade to Veeam Backup & Replication 3.0 and benefit from aggressive discounts. For a limited time, Veeam is offering a 50% discount on Veeam Backup & Replication on like-for-like product replacements.

Here’s how it works:

• Any product license currently used for VMware ESX and ESXi backup, replication, and recovery may be converted to a Veeam Backup & Replication socket license at 50% off the normal SRP (Suggested Retail Price)
• Where extended maintenance and support contracts are in place for the previous product, any unexpired full years of support may be purchased from Veeam, also at 50% discount off SRP
• Additional (non replacement) Veeam Backup & Replication product licenses may be purchased at regular price
• Proof of ownership (in the form of an invoice for the competing product) is required
• This offer is valid until June 15, 2009

Example: A customer currently owns 20 socket licenses of Product X, and wishes to upgrade to 20 socket licenses of Veeam Backup & Replication. These 20 licenses can be purchased at a 50% discount off SRP. The customer also has 2 years and 3 months of prepaid maintenance/support on Product X. The customer may license either 1 or 2 additional years of maintenance for Veeam Backup & Replication at a 50% discount off SRP. Please note that the first year of maintenance is included at no additional charge in the purchase of Veeam Backup & Replication.

http://www.veeam.com/go/backup-upgrade/more.html

Join us for an exclusive peek at how VMware is bringing cloud computing to businesses of all sizes.

VMware is once again leading the virtualization industry by bringing cloud computing to the datacenter. Transform your IT infrastructure into a private cloud—a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds—delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service.

On April 21, 2009, we’ll be unveiling how VMware is taking IT to new heights of efficiency, choice and control through service-level automation—dramatically reducing capital and operating costs and maximizing IT efficiency—with the freedom to choose any application, OS, or hardware.

Join Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware, as he and other VMware leaders officially unveil the next generation of virtualization technology from VMware.

Don’t miss your chance to participate in one of the most groundbreaking events this year.

De aankondiging is te vinden op de website van VMware, hier is ook een mogelijkheid om te registreren voor deze webcast.

This is the device that was demoed: http://www.nokiausa.com/find-products/phones/nokia-n800-r6. While this is not a phone like what is mentioned in the video it is still very impressive. There are hurdles to take though because you will probably want to have different phone numbers attached to different environments and that usually means multiple SIM cards (in the case of GSM).

The keynote this morning is introduced by Maurizio Carli. The main speaker is Dr. Stephen Herrod who is the CTO and Senior VP of R&D and the topic is a more technical look at the announcements made yesterday combined with several demonstrations.

Check the tech

New performance figures for the vCompute are 8 vCPU, 256GB per VM, 40Gb/s of throughput.The power is now available to run a VM that needs 510 spindles to saturate the I/O.

The recently announced SPECweb world record is elaborated on. Effectively it means that the configuration could run 3 billion pages per day.

In the vStorage layer front thin provisoning is coming and there will be the possibility for hardware vendors to talk directly to the array from the virtual infrastructure. There will be a software variant of thin provisioning but doing it from the array will be much faster.

After the storage there is time for networking. Most of the information we know already from the announcements of the distributed vSwitch and the Cisco Nexus 1000V switches.

Building the giant computer

All this consolidation leads to a large pool of resources. Mr. Herrod now talks about DPM (Distributed Power Management). DPM will power off host servers when they are not needed saving more power on top of the power savings that you already have by consolidating the servers.

Application vServices
In the new version there will be improvements on the management layer with built in chargeback and poilicy settings. Application vServices also contains the availability services such as High Availability. Within vSphere there will be a new functionality called Fault Tolerance.

Fault Tolerance will enable you to get High Availability for Virtual Machines compared to hosts (which are protected by VMware HA). Fault Tolerance will shadow a virtual machine running on one host to a copy on another host and the virtual machine will fail over instantly should the host running the primary machine fail. When that occurs it will also generate another shadow on another host to maintain the level of protection.

Security
VMware VMsafe was introduced last year and it comes back in the keynote. It seems that there are actual implementations by vendors but nothing to be demonstrated it seems.

vShield Zones (virtual firewall layer) is also discussed but only briefly.

Management
vCenter Server Heartbeat is discussed. With this product you can finally protect protect the management server itself. The goal is to get the management server in a highly available state as this was not possible before.

The underlying goal is to get the vCenter Servers also as virtual machines because 60% of clients still run these as physicals

vCenter has its limitations and with really large datacenters and cloud operators you will get to these limitations. If you have more than 3000 VM’s you need more than one server. New in vCenter Server is Linked Mode where you can manage multiple vCenter Servers from one client. There is also a new Search function to find what you are looking for in your really big cloud/datacenter. The maximum of linked vCenters is 10 (so 30.000 VM’s).

Configuring hosts will become much easier with vCenter Host Profiles. With these profiles you can configure a master profile for you host configuration and automatically remediate hosts to the host profile.

A minor announcement is that vCenter Server is available as a Linux Server as well as a preconfigured Virtual Appliance. The crowd seem to be pleased because there is a short applause.

More on the vCloud
More information about Federation and a discussion about one challenge for these clouds and that is long distance vMotion. There is a lot of work going into this and there are a lot of challenges to be solved mostly with replication, memory states and disk cosistency.

vClient (Desktop Virtualization)
Nothing new specifically here.

Mentions of Thinapp, Offline Desktops and VMware ACE technology.

Jerry Chen comes on to talk about virtual desktops and PC over IP technology. For the WAN with 150ms to 250ms latency they are now able to support virtual desktops with video, VoIP etc. where previously that wasn’t
possible with regular RDP.

Over the LAN PCoIP is able to support HD dual monitors, rich internet applications, animation and HD Video.

3D applications have always been a challenge but now there is a demo of 3D
applications (Google Earth and 3D modeling providing blade PC capabilities over a thin client. It seems really smooth and it is mentioned that this will support heavy 3D application such as AutoCAD.

Virtualization of a mobile phone
A technology where many have asked what the use of it is. The mobile phone hypervisor has a number of use cases from software providers wanting to provide a mobile phone virtual appliance to their customers to hardware
manufacturers wanting to test on a ingle hardware platform.

Demonstration of a Nokia N800 running two mobile operating systems. Very impressive. I will try to get the video online tonight. Keep in mind though that the device is not a phone.

In this session we get an overview of what vCenter Orchestrator does
and how it can assist with automation and orchestration. There are a
lot of things that can be automated in a virtual environment.
Orchestrator works with workflows. It has a workflow engine to make
these processes and it comes with a number of standard workflows built
it.

Orchestrator is also able to integrate with third party change
management systems so changes can be scheduled and automatically
handled, closed and documented results. It can also communicate with
multiple vCenter servers so you only have to configure it once for your
whole environment.

There are three parts to orchestrator:

• Workflow Engine, this can react to scripts, scheduling, event triggers etc.
• User Interface
• Workflow Client, this is where you manage your workflows

Orchestrator is built on Java and will support future software
versions of virtual infrastructure. Multiple database management
systems are supported (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL) and it will come with
an open API.

One thing I didn’t know is that LifeCycle Manager is a VMware Orchestrator ‘enabled’ application.

There are a lot of different use cases for Orchestrator. A lot of
things that can be automated with Powershell scripting can be automated
through Orchestrator so there may be a question about what the use is
for Orchestrator. It could be valid for a specific organization to ask
the question “should I buy this technology or build it myself?”.

That is always something to think about but all the functionality
that is already in the product will make that decision easy I think. It
is interesting however that Powershell integration is not available
*right now*.

Projected release date is 1H09.

Update: I had a chance to ask the presenter about the status of
Powershell integration and he commented there is a lot of work being
done to integrate this into the product but that it necessitated a
partial redesign or re-architecture of the application. According to
him it is not a question of if but a question of when they will be able
to get this done.

Based on the internal demands SAP have been able (by using VMware solutions) to split their virtual machine provisioning into two service levels. With their internal solutions they are able to cater for both the volume business and the specials.

By building their own cloud and building out a virtualization provisioning system they are able to transparently provision a machine foruse evn by external service providers.

After an introduction by Maurizio Carli, the new EMEA General Manager, we have now arrived at the keynote of Paul Maritz. His introduction was mostly the same as yesterday with emphasis on the expertise that VMware has built up over the years.

The focus for the future is on the vCloud. Cloud computing is the current direction that the IT business is going to finally enable the IT As A Service and Mr. Maritz his presentation focuses on VMware as an enabler of the cloud where one key point is that companies are always starting with a legacy set of application where encapsulation is necessary to bring these applications into the cloud.

And after this elaborate explanation of the cloud architecture and VMware’s role in the cloud system the formal announcement is made that the set of programs and tools is called VMware vSphere. vSpere is not the narrow definition of ESX4 or even the next version to VI3 but it is meant as the name of the framework that consists of compute, storage and network services on the technical side and availability, security and scalability on the application/services/management layer.

The next announcement is the introduction of vCenter Suite. Like vSphere this is not just the successor to vCenter Server but also a framework to enable additional management and for instance also chargeback options.

After a segment on cloud computing that was similar to the segment that I wrote about yesterday we are now looking at an Enterprise Cloud demo from Terremark. For those familiar witVI3.5 functionality this is known territory but the application in a cloud form is new as well as the opportunity to buy just what you need and not get cut off when you “overuse”. You just pay extra for the time that you use the extra resources and have the opportunity to scale out (if it is a permanent rise in capacity use) or just leave it (when you have a temporary usage peak).

The Terremark demo was followed by an Engineyard demo about provisioning a Ruby on Rails application in the cloud and a demo of IT Structures about providing proof of concept environments in the cloud that can be seamlessly integrated into your internal cloud infrastructure when you conclude the PoC and want to start using the particular environment.

Client Side Virtualization

Our trip into the cloud is now over and we are looking at the desktop virtualization side of things. This was an subject where an announcement was hinted on yesterday.

The concept is that the desktop can be portable to everything. The biggest challenge with this is the mobile endpoint and the fact that they have tendency to get offline.

The details have been communicated yesterday on parner day. With the highlights of the roadmap coming from December of last year with View3 and more onthe protocol side.

The announcement that was hinted on yesterday is a new partnership between VMware and Intel on a client side hypervisor. It seems to be a partial comeback of the Intel vPro initiative (which frankly I have never heard of a company using it).

Key points of the new solution will be the fact that the vPro layer is there in the hardware to enable image verification/security, remote access and management.