Next: VMware Tackles Smartphone Virtualization

The bane of the cell phone industry is that its software needs to be rewritten for every new model. And since new cell phones come along about as often as, ah, cell phone commercials on TV, that's a problem. The answer is virtualization -- break the dependence on hardware of a piece of software written for a particular device.

VMware was by no means the first to implement virtualization. But it understood ahead of others that virtualization would benefit the low end of the server market based on Intel's x86 instruction set. Now it's testing its ability to virtualize an even bigger mass market, the one for mobile phones.

There were 2.9 billion chips produced last year based on the Advanced Risc Machine or ARM designs. VMware proposes to virtualize the high end of this market so that applications developed for Samsung can run on Motorola devices as well. In theory, they'll run on the Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry and Ericsson cell phones as well.

VMware has come up with a 20-30K hypervisor -- one that sips memory rather than guzzles it. The mobile hypervisor slips in between a cell phone application and the mobile device CPU, intercepting instructions from above and recasting them to meet the bare metal needs of the device below. Most cell phones are based on a common underlying ARM chipset design.

Specifically, VMware's Mobile Virtualization Platform will virtualize the instruction set for all processors based on the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 designs. Gartner analysts estimate that half of the smart phones shipped in 2012 will run virtualized software.

Virtualization is going to give cell phone application developers added impetus to produce for the "open" operating systems powering mobile devices, including Symbian, Linux, and Windows CE. These operating systems will be driving some of the most competitive devices.

In effect, cell phone applications will become virtual appliances. They will be bundled with a stripped down, optimized version of its chosen operating system, then downloaded to run on a variety of smart phone handsets, ignoring the previous hard boundary between manufacturers and operating systems. The virtualization layer is able to rationalize away these differences.

VMware is basing its virtualization layer that accomplishes this on technology it acquired in October but did not announce publicly until yesterday. The acquisition was Trango Virtual Processors, founded in 2004 in Grenoble, France.

Resource - Information Week

Intel-backed start-up tries to connect enterprise IT to the "cloud"

A start-up called Enomaly has developed virtualization management software that it claims will integrate enterprise data centers with commercial cloud computing offerings to form a single "virtual private cloud" that manages and governs both internal and external resources from a single console.

Founded in 2004 as a consulting company, Enomaly dropped its consulting business in early October to focus solely on its software efforts, which began in 2005 with an open source management tool that runs on top of the Xen hypervisor.

The vendor's primary offering now is the Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), which co-founder and chief technologist Reuven Cohen says can manage multiple hypervisors and provide better integration with Internet-based services such as Amazon's EC2, which offers on-demand computing capacity. Enomaly also makes it easier to move workloads on virtual machines from one data center to another, even if separated by wide distances, Cohen says.

"The economic collapse is leading companies to look at alternatives to buying large amounts of infrastructure," Cohen says.

Intel helped bankroll the company's product development and is jointly building a next-generation content distribution engine with Enomaly, a custom system that Intel will market to its own customers, says Jake Smith, a technologist with Intel's server product group. (Compare server products.)

With ECP, Enomaly says, enterprises manage their own virtual servers and remotely accessed computing capacity with "an intuitive, browser-based dashboard [that] makes it easy for IT personnel to efficiently plan deployments, automate [virtual machine] scaling and load-balancing; and, analyze, configure and optimize cloud capacity."

Enomaly supports the Xen hypervisor, will support VMware within a few weeks and Microsoft's Hyper-V in 2009, Cohen says. Hypervisors lack migration capabilities that make it easy to move applications to services like Amazon EC2, and thus can be augmented with Enomaly's software to become more flexible, Cohen argues.

"They don't look at networking beyond their own infrastructure," Cohen says of the industry's major hypervisor vendors. "They assume you're going to stick within the context of their particular platform. In reality, there is a heterogeneous environment."

Because Enomaly is vendor-agnostic, the software provides the ability to bring into the cloud whatever virtual machine is best suited to run a particular application, an attribute Intel needs for its content distribution engine, Smith of Intel says.
Smith views Enomaly as a "cloud compute infrastructure built for cloud operators or those who want to operate their environment in the cloud from day one."

But he says VMware is better positioned than Enomaly to help enterprises bridge the gap between data centers and externally accessed cloud services.

"Just because you can do it technically doesn't mean you have production customers who have done that with you to date," Smith says. "Technically, Intel can build an 81-core chip but it doesn't mean we have it commercially available in production."

Enomaly says ECP provides the following benefits:

• Ability to combine many servers into a "single, seamless, sharable cloud."
• Automatically scale during times of high demand by accessing both "local and remote clouds."
• Partition public computing utilities such as Amazon EC2 into a quarantined private cloud.
• Ability to make data center resources rapidly available to any application, and ensure instant recovery and live maintenance of applications.

The open source download is available at Enomaly's Web site, and the company sells support and add-ons. About a half-dozen paying customers are using prototype installations of the technology, Cohen says, while many more use the open source software for free.

There are about 1,000 users in a beta program, including Microsoft, Oracle, GE, VeriSign and the U.S. Department of Energy, according to a 451 Group analyst report on Enomaly. Prototype projects include Intel's content delivery network and projects at France Telecom and Rackspace. 

Cohen got his start in 1998 when he founded video streaming company Graphic Substance, and says he helped create the Napster interface. Most of his video streaming customers were in the World Trade Center, and thus his business ended after Sept. 11. Cohen then became involved in open source and content management, spending a few years as a freelance consultant before co-founding Enomaly.

Resource - NETWORK WORLD

Microsoft: VMM will ship Nov. 1

Microsoft on Tuesday said development was complete on its Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and that the software, which is used to manage the company's new server-virtualization technology, would be generally available Nov. 1. Microsoft said on Sept. 8 that System Center VMM would be complete in 30 days and available between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31. While the first target was missed, users will get the management tool between those two dates. Until Nov. 1, users can download an evaluation version.

VMM is the company's first tool for managing its recently released Hyper-V platform, along with virtualization environments from VMware and Xen.

Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization strategy for Microsoft said on his blog that hundreds of early-deployment customers are already using "either the beta or release-candidate version of VMM to manage their Hyper-V deployments." VMM was originally slated to ship 30 to 60 days after the release of Hyper-V, which came on June 26.

Microsoft also has said it will offer a stand-alone version of VMM 2008 that is unbundled from the System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE), which was introduced late last year. The 2007 version of VMM is only available with SMSE, which includes enterprise server-management licenses for System Center Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager and Virtual Machine Manager. Customers complained that in order to get VMM they had to buy into the entire System Center suite. In addition, they had to cover it with a Software Assurance maintenance contract.

Microsoft has previously announced that the stand-alone version of VMM 2008 will be on its price list in November at $675, which is a license per-device and includes rights to the management server.

VMM helps users configure and deploy virtual machines. It also provides centralized management and provisioning tools. The software is a core piece of Microsoft's System Center family of management tools, including integration with Configuration Manager and Operations Manager.

Management has emerged as a core issue in virtualization deployments, and experts are saying that Microsoft's set of tools may be the strength of its virtualization offerings, which range from the server to the desktop.

Resource - NetworkWorld

Top 10 strategic technologies for 2009

Analyst house Gartner has tipped its top 10 strategic technologies and trends for next year, with virtualization, cloud computing and social networking all making the grade.

The analysts believe all 10 technology trends have the potential to have a significant impact on businesses over the next three years. David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst, said companies should look at them as "opportunities"--and evaluate where each can add value to their business' services and offerings.

The 10 technologies/trends are:

1. Virtualization
Not just server virtualization but storage and client devices too. For instance, Gartner says virtualization can significantly decrease the cost of holding information by eliminating duplicate copies of data on real storage devices.

2. Cloud computing
The analyst says smaller companies especially can benefit from cloud computing because of built-in elasticity and scalability which can help them grow quickly while also reducing barriers to entry. Gartner also believes there are opportunities here for larger organizations, especially as certain IT functions become less customised.

3. Servers--beyond blades
Servers are evolving in a way that will simplify the provisioning of capacity, according to the analyst, so organizations will be able to track an individual resource type--such as memory or processing power--and replace that as needed, rather than having to pay for all resources every time an upgrade is needed.

4. Web-oriented architectures
Web-centric technologies and standards will continue to affect enterprise computing models, says Gartner--leading to greater use of service-oriented environments in the business over the next five years.

5. Enterprise mash-ups
Quirky Web mash-ups are inspiring businesses to investigate how mash-ups can be added to enterprise systems to help deliver and manage applications. The analyst says application architects and IT leaders should therefore look to further explore enterprise mash-ups.

6. Specialized systems
Heterogeneous server systems are an emerging trend in high performance computing--to cope with the most demanding workloads--where previously a dedicated appliance may have been used. Gartner says it eventually expects this specialized system approach to filter down to the general-purpose computing market as well.

7. Social software and social networking
The analyst says organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application--and, to avoid being left behind, should adopt a social platform sooner rather than later or risk seeming "mute" while rivals get talking to communities and customers.

8. Unified communications
Expect massive consolidation in the comms industry as apps shift to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems, says Gartner. This means formerly distinct markets and vendors will converge--so organizations must plan to take account of comms functions being replaced or converged and adjust their own admin teams accordingly.

9. Business intelligence
BI was the top tech in Gartner's 2008 CIO survey and the analyst continues to back its potential for boosting and transforming business performance. It says such tools are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment like the current global credit crunch.

10. Green IT
Companies should think about shifting to more efficient products and processes as environmental scrutiny increases, and cut energy use. Green regulation is on the rise and this especially has the potential to seriously limit how businesses build data centers so organizations should have alternative plans for capacity growth.

Resource - ZDNet Asia