One of the most requested features from Service Providers and Enterprises is IP Address Management (IPAM). I can't tell you how many times I have listened to customers ask for a platform that manages IP Addresses effectively on a large scale, even to the point of managing disparate classes and subnets. What happens when two companies merge, do you munge spreadsheets or do you have this software yet? It's not only the software that is unique but that it runs as a XenServer VM in Para-Virtualized mode, meaning it is high-performance. Even better is these run in linux.

Nixu Software specializes in software designed for DNS, DHCP and IP address management. To run Nixu Products in a virtual machine environment, simply download the ISO installation media from their website and boot up a new virtual machine. The installation media auto-installs the entire server stack.

Unlike traditional computing appliances that require specific hardware to run on, Nixu Products provide a quick and cost-efficient way to migrate and consolidate core network services such as DNS and DHCP to virtualized computing environments. By streamlining tedious network and system management routines, Nixu Products offer exceptional availability and ROI.

Here are some of the Highlights of using NIXU DNS and DHCP in a XenServer VM:

• Centralized IP Address Management
  • Merge/Join IP Blocks
  • Split IP Blocks
  • Subnets in use – report
  • Subnets free – report
  • Addresses in use – report
  • Addresses free – report

• Runs in XenServer as a VM, optimized for Para-Virtualization
  • Supports pv-ops

• Supports IPv6
• Uses secure communication between secondary name servers, using keys
• Role based administration
  • Assign subnets to administrative domains

• Supports BIND syntax
  • For the BIND junkies

• Has a configuration checker
• Automated installation and maintenance reducing management overhead
• Centralized management of all nameservers
• Hardened design for security

WATCH this video tip:

Download the Nixu / XenServer Integration Guide.

Read about Nixu Software here.

Download Nixu Software here.

Read about Citrix XenServer 5.0 here.

Download Citrix XenServer 5.0 here.

Tap into the power of AppExpert!

The next virtualization vendor on up in my series of posts digging down into CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" is Marathon Technologies.
Here is what CIO Magazine has to say about Marathon -

As stated by CIO Magazine, Marathon was awarded a Best of VMWorld award in 2007. This is a quote from Tech Target about Marathon and this award -

I have posted about Marathon before (such as this post about the video interview from iForum and this interview with the CTO Jerry Melnick . Those two posts give you some background on the technology. Tarry Singh of Virtualization for Everyone did an interview with Jerry Melnick in January.

Recently Marathon Technologies has posted a demo video on YouTube.

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Marathon's everRun v-Available gives you the only fault tolerant solution for virtual machines, and it is designed exclusively for Citrix XenServer. Recently, Marathon published a joint whitepaper with Citrix that dives down into this solution . You can download the paper here. You can run the Marathon v-Available ROI Calculator here.


Pricing: The pricing on Marathon Technologies v-Available everRun for Citrix XenServer is $2000 per server. Here is the math for buying a complete solution with XenServer -

Citrix XenServer Enterprise licenses at list-
2 X $3000=$6000

Marathon v-Available at list -

2 X $2000=$4000

Total = $10000 

For $10,000 you get a fault tolerant server virtualization solution that provides true fault tolerance  AND maximum uptime for your virtual machines on XenServer.  You contact Marathon for more info.



Marathon clearly has an excellent solution to provide true fault tolerance for virtual machines running on Citrix XenServer. Many people do not realize that Marathon Technologies also has a solution for Citrix XenApp. Gabe Carrejo on the Field Readiness team at Citrix recently did some testing regaiidng their solution for Citrix XenApp and shared with me the test videos he created.

Gabe has done excellent work in working with Marathon to build this environment and to record his results. He broke his test out into eight different scenarios, and created short videos for each.

In this first video, Gabe shows XenApp sessions (the video was made before the name change, so still uses the Presentation Server name) maintaining the  connection despite a hard drive failure on the primary node.

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In this next video, you see all the XenApp sessions over ICA stay up despite a network card failure on the primary server.

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Next, Gabe causes the primary server to completely fail and the load to migrate over to the secondary server. No XenApp sessions are lost during this failure and migration.

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Gabe then migrates the entire load back to the primary server with no session loss.

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One final video I would like to show you from testing done by Gabe. In this test, Gabe simulates 39 user sessions using EdgeSight for Load Testing. He causes the server to fail and all the sessions maintain the connection. .

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Here is a higher resolution version, but without the call outs (notes).

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Gabe created additional videos where he simulated the failure of different hard drives in each server and a combination of hard drives and network cards. You can watch these additional videos at http://youtube.com/user/CitrixBlogger.

As you can see, Marathon Technologies provides a truly fault tolerant solution for both Citrix XenServer and XenApp (and to XenApp running virtualized on XenServer).

Next up is Blue Lane.

The next virtualization vendor on up in my series of posts digging down into CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" is PlateSpin.

In my last post on this series, I got a bit ahead of myself and posted that Marathon Technologies was next. I had just seen some videos of Marathon working with XenApp and got a bit ahead of myself. Marathon is after PlateSpin.

Here is what CIO Magazine has to say about PlateSpin -

As you may have heard, Platespin and Novell recently announced that Novell is acquiring PlateSpin.

PlateSpin did a podcast interview with Virtual Strategy Magazine last year.

PlateSpin has three products today, PowerConvert, PowerRecon, and a new virtual appliance product called Forge. Here are some brief product overviews.

PowerConvert

You can view a replay of a PowerConvert webinar here.

PowerRecon

The PowerRecon webinar replay is here.

Forge

I found a couple of quick PlateSpin PowerConvert overviews on YouTube (made by ITDVDs.com)

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I did an earlier post on PlateSpin that includes a link to a video interview at iForum.

Next up on the list is Marathon Technologies (I am sure this time! ). Again, I have posted about Marathon before (such as this post and this post . Marathon Technologies has an excellent solution that not only integrates with XenServer but XenApp as well. I have quite a few videos to show this teed up for my next post in this series.

The next virtualization vendor on up in my series of posts digging down into CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" is Equallogic, theiSCSI vendor acquired by Dell recently.
Here is what CIO Magazine has to say about Equallogic -

Equallogic is a very respected name in iSCSI and storage in general. The company recently won one of InfoWorld's "Technology of the Year Award" for 2008 in Storage.

According to David Marshall of VMBLog.com, Equallogic was awarded "SAN Product of the Year" at the TechWorld Awards last year.
I did not find any podcasts with Equallogic, but there is no shortage of videos on YouTube.
This first one gave me a chuckle. Marc Farley of Eqallogic asks "What's in Your Basement?" apparently in response to a Hitachi Blogger. Marc Farkey tells the world how much of a geek one SE at Equallogic is -

Only a true hard core geek would have to run a network sniffer to find all the computers on his home network. His parents must be very proud...

Soon after the Dell acquisition was announced, the head of Equallogic Don Bulens was interviewed by Dan Bricklin (who just happens to be the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first ever spreadsheet).

Finally here is one more video about the Equallogic strategy with Dell as told by Eric Schott (Director of Product Management of Dell/Equallogic) in an interview with Uberpulse.com

Citrix has a very strong partnership with Dell, so we can expect much more partnering activities with Dell Equallogic in the future.
Next up on the list is Marathon Technologies. Regular readers know that I have posted about Marathon before (such as this post and this post . Marathon Technologies has an excellent solution that not only integrates with XenServer but XenApp as well. I have even more content on Marathon Technologies to add for the next post...

A couple of weeks ago CA released the results of a virtualization management survey they commissioned. I finally got around to reviewing it this week (download the slides here). The survey digs down deep into why these companies made the move to server virtualization, what benefits they feel were a result, what are the management challenges, and how those virtualization investments were measured (if at all).
Here is how the respondents are described in the study (on slide 3) -

Chris Preimesberger of eWeek had this take on the study -

 
Only 35% of worldwide companies who responded to the survey have standardized on a single vendor platform. With fair use in mind, I pulled a just a few screen shots from the slides to give you a visual (all of which are copyrighted by CA)  -
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Even more interesting is the fact that only 40% of companies that responded expect to be standardized on a single vendor 18 months from now.

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There may be more competition in the marketplace than some other companies would have us believe.
 
Another part of the survey I found very interesting is the primary drivers and benefits. In my experience, cost reduction from server consolidation is the primary driver that starts most server virtualization projects, and other factors (like disaster recovery) drive expansion.  This is true for many of the companies in this survey.
 
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The top four benefits for worldwide companies are "Ease of hardware provisioning and software deployment", "Lower TCO" , "Optimizing System Performance" and "server consolidation". I would argue that three of these are tied directly to costs, and those three lead by a wide margin in the US. I am surprised to see performance and load balancing beat server consolidation by 1% worldwide, however.

One very interesting note from the report is on the return on investment (ROI) of server virtualization. The survey found 45% of worldwide respondents did not have any method in place to to measure the ROI of virtualization solutions (slide 34). Another 26% worldwide "don't know" if they have been able to measure their server virtualization ROI. Network World reported last year on another study by CA that reported "40% of 800 IT organizations polled worldwide were uncertain if their use of server virtualization technology was successful" There certainly appears to be an opportunity to help measure the return on the investment in server virtualization.

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The overall conclusions from the survey are presented on slides 38,39, and 40. Other conclusions are that security and software licensing are big issues to these companies. In my opinion, The reality is that this is still a relatively new market (compared to many other IT markets) and there are many challenges and opportunities for the vendors in this space. I highly recommended reviewing the report when you have a few moments.

Next on up in my series of posts digging down into CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" is Embotics. Here is CIO Magazine's take -

Embotics is a startup founded in 2006. In addition to the CIO Magazine list, eWeek Channel Insider added Embotics to the "10 Technologies and 20 Vendors You Should Know for 2008" list (that title just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?)

Their product is called V-Commander. Here is how they describe it on their website -

I love the metaphor of "herding cats" for virtual machine sprawl. David sent me a presentation on Embotics and I pulled some screen shots from that to show some visuals from the product.

Here in the Operations view of V-Commander you can see some of the capabilities of V-Commander to control both online and offline virtual machines.

 

The product gives you the ability to track which template was used to make a virtual machine and put an "id tag" on a vm so you can track its entire lifecycle.
 
In this view, you can monitor a virtual machines history, see its parent and child vms, and execute a list of commands on the virtual machine.


 

The Policy screen gives you an idea of some of the capabilities V-Commander gives you. You can set policies to alert you when an unknown virtual machine is powered on or or off, quarantine unknown virtual machines, or disable any deployment of an unknown virtual machine.

The combination of id tagging, lifecycle management and visibility and control of unknown virtual machines is very intriguing, not only for server virtualization, but for desktop virtualization with XenDesktop as well.

David Lynch, the VP of Marketing of Embotics, has been active since Embotics announced their V-Commander product last fall. As always, Virtual Strategy Magazine (I love the new look to their web site) can be counted on to do a great podcast interview with Embotics.

David Lynch did an interview with Tarry Singh of "Virtualization for Everyone". This interview is from November 2007.

Tarry does a great job with his questions in this interview.

David and his team have been busy getting the word out. Mike Vizard of eWeek also did a podcast with David Lynch last month and Anil Desai did a webcast with Embotics for Search Server Virtualization as well.

Embotics joined the Citrix Global Alliance Program in November of 2007, and is currently working on their integration into XenServer.  According to David Lynch, part of the plan is to use the look and feel of XenCenter for this new offering. I look forward to seeing what they put together for XenServer. Once XenDesktop is launched, I can see an even greater need for virtual machine life cycle management by a tool like Embotics V-Commander.

Next on the list is Equalogic... 

Next up on CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" list is Platform Computing. I saw a demo of Platform Computing's solution at iForum, and met with some of their staff at Citrix Summit. I think VM Orchestrator is an excellent add-on to a Citrix XenServer deployment for those sites that require the added capabilities of Dynamic Resource Management and Restart HA.

CIO Magazine quoted Chris Wolf of the Burton Group -

Platform Computing has been involved in grid computing for 15 years. Their newest virtualization offering VM Orchestrator (VMO) is a Citrix XenServer Only solution.

Here is how Platform Computing describes VM Orchestrator (VMO) on their website -

VMO includes the following features -

• Multi-Host Dynamic Resource Management (DRM)Create policies; optimize your virtual environment - In the demo I saw at Summit, you have the ability to set nested policies based on CPU utilization, and move either the least loaded or most loaded VM. VMO is designed to avoid the VM pinball effect that can occur with other solutions when a virtual machine moves from server to server rapidly.
• Resource Aware High Availability (HA)Mitigate risk; minimize cost - The restart HA capability with VMO allows you to specify restart on any server in the resource pool. You do not have to set up a one - one relationship for HA. You can have one server in the pool available for restart HA for any server in the pool for instance.
• Accessibility from Anywhere Launch a browser; manage your environment With VMO, you have web based management for your entire XenServer deployment. While this management does not completely replace all the configuration and setup functions of XenCenter, it does give you the ability to do day to day management from a browser on any machine.
• Self-service Virtual Machine Management Give users more control; maintain control over resources This is an interesting feature that gives you the ability to allow specific user to subscribe to specific virtual machines or templates through the web based management tool (without access to other management functions). This could be extremely useful in a XenDesktop deployment.

VMO is delivered as a virtual appliance on XenServer, so it is very simple to get installed and running.

Dan Kusnetsky of ZDnet recently did a blog post on Platform Computing that provides additionally company background -

Platform Computing posted a page of links to demos of VMO v3 on their site at this link. On this page is a video that specifically covers the VMO  DRM load balancing policies. You can really get a good feel for the power of using a policy engine for DRM that gives you much more fine grained control on the migration of virtual machines than any other existing solution.

I did find one video by Peter Dyer (great guy) of Platform Computing on YouTube. 

At iForum, David Marshall of VMBlog.com interviewed Peter Dyer on VMO.

Platform joined the Citrix Alliance Program last year, and recently completed Citrix Ready certification.

Here is the pricing for VMO -

When VMO is combined with Citrix XenServer Enterprise, you get a complete server virtualization solution that includes XenMotion, Resource Pooling, Dynamic Resource Management, Pool Based Restart HA, and Web Based Management for somewhere between $4000 - $4800 per server, depending on whether you buy an annual or perpetual license (and no extra expense on management).

Next up on the list from CIO Magazine is Embotics...

Just before Christmas I made a post on CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" list. My first post was about Cirba and the second one covered VizionCore. I met with both companies at Summit. Cirba was a sponsor of Summit and George Pradel from VisionCore came down as well.

Unfortunately, travel in January to visit partners and Citrix Summit have kept me so busy I haven't had much time to continue this series. Here is the next company from the list with some added background -

Akorri -

Here is how Akorri describes their product on their website -

As with the first two partners on this list, Virtual Strategy Magazine did a podcast on Akorri -

David Marshall of VMBlog.com and the Virtualization Blog on InfoWorld recently wrote a story reviewing the accolades Akorri has received -

I found a few Akorri specific videos on the web.

First, an interview with their CEO (done by TechTargetTV ) regarding their Best of VMWorld award -

I also found these white board videos in the ZDnet "At the Whiteboard" Series done by Akorri's VP of Marketing, Tom Joyce (who has apparently been promoted to CEO since these videos were made).

Managing Application Performance Across IT Domains - At the WhiteBoard Series from ZDNet

Application Service Level Management

Akorri is certainly on the radar, and I personally expect them to be engaged in our Alliance program and Citrix Ready in the near future.

Next up is Platform Computing... 

Just before Christmas I made a post on CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" list.

Cirba was first on the list. Next is Vizioncore -

VizionCore offers several very popular management tools for virtualization. VRanger Pro offers a comprehensive backup and restore solution for virtual machines. You can find demos and screenshots here. VReplicator provides host level replication of entire virtual machines. VConverter is a P2V solution, and VOptimizer is a product for optimizing virtual hard disks sizes.

George Pradel of VizionCore recently did a podcast on their solutions with Virtual Strategy Magazine. Here is a list of topics covered -

George was a SE Manager at Citrix when I was just starting out. He is a great resource to have and a very engaging person.

According to their website, Vizioncore started out a a consulting and software development company focused on Citrix products. Vizioncore has found a great deal of success as they have moved into the virtualization management space. Now that Citrix has become a major player in the virtualization space, I am looking forward to seeing Vizioncore come full circle and work closely with Citrix in this growing market.

CIO Magazine recently did a story entitled "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2008". This story focuses on up and coming vendors who add significant value to the virtualization stack.

I am very familiar with some of these companies, and others I only have heard of in passing. I did some research on each to ensure I am up to date. I would like to share what I found on each in the blog. I will do one post on each of the ten.

The first company on the CIO Magazine list is Cirba.

Cirba has an interesting product for helping an IT team determine plan a new server consolidation or move to server consolidation (or both). Here is a overview from their site -

I found a flash product overview on their site - View it here.

There was a podcast earlier this year on the Virtual Strategy Magazine site with Andrew Hiller from Cirba.

Here is a summary of the discussion -

This article from SearchServerVirtualization.com highlights the problem Cirba's Data Center Intelligence software solves -

David Marshall of VMBlog.com points out many of the accolades Cirba has received -

I was intrigued by the demo I saw of the Cirba DCI tool, and I can certainly see that value in doing such detailed analysis before a server consolidation and virtulization project.

Next up on the list is VizionCore. I will post that info later this week.

Between the Thanksgiving holiday and the migration to the new blog site on Citrix.com, I have fallen a bit behind on posting iForum videos with alliance partners. Here is the next one - DataCore Software. I haven't yet had any personal experience with DataCore Software, but I have heard very good things about it. It is ironic that I haven't, since their headquarters is about a block from the Citrix HQ in Ft. Lauderdale.

Virtual Strategy Magazine does this interview with George Teixeira, the CEO and Co-Founder of DataCore. George says during the interview "One of the big things we've got is a low cost entry point $1000 SAN that allows them to basically take any pc and transform it into a storage server to support XenDesktop and XenServer as well the Citrix platform." A $1000 SAN definitely piques my interest.

I found this video on their website that covers their overall solution.

I also found this podcast from David Marshall of Infoworld that covers DataCore (and DevonIT) from iForum.

According to this white paper from the Taneja Group "DataCore is the Perfect Compliment to Virtualized Server Infrastructure". I am going to work on getting some more technical info directly from DataCore and post it to the blog.

I would like to hear from any users of DataCore Software to get their opinion and hands on experiences with the software.

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The webinar entitled Making the Business Case for Virtualization It Not Just For Server Consolidation Anymoreis today at 12 noon EST.

UPDATE: If you missed the webinar, you can still watch the recording of the entire presentation at the link. Click on the link above, go through the short registration, and the click on the link to view the archived webinar.

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After my earlier blog post on the Best of VMWorld solution for high availability offered by Marathon Technologies, I have received numerous questions about the solution offered by Marathon Technologies specifically for XenServer. Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Marathon, graciously agreed to provide some background info on Marathon Technologies and answer a few other questions.

Barry Flanagan: Many Citrix customers may not be familiar with Marathon Technologies. Can you give us a brief history?

Jerry Melnick: Marathon was founded in 1993 by engineers responsible for developing Digital VAX FT fault tolerant systems. The team used this experience to develop the first software and networking technology that allowed multiple Wintel servers to operate as a single fault tolerant system. In 2003 the company migrated its technology to a software-only product that works with standard off-the-shelf Intel/AMD servers, unmodified Windows and standard, unmodified Windows applications.

Barry Flanagan: Your website describes everRun as Availability Software. What are the three things people show know about how your software solves the problem of unplanned downtime?

Jerry Melnick: First, we don say lightly. Our everRun software keeps critical applications available in industries where downtime equals big bucks, including process manufacturing, gaming, media and broadcasting, financial services and federal markets. We have over 1500 global customers including five of the top ten pharmaceutical manufacturers, four of the top five television networks in the US and over 1000 mid-market companies.

Second, we developed what we call our ComputeThru technology that keeps essential applications running through both network and disk I/O failures. That means they rarely, if ever, experience lost data, lost revenue, or lost productivity due to common system or network failures. And now we working closely with the Citrix to bring our proven availability software to virtual machines. Unlike existing availability solutions that add cost and complexity to the virtual environment, everRun VM is simple and reliable.

Third, everRun provides a much more simplified approach to server availability, whether they physical servers or virtual servers. It completely automates setup, configuration, fault detection and policy management. Automated setup and configuration eliminates the manual configuration other availability solutions require.

Barry Flanagan: Do you have any real world examples of companies who use your solutions?

Jerry Melnick: The world largest commodities exchange uses our software to ensure their pricing board information and order confirmation messages are always available, Wellcome Trust, the organization responsible for the sequencing of one-third of the human genome, uses everRun to guarantee high-availability of genomic data for its research users. And MAN AG, one of the Europe biggest and best truck manufacturers, uses everRun software to make sure all their employees in offices around Germany have continuous access to key applications and data. The division we work with is also a big Citrix customer. You can read about how they use everRun and Citrix software on our site.

Barry Flanagan: Do you have any numbers on the cost of downtime for specific industries?

Jerry Melnick: Here are some industry figures for key applications. Your mileage may vary.

Application Downtime Cost Per Hour
ERP 780,000
Supply Chain Management 660,000
E-Commerce 600,000
Internet Banking 420,000
Customer Service Center 220,000
Electronic Funds Transfer 210,000
Messaging/Email 60,000
Hospital Information System (avg. three hospital IDN with 1400 beds) 60,000
Hospital Information System (avg. single hospital with 500 beds) 15,840

We have an ROI calculator on our web site that can help you determine what downtime on your physical servers is costing your organization

Barry Flanagan: The November 28th webinar listed on your site talks about the Best of VMWorld approach to protecting virtual machines. How did Marathon win a Best of VMWorld award when the product is designed exclusively for Citrix XenServer?

Jerry Melnick: At VMworld, Mendel Rosenblum, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at VMware, highlighted hardware fault tolerance as one of the company three key technology initiatives. But according to Mendel, their solution is still in early development and won be out in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, we demonstrated everRun VM at the show, and we ship the industry first fault tolerant-class virtual machine software in Q1 of next year.

Barry Flanagan: What is different about this webinar? Why should someone working with virtualization technologies attend?

Jerry Melnick: Well, if you didn see the everRun VM showcase at VMworld or iForum, I be explaining how it works. IDC virtualization guru, John Humphreys, will share some real world numbers on virtualization savings based on customer surveys they conducted. And it a great opportunity to hear Simon Crosby (CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division of Citrix) talk about the new economics of server virtualization.

Barry Flanagan: What will an attendee learn from attending this webinar? Are there any takeaways?

Jerry Melnick: John will give you good guidance on how to evaluate and structure your virtualization business case for your management. We be providing attendees with a first chance to use a brand new virtualization and availability ROI calculator that will help make your case. And of course Simon will be thought-provoking as always.

UPDATE: I received pricing info back from Jerry and his team. The final pricing is not yet determined, but here is the TENTATIVE pricing info.

Marathon everRun VM integrated bundle (Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition v4 + everRun VM)

Dual socket: $4500 Quad socket: $9000

Marathon everRun VM only (for upgrading existing XenServer installations)

Dual socket: $2000 Quad socket: $4000

As stated above, this pricing is not yet written in stone.

Thanks to Jerry Melnick for answering our Seven Questions. There will be an opportunity to ask Jerry, John Humpreys and Simon Crosby more questions at the end of the webinar.

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The next partner from the XenSource Pavillion at iForum I would like to highlight is PlateSpin.

Virtual Strategy Magazine also did a video interview with PlateSpin at iForum. In this video Paul Sheridan of PlateSpin covers PowerRecon and PowerConvert.

PowerConvert is described as a migration tool. On the surface, it looks like a simple P2V tool. if you dig down deeper, you quickly find PowerConvert can do a lot more. here is a list I found of all the different types of migrations this tool supports.

P2V

- V2P

- V2V

- P2P

It can do this over the LAN or WAN, and can even do live incrementation migration at the file and block level. According to the product page on their website, this can happen while the server is live and running. I am extremely impressed with the capabilities of PowerConvert. This looks to be an incredibly useful tool for those who are moving to server virtualization. I would love to hear from any readers who have personal experience using PowerRecon in your own environment.

The other product is PowerRecon. I have to admit, the name of this product when I first heard it had me thinking of monitoring voltage on server power supplies. Here is a list of what the product actually does - automates the collection of server inventory, workload and resource utilization data and gives you the ability to do forecasting and trending of workloads. In light of that explanation, the product names makes a bit more sense. The next question for me was, wwhat does this have to do with server virtualization? Since a big part of the dirving force for server virtualization is under utilization of current server resurces, it makes a lot of sense to have a tool to know what the current levels of cpu utilization are for your server farm. The Virtual Infrastructure edition does the same thing for VM power by VMWare. I do not know yet if a XenServer Edition is forthcoming, but I will ask.

PlateSpin recently did a webinar on PowerRecon. Here is the link:

http://www.platespin.com/downloads/downloaddetails.aspx?fid=370

If you have experience using Platespin products, please post your experiences in the comments.

I have found several more partners videos to highlight. I will get to those over the next several days.

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One booth I visited in the XenSource Pavilion is Marathon Technologies. I can recall recommending their high availability solution to a number of customers back in the late 90 when I was still an independent consultant. Back then, the solution was hardware and software based. Now, Marathon solution is a completely software based high availability solution and runs on industry standard hardware. Marathon announced a new XenSource specific solution at VMWorld, and won Best of VMWorld for New Technolgoies . John Bara from XenSource (now part of the Virtualization Management Group at Citrix) said this about Marathon:

By integrating everRun with XenEnterprise, Marathon is enabling customers of any size to get simple, enterprise-grade virtualization solutions with FT-class application availability, said John Bara, vice president of marketing at XenSource. is another example of how XenSource is working with partners to ensure XenEnterprise seamlessly integrates as the virtualization platform for a wide-range of high-performance, best-in-class solutions._

In the demo I saw, the v-Available everRun solution from Marathon was able to handle a failure of a hard drive one side of the link and a network card on the other side and continue running. Unlike many other virtualization HA solutions, Marathon solution does not restart the VM after a failure on one side of the link. The Marathon is always running and can handle the failure of a single component of either side, or an entire VM on one side without any downtime. It makes for a very impressive demo.

That demo was of two servers on a LAN. The solutions also works over a WAN. I am still trying to get more info from Marathon Technologies to nail down what are the specific WAN requirements for this new offering. According to the Marathon FAQ the Split Site solution ( a different product) requires 10 ms of latency or less. Assuming has the same requirement, you cannot replicate a VM from a datacenter on the east coast to one on the west coast. According to a few docs I found on the Marathon website, the limit is 100 miles.

Here is a video I found on YouTube of an interview done by Virtual Strategy Magazine.

There was a virtualization webinar last week with Marathon CTO Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Citrix Virtualization Management Group Simon Crosby, and Chris Wolf from the Burton Group. Here is the webinar link .

Marathon has an excellent High Availability solution for virtual machines running on Citrix XenServer. If HA is requirement for you, check it out.

I have several more partner solutions to blog abut as I get time.

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