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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.
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.