Vizioncore announced availability today of vCharter Pro as an enterprise-class performance monitoring and management solution for ESX shops.

Pano Logic's virtual desktop solution (VDS) is getting a major rev update to v2.0, picking up WAN, wireless, and improved USB support for its tiny, shiny VDI client.

The biggest news out of ManageFusion so far? Symantec bought AppStream last night and is rolling 'em into the newly formed "Endpoint Virtualization" group.

One of the themes coming from RSA and from vendors in the last few months is the notion that virtual servers, whether running on a hypervisor or not, are somehow more at risk that physical servers. I don't buy it entirely because servers and applications that are virtualized tend to be in tightly controlled data centers. If your data center is secure, so are your servers. Why treat virtualized servers special?

Here's a follow-up with VMware on the company's new Lifecycle Manager add-on for ESX.

Happy Monday -- I'm catching a plane out to the Altiris ManageFusion conference in Vegas.

We all know how it starts. You said, 'sure, just this once.' Someone said, 'psst, buddy, try this out.'

Virtual Center can support 200 hosts and 2,000 VMs. VMware's new Lifecycle Manager offers hope to automate and track those thousands of containers.

I wrote on Sun's VDI upgrade earlier this month. Charlie Babcock interviewed Jeff Harvey from Cincinnati Bell about that company's VDI deployment...

Should we call this stage two of adoption for virtualization? Am I jumping too soon with my "1x1 makes sense" pitch?

VMware's Bangalore engineering office is set to grow to 1,000+ in two years. Add in 200 or so other sales and support employees, 160 channel partners, university partnerships, and many customers across India to see the big picture.

Ubuntu's JeOS (say 'juice' if you must) weighs in at 151 MB. Want to roll your own VMware miniappliance? JeOS is a pretty good place to start.

Every P2V business case is about cost savings, right? You know the pitch; consolidation will set you (and your budget) free. PR firms are even touting virtualization as the saving grace for budget woes in the coming Dark Age, er, recession. What if I told you that IT pros up and down the food chain are looking at VM'ing to resolve server-build hassles and a list of other operational woes? What if I said those same folks are expecting costs to be neutral, or higher for P2V, but their business case is still good...

Part of the rationale for Web services has always been that they can tunnel through firewalls, linking networks that are otherwise securely separated. Virtualization puts up similar barriers between applications within a single machine, so will crossing them require similar technology?

Who else wants Mike's job? He gets to hang out at Intel predicting the future of computing.

Sun's rapid move to v2.0 brings a new Virtual Desktop Connector hoping to serve as a "universal translator" for many-to-any desktop delivery.

I spoke with Kidaro CEO Kevin Brown for about 90 seconds yesterday afternoon; the conversation was cut short due to an emergency conflict on my end. Kevin and I hope to reconnect via phone next week while he is in Israel. I suspect he and his will be a bit busy for the foreseeable future, what with that recent Microsoft acquisition...

I've been digging into I/O virtualization lately and ended up speaking with some folks who want to virtualize everything. Everything. Data I/O. Network. Entire physical servers. Liquid Computing is hoping to be the next major disruption in the force.

I've spent the better part of the last week reconfiguring gear in the virtualization test lab, getting reacquainted with machine specs and idiosyncrasies. We have a variety of servers connected to a Dell, nee EqualLogic, iSCSI SAN. Half of our HP servers and one Xserve also have 2 Gb Fibre Channel HBAs, unused since we lost our FC SAN. Remember when those 2 Gb FC connections seemed zippy? 4 Gb HBAs have been on the market for a couple years, and a number of recent 8 Gb FC solutions are being touted as a remedy for I/O constraints in virtualized environments.

Novell's Richard Whitehead and I sat down to a lively discussion on the trials and tribulations of VM management. Whitehead was good enough to remind me of Novell's open source chops on SUSE and Xen...

I missed Intel's 10GbE and IOV news. Read on for why you shouldn't make the same mistake.

When Cisco and Juniper first said they were opening their router OSes, I thought that they'd be about as open as the iPhone. With Cisco's launch of IOS XE, I realize I was wrong: The iPhone is much more open.

So you liked trekking to Cannes for VMworld? Pony up for autumn in the U.K. to attend the vendor-independent "Virtualization Congress."

VMworld Europe offered a bunch o' news. I/O is big. IOV is getting bigger. VMware and others came out strong on systems management and security tools. I guess they have been listening to their customers.

I spoke with Stonesoft on Wednesday regarding the company's new security solutions for VMware. Intrahost protection, anyone?

Riverbed jumps much deeper into application-aware networking today with the RiOS Service Platform, a way to run servers on its Steelhead branch-office boxes using virtualization.  As with similar initiatives from Cisco and 3Com, Riverbed's long-term aim is to replace servers with networking appliances: Virtualization decouples software from hardware, so why bother with physical servers?

An Indy-based independent consultant I know turned me on to Stoneware, makers of a webOS, not the heavy stuff your mother-in-law collects. Will they break into the desktop virt market?

I had a very informal chat with a buddy of mine about service management. And virtualization. Many TLAs were used.

I was weighing topic posts tonight, and Xen won out over VMware. Will this be a trend in the market? Demo v4.1 and see for yourself.

Just how much CO₂ is offset by virtualizing your servers? Oriel, an Aussie VMware partner, offers a calculator that explicitly shows the benefit to the planet for P-to-V conversions.

Last fall CA hit up IT management at shops earning $250M+ revenue to check the pulse of virtualization. 300 professionals from the United States, U.K., Germany, Australia, and Korea replied. They're sharing the goods.

VMware and Citrix have been stepping on each other's toes. A bunch. Will they meet somewhere in the middle, or are they shooting for winner takes all?

VMware’s stock price might have tumbled, but that isn’t stopping VC investment in the virtualization space. Two startups raked in millions this week.

What started as a basic VM test has taken on a life of its own; it looks like we'll be walking the virtualization talk, pushing a VM host out near the edge of my production network. Wish me luck ...

Sentillion saw a business opportunity, talked to its customers, and mashed up a novel solution to a problem that already had a couple of "answers."

Today was one of those days that make you wonder: Just how may PR firms are working the virtualization sector?

Last century when Cisco started buying companies like an Orange County Housewife with a Platinum card in Silicon factory, the fool-proof way to sniff out the acquisition's purpose was to start with the assumption that Cisco believed the acquired company would help it sell more routers.

I spoke with Don Norbeck out of Wayne, Pa., this morning. He's director of product development for SunGard Availability Services, though a more appropriate title might be SunGard Virtualization Guru. Or Evangelist.

I'm not ready to drop $200 for a Leopard-friendly iSCSI initiator for the test lab. Aside from writing our own (which won't happen), it looks like ATTO Technology's Xtend SAN is the only game in town.

Alright, no actual transmutation occurs, but LeftHand Networks can help customers repurpose existing x86 storage into iSCSI SANs with its Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) for ESX.

Stay with me for a minute. I was going to write on topic about storage options for virtualized environments but got led astray by current events.

Leveraging the ESX experience of subsidiary Mosso, Rackspace is moving beyond 1x1 hosting solutions.

Chris Hoff points out a limitation with NAC appliances and virtualization in "How the Hypervisor is Death By a Thousand Cuts to the Network IPS/NAC Appliance Vendor." But the example he describes is somewhat silly when compared with how virtualization and NAC are deployed.

VMware buys Thinstall and acquires services side of Foedus.

I’ve had a number of recent requests for additional virtualization sites and resources. While I’m reluctant to admit that one might need to look outside of Network Computing or InformationWeek, I'm including some of my favorite bloggers and vendor sites on the topic. Feel free to fire up your favorite RSS reader (as long as you subscribe to NWC.com's feed first!) Enjoy.

Mac admins rejoice. Others may want to read, too. Trust me.

A couple of recent fee-for-view reports stated IT spending on virtualization will ... go up over the next three years. Perhaps we will need to spend money to save money in the long run.

A new year brings a new SAN in our lab.

Not up to date with your Intel and AMD chipset nomenclature? Unsure if that spare no-name server on the bench is a good platform for a hypervisor solution? You can test your server's capabilities in less time than it takes to read this post.

I had a chat with Paula Daley, a product marketing VP at CA, about Unicenter ASM and virtualization management strategies in general. CA has worked hard to leverage its existing broad cross-platform base as virtual environment management has grown in its product line. CA's design goals for an ASM-managed ESX shop? How about dynamic resource brokering per host to optimize application performance, with VMotioning as a last resort. Oh, and reducing the menial workload for high-cost VM talent in your IT shop.

It's Press Release Wednesday. First up, SAP and VMware are getting their groove on.

VMware has released VMware Infrastructure 3 for general availability. As expected, performance improvements, better automation, and easier management of host and VMs are on the list of improvements.

Last week, InformationWeek held a single-day event called the "Future of Virtualization." Along with me and Charles Babcock, InformationWeek editor at large, were reps from Citrix/XenSource, VMware, Sun, and Blue Lane.

We are losing our long-term EqualLogic iSCSI SAN due to Dell's $1.4 billion acquisition of EqualLogic. Good for them, bad for us. The EqualLogic folks are rounding up all their loaner equipment as part of due diligence.

MS changes up its hypervisor strategy for Windows Server 2008:

Citrix, VirtualIron, and Oracle. What do these things have in common? Xen, xen, xen...

It has been a busy seven days on my end, leading to a dearth of blog postings: Interop/Vegas prep, a number of production issues, and a couple of in-depth interviews. Read on for more.

If I hear the word virtualization one more time I think I might get sick to my stomach. However, I just witnessed a stunning demo of VS 2008 here in Redmond by Jeff Woolsey of the Server Virtualization team. If you think virtualization is still a fad, read on about how Microsoft's own internal IT department is using virtualization and saving millions.

Apple relaxes licensing language on Leopard Server to permit virtualized instances, VMware Fusion seems to run just fine on Leopard server and client, and the venerable MS Virtual PC still seems to work for those unfortunate souls still running PowerPC hardware. Does this mean everyone is coming to the virtualization party now?

Total consolidated revenues for the 3rd quarter were $358 million, up a striking 90% vs 3Q06. Does anyone out there still think virtualization is a passing fad?

A short Monday morning post: The Citrix/XenSource deal has been finalized, as expected, to the tune of $500 million in cash and common stock.

...which sounds better than 700 pounds of expensive gear got dumped at the wrong loading dock on Wednesday. Hey, everything sounds better in French. As they say, the best laid plans...

I had an interesting chat with John Toor and Ariel Cohen from Xsigo Systems late last week. Xsigo has a novel approach to I/O hassles in virtualized (and traditional) server environments. Virtualize everything (network connections, HBAs) for a host, aggregate all the bits via one InfiniBand adapter, run the traffic from your servers over one cable to an “I/O Director” box with massive internal data fabric, and then connect everything on the back end (gigE, FC, iSCSI, copper, optical, you name it) to the I/O Director. You know what? Virtualizing I/O makes a heck of a lot of sense...

For those of you who read my last blog post, virtualization wasn’t the problem. You may recall my minor tiff with vendor support over a building maintenance system. The support tech was stonewalling problem resolution ‘til we ran their SW on a dedicated physical server, or real server, in his parlance. After much testing, it turns out that VM’ing wasn’t the problem, and our VMware Server host box keeps chugging away. Speaking of successful, free virtualization hosting platforms: It seems the OpenVZ project team wants to make it even easier for newbies to demo their stuff. Read on after the link for more...

An anecdote from the production side. We’re in the midst of a minor squabble over support for a third-party app running on a VM. Read on for the punch line ...

We're taking our first baby steps as gear starts to arrive for our virtualization test lab. To get things rolling, we've fired up a couple of open-source platforms while we wait for our our ESX testbed to arrive.

I met with Hugh Kelly of Canton, Massachusetts based Network Engines this week to discuss his company’s virtual appliance solution. Their business model doesn’t actually sell appliances; Network Engines offers a service to software vendors, appliance-izing solutions for other development houses. You say you already have a great security or management product but lack the in-house expertise to integrate it into a turn-key solution for ESX? You could give these folks a call...

With the upcoming release of VMware's Virtual Desktop Manager 2 (VDM) product, the customer-installable Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) draws closer to becoming a reality. VMware has yet to release pricing, nor have they published a SKU for direct customer consumption, but nonetheless, it lives in a private beta format now with a public beta to come in the next month or so. If you want to participate in the public beta, go here to get started.

Symantec today announced an update for Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX. I spoke with company reps last week about the product, which aims to do for ESX what other versions of cluster server do for other hardware platforms and operating systems, namely add overall manageability and high availability.

Diane Greene's keynote address at VMworld 2007 on Tuesday included the announcement of VMware's new, improved, and smaller ESX Server 3i hypervisor. Putting this in perspective, the current VMware ESX hypervisor wields a footprint of a little over 2GB - the Red Hat Enterprise Linux v3 (RHEL3)-based Service Console takes up 2GB, and the Kernel hypervisor, 32MB. Not bad all things considered. But now imagine a smaller hypervisor - so small it fits on a USB key that nowadays would be considered undersized by a long shot.

Hello to all and a big thank you to Art for kicking of the Virtualization Immersion Center blog for me. To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges, Looks like I picked the wrong week to be off-line.

VMworld 2007 at San Francisco's Moscone Center is underway! This three day event is showcasing virtualization like no other event, with forward thinkers and progressive implementers sharing best practices, lessons learned, and industry predictions with 10,000 (literally) virtualization aficionados.

Virtualization security has been on the minds of a lot of IT folks lately. There's no doubt that virtualization changes the security game - and because it involves new software - the potential for new exploits exists

Virtualization is a hot topic by any measure, and the security world has not escaped healthy debates and new discoveries from researchers just beginning to plumb the issues. They're looking at not only the impact of virtualization on security, but also the impact security can have with virtualization. Here's a brief summary of some of the different issues that are keeping things interesting.

Welcome to the Virtualization Immersion Center. Normally this first blog post would come from your site editor, Joe Hernick, but Joe is taking a few weeks to move and settle into a new home. So, in Joe's absence, I welcome you.